The Narrow Escape in The Lady's Not for Burning

The Narrow Escape in The Lady's Not for Burning MARY ANN K. DAVIS Near the end of his brief and tantalizing essay on comedy, Christopher Fry notes that in the twentieth century, "literature has been thought unrealistic which did not mark and remark our poverty and doom."1 The attitude he distinguishes here is, of course, the characteristic modem malaise, an attitude which has carried over into theories ofcomedy as well- Louis Kronenberger's argument, for instance, that comedy is pessimistic.2 To Fry, however, comedy rather offers an alternative to the bleakness of the modem vision; indeed, the most compelling function ofcomedy is to present such an alternative: "Joy (ofa kind) has been all on the devil's side, and one of the necessities ofour time is to redeem it" (p. 17). Comedy offers its joyous alternative, Fry suggests, through "a narrow escape into faith" (p. 15). This has posed a problem for readers who are unable to share Fry's Christianity; hence the frequent suggestion that he is unrealistic. And even such a sympathetic reader as J.A. Collins finds Fry less than successful in his efforts to redeem joy: "spirit and flesh refuse to harmonize and the old battle continues."3 I would like to suggest, however, that, at least in the case of The Lady's Not for Burning, Fry's comic escape is both more sophisticated and more successful than is usually granted. Fry is fully aware ofthe modem wasteland, ofman's inhumanity to man, and of the frequent absurdity of life. He knows too that there is no escaping from them, as his bureaucratic buffoon, Mayor Tyson, attempts to do when he shuts himself up in his study, "to be alone with my own convictions,"4 convictions which he does not wish to be shaken. And as Thomas tells Jennet at the very end of the play, "Girl, you haven't changed the world" (p. 86). In one sense he is right. Yet the convictions of most of the characters, including Thomas himself, have changed; two new elements have been added to the modem vision: laughter, "an irrelevancy/Which almost amounts to revelation" (p. 52), and love, which is revelation indeed. Escape in The Lady's Notfor Burning 421 The narrow escape into faith takes the form, in The Lady's Notfor Burning, of an epistemological shift. No one is converted or "born again" in a narrowly religious sense. However, Thomas and Jennet have discovered the limitations of their assumptions about human knowledge and thus have found an alternative to modem malaise and desolation. And those discoveries constitute a very real psychological and spiritual rebirth. Jennet's case is at once the clearest and the most complex. She describes herself as an empiricist, putting her faith in "the actual!/What I touch, what I see, what I know; the essential fact" (p. 54). But she suddenly has been confronted by a situation in which "the actual" cannot be determined empirically: "horror is walking round me here/Because nothing is as it appears to be" (p. 53). The failure of essential fact to save her from arrest threatens not only her life, but also what she believes to be the ordering principle of existence. Without it, life is meaningless, and she longs for the restoration of a world where "it is what it is" (p. 53). What Jennet fails to realize is that the assumption that appearance and reality must, or should, correspond is the source of her difficulty rather than the solution to her predicament. Her accusers, though far from philosophical, are empiricists as well. Explaining to Thomas why she has been called a witch, Jennet says: I live alone, preferring loneliness To the companionable suffocation of an aunt. I still amuse myself with simple experiments In my father's laboratory. Also I speak French to my poodle. Then you must know I have a peacock which on Sundays Dines with me indoors. Not long ago A new little serving maid carrying the food Heard its cry, dropped everything and ran, Never to come back, and told all whom she met That the Devil was dining with me. (p. 55) This is more...