The Power of Withholding: Politics, Gender, and Narrative Technique in William Trevor's Felicia's Journey

William Trevor composed Felicia's Journey (1994) during a period of momentous change in the relationships between Ireland and Britain, the phase following the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985.¹ Like Trevor's earlier works, the novel reflects how individual lives bear the imprint of the political, economic, and cultural narratives and histories of their places of origin. In the opening chapters, revelations about the title character's lack of prospects and quality of her life stand as an indictment of successive Irish governments since Independence, all of which failed to provide adequate employment and hope for generations of their young.² The novel is equally severe in its depiction of the country to which she flees in search of her lover. Glimpses of the English Midlands from the train convey to Felicia and the reader what a cluttered, congested, over-populated region it is. It appears as a place where differentiation between the human and non-human no longer holds: "Everything—people and houses and motorcars, pylons and aerials are packed together as if there isn't quite enough room to accommodate them."³ This and later passages capture a soulless urban culture in spiralling economic decline, at a time when the "passionate intensity" of Thatcherism during and after the Falklands War has long passed, but not its emphases on greed, acquisition, and self-interest.⁴

For Trevor's characters, the past can never be dead or safely distant. Rather, the past begets loss after loss, violence after violence. Their sufferings are attributable sometimes to politics, governments, institutions and their ideologies, but at other times arise as a consequence of family history and individual psychology. In Trevor's, as in Dickens's fictions, it is frequently the young that have borne most, the traumatic experiences in childhood scarring the rest of their lives; one thinks of the eleven-year-old heroine of Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971), whose parents perish in an arson attack, and of eight year-old Willie Quinton in Fools of Fortune (1983), his life forever scarred by his father's and sisters' murder by Black and Tans, and, subsequently, his mother's suicide.⁵ For the six-year-old Felicia, it is her mother's untimely death that delivers the shattering blow and leaves her exposed during her teenage years to ill-use by a succession of predatory men. Only at the novel's dénouement is it disclosed that the worst of these, Hilditch, had himself been abused at a vulnerable age, a victim of his promiscuous mother.

Many critical commentators on Felicia's Journey have viewed it primarily through a postcolonial lens. Writing after the novel's 1994 release, and thus in the wake of the "peace process," the 1994 and 1997 ceasefires, and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, these critics foreground the novel's critique of British colonialist ideologies and, to a lesser extent, those of "post-independence Irish nationalism." Some readings went so far as to assign a representative status to the principal English character, interpreting his murderous tendencies as a "product of thwarted imperial ambition," and labeling him an "agent of colonialism."⁶ One goes so far as to as call him "the Imperial Serial Killer."⁷ Historical conflicts between Ireland and Britain are indeed a significant presence in Felicia's Journey, but the text most certainly does not provide a "sustained allegory of Anglo-Irish relations."⁸ Its antagonists, Felicia and Hilditch, are fully developed individuals with their own specific histories. The pairing and gendering of these two characters initially appears to conform to patterns of representation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish nationalist ideology, portraying Irish woman as victim, and English man as predator. But Trevor's novel transcends such simplistic paradigms, and embraces a much broader picture of humanity and inhumanity.

William Trevor possesses a mastery of narrative technique that has been recognized by readers and reviewers alike for almost fifty years. The skill with which he selects his diction; creates settings; presents, pairs, and contrasts characters, and shifts the viewpoint...