Andrew's Wiki
Mary Olivier

Folks

• Mary Olivier, our heroine, an intellectually and philosophically oriented dreamer who wants nothing but the freedom to follow her mind; starved for affection, she turns to the Greeks for help; her life is dominated by the feeling that something will happen—which never quite does—until she successfully publishes

• Emilius Olivier, her father, the teasing Victorian patriarch who inspired fear and hatred in his children; jealous of the attention his wife gives anyone else, he dies of apoplexy aggravated by alcohol abuse

• Caroline Olivier, her mother, a simple woman who loves her eldest son fiercely and lets the others go by the wayside; she’s afraid and jealous of Mary, so she tries to keep her down, as a faithful pious shadow who will do whatever she wants; Mary gives up her love to keep her company when she’s alone and senile

• Mark Olivier, the cherished eldest son; he goes to the army to get away from his mother, who suffocates him even though he loves her deeply; he dies of a weak heart in India, before he was to come home for good

• Daniel Olivier, the forgotten middle son, naturally a farmer but forced by his mother into an office; this career torment and a disappointment in love drive him to drink; finally, he manages to get away from the family and emigrate to a farm in Canada

• Roddy Olivier, the youngest son, whose childhood rheumatic fever ruins his heart; unfit for anything but family life, which torments him because he is unloved, he dies after compulsory labor (first his family sending him off to Canada to farm, then people forcing him to build a stone fence to “pay his own way”

• Jenny, the old devoted servant who dies just before she is to be married

• Catty, another devoted servant who refuses to leave Mary and says that Mary is “her child” really

• Aunt Charlotte, sister of Emilius, mad Aunt Charlotte, who, after her parents forbid her marriage, now thinks that every man wants to marry him; everyone says she is mad, but later, after forced into an asylum, Mom admits that other than this problem, she was perfectly sane; she causes Mary to worry about inherited mental illness and provides another “oppressed Victorian woman” figure

• Aunt Bella and Uncle Edward, Mom’s sister, their home provides Mary with great childhood memories (except for the promised lamb, which is sickly and dies)

• Uncle Victor and Aunt Lavvy, both siblings of Emilius and Charlotte, neither of whom marry because they must take care of Charlotte; even though Victor loved Mom (Emilius stole her) and Aunt Lavvy wanted to marry a Unitarian minister; they are both figures of people who bow down in the way Mary is expected to do so; Lavvy is a freethinker like Mary, and Victor thinks he’ll get mad like Charlotte (so he commits suicide)—so both are seen as similar to Mary

• Jimmy Posonby, Mary’s first kiss, the pattern for male beauty all her life

• Maurice Jourdain, her first real love affair, he is not as intellectual, it turns out, and doesn’t want a free-thinking wife; he marries a girl who’s obedient and domestic

• Sutcliffes, the big-house family in Yorkshire; the husband loves young Mary even though she never figures it out, while the wife figures it out; they move away to avoid Mary

• Lindley Vickers, another romantic figure for Mary who ends up snogging with the local loose lady and showing her how gross men can be

• Lee Ramsden, the professor she can’t meet because he’s too busy; but later when “famous” she gets to lord it over him

• Richard Nicholson, Mary’s true love; he waits for her mother to die, but he marries just a little too soon; he is there so that Mary can figure out the relationship between love and reality

Themes

• Victorian womanhood: you must sacrifice (she rots until a chance encounter with a Greek philosopher allows her to publish her translations and poetry)
  • Lots of characters echo this plot: it’s like everyone around them sacrificed so they could have a perfect family….and it’s not perfect
• Skepticism towards received institutions (religion, authority)
• Philosophy: after years of agony, and Kant and Hegel and Haeckel, she realizes that her flashes of happiness are when she knows reality, that beauty is the truth of the object, the thing-in-itself, and she has to stop trying to possess those things because that ruins their nature; she has to let go to be happy
  • It turns out that her mom’s admonitions that she wanted too much were right!
  • Beauty Is Truth: you must appreciate the thing-in-itself-ness of the things around you
    • You mustn’t cling to them
    • Apprehension of the beauty in the outer world will make you happy
    • Reality is not morality, belief, or goodness
  • Ultimately, thought—philosophy—does not get you where you want to go; it is awareness that does so
    • An intellectual reason behind an aesthetic form: if awareness is the real thing, then you write about awareness
• Individuality
  • You are in a “net” of heredity; you are your family (“one immense organism”), which restricts your field of action
  • But nonetheless you can still be happy: your personal will to live survives
  • She likes books that take you out of yourself, that make you forget yourself and your problems

Modernism

• Episodic
• Impressionistic images
• Use of second person to reflect infancy; third person for the rest of it
• Victorian bildungsroman within modernist style
• 241: “pushing the universe away from itself to draw it back again, closer than close”
  • Defamiliarization as method, necessity for realism
• 294: in a moment of aesthetic rapture, “the Will and the Idea were not divided as they are in life; they were one. That was why beautiful things made you happy.”
  • Schopenhauer: will = drive to life, desire; what makes the world go round
  • Will = personal; idea = the universal
• Some topics: new anthropology, Darwin, Spencer; comparative religion (she reads Vedas and Upanishads), New Woman bicycle; desserts; Hardy versus Trollope (she likes Hardy, Mom likes Trollope); hotel tea; the “you’d feel sold” metaphor running throughout