Daniel
Alexander Apatiga
Professor
Stapleton
Large
Essay (Revision)
May
9th, 2014
The Persona in Margaret Oliphant’s
Autobiography
Margaret Oliphant’s persona is like
that of an archaeologist. She tries to uncover her past and is discerning
which memories to reminisce, and at times, she discovers that she doesn’t want
to forego her piousness, but to instead face the same, futile hardships
(regarding the death of her children) that would be hidden or obstructed from
view. Her persona’s unifying theme is her children, and her persona is
not intended to say that the moral lesson is to not have children, but that one
should come to a state of equilibrium when confronted with loss. Her
persona’s carefully chosen memories that seem happy are when she is not talking
about her love life or them: “[the autobiography] was written for my boys, for
Cecco in particular” (Oliphant, 1990 86). Her persona had to deal with a
lot of unfairness wherever she encountered it, losing her children and husband
to diseases and not getting a few of her works published, less
importantly. The loss of her family gives her persona a distraught, edgy
tone throughout the autobiography. This causes the reader to empathize
with her persona, strongly, as it often takes a lamenting tone for long periods
of the narrative. Also, some of the mishaps she encountered with
publishers may have been due to her being a woman in a patriarchal
society. Oliphant wants her readers to take away her life, to immortalize
it into the English canon, but more importantly, to remember her
children.
Margaret Oliphant’s archaeologist
persona is paradoxically wrong and paranoid at times. She is wrong about
people believing that she is murderous—not because she is in reality
responsible for her children’s and her husband’s deaths: “I did not know where
to go in Paris, as I could not go back to the same hotel where we had been when
my husband was with me; and in our innocence we went to the Bristol!—my
sister-in-law having been advised to go there, at second or third hand, through
Mr. Pentland” (Oliphant, 1990 88). Without medication to save her loved
ones, she tries to not appear in any way responsible for her loved ones’
deaths. This however is not in reality how she is viewed, though one
person she mentions calls her responsible: “One cruel man the other day told me
I had ruined my family by my indulgence and extravagance” (Oliphant, 1990
79). But, the events that unfolded seem to warp her mind into thinking
she is responsible, as evidenced by her often times trying to forget the past
and her persona takes a guilty tone often right after a death. Margaret
appeared capable of handling herself and her family, there were times that this
was questionable to a psychologist, or anyone who saw her suffering.
Also, society did not understand
illnesses as we understand them today: for instance, antibiotics were not
widely available, which could have prevented many of her loved ones’ deaths,
and the theories surrounding the spreading of diseases would have been
primitive. Essentially, she was very lucky to be alive even though she
thought of her having survived the diseases that befell her children and
husband as a curse. She was driven to the point where she could not
handle her misfortunes, and temporarily denounced and renounced God even though
He was central to her life; she regains her piousness when she finds a way to
forgive herself.
Margaret Oliphant’s archaeologist
persona appears to self-reflect at the dig site of her past memories about her
youth, gloomily, as though there were few positive things to remember.
Early on in the autobiography, when she is young, she chooses to remember her
deceased sister, Isabella, with despair. At the time, in the
autobiography, of when Margaret Oliphant narrates her youthful years living
with her parents, the persona sort of daydreams, melancholically about if one
were not dead but alive: her “[mother] had lost three children one after
another—one a girl about whom I used to make all sorts of dream-romances, to
the purport that Isabella had never died at all…” (Oliphant, 2002 56).
And she reflects that she had few friends while growing up: “I grew up
without any idea of the pleasures and companions of youth… I had nobody to
praise me except my mother and Frank” (Oliphant, 2002 66). At times she
foreshadows the terrible troubles that awaited her: “But there is always a
prophetic ache in the heart when such calamity is on the way” (Oliphant, 2002
68). Margaret Oliphant lacked persistence at climbing up from a deep
cataclysm; she regressed into the shadows of the mind.
Margaret’s archaeologist persona finds
sharp objects that poke her and hurt her often as she digs around—not only are
these symbolic of life’s events, but failed relationships. “Now in this
innermost chamber of the heart which no man except a husband can enter and he
but a little, I am alone always, alone in the world for ever.” (Oliphant, 2002
46). This also suggests her persona is heterosexual and that she guards
her feelings from strangers. Earlier on in her autobiography, before she met
her future husband, Frank, she had a failed relationship with a man whom she
considered to be very unattractive. After she gets published for the
first time, she at times does not understand why publishers publish lower
people on her idea of intellectual merit instead of her own works, too.
She feels betrayed by the publisher’s lack of confidence in her art.
Margaret Oliphant’s youthful quality
talks about the past in a humble tone to others; she has this innocence quality
of who is intelligent and inexperienced at the enjoyments of life When
she had some guests over to talk about “books and the finest subjects… [she]
had not the least idea how to [amuse her guests]” they most likely were not
good friends and she repeatedly said that she was friendless for long times,
withdrawing from society essentially (Oliphant, 1990 39). The fact that her
parents were poor most likely contributed to this sense of inexperience: “[My
mother] was a poor woman all her life, but her instinct was always to give”
(Oliphant, 2002 62). And when she finally came across death, she
innocently expresses it: “I never had come within sight of death before”
(Oliphant, 2002 75). Even as a married woman she viewed herself as
unworldly: “I did not know where to go in Paris, my husband was with me;
and in our innocence we went to the Bristol,” she writes (Oliphant, 1990
88).
By contrast, the persona of Margaret
Oliphant reminisces about her past with envy towards the end of her
autobiography, since it took her thirty or so years to finish her
autobiography. Her older persona paints a landscape of a happy time when
travelling abroad: “I think with pleasure of the pleasant tumult of that
arrival, --the delight of rest, the happy sleepy children all got to bed, the
little party of women, all of us about the same age, all with the sense of
holiday, a little outburst of freedom, no man interfering, keeping us to rule
or formality” (Oliphant, 1990 107). Albeit, this is a memory of a time
when she’s alone and everyone she loved is dead. She also later portrays
herself as a thoughtful, imaginative lady who is capable of imagining other
points of view with immense skill.
Margaret Oliphant’s persona places
blame on herself and shows this by repeating her stories often for many of
life’s injustices that were thrown her way. Effectively, her
persona highlights the events that have led up to the deaths of her children,
or the death of her husband, through this literary style. She repeats the
story of Maggie’s death twice—once in the beginning and once towards the
end. At the beginning, she explains her death with a large sense of loss and
what-if melancholy: “[Maggie] was just beginning to sympathize with me, to
comfort me, and at this dear moment, her little heart expanding, her little
mind growing, her sweet life blossoming day by day, God has taken her away out
of arms and refuses to hear my cry and prayer” (Oliphant, 2002 37).
Towards the end, she remembers Maggie again in a more constrained and almost
frank tone, but still melancholically and lamentably: “On the 27th
of January 1864, my dear little Maggie died of gastric fever” (Oliphant, 1990
108). Happier moments in her life she avoids while she’s lamenting,
because she’d rather cause a pang about these misgivings. But this does
not stop her from continuing her for-her-children theme.
Margaret Oliphant’s archaeological
persona digs further into the earth to find alternative answers of if her
children were still alive. She pictures herself as being instead dead or
her and her children are all happy together in the grave—she is nonetheless
dead. The most moving of her sub-plots was when she loses her husband,
which happens basically in the climax of her story, which caused me to feel
goose bumps when I read it. She has lost her lover not by divorce or
separation, but by the injustice of terminal illness—much worse than most of us
can experience. Death comes into her life unfair-like, which produced a
sad sensation in me very profoundly, where she says: “when his father was
dead,” speaking of her boy (Oliphant, 1990 78). The hidden, moral message
in her persona seems to be that the most important thing in life to cherish
every moment and be strong.
Margaret Oliphant’s archaeologist
persona places the urn of religion closer to her body, accepting that God can
decide who dies when, but she doesn’t think any of her children will go to hell
and that they are at some kind of happier place. Also, her persona blames
a lot of her unhappiness on God, who wants to take her children away from her,
basically. At times though, she uses her belief in God to get through the
tough moments in her life, to essentially set aside the grief. This can
be seen by her mentioning the chapel where she walked every morning at one
point, in England. She probably was a church goer, though she does not
explicitly state this.
She blames God often destroying the
religious pots, finally accepting her children’s death to be the will of God,
though she thinks him unjust. She doesn’t trust him: “She is with God,
she is in his hands… Can I trust her with him? Can I trust Him that He
has done what was best for her, that He has her safe, that there has been no
mistake?” I don’t think her persona portrays herself as thanking God for
anything she has been given, because they are all taken away… In one of her
most despairing moments, she says, “It seems as if God had broken his word to
me, leaving me here helpless with my hands stretched out, refusing me with an
unreasonable silence” (Oliphant, 1990 80). She is indeed a fatalist, a
victim to God’s plan, like a damned Calvinist.
Whereas earlier in her story, where she
was more submissive to the will of God, she in her older age becomes more
thoughtful with viewing her life’s struggles. She begins to see herself
from a bird’s eye perspective, thus, more clearly. “I feel myself like
the sufferers in Dante, those of whom we have been reading, who are bent under
the weight of stones…” (Oliphant, 1990 99). Her piousness has not waned,
however, since she quotes the bible still rarely and only when doing so closely
summarizes her past and foreseeable future (when she has begun to picture
herself dead): “I was still young, and all was well with the children. My
heart had come up with a great bound from all the strain of previous trouble
and hard labor and the valley of the shadow of death” (Oliphant, 1990 104).
Though she has will power to overcome her suffering, she ends the sentence on a
sad note: a synechdoche of her life and an allusion from the bible.
Often, her archaeologist persona
befriends other non-archaeologists from a vain perspective of similar
experiences and characteristics, giving herself a warm, friendly tone.
She, at one point, mentions that she became friends with a woman who had
similarly lost her children due to disease early on. Later, she makes
friends with a woman that reminds her of her mother, and they became
close. Her brother, Willie, who she is friends with throughout the
narrative is always there to take of his sister. She also takes note of
female infantilization in Mr. Blackett’s behavior towards his wife, which she
finds irritable: “Mrs. Blackett was about my age, and a fine creature, very
much more clever than her husband, though treated by him in any serious matter
as if she had been a little girl.—a thing quite new to me, and which I could
not understand” (Oliphant, 1990 100).
At times in the autobiography, she
becomes politically concerned about events like for instance the procession in
Rome while she’s with her husband. And she uses Marxist terminology, who
evidently influenced her, such as the motif of “Bourgeois,” twice throughout
the novel—once while commenting on female infantilization as I mentioned above,
and the second time, while talking about her father’s spend-thrift habits: “[My
mother] would have borne anything and everything for her children’s sake, to
keep their home intact, and her youth had been troubled and partially dependent
one—dependent upon bourgeois relations on the other side” (Oliphant, 2002
57). According to the annotation, she was referring to a middle-class
family, however, I think she was making a larger argument that there was some
kind of economic injustice in her family.
Towards the latter half of her
autobiography, her persona begins to recognize that focusing on the sorrows of
the past will not get her very far and is not in her own interests, perhaps
health-wise. She finds an age-old remedy—laughter—to brighten her day,
laughing again after a long time of seriousness, at a time after she lost her
last child. She even makes a self-reflection about how she keeps over
lamenting, “But I must not begin to write of my boy, or I will not be able to
think of anything else—not five months yet since he has been taken from me”
(Oliphant, 1990 74). Her persona also begins to focus on day-to-day
activities, though at times, the narrative returns right back to despair of
loss concerning another child who’s dead.
In her autobiography, Margaret
Oliphant’s persona is pious to a large extent and is critical of herself in her
way of responding to life’s misfortunes. She tries to portray herself in
as realistic light as possible, being self-critical of her faults and asking
large questions regarding her misfortunes in life. Why did He (God) take
away her children? By these sorts of rhetorical questions, her persona
asks for forgiveness and empathy from the reader, though she expects nothing in
return. Her despairing persona, which at times appears to be tamed
by time, can sometimes revert back to remembering someone who is dead 30 years
later, however, since the memory is of her son. She presents herself as a
hard worker and as a deep thinker as a writer should be.
Works Cited:
Oliphant, Margaret. Jay,
Elisabeth ed. The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1990. Print.
Oliphant, Margaret. Jay,
Elizabeth ed. The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant. Mississauga,
Broadview Press Ltd., 2002. Print.
