belle book and candor: Novella November: The Love Child

"A love-child, the phrase had surged up from her inner consciousness, and she spoke it without realizing what it implied. It just did express what Clarissa truly was to her---the creation of the love of all her being. It was the truth, and in face of the truth she knew that no one could take the child away. She had saved her."

Being an only child led me to manifest Jasmine. She was a bit older than me, smarter, cooler, owned a pink Corvette, and had luxurious glitter dusted hair that she dragged across the floor. I told anyone who'd listen that Jasmine (yes, she was named after Aladdin's main squeeze) was my sister. My parents played along. They poured extra Kool-Aid for her, set a placemat at our table for her, made sure she was buckled up in the backseat --- for my benefit they entertained this second "daughter".

After some time Jasmine started to become an issue, this when I began to talk about her outside of the comforts of home. Jasmine never went to school with me (she was older and cooler remember?), but I blabbed about her enough to where she became known to my teacher. Little did I know that I had successfully convinced her of Jasmine's existence so much so that when my parents came to a PTA meeting (yes, my parents actually went to those) my teacher asked about Jasmine's whereabouts and was greeted with my parents' quizzical stares.

Jasmine is no more, as all the "imaginary friends" I have now are characters in stories that I have hibernating in unfinished word docs, but it's a little funny that what made Jasmine more "alive" was not me just believing in her existence, but that I kept her in the confides of home, and once she became realized outside of that, poof! she was gone. Gone because she wasn't just exclusive to me anymore. I had messed up giving her away. Reality had intruded the fantasy. In short, I grew up.

To create a person out of thin air, give them shape and identity and then be able to convince others of such a creation requires an intimacy that is challenging to explain. Of course psychoanalysts, child experts whathaveyou have tried to link the appearance of an imaginary friend to a child having a social "problem", and since only children are sheltered little monsters who bray at the moon at midnight every third Thursday, we are classified as having such a "problem." (I'm kidding) True, I created Jasmine's existence due to a desire to have siblings, but it also was an inkling of the storytelling life I would quasi-live one day, and the wild imagination that I continue to have all so I can keep a little fantasy in my reality.

Maybe that's why I was drawn to this odd little novella as The Love Child actually delves into that weird, sorta Frankenstein-equse way we 'create' individuals in our adolescent, and how they somehow translate towards our adulthood. The Love Child delves a little further as it asks the question: what would happen if you conjured up your imaginary friend as an adult? If you're Agatha Bodenham, you'd play along, that is, till such a creation begins to consume you greatly...

Agatha Bodenham has lived most of her 32 years of life in a drab, socially inept, and cloistered existence with her mother. The two of them for the most part are emotionally detached. They never show affection or interest in each other, and only interact with their faithful servants. When her mother passes away, Agatha now finds herself truly alone, and her loneliness stirs within her just enough to force her to acknowledge that the last time she felt such true loneliness was as a child, she abated this by conjuring up an imaginary friend, whom she named Clarissa.

Though impossible to imagine at first, Agatha does successfully 're-imagine' Clarissa, and to her delight, the two of them become reacquainted with one another. Agatha is aware of the absurdity of Clarissa's sudden appearance, and at first, she is careful to conceal her from her servants, till Clarissa soon becomes visible to others, becoming less and less transparent and more a living entity. Agatha soon passes Clarissa off as an adopted child, "a love-child", and after such arrangements, Clarissa becomes a fixture in the household, doted on by the servants and loved with a fierceness by Agatha.

"It was difficult to understand, but there was no doubt that Clarissa could be explained by the very same law which accounted for the appearance of the planets in the sky and the vegetables in the garden. She had her place between the stars and the cauliflowers."

After some years pass, the fantastical, insular world that the two of them have created begins to erode when Clarissa reaches her teen years, and her interests begin to focus on tennis, driving lessons, and the attentions of a young man, named David. Soon, Agatha fears of losing Clarissa come to a head, leading to some difficult repercussions.

Okay, all of this sounds a bit unusual, and the narrative does snuggle into being a quaint, quirky little tale of a woman finding happiness through a repressed memory, but by the end things shift from being straightforward to turning a sinister screw. There is a chilling edge to The Love Child that I couldn't shake, and the last few pages will haunt me for a while. At times it reminded me of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl, as it had just enough unease that it took what feels like a whimsical fairy tale, and then becomes shrouded in Gothic tones a la Frankenstein, where the creator and the "monster" begin to battle for ownership.

Agatha, at first, creates Clarissa to mask the deep loneliness of her station, but Clarissa is also created to be a manifestation of the girl that Agatha wished she was, as well as the girl she wishes she could have. It's why when Clarissa grows up, and beings to become more self-aware and makes new acquaintances, Agatha disintegrates into severe depression, sickness, and sometimes even maniacal behaviors. Clarissa soon stops being just a "love child" and becomes more of an object to be possessed, to control, especially when David comes into the picture. Both David and Agatha tend to 'battle it out' for Clarissa, at times objectifying her, as they want to control her life and actions, and go out of their way to have Clarissa in their presence.

Edith Olivier has this interesting way of forming scenes that are light, and breezily comedic, and then turns them tense. This happening in scenes with Agatha and David duke it out with stares and sarcasm. There is one scene concerning a boat ride that you can just feel the strain between the two of them, and it's comical in a way, till Olivier yanks you out of that and throws you into an unsettling scene pages later. After the boat ride, David and Clarissa go on a hike, and Agatha though not a hiker by any means, desperately treks along in order to keep Clarissa away from David, but then becomes stuck when she climbs a rock formation. Her freak out on the rock acts as a signal that Agatha is losing grip with Clarissa, her creation, her fantasy.

"No, no, it is he who makes it worse," Agatha groaned. She had an idea that if only she and Clarissa were left alone, her courage might return, but when she tried to visualize the actual decent, she clung to the stones where she lay. They seemed the last solid rampart in a swaying world."

This deceptive, unsettling little book was written in 1927 and was Olivier's first novel. Olivier (who was related to the legendary actor Laurence Olivier), came to novel writing much later in life this after helping form the Women's Land Army in Wiltshire during World War I. She was mostly known after the war for being among the artistic and intellectual set of the time, as she was close friends with such luminaries as Rex Whistler, Siegfried Sassoon, and Cecil Beaton, and she also served as mayor of Wiltshire during the 1930s and 1940s, becoming the first woman to hold such a position. A clergyman's daughter, and raised socially conservative, Olivier seems not the type to write something as odd and bold as The Love Child, but she did write something incredibly moving and thought-provoking that is quite ahead of its time in terms of writing about women, especially women who occupy the fringes of what is "normal". Olivier expertly approaches loneliness, and perpetual singularity, and is sensitive to those who bear such afflictions as Agatha is written in such a way that you do feel compassion for her, and root for her to be able to love in the way she so desires.

I don't want to look at The Love Child as a "tragic spinster novel", as though it does tick some of those tropes and fits in with the vibe of the era where women found themselves outnumbering men, due to entire generations of men being wiped out due to the war, but as it roams shadowy corners it takes on an acquired flavor all of its own that takes that trope and makes it do a headstand. After reading Rachel Ingalls' Mrs. Caliban, The Love Child reads as that book's great aunt in a way. It's something distant, something more prim, but still genetically adjacent as it too reads a bit ominous and deals with a deeply lonely woman who may/may not have conjured up a unique companion as a shield towards the inevitable reality they don't want to face.

It's funny how books choose us as here I am putting down Mrs. Caliban and picking up The Love Child, embracing the odd, the familiar, the insightful, and entering distorted worlds where the lines blur between fantasy and reality, with women who find themselves in the thick of it.

////

from the margins