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<\/a><\/p>\n“Keeping ‘each of the twos in its right place’:
\nthe problematic return journey in The Cuckoo Clock
\nand
\nThe Tapestry Room
\nby Mrs Molesworth”<\/h3>\nBeatrice Turner
\nRecipient of the 2008 Friends of the Dorothy Neal White Collection Scholarship<\/em><\/h4>\nFirst published in 2009<\/p>\n
By the Friends of the Dorothy Neal White Collection<\/p>\n
P O Box 12499, Wellington, New Zealand<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Friends of the Dorothy Neal White Collection and Bea Turner<\/p>\n
ISSN 01145428<\/p>\n
The Dorothy Neal White Collection is housed in the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa<\/p>\n
Keeping the \u201ceach of the twos in its right place\u201d: the problematic return journey in The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room<\/h4>\n
The \u201creturn journey\u201d is a common motif of children\u2019s fantasy; the child in the text and, vicariously, the child reader, are allowed to adventure into unknown, wild, and potentially dangerous territory and to be returned safely at the narrative\u2019s end to a familiar setting. What the trip into a fantastic or unknown world symbolises, however, or what purpose it serves is difficult to pin down. It is the fact of the \u201creturn\u201d to normality which renders this device so ambiguous. The return is problematic, since whatever lessons learned or social or psychological concerns are worked out in the fantasy, the child is returned to the reality from which it came: things have not changed. Sarah Gilead(1), discussing this problem of what to do with the return, wonders:<\/p>\n
From the vantage point of the return, is the fantasy a socialising, ego-forming expression of anxieties, fears or grievances? Or is it a stimulus to subversive desires or cognitions and hence a threat to socialisation? Does the fantasy plot yield knowledge, consolation, or moral significance and thus fit the concept of children\u2019s literature as comforting and educative\u2026Does the frame, as a \u201csafe\u201d container, enable the fantasy to challenge the norms of reality?\u201d<\/cite><\/p>\nThe fantasy framed by departure and return to normality may work in any of these ways. What is consistent, however, is that the fantasy works upon the child who experiences it, and whether they derive growth, understanding, moral awareness or a safety-valve for antisocial desires from the experience, the return is made to a reality that has remained unchanged. In this sense, whether the fantasy journey endorses behaviour that is anarchic or desires which are unsanctioned by society, or puts the protagonist through challenges designed to socialise in the \u201creal\u201d world, the child returning must remain in a reality which is fixed. They may choose to adapt or not, but the world in which they belong will not adapt to fit their transformative experiences. U. C. Knoeflmacher(2)<\/sup> notes that the \u201cdecorous and lady-like women who dominated the field of Victorian children\u2019s literature\u201d express something of a paradox in their writing, since \u201cthe mode of fantasy also freed the same aggressive impulses that their fictions ostensibly tried to domesticate\u201d. He argues that writing fantasy, for women such as Mrs Molesworth, whose texts The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room this essay will discuss, was a way to \u201cturn their own satiric energies against the deficiencies or complacencies of a society that frowned on female anger\u201d while outwardly functioning as narratives of socialisation.<\/p>\nThis discussion will not take up that specific issue of female aggression, and nor do I intend to take up any issues of authorial intent. Instead I wish to focus on this idea that fantasy, and the return in particular, was a way of allowing the child to covertly escape social norms and pressures, and in doing so, to exist for a limited time in a space unaffected by adult desires and meaning. I will argue that the return<\/p>\n
actually amplifies the impossibility of achieving this, not merely through the very fact of the return, in which the \u201creal world\u201d has the \u201clast word,\u201d as it were, but because, as I will show, the fantasy cannot occur in a space entirely free from adult intervention. Just as the adult is constantly and unshakeably present in the language, so the idea of an adult presence is constantly present in the narrative, in the form of a guide or mentor figure. The presence of the adult in the return fantasy sets limits upon to what extent the child can have a truly anarchic and unrestricted experience, since the adult guide constantly explains, limits and instructs how to proceed in worlds that appear initially lawless.<\/p>\n
Viewed in this way, the return journey into fantasy becomes a cyclical gesture of the sort that other Victorian children\u2019s fantasy narratives (for example, At the Back of the North Wind, The Water Babies and the Alice texts) practise in language. Instead of being worked out at the linguistic level however, the return is made part of a narrative, and enacts at the level of plot this reaching towards an idea of the child. The return journey, in other words, is an attempt to grasp or articulate this \u201cchild\u201d through first setting up a representation of the real world, with the associated known social structures, and then striking out from that representation of the real into a representation of fantasy land, which may be governed by rules of its own, but which seems a strange and lawless place. It is in the wild and unsocialised spaces of fantasy that the child\u2019s inner life might be explored, and the idea of what a child might do if free from adult rules pondered.<\/p>\n
However, while this remains a theoretical possibility, what actually happens in the journey into fantasy is quite the<\/p>\n
![\"alt=\"](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/cl-201x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWalter Crane illustration for The Cuckoo Clock<\/div>\nopposite. The child is accompanied by adult figures, and while they may be helpful or downright useless, they still signal that it is impossible to imagine a child without a mediating adult. The return is a retreat, an admission that narrative fails just as language does to say what the child really is, that it will always be understood through the eyes and the idea of the adult. In delivering the child safely back to the reality from where it was taken, the return proposes that there is no child who can be successfully articulated other than as a socialised being, something understood through the adult culture that it inhabits and which shapes it.<\/p>\n
In Mrs Molesworth\u2019s The Cuckoo Clock, characters seem trapped inside repetitive cycles of history, unable to act in ways that have not been previously rehearsed1<\/sup>. Change has a deceptive quality in this narrative. In the opening description of the house and garden to which Griselda is sent to live,<\/p>\nThere was a colony of rooks in this old garden. Year after year they held their parliaments and cawed and chattered and fussed; year after year they built their nests and hatched their eggs; year after year, I suppose, the old ones gradually died off and the young ones took their place, though, but for knowing that this must be so, no one would have suspected it, for to all appearances the rooks were always the same – ever and always the same. (The Cuckoo Clock)<\/cite><\/p>\nThe narrator posits that change must occur, for time passes and rooks are not immortal, yet that italicised \u201csuppose\u201d suggests that although the narrator is aware that both the passage of time and the birth and death of rooks are things that \u201cmust be so,\u201d the evidence of appearances, that the rooks were \u201cever and always the same\u201d is almost more convincing.<\/p>\n
The way things appear is more important in this narrative than the way they really are. The description of the changing yet unchanged rooks could serve as a sort of blueprint for how the narrative works. While change does occur, it is really only a recycling of past established patterns. Nothing happens, for a long time, the narrator says, in the house and its garden, both of which are terribly old, until \u201cone day at last there did come a change\u201d. The change that comes is Griselda, a little girl who has been sent to the house to live with her two great aunts following the death of her mother. Her arrival is a source of consternation for the rooks, who try anxiously to see \u201cwhat was the matter\u2026A little girl was the matter!\u201d. There is a sense that her arrival is perhaps a threat to the property\u2019s unchanging existence, but even this is contained by the description of Griselda, who is<\/p>\n
A little girl in a grey merino frock\u2026all grey together, even to her eyes, all except her round rosy face and bright brown hair. Her name even was rather grey, for it was Griselda.<\/cite><\/p>\n![\"alt=\"](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2-214x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWalter Crane illustration for The Cuckoo Clock<\/div>\nHer potential for change, signified by her rosy face and bright hair, markers of her youth, is limited by her strong association with the colour grey, with its connotations of old age. Griselda is linked to the past not only by this, but through the memories of the three old ladies, the \u201caunts\u201d (who were really the much older cousins of her grandmother) and the old servant Dorcas. \u201cWe are all old here, missie. ‘Twas time something young came to the old house again,\u201d Dorcas tells Griselda, suggesting that although she is \u201csomething young,\u201d she is not something new: that \u201cagain\u201d points to a repetitive history of which Griselda is an unwitting part. Later Aunt Grizzel tells Griselda that she is the third generation of young children entrusted to the aunts\u2019 care, following her grandmother and her father. This insistence on permanence and repetition is even echoed in the speech of the two aunts; Aunt Tabitha, the quiet, passive sister, almost never speaks for herself, instead acting as an echo for her more confident and decisive sister. \u201cIt was rather a bother to have to always say \u2018thank you\u2019 or \u2018no, thank you\u2019 twice, but Griselda thought it was polite to do so, as Aunt Tabitha always repeated everything that Aunt Grizzel said\u201d.<\/p>\n
The constant refrain of the aunts is how much she resembles her long-dead grandmother Sybilla: \u201cThe aunts looked at each other with a little smile. \u201c\u2018So like her grandmother,\u2019 they whispered\u201d. This resemblance becomes all the stronger when we learn that Griselda, like her grandmother, has a fascination with the cuckoo clock in the drawing room. Her eventual discovery of the magical cuckoo who lives inside it and their subsequent adventures together, it is strongly suggested, is a secret that Sybilla also knew of. \u201cJust what Sybilla used to say,\u201d whispers Aunt Grizzel, when Griselda insists that the cuckoo is alive. Later the cuckoo reveals to Griselda, in a dream sequence of moving images, that Sybilla was sent from Germany to live with the great aunts in England, and that the cuckoo clock was made by her grandfather and gifted to her when she came to England. \u201cGriselda\u201d is of course not only a \u201crather grey\u201d name, it is also a German name, and \u201cGrizzel\u201d is the anglicised form of the name.<\/p>\n
Through their repetition of not only how much she resembles her, but of their hopes that she may turn out \u201cas good as dear Sybilla, if not as beautiful \u2013 that we could hardly hope for,\u201d Griselda is manipulated by her great aunts into a reincarnation of Sybilla, curtailing the possibility of any difference or of an existence in her own right. The change that \u201ccame at last\u201d is not so much of a change, it seems, as the beginning of another cycle in a history that is prescribed, and Griselda\u2019s status as both a change and an unchangeable \u201cversion\u201d anticipates the cyclical structure of the narrative. The cuckoo himself, while for Griselda an agent of change and magic and entertainment, is actually, says Dorcas, the good luck charm that keeps the house safe and happy in an unchanging state. When the cuckoo clock stops after Griselda hurls a book at it, in a rage at her arithmetic sums, this portends for the great aunts not just bad luck, but the cessation of any kind of future. Aunt Grizzel, in great distress, cries: \u201cWhat can be going to happen? The cuckoo clock has stopped\u201d. Without the cuckoo clock, they have no concept of future; or to put it more accurately, the idea of a future, of change, is unthinkable to them because the cuckoo is constant, and represents complete, unchanging continuity. It has been in the house since Sybilla\u2019s arrival began the cycle of extreme youth managed by age, and without it, it is suggested, this safe and happy status is threatened.<\/p>\n
That it is the cuckoo clock which is the key to the unchanging nature of the house and its inhabitants raises a problem if one of the functions of the return is to be understood as an escape or departure from the restricting norms of the socialised sphere which is inevitably an adult-constructed world. Griselda\u2019s fantasies are entirely orchestrated by the cuckoo, who is a very definite \u201cadult\u201d figure, and who consistently engages her in catechistical dialogue, albeit not always successfully. Although he takes cues from her daytime activities, for example, her admiration of the carved \u201cNodding Mandarins\u201d in the drawing room, the cuckoo retains absolute control over what she experiences, acting as a guide and protector, but also as the mediator of her experiences. Griselda is not allowed any role in transporting herself, either during the daytime or at night, to the scene of fantasy. There are no portals, such as the rabbit hole, and unlike Alice, she does not have to figure out the rules herself, as the cuckoo is a thoroughly reliable guide. She has no space to act as a quasi-adult within: even her brief walks outside on the terrace occur only on the occasion of auntly permission.<\/p>\n
Griselda is a child who is entirely without agency in the real world, yet the potential for the fantasy world to be a release-valve for the mental pressure of a constrained existence is suppressed too. The cuckoo\u2019s control over her extends even as far as her physical movement. She can never understand how she is transported, and neither can the narrator \u2013 she is simply \u201chere\u201d one minute and \u201cthere\u201d the next, moved by the cuckoo\u2019s abilities. When it comes<\/p>\n
![\"alt=\"](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/ch-197x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWalter Crane illustration for The Cuckoo Clock<\/div>\ntime for her to return, she is never allowed to see the way back, but is always put to sleep in some way, so that she knows \u201cnothing more till she open[s] her eyes the next morning,\u201d to wonder \u201cI believe the cuckoo made me fall asleep on purpose to make me fancy it was a dream. Was it a dream?\u201d.<\/p>\n
The return functions as a curtailing of experience, but to what extent does the fantasy itself act as a controlling agent? Her adventures appear to allow her to play out some potentially dangerous fantasies; dangerous that is, in their \u201cadult\u201d and experiential implications. She attends a ball where she dances with the Emperor of China. Like Alice at the Mad Hatter\u2019s tea party, Griselda is allowed to participate in a surreal parody of an adult ritual: here her Mandarin suitor and his courtiers are life-size nodding dolls who cannot speak. She also has, like Alice, experiences of a more profoundly fantastical nature: she is taken to the garden where all the world\u2019s butterflies paint all the world\u2019s flowers; she visits the lake on the Moon and looks back at the Earth. As Sarah Gilead notes, the return may condone such unsettling experiences by \u201cofficially resolving and fixing meanings\u201d once safely back in a \u201creal\u201d setting, but it becomes evident when considering how Griselda\u2019s adventures occur that even within the fantasy setting the balance of power lies with the adult figure of the cuckoo.<\/p>\n
\nThe cuckoo not only hides from Griselda exactly how he transports her, he also selects her adventures and accompanies her, guiding and advising at all stages so that she is neither terrified at the distance between the Earth and the \u201cother side\u201d of the moon, nor does she inadvertently give offence to the King and Queen of the butterflies. So just as the repetitive history of which Griselda becomes a part works to thwart change, ensuring that she is transfixed in her role, so the cuckoo\u2019s presence acts to preserve her as a child under the supervision of an adult. No matter how potentially dangerous and profoundly strange and otherwordly her adventures, she undertakes them as a child who is understood through her relationship with the cuckoo who acts both as chaperone and pedagogue, and the series of fantasies is framed as a series of lessons. Indeed, the cuckoo\u2019s refrain, \u201cyou have a very great deal to learn,\u201d and Griselda\u2019s initial reluctance to learn the lesson of obedience, points to a narrative which is overtly concerned with the importance of preparing a child for subjugation beneath adult rule. It is not until Griselda has internalised this lesson, realised that \u201cit\u2019s all \u2018obeying orders\u2019 together\u201d which matters and submitted dutifully to the strictures of the aunts that she is rewarded with the official sanctioning of her new daytime playmate, Phil. The narrative is resolved with the two children established as friends and the cuckoo, obligingly realising he is not needed any more, bidding Griselda farewell in a \u201creal\u201d dream: \u201cmerely a dream, nothing else\u201d.<\/p>\n
Griselda\u2019s very obvious lack of agency bears similarities to the experiences of children in two other \u201creturn\u201d fantasies. Alice\u2019s adventures and those of the two cousins who find their way into Tapestry Land in another of Mrs Molesworth\u2019s children\u2019s fantasies, The Tapestry Room, are both conducted under the supervision of adult eyes. While the cousins Hugh and Jeannie appear to negotiate their own way to a greater extent than Griselda, who is instructed by the very adult-sounding cuckoo at every turn where to go and also how to behave, they are still guided by their own \u201cadult\u201d bird, the mysterious and rather frightening raven Dudu. Dudu does not accompany them as the cuckoo does Griselda, but he has complete control over Tapestry Land, and the final say in what happens there and who is allowed entry. Given that Dudu is a French raven, it is tempting to suggest that his name is a sort of \u201cchildspeak\u201d play on the French word for \u201cGod,\u201d \u201cDieu.\u201d2<\/sup> Certainly Dudu has a godlike omnipresence and omniscience in Tapestry Land. He describes himself to Hugh as merely the \u201cguardian\u201d of the entrance, but also instructs him to whistle three times should he require assistance. When a boat the cousins are attempting to navigate up a river runs aground and Hugh whistles, it is not Dudu himself who appears, but a fleet of frogs. Dudu is apparently able to control events in Tapestry Land from some unknown and unseen position.<\/p>\n![\"alt=\"](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/aw-264x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nJohn Tenniel illustration for Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland<\/div>\nAlice too encounters adult figures and guides in Wonderland. The advice they give may be meaningless or unhelpful (the Caterpillar\u2019s direction to eat one side of the mushroom to grow taller and one to grow shorter without indicating which is which almost results in Alice\u2019s annihilation), but they are adult ciphers, and behave in ways which Alice instinctively recognises: \u201c\u2018How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!\u2019 thought Alice. \u2018I might as well be at school at once\u2019\u201d (Wonderland). Griselda experiences a similar attitude from Cuckoo: when she tries to point out a logical inconsistency in his argument, he cuts her off with an adult evasion tactic Alice would have found familiar. \u201c\u2018Nonsense,\u2019 said the cuckoo hastily; \u2018you’ve a great deal to learn, and one thing is, not to argue\u2019\u201d. Dudu, while never a subject of the text\u2019s covert mockery in the way that the cuckoo and Alice\u2019s guides are, occasionally engages in patronising adult snarkiness. When Hugh tells him he would like to throw a party in the tapestry room castle, \u201c\u2018only,\u2019 observed the raven, drily, \u2018there is one little objection to that. Generally \u2013 I may be mistaken of course, my notions are very old-fashioned, I daresay \u2013 but generally, people give parties in their own houses, don\u2019t they?\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n
Dudu, as Jeanne recognises, is rather too frightening a character for mockery. His inscrutable gaze and apparent ability to hear everything said makes him seem a \u201cwicked enchanter\u201d: she tells Hugh that it\u2019s best to be \u201cmost frightfully polite\u201d to him, and even her father addresses him as \u201cMonsieur Dudu\u201d with no trace of irony. While the narrator of The Cuckoo Clock occasionally delights in pointing out where the cuckoo tries to hide mistakes behind an adult authority, Dudu is above such treatment. When he puts Hugh down, Hugh and the narrator assume a wounded but fearful silence. While the cuckoo mimics an authoritative but foolish adultness, Dudu represents a sterner adult authority, one that is not necessarily \u201cfair\u201d but maddeningly right. The cuckoo and Dudu are therefore both parodies or versions of adult behaviour, and their presence as guides of greater or lesser degrees of usefulness points to the impossibility of creating a space from which adults are actually outlawed.<\/p>\n
In both The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room the fantasy setting in which the children find themselves seems to have an intended function, however this might be ultimately thwarted by adult presence, of allowing a form of manageable experience which is not (and should not be, these texts imply) available to the children in their daytime lives. Both fantasies are ones to which the children may return, but only at night, and The Tapestry Room in particular makes it explicitly clear that the two states must be kept separate. When Jeanne and Hugh meet on the morning following their first foray into Tapestry Land, Hugh is upset to discover that although he can remember the night\u2019s events clearly, Jeanne appears to have no recollection of what happened. It becomes clear that Jeanne\u2019s apparent forgetfulness is, in fact, the \u201ccorrect\u201d and safe way to deal with these adventures. Marcelline, Jeanne\u2019s mysterious nanny who seems well aware of the powers of Dudu and the tapestry room, explains to Hugh that there is \u201ctwo of everything…and the great thing is to keep each of the twos in its right place\u201d (The Tapestry Room). In a subsequent fantasy, Hugh is relieved to find that Jeannie does remember, but when he points this out to her she explains, \u201c\u2018You don’t understand, Cheri. I’m moonlight Jeanne, now \u2013 when we were having the dolls’ feast I was daylight Jeanne. And you know it’s never moonlight in the day-time….I don’t exactly forget,\u2019 said Jeanne, \u2018but it spoils things to mix them together\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n
It does more than spoil things, as Griselda discovers when she befriends a little boy in the aunts\u2019 grounds. They decide to search for the entrance to Fairyland together and become hopelessly lost. When she announces the friendship to Dorcas, the old servant is horrified, for Aunt Grizzel \u201cthinks all boys rude and naughty, I\u2019m afraid, missie\u201d (The Cuckoo Clock). What particular type of naughtiness it is that Aunt Grizzel loathes becomes evident when Griselda reveals that Master Phil still has a nurse, and<\/p>\n
![\"alt=\"](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/bg-192x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWalter Crane illustration for The Tapestry Room<\/div>\nDorcas considers, \u201cThen he must be quite a little boy, perhaps Miss Grizzel would not object so much in that case\u201d. As a very little boy, Phil is harmless, but as someone her own age, he poses a potential sexual threat to Griselda. When Griselda announces this new friendship to the aunts, declares her intent of maintaining it and flies off in a temper when it is forbidden, Aunt Grizzel is swift to attribute blame. \u201c\u2018Already,\u2019 she said faintly. \u2018She was never so violent before. Can one afternoon’s companionship with rudeness have already contaminated her?\u2019\u201d.It falls to the cuckoo, as usual, to provide an explanation, which he does in the form of the dream sequence. Griselda is shown a scene from a ball in the old house, where a young girl \u201cwas dancing with a gentleman whose eyes looked as if they saw no one else, and she herself seemed brimming over with youth and happiness\u201d. But the next scene is of the girl\u2019s funeral. The young gentleman paces beside her coffin, white with grief, and when Griselda questions her aunts about this scene, she learns that he dies soon after of a broken heart, and their baby son, her father, was sent to the aunts. Griselda herself has recently lost a mother: this is the reason why she has been sent to live with the aunts.<\/p>\n
Dead parents are, in fact, everywhere in these two texts. Sybilla is raised by her grandfather as her parents are dead, and Hugh is sent to live with Jeanne and her family following the death of his parents. Jeanne is the sole child in possession of a full set of parents, but even they have more than a suggestion of mortality about them; her father is much older than her mother and suffers rheumatism. Dudu the raven tells Hugh and Jeanne the story of their ancestors just as the cuckoo shows Griselda hers, along the way remarking that he is somewhere in the region of three or four hundred years old, and again it is a story filled with dead parents and children. The cousins\u2019 great-grandmother Jeanne and great-grand aunt befriend a little English girl while they are in their late teens. This girl has lost both her parents. She moves away and the young ladies marry, and do not meet with their English friend Charlotte until many years later, when the Revolution has broken up their family, and Charlotte is able to help Jeanne and her husband escape France. The friends meet up once more, many more years later when all three are old women. Charlotte\u2019s and Jeanne\u2019s husbands have both died as relatively young men; Charlotte has lost all her children and is herself on her way South to die in a temperate climate in the area where her baby daughter died.<\/p>\n
This sad history, and the history of Griselda\u2019s family, makes clear the dangers of marriage and childbearing. It is physically and emotionally damaging, and while this might be read as merely reflecting the realities of an age where death in childbirth and infant mortality was a very real possibility, Aunt Grizzel, at least, believes that these threats are ones that Griselda can be potentially sheltered from through limiting any real experience and interaction with \u201crude\u201d boys. It is difficult, however, to read Aunt Grizzel\u2019s desire to prevent or at least delay Griselda\u2019s entry into an adult relationship as that of a radical woman who wishes her great niece free from the unequal power relations of sexual maturity. Griselda\u2019s lesson, emphasized again and again, is to learn to obey, and to do her duty, and it is the successful mastery of this lesson which signals that the fantasy may leave off, and the process of forming real friendships with other real children may begin.<\/p>\n
Her name refers back to the \u201cPatient Griselda\u201d story, perhaps most well-known for its appearance in Boccaccio\u2019s The Decameron, where a young wife uncomplainingly endures heartbreak, humiliation and rejection at the hands of her husband, who merely wishes to test her patience and sense of duty; having done so, he honours her as the ideal woman and all ends happily. It seems that The Cuckoo Clock highlights sexual relationships as a source of damage to women, but rather than propose a radical rejection of the role of wife and mother, Griselda must be sheltered for as long as possible in a state of innocence from what is ultimately inevitable. Her lesson of obedience enforces her position within the text and within the family structure as the newest element of a repetitive narrative. She will, one day, have to endure the deadly pains of childbirth just as her grandmother and her mother have.<\/p>\n
In a similar way, the narrative of The Tapestry Room insists on an absolute separation between the \u201cdream\u201d Jeanne and Hugh, and their \u201creal\u201d counterparts. Just as Griselda may dance with a Chinese emperor in the fantasy realm but must not play with little boys in the \u201creal\u201d world, The Tapestry Room attempts to provide symbolic release and experience in fantasy while prolonging innocence as long as possible in reality. In Tapestry Land, the cousins act as the parents of a strange little family that includes Houpet the chicken, Grignan the turtle, and Nibble the guinea pig, with Dudu as an omnipotent and often unseen protector. Jeanne and Hugh even act out an unwitting parody of the genteel family stroll, walking arm in arm together in stately<\/p>\n
\nRecipient of the 2008 Friends of the Dorothy Neal White Collection Scholarship<\/em><\/h4>\n
First published in 2009<\/p>\n
By the Friends of the Dorothy Neal White Collection<\/p>\n
P O Box 12499, Wellington, New Zealand<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Friends of the Dorothy Neal White Collection and Bea Turner<\/p>\n
ISSN 01145428<\/p>\n
The Dorothy Neal White Collection is housed in the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa<\/p>\n
Keeping the \u201ceach of the twos in its right place\u201d: the problematic return journey in The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room<\/h4>\n
The \u201creturn journey\u201d is a common motif of children\u2019s fantasy; the child in the text and, vicariously, the child reader, are allowed to adventure into unknown, wild, and potentially dangerous territory and to be returned safely at the narrative\u2019s end to a familiar setting. What the trip into a fantastic or unknown world symbolises, however, or what purpose it serves is difficult to pin down. It is the fact of the \u201creturn\u201d to normality which renders this device so ambiguous. The return is problematic, since whatever lessons learned or social or psychological concerns are worked out in the fantasy, the child is returned to the reality from which it came: things have not changed. Sarah Gilead(1), discussing this problem of what to do with the return, wonders:<\/p>\n
From the vantage point of the return, is the fantasy a socialising, ego-forming expression of anxieties, fears or grievances? Or is it a stimulus to subversive desires or cognitions and hence a threat to socialisation? Does the fantasy plot yield knowledge, consolation, or moral significance and thus fit the concept of children\u2019s literature as comforting and educative\u2026Does the frame, as a \u201csafe\u201d container, enable the fantasy to challenge the norms of reality?\u201d<\/cite><\/p>\n The fantasy framed by departure and return to normality may work in any of these ways. What is consistent, however, is that the fantasy works upon the child who experiences it, and whether they derive growth, understanding, moral awareness or a safety-valve for antisocial desires from the experience, the return is made to a reality that has remained unchanged. In this sense, whether the fantasy journey endorses behaviour that is anarchic or desires which are unsanctioned by society, or puts the protagonist through challenges designed to socialise in the \u201creal\u201d world, the child returning must remain in a reality which is fixed. They may choose to adapt or not, but the world in which they belong will not adapt to fit their transformative experiences. U. C. Knoeflmacher(2)<\/sup> notes that the \u201cdecorous and lady-like women who dominated the field of Victorian children\u2019s literature\u201d express something of a paradox in their writing, since \u201cthe mode of fantasy also freed the same aggressive impulses that their fictions ostensibly tried to domesticate\u201d. He argues that writing fantasy, for women such as Mrs Molesworth, whose texts The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room this essay will discuss, was a way to \u201cturn their own satiric energies against the deficiencies or complacencies of a society that frowned on female anger\u201d while outwardly functioning as narratives of socialisation.<\/p>\n This discussion will not take up that specific issue of female aggression, and nor do I intend to take up any issues of authorial intent. Instead I wish to focus on this idea that fantasy, and the return in particular, was a way of allowing the child to covertly escape social norms and pressures, and in doing so, to exist for a limited time in a space unaffected by adult desires and meaning. I will argue that the return<\/p>\n actually amplifies the impossibility of achieving this, not merely through the very fact of the return, in which the \u201creal world\u201d has the \u201clast word,\u201d as it were, but because, as I will show, the fantasy cannot occur in a space entirely free from adult intervention. Just as the adult is constantly and unshakeably present in the language, so the idea of an adult presence is constantly present in the narrative, in the form of a guide or mentor figure. The presence of the adult in the return fantasy sets limits upon to what extent the child can have a truly anarchic and unrestricted experience, since the adult guide constantly explains, limits and instructs how to proceed in worlds that appear initially lawless.<\/p>\n Viewed in this way, the return journey into fantasy becomes a cyclical gesture of the sort that other Victorian children\u2019s fantasy narratives (for example, At the Back of the North Wind, The Water Babies and the Alice texts) practise in language. Instead of being worked out at the linguistic level however, the return is made part of a narrative, and enacts at the level of plot this reaching towards an idea of the child. The return journey, in other words, is an attempt to grasp or articulate this \u201cchild\u201d through first setting up a representation of the real world, with the associated known social structures, and then striking out from that representation of the real into a representation of fantasy land, which may be governed by rules of its own, but which seems a strange and lawless place. It is in the wild and unsocialised spaces of fantasy that the child\u2019s inner life might be explored, and the idea of what a child might do if free from adult rules pondered.<\/p>\n However, while this remains a theoretical possibility, what actually happens in the journey into fantasy is quite the<\/p>\n opposite. The child is accompanied by adult figures, and while they may be helpful or downright useless, they still signal that it is impossible to imagine a child without a mediating adult. The return is a retreat, an admission that narrative fails just as language does to say what the child really is, that it will always be understood through the eyes and the idea of the adult. In delivering the child safely back to the reality from where it was taken, the return proposes that there is no child who can be successfully articulated other than as a socialised being, something understood through the adult culture that it inhabits and which shapes it.<\/p>\n In Mrs Molesworth\u2019s The Cuckoo Clock, characters seem trapped inside repetitive cycles of history, unable to act in ways that have not been previously rehearsed1<\/sup>. Change has a deceptive quality in this narrative. In the opening description of the house and garden to which Griselda is sent to live,<\/p>\n There was a colony of rooks in this old garden. Year after year they held their parliaments and cawed and chattered and fussed; year after year they built their nests and hatched their eggs; year after year, I suppose, the old ones gradually died off and the young ones took their place, though, but for knowing that this must be so, no one would have suspected it, for to all appearances the rooks were always the same – ever and always the same. (The Cuckoo Clock)<\/cite><\/p>\n The narrator posits that change must occur, for time passes and rooks are not immortal, yet that italicised \u201csuppose\u201d suggests that although the narrator is aware that both the passage of time and the birth and death of rooks are things that \u201cmust be so,\u201d the evidence of appearances, that the rooks were \u201cever and always the same\u201d is almost more convincing.<\/p>\n The way things appear is more important in this narrative than the way they really are. The description of the changing yet unchanged rooks could serve as a sort of blueprint for how the narrative works. While change does occur, it is really only a recycling of past established patterns. Nothing happens, for a long time, the narrator says, in the house and its garden, both of which are terribly old, until \u201cone day at last there did come a change\u201d. The change that comes is Griselda, a little girl who has been sent to the house to live with her two great aunts following the death of her mother. Her arrival is a source of consternation for the rooks, who try anxiously to see \u201cwhat was the matter\u2026A little girl was the matter!\u201d. There is a sense that her arrival is perhaps a threat to the property\u2019s unchanging existence, but even this is contained by the description of Griselda, who is<\/p>\n A little girl in a grey merino frock\u2026all grey together, even to her eyes, all except her round rosy face and bright brown hair. Her name even was rather grey, for it was Griselda.<\/cite><\/p>\n Her potential for change, signified by her rosy face and bright hair, markers of her youth, is limited by her strong association with the colour grey, with its connotations of old age. Griselda is linked to the past not only by this, but through the memories of the three old ladies, the \u201caunts\u201d (who were really the much older cousins of her grandmother) and the old servant Dorcas. \u201cWe are all old here, missie. ‘Twas time something young came to the old house again,\u201d Dorcas tells Griselda, suggesting that although she is \u201csomething young,\u201d she is not something new: that \u201cagain\u201d points to a repetitive history of which Griselda is an unwitting part. Later Aunt Grizzel tells Griselda that she is the third generation of young children entrusted to the aunts\u2019 care, following her grandmother and her father. This insistence on permanence and repetition is even echoed in the speech of the two aunts; Aunt Tabitha, the quiet, passive sister, almost never speaks for herself, instead acting as an echo for her more confident and decisive sister. \u201cIt was rather a bother to have to always say \u2018thank you\u2019 or \u2018no, thank you\u2019 twice, but Griselda thought it was polite to do so, as Aunt Tabitha always repeated everything that Aunt Grizzel said\u201d.<\/p>\n The constant refrain of the aunts is how much she resembles her long-dead grandmother Sybilla: \u201cThe aunts looked at each other with a little smile. \u201c\u2018So like her grandmother,\u2019 they whispered\u201d. This resemblance becomes all the stronger when we learn that Griselda, like her grandmother, has a fascination with the cuckoo clock in the drawing room. Her eventual discovery of the magical cuckoo who lives inside it and their subsequent adventures together, it is strongly suggested, is a secret that Sybilla also knew of. \u201cJust what Sybilla used to say,\u201d whispers Aunt Grizzel, when Griselda insists that the cuckoo is alive. Later the cuckoo reveals to Griselda, in a dream sequence of moving images, that Sybilla was sent from Germany to live with the great aunts in England, and that the cuckoo clock was made by her grandfather and gifted to her when she came to England. \u201cGriselda\u201d is of course not only a \u201crather grey\u201d name, it is also a German name, and \u201cGrizzel\u201d is the anglicised form of the name.<\/p>\n Through their repetition of not only how much she resembles her, but of their hopes that she may turn out \u201cas good as dear Sybilla, if not as beautiful \u2013 that we could hardly hope for,\u201d Griselda is manipulated by her great aunts into a reincarnation of Sybilla, curtailing the possibility of any difference or of an existence in her own right. The change that \u201ccame at last\u201d is not so much of a change, it seems, as the beginning of another cycle in a history that is prescribed, and Griselda\u2019s status as both a change and an unchangeable \u201cversion\u201d anticipates the cyclical structure of the narrative. The cuckoo himself, while for Griselda an agent of change and magic and entertainment, is actually, says Dorcas, the good luck charm that keeps the house safe and happy in an unchanging state. When the cuckoo clock stops after Griselda hurls a book at it, in a rage at her arithmetic sums, this portends for the great aunts not just bad luck, but the cessation of any kind of future. Aunt Grizzel, in great distress, cries: \u201cWhat can be going to happen? The cuckoo clock has stopped\u201d. Without the cuckoo clock, they have no concept of future; or to put it more accurately, the idea of a future, of change, is unthinkable to them because the cuckoo is constant, and represents complete, unchanging continuity. It has been in the house since Sybilla\u2019s arrival began the cycle of extreme youth managed by age, and without it, it is suggested, this safe and happy status is threatened.<\/p>\n That it is the cuckoo clock which is the key to the unchanging nature of the house and its inhabitants raises a problem if one of the functions of the return is to be understood as an escape or departure from the restricting norms of the socialised sphere which is inevitably an adult-constructed world. Griselda\u2019s fantasies are entirely orchestrated by the cuckoo, who is a very definite \u201cadult\u201d figure, and who consistently engages her in catechistical dialogue, albeit not always successfully. Although he takes cues from her daytime activities, for example, her admiration of the carved \u201cNodding Mandarins\u201d in the drawing room, the cuckoo retains absolute control over what she experiences, acting as a guide and protector, but also as the mediator of her experiences. Griselda is not allowed any role in transporting herself, either during the daytime or at night, to the scene of fantasy. There are no portals, such as the rabbit hole, and unlike Alice, she does not have to figure out the rules herself, as the cuckoo is a thoroughly reliable guide. She has no space to act as a quasi-adult within: even her brief walks outside on the terrace occur only on the occasion of auntly permission.<\/p>\n Griselda is a child who is entirely without agency in the real world, yet the potential for the fantasy world to be a release-valve for the mental pressure of a constrained existence is suppressed too. The cuckoo\u2019s control over her extends even as far as her physical movement. She can never understand how she is transported, and neither can the narrator \u2013 she is simply \u201chere\u201d one minute and \u201cthere\u201d the next, moved by the cuckoo\u2019s abilities. When it comes<\/p>\n time for her to return, she is never allowed to see the way back, but is always put to sleep in some way, so that she knows \u201cnothing more till she open[s] her eyes the next morning,\u201d to wonder \u201cI believe the cuckoo made me fall asleep on purpose to make me fancy it was a dream. Was it a dream?\u201d.<\/p>\n The return functions as a curtailing of experience, but to what extent does the fantasy itself act as a controlling agent? Her adventures appear to allow her to play out some potentially dangerous fantasies; dangerous that is, in their \u201cadult\u201d and experiential implications. She attends a ball where she dances with the Emperor of China. Like Alice at the Mad Hatter\u2019s tea party, Griselda is allowed to participate in a surreal parody of an adult ritual: here her Mandarin suitor and his courtiers are life-size nodding dolls who cannot speak. She also has, like Alice, experiences of a more profoundly fantastical nature: she is taken to the garden where all the world\u2019s butterflies paint all the world\u2019s flowers; she visits the lake on the Moon and looks back at the Earth. As Sarah Gilead notes, the return may condone such unsettling experiences by \u201cofficially resolving and fixing meanings\u201d once safely back in a \u201creal\u201d setting, but it becomes evident when considering how Griselda\u2019s adventures occur that even within the fantasy setting the balance of power lies with the adult figure of the cuckoo.<\/p>\n The cuckoo not only hides from Griselda exactly how he transports her, he also selects her adventures and accompanies her, guiding and advising at all stages so that she is neither terrified at the distance between the Earth and the \u201cother side\u201d of the moon, nor does she inadvertently give offence to the King and Queen of the butterflies. So just as the repetitive history of which Griselda becomes a part works to thwart change, ensuring that she is transfixed in her role, so the cuckoo\u2019s presence acts to preserve her as a child under the supervision of an adult. No matter how potentially dangerous and profoundly strange and otherwordly her adventures, she undertakes them as a child who is understood through her relationship with the cuckoo who acts both as chaperone and pedagogue, and the series of fantasies is framed as a series of lessons. Indeed, the cuckoo\u2019s refrain, \u201cyou have a very great deal to learn,\u201d and Griselda\u2019s initial reluctance to learn the lesson of obedience, points to a narrative which is overtly concerned with the importance of preparing a child for subjugation beneath adult rule. It is not until Griselda has internalised this lesson, realised that \u201cit\u2019s all \u2018obeying orders\u2019 together\u201d which matters and submitted dutifully to the strictures of the aunts that she is rewarded with the official sanctioning of her new daytime playmate, Phil. The narrative is resolved with the two children established as friends and the cuckoo, obligingly realising he is not needed any more, bidding Griselda farewell in a \u201creal\u201d dream: \u201cmerely a dream, nothing else\u201d.<\/p>\n Griselda\u2019s very obvious lack of agency bears similarities to the experiences of children in two other \u201creturn\u201d fantasies. Alice\u2019s adventures and those of the two cousins who find their way into Tapestry Land in another of Mrs Molesworth\u2019s children\u2019s fantasies, The Tapestry Room, are both conducted under the supervision of adult eyes. While the cousins Hugh and Jeannie appear to negotiate their own way to a greater extent than Griselda, who is instructed by the very adult-sounding cuckoo at every turn where to go and also how to behave, they are still guided by their own \u201cadult\u201d bird, the mysterious and rather frightening raven Dudu. Dudu does not accompany them as the cuckoo does Griselda, but he has complete control over Tapestry Land, and the final say in what happens there and who is allowed entry. Given that Dudu is a French raven, it is tempting to suggest that his name is a sort of \u201cchildspeak\u201d play on the French word for \u201cGod,\u201d \u201cDieu.\u201d2<\/sup> Certainly Dudu has a godlike omnipresence and omniscience in Tapestry Land. He describes himself to Hugh as merely the \u201cguardian\u201d of the entrance, but also instructs him to whistle three times should he require assistance. When a boat the cousins are attempting to navigate up a river runs aground and Hugh whistles, it is not Dudu himself who appears, but a fleet of frogs. Dudu is apparently able to control events in Tapestry Land from some unknown and unseen position.<\/p>\n Alice too encounters adult figures and guides in Wonderland. The advice they give may be meaningless or unhelpful (the Caterpillar\u2019s direction to eat one side of the mushroom to grow taller and one to grow shorter without indicating which is which almost results in Alice\u2019s annihilation), but they are adult ciphers, and behave in ways which Alice instinctively recognises: \u201c\u2018How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!\u2019 thought Alice. \u2018I might as well be at school at once\u2019\u201d (Wonderland). Griselda experiences a similar attitude from Cuckoo: when she tries to point out a logical inconsistency in his argument, he cuts her off with an adult evasion tactic Alice would have found familiar. \u201c\u2018Nonsense,\u2019 said the cuckoo hastily; \u2018you’ve a great deal to learn, and one thing is, not to argue\u2019\u201d. Dudu, while never a subject of the text\u2019s covert mockery in the way that the cuckoo and Alice\u2019s guides are, occasionally engages in patronising adult snarkiness. When Hugh tells him he would like to throw a party in the tapestry room castle, \u201c\u2018only,\u2019 observed the raven, drily, \u2018there is one little objection to that. Generally \u2013 I may be mistaken of course, my notions are very old-fashioned, I daresay \u2013 but generally, people give parties in their own houses, don\u2019t they?\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n Dudu, as Jeanne recognises, is rather too frightening a character for mockery. His inscrutable gaze and apparent ability to hear everything said makes him seem a \u201cwicked enchanter\u201d: she tells Hugh that it\u2019s best to be \u201cmost frightfully polite\u201d to him, and even her father addresses him as \u201cMonsieur Dudu\u201d with no trace of irony. While the narrator of The Cuckoo Clock occasionally delights in pointing out where the cuckoo tries to hide mistakes behind an adult authority, Dudu is above such treatment. When he puts Hugh down, Hugh and the narrator assume a wounded but fearful silence. While the cuckoo mimics an authoritative but foolish adultness, Dudu represents a sterner adult authority, one that is not necessarily \u201cfair\u201d but maddeningly right. The cuckoo and Dudu are therefore both parodies or versions of adult behaviour, and their presence as guides of greater or lesser degrees of usefulness points to the impossibility of creating a space from which adults are actually outlawed.<\/p>\n In both The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room the fantasy setting in which the children find themselves seems to have an intended function, however this might be ultimately thwarted by adult presence, of allowing a form of manageable experience which is not (and should not be, these texts imply) available to the children in their daytime lives. Both fantasies are ones to which the children may return, but only at night, and The Tapestry Room in particular makes it explicitly clear that the two states must be kept separate. When Jeanne and Hugh meet on the morning following their first foray into Tapestry Land, Hugh is upset to discover that although he can remember the night\u2019s events clearly, Jeanne appears to have no recollection of what happened. It becomes clear that Jeanne\u2019s apparent forgetfulness is, in fact, the \u201ccorrect\u201d and safe way to deal with these adventures. Marcelline, Jeanne\u2019s mysterious nanny who seems well aware of the powers of Dudu and the tapestry room, explains to Hugh that there is \u201ctwo of everything…and the great thing is to keep each of the twos in its right place\u201d (The Tapestry Room). In a subsequent fantasy, Hugh is relieved to find that Jeannie does remember, but when he points this out to her she explains, \u201c\u2018You don’t understand, Cheri. I’m moonlight Jeanne, now \u2013 when we were having the dolls’ feast I was daylight Jeanne. And you know it’s never moonlight in the day-time….I don’t exactly forget,\u2019 said Jeanne, \u2018but it spoils things to mix them together\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n It does more than spoil things, as Griselda discovers when she befriends a little boy in the aunts\u2019 grounds. They decide to search for the entrance to Fairyland together and become hopelessly lost. When she announces the friendship to Dorcas, the old servant is horrified, for Aunt Grizzel \u201cthinks all boys rude and naughty, I\u2019m afraid, missie\u201d (The Cuckoo Clock). What particular type of naughtiness it is that Aunt Grizzel loathes becomes evident when Griselda reveals that Master Phil still has a nurse, and<\/p>\n Dorcas considers, \u201cThen he must be quite a little boy, perhaps Miss Grizzel would not object so much in that case\u201d. As a very little boy, Phil is harmless, but as someone her own age, he poses a potential sexual threat to Griselda. When Griselda announces this new friendship to the aunts, declares her intent of maintaining it and flies off in a temper when it is forbidden, Aunt Grizzel is swift to attribute blame. \u201c\u2018Already,\u2019 she said faintly. \u2018She was never so violent before. Can one afternoon’s companionship with rudeness have already contaminated her?\u2019\u201d.It falls to the cuckoo, as usual, to provide an explanation, which he does in the form of the dream sequence. Griselda is shown a scene from a ball in the old house, where a young girl \u201cwas dancing with a gentleman whose eyes looked as if they saw no one else, and she herself seemed brimming over with youth and happiness\u201d. But the next scene is of the girl\u2019s funeral. The young gentleman paces beside her coffin, white with grief, and when Griselda questions her aunts about this scene, she learns that he dies soon after of a broken heart, and their baby son, her father, was sent to the aunts. Griselda herself has recently lost a mother: this is the reason why she has been sent to live with the aunts.<\/p>\n Dead parents are, in fact, everywhere in these two texts. Sybilla is raised by her grandfather as her parents are dead, and Hugh is sent to live with Jeanne and her family following the death of his parents. Jeanne is the sole child in possession of a full set of parents, but even they have more than a suggestion of mortality about them; her father is much older than her mother and suffers rheumatism. Dudu the raven tells Hugh and Jeanne the story of their ancestors just as the cuckoo shows Griselda hers, along the way remarking that he is somewhere in the region of three or four hundred years old, and again it is a story filled with dead parents and children. The cousins\u2019 great-grandmother Jeanne and great-grand aunt befriend a little English girl while they are in their late teens. This girl has lost both her parents. She moves away and the young ladies marry, and do not meet with their English friend Charlotte until many years later, when the Revolution has broken up their family, and Charlotte is able to help Jeanne and her husband escape France. The friends meet up once more, many more years later when all three are old women. Charlotte\u2019s and Jeanne\u2019s husbands have both died as relatively young men; Charlotte has lost all her children and is herself on her way South to die in a temperate climate in the area where her baby daughter died.<\/p>\n This sad history, and the history of Griselda\u2019s family, makes clear the dangers of marriage and childbearing. It is physically and emotionally damaging, and while this might be read as merely reflecting the realities of an age where death in childbirth and infant mortality was a very real possibility, Aunt Grizzel, at least, believes that these threats are ones that Griselda can be potentially sheltered from through limiting any real experience and interaction with \u201crude\u201d boys. It is difficult, however, to read Aunt Grizzel\u2019s desire to prevent or at least delay Griselda\u2019s entry into an adult relationship as that of a radical woman who wishes her great niece free from the unequal power relations of sexual maturity. Griselda\u2019s lesson, emphasized again and again, is to learn to obey, and to do her duty, and it is the successful mastery of this lesson which signals that the fantasy may leave off, and the process of forming real friendships with other real children may begin.<\/p>\n Her name refers back to the \u201cPatient Griselda\u201d story, perhaps most well-known for its appearance in Boccaccio\u2019s The Decameron, where a young wife uncomplainingly endures heartbreak, humiliation and rejection at the hands of her husband, who merely wishes to test her patience and sense of duty; having done so, he honours her as the ideal woman and all ends happily. It seems that The Cuckoo Clock highlights sexual relationships as a source of damage to women, but rather than propose a radical rejection of the role of wife and mother, Griselda must be sheltered for as long as possible in a state of innocence from what is ultimately inevitable. Her lesson of obedience enforces her position within the text and within the family structure as the newest element of a repetitive narrative. She will, one day, have to endure the deadly pains of childbirth just as her grandmother and her mother have.<\/p>\n In a similar way, the narrative of The Tapestry Room insists on an absolute separation between the \u201cdream\u201d Jeanne and Hugh, and their \u201creal\u201d counterparts. Just as Griselda may dance with a Chinese emperor in the fantasy realm but must not play with little boys in the \u201creal\u201d world, The Tapestry Room attempts to provide symbolic release and experience in fantasy while prolonging innocence as long as possible in reality. In Tapestry Land, the cousins act as the parents of a strange little family that includes Houpet the chicken, Grignan the turtle, and Nibble the guinea pig, with Dudu as an omnipotent and often unseen protector. Jeanne and Hugh even act out an unwitting parody of the genteel family stroll, walking arm in arm together in stately<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n