ROBERT FAGAN
267
formulas: We are not a hazardous aggregation of mean genes." Sam is a
playful tyrant who uses the eugenic principles of
Brave New World
to
bully his family. Henny, Sam's wife, has not found a formula for
reassembling humans, or for controlling nature. She lives in a female
world of social and biological bondage, and maliciously gossips about
the fate of other women. "She had a breath like a salt mine and a great
belly like a foaling mare," Henny says, "floating and bloating and
talking about her medicine and when she went to the toilet. Then she
died, and what does he do? Turns round and writes a book of poetry
about his angel." Sam is dominant but Henny is more interesting to
the children, who are torn between the rationalized world of their
father and the more sensuous and exotic world of their mother:
There was even a difference in the rooms. Everyone knew everything
that was in Sam's rooms, even where the life-insurance policy and
the bankbook were, but no one (and least of all Sam, that know-all
and see-all) knew for certain what was in even one of Henrieua's
closets and tables. Their mother had locked cabinets with medicines
and poisons, locked drawers with leuers and ancient coins from
Calabria and the south of France, a jewel case, and so on....
Henriella screamed and Sam scolded: Henny daily revealed the
hypocrisy of Sam, and Sam found it his painful duty to say that
Henny was a born Liar. Each of them struggled to keep the children,
not to deliver them into the hands of the enemy.
The children become refugees wandering between the savage poles
of their parents' existence. Sam's futuristic optimism insulates him
from reciprocal human relationships. Henny confronts, but is incap–
able of solving, the growing poverty and disorientation of her family.
Louie, with tragic and believable logic, decides to poison her parents.
Henny consciously accepts the poison. Sam, fatuously unaware of the
situation, avoids it. Louie must abandon her brothers and sisters to
Sam and make her own escape.
For Love Alone
(1945)
continues the
autobiographical thread of Stead's life. Its heroine, Teresa, escapes her
family and Australia, but she knows she still must escape a more
pervasive bondage:
There was a glass pane in the breast of each girl; there every other girl
could see the rat gnawing in her, the fear of being on the shelf. ... A
woman is a hunter without a forest. There is a short open season and
a long closed season. . .. Yes, we're pressed for time. We haven't time
to
get educated, have a career, for the crop must be produced before
it's autumn.. . . But they won't even rebel, they're afraid. They're
afraid
to
squander their few years. The long night of spinsterhood
will come down. What's to be done? But one thing is sure, I won't do
it, they won't get me.
