The Artist as Observer

Abstract

Barbara Pym’s novels contend that the meek inherit the earth, and perhaps no other aspect of her work accounts so fully for the pleasure they afford the reader. Her comedy sets the downtrodden and little-regarded narrator and his audience in a position of moral superiority to the powerful, authoritarian characters in Pym’s fictional world by exposing their weaknesses through the mildness of the ‘excellent women’. Quiet resentment is a persistent undertone in Pym’s heroines, though they seldom show it. This underlying sense of unexpressed anger charges her satire with vibrancy. Pym’s women characters have ample cause to chafe, for they often find themselves in situations which constrict them and which emphasise their inadequacy in dealing with the world. They fail either to receive credit for what they have done or to get what they need. Further, other characters consistently humiliate or insult heroines such as Belinda of Some Tame Gazelle and Mildred of Excellent Women. And outwardly, they accept such treatment. These two, Pym’s archetypal ‘excellent women’, invariably turn the other cheek, shoulder the blame and respond with deference to the latest display of rudeness or ill manners, as when Belinda apologises for not having offered sherry to her dinner guests sooner, ‘thus taking upon herself the blame for all the little frictions of the evening’.