ENCOUNTERING THE DIVINE IN LITERATURE
Dorothy Whipple’s They Knew Mr Knight
Celia Blake Meets God
They knew Mr Knight is a novel by the English writer, Dorothy Whipple, published in 1934 and made into a film in 1946. It is set in the English Midlands in the late 1920s, in the period leading up to the US financial crash which triggered what became known in England as the Great Depression. Celia Blake is a respectable middle-aged mother of three teenagers. Her life is devastated by the discovery that her husband is guilty of bank fraud and he is subsequently sentenced to 12 months in Lincoln Prison.
Thomas Blake has been unwisely taking advice from the shadowy (in every sense) financier, the Mr Knight of the title. As a result, the family’s financial and social situation improved, for a time. But then his investments begin to go bad. In order to maintain their new lifestyle and pay back money owed to Mr Knight, Thomas obtains an overdraft from the bank under false pretences and is convicted. Not only is he disgraced and deprived of his freedom, but the firm he manages has to be sold, leaving the family destitute.
Whipple is a master at conveying the sickening slide into awareness that Celia experiences as, little by little, she learns the truth of how much they owe and then, finally, of how Thomas has broken the law and been caught. The dislocation jolts the family out of its former comfortable shape, in a myriad of saddening ways. When her daughter Freda is told the news and reacts angrily to her father, Celia goes to protest but instead keeps silent:
The children had been wronged: that freed them from her control. They would have to be what they were now; not what she would wish them to be.¹
In between frustrating, shame-filled visits to the jail, Celia sinks into a deep depression, shutting herself up in the house with the curtains drawn, so that no passer by can look in and see her.
When her work was done, Celia simply sat and waited for time to go. Five o’clock struck like a knell every day, because she knew that at five Thomas was shut into his cell in frightful solitude (p.434).
In order to put bread on the table, Celia decides to take in a paying lodger, the quiet Mr Taylor, who is ‘very interested in the maintenance of his own health’ (p.438), and insists on prunes being served at every meal. Now, as well as the pain of missing her husband and watching her children suffer, she no longer even feels free in her own home.
The Blakes are not religious people. Celia muses that she has been to many different kinds of church but they have nothing to offer her; she is put off by ‘the insistence that their way, and their way only, is the one approach to God’ (p.444). Despite this, Whipple has her character undergo a spiritual experience that results in lasting change. But how does she describe an experience that those who have had the experience say is fundamentally indescribable?
There are elements to Celia’s divine encounter, as Whipple presents it, that echo many real-life accounts of spiritual experiences.
A. The experience occurs when she is at the end of her own resources. ‘She lay back in the chair. She was tired, and above all, weak; weak and helpless’ (p.444).
B. Celia’s everyday behaviour and thought processes are on pause: ‘The clock ticked on the wall. The fire flickered softly in the grate. She was very still; her mind was empty’ (p. 444).
C. The experience is fundamentally benign and surprising: ‘Incomprehensible though it was, minute trickles of happiness seemed to be flowing into her arid being; inexplicable, unreasonable happiness’ (p. 444).
D. Celia is tuned into a different dimension of consciousness: ‘She felt strangely conscious, aware. She raised her eyes as if there was something to be seen, but there was nothing’ (p. 445).
E. The experience is likened to physical states of well-being: ‘Warmth and sweetness burst into her heart … she was warmed, reassured, made happy, like a child by a father’ (p. 445).
F. Being conditioned by the Christian culture of her upbringing, Celia concludes that what she is experiencing is the presence of ‘God. It’s God reminding me of Himself’ (p.445).
G. The divine presence is experienced as a light: ‘the light that she had seen as rare flashes now shone full upon her. She was amazed by its splendour’ (p.445).²
H. New knowledge is imparted to Celia:
She saw. She knew. For a little space of time, she lived at the height of perception; for one moment, which would illuminate a lifetime, she was able, in spite of her thick self, to apprehend God (p.445).
In his seminal 1902 book -Varieties of Religious Experience — William James explored different accounts of people who had experienced the divine in a mystical way, and he noted factors which occurred again and again. James noticed four important ‘marks, which when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical.’³
i] The experience is ineffable: ‘it defies expression … its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.’
ii] The experience has a noetic quality: the mystical state is experienced as a state of knowledge.
iii] The experience is transient.
iv] The coming and going of the experience is outside the control of the experiencer.
The above are all hallmarks of Celia’s experience. Even in the midst of it, she knew that it would pass and ‘the moment did fade. It seemed to Celia that an actual light was withdrawn from the kitchen, but not from her heart’ (p.445).
Whipple describes her character as being changed by this transient experience in a way that does persist and is all-pervasive. She is immediately re-energised physically, springing to her feet and throwing open the doors of the house, which she had been keeping closed in order to hide away. Like many people who have had mystical experiences or who have accessed deep meditative states report, Celia’s eyes are opened in a new way to the beauty, the aliveness of nature: the clouds are a miracle, the blackbird’s song is pure and ecstatic (p.446).
Nothing in Celia’s dire outward circumstances has changed but she is now experiencing life in a completely different way. Her spiteful neighbour, Mrs Greene, is outraged to hear Celia enthusing so joyfully about the magnificent sky, ‘while her husband was a common criminal in Lincoln gaol!’ and ‘she kept a lodger and hadn’t a penny in the world’ (p.446). James noted that some people attain this state, experiencing
the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though the outer conditions should remain the same.’⁴
Celia’s daughter, Ruth, is astonished to come home and find her mother happy and like her old self, for the first time in months. Celia struggles to explain to Ruth, saying only that God has changed her. She quotes Tennyson, describing a presence that is ‘closer than breathing, closer than hands and feet’ (p. 448). ‘I can’t explain any more clearly than that… it’s no good talking about it, darling.’
Ruth is puzzled, saying that she occasionally has ‘glimmerings … of something wonderful… I call it inspiration’ (p. 448). But Celia’s experience has not made her certain and dogmatic — rather the opposite. There is a breadth of openness in her that seems to come with the divine encounter. And at the same time, a healthy pragmatism.
‘It doesn’t matter what we call it,’ she replies, ‘I suppose to each one of us it is something different — a different aspect of the same thing. The kettle’s boiling. I must make the coffee (p. 448).
When someone has a spiritual experience that changes them, there is a ripple effect, spreading to the people around them. Those ill-disposed, like Mrs Greene, are disconcerted, maybe even angered. But Whipple has the character of Ruth display a different reaction. ‘Her mother was restored to her happiest self , and as such, was irresistible’ (p.449). As many people discover in real life, the potential for positive change in both the experiencer and in those around them, is sketched out in the novel. The difference in Celia will go on to affect the whole family in distinct, positive ways. But the effect on Ruth is immediate. Infected by the new hope and energy in her mother, Ruth decides to risk sending the manuscript of her rejected novel to another publisher.
Notes
- Dorothy Whipple (2000, first published 1934), They knew Mr Knight, Persephone Books, p. 410.
- Individuals who undergo near death experiences often describe the divine presence as a light and tend to understand the presence in terms of their cultural and religious conditioning.
- William James (1916, first published 1902), New York: Longmans, Green, p.380.
- ibid, p. 248.
