The Civics of Civility, an Excerpt
An excerpt from “The Civics of Civility”, an examination of Anita Brookner’s Providence
A life has been ruined by literature. But this was not supposed to happen. Kitty Maule is in love — and words have been her guide. Why then, against all that they have promised, is virtue not rewarded, does not patience fulfil its own end? Why does the tortoise not win the race?
The romantic tradition, which she so assiduously teaches at an English University, and with which she is unknowingly at some variance, propels her towards a grand constancy. But she is a constant in a one-sided equation, a numerator of pitiable alienation. The other numerator is fellow professor Maurice Bishop, a shining, implausible bundle of virtues himself. There is no common denominator. The sum, therefore, is one.
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1.
Mr. Woodhouse was almost as much interested in the business [of writing charades] as the girls, and tried very often to recollect something worth putting in. “So many clever riddles as there used to be when he was young — he wondered he could not remember them! But he hoped he should in time.” And it always ended in “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid.” (Jane Austen, Emma )
Kitty, a fair but frozen maid, was born Catherine Josephine Thérèse Maule in Anita Brookner’s novel, Providence. Apparently unable or unwilling to live up to that name, she consents to be called “Kitty” long past the age of kittenhood. And yet, the name is somehow appropriate as she serves out a perpetual apprenticeship in what she hopes is a traditional romance, all the while completing a conclusive novitiate in the Romantic Tradition at a small English provincial university.
Kitty Maule is an academic: a researcher and a tutor, whose meticulous attention to and absorption of detail in the study of Constant’s Adolphe is not paralleled in her constant and anxious scrutiny of what it means to be English.
She is in love with Maurice Bishop, colleague, history professor and onetime lover and now, to her dismay, merely a friend. As the story, such as it is, unfolds, Kitty is longing to be asked by Maurice to accompany him to France, where he will be going to research the great French cathedrals. He has told her all about his proposed trip while, incidentally, she was typing his lecture notes on the great English Cathedrals.
“Her main preoccupation was whether Maurice would ask her to go to France with him. She would be useful, she knew, could do all the boring things, while he got on with driving the car and getting from one place to another and being inspired by what he saw. French after all, was her mother tongue; she could save him a lot of time and trouble.”[1]
Born of an English father and a French mother (whose parents were French and Russian), Kitty “struggles incessantly between two worlds, the one, dead; the other powerless to be born.”[2] She thinks she wants, more than anything, the love of Maurice Bishop.
In reality, her most profound desire is to be English, only and simply English — to belong to one world and to that world completely. Wanting and having, however, are two different states of being, a fact that Kitty fails to realise throughout this painful novel. Wanting to be English does not make her so. Neither does wanting Maurice Bishop obtain him, despite her fervent belief that “they also serve who only stand and wait.” (Or indeed the belief that “servitude” is a desirable condition.)
To this end, she lives two lives: one with her European grandparents on weekends; the other, during the week, in her small Chelsea flat. Having purposefully eschewed any affiliation with her French heritage except to speak its language flawlessly, she lays claim to England through her paternal heritage, with one conclusive, rehearsed remark: “My father was in the army,” Kitty repeats often, as if in incantation. “He died before I was born.”
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The rest of this article can be found at:
[1] Brookner Providence, 22
[2] Matthew Arnold, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.
