The World My Wilderness by Rose Macaulay

First published: 1950

Type of work: Social criticism

Time of work: The years immediately following World War II

Locale: A village in the south of France, and London

Principal Characters:

• Helen Michel, a handsome woman in her mid-forties, the widow of Maurice Michel and former wife of Sir Gulliver Deniston
• Barbary Deniston, Helen’s seventeen-year-old daughter
• Richie Deniston, Barbary’s older brother, a veteran of the war
• Raoul Michel, Barbary’s half brother and Helen’s stepson
• Sir Gulliver, who is still in love with Helen but now married to a younger woman
• Pamela Deniston, Sir Gulliver’s second wife, the mother of a son and awaiting the birth of a second child

The Novel

Most of the action of The World My Wilderness takes place in London, where, in spite of her protests, Barbary Deniston has been sent by her mother to live with her father. The reason for Helen Michel’s dismissal of her daughter is not revealed until the closing pages of the novel, when Helen realizes not only how important her daughter is to her but also how the war contributed to her feelings of estrangement from her daughter.

Growing up in France during the Nazi occupation, Barbary and her stepbrother, Raoul, are indoctrinated early by the French Resistance forces and accept the view that any action that leads to driving the Germans out of France is both moral and necessary. Barbary’s stepfather, Maurice Michel, however, is what some call a “collaborator,” a person with the view that since France has come to terms with Germany, there is no reason for French citizens to wage a private war of their own against the Germans. Maurice has tolerated the Nazis, made money from them, and invited them to his house. He believes that accommodation to the fortunes of war defines civilized behavior, not guerrilla warfare carried out in the name of futile vengeance. Though Maurice has done business with the Germans, however, he more than once has sheltered escaped Allied prisoners—even Richie, Helen’s son, who escaped from a German prison and was trying to make his way with the help of the French Resistance to Spain.

Helen and Maurice are well suited to each other. Indeed, given their differences, one wonders how it was possible for Helen to stay with Sir Gulliver for the ten years they remained married. Caught in France after the German invasion, Helen chooses to remain with Maurice, deserting her husband and Richie. Sir Gulliver declares that it is not so much Helen’s desertion of him that he considers intolerable but her embracing the attitude that it is possible to live in an occupied country on amicable terms with its occupiers. Helen, however, has another view. She thinks of herself as neither noble nor high-minded. She is, rather, a hedonist, demanding of life only that she should be left alone to occupy herself with pleasurable activities.

The drowning of Maurice by the maquis, the plan of which Barbary and Raoul had to have known, is an action Helen finds hard to accept, so she turns away from her daughter and stepson and lavishes all of her affection on her infant son fathered by Maurice. Her dismissal of Barbary is a direct result of Maurice’s death and Barbary’s involvement with the maquis, whether or not Barbary had any direct responsibility.

The omniscient point of view that Rose Macaulay employs shifts from character to character, revealing the mind-set, moral assumptions, and personality of each character. As point of view shifts, different ethical principles and ways of looking at the world are brought into focus until a complex range of viewpoints are explored.

Though Helen is an important character, the protagonist of the novel is Helen’s daughter, Barbary, who is cast out of her home by her mother and sent to her father’s home, where the circumstances and the immediate surroundings are totally alien to her. Her father, Sir Gulliver, has married a younger woman, younger than Helen, has picked up the pieces of his life, previously scattered by Helen’s desertion, has fathered a son within his second family, and awaits the birth of a second child. Barbary is totally unlike his conception of the dutiful daughter, and though he makes several efforts, he cannot penetrate the shell Barbary has placed around herself, admitting to her real presence only Raoul, who has also been banished from his home by Helen and sent to live with an uncle.

Both Raoul and Barbary still think of themselves as freedom fighters, still relate more to the poverty-stricken and criminally motivated people who live in London’s Cheapside amid the ruins of war. Barbary thinks of the people who reside in and among the shattered buildings as the London Resistance movement, an effort parallel to the French Resistance, so she feels more at home at Cheapside than in her father’s house.

Barbary believes that her father’s second wife is not really married to him and that she should be cast out and Helen reestablished in her rightful place. Helen, of course, has no such expectation and about as little desire to live with Sir Gulliver as Barbary does. A difference is that Helen is older, has a home of her own, and needs no one to care for her material needs.

In spite of her belief that she can care for herself, Barbary is still a child and a very troubled one. The severe injury that befalls her as she is being chased by the police is the occasion for the climax of the novel and sends Helen rushing from Monte Carlo to London to care for her daughter. There, in spite of the hesitancy of Sir Gulliver’s wife, Pamela, Helen stays in her former husband’s home to be near Barbary, for now her love for Barbary comes to the fore, and she realizes that her daughter has always been first in her affections and always will be, whatever she does. Indeed, in order to remove Barbary from Sir Gulliver’s house, Helen is forced to drop another metaphoric bomb on her former husband and admit to him that Barbary is not even his daughter.

The Characters

Though in many ways a minor character, Richie Deniston is central to the novel’s structure and meaning. His personality has been formed by both his father and his mother, and, though he understands the reasons for their separation, he still considers that they should not have been divorced since it is clear to him that Sir Gulliver and Helen remain attached and attracted to each other. Richie is a mediating element in the novel. Civilized, witty, educated, he can be contemplative as well as playful, and he seems comfortable with one foot in each world. Richie understands and accepts the moral forces that direct his father’s activities; in like manner, Richie comprehends and sympathizes with the pleasure principle that in the main guides his mother’s actions.

Only twenty-three, and when the novel opens in his first year at Cambridge, Richie has already spent three years involved in a barbaric war and has experienced not only the death of soldiers around him but also imprisonment and escape. As an antidote to war, Richie seeks the niceties of civilization—luxuries, comfort, good company, exquisite food and drink.

Barbary, on the other hand, is an anarchist, apparently opposing all authority, used to hiding bombs and derailing trains. While Richie was in the army, Barbary, three years younger, was growing up in occupied France, hanging out with the maquis, accepting, as if by osmosis, values common to those who, deprived of their homeland, turn to retaliatory guerrilla warfare as properly moral alternative behavior. This upbringing during her most formative years is what makes it impossible for Barbary to accept her father’s life-style. In London and enrolled in the Slade Art School, Barbary takes every opportunity to escape with her half brother from London’s moneyed class and to find refuge among London’s equivalents to the French maquis. She claims for herself and Raoul a space next to a bombed-out church, looking down on the wilderness of a wrecked city. There, they imitate the actions of others who are on the streets, unemployed, getting by on petty thievery and keeping a constant eye-out for the police.

There are no villains in this novel—only people trying to make do. A reader can understand Maurice’s reasons for maintaining friendly relationships with the Germans and also Sir Gulliver’s declaration that he could never condone Helen’s acceptance of amicable relations with the Germans and, consequently, her rejection of what he considered to be decency and integrity. Sir Gulliver’s love for Helen was and remains intense. He knows that he could break his marriage vows and betray his young wife, Pamela, if Helen were to remain near, and he desires more than anything else that she should remain. Nevertheless, he has the moral strength to ask her to leave and to demand that his daughter stay. Helen, who would just as soon keep things light and positive and who is not averse to maintaining friendly, even sexual relations with her former husband, has, she believes, what is for her a single moral alternative. She does not want to hurt Sir Gulliver, but for Barbary’s sake and her own, she needs to keep Barbary with her and away from Sir Gulliver. Helen’s confession that Barbary is not Sir Gulliver’s daughter is a terrible blow to him and a problem for Helen, who would have much preferred that they parted in love and not in hate.

Critical Context

Coming near the end of her literary career, after she had once again embraced the Church of England, The World My Wilderness explores with greater seriousness a far-ranging set of themes than do Macaulay’s previous novels. The acuteness of her social commentary and the depths of her compassion, combined with a technical virtuosity appropriate to the realistic mode in which she writes, caused many critics to rate The World My Wilderness among Macaulay’s finest achievements. Contemporary reviews of the novel praised Macaulay for the poignancy and warmth of heart which is carried throughout the novel and the discernment and subtlety of her interpretation of the contemporary world but, strangely enough, faulted her handling of characterization—some reviewers arguing that the rendering of Barbary is more successful than that of the older generation, and other reviewers asserting just the opposite: that it is the older generation that gives the novel its special credibility and appeal.

Literary historians most generally classify Macaulay with her female contemporaries Rebecca West and Storm Jameson as a competent writer but, in her reliance on established literary traditions and novelistic techniques, of lesser importance and interest than such modernists as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.

Bibliography

Burgess, Anthony. The Pattern and the Core, 1965.

Macaulay, Rose. Letters to a Friend, 1961. Edited by Constance Babington-Smith.

Macaulay, Rose. Last Letters to a Friend, 1962. Edited by Constance Babington-Smith.

Macaulay, Rose. Letters to a Sister, 1964.