trennels | Ann: hidden depths, even a dark side?

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Ann: hidden depths, even a dark side?

I've been thinking a bit lately about Ann, who is the recurrent character whose inner life we know least about - I'm trying to remember if there are any scenes anywhere in any of the books from her pov at all. If her physical resemblance to her siblings wasn't mentioned, one might think that they'd got the babies mixed up at the hospital. On the other hand, she does do classically Marlovian things like being good at games (cf the discussion with her form about throwing the match in The Cricket Term, in which it's assumed that she will be playing, until her ethical position comes into conflict with the general feeling on the subject), and her impressive performance as Mary in the Nativity Play - where she manages compelling stillness and silence; not to mention the general taking charge, being a dorm prefect and probably on the fast-track to Head Girl (she is so the kind of thing Miss Keith likes, though I could, actually, imagine conflicts). Oh yes, and she also plays the piano, well.

Although her selflessness and helpfulness are shown as intensely annoying to her siblings, there's never any doubt that Ann is entirely sincere, and is not one of those characters who recur in the novels of Charlotte Yonge, who are apparent epitomes of virtue but whose spiritual pride leads them to a fall.

Yet, it's a curious insight into her character when, in Peter's Room, she admits to identifying with Charlotte Bronte - it's almost as startling as if she'd confessed to wanting to be Amy March rather than Beth (she must surely regret the lack of modern opportunities to take gruel to the infectious deserving poor). This is an identification which involves completely eliminating Giles and Lawrie from the picture, and killing off Karen and Rowan. Not to mention their mother. Hmmm. And suggests a hidden romanticism at odds with what we thought we knew about her.

Is she really going to placidly continue on to become a nurse? Might she fall victim to a cult? Given the opportunities for women now in the C of E, might she seek ordination? Are there surprises in store?

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I think her ethical position in that match is also very Marlow - although none of the others would be in a form where marks were more important than matches (possibly Karen). It's not quite comparable to Nick's realisation that you can't dolly (?) out the Head Girl when playing her at cricket, but it is very play up and play the game.

And by contrast, I don't know that her performance is really all that typically Marlow. Yes, in terms of her ability to do it (although Rowan claims to have been terrible as Gabriel), but it's not really an assured competence that I tend to associate with the others. She can do Mary because of her spirituality, and I can see her being an earnestly bad actor in another part. By contrast, her sisters would never achieve the stillness as Mary because they think it's the right thing to keep religion private, but would be probably just as good in any other role.

She's rather brave, I think. It can't be easy in a family where your siblings don't like you very much, and are dismissive of just about every effort you make. But she says and does things because she honestly thinks that they're the right thing, even when met with Nick's full-on revulsion.

That said, I wouldn't be particularly tolerant of her if I had to live with her either.

I think she'd be hell to live with and yet she's not 'the Angel in the House', because of that stubborn adherence to what she thinks is right, rather than simply lying down and doormatting for other people.

I have never been able to get past the Ann who in Run Away Home refuses to lend her bicycle to Nicola because Nicola is going to Latin Mass, and Ann disapproves. That's where the picture of Ann as Martyr suddenly shifted to a picture of Ann as ruthless Jihad executioner. Not that there are many opportunities for that sort of thing these days (and I always think AF's identification of her as a classically woolly-thinking left-winger doesn't quite gell - whatever she is, is not woolly). I think picked up taking Bibles into pre-glasnost Russia, myself.

But that's quite brave in that context of the family ideology of sharing things. And is it, after all, that different at base from some of Patrick's no-compromise attitudes and behaviour?

If I was Ann, I wouldn't lend another bicycle to anybody.

Ha! I'd almost forgotten that.

That occurred to me later on - if I were her I'd chain it up and keep the key in a very safe place!

And if that had been her stated motivation in Run Away Home I'd have been right behind her, too.

Yes, very true.

I do feel stirrings of worry about how Ann and the rest of the family ever got over the Edward Oeschli business - I think it's left dangling at the end of Run Away Home.

I find Ann's persistent helpfulness interesting - I always wonder whether it's her way of feeling needed, which is the closest thing to being liked she's likely to get, or whether she actually felt closest to Peter and the twins when she was four or so and they were at the playpen stage and she could trot around picking up after them, and she's been stuck in that mould of being a Big Sister ever since.

She certainly doesn't seem to get any of the perks of being older than them, unless you count the occasional boater hat.

There's that bit in Cricket Term when Ann won't smuggle Nicola an extra book because she disapproves of breaking the school rules as well. An earlier glimmering of her unwillingness to compromise her beliefs/see someone else's side?

My main rememberance of Ann in Run Away home is her being shattered because the others lied to her about helping Edward. I do wonder if she really thinks she would have supported them, given her stubbornness when she doesn't approve of someone's actions. Although I suppose it does fit in - she doesn't try to prevent Nick taking the book, just won't assist her. Same with the bike - more of refusing to enable her rather than deliberately obstructing, although that's quibbling rather.

It's also minority/majority stuff. I feel fairly sympathetic towards Ann because she's pretty much on her own in terms of expressing her spirituality, but I find similar views infuriating in say the Chalet books, because they're everywhere.

There's that bit in Cricket Term when Ann won't smuggle Nicola an extra book because she disapproves of breaking the school rules as well.

Though actually, just to introduce further ambiguity, it's not so much the extra book as the fact that it's Limited - and doesn't Nicola get extra annoyed because she sees Ann's point? (And herself wouldn't lend the book to anyone else for the same reason.)

Someone wrote an article a few years ago about how Ann would fit in beautifully at the Chalet School, and I agree that I sometimes feel a surprised kind of sympathy for Ann that her evident school-story virtues are not being rewarded, though I think Forest's spot on about the reaction such people really induce in others. ('She's the kind of person who lives for others...', &c)

I feel fairly sympathetic towards Ann because she's pretty much on her own in terms of expressing her spirituality

Yes, if she were a Yonge character she wouldn't be the complacently virtuous Flora May/Wilmet Underwood character, she'd be Phoebe (was it?) in Hopes and Fears or Nuttie in Nuttie's Father, or Meta in The Daisy Chain, who are trying to live the life of devotion within a worldly household that may be not merely indifferent to their interests but actively hostile (or at least generative of serious faith vs appropriate obedience to parents/guardians conflicts).

I think Ann's religiosity is presented as smugger than Peter's.

Do you mean Patrick, not Peter? I'm not sure 'smug' is quite the way I'd define it: she's much more for the manifestation in good works - Patrick seems to be much more about liturgy and traditional practices. I could see her belonging to one of those groups which takes round food to the homeless on the city streets but also holds incredibly narrow views about who are the saved.

Whoops, Patrick it is. I am very stupid about character names.

Smug may be the wrong word; she's very "I am right and you are wrong and why can't you just SEE that?" -- as you say, very narrow views about who's saved.

I think that the author approves of Patrick's traditional Catholicism more than Ann's traditional Anglicanism. For instance, she takes without question that Patrick believes a post-Vatican-II Mass invalid. I think this is the narrator peeking through.

Yes, there's more sympathy for his position, but I'm not sure that (from my lapsed-Methodist perspective) there is all that much to choose.

I don't have the books to hand, but I have a dim recollection of two conversations, one between Nicola and Dr herrick in End of Term, the other between Tim and Miranda in Autumn Term, where one is left with an impression that somehow Ann's spirituality is left lookiing somewhat superficial and second-rate...

I think I agree with you - Ann would never think that taking a hawk into a church was appropriate, while Nick sees it as a sign of believing properly/wholeheartedly. Is the Tim and Miranda one where the virgin birth is just the kind of gloriously unlikely thing that one or the other of them might believe?

That sounds like it yes. It's Attic Term, not Autumn Term: Tim and Miranda left on their own over half term to come up with something to replace the Christmas play. And so Patrick (ghosting AF)'s reactions to Vatican II very much on evidence and the whys and wherefores of deep religious belief generally apparent throughout.

I'm never exactly sure about what Patrick's religious beliefs mean to him apart from the adherence to long family tradition.

I'm not sure he does either though, which is par for the course for an intelligent and highly educated teenage boy in a devout Catholic household (and for all I know equivalents in other faiths). Quite a lot is to do with the romance of being Catholic through penal times, standing up against the might of the state etc. I suspect. He exhibits a devotion to Edmund Campion and Thomas More at some point: something in which I have sympathy with him, but it's nonetheless telling.

There's none of the agonising over minutiae that I find so distressing (and yet compelling to read) in Antonia White's Frost in May, though that may be the over-meticulousness of the convert (esp by comparison with her cradle-Catholic friends) anyway.

Hmm - I was having thoughts about this and I couldn't help thinking about Grahame Greene and Brighton Rock and people who are Catholics and Know Good and Evil, even though they're not just sinners, they're psychopathic thugs, are somehow Better than people who just know the difference between Right and Wrong. Which I found when I first read it, and still consider, a maddening (and probably not exactly theologically orthodox) position.

Certainly not orthodox. Borders on Jansenism.

(Find myself wondering whether AF ever met or corresponded with Greene or Waugh, particularly post VII)

I've finally managed to run down a passage I was looking for by Stella Gibbons about a similar type of person (though the character in question is a bit more intrusively intervening than Ann usually appears to be). It's in Shadow of a Sorcerer (1955):

She had never been lovely or silly or selfish; she had always been a grand sensible type.... It did not occur to him that Ruth might have had to struggle with the temptations which beset a grand sensible type; the temptation to be hard, to be bossy, to neglect the sacramental side of church-going in favour of good works, to think that she knew everything.

i hate to say anything bad about La Forest but I think the problem with the character of Ann - we know so little about her, and what we do know is virtually one dimensional - is that she is AF's antithesis. I get the feeling that AF channelled all the characteristics that mystified, irritated and antagonized her in other people into the writing of Ann. Which explains why there are no scenes written from Ann's point of view, because AF just can't get inside an Ann-type head, nor can she ever empathize with her feelings. To me Ann is not a logical, rounded character, in the way that Peter is, for example.

Yes, on one level she is a 'flat' character by the EM Forster definition: and yet every so often there are these flashes that there might be something else.

Her reaching breaking point with Ginty in Falconer's Lure when she's run back and forth to Trennels looking for G being a case in point...

There are a few little snippets from Ann's point of view. The comment in (I think) Attic Term where she notes that "caring for your family is more important than just people" or some such (in fact, Ann gets quite a few sympathetic moments in Attic Term, where even Nicola concedes that she is good with her infant young). Then there's a snippet at the start of End of Term where she finds it beastly for Nicola to wish openly that Rowan was still at school. On the whole, though, I agree that Ann's impossibly law-abiding piety borders on the unconvincing at times, especially in Run Away Home. AF's dislike of her was just too obvious.

In Cricket Term and Attic Term she shows a few flashes of humanity (snapping at Nicola when she's being helpful, a few snide (for Ann) comments about Ginty). I like that scene in Attic Term where Ginty's sitting on the wall, for some reason (isn't there a bit of that in Ann's pov?)

Ann and Ginty couldn't be much more different and be siblings - are they in some way mirror-images? They could each do with some of the other's qualities.

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Ann: hidden depths, even a dark side?

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