Hilary Mantel (born July 6, 1952 in
Derbyshire, England) is a major British novelist, short story writer, and
critic. As a child Mantel experienced minority status in her North England
community since her parents, though born in England, were of Irish descent and
Roman Catholic. Mantel seems to have internalized Catholicism as a retributive,
superego-ish sort of religion (“it’s like installing a policeman”) rather than
as the source of cosmic order and self-transcendence seen in the work of
Catholic writers from Evelyn Waugh to Graham Greene.
Mantel’s critique of Catholicism may have something to do with the rigor, parsimony, and enforced abstemiousness (no eating in public is a rule of the convent school) of the Catholic institutions she attended. Her exploration of Catholic girls’ primary and secondary school in her novel An Experiment in Love (1995) paints a picture of these institutions as spiritually impoverished, and details the consequences of such impoverishment for girls’ development.
At the Holy Redeemer, a convent school, the girls are treated with “frigid courtesy” by the nuns, who keep their pupils’ excesses in check by sarcasm. Uttering formulaic prayers, evoking God’s glory “in a prosaic way,” the nuns at the preparatory school are “grumpy and exacting, petty and cold.” (An Experiment in Love, Picador, 1995, p. 131) At primary school, narrator Carmel McBain gives Sister Basil the silent treatment for asking her “a stupid question.” Carmel then leaves a slip of paper with the written answer on the sister’s desk: “So I knew: and she knew I knew.” (p. 54) Carmel’s teacher has underestimated her intelligence, as Catholic schools underestimate girls’ potential generally, as Carmel’s London University, secular and state-run, underestimates women’s hunger – both their literal hunger for food, and their hunger for a viable role in the world.
Mantel’s critique of Catholicism may have something to do with the rigor, parsimony, and enforced abstemiousness (no eating in public is a rule of the convent school) of the Catholic institutions she attended. Her exploration of Catholic girls’ primary and secondary school in her novel An Experiment in Love (1995) paints a picture of these institutions as spiritually impoverished, and details the consequences of such impoverishment for girls’ development.
At the Holy Redeemer, a convent school, the girls are treated with “frigid courtesy” by the nuns, who keep their pupils’ excesses in check by sarcasm. Uttering formulaic prayers, evoking God’s glory “in a prosaic way,” the nuns at the preparatory school are “grumpy and exacting, petty and cold.” (An Experiment in Love, Picador, 1995, p. 131) At primary school, narrator Carmel McBain gives Sister Basil the silent treatment for asking her “a stupid question.” Carmel then leaves a slip of paper with the written answer on the sister’s desk: “So I knew: and she knew I knew.” (p. 54) Carmel’s teacher has underestimated her intelligence, as Catholic schools underestimate girls’ potential generally, as Carmel’s London University, secular and state-run, underestimates women’s hunger – both their literal hunger for food, and their hunger for a viable role in the world.
Sixty-odd years on, the picture Mantel paints
of single-sex education for females, whether Catholic or secular, evokes
something of the shape of argument made by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). Woolf is of
course discussing the more basic problem of access to education; but she notes in relation to the
making of women writers that women have been kept from writing because of their
relative poverty. In a similar way, though Mantel’s Carmel McBain attains
access to higher education, “she finds to an extent that social class does
matter, the fact that she’s poor matters” (BBC Interview with Hilary Mantel: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12247.shtml)
Despite the author’s distancing of
her connection to her Catholic upbringing, however, in the world of Mantel’s Experiment there is plenty of original
sin to go around. It is difficult to imagine a theology equal to the task of
accommodating the author’s representation of evil, or a terminology more apt
than that of the Seven Deadly Sins for describing it, when evil emerges among
the characters of the Experiment.
In addition to suffering the privations of Catholic education for females, Mantel experienced alienation from the flesh caused by years of chronic illness. In spite of ill health, however, Mantel traveled and lived abroad, in Saudi Arabia and Africa, with her husband, geologist Gerald McEwan. Mantel’s novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) is a record of her observations of contemporary life in the Middle East.
Astute at representing the conflicts of modern society,
Mantel’s greatest gift is perhaps her uncanny ability to reinterpret the movers
and shakers of the past within a framework provided by her speculative thinking
about historical persons, events, and motives. Mantel’s 2009 novel, Wolf Hall, discloses Tudor machinations
from the time of Henry VIII as part of a trilogy of which the second and third
books are Bring Up the Bodies (2012)
and The Mirror and the Light (in
progress). Mantel’s historical fiction is known for its contrarian depiction of
character, present tense narrative (in Wolf
Hall), and frequent use of dialogue. In an earlier work of historical
fiction, A Place of Greater Safety (1992),
the author recreates the drama of the French Revolution, effecting finished
portraits of revolutionaries Danton, Robespierre, and Camille Desmoulins. Here,
too, she weaves together dynamic characters, speculative imagination, and dramatic
reenactment of events, using modernist writing techniques like shifts in point
of view. Mantel’s literary intelligence inheres in her ability to look deeply
into the workings of a social system, be it modern or historical, and expose
the underlying operations of its machinery. That ability is equaled only by the
author’s unerring intuition in reading the truth of the human heart.
From An Experiment in
Love:
Our autobiographies
are similar, I think; I mean the unwritten volumes, the stories for an audience
of one. This account we give to ourselves of our life – the shape changes
moment by moment. We pick up the thread and we use it once, then we use it
again, in a more complex form, in a more useful garment, one that conforms more
to fashion and our current shape. I wasn’t much of a knitter, early in my life.
I was perpetually doing a kettle-holder. What is a kettle-holder? you’ll ask.
It is a kind name for any chewed-looking half-ravelled object of rough oblong
shape, knotted up by a day-dreaming nine-year-old on the biggest size of wooden
needles: made in an unlikely shade like lavender or bottle-green, in wool left
over from some adult’s abandoned project: or perhaps from a
garment worn and picked apart, so that the second-hand yarn
snakes under your fingertips, fighting to get back to the pattern that it’s
already learned.
Katrina was a good
steady knitter. You would see her with her elbows pumping, hunched over a
massive, clotted greyness; it was as if a crusader had come by and thrown his
chain-mail in her lap. I never knew if she finished her garments, or whether
her mother and father wore them. All their clothes looked alike; winter and
summer they were wadded in their layers, blanketed, swaying heavy and not
speaking along Curzon Street.
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