RECORD
The Girls of Slender Means
- Title:
- The Girls of Slender Means
- Author:
- Muriel Spark
- Date of Publication:
- 1963
- Description:
- The Girls of Slender Means is a novella written in 1963 by British author Muriel Spark. It was included in Anthony Burgess's 1984 book Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 — A Personal Choice. In 2022, it was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II. (Source: Wikipedia)
- Keywords:
- Belief Holy People Omens & Visions Sacred Texts Sacrifice
- Religions:
- Locations:
-
United Kingdom majorHaiti major
- Wikidata Entity ID:
- https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q716712
- Open Library ID:
- https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5883048M
- Item Type:
- Text
- Item Image Format:
- image/jpeg
Keyword Engagements
- Belief
- Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means turns on the interpretation of a tragedy. The novel closes with the destruction of “The May of Teck Club,” a boarding house that is home to the community of young women with whom the novel is concerned, following the explosion of an unexploded World War II munition. As the house collapses, Nicholas Farringdon attempts to help the girls escape; a few girls are left at the close, Selina, Jane and Joanna. Selina first escapes and then returns to Nicholas’s horror to rescue a Schiaparelli dress, delaying the rescue of the others. Jane struggles to climb through the window. Joanna, who has been intoning Gerard Manly Hopkins “The Wreck of Deutschland” for much of the novel as part of her training as a teacher of elocution, cannot exit in time; she is unhurried, calm, and stoical about her situation. She utters a prayer and appears to accept her death. Nicholas watches her. The house comes down around her. The events concerning “The May of Teck Club” are set in 1945 and are told in flashback. The novel opens in 1963 where we learn – through telephone calls from ex-residents of “The May of Teck Club” that Nicholas Farringdon, who had been a Marxist intellectual in 1945, had subsequently entered the Roman Catholic priesthood and had been killed while a missionary in Haiti. The novel suggests that it was Nicholas’s interpretation of Joanna’s behaviour that informed (or even constituted) his conversion. However, the flippancy with which Nicholas’s own martyrdom is invoked leaves open the possibility that his interpretation may well have been mistaken.
- Holy People
- In Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, Joanna Childe, the woman who denies in “The May of Teck Club” tragedy, is identified with the nuns upon whom Gerard Manly Hopkins reflects in “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Training to be an elocution teacher, Joanna is often heard reciting Hopkins’s poem around the house and Nicholas Farringdon endeavours to commit her recitals to tape. Trapped as the house collapses around her following the explosion of an unexploded munition, Joanna appears to accept her fate stoically and utter a prayer as a sign of faith. At the same time, the novel depicts Joanna as the remnant of a previous age: a conservative-voting rector’s daughter from the country in an increasingly secular country shaped by the welfare state. She is also shown to be serious, reserved, and emotionally distant; she had been jilted by a curate, and had committed to a single, celibate life. While Nicholas interprets Joanna’s actions as a form of martyrdom akin to that of Hopkins’s nuns, the novel contemplates the possibility that death was a way out for the broken-hearted Joanna with her disclination to escape the burning house becoming a form of suicide. Inspired by his interpretation of Joanan’s action, Nicholas becomes a Roman Catholic priest, and ultimately a martyr as he is killed as a missionary in Haiti. The gossipy tone in which Nicholas’s death is related – much of the novel takes place in flashbacks to 1945, while his death occurs in the novel’s present, 1963 – through phone calls among ex-residents of the “May of Teck Club” presents his behaviour unsympathetically through secular eyes as a ludicrous outcome.
- Omens & Visions
- In the eyes of Nicholas Farringdon, in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, Joanna Childe dies a martyr. She reveals her Christian faith as she confronts her impending death as “The May of Teck Club” collapses around her in the tragedy that closes the novel. Nicholas sees Joanna as set apart from the outset. The poetry she intones in her training as an elocution teacher is melancholy. She appears sexually repressed too. There is something morbid in her reserved emotional attitude. Whenever Nicholas looks at Joanna in the 1945 flashbacks, there is an anticipation of her death.
- Sacred Texts
- In Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, Gerard Manly Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland” functions as a sacred text. Training to be an elocution teacher, Joanna Childe is heard throughout the novel reciting the poem. The novel includes the verses she recites. Nicholas Farringdon endeavours to record Joanna’s performance. Joanna dies in the tragic destruction of “The May of Teck Club” following the detonation of unexploded munitions. Joanna is the daughter of an Anglican rector with a love for the Book of Common Prayer and utters a prayer from the Prayerbook as she confronts her death. Her early death, a stoical demeanour, and her willingness to utter prayer as disaster befalls identifies her with the nuns of Hopkins’s poem. Throughout the novel, the sound of Hopkins’s poem both anticipates the disaster that is to come – the wreck of the May of Teck Club – and serves as a hermeneutic through which Nicholas (and possibly the reader) interprets the disaster.
- Sacrifice
- Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means explores the idea of martyrdom: Joanna Childe dies in the disaster that destroys “The May of Teck Club;” Nicholas Farringdon dies a martyr as a Roman Catholic missionary priest in Haiti; and Gerard Manly Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland” that concerns nuns’ acceptance of death during a wreck is a central intertext, frequently quoted in the body of the text. While sacrifice and martyrdom is a central concern of the novel, the novel invites or at least leaves it possible to interpret sacrifice from a secular perspective. Joanna’s death can be interpreted as a continuation of the action of Hopkins’s nuns. At the same time, we learn that Joanna is heartbroken and potentially emotionally and sexually repressed. While Nicholas interprets Joanna’s death as a martyrdom and this inspires his own vocation, the novel leaves open the possibility that Joanna’s death was a form of self-harm, invoking the frequent modern association between sacrifice and psychological illness. Nicholas dies a martyr, but his death is related as ridiculous by the novel; while much of the novel takes place in flashbacks to 1945, Nicholas’s death occurs in the novel’s present in 1963 and is related through the gossipy phone calls among ex-residents of “The May of Teck Club.” Sacrifice in this context comes across as an absurd relic of the past: a possibility for Hopkins’s nuns but firmly out-of-date in 1963.
Attribution
- Citation:
- "The Girls of Slender Means", Mapping Religion in the Global Anglophone Novel (MaRGAN), https://ghjensen.github.io/margan/items/margan034.html
Rights
- Rights:
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- Standardized Rights:
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/