The Mallen Streak

The Mallen Streak

The Mallen Streak, first published in 1973, is the first in the 'Mallen' trilogy of novels, which follow the fortunes of the Mallen family through succeeding generations in the nineteenth century. The second novel, The Mallen Girl, follows the fortunes of Barbara, the daughter of Thomas Mallen and the product of his incestuous rape of his niece, Barbara Farrington. The final novel in the series, The Mallen Litter, deals with Barbara's triplets (the 'litter' of the title) and "unwittingly, she watched as history began to repeat itself". The series was filmed in the 1970s by Granada television, and the novels as a whole have become the best known in Cookson's considerable body of popular historical sagas and romances.
I've chosen the novel partly because it is interesting (or at least raises interesting questions) in its own right, but also because of its representative status and because of the more general issues of "women's popular fiction" and the basis for its popularity. The Mallen Streak contains many of the classic Cookson settings and ingredients (a 'northern England' setting, on the 'borders' of civilisation and "raw and rugged nature", often historical, featuring the lives and loves of families across generations, and concerned with families, desires, cruelty, madness, deceit, inheritances, marriages and lovers). As a family/historical saga it is typical also of a wider body of "women's fiction", with its emphasis on "family history" (as opposed to the 'History' of 'Kings and battles'), its emphasis also on the exploration of heterosexual relationships, and for its representation of "basic and natural" patterns of human motivation, will and desire within those families. One of the wider questions which I want to focus on is why such fiction is popular amongst women, or is directed at a female audience, and to introduce one or two arguments about the nature and effect of that popularity, but that's for later on in the session!

To begin, what would you say were the distinctive or characteristic qualities of the novel, in terms of style, appeal, ingredients, narrative form and pattern, characterisation, etc.? What "genre" would you place it within, and what other books or other texts is it like? Do you agree with my attempts to describe and classify the novel above? Would you place it with Jane Eyre and Rebecca, with 'Mills and Boon' novels or the writings of Jean Plaidy or Barbara Cartland? - if not, why not?

Opening pages. The novel opens with a description of the house, an introduction to the 'Mallen' history, and a description of Thomas Mallen himself. What strikes you about the way that the novel opens? Look particularly at the description of the house and its setting, and then the way that the 'Mallen secret' is introduced; look also at the characterisation of Mallen himself (stereotyping?), and, most important of all, the "assumptions" which the opening chapter relies upon (what do we, as a reader, need to know, what is and what is not emphasised?). Is it significant that it is set in 1851?

(iii)

Miss Brigmore. Anne Brigmore is the unspoken heroine of the novel - what sort of heroine is she? Where does she come from, and how is she presented? What sort of woman is she? What does she think and feel, and how does she react? In what ways is she presented as the "perfect woman" - mistress, wife, mother and teacher - and what does this say about the novel's preferred system of values and assumptions about what women are and how they should be? Look, for example, at I, 2 (Book I, Chapter 2) para: "Miss Brigmore was of medium height..."; or I,6 (para: When Miss Brigmore knocked..."); I,7 (para: Things had not turned out"); II, 2, (para: "She had never liked Donald Radlet..", and. slightly later, her remark that "you have to connive to exist"); her role throughout the remainder of the novel, and, most significantly, her role at the end. Is it significant that she is a socially upwardly mobile middle class governess, (this anticipates our work on lower middle class values next week, when we consider To Serve Them All My Days), or is it more important that she is a kind of indomitable and resourceful matriarch?

Thomas Mallen and "men as bulls"! Just as the novel presents Miss Brigmore as one representative of femininity, so Thomas Mallen is presented as archetypally "Male". How does the novel present him, in relation to other men in the novel? What assumptions or assertions are made about maleness (and particularly male sexuality and motivation) in the novel? You should look at the opening portrayal of him as the magnanimous host, hard-living and "whorin"; at his reaction to the financial disaster and his son's disappearance; at his reactions towards Donald (male pride in his loins!) and (II,3) at his reactions to Donald's proposal to Constance; and, most important of all, the incident with Aggie/Barbara (look, for example, at IV, 1, his reasons for not marrying Miss Brigmore, and the incident where he accidentally rapes his niece). Does the novel judge and condemn him, or is it more ambivalent than that?

Constance/Barbara/Donald/Matthew. The major part of the novel is given over to the saga of the relations between the two brothers and the two sisters. What, do you think, is significant about this focus on the (virtually) incestuous relationships here? What does it show about the novel's principal concern with "logic of the blood" and the patterns of lust and desire. Consider also the characterisation of Donald and Matthew and the reasons why the two differ ("blood" is thicker than social conditioning?).

(vi)

Assumptions, assertions and narrative "logic". The novel advances a variety of assertions ("you have to connive to exist", "all men are bulls", "the pattern of life is already cut", etc.). What is the status of these within the novel as whole? Are they proved or disproved in the course of the novel? Why, in the books terms, do things happen or people behave in the way that they do? What is "natural" and what is "cultural" or "civilised"? What conclusions does the novel seem to come to as regards sex, desire, jealousy and possessiveness? What I am getting at is the way that the novel, in its action, plot and narrative structure, relies on certain assumptions and assertions: the 'logic' of the "Mallen world" is that men/women behave (or should behave) in certain ways, and should be some things and not others; that the motor which drives the novel's action is part blood, part "natural psychology", rather than the workings out of abstract social and political forces. Some comments from Rewriting English are valuable in this respect:

[The] reversal of the common view of history, allowing the usually marginalized female sphere to dominate, is extended in Catherine Cookson's work and in other 'family sagas'. In the 'Mallen Trilogy' the history of the history books is only a signpost for the history of the family. Wars, parliaments and economic crises serve only as backclothes against which the Mallen 'curse' works itself out from generation to generation.

This alternative view of historical processes and causality places emphasis on the determining effects of male/female "natural psychology", and the working out of biological and psychological patterns over time. Would you agree with this approach?

(vii)

Bigger issues. Here I am interested in the effects on the reader of novels such as The Mallen Streak, and the reasons why they are popular. Is it because they offer symbolic rehearsals of "natural and unchanging processes", men and women and families? Is it because they take us to a "different world", a simpler and rawer world? Or does it simply provide harmless and consoling forms of escapism and wishfulfilment, gratuitous entertainment and satisfy our cruder interests in what families and bed-partners get up to behind closed doors? To what extent would you agree with the words of Germaine Greer: "The domestic romance myth remains the centrepiece of feminine culture. Sexual religion is the opiate of the supermenial. Romance sanctions drudgery, physical incompetence and prostitution." The appeal of novels such as The Mallen Streak is, it has been suggested by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies group in the 1980s (and published in Rewriting English, Methuen, 1985), that they re-enact and legitimate ideologies which are actively felt and experienced by women: legitimating forms of female desire which are "exclusively heterosexual, patriarchal and sado-masochistic" where "sado-masochistic heterosexuality" means "the form of sexual relationship between men and women - the dominant one in our society - in which pleasure is the result of masculine activity and feminine dependence and passivity." (p99). I want to conclude with a long extract from this perspective on The Mallen Streak and other works of romantic fiction, not because I necessarily believe it to be the last word on the genre but, as you shall see, it raises a question or two for you to consider and debate!:

"Observing the extent to which reality appears turned upside-down in the conventions of romantic fiction, we can register the presence of a powerful ideology which speaks to and resolves in imaginary form many of the most significant and fundamental aspects of women's subordination. That romance comforts women, affirms their value, offers to resolve in imagination conflicts that remain unresolved in reality, while at the same time reconciling them to a subordinate place in that reality, is not a matter of regret or for accusations of false consciousness. Women are not as simply suggestible and credulous as some Marxist and earlier feminist analysis has supposed, and are quite capable of recognizing a fairy-story when they see one. But to respond - even in ironic, ambivalent or self-mocking fashion - to the prince on his white charger, the dark handsome hero with his strong fingers and granite jawline, is to acknowledge implicitly that all is far from well in women's lives. That is what makes it a popular form, and allows the same stories to be told over and over again. Fundamental changes in the genre are likely only when the contradictions that shape women's lives are altered or resolved." (pp 104-5)

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