interest in the female character can be discussed on a variety of levels. There are personal reasons, but it can also be understood in postcolonial terms as a way of both connecting with Wales and forging separation from England, if England is seen as a bastion of patriarchy and control. Humphreys himself has remarked that women have become more and more central to his work.
I’m a great admirer of women I must say. Especially in the combination of the mythological and the historical, which is something I’m always very much engaged with – there the woman is absolutely vital, the ‘Great White Goddess’, and men are peripheral. As far as the Welsh experience is concerned woman is very, very important: she’s central, she’s continuity, she’s survival.64
What is slightly surprising then is the fact that his protagonists are usually men. Amy Parry may be the central figure of the sequence but Cilydd is the more important character by the end and certainly appears to have more of the values of which the author would approve and which are positively Welsh. In the more recent independent novels, Jones, Unconditional Surrender and The Gift of a Daughter, it is true that the more dynamic characters are female. The females take action, are enigmas, break with tradition. The experience being described, however, is that of the male: Jones, the rector, Aled Morgan. They are misfits, outsiders in some way, disillusioned and generally redundant, examples of the (emotionally) disabled colonial figures mentioned earlier. Cilydd would have identified with them had he survived. One must ask what if any connection this has with Humphreys himself.
Humphreys’s attitude towards women, or rather female characters, is more unusual than the perspective taken in the remark quoted above. The female character most typical in his work is not only ‘vital’ and ‘central’; she is usually young, beautiful, rebellious and sexually experienced. In a novel set in the 1980s or 1990s this is arguably modern, liberated or typical behaviour, but it is more surprising in novels written in the 1940s and 1950s. From The Little Kingdom onwards the pattern has been consistent. Rhiannon Morgan is the daughter of a minister.65 She has sex with Owen Richards, who does not love her, but not with Geraint, who does. Lucy, in A Change of Heart, connects the male characters together; she is Howell’s wife, Frank’s sister and Alcuin’s lover. In The Italian Wife Paola desires her husband’s son and in The Gift Polly has more than one sexual partner. In A Man’s Estate the chaste Hannah is balanced by her half-sister, the promiscuous Ada, as Kate and Lydia are balanced in Outside the House of Baal. By the later novels Humphreys is portraying more than one generation, but in each novel there is a ‘vital’ young girl who either has sex with men she believes she loves66 or who behaves suggestively with older men to control them.67 What is interesting is the reason for the author’s fascination with this character type. Part of the reason may be the interest in Blodeuwedd, the woman made to fulfil one man’s desires but who dares to have desires of her own and is drastically punished. Another possibility is that the mother figure with which Humphreys grew up was a Lydia more than a Kate. Thomas suggests this when he describes Humphreys’s mother as ‘in her youth a free spirit, lively, strong-willed and unconventional, who eagerly embraced marriage to a schoolmaster as a convenient escape from a claustrophobic home background’.68 Whatever the reason Humphreys has for seeing the dynamic force in both family and social politics as the extrovert, unconventional woman, it has been a strongly motivating force behind much of his fiction.
One of the likely reasons for Humphreys’s persistent use of this character type is his perennial desire to discuss the Welsh condition. His female protagonists are frequently representative characters, at one level at least symbolic of Wales or the Welsh experience. His view, therefore, of Wales as being (over a period of centuries and due to its colonial subordination) a passive, possibly even an emasculated, country, combined with his desire to see Wales develop more independence, leads him to reuse this character type. What a great deal of recent criticism on a variety of writers has asserted is a strong connection between the feminist and the postcolonial position, between feminist reaction to patriarchal systems and postcolonial resistance to imperialism. In Humphreys’s case his concern to address Wales’s colonial situation results in an implicit endorsement of (Welsh) patriarchal society, rather than in the formation of a solid front between a colonized culture and a subordinated gender, ‘colonized’ by the male. His dilemma may be usefully compared with that of Conrad in his novella, Heart of Darkness. Only two women in the novella speak: the conventional aunt and Kurtz’s Intended, who, like the aunt, is not named except in relation to the male; both are enamoured of their own subservience to patriarchy. Humphreys’s presentation of women is much less clear cut than this. His women are complex and often the focus of his story, frequently rebelling against male domination. However, just as Conrad has been accused of writing in the language of imperialism and thus negating his critique of imperialist activities,69 so Humphreys’s use of the English language may be accused of subtly reinforcing the patriarchal situation which his female characters question. In Heart of Darkness the females are doubly distanced from the author by the story’s being doubly narrated by male, seafaring, bourgeois, white, British characters. We know that a male teller is portraying these women for a male audience but we may not safely assume his point of view is also the author’s. Usually, however, Humphreys’s presentation is direct and authorial, although it is dramatic and lacks (in the later work) much explicit authorial interpretation. Nevertheless, men are, for the most part, presented as the controlling element in the family and in society at large, locally, regionally and nationally.
This shows how difficult it is for an author (who wishes to portray the female position in an enlightened way or criticize the treatment of women in the historical past in his fiction) to criticize his own society, when he is simultaneously trying to criticize his nation’s treatment at the hands of another nation. Thus Humphreys’s instinct to present Welsh life as idyllic in the past, because it is Welsh,70 conflicts with his desire to present the female as wrongly treated. So we see Amy Parry thwarted by the unnaturally unattractive uncle’s overbearing male domination of his niece and his wife, but simultaneously we see society as a whole working well in the same patriarchal way and Amy as a ‘harridan’ in her demands for control in her married relationship with John Cilydd. On the one hand, the author is trying to show how Welsh society existed, in history, and is thus constricted by what he believes it was really like, that is, patriarchal. On the other hand, he wishes to assert that Welsh is different from and better than English. And, through the use of Celtic myth, the emphasis on the goddess as the source of power, and the stereotype of the Welsh Mam as the linchpin of Welsh society, he wishes to show woman as central.
THE LANGUAGE QUESTION
Humphreys’s use of the English language in novels in which he is concerned to express and explore the condition of Wales, in particular the ways in which it might be seen as ‘different’ from England rather than subsumed into a unified identity, is a further dilemma for the author and one which merits brief mention here. By 1990 he had decided: ‘the language, absent or present, remains the key to the Welsh condition’.71 However, he himself had learnt the language in his years at Aberystwyth as a student and whilst doing farm work during the war. A central dilemma for a politically conscious Welshman, brought up with English as his first language, has to be in what language he should write and for what audience. It is perhaps inevitable that Humphreys’s fiction should be exclusively in English, the language in which he had been both raised and educated.72 And, writing in English, it is understandable that he should aim to be published in London and to reach as wide an audience as possible in order to forge a successful career as a writer. Nevertheless, this remains a dilemma for the author throughout his career and is, perhaps, a contributory factor to the author’s choices of subject matter in his novels, many of which are very deliberately and self-consciously Welsh in setting and theme. The early novels, in particular, swing from Wales and back again,73 each arguably unbalanced either by the excessively emotional charge of Wales as an issue or by its absence.74 They also demonstrate an increasing awareness of the importance of Wales to the author and a development in ways of portraying Wales through fiction. The importance of inheritance and personal responsibility to
