with the difference that Elis has not sacrificed a daughter but has fathered an illegitimate one. Hannah, too, is Electra but also unlike Electra in her ill health. Updated, she suffers from chronic asthma, and is a faded spinster of thirty-five, but like Electra she is aware of being trapped in time: ‘for me, the crisis is still to come, a revelation that will explain the present, bury the past, and redeem what is left of the future.’48 The language Humphreys uses makes the reader constantly aware of mythic echoes, of the archetypal pattern, and possibly that his character would actually have been speaking in Welsh. It is not then a modern idiom. The differences embodied in Mrs Elis are an even more striking comment on modern society. There was no great passion for Vavasor, only a desire to be matriarch, to manipulate and control through a new heir. In fact, the classical reasons for Agamemnon’s absence from home – the male conspiracy and the pursuit of a beautiful adultress – are a metaphorical comment by the author on British politics, for Elis is another of those Welsh politicians with the Lloyd George syndrome. Mary Elis’s hypocrisy is indicated by her keeping the hated husband’s name to increase her status in the area, where she controls the farm, the local chapel and justice, as JP. By the novel’s end Philip has exposed her as the murderer of her first husband and Humphreys presents her in classically tragic mode, splattered with the blood of the cockerels she has decapitated.49
The action of the novel follows the myth: Philip returns home and brings about the revelation of the truth and consequent punishment; Hannah’s wait for her brother is rewarded; the murderers are punished by the disclosure. It is, however, a far more psychological presentation. The reader learns about Elis’s murder and that the repression of their guilty secret has been the root cause of their behaviour for the last thirty years. Hannah’s awareness is very different from Electra’s; in spite of bad treatment by her mother, she does not hate her and is unaware of her father’s murder. Also by the end of the novel she, not Philip, will have the farm, their father’s inheritance. Philip will choose to go abroad and follow his career, whereas Orestes’ exile was forced punishment. One positive factor which emerges is their love for each other. However, there is an added effect of using myth. For the reader aware of the mythic pattern, Hannah’s character is underpinned by the original Electra, so that the Electra emotions emerge as unconscious motivation and Hannah appears to be repressing her real feelings, the desire to punish her parents, for example. A different effect of using myth is the degree of pre-knowledge of the novel’s outcome. So, on one level, the novel works almost as detective story, with the murder a complete surprise to the reader unaware of the myth. The knowing reader, however, will expect this, along with the lack of conflict between brother and sister. Humphreys’s comment that the whole pleasure in traditional storytelling was ‘how you got there’ rather than what happens, that ‘you must begin every story at the end’,50 indicates a strong reason he may have had for using myth in this depth.
Whereas The Eumenides develops an argument between the old and new law of Athens, coming down in favour of the new patriarchal tradition of Apollo rather than the old of the Furies, Humphreys translates this into a discussion of English and Welsh laws of inheritance. Philip arrives espousing the English right of primogeniture, but then uncovers his father’s financial interest in the farm, which gave him ownership and logically means either or both of his two children should inherit, rather than Dick, Mary’s favoured youngest child. By the conclusion Hannah accepts the farm from Philip, finding a solution that is not typically English in that she is a female heir, but which favours Elis over Mary. In a sense the brother and sister share the farm, which is the ‘Welsh’ solution.51 This relates back to the passage from Humphreys’s letter quoted above; he has found in myth/tragedy an archetype which he can relate to ‘the backwoods of Flintshire’, a way of arriving at a just inheritance, for inheriting is one of the commonalities of the human condition.
There are strong similarities between the novel and Sophocles’ Electra, which also focuses on the adult siblings. However, Orestes’ love for his father underlines Philip’s complete lack of interest in his. Electra, on the other hand, is a clear pattern for Hannah, weeping, unmarried, childless and bearing the endless burden of woe. An even stronger reason for suspecting that this version was clear in Humphreys’s mind is that Electra’s sister, Chrysothemis, might have suggested the role of Ada, the half-sister. Sophocles emphasizes the cruel treatment of Electra but Humphreys has Hannah being quite fond of Vavasor, and emulating his career as chemist. Humphreys’s novel then is a study of a daughter’s antipathy towards her mother and vice versa, which may well stem from an interest in psychology and the Electra complex rather than a particular play.
If Humphreys used the Aeschylus version, then the existence of Idris Powell is problematic, unless he is seen as a presentation of the current religious view in the way that the word of God might equate with the message of Zeus. However, in Euripides’ version Electra has a poor husband who has strong moral values but is despised by the court. This possibly suggested the role of Idris, whom Hannah would like to marry. In Euripides’ play the husband acts like a guardian not a lover, paralleling Idris who wants to be Hannah’s friend. On the other hand, in this play Electra loathes her stepfather and was saved by her mother from the death he planned. Euripides has also altered Electra’s character, presenting her as a permanent moaner, as rude, egocentric and arrogant, very different from Hannah’s long-suffering Christian attitude, although Hannah, too, is prone to moan. Euripides’ play is very anti-women, blaming Electra for planning the murder and Clytemnestra for not accepting her husband’s judgement; it strongly advocates patriarchy. Humphreys too appears interested in gender differences in 1950s society. If the lifestyles and achievements of the brother and sister are analysed, social factors have produced a male remarkably successful compared with his sister. Even at the end Hannah is running the farm because her brother allows it.
A consistent pattern in the novels so far is that of the destructive mother. This portrayal of a mother by Humphreys, alongside other mothers in his fiction, fits into the monster of the angel/monster dichotomy, outlined by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who argue that: ‘the female monster is a striking illustration of Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis that woman has been made to represent all of man’s ambivalent feelings about his own inability to control his own physical existence, his own birth and death’.52 This particular myth lends itself to an analysis of this character type, but Humphreys has produced a particularly unattractive, damaging mother in Mary Ellis. Given the emphasis on the culpability of Aegisthus and Agamemnon in all of the Greek dramatic versions, it is noticeable that neither Elis nor Vavasor is essentially at fault. Indeed, it could be argued their faults stem from marriage to Mary Elis. She is a type of woman prevalent in Humphreys’s fiction: controlling, manipulative, strong and destructive, a woman who can operate in a man’s world. Such mothers damage their offspring, restricting their emotional development. However, traditionally dutiful mothers, passive, homebound and loving do greater damage in that they produce weak children, who are failures or spoilt, selfish and destructive, such as Ada and Dick. Clytemnestra is consistently portrayed as sexually voracious but Humphreys removes every trace of this sexuality from Mary, giving her not only the active qualities traditionally associated with the stereotypical male in a patriarchal presentation, but physical qualities too. Indeed, his sympathetic presentation of Vavasor Elis (Aegisthus), his passivity, piety, the scientific ability which links him with Philip and Hannah, and the blindness which is real and symbolic and stresses his role as witness to murder rather than accomplice all work to engage the reader’s sympathy and increase hostility towards Mary. In a feminist text the anti-stereotypical presentations of Mary and Vavasor might be seen as deconstructing the norm, as presenting a positive female role. However, in this novel Hannah is possibly more important a character and is stereotypically passive, sickly and subservient to the male. Also, the angel/monster dichotomy here is between virginal Hannah and sexually active Ada. The portrayal of Mary is a male portrayal of a hideous mother, of the type mentioned by Gilbert and Gubar above. The novel is not anti-female; it frequently shows great empathy towards Hannah and Ada, for example. However, the domineering wife/mother is definitely the villain of the piece.
Humphreys repeats the technique of strong mythological prefiguration with his use of the Hippolytus myth in his sixth novel, The Italian
