ПРОСТРАНСТВО И ВРЕМЯ В РОМАНЕ АГАТЫ КРИСТИ «РОЗА И ТИС»

Agatha Christie who is well known as an author of detective novels that have become classical, wrote also novels of a different genre. Under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, she published six novels: “Giant’s Bread”, “Unfinished Portrait”, “Absent in the Spring”, “Daughter is a daughter”, “The Burden” and “The Rose and the Yew Tree”. Researchers of A. Christie’s works suspect that these non-detective novels were dictated by personal experience of the writer and they rank these works to the psychological prose.

The novel “The Rose and the Yew Tree” was written in 1947, published in November of 1948, and became the fourth novel, published under the name Mary Westmacott. Exploring the “Autobiography” of the writer, written at the end of her life, we found a mention about that novel:

”A few years later I wrote another book of Mary Westmacott – called The Rose and the Yew Tree. It is one I can always read with great pleasure, though it was not an imperative, like Absent in the Spring. But there again, the idea behind the book had been with me a long time – in fact since 1929. Just a sketchy picture, that I knew would come to life one day” [1, p. 499].

The story is based on the development of two biographical lines - the story of John Gabriel, the vainglorious man from a working class who has achieved success and occupied a high position in society, and the tragic story of Isabella, a noble and beautiful woman, belonging to an ancient noble family. She saves John Gabriel by losing her own life. A third character - Hugh Norreys, tells the whole story.

The novel apparently has nothing in common with the well-known works of the writer, but it has a mystery – mystery of the human soul, that is also important in A. Christie’s detective novels. The object of artistic representation in this work are the personalities of the characters and their interactions. The main theme of the novel passing through the fate of all the central characters is a topic of choice. It is associated with the motifs of time, love and hatred, good and evil, nobleness and meanness. In the centre of work is the personality of the main character Isabella, her emotional world, her life perception.

The poetics of the novel is rich in artistic techniques – there are allusions to the works of literature, pictorial and musical art, motifs of life and death, love and hate, symbolic images. The space-time organization of the artistic world of the novel is very interesting and unique.

John Gabriel and Isabella belong to different “worlds” by their birth and upbringing, they have different moral values, and at the beginning of the novel have different life perspectives. This is not just a love story; it is the story of human’s search of his own path.

The actions take place in the small English town St. Loo in Cornwall during the Second World War. St. Loo is located on the Atlantic coast, it may be divided into three different worlds: a fishing village which is located there for centuries and reminds the Flemish landscape, a modern resort part of the town with fashionable hotels, the ancient castle of St. Loo which stretched far away from the rare villas and mansions; and behind these three worlds there is an old church at the very top of the mountain.  

The art space of the novel is organized by these three worlds, each of which belongs to one of the main characters: a country house where the narrator Hugh Norreys lives, the St. Loo castle where Isabella lives standing next to it and the modern part of the city – the home of John Gabriel. The modern part of the town with all its business centres and shops is located on the plain valley and the castle is located on the hill at the foot of the medieval church.

Hugh Norreys, a former schoolteacher and an officer, now bedridden, moved with his brother’s family to St. Loo, where the main events of the book take place. The narrator becomes a powerless witness of the circumstances of the political struggle and love story. Unable to leave the house, Hugh Norreys becomes an observer. He describes himself with the words: “My role was clear. I was the looker-on” [2, p. 548]. Everything Hugh Norreys had in his life stayed in the past: a military service, a work as a schoolteacher, the woman he loved. When he moved to St. Loo he did not have any reasons to live, at some point, he was even ready to commit a suicide. He lives only in his memories, his time is past, his space is limited by the walls of his house and the garden from where he could watch the castle of St. Loo. However, his subjective space is aesthetic – it includes flowers, books, music and Isabella who embodies in the novel the ideal of beauty and nobility became his friend.

John Gabriel is a young and active politician, striving to get the power in any way. Being born in a working class family, he bears a huge dislike and disgust to the upper class and the ranks. John Gabriel yearned power so much that he agreed to participate in the elections as a candidate from the conservative party that he hated most of all. This person has no relationships with his family, he lives alone, and he has no morality and eternal values. One of the characters, captain Carslake, says about him: “To tell you the truth, I've no idea ... He does not come from anywhere exactly - if you know what I mean” [2, p. 555]. However, through all his faults, John Gabriel knows how to behave in society, he is a good conversationalist, and he has a certain charm and a sort of power over women. In public he always plays the role of the hero, noble and honest, but only staying alone with Hugh Norreys, he allows himself to behave as he wants and shows his true feelings; he does not see any danger in a helpless mutilated Hugh and shares with him his secrets. So, after saving child right in front of the citizens’ eyes he said to Hugh: “I've been going around all keyed up looking for something in that line to turn up. Children are the best for sob stuff purposes” [2, p. 566].

John’s attitude to Isabella is the same as his attitude to the social class to which she belongs. Despite the impression he makes on others, this man cannot belong to any idea or serve people, his only wishes and purposes are power, career and money. He has no any connections with the past, he is educated but bereaved of any sense of aesthetic sensitivity and beauty, he is unspiritual. John’s love to power, vanity, indifference to poor people, hatred to noble and rich ones deprive his subjective space of the harmony.

The Gabriel’s monologue about the fresco “The Triumph of Death” in the cathedral Campo Santo in Pisa is very important for understanding his nature:

“Heaven and Hell and Purgatory and all the rest of it. Hell is rather jolly, little devils pushing you down with pitchforks. My God, those women! They do not know about Hell, they do not know about damned - they do not know anything! They just sit there, smiling smugly. God, I would like to tear them down from their trees and their state of beatitude and pitch them down into the flames! Hold them there writhing; make them feel, make them suffer! “ [2, p. 587].

This episode reflects John’s attitude to Isabella, for him she is just as incomprehensible as the angels are, as good and nobleness are. The mural is a metaphor to the space of Isabella and John. He feels hatred to everything that transcends him, he wants to crush it, to ruin to humiliate, and all that he does to Isabella enticing, tempting and taking her away from St. Loo.

Special for John Gabriel Agatha Christie creates a fictional faceless city Zagrade where he took Isabella, this dirty featureless grim city in the ruined post-war Slovakia suits to impersonal and destroying Gabriel. He is looking to the future and does not have any noble desires, he belongs to the present time, his space is full of different people, but mostly, they are the wrong people, and his goal is to have power over them. Without the strong connections with the past this man cannot serve to people, he does not even belong to the party, which elected him. He does not belong to himself. In his space, there is no beauty and nobility and the only literature hero he associates himself with is Iago:

“I understand Iago! If I ever produced Shakespeare, I'd go to town on Iago. Imagine to yourself what it's like to be born a coward - to lie and cheat and get away with it - to love money so much that you wake up and eat and sleep and kiss your wife with money foremost in your brain” [2, p. 626].

He aims to make a political career, to achieve some success, but this is an outward success and a spiritual degradation. He seems to be a hero, but he defends Isabella at the moment of a mortal danger, and it is Isabella who saves John’s life protecting him from the bullets by her own body.

Isabella appears as a beautiful and fairy medieval Lady, aloof and mysterious, but at the same time natural as the nature itself. Her life was predetermine and even – she graduated from the high school and lived in the family castle waiting for her cousin Rupert St. Loo to come back after the War. She had loved him since her childhood and it was expected that Isabella Charteris – beautiful, aristocratic, and privileged – would marry her cousin Rupert when he returnes from the War. Isabella has repeatedly been compared to Shakespeare's Fortinbras , she is as straightforward, courageous and resolute. One of the characters call her “Fortinbras of nowadays”. Outwardly, she lives as if she is out of time: she is not interested in the past, future, and even present. However, the narrator emphasizes the resemblance of Isabella to a Beautiful Lady, who lives in a medieval castle, with a classical statue, beautiful images. Hugh Norreys finds in her smile a resemblance to archaic statues:

“I knew then what she reminded me of. She was like those Acropolis Maidens of the 5th century B.C. She had that same inhuman exquisite smile” [2, p. 564].

Her art space is an old castle of St. Loo and she cannot imagine her life without that place just as her favourite sort of roses that do not live without their bush:

“A rose wants to be by itself, in a glass - then it's beautiful - but only for a very short time - then it drops and dies. Aspirin and burning the stems and all those things do not do any good - not to red roses - they're all right for the others. But nothing keeps big dark red roses long - I wish they did not die” [2, p. 618].

An old English castle and a garden do not limit Isabella’s art space; it also includes the allusions to works of visual and verbal art (caryatids of Acropolis, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, medieval stained-glass artworks and murals). The thing she owns show her connection with the past.  Even the prayer that she got as a a wedding present from John Gabriel (he didn’t know what it was and called it «some Catholic Thing») appeared to be a medieval, just as if it was meant to belong to her, but accidentally caught into the hands of this man.

Her relationships with this ancient ancestral castle is so strong that when she leaves it, everything changes, and the castle ruins and people start to rebuild it, as if only Isabella maintained the life in this place. Her time is past with which she is strongly connected but infused with the eternal values ​​and spirituality her time turns to be an eternity. Even in a shabby and gloomy room in a faceless Zagrade, where Hugh Norreys found her, he mentioned that she was still the same Isabella he knew, she has not changed:

“She looked exactly as she had looked when she left St. Loo Castle. Her dress, actually, was shabby. But it had cut and style, and thought old, she wore it with ease and distinction. Her hair was still in its long shimmering page-boy bob. Her face was beautiful, calm and grave. She and the room had, I felt, nothing to do with each other. She was here, in the midst of it, exactly as she might have been in the midst of a desert, or on the deck of a ship. It was not her home. It was a place where she happened, just at the moment, to be” [2, p. 650]. Surrounded by dishonest people in miserable conditions she still was the same Isabella: “In the middle of it, sitting with her feet tucked up under her, and embroidering a piece of silk, was Isabella… She sat there smiling quietly, the same remote Acropolis Maiden smile” [2, 654].

Isabella’s space and time are out of physical quantities. An eternity to which she belongs, a sense of beauty, generosity and dignity – are constant in her soul, and wherever she is, these qualities cannot be taken away. Even in the disgusting place and conditions where Gabriel put her she somehow saved her inner fairy world and did it naturally. Being physically in the place that was so much contrasting to the place where she grew up, she kept herself the same clean and noble lady that she always was. There, in Zagrade, she found an old piece of an old silk and embroidered her favorite deep red roses from the St. Loo castle’s garden as a symbol of a place to which her soul belonged.

Her time is present where she lives in and the past with which she has very strong connection, but the eternal values she follows (goodness, love, loyalty), and which Gabriel denies, ascribe her to the eternity. Agatha Christie in a delicate way shows the contrast between her characters using the allusions to Shakespeare’s tragedies. Noble Isabella is compared to Fortinbras, sneaky John to Iago and Hugh to Hamlet. A triangle outlined between these characters corresponds to time and space organization of the novel – three different characters belong to different worlds and different time. However, the most important is the contrast between worlds of John and Isabella. In the novel “The Rose and the Yew Tree” Agatha Christie shows unconventional view on Victorian opposition of the men’s and women’s spaces, according to which the world of a man is open and active and the world of the woman is usually limited by the space of her house and family, it’s closed and contemplative. In the novel the man detached from family values ​​and eternal ideals, has a limited and closed space. However, the world of the woman closely connected with the past, with the traditions, the culture and the art, is open and even unlimited.

There is not just a contrast of John’s and Isabella’s chronotopes and not only the opposition of the “men’s world” and the “women's world”, but also the contrast between vile and noble, temporal and eternal, which brings to Agatha Christie’s psychological novel philosophical implications.