Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm as SF Text

[This follows on from my previous post on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as SF Text but this is really thoughts rather than a fully fledged argument! – 2024 Update: there are some more posts in this series now – index – and I have added another paragraph with some new analysis to the end of this post]

Cold Comfort Farm is set maybe 15-20 years after its date of publication (1932). One character (Claud) has participated in the Anglo-Nicaraguan Wars of 1946 (Gibbons 2006: 160) and there is a telephone conversation in which Flora is visible to Claud via the ‘television dial’ at his home (Flora is in a public phone box and so doesn’t have the option of seeing the other end of the line; see Gibbons 2006: 128). (Compare Woolf in The Years [1937]: ‘One of these days d’you think we’ll be able to see things at the end of the telephone?’ [324]).

One way of thinking about this near-future setting would be to consider Cold Comfort Farm as a work sitting on that line of development imagined by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own as stretching forward a hundred years from Life’s Adventure by Mary Carmichael (which is perhaps a fictional version of Marie Stopes’s Love’s Creation – A Novel [1928]) to a point when a genuine women’s writing will be the norm. Certainly, Cold Comfort Farm carries some of the markers that Woolf refers to. For example, it has conversations between women characters that don’t revolve around men. Furthermore, it specifically refers to both Jane Austen and Emily Brontë, who, according to Woolf, were the only the two women writers to have written ‘as women write, not as men write’ (Woolf 2000: 68). While Jane Austen provides a model for Gibbons to the extent that Flora puts things to rights in the manner of Fanny Price (of Mansfield Park, which is the source of the novel’s epigraph); Emily’s Wuthering Heights is both satirised (especially in the character of Adam) and used as evidence of the pressures on women writers because of Mr Mybug’s contention that ‘No woman could have written that. It’s male stuff …’ (p. 102). As Flora has predicted, Mybug is writing a book to prove that Branwell wrote his sisters’ novels.

Flora also has to cope with her cousin Seth and his attitude of not letting women eat him: ‘I eats them instead’ (p. 82). Both Seth and Mybug in rather different ways represent Woolf’s point that men’s sense of self is often dependent on their assumption of superiority over women, which means that men do not want women to write great books or tell the truth about existence:

For is she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and dinner at least twice the size he really is? [….] The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. (Woolf 2000: 32-3)

Although Gibbons deals with these topics humorously, there is still obvious criticism of men’s behaviour in the book. As Faye Hammill notes: ‘Gibbons’s objection to male intellectuals, and their undervaluing of female intelligence, was strikingly justified by some of the reviews of Cold Comfort Farm. Several reviewers expressed incredulity that a mere journalist, and a woman at that, could have produced such an accomplished work, and one even speculated that Stella Gibbons was a pen-name of Evelyn Waugh’ (Hammill 2001: 842).

Of course, Cold Comfort Farm is not a radical feminist text in the same way that A Room of One’s Own is. As Hammill points out, Flora appeals not to the committed feminist but to the ordinary woman reader and ‘the ground of her appeal is the pleasure that a woman with a degree of autonomy can gain for herself’ (846). None of her advice (e.g. to Elfine on how to perform femininity – see Gibbons 2006: 129-130) ‘betokens a politically radical woman, yet Flora’s seizing of power within the Starkadder family presents a clear image of female ascendance and defiance that exists in a curious tension with her emphasis on conventional feminine behaviour’ (Hammill 2001: 846).

So where does Cold Comfort Farm sit on that Woolfian century stretching from 1928 to 2028? It’s definitely a step forward in some respects from Mary Carmichael because it imagines a world where modern women can be an updated Jane Austen heroine and have agency (and enjoy themselves) by performing a particular kind of modernised conventional femininity, while being the wittiest person in the room.

Unsurprisingly, the novel was (and has remained) incredibly popular. It was reissued as a Penguin paperback in 1938. As the English Studies Group of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies noted in 1979, Gibbons distances herself (in the foreword) from pretensions to literary status. In this respect the novel might be seen as ‘middlebrow’ in the terminology of the period. Rather than map ‘lowbrow’, ‘middlebrow’ and ‘highbrow’ onto social class, one way of thinking about these categories is how the text positions (or ‘interpellates’) the reader. So, while a ‘lowbrow’ text might position a reader ‘in such a way as to identify with one or more characters’, a ‘middlebrow’ text situates the reader ‘in the position of the author or narrative “point of view”’; and a ‘highbrow’ ‘reader [or literary studies academic or postgrad student] “sees” the text from the position of literary ideology’ (1979: 13-4). Elements of all three of these are present in Cold Comfort Farm, but readers are mainly situated in terms of the narrative point of view albeit, as the ESG point out, with a significant disruption to that process:

The text interpellates its reader, as we saw in the author’s foreword, as the ordinary person, the consciously non-literary, knowledgeable, responsible general reader. This reader and the author are one, part of the same community of common sense. [. . . .] [However] [t]here are moments, like the scene of ‘ordinary human enjoyment’ at the wedding, when the gender of the ordinary person is seen as unimportant. Everyone participates equally in the life of the community. This appeal, to an ungendered ideal of ‘citizenship’, is distinctively middlebrow. Elsewhere in the text, though, the interpellated reader is importantly female: when male sexuality is ridiculed, when Flora rescues the female victims of rural idiocy, when she wryly foresees Mybug’s claim that Wuthering Heights was written by Branwell Brontë. (1979: 16)

The ESG go on to discuss the struggle between Flora and Aunt Ada as ‘a conflict between two forms of female power’ (1979: 16) – the power of the older woman in the traditional extended family and the power of the newly independent woman. This is illustrated by Aunt Ada’s second-person stream of consciousness in Chapter 10 (Gibbons 2006: 113-115) which in practice works as an address to the reader, who here is unequivocally positioned as female: ‘an appeal to shared female experience: “something nasty in the woodshed”, the problem that has no name’ (1979: 18). The problem is, as Woolf pointed out in ‘Professions for Women’ (1931), that even if a woman has the benefits of modern independence and the material resources signified by ‘a room of her own’ it is still not acceptable to write ‘the truth about [her] own experiences as a body’ (Woolf 2000: 360). A message that was born out by the critical drubbing and damage to her reputation undergone by Naomi Mitchison after publishing We Have Been Warned (1935).

Finally, the ESG conclude:

Cold Comfort Farm never achieves a closed, coherent interpellation of the reader-writer as sensible ordinary person. The equivocality of the text exposes the contradictory situation of the female reader-writer, unable to read-write either highbrow, lowbrow or middlebrow fiction, because no kind can carry the assertion of her distinctive and in many ways oppositional femaleness. (1979: 19)

While, on the whole, we no longer think of texts as ideology machines in quite the same way as they did in the late 1970s this does, I think, provide a useful summing up of how the novel functions. It is one way of expressing how Cold Comfort Farm is not entirely modern, even for 1932. In terms of the Woolf SF continuum, it might be considered a transitional text because despite its understanding of the modern world (which still seems fresh today), it’s clearly written with the knowledge that it has to abide by a number of traditional conventions (specifically not directly writing about women’s experiences as bodies) in order to be considered safe for society. Therefore, it is not as radical or transgressive as contemporary fictions by other women writers such as Mitchison or Ethel Mannin and, as a consequence, it doesn’t have exactly the same kind of troubled reception history (although as Hammill pointed out in 2001, it wasn’t really written about or considered canonical in any way up until that point in time). Nevertheless, struggles are fought on many fronts and Cold Comfort Farm implicitly holds out a future for women that is different from the reality of the early 1930s and can thus be seen as part of that process Woolf identified of women working for 2028.

In this feminist context, it is worth noting that at one point in the novel, Flora is described as having her ‘hand on the plough’: ‘However, her hand was on the plough, and she would not turn back, because, if she did, Mrs Smiling would make a particular sort of face, which in another and more old-fashioned woman would have meant: “I told you so”’ (50). I only noticed this in 2023, while teaching an MA class on fiction of the 1930s, and got very excited because this is a biblical quotation (Luke 9:62) that was used in the suffragette movement. Specifically, the verse was cited by the American suffrage activist Alice Paul in relation to her decision, after the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920 (which gave women the vote), to keep campaigning for a further amendment to enshrine equal rights for women in the US Constitution: ‘when you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row’.^[i] Mitchison describes Erif Der, the protagonist of her The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) as having her ‘hand on the plow’ in order to make the point that it is not enough for Erif to have a hand on the plow, or for women to have the vote in Britain: only by keeping control of the plow and using it to reconfigure the field, or society, can full freedom be achieved. In this respect, these two novels are linked (and I’m sure there must be other examples of the phrase being used in this way). For more on The Corn King and the Spring Queen, see my post on it from this series.

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[i] Quoted in Peter Dreier, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2012), 149

Works Cited:

English Studies Group, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham. ‘Thinking the Thirties’. Francis Barker et al (eds), 1936: The Sociology of Literature, Volume 2 – Practices of Literature and Politics. Colchester: University of Essex, 1979: 1-20.

Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006 [1932].

Faye Hammill, ‘Cold Comfort Farm, D.H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars’, Modern Fiction Studies, Winter 2001; 47, 4: 831-854.

Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2000.

Virginia Woolf. The Years. Hammersmith: Grafton, 1977 [1937].