Mark Studdock Character Analysis

Before [Curry] sat down, nearly everyone in the room desired strongly to make the outer world understand that Bragdon Wood was the private property of Bracton College and that the outer world had better mind its own business. […] Then came a new voice from quite a different part of the Soler. Lord Feverstone had risen. […] A good many Fellows––Studdock was not one of them––imagined they were watching a revolt on Feverstone’s part against Curry and his gang and became intensely interested. […] gradually, one by one, the “outsiders” and “obstructionists,” the men not included in the Progressive Element, began coming into the debate.

She liked her clothes to be rather severe and in colours that were really good on serious aesthetic grounds––clothes which would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety––and because of this preference she did not know that she was interested in clothes at all. She was therefore a little annoyed when Mrs. Dimble met her coming out of Sparrow’s and said: “Hullo, dear! Been buying a hat? Come home to lunch and let’s see it. Cecil has the car just round the corner.”

It was a moment of extraordinary liberation for Mark. All sorts of things about Curry and Busby which he had not previously noticed, or else, noticing, had slurred over in his reverence for the Progressive Element, came back to his mind. He wondered how he could have been so blind to the funny side of them.

“It really is rather devastating,” said Feverstone […] “that the people one has to use for getting things done should talk such drivel the moment you ask them about the things themselves. […] our two poor friends, though they can be persuaded to take the right train, or even to drive it, haven’t a ghost of a notion where it’s going to, or why.”

“There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet. First we couldn’t; and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples […]. The third problem is man himself. Man has got to take charge of man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest––which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. […] sterilisation of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education […]. A new type of man: and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.”

Mark did not ask again in so many words what the N.I.C.E. wanted him to do; partly because he began to be afraid that he was supposed to know this already, and partly because a perfectly direct question would have sounded a crudity in that room––a crudity which might suddenly exclude him from the warm and almost drugged atmosphere of vague, yet heavily important, confidence in which he was gradually being enfolded.

They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy. […] It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear. The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly […] did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person. All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions […], for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. […] And yet he could not help rather liking this village.

On what terms would he go back? Would he still be a member of the Inner Circle even at Bracton? […] He went out before lunch for one of those short, unsatisfactory walks which a man takes in a strange neighbourhood […]. After lunch he explored the grounds. But they were not the sort of grounds that anyone could walk in for pleasure. There were trees dotted about and winding paths covered so thickly with round white pebbles that you could hardly walk on them. […] There were plantations––slabs would be almost a better word––of that kind of laurel which looks as if it were made of cleverly painted and varnished metal. […] The whole effect was like that of a municipal cemetery. Yet, unattractive as it was, he sought it again after tea […].

Stone had the look which Mark had often seen before in unpopular boys or new boys at school, in “outsiders” at Bracton––the look which was for Mark the symbol of all his worst fears, for to be one who must wear that look was, in his scale of values, the greatest evil. His instinct was not to speak to this man Stone. He knew by experience how dangerous it is to be friends with a sinking man or even to be seen with him: you cannot keep him afloat and he may pull you under. But his own craving for companionship was now acute, so that against his better judgement he smiled a sickly smile and said “Hullo!”

The resentment which had been rising and ebbing, but rising each time a little more than it ebbed, for several minutes, had now overflowed. All this talk of promises and obedience to an unknown Mr. Fisher-King had already repelled her. But the idea of this same person sending her back to get Mark’s permission––as if she were a child asking leave to go to a party––was the climax. For a moment she looked on Mr. Denniston with real dislike. She saw him, and Mark, and the Fisher-King man […] simply as Men––complacent, patriarchal figures making arrangements for women as if women were children or bartering them like cattle. […] She was very angry.

“[Y]ou do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”

[…] “I thought love meant equality,” she said […]. “I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”

“You were mistaken,” said he gravely; “that is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes––that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. […] Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. […] It is not your fault. […] No one has ever told you that obedience––humility––is an erotic necessity.”

It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical––merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.

He looked back on his life, not with shame but with a kind of disgust at its dreariness. The hours that he had spent learning the very slang of each new circle that attracted him, the perpetual assumption of interest in things he found dull and of knowledge he did not possess, the almost heroic sacrifice of nearly every person and thing he actually enjoyed, the miserable attempt to pretend that one could enjoy […] the Progressive Element, or the N.I.C.E.––all this came over him with a kind of heartbreak. When had he ever done what he wanted? Mixed with the people whom he liked? Or even eaten and drunk what took his fancy? The concentrated insipidity of it all filled him with self-pity.

And he now knew, for the first time, what he had secretly meant to do with Jane. If all had succeeded, if he had become the sort of man he hoped to be, she was to have been the great hostess––the secret hostess in the sense that only the very esoteric few would know who that striking-looking woman was and why it mattered so enormously to secure her good will. Well…it was lucky for Jane. She seemed to him, as he now thought of her, to have in herself deep wells and knee-deep meadows of happiness, rivers of freshness, enchanted gardens of leisure, which he could not enter but could have spoiled.

But there it was––solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal. “All that,” as he called it, was what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from “all that,” then be damned to the scientific point of view! The vehemence of his choice almost took his breath away; he had not had such a sensation before.

He was himself, he felt, as helpless as the wooden Christ. As he thought this, he found himself looking at the crucifix in a new way––neither as a piece of wood nor a monument of superstition but as a bit of history. Christianity was nonsense, but one did not doubt that the man had lived and had been executed thus by the Belbury of those days. And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image, though not itself an image of the Straight or Normal, was yet in opposition to crooked Belbury. It was a picture of what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight––what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross.

Before [Curry] sat down, nearly everyone in the room desired strongly to make the outer world understand that Bragdon Wood was the private property of Bracton College and that the outer world had better mind its own business. […] Then came a new voice from quite a different part of the Soler. Lord Feverstone had risen. […] A good many Fellows––Studdock was not one of them––imagined they were watching a revolt on Feverstone’s part against Curry and his gang and became intensely interested. […] gradually, one by one, the “outsiders” and “obstructionists,” the men not included in the Progressive Element, began coming into the debate.

She liked her clothes to be rather severe and in colours that were really good on serious aesthetic grounds––clothes which would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety––and because of this preference she did not know that she was interested in clothes at all. She was therefore a little annoyed when Mrs. Dimble met her coming out of Sparrow’s and said: “Hullo, dear! Been buying a hat? Come home to lunch and let’s see it. Cecil has the car just round the corner.”

It was a moment of extraordinary liberation for Mark. All sorts of things about Curry and Busby which he had not previously noticed, or else, noticing, had slurred over in his reverence for the Progressive Element, came back to his mind. He wondered how he could have been so blind to the funny side of them.

“It really is rather devastating,” said Feverstone […] “that the people one has to use for getting things done should talk such drivel the moment you ask them about the things themselves. […] our two poor friends, though they can be persuaded to take the right train, or even to drive it, haven’t a ghost of a notion where it’s going to, or why.”

“There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet. First we couldn’t; and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples […]. The third problem is man himself. Man has got to take charge of man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest––which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. […] sterilisation of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education […]. A new type of man: and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.”

Mark did not ask again in so many words what the N.I.C.E. wanted him to do; partly because he began to be afraid that he was supposed to know this already, and partly because a perfectly direct question would have sounded a crudity in that room––a crudity which might suddenly exclude him from the warm and almost drugged atmosphere of vague, yet heavily important, confidence in which he was gradually being enfolded.

They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy. […] It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear. The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly […] did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person. All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions […], for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. […] And yet he could not help rather liking this village.

On what terms would he go back? Would he still be a member of the Inner Circle even at Bracton? […] He went out before lunch for one of those short, unsatisfactory walks which a man takes in a strange neighbourhood […]. After lunch he explored the grounds. But they were not the sort of grounds that anyone could walk in for pleasure. There were trees dotted about and winding paths covered so thickly with round white pebbles that you could hardly walk on them. […] There were plantations––slabs would be almost a better word––of that kind of laurel which looks as if it were made of cleverly painted and varnished metal. […] The whole effect was like that of a municipal cemetery. Yet, unattractive as it was, he sought it again after tea […].

Stone had the look which Mark had often seen before in unpopular boys or new boys at school, in “outsiders” at Bracton––the look which was for Mark the symbol of all his worst fears, for to be one who must wear that look was, in his scale of values, the greatest evil. His instinct was not to speak to this man Stone. He knew by experience how dangerous it is to be friends with a sinking man or even to be seen with him: you cannot keep him afloat and he may pull you under. But his own craving for companionship was now acute, so that against his better judgement he smiled a sickly smile and said “Hullo!”

The resentment which had been rising and ebbing, but rising each time a little more than it ebbed, for several minutes, had now overflowed. All this talk of promises and obedience to an unknown Mr. Fisher-King had already repelled her. But the idea of this same person sending her back to get Mark’s permission––as if she were a child asking leave to go to a party––was the climax. For a moment she looked on Mr. Denniston with real dislike. She saw him, and Mark, and the Fisher-King man […] simply as Men––complacent, patriarchal figures making arrangements for women as if women were children or bartering them like cattle. […] She was very angry.

“[Y]ou do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”

[…] “I thought love meant equality,” she said […]. “I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”

“You were mistaken,” said he gravely; “that is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes––that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. […] Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. […] It is not your fault. […] No one has ever told you that obedience––humility––is an erotic necessity.”

It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical––merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.

He looked back on his life, not with shame but with a kind of disgust at its dreariness. The hours that he had spent learning the very slang of each new circle that attracted him, the perpetual assumption of interest in things he found dull and of knowledge he did not possess, the almost heroic sacrifice of nearly every person and thing he actually enjoyed, the miserable attempt to pretend that one could enjoy […] the Progressive Element, or the N.I.C.E.––all this came over him with a kind of heartbreak. When had he ever done what he wanted? Mixed with the people whom he liked? Or even eaten and drunk what took his fancy? The concentrated insipidity of it all filled him with self-pity.

And he now knew, for the first time, what he had secretly meant to do with Jane. If all had succeeded, if he had become the sort of man he hoped to be, she was to have been the great hostess––the secret hostess in the sense that only the very esoteric few would know who that striking-looking woman was and why it mattered so enormously to secure her good will. Well…it was lucky for Jane. She seemed to him, as he now thought of her, to have in herself deep wells and knee-deep meadows of happiness, rivers of freshness, enchanted gardens of leisure, which he could not enter but could have spoiled.

But there it was––solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal. “All that,” as he called it, was what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from “all that,” then be damned to the scientific point of view! The vehemence of his choice almost took his breath away; he had not had such a sensation before.

He was himself, he felt, as helpless as the wooden Christ. As he thought this, he found himself looking at the crucifix in a new way––neither as a piece of wood nor a monument of superstition but as a bit of history. Christianity was nonsense, but one did not doubt that the man had lived and had been executed thus by the Belbury of those days. And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image, though not itself an image of the Straight or Normal, was yet in opposition to crooked Belbury. It was a picture of what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight––what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross.