'The Small Room' - Mary Sarton

I’m currently flying back from the Algarve, but I wanted to at least try to participate in the ‘Slaves of Golconda’ discussion about Mary Sarton’s ‘The Small Room’. It’s only the second SoG book that I’ve finished this year and I want to make an effort.

‘The Small Room’ details a year at Appleton, a rigorously academic, exclusively female college in Midwest America. Lucy is a new English professor, who has recently broken her engagement and decided to take up a position at Appleton, although she’s not sure teaching calls to her as it does others.

Lucy is unfortunate enough to uncover a plagiarism scandal at Appleton not long after she arrives. A promising student called Jane, has stolen parts of an obscure essay and submitted it as an original essay to the college magazine. Jane is the intellectual prodigy of a celebrated medieval studies lecturer Caryl Cope. Caryl is admired by many of the Appleton professors, as she appears so intellectually principled and is determined to pull academic excellence from as many students as possible. She is well known to be a forceful person and by the time Lucy discovers Jane’s plagiarism she has already demonstrated her power to intervene in another talented student’s disciplinary case. Finally, Caryl’s long term lover is Olive, the commanding, wealthy benefactor of Appleton, who has promised to leave Appleton her money when she dies, which makes the negotiations around Jane’s case extremely sensitive.

When I read the blurb it sounded to me as if there would be a typical dust up between the two professors, with the young, new professor one on the side of RIGHT and the other entrenched, possibly aggressive professor determined to keep her reputation from being damaged. I’m not quite sure how I got that from ‘she had discovered a dishonest act committed by a brilliant student who is a protégée of a powerful faculty member’ but that’s what it brought to mind. Happily the novel is more complex than my tired imagination allowed for; the character’s positions are not so delineated and the reader’s are not guided into simplistic sympathies.

Caryl betrays weaknesses that make the reader dislike her and flaws that make her easier to empathise with. Caryl makes the mistake of pushing Jane too much intellectually, when she is fragile and desperate for approval and watching Jane break down is enough to make any reader rear away from Caryl’s cause. She’s often shown as a blunt character, who is aggressive and extremely focused on the intellect and in many a novel that uncompromising intellect attached to her gender would make her a natural villain. However, Lucy’s views of her are well balanced and even after Jane’s breakdown, Lucy is careful not to fly off the handle and call ill treatment. She disagrees with Caryl and at times seems almost fearful of her, but she also finds common cause with Caryl and comes to consider her a friend. I think seeing Lucy align herself with Caryl’s initial way of dealing with Jane’s transgression (hushing it up, while telling the other professors) makes it easier to view Caryl’s actions with sympathy.

As much as the scandal over Jane’s actions provide the main focus for the novel’s plot and Caryl Cope is at the centre of this scandal, it’s Lucy who the reader is really encouraged to focus on. One of the main strands of the novel is Lucy’s year of development, as she learns how to motivate her students, thinks about whether a teacher’s life is for her and straddles the line between being involved in students academic development and being unwillingly drawn into their personal lives. I really enjoyed this part of the novel, because it’s a conflicted story of a woman trying to figure out why she’s lived as she has so far and how to work as a teacher entrusted with educating other women. Lucy’s thoughts about her broken engagement and her potential future as an unmarried teacher are so candid. While I might not like that Lucy only got her doctoral degree because the location of her college was close to where John worked, it’s appealing to hear a character talk about such an anti-feminist idea honestly and with a certain nervousness at her weakness for it, without launching her thoughts as a generalising, defensive attack on feminist thought. And although I’d never make a teacher, it was so interesting to see Lucy work her way through how she might teach and best work with her students.

‘The Small Room’ is a novel I don’t feel equipped to really dig into. I think the meaning and consequences of Lucy’s story of professional development would be best analysed by someone teaching, or in the process of being taught, which is why I’m excited to see what the teachers and students in SoG made of the novel. The lessons she learns from her first year as a teacher seem to apply specifically to teaching methods and Appleton doesn’t seem to stand as a microcosm for the wider world. Instead the ideas about how to connect effectively and productively feel particular to relationships between students and teachers. ‘The Small Room’ feels like a contained novel, focused on campus life, unconcerned with linking campus relations to the wider emotional world. That’s not an approach I’m familiar with seeing in novels, but it’s a direct focus that I now think I’d like to see more.

Still, I suspect that I’m missing the connection between Appleton and the wider world, because ‘The Small Room’ is a novel that is preoccupied by psychology. Psychology seems to be a relatively new school of examination to the characters in the novel and Appleton’s administrations struggle with Olive about appointing a campus psychologist. If I knew more about early psychological teachings, I’d probably make more of a connection between different psychological theory applied to the wider population and the way Lucy and other characters react to their students.

Psychological theory being pretty unknown to me I could only make basic guesses about how Mary Sarton wants her readers to react to her characters, but was unable to really grasp why she seemed to be indicating approval for Lucy’s relationships with her students and disapproval for Caryl cope’s relationship with Jane. I understood that the way Caryl relates to Jane was not the correct, as Jane has a breakdown and the way Lucy relates to her student Tabitha was correct, as Tabitha’s work progresses beyond anyone’s expectations. What I didn’t really understand was what about Lucy’s approach does the author want her readers to believe helped Tabitha to advance? To me it seemed to be Lucy’s emotional distance and her abilities as ‘an ear’ who listens openly. But Caryl’s emotional distance seems to be just what Lucy believes caused Jane to have a breakdown. I was unsure, but still interested.

I’m not trying to imply that the specific focus of ‘The Small Room’ makes it a novel that lacks something, because it doesn’t seem to want to link the emotions of the campus community to universal human relations. Neither do I want to imply that I couldn’t pin down meanings because the book was unclear. It is always important to be reminded that you don’t know even close to everything about everything. The areas ‘The Small Room’ takes as its subject just aren’t areas I have a lot of experience in. It was challenging to read so far outside my knowledge and I felt stretched by the novel, felt like I was learning, even if I haven’t really worked out what the novel is saying on a deeper level. One of my favourite parts is when Lucy attends a lecture held by another professor, not the great Caryl Cope, but Hallie a fellow literature professor:

'And slowly, what had been a painful, stumbling series of unrelated questions and answers became something like a fugue. Hallie was gently imposing a line, bringing them back to certain themes played over and over - thought, language, character, the making of a poet. And as she led the class back to these major chords, again and again, weaving in and out, asking the probing question, responding to the sensitive answer, what had in the first few moments been a professor "drawing out" a student had become a true dialogue.'

And now I look forward to reading how teachers and students related to this novel, which has made a firm impression on me by leaving lots for me to consider and explore.