The House in the Dormer Forest

The House in Dormer Forest (1920), Webb’s third novel, revolves around the ill-fated Darke family, whose members live together in uneasy proximity and are repressed by the atmosphere of their ancestral country mansion. Dormer Old House is described by Webb as “a mansion to the majority, a prison to the few.”

Although The House in Dormer Forest is the most populated of Mary Webb’s novels, Dormer Old House is the primary focus in this novel. Landscape takes on symbolic significance, and becomes the controlling background of the story. The opening chapter, which describes Dormer Old House in its setting, can be compared to the description of Egdon Heath at the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Both novels vividly convey a sense of place, and an awareness of the influence that landscape can exert over human endeavor. The fact that Webb doesn’t introduce a human personality until the second chapter is an indication of the importance of setting to action.

Dormer Old House exerts an unwholesome influence on its inhabitants. The needs of the individual are subservient to convention and stifled by a demand for conformity:

All these things you could see in clear weather, but when it was misty—and mist lingered here as of inalienable right—the house was obliterated. It vanished like a pebble in a well, with all its cabined and shuttered wraths and woes, all its thunderous “thou shalt nots.” At such times it did not seem that any law ruled in the valley except the law of the white owls and the hasty water and the mazy bat-dances. Only those who slept there night by night could tell you that the house was overspread with a spiders-web of rules, legends and customs so complex as to render the individual soul almost helpless.

Against this backdrop, the Darke family acts out its drama: the rebellion of the four grown children of Solomon and Rachel Darke—Amber, Jasper, Peter, and Ruby. Grandmother Hannah Velindre (Rachel’s mother) and distant cousin Catherine Velindre also form part of the Darke household, along with four servants—Sarah Jowel (kitchen maid), Mrs. Gosling (upstairs maid), Marigold (housemaid), and Enoch Gale (Dormer’s earth-mystic handyman). Lively, ironic, sharp, and humorous, The House in Dormer Forest is more social satire than rural novel, with the action centered on human relationships.

Jasper Darke’s rebellion is his refusal to accept religious dogma, which he perceives as “the idiotic hotch-potch of the churches.” Dismissed by the Theological College where he has been studying, Jasper feels alienated by the hostile reception he receives from his parents and grandmother. Jasper works as a farm hand upon his return to Dormer Old House. In his spiritual loneliness, he is ensnared by his cousin, Catherine Velindre. Ultimately, the lovely but heartless Catherine spurns Jasper as an infidel when he refuses to “make the truth in himself a lie.”

Peter Darke rebels against Dormer’s moral class-code. Peter also desires his cousin Catherine, but is rebuffed by her and turns instead to the young housemaid, Marigold. Peter’s passionate love for Marigold leads to Marigold’s upbraiding and dismissal by Mother Rachel Darke. The headstrong and impulsive Peter defies his elders and marries where his heart lies.

Ruby Darke’s materialistic nature leads her into a marriage to Ernest Swyndle, the clergyman (second only to Jane Austen’s Mr. Collins in his bigotry and hypocrisy). The match is thoroughly approved by the elder Darkes, but Rachel soon realizes that marriage for ease rather than for love can be a loathsome trap.

The eldest child, Amber Darke, is a self-portrait of the young Mary Webb before her marriage. Amber has been a silent rebel all her life. Early on, she learns from handyman Enoch Gale how to survive the repression of Dormer House. Amber spends each dawn in the Bird’s Orchard and forest far from the house. Unmarried at thirty, she is a failure in the eyes of her family. Amber loves “maternally, protectively, perceptively” and is spiritually sensitive:

For Amber Darke was something of a mystic, though not exactly a religious mystic, nor that wilder, sadder creature, an earth-mystic. Sometimes she was deeply stirred by the beauty of Nature, but she did not live for it alone, as does the true child of the weeping god. Sometimes it was music that stirred her, or a stray sentence from the Bible, or the stars, or poetry; but most often it was the sudden rapture or the sudden pain of loving. Love would leap up in her at a chance touch of pathos in the most unpromising people. At these times she left the shallows of beauty that is heard and seen, and slipped out into the deep sea where are no tides of change and decay, no sound, no colour, but only an essence. In those waters nothing is but the spirit.

Amber has, however, paid a physical price for her intensity of feeling. Plain and sallow, she believes that “perceptiveness and emotional beauty, even the gift of humour must be paid for to the last drop of vitality.” Behind Old Dormer House is the Beast Walk, a steep avenue of fantastical animal shapes fashioned from primeval yew and holly trees by ancestors of the Darke family. In Mary Webb (1990), Gladys Mary Coles says: “the Beast Walk is one of Mary Webb’s most extraordinary imaginative creations, a powerful symbol of the dark unconscious, and particularly of man’s tendency to revert to the beast when dominated by ‘herd instinct’ or in upholding the ‘isms’ he has created.” Jasper goes to the Beast Walk, tormented by his hopeless love for Catherine and miserable at his family’s harsh treatment of him since his crisis of faith:

He [Jasper] was realizing that there are depths of savagery in the human heart deeper than that of killing; that when law is put before love and the material before the spiritual there is nothing left wherewith to combat evil.

Amber, modest and graceful, finally finds true love when Jasper’s idealistic and intelligent friend from Theological College, Michael Hallowes, comes to Dormer Valley to visit his friend. The calculating but beautiful Catherine Velindre tries but fails to snare Michael. Amber is then no longer “the honeyed flower that no bee visits.”

The House in Dormer Forest is the most modern of Webb’s novels. In it, she is preoccupied with the collective tyranny that dominates society and the need for the individual to discover and fight for the integrity of the self. Webb uses Amber Darke to express her beliefs about the unconscious mind:

. . . within, deep in the tenebrous recesses of sub-consciousness, man hopes to find God. Not in churches, not in his fellows, not in nature will he find God until he has seen all these things mirrored in that opaque and fathomless pool lying within his own being, of which, as yet, we know nothing.

Despite its range of characterization, humor, irony, and sureness of touch, The House in Dormer Forest is less of an artistic success than her first two novels. Webb is so eager to get her message across that she sometimes intrusively shouts over her characters instead of conveying her ideas through the drama of her story. In spite of her didacticism, most contemporary reviewers did not respond to the symbolized truths embodied in this novel. The reviewer for the Bookman (September 1920) recognized the “all-pervading humour. The description of the house and of people are touched with an agreeable wit,” but “there is much of gloom in the story and a little of tragedy.” The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (July 22, 1920) was less complimentary, saying that the world Webb creates is “a very gloomy place” and the impact of “so much unrelieved intensity is to produce not only gloom but monotony.”

Mary Webb felt a fierce necessity to transmit her intuitions to the world through her writing. As Webb’s convictions deepened, her literary ambitions increased. Webb was so distressed by the reviews of The House in Dormer Forest that she became ill, and suffered her first serious attack of Graves’ disease in eight years (since before her marriage).