The Old Wives' Tale summary and theme
The Old Wives’ Tale is divided into four books, corresponding
to Constance and Sophia Baines’s adolescence (Book 1), Constance’s adulthood
(Book 2), Sophia’s adulthood (Book 3), and the sisters’ reunion in old age
(Book 4). Bennett sets his story in a town called Bursley—a fictionalized
location based on the English town of Burslem, one of the “Six Towns” that
incorporated to become Stoke-on-Trent. In Bennett’s novel, Book 1 takes place
in the early 1860s and is situated in Bursley and the "Five Towns"
neighbourhood. The Baines family rents a structure on St. Luke's Square where
they reside and run the draper store that has been in the family for generations.
While her husband John is bedridden after suffering a stroke, the mother, Mrs.
Baines, manages both the home and the store. Constance, who is a little elder
than Sophia, is mellow-tempered and naively good-natured. Although Sophia is
more independent and impulsive than her sister, it turns out that she shares
her sister's propensity for common sense as the novel progresses.
The story of the family is told in Book 1's "Mrs.
Baines" during the teenage years of the sisters. Sophia and Gerald Scales,
a travelling salesman, start an impulsive affair.
Book 2, “Constance,” focuses on the older sister’s storyline. Samuel and Constance
Povey get along well together, although they experience the commonplace
tensions of a young marriage. A few years into their marriage, Samuel and
Constance have a son, Cyril. He’s an intelligent child, gifted in many ways,
but has a troubling streak of self-centeredness and a lack of empathy for
others. A crisis unfolds for the Povey family when Samuel’s cousin Daniel is
indicted for murdering his wife. Samuel exhausts himself in the effort to save
his cousin, but in the end he fails, and the lost cause cripples his health. He
passes away, leaving Constance to raise Cyril, now a teenager, alone. The
family’s landlord purchases the business but nevertheless allows Constance and
Cyril to continue living in the attached home. Cyril eventually succeeds in
pursuing a career in art, defying the expectations of his mother, and leaves
Constance alone in the Bursley house.
Book 3, “Sophia,” picks up Sophia’s story from the point of
her elopement. Her paramour, Gerald, was planning the escapade as a passionate
fling, not an actual marriage, but Sophia presses him for a proper wedding.
After their marriage, they take up residence in Paris, living in hotels on the
money Gerald received in an inheritance. He spends his money too lavishly,
however, and nearly his entire inheritance is gone within the first four years.
Their marriage crumbles along the way, as Sophia discerns more of his true
character. She, who was the impulsive one in her family, now must take up the
role of preaching moderation and common sense. Gerald eventually abandons her,
and after a serious illness she finds herself recuperating in a Paris
boardinghouse. It becomes her home, and she enters into business with the
building’s owner before taking over the administration of the boardinghouse
during the Franco-Prussian War. When the war is over, she uses her savings to
buy an exclusive boardinghouse for English visitors in Paris and becomes
well-known as a keen and capable businesswoman there.
In the final part of the novel, Book 4, “What Life Is,”
Constance and Sophia reunite. A visitor from Bursley comes to the boardinghouse
and realizes that the manager is the long-lost Baines sister, so upon his
return he tells Constance of Sophia’s location. Constance writes to her sister,
and Sophia sells her boardinghouse and returns to England. While Sophia doesn’t
initially intend to take up permanent residence back in the old family home,
circumstances work out that way, and the two sisters end up living together for
the final years of their lives. Sophia passes away shortly after learning of
the death of her long-estranged husband Gerald, when she’s shocked by the changes
that time has wrought. Constance dies about a year later, just as major
transformations sweep through their hometown.
THE OLD WIVES' TALE CHARACTER ANALYSIS
CONSTANCE (BAINES) POVEY
Constance is the older of the two Baines sisters by a year.
In outward appearance, she isn’t portrayed as quite as striking in beauty as
her sister, Sophia, but is pleasant and agreeable to everyone. Calm and
levelheaded, Constance wants to abide by the rules and do her duty to her
family. As a result, she follows in her parents’ footsteps and keeps the family
business going, never complaining about parental expectations and never
expressing any contrary desire to that plan. One of her dominant traits
throughout the book is her good-naturedness and her empathy toward others: “[S]he
wanted to help everybody, to show in some way how much she sympathized with and
loved everybody” (79). This good-naturedness, while a positive quality,
sometimes borders on naivete, and in relationships in which discipline and firm
boundaries are necessary—such as with her son, Cyril—this feature of
Constance’s temperament proves a liability.
When Constance's mother retires, she marries Samuel Povey, a
seasoned member of the Baines family staff, and the two of them take over
running the draper's store. Cyril, their only kid together, is intelligent and
gifted but alarmingly egotistical. Constance is left with the ultimate burden
of raising Cyril after Samuel dies when he is still a teenager. However, since
Constance's good-natured empathy and Cyril's self-centeredness directly
conflict with one another, they don't really comprehend one another and drift
apart, which causes Constance great pain and loneliness.
Constance’s character is one of the ways that Bennett
illustrates his principle of the unchangeableness of temperament, even amid the
many changes of life. The character’s name itself appears to be a symbol for
the idea of constancy. The steadiness of her nature can be an asset, as when it
allows her to persevere in the early years of her marriage without facing too
much disruption from the small tensions that regularly arise. However, her
constancy is a limiting factor in other situations, as when she can’t conceive
of embarking on another way of living than the one she has known: As Sophia
observes, “You can’t alter her” (556).
MRS. BAINES
Mrs. Baines is the girls’ mother and the dominant influence
in their lives throughout Book
Her character shows aspects of both of her daughters’
temperaments: Like Constance, she’s calm and levelheaded, and like Sophia, she
has a strong will and a deep sense of confidence. She tends to get along well
with Constance, who’s willing to bend to her mother’s will, but Sophia’s
willfulness often conflicts with her mother’s sense of sovereignty over the
household, leading to a relationship often described in antagonistic terms of
battles, victories, and defeats.
SAMUEL POVEY
Samuel Povey is a supporting character in Books 1 and 2. He first appears as a longtime assistant in the Baines shop and later marries Constance. The romance between them occurs mostly out of view of the narrative and thus may come as something of a surprise, especially since the first impression of Samuel is not of a romantic figure but an odd character in need of the care and ministrations of others. He has a keen eye for business, however, so he makes a good match for Constance, in whose care the family business falls.
Samuel is a wishy-washy character who holds strong opinions
on certain topics but isn’t willing to voice them, and who hides his
deepest-held emotions until they burst out in a pathetic way. He believes in
good morals but nonetheless slips into improprieties through the influence of
others (like his cousin Daniel). He can be single-minded about a small set of
narrow interests, such as the financial ledgers of the business. This quality
proves his undoing, however, when he single-mindedly pursues the release of his
cousin Daniel, who’s on trial for murder. He pushes himself so hard that his
health falls apart when the petition for release fails, and he passes away. His
death, near the midpoint of Book 2’s narrative, parallels the death of John
Baines in Book 1 and the departure of Gerald Scales in Book 3; all three Baines
women are alone for the remainder of their story arcs.
GERALD SCALES
Gerald appears at the end of Book 1 and the beginning of Book
3. A traveling salesman, he keeps the Baines family shop stocked with
merchandise, and through that contact, Sophia meets him and becomes infatuated.
He initially appears as a dashing, romantic figure, but warning signs even in
those early appearances indicate that he seems too ready to take improper
liberties, as in his budding relationship with Sophia. These warning signs
prove founded in the beginning of Book 3, where it becomes apparent that he’s
only interested in romance itself, without any commitment to faithfulness.
Gerald provides a contrast to Sophia’s character, allowing
her to develop some of her underlying traits. Although he’s impulsive, like
her, his impulsivity runs much further—to an astonishing carelessness in
lifestyle and financial habits. Faced with this tendency in her new husband,
Sophia learns to control her own impulsivity so that she can exercise the
restraint and moderation that their relationship deeply needs. Gerald’s flaws,
then, bring out some of the multifaceted strengths in Sophia’s character.
Eventually, Gerald leaves altogether, only appearing again as a corpse in Book
4.
CYRIL POVEY
The only child of Constance and Samuel Povey, Cyril appears
in Books 2 and 4. He is a bright child, gifted in sports and especially in art,
but has deep character flaws that add to the tension in Constance’s narrative.
Cyril is inordinately selfish and lacks his mother’s empathy toward others. His
self-centeredness sometimes leads him to breach the bounds of family morals, as
when he steals money from the shop’s till to buy implements for smoking. He’s
wholly fixated on his own life and prospects, which include pursuing a career
in art. His talents in art are undeniable, but his fixation on himself leads to
a growing and painful estrangement from his mother, whom he increasingly
neglects as he gets older.
Cyril, like Constance and Sophia, underscores Bennett’s theme
on the unchangeability of temperament even amid the changes of life. Despite all the efforts of
Samuel, Constance, and Sophia to reform him and make him more attentive to
others, he retains his self-centered focus throughout the story. His neglect
for his mother is ultimately realized in his failure to even make it to her
funeral.
THE OLD WIVES' TALE THEMES
THE CHANGES OF LIFE
The dominant theme
of the novel concerns the transformations effected by time in a person’s life.
Bennett was inspired to write The Old Wives’ Tale by an incident in
which he saw an old woman and imagined how different she might have been in her
youth: “This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from
these ridiculous mannerisms. […] One ought to be able to make a heart-rending
novel out of the history of a woman such as she” (31-32). This theme of outward
transformations runs throughout the novel, as Bennett focuses on the girls’
youth and vitality in Book 1 and on their aged frailty in Book 4. The theme
comes to a head in Sophia’s viewing of the body of her late husband, whom she
hasn’t seen for decades, when she’s struck by the ravages of time upon his
frame.
This two-sided dynamic—of radical outer change and inner
unchangeableness—adds to the tragedy
of the book’s final section. Although Constance and Sophia are still the same
people they always were, their outward aspect has been thoroughly altered by
time, and no one relates to them with the admiration so commonly lavished on
youth and beauty. Rather, they’re seen as relics of a bygone age, “old” and out
of touch, which adds a note of unfairness to the story.
THE MYSTERY
OF OTHER MINDS
Bennett’s focus on
psychology and personality traits leads to another major theme in the novel:
the mystery of other minds. This theme picks up on a dynamic that is common to
all human experience: the fact that although we try to understand one another,
we never really do. The characters in Bennett’s story are often surprised by
one another’s thoughts and actions, having assumed they knew how the other
person thought and finding themselves shocked to be proven wrong. This is true
even of characters who know each other well: Constance finds herself startled
by many things her husband does, and Sophia is surprised at Constance’s
intractable ways even though she knows her sister is unchanging in temperament.
This theme arises
early in the narrative,
as the two sisters find each other startled by their reactions to the incident
with Samuel’s tooth: “The atmosphere
had altered completely with the swiftness of magic. […] the youthful, naïve,
innocent charm of both of them [was] transformed into something sinister and
cruel” (66-67). The same idea continues throughout the book’s narrative, as
Sophia startles her mother with her contrary desires regarding her pursuing a
future as an educator, as Cyril likewise startles his parents with his ideas
about pursuing art, and as Gerald and Sophia misread one another repeatedly in
their relationship. In each case, their expectations for what the other
character will do are shattered in the face of what that person actually thinks
and does.
Bennett, who also explores the first subject, frequently has
his characters acknowledge how little they know about other people's thoughts.
He makes mention of how poorly human beings understand our own thoughts.
Occasionally, we can startle ourselves. Additionally, we occasionally find it
difficult to recognise aspects of our personalities that are obvious to others.
Whether or not the impressions that others have of us are entirely accurate,
they still represent a reality to which we are largely blind, as when Constance
continues to be unaware of the way that Sophia and the doctor have evaluated
her character as being one of the causes of her problems: "It had not
occurred to her that if she was worried and ill, it might be because she was
worried and ill, not because she was sick, but because she was worried.
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