In Mrs Engels, Lizzie Burns values stories and sets a significant context for a consideration of the novel: “In front of us aren’t our husbands but the stories we make of them, one story good till a better one comes to replace it, and it’s only afterwards that this is understood, only after you have loved and hated them for what they never were; only after it has ceased to matter.”
Here she endorses words and fiction as fundamental aspects of reality. The physical presence of Frederick Engels before her is no longer a fixed reality; rather the stories (plural) generated by relationships (loving and hateful) bear the force of truth and reality – we make stories out of necessity.
As a result, Lizzie is seldom settled in Mrs Engels. Walking around Manchester and London, her narration represents a pilgrimage of sorts (less Molly and more Leopold). A part of Lizzie seeks home and solace, yet her uncertainties define her sense of self and home as she crosses class and gender divisions in her society as an insider/outsider. She is loyal and loving as she is temperamental and unpredictable; she is illiterate and insightful in a society defined by ideas and writing.
McCrea establishes the form for these journeys in four named sections and 38 chapters (the final chapter is not named). Chapters generally contain subdivisons (marked by symbols and extra spacing). The first three sections indicate the passage of time: “Phase the Now,” “Phase the Next”, and “Phase the Last.” The title of the final section, In Paradisum, suggests a transcendence of the timeline. This form points to control, purpose and chronology – pillars to offer support and direction. Set against these, Lizzie roams.
The tension between formal design and narration reflects Lizzie’s challenges to authority, challenges often given voice in startling figurative language. Responding to an anarchist’s criticism of Marx, she turns to metaphor, “a coil in me loosens, and I feel I can start to enjoy myself” – a momentary freedom in the face of Marx’s influence on her life. As she says, “[Frederick] has made of Karl something like a wife. Those of us who really love Frederick have had to fight over what remains after Karl has had his way, and in truth, there’s rare much there to wake up to.” The simile accurately reflects her sense of being an outsider as Marx becomes the secure wife while Lizzie experiences the despair of a casual lover, “rare much there”.
However, this sense of loss is not a dominant mode for Lizzie’s voice is subtle and compound, wandering and unpredictable. Just as she draws on figurative language to deal with her complex feelings and relationships, she consistently relies on playful and crude diction to express herself: “It’s awful grand”; “my cunny”; “effin mighty”; “hooer’s donkey”; and a “real bowel mover” suggest her range. Delightful as such phrasing may be, Lizzie is aware of the effects of it and the image it projects of her: “Jew Beloff” notes her “intelligence” but presses her “to speak” well in order to avoid being judged simply as “unread”. McCrea brilliantly manages these variations in language as Lizzie moves from one register to another.
In effect, she is both mistress and maid, increasingly aware of her sense of self: “I can’t bear to be inside my skin”. Observing herself from a distance, this surreal image draws a pure self from within her skin. Her body, her public figure, represents shame and she seeks solace elsewhere, imagining freedom in a play of words. And that sense of seeking to escape the self, while acknowledging the impossibility, is present throughout the novel. It is there in exquisite diction as she describes being awoken by Moss’s movement in the bed: “I’m hauled from it [sleep] young by the sound of the springs grating.” Here, one word choice reveals Lizzie’s experience. The shocking use of “young” has many layers of meaning from “early” through “innocence” to “renewal”, pointing to Moss’s transformative effect on her life by simply waking her up and/or by taking her out of herself to be young again.
These enabling moments are as revealing as they are transitory and are recognised as such by Lizzie when she cautions Engels:
“You have always had a too high opinion of our minds, Frederick Engels. We’re far more ignorant than you give us credit for. Far far more.”
Lizzie is acutely aware of the hierarchy of knowledge that exists about her. Her repeated use of and emphasis on “far” creates a fading vista – a vast distance between the lovers is realised in language. Engels’s reply is telling in its meaninglessness, “Pah.” However, as Lizzie separates them, McCrea draws them together when they shake their heads in “unison”. On one level, the shared gesture does not bridge the gap between them; on another, the mirroring reflects common ground. Such acts of separation and connection occur throughout the novel to emphasise the complexity of character, relationships and love.
The subtlety of narration in Mrs Engels is breathtaking. Lizzie consistently shows that she has “a mind too and, let me tell you, it’s full of worries”. In being true to this sense of her mind, McCrea creates a fascinating character. Accentuating the outsider in terms of class and gender, and emphasising ignorance and illiteracy in the face of giants of intellectual life, Lizzie questions the truth and values of Engels and Marx, of history, of philosophy and of literature. I am reminded of Wallace Stevens’s Notes to a Supreme Fiction:
“You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.”
Mrs Engels is a profound achievement, sophisticated and tense in each element of its construction and expression, moving to see the “sun again” and see it differently. This is, as Gavin McCrea says, a “work of fiction”, and it is a compelling one of remarkable subtlety and insight, a novel which illuminates the power, limitations and gaps in our stories of the past.
Ron Callan is a retired lecturer from the UCD School of English, Drama and Film and has written mainly on American poetry
