If Humphreys used the Aeschylus version, then the existence of Idris Powell is problematic, unless he is seen as a presentation of the current religious view in the way that the word of God might equate with the message of Zeus. However, in Euripides’ version Electra has a poor husband who has strong moral values but is despised by the court. This possibly suggested the role of Idris, whom Hannah would like to marry. In Euripides’ play the husband acts like a guardian not a lover, paralleling Idris who wants to be Hannah’s friend. On the other hand, in this play Electra loathes her stepfather and was saved by her mother from the death he planned. Euripides has also altered Electra’s character, presenting her as a permanent moaner, as rude, egocentric and arrogant, very different from Hannah’s long-suffering Christian attitude, although Hannah, too, is prone to moan. Euripides’ play is very anti-women, blaming Electra for planning the murder and Clytemnestra for not accepting her husband’s judgement; it strongly advocates patriarchy. Humphreys too appears interested in gender differences in 1950s society. If the lifestyles and achievements of the brother and sister are analysed, social factors have produced a male remarkably successful compared with his sister. Even at the end Hannah is running the farm because her brother allows it.
A consistent pattern in the novels so far is that of the destructive mother. This portrayal of a mother by Humphreys, alongside other mothers in his fiction, fits into the monster of the angel/monster dichotomy, outlined by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who argue that: ‘the female monster is a striking illustration of Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis that woman has been made to represent all of man’s ambivalent feelings about his own inability to control his own physical existence, his own birth and death’.52 This particular myth lends itself to an analysis of this character type, but Humphreys has produced a particularly unattractive, damaging mother in Mary Ellis. Given the emphasis on the culpability of Aegisthus and Agamemnon in all of the Greek dramatic versions, it is noticeable that neither Elis nor Vavasor is essentially at fault. Indeed, it could be argued their faults stem from marriage to Mary Elis. She is a type of woman prevalent in Humphreys’s fiction: controlling, manipulative, strong and destructive, a woman who can operate in a man’s world. Such mothers damage their offspring, restricting their emotional development. However, traditionally dutiful mothers, passive, homebound and loving do greater damage in that they produce weak children, who are failures or spoilt, selfish and destructive, such as Ada and Dick. Clytemnestra is consistently portrayed as sexually voracious but Humphreys removes every trace of this sexuality from Mary, giving her not only the active qualities traditionally associated with the stereotypical male in a patriarchal presentation, but physical qualities too. Indeed, his sympathetic presentation of Vavasor Elis (Aegisthus), his passivity, piety, the scientific ability which links him with Philip and Hannah, and the blindness which is real and symbolic and stresses his role as witness to murder rather than accomplice all work to engage the reader’s sympathy and increase hostility towards Mary. In a feminist text the anti-stereotypical presentations of Mary and Vavasor might be seen as deconstructing the norm, as presenting a positive female role. However, in this novel Hannah is possibly more important a character and is stereotypically passive, sickly and subservient to the male. Also, the angel/monster dichotomy here is between virginal Hannah and sexually active Ada. The portrayal of Mary is a male portrayal of a hideous mother, of the type mentioned by Gilbert and Gubar above. The novel is not anti-female; it frequently shows great empathy towards Hannah and Ada, for example. However, the domineering wife/mother is definitely the villain of the piece.
Humphreys repeats the technique of strong mythological prefiguration with his use of the Hippolytus myth in his sixth novel, The Italian Wife, but in this case he focuses on the wife/mother as victim, the bullied not the bullier. John J. White has pointed out that myth is often used as a loose analogy rather than ‘a scaffold upon which the modern story has been erected’,53 which can make the novel too deterministic but, whereas Humphreys absorbed the deterministic element into both the characterization and the Nonconformist background in A Man’s Estate, the plot of this sixth novel is very rigidly determined. Ioan Williams has indicated the ‘deficiencies of structure and problems of focus’ and an ‘uncomfortable tension between the moral subject and the pattern of action’.54 Because Humphreys structures much of the plot around Richard (the Theseus character) rather than Paola (Phaedra) and develops the sexual side of Chris (Hippolytus) in a way not prefigured by the myth, there is a blurring of focus and an uncomfortable lack of sympathy for all three modern characters. The rural Welsh Nonconformist society evoked in A Man’s Estate features a nexus of tensions between the power of the Bible, hidden murder and English and Welsh cultures, and these internal conflicts sustain comparison with those in great tragedy, whether by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides. However, the glimpses of wealthy existence in Switzerland, Italy and England in The Italian Wife and the suggestion of a media empire are unconvincing in comparison.
In his article ‘The “Protestant” Novelist’, which appeared in the Spectator in 1952, Humphreys made a comment which throws more light onto his reasons for using myth:
If some novelist wishes to extract the Aeschylean conclusion – that man learns wisdom only through suffering – out of a contemporary setting, the ring of truth about the plot, the characters, the situations, the scenes, must be clearly and immediately audible to the sympathetic reader; both story and theme wholly integrated into the circumstances of our time.55
Unfortunately, The Italian Wife lacks the ring of truth which A Man’s Estate has, and this is partly to do with Humphreys’s ability to convey convincingly a portrayal of rural Welsh life. One of the reasons Humphreys may have been drawn to Greek myth is its commonality as a European experience with a set of fixed symbols understood across Europe. Using such myths may have seemed to Humphreys a way of both asserting the position of Wales as a nation within Europe rather than Britain, and simultaneously subverting the English canon. A more important reason may, however, be suggested by the above quotation; the idea of learning wisdom through suffering and in a contemporary context indicates that using myth in this way may have been due to the profound effect the Second World War had on the novelist. It is a way of controlling and ordering experience, whilst imbuing an individual character with the symbolic value of Everyman.
An examination of Humphreys’s first six published novels reveals that he is already using the majority of the techniques which will later become the strategies of liberation he will use to explore Wales’s post-colonial condition. However, the tendency here is to use them either too heavily, producing an overly prescriptive plot, or too lightly with an original plot that does not sufficiently support the novel. He has yet to harness the prefiguring techniques of myth and/or history to a dynamic original plot or to use them with an integral purpose. He appears to have moved away from history towards the use of myth and has demonstrated great skill in transferring suggestively the details from myths to the novel. However, this method brings with it a heavily predestined and dated effect. This works well with the presentation of a particularly tragic situation in a past generation of quite dated characters living in an out-of-touch location – Wales is very much the cultural backwater in A Man’s Estate – but it is clearly not going to succeed in most contemporary novels, and does not in The Italian Wife. When he stops using myth to provide a successful plot, and uses it instead to provide either interest, depth or suggestion, Humphreys moves to a second, more successful stage in his career. Fortuitously, perhaps, a different kind of plot strengthening occurs, simultaneously with a desire to feature Wales as more than a setting for the fiction.
A TOY EPIC
The publication of A Toy Epic in 1958 was a major landmark in the career of Emyr Humphreys for several reasons.56 First, it allowed him to put behind him the failure of the first draft and the insecurity which that had caused. Because it used so much of that early draft and received so much critical acclaim in the revised form,57 it was bound to increase the