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Relationships: Margot & Stephen
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Author:  Róisín [ Wed Mar 26, 2008 8:14 pm ]
Post subject:  Relationships: Margot & Stephen
Margot, the older sister of Jem Russell, married Stephen Venables against her parents wishes, and was therefore estranged from them for many years. When Margot and Stephen married first, they moved to Australia. They had five children (Jimmy, Daisy, Frankie, Stevie and Primula) - the three boys died in Australia. Soon after, Stephen died too, of snakebite. Stephen was portrayed as a weak and irresponsible man who drank too much and was jealous of his wife's affections. Their marriage was not happy - possibly this is the only unhappy marriage in CS-land.

So, what do you think of the relationship that Stephen and Margot had? What do you think attracted her to him in the first place - enough to leave her family and her homeland? If Stephen didn't become a drunk until they arrived in Queensland, what do you think made him so? How do you think that the death of their three boys affected the relationship they had with each other?

This is one of the darker and more complex relationships that EBD wrote about and there are possibly some upsetting issues here for people, but please do raise your opinions below :D
Author:  Alison H [ Wed Mar 26, 2008 8:35 pm ]
Post subject: 
I think it's a shame that this wasn't developed further - we learn very little about Jem and Margot's parents and upbringing, and then Margot fades away and dies before we really get to know her; and the effect of the difficult marriage and loss of father/brothers on Daisy (Primula would have been too young to remember much about it or them) is never really covered. However, I suppose EBD couldn't say too much about a bad and probably abusive marriage in a book originally meant for children.

It's interesting that she broaches the subject at all, though: she could just have said that Stephen had died. Margot seems to be a character doomed to tragedy - bad marriage, loss of 3 children, loss of her only close friend (the nurse) and then an early death.
Author:  Sunglass [ Sun Mar 30, 2008 3:25 pm ]
Post subject: 
This is one of the almost-overlooked dark depictions of marriage that exist as the flip-side to all those worthy, loving, squeaky-clean, enormously fertile doctor-CS girl/mistress marriages we see in close-up. (A bit like the way the marriage of Charlotte Lucas and the blimpish Mr Collins is the dark flipside of the immensely romantic and moneyed matches of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.) Not that there's anything obviously similar - I just think you can see both Austen and EBD bleakly ackowledging in a minor, easily-overlookable way, that some marriages in the real world are like that, even though their books are concentrating on other, more palatable matters.

I think it's significant that EBD leaves it all veiled in euphemism which she disguises as Margot's pathetic loyalty to her dead husband. We never hear any details, just a marriage implicitly gone sour, an alcoholic husband, three children killed (apparently by a bad climate, but their deaths of course also somehow down to Stephen Venables being a bad enough father and husband not to have done the decent Dick Bettany thing and sent his children away to be educated somewhere else) and destitution.

It's a warning, surely, about the dangers of taking the law into your own hands, running off and making an unsuitable marriage against your family's wishes? Here the disapproving parents turn out to be absolutely right, and because all contact has been cut off (are we told whether Margot tried to mend things before Stephen's death, or was it very much a case of her name being crossed out of the family Bible and everyone's will?) Margot is left to deal alone and destitute with the fairly horrific consequences of her own rash romantic love. (Presumably, if Stephen was a 'legit' husband in Russell eyes, the Venables offspring could have been sent back and absorbed into the Die Rosen nursery, and so survived?)

Yet her story doesn't end happily even when she's absorbed back into the family. Even after Jem (who, as people have said elsewhere often, comes off as Unpleasant Victorian Paterfamilias when Joey 'finds' the Venables in the street) 'rescues' Margot, she's never alowed 'forgiveness' by EBD and doesn't get any kind of happy ever after. Not just that she dies young, leaving two very young orphan girls, but I've always seen something significant in a very fragile, traumatised woman, in the world of the CS, leaving her children to go back to what must have been a fairly demanding live-in job as Matron in a school. Do we ever hear anything about her success as Matron?

The only thing I can remember is someone pre-approving of her and saying that she would know her own limitations, or something, but I've never for one moment bought Margot, who we only ever see as ill, fragile and exhausted by her life, becoming matron to a school full of madcap girls as a 'natural' thing. Why does she do it? Surely, in the comfortable financial world of the Russells, and their infinitely expandable nursery, she doesn't need the money? Wouldn't Jem have handed over whatever inheritance was cut off, or at least given her an allowance? Or, even though it means leaving her two little girls at the Sonnalpe, is being around Jem somehow still difficult for Margot?

I do see her story as a warning against marrying against your familiy's wishes. Husbands can be dangerous, and making an entirely personal decision in the face of collective disapproval is going to lead to awful consequences. So meet a nice doctor very young, with the entire CS around as chaperones, and marry with full CS approval, and, if possible, the entire CS at your wedding, giving the seal of approval.

Excuse essay - procrastinating chapter!
Author:  jennifer [ Mon Mar 31, 2008 3:12 am ]
Post subject: 
I do find it interesting that this is one of the very, very few examples of a bad marriage we see, and even in euphemisms it sounds pretty dire - the quote below is from the hardback, as I think this is significantly abridged in the paperback.

Quote:
He had been a weak man, one of those wasters who can be the delight of company but are tyrants at home. He had never accomplished anything, though he was always going to do wonders. His poor little wife had had to bear the brunt of all the financial worries, for he seemed to have no idea of the value of money, and would order largely without considering how he was going to pay. Later, he had taken to drinking, though she only spoke of it vaguely, and he had been as great a care to her as her children. There had been three little boys, as well as Daisy and Primula Mary; but they had all pined and died in the cruel climate of North Queensland.


Quite a contrast to "girl meets handsome doctor, gets engaged a month later, is married, has masses of kids and settles into domestic bliss"!

Are there any other bad marriages referred to in the series? I can't think of any offhand.
Author:  Sunglass [ Tue Apr 01, 2008 9:44 am ]
Post subject: 
jennifer wrote:
Are there any other bad marriages referred to in the series? I can't think of any offhand.


The only one I can think of offhand is Ted Grantley's parents' marriage - where he's a nice guy, she's a silly spoilt flake, and the blame is definitely on the wife. Or Bob and Lydia Maynard's marriage, which while we're not told it's unhappy, sounds blighted by their son's death, which is again seen as his mother's fault (rather horrifyingly) - and I suppose differences are suggested by the fact that he likes to have Joey and the children around, and she doesn't. No marriage involving a doctor is ever unhappy, though!
Author:  Caroline [ Tue Apr 01, 2008 11:27 am ]
Post subject: 
I've always thought of the Carrick parents marriage as a pretty bad one - he's a cheat and a fraudster, but obviously something of a flashy charmer; she is shown as sour-faced and shrewishly bad-tempered.

I suppose one could argue that they are together in their awfulness, and Juliet is their victim, rather than the Venables model of nice parent / nasty parent, but Mrs C is shown so little that I suspect her of being under Mr C's thumb - keeping in with him at the expense of her child. Hmmm. Maybe that's sterotyping - we don't *want* to think the the Mother is Bad, so she must be a victim of the Awful Man too...

EBD has plenty of marriages where we are shown Mother choosing to stay with Father (the Johnstons, the Bettanys - most of the colonial folks) and leaving the kids to be brought up elsewhere... Twas a convention of the time and the class though...

The Wintertons marriage strikes me as quite comparable to the Venables'. Although without the alcoholism....
Author:  Sunglass [ Tue Apr 01, 2008 11:57 am ]
Post subject: 
Yes, there are lots of marriages that EBD doesn't specifically say are unhappy, but that look pretty appalling or unbalanced from the modern reader's perspective! I entirely agree about the Carricks and the Wintertons. I always loathe that moment when we're told Mr Winterton returns home to find 'his girls' were everything he disliked - lazy, impudent, whatever. Very much the implication that the girls' characters are his wife's creation and responsibility, and that he is fully within his rights to act as judge of all three. His wife appears at times to feel much as his daughters do about him.
Author:  Jennie [ Tue Apr 01, 2008 12:57 pm ]
Post subject: 
I definitely got the impression that Mrs Winterton was afraid of her husband, and that he felt himself to be infinitely her superior. So why did he marry her if he felt that way?

And Giles seems to feel the same.

And, as a plot device, the family left behind bit was definitely creaky. Lots of families lived out in the Far East, and if he didn't like his daughters, why did he leave them for so long with a woman who was not 'his equal'?
Author:  Mrs Redboots [ Tue Apr 01, 2008 9:38 pm ]
Post subject: 
What about Mary-Lou's parents' marriage - it can't have been all that happy or he wouldn't have gone off into the wild blue yonder, never to return! At least Verity-Anne's father was a widower.... and yes, heartless to abandon V-A, but it can happen (my great-grandmother died when my grandmother was born and her father abandoned her - she was brought up by relatives who considered it their "Christian duty" to take her in and made sure she knew it).
Author:  Alison H [ Tue Apr 01, 2008 10:04 pm ]
Post subject: 
Various couples really don't seem very well-matched, though, as other people have said. Prof and Mrs Trelawney don't see each other for years and it's hard to imagine what (given what we're told about each of them) they ever had in common. The same with the Wintertons, the Richardsons, the Grantleys, maybe the Cochranes.

However, at a time when people were expected to stay together even if they weren't happy together, and when some couples might not have known each other for long before marrying if they were reasonably well-off and didn't have to wait to save up, the existence of some marriages like that was probably par for the course ... but I think that Margot and Stephen's is the only one where there are hints that one partner really suffers at the hands of the other - psychologically and probably physically as well.

Poor Margot - I wish that EBD had let her find happiness instead of just saying that she'd "faded out of life" :cry: .
Author:  jennifer [ Wed Apr 02, 2008 2:16 am ]
Post subject: 
That's a good point about the Wintertons. He basically treats his wife on the same level as his daughters - someone who is incapable of making good decisions on her own, and needs to be closely monitored and corrected. He married as a widower with a young child, though, so he may have been primarily marrying to have someone to care for his son. He has also apparently gone 10 years without checking on his kids, leaving them entirely to his wife, after moving them all out into the country, away from their support system, and things like day schools.

Prof and Mrs Trelawny I could see - if he's like Mary-Lou and Gran, then having a wife who is retiring and in the background and not strong willed might be just fine with him - think of the Mary-Lou/Verity dynamic. Not everyone wants an equal partner in a marriage (and some people are actively against it). And going off for years at a time seems to be quite accepted and normal, although in most cases EBD has the mother going along to take care of the father (an Amazon expedition, however, would not be a good place for that).
Author:  JayB [ Fri Apr 04, 2008 4:06 pm ]
Post subject: 
Jennie wrote:
And, as a plot device, the family left behind bit was definitely creaky. Lots of families lived out in the Far East, and if he didn't like his daughters, why did he leave them for so long with a woman who was not 'his equal'?


I assumed Mr Winterton went out East as a war correspondent. He probably had no settled base but travelled a lot in unsafe areas. Freddie was only a baby when he left. It would have made more sense to leave the family at home. (If they had gone, they might well have ended up in a Japanese prison camp, so just as well they didn't go.)

Mrs Winterton is made to appear weak, but she did bring up her family as a single parent throughout the war. She can't be totally incompetent.

Polly sounds like a normal teenager to me, and I think she's entitled to feel resentful of a father who comes home after ten years and finds fault with everything, and, reading between the lines, bullies the mother as well as the girls.

Giles is a total prig and Freddie will probably grow up to be as bad if he's constantly hearing his father and brother complaining about how badly behaved his sisters are.
Author:  jennifer [ Sat Apr 05, 2008 3:01 am ]
Post subject: 
As an aside, Giles and Peggy do seem like a good match for me - she's very prim and proper and her behaviour and appearance are all what adults want, and convinced her own way is the right way, and it's her duty to help others to the right way. Giles, on the other hand sounds like a prig with very rigid standards and little patience for the foibles or personalities of others (much like his father).
Author:  CBW [ Sat Apr 05, 2008 7:47 am ]
Post subject: 
which book talks about Giles? I don't really remember him
Author:  Maeve [ Sat Apr 05, 2008 8:20 am ]
Post subject: 
It's in Peggy. Polly tells Peggy:
Quote:
“When Father wasn’t much more than a kid, he married, and Giles is their child. She died of bronchitis when Giles was about three, and a few years later he met Mother and married her, and there were us three —me, Lala, and Freddy."


Later we are told that after Mr. Winterton left to work overseas,
Quote:
the whole family, including Giles, Mrs. Winterton’s stepson, then a boy of fourteen, set off for Thoreston, where they had lived ever since. Giles was at public school then. Later, he went into the Navy, and from that time, most of his leaves were spent with friends. He was fond enough of his stepmother, who had been very good to him: but as Polly and Lala grew older, under the irregular discipline of their mother and governess, they became more and more untidy, impudent, and careless, so that he preferred to have as little to do with them as possible.
Author:  CBW [ Sat Apr 05, 2008 10:26 am ]
Post subject: 
Quote:
He was fond enough of his stepmother, who had been very good to him: but as Polly and Lala grew older, under the irregular discipline of their mother and governess, they became more and more untidy, impudent, and careless, so that he preferred to have as little to do with them as possible.


What a horrible prig! What on earth did Peggy see in him
Author:  Ela [ Sat Apr 05, 2008 6:11 pm ]
Post subject: 
CBW wrote:
What a horrible prig! What on earth did Peggy see in him

Isn't Peggy something of a prig, too, though? She certainly doesn't come across as lively or as interesting as Bride, for example. I always disliked the idea of her "silvery" voice - sounds a bit tinkly and little-girly. I wonder if people in the outside world might not take her seriously as a result.

Anyway, back on topic, there often seems to be a theme in girls' school stories that it's the mother - weak, selfish and often vain and silly - who causes the problem behaviour in her daughter: whereas fathers are often hard-working, stern but just, and fair. Gwendoline-Mary's parents (in Malory Towers) seem to be of this ilk, for example.

Margot Venables was badly treated in general by EBD - I disliked the re-naming of the Margot Venables prize, for instance, and wish that it had been kept as originally named. Someone on the board wrote a drabble about how EBD should have written that, which I thoroughly agreed with!

I wondered at first why it had been the three boys who died, but apparently this would have been likely, since boys are more likely to die in infancy than girls, given equal circumstances. And since reading "In the Wet" by Nevil Shute, I don't wonder about dying as a result of the climate - sounds a very uncomfortable place to live, particularly in the early 1900s when conditions would have been absolutely basic.
Author:  JayB [ Sat Apr 05, 2008 6:28 pm ]
Post subject: 
I wonder if Stephen Venables would have been a perfectly adequate husband, if rather a weak character, if they'd stayed in England and he'd had a job as a bank clerk? He must have been affected by the conditions in Queensland, the isolation, the loss of his children, his perceived failure as a husband and father to provide for his family and protect his sons.

It's rather a chicken and egg situation - was he always a bad lot and the Russells were right about him from the start, or did he only become a bad lot because of everything that happened?
Author:  jennifer [ Sun Apr 06, 2008 3:48 am ]
Post subject: 
I get the impression that Stephen was one of those people who always has big schemes for how they're going to succeed, but doesn't have the intelligence or commitment or strength to carry through. So if you put him in a bank clerk job, he'd be unsatisfied, dreaming of the next get rich quick scheme.
Author:  Travellers Joy [ Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:18 am ]
Post subject: 
Yes, that's how I read his character too. Not a bad person as such, just something of a no-hoper who became increasingly difficult to live with as his grand schemes failed, and who resented Margot's family because they'd never approved of him in the first place, and then of course fell apart when his boys died.
Author:  JayB [ Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:24 am ]
Post subject: 
jennifer wrote:
I get the impression that Stephen was one of those people who always has big schemes for how they're going to succeed, but doesn't have the intelligence or commitment or strength to carry through...


And neither, I think, did Margot have the necessary drive or intelligence. She always seems to have waited for someone else to take the initiative - Stephen, her friend the nurse, even Daisy, when they reached Innsbruck and didn't know what to do next.

Whereas women such as Madge or Nell Wilson or Nancy Wilmot would probably make a success of anything they turned their hands to, Margot probably would have been happiest (and lived longer) with a man like her own brother, who took all the reponsibility and required nothing more of her than looking decorative and producing children.

It's fun to speculate about heredity. Primula seems to be her mother all over again - frail, shy, compliant. Daisy has Jem's brains and dedication, but I wonder if she gets her charm and sense of fun from her father, and if we can see in Daisy something of what made Margot fall for Stephen?
Author:  Anjali [ Mon Apr 07, 2008 12:37 am ]
Post subject: 
JayB wrote:
It's fun to speculate about heredity. Primula seems to be her mother all over again - frail, shy, compliant. Daisy has Jem's brains and dedication, but I wonder if she gets her charm and sense of fun from her father, and if we can see in Daisy something of what made Margot fall for Stephen?


That's really interesting JayB - I had never thought of Daisy's sense of fun as being inherited from Stephen before - it's very probable..

Margot's situation always strikes me as very sad - especially the way she is wandering around alone in Innsbruck without a clue.....very far from a capable CS girl....
Author:  jennifer [ Mon Apr 07, 2008 3:16 am ]
Post subject: 
I see Margot as a fragile character - sort of a hot house flower. She's the kind of personality who would thrive in a nurturing environment, where she's safe and loved, but tends to wilt in a harsh environment. I know some women like that, where you look at them in their teens and early twenties and think "I hope they find a kind husband who will take care of them", because you just know they're going to attract the losers, and not know how to get rid of them.

I wonder if it came partially from her upbringing. Jem seems to fit very much in the man as head of household and supreme authority, in charge of all details sort of mould, so maybe Margot was brought up to be submissive, sweet, gentle and ladylike, and to accede to the more competent male's judgement, and suppress her own needs for others. With a kind, caring husband she'd be okay, but with a bad husband, she'd have no defences.

Stephen, on the other hand, I see as the kind of person who would screw up a perfectly fine situation by trying something impractical, or not attending to business, or showing up drunk, or something like that.
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