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Benjamin Britten, Owen Wingrave and the politics of the closet; or, ‘He Shall Be Straightened Out at Paramore’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Stephen McClatchie
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Extract

Benjamin Britten's television opera, Owen Wingrave, first broadcast on the BBC on 16 May 1971, is probably the least known of his sixteen operatic works. Based on an equally obscure tale of the same name by Henry James, it concerns the last scion of a military family who decides to abandon his calling and embrace pacifism. After fierce family opposition and disinheritance, Owen agrees to spend the night in a haunted room in the family mansion of Paramore – a room in which an ancestor was found dead ‘without a wound’ after accidentally killing his son while disciplining him. Several hours later, his body is discovered – dead, without a wound, like that of his forbear. Despite the compeffing nature of the story, Owen Wingrave has never found a secure place in the Britten canon, largely owing to a lingering dissatisfaction aroused by the ending. In what follows, I should like to explore this dissatisfaction and propose a context within which to approach the opera.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 59 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 James's tale was first published on 28 November 1892 in the Christmas number of the Graphic. It reappeared in several collections of James's stories before he revised it for inclusion in The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James, where it appears in vol. 17 (1909)Google Scholar. In December 1907, James converted the story into a one-act play, The Saloon; George Bernard Shaw was strongly critical of the play, and entered into a revealing correspondence on the subject with James. The full correspondence as well as a brief discussion of it form part of the foreword to The Saloon in James, Henry, The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Edel, Leon (Oxford, 1990), 642–7.Google Scholar

2 That this attitude still occurs today may be seen in Whittall's, Arnold otherwise excellent articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Sadie, Stanley (London and New York, 1992).Google Scholar

3 Miller, D. A., The Navel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), 206.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 206–7.

5 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, ‘Divinity: A Dossier, A Performance Piece, A Little-Understood Emotion (written with Michael Moon)’, in Tendenries (Durham, NC, 1993), 222.Google Scholar

6 On this idea of ‘knowingness’ as it relates to Britten's critical reception, see Carpenter, Humphrey, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (London, 1992), 44–5, 59, 75, 196–8, 303Google ScholarBritten, Benjamin, Letters From a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, ed. Mitchell, Donald and Reed, Philip (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), 6, 7, 873Google ScholarHolloway, Robin, ‘The Church Parables (II): Limits and Renewals’, in The Britten Companion, ed. Palmer, Christopher (London, 1984), 223–4.Google Scholar

7 Mitchell, , ‘Introduction’, in Britten, Letters From a Life, 56.Google Scholar

8 Carpenter, , Benjamin Britten, 178.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., 178 578.

10 Ibid., 335.

11 For further information, see Weeks, Jeffrey, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, rev. edn (London, 1990), esp. 158–67.Google Scholar

12 In a letter of 5 November 1954 to Eric Walter White, Britten opines that the story of Owen Wingrave has ‘much the same quality as the Screw’ (Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 508).

13 Support for such a reading may be found in both the Britten and the James literature. See Brett, Philip, ‘The Authority of Difference’, Musical Times, 134 (November 1993), 634Google Scholar, and Heldreth, James scholar Leonard, ‘The Ghost and the Self: The Supernatural Fiction of Henry James’, in The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Morse, Donald E., Tymn, Marshall B. and Bertha, Csilla (Westport, 1992), 139–40.Google Scholar

14 Brett, Philip, ‘Britten's Dream’, in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Solie, Ruth A. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), 276.Google Scholar

15 Beaver, Harold, ‘Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes)’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), 105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Sedgwick, ‘Divinity’, also discusses this notion of homosexual reading.

17 Roth, Marty, ‘Homosexual Expression and Homophobic Censorship: The Situation of the Text’, in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexualiy, ed. Bergman, David (Amherst, 1993), 268.Google Scholar

18 For a detailed demonstration of the working of connotation, see Miller, D. A., ‘Anal Rope’, in Inside/Out Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Fuss, Diana (New York, 1991), 119–41Google Scholar, from which the last observation was taken.

19 ‘The homosexual text can easily pass itself off as a story about other deviancies … in which the language … “fits” homosexuality’. Roth, ‘Homosexual Expression and Homophobic Censorship’, 272. See also Flannigan-Saint-Aubin, Arthur, ‘The Mark of Sexual Preference in the Interpretation of Texts: Preface to a Homosexual Reading’, Journal of Homosexuality, 24 (1992), 65–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 On this point, see Dawson, Graham, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London and New York, 1994)Google Scholar, and Mosse, George, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectabiliy and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

21 The introduction to Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985)Google Scholar offers a theoretical account of the tension between male homosociality and male homosexuality.

22 See Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 511; and Mitchell, Donald, ‘Owen Wingrave and the Sense of the Past: Some Reflections on Britten's Opera’, liner notes accompanying the complete recording of the opera conducted by Britten (London OSA 1291), 1972.Google Scholar

23 James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, ed. with introduction and notes by Lustig, T. J. (Oxford, 1992), 39Google Scholar. All further citations of James's story will be taken from this edition.

24 The unmistakable sexual overtones attached to the name of the Wingrave family seat are another indication of the conjunction of sexual and familial concerns in the tale.

25 Among the literary studies of James's homosexual subtexts, the following have been most useful: Knox, Melissa, ‘Beltraffio: Henry James's Secrecy’, American Imago, 43 (1986), 211–27Google Scholar; Moon, Michael, ‘Sexuality and Visual Terrorism in The Wings of the Dove’, Criticism, 28 (1986), 427–43Google Scholar; Hall, Richard, ‘Henry James: Interpreting an Obsessive Memory’, Journal of Homosexuality, 8 (1983), 83–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 James, , Complete Plays, 657. The Saloon is quite different from either story or opera, although Piper and Britten borrowed the motivation for the boy's trespass from James's dramatisation: he refused to fight.Google Scholar

27 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 72–3.Google Scholar

28 About Britten's pacifism, see Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 41, 68, 134–5, 174, 317, 590, as well as Britten, Letters from a Life, 34–5, 484–5, 873, 1046–9, 1085–6.

29 In 1935, Britten went door to door in Lowestoft distributing Peace Ballot papers. The next year he wrote the Peace of Britain and the following year he composed a Pacifist March for the Peace Pledge Union.

30 In this light, Britten's comment about the character of Peter Grimes is revealing: ‘A central feeling for us was that of the individual against the crowd, with ironic overtones for our own situation. As conscientious objectors we were Out of it. We couldn't say we suffered physically, but naturally we experienced tremendous tension.’ (Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 203.) According to Michael Kennedy, ‘is it to be seriously doubted that “and homosexuals” were unspoken but implied words in that statement?’ Kennedy, Michael, Britten (London, 1981), 123–4.Google Scholar

31 In his article ‘Undead’, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana, Fuss, 324–40Google Scholar, Ellis Hanson discusses the centrality of notions of death (especially the figure of the vampire) to every historical construction of same-sex desire, and demonstrates most clearly how media representations of AIDS return obsessively to ‘specular images of the abject’ (324).

32 Fuss, Diana, ‘Inside/Out’, in Inside/Out Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Fuss, 3.Google Scholar

33 Only through the violent exclusion of the abject is the subject able to shore itself up, to constitute itself as a stable entity. The abject, then, through a process reminiscent of Derridean supplementarity, acts as a destabilising force, as ‘a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness’ that forces me to ‘the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me’; see Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essqy on Abjection, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York, 1982), 1–2.Google Scholar

34 The passage in question is found at rehearsal number 160 in the Faber piano-vocal score of the opera (F0502).

35 Even though no one but Owen sees these ghostly figures, in the absence of evidence to the contrary we believe our own eyes – we, after all, have seen them.

36 Two of the three elements of the Wingrave Ballad (its opening major second and perfect fifth, and the distant trumpet fanfare) are foreshadowed in the Paramore interlude in Act I. Whittall argues that what he terms the ‘ballad chord’ (an 0, 2, 5 collection) is not only a partial inversion of the first chord of the piece, but also forms the basis of the entire final scene: Whittall, Arnold, The Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies in Themes and Techniques, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1990), 251–5.Google Scholar

37 In The Saloon, the denouement is in fact represented on stage (albeit in darkness). It seems that Britten had a fondness for placing crucial encounters off stage – consider the unheard interview between Vere and Billy at the heart of Billy Budd. In the case of Owen's night in the haunted room, critics have generally taken this as licence to allegorise. Jeremy Tambling, for instance, points to the haunted room's Freudian associations as the ‘place of the primal scene, where the Father's power is finally to be located’. Tambling, Jeremy, Opera, Ideology, and Film (Manchester, 1987), 119.Google Scholar

38 Whittall regards these chords as harmonisations of the notes of the B-flat, C, B, and A major triads, but notes that this process breaks down at the final (delayed) chord, which – by his notion – ought to have been an E but instead is an A flat. This Whittall sees as significant: ‘[That this process is incomplete] … confirms as surely as the celebrated chord-sequence in Billy Budd that what is “resolved” is the fact that the hero must die. Owen has not defeated the curse, but he has banished, if only temporarily, the mindless violence of the twelve-note chords’. Whittall, , Music of Britten and Tppett, 251–4.Google Scholar

39 These chords, in addition to referring back to Owen's poise in confronting his grandfather, also evoke the tolling of bells and thus the whole opposition of peace to war, given the traditional association of the Church with peace.

40 See Brett, Philip, ‘Eros and Orientalism in Britten's Operas’, in Queerins the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Brett, Philip, Wood, Elizabeth and Thomas, Gary C. (New York, 1994), 235–56.Google Scholar Britten's first evocation of the gamelan in his operas occurs in the prologue to Paul Bunyan as the moon turns blue, heralding the birth of Bunyan. The homosexual in this work – Johnny Inkslinger – is not consistently associated with the gamelan sound, although his Song is punctuated by gamelan-like celesta and xylophone chords; for discussion of Inkslinger, see Hindley, Clifford, ‘Britten, Auden, and Johnny Inkslinger’, Perversions, no. 2 (Summer, 1994), 42–56.Google Scholar

41 Both Donald Mitchell (‘Owen Wingrave and the Sense of the Past’, liner notes) and Humphrey Carpenter (Benjamin Britten, 508), argue for this wider meaning. Carpenter, in particular, would see the fanfare as representing ‘magic casements’ opening on to Britten's imagined idealised Other world.

42 But there is in other of Britten's operas: Owen's aria bears a remarkably similarity to Vere's ‘I was lost on the infinite sea’, not only in sentiment – a statement of personal peace – but also in structure, since – like the Peace aria – the accompaniment of Vere's aria consists of arpeggios floating above widely spaced chords; in this case, the enigmatic [1993]). Interview chords. (I believe that Mitchell, ‘Owen Wingrave and the Sense of the Past’, was the first to point this Out.) B flat plays an important role in both sections and commentators have suggested that this key served to symbolise for Britten the idea of peace (Whittall, , Music of Britten and Tippett, 232–3)Google Scholar; B flat is the principal tonal centre of the parable portion of The Prodigal Son and is also the key of Vere's concluding statement ‘I was lost on the infinite sea’ in Billy Budd.

43 Indeed, Holloway, , ‘The Church Parables (II)’, in The Britten Companion, 224Google Scholar, suggests that ‘in Owen's monologue praising peace, we sense that the word's larger vibrations carry beyond the purely conventional associations invoked. His fervour and the music's glittery warmth amidst so much that is angular and crashing suggest what dare not speak its name in work after work … The private, almost fetishistic quality of this word in Britten's output explains itself – warrants its full warmth – only if it is understood as the pass- or code-word for his sexuality.’ Donald Mitchell and Humphrey Carpenter likewise argue for the word's wider associations.

Philip Brett concludes that ‘peace and pacifism come to stand in for, or perhaps at least to complement, those homoerotic desires and feelings that the “gamelan” had signified in Britten's music since at least The Turn of the Screw’. Brett, ‘Owen Wingrave’, liner notes to the compact disc reissue of the complete recording, conducted by Britten (London 433 200–2 [1993]).

44 Evans, Peter, The Music of Benjamin Britten, rev. edn (London, 1989), 503.Google Scholar, Whittall, Music of Britten and Tippett, 250, argues that the private haunting theme does not blend perfectly with the public pacifism theme.

45 Whittall, Music of Britten and Tippett, argues the point in technical musical terms, suggesting that the opera modulates from an initial twelve-note proposition to a modal resolution (the Mixolydian ‘ballad’ chord) that is at once ‘ambiguous and inevitable’ (261).

46 Donald Mitchell, the opera's first commentator, suggests that Owen is victorious (‘Owen Wingrave and the Sense of the Past’); Whittall argues that Owen lacks the courage of his convictions and seeks to prove his courage—the rightness of his decision—by sleeping in the haunted room and that this is ultimately futile (Music of Britten and Tippett, 250). Jeremy Tambling, Opera, Ideology, and Film, 122, offers a highly psychoanalysed reading, arguing that the work represents a study in the sexual basis of violence, while Humphrey Carpenter prefers to allegorise the entire plot, suggesting – among other things – that Coyle is modelled after Frank Bridge, Britten's ‘substitute’ father, and that Kate represents the suffocating side of his partnership with Pears. To him, when Kate reappears and challenges Owen to sleep in the haunted room, ‘it is as if Auden had suddenly returned and had again thrown down his 1942 gauntlet: “If you are really to develop your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer, and make others suffer”.’ When Owen/Britten accepts the challenge after some hesitation, Carpenter compares him to Grimes striding off to his and the Apprentice's fall in the hut (Carpenter, Benjamin Britten, 512–13). Carpenter never really deals with the success or failure of the ending on its own terms, however, but his suggestion of its personal significance to Britten obviously resonates with my own interpretation.

47 See Roland, Jordan and Emma, Kafalenos, ‘The Double Trajectory: Ambiguity in Brahms and Henry James’, 19th-Century Music, 13 (1989), 129–44.Google Scholar

48 Brett, ‘Owen Wingrave’, 11.

49 Piper, Myfanwy, ‘Writing for Britten’, in The Operas of Benjamin Britten, ed. Herbert, David (New York, 1979), 14–15.Google Scholar

50 In The Saloon, Kate has been ‘consecrated’ a Wingrave (and a man?) through her encounter with the Spirit. For an account of Britten's misogynistic portrayals of women, see McDonald, Ellen, ‘Women in Benjamin Britten's Operas’, Opera Quarterfy, 4 (1986), 83–101, esp. 83–7, 89–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 Fuss, ‘Inside/Out’, 3–4.

52 Brett, ‘Britten's Dream’, 277.

53 I should like to thank Grace Kehler and Jeffrey A. Schneider for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.