Bowen reflects her own personal experience through this novel, especially through Lois Farquar where she puts characteristics of her own childhood and teenage years into her character. As stated by the author Phyllis Lassner, “Bowen’s conception of her family home is reconstituted in the relationship between Danielstown and its residents”. All Bowen’s books characteristically portray moments in her life. In “The Last September,” Bowen deals directly with the crisis of being Anglo-Irish at a time of national crisis, called the Troubles. Just as her early stories were written about her childhood at the time of her transition to adulthood, this work, too, marks another stage of transition in her life.
Her work contains a very important metaphoric dimension and many of her fine descriptive passages recall that of Virginia Woolf. There is the same impressionistic technique and the same imagist vein. Bowen’s descriptive powers are often exemplified in her evocations of the Irish landscape, generally characterised by the themes of space and light, further invested with a symbolic dimension.
The novel is rich in; symbols, vivid imagery, irony and personification. The symbols, images, and ironies often reinforce the foreshadowing of the Anglo Irish fate. The key symbols, images, and irony are discussed below.
Bowen’s adjectives employed within the novel to describe the countryside are characteristic of her writing style. The openness and emptiness of the landscape surrounding the house are in direct and deliberate contrast to the enclosure of the inhabited house. The apparently transparent and insensate countryside, which yet I feel, contains an underlay of menace and evil violence, is opposed to the immobile house and to the life contained within it. The house is only protected by its trees behind which the sky seems to contain menace. The nature that surrounds them, open and visible yet alien and elusive, represents another world outside the demesne which the Anglo Irish are excluded from. The omnipresence of the countryside, and its silence below the very existence of the house which Bowen uses as a symbol of domination, and the centre and emblem of the possession that the landlords claim to exert over the land. Thus Bowen portrays the relationship between the house and the countryside to reflect the alienation of the Anglo Irish from the land which they have never really owned.
Bowen personifies Danielstown in order to illustrate the power it asserts over the land and its inhabitants “twenty dark windows …face of the house”, she subtly compares the house to the face of a person, the power is therefore intensified and also the idea of being idealised by the fact it has not only two eyes but twenty. The use of the colour grey is also a portrayal of the darkness of oppression which Danielstown inflicts upon its inhabitants and the Irish people who cannot accept its existence. I agree with S. Tillsmen when he states “the darkness connects the detriment which the presence Irish gunmen and hidden guns social conventions of ‘the big house’ has caused.”
Bowen’s personification of the house in chapter eight creates a sense that its ‘apprehensive’ and is trying to hide its face. The house is aware of immediate danger “its seemed to gather its trees close in fright” this again reinforces the idea of the house being an observer “ the centripetal, rather cut-off life of the demesne and the intense existence of the empty country”. Bowen was conscious of the power of the house within the landscape, great houses were a bold social and political gesture built in spite of history and I feel Bowen portrays the sense of the house being rejected “lovely unloving county, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set.” she portrays the ambiguous position of the Anglo Irish also the use of the paradox is a clear constriction of the life of the Anglo Irish.
Bowen identifies the silent, lonely world of the house and its power as a social structure, the males of the house have social power and control, the females are the subordinate figures but both genders are dependant upon the security and stability which the house offers, it is in a sense “a magnet of their dependence.” P Tyler states that “ the astronomy between the two genders is that the males are active and socially empowered and the females are passive. Their lives have been shaped by the history, the protagonist of the novel, Lois Farquar is reliant on the stability of “the Big House” it acts like “a kind of womb”. The insular world of the house protects Lois from the reality of the outside world. In a future filled with mystery Lois believes that Danielstown will be ever present, the irony is that Danielstown is dispossessed thus the future offers no certainty. The house and Lois are both caught in a period of transition.
Also, the novels perspective is constantly shifting often in an unsettling manner for the reader and as O’Brien Johnson has demonstrated , the emphasis on light, darkness and perception is as prevalent as to become a dominant motif in the novel. Repeatedly, Danielstown is described as staring “blank” “blind”. On Gerald’s arrival for his last meeting with Lois , “the house so loomed and stared so darkly and oddly that he showed a disposition to move away from the front of it. And Daventry on his mission to announce Gerald’s death “superciliously returned the stare of the house”. There is repeated emphasis on the darkness of the shrubberies and the looming forests beyond which harbour Irish gunmen and hidden guns.
The upstairs of the interior has also been characterised in terms of light, an aggressive light representative almost of an invasion of the outer countryside. Drained of life and colour, physically degraded and tarnished. Exhaustion symbolises a larger condition conflicting the house as a whole and the world which it encloses within its walls.
Bowen may also be trying to reflect the blindness of its inhabitants, their dislocated world of tennis parties ignores the actual danger narrowing around them. Lady Naylor’s character is used by Bowen to illustrate separatism, her conversation frequently makes deprecating allusion to the English “they’re so hard to trace,” her remarks are the occasion for much of the comedy in the novel. However, there is a less international comic element in what she says. Much of what says is contradictory considering her own values and the position of the Anglo Irish themselves. Her character is resolved that there most be no defeatist conversation about the situation at her dinner table . She withdraws herself and her guests into the comfortable “cocoon” of cultivated indifference. “The big house people were handicapped, shadowed and to an extent queered by their pride, by their indignation at their decline and by their divorce from the countryside in whose heart their struggle carried one.”
Like Lady Naylor, Sir Richard Naylor is, too, associated with comedy in the novel with his description of the Black and Tans as “coffee pots” Bowen again subtlety exposes the passiveness and lack of understanding of the Anglo Irish.
Throughout the novel Bowen uses numerous amounts of metaphors of invasion to foreshadow the tragic fate of the Anglo Irish, firstly she uses nature surrounding them to symbolise the closeness of danger “burning begonias”, “rising and toppling,” “empty sunshine” also the repetitive falling of rain at the start of every chapter is symbol of great storm to fall on them it also coincides with Francie’s comment “it’s the end of our weather.” Imagery of fire evokes an ominous allusion which reveals its significance at the end of the novel. Throughout the novel, the world outside the demesne is described and perceived as sinister, and that early image of the orange sky which “crept and smouldered” is intensified until it culminates in the final paragraph of the novel in which Danielstown and two other houses are burned and “a fearful scarlet ate up the hard spring darkness.”
Also the death of the snail in chapter twenty-two is a sign that although they may have a protective exterior they will still be crushed.
In conclusion I feel the big house in the novel does prove to be a complex tragic character. Bowen successfully captures the naivety, denial and the ending of the way of life of Bowen’s circle “Will there ever be anything we can all except not notice?” Having prided themselves on continuity, rootedness and a life symbolically centred on the Big House, they have come to feel like unreal transients.
