Catherine Cookson Country

On the Borders of Legitimacy, Fiction, and History

Julie Taddeo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351953177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Britain's most widely read author of the late twentieth century, Catherine Cookson published more than 100 books, including The Fifteen Streets, The Black Velvet Gown, and Katie Mulhollond. Set in England's industrial northeast, her novels depict the social, economic, and emotional hardships of that area. In the first essay collection devoted to Cookson, the contributors examine what Cookson's memoirs and historical fiction mean to readers, including how her fans contribute to her position in the cultural imaginary; constructions of gender, class, and English and Irish identity in her work; the importance of place in her novels; Cookson's place in the heritage industry; and television adaptations of Cookson's works. Cookson's work tackled topics that were still taboo in the early post-World War II era, such as domestic abuse, rape, and incest. This collection places Cookson in historical context and shows how skillful she was at pushing generic boundaries.

PART 1

Literary Paradigms and (Il)legitimacy

Chapter 1

Illegitimate Histories: Rape and Illegitimacy in the Novels of Catherine Cookson

Diana Wallace

Illegitimacy is the matrix out of which Catherine Cookson’s fiction comes. Cookson’s novels return repeatedly, even obsessively, to the theme of illegitimacy, the question of origins, and the secrets generated by the shame of bastardy. Given the circumstances of her own birth to an unmarried mother, this might appear simply to reflect her own experience. Yet reading her novels as a reflection of her autobiography—an interpretation which Cookson herself encouraged—oversimplifies a particularly complex relationship between fiction and reality, not least because such an approach does not explain the huge popularity of her novels. Despite her long-lasting status as the “most borrowed author,”¹ Cookson has, with a few honorable exceptions, mainly been ignored by academic literary critics. Her work seems to pose special challenges for the literary critic, partly because it does not do the kinds of things which we usually like texts to do. In this essay I want to focus on the central issue of illegitimacy in order to tease out some of the reasons why her work has been so neglected.

The word illegitimate has two closely connected meanings: “not authorised by law; improper” and “not recognised by law as legal offspring, bastard” (OED).² It is the resonances between these two meanings, and the experiences to which they refer, and the particular experience of Cookson’s life which help to explain the popularity of her fiction with her mainly female and working-class readers. Moreover, her fiction can also usefully be situated within the context of the long-established connection between the theme of illegitimacy and the historical novel as a genre. The majority of Cookson’s novels after 1967 can be classed as “historical fiction.” That is, they are set, to borrow Walter Scott’s famous formulation in the subtitle of Waverley (1814), “sixty years”—or more—“since.” Many use a version of the family saga moving from the early nineteenth century to the First or Second World Wars, either war acting as a cut-off moment which separates “past” from “present.” However, even those early novels which are not so obviously “historical” tend to be set in a version of “the past,” often around Cookson’s own childhood in the early twentieth century.

Her first novel, Kate Hannigan, published in 1950 when Cookson was 44, opens with what is at first glance a barely fictionalized account of Cookson’s own birth as “Annie,” the daughter of the eponymous working-class and unmarried heroine. The novel documents the trauma of the “dreadful shame” (166) caused by Annie’s discovery that her supposed sister is, in fact, her mother and that she has “no da” (162), and her subsequent pretence that the young middle-class (and unhappily married) doctor who delivered her is her father. It ends during the First World War with the marriage of Kate Hannigan to the doctor, now a widowed war casualty. Castigating Cookson’s “self-absorption,” Robert Colls argues that “one can see all the great motifs of her subsequent writing in the first six pages of Kate Hannigan” (179). While there is some truth in Colls’s comments, his analysis underestimates the work of re-imagination which shapes the raw biographical material into a novel. For Cookson, of course, cannot have consciously witnessed the moment of her own birth, although she undoubtedly heard family stories about it.

Cookson’s first historical novel proper, for which she did considerable research, was Katie Mulholland (1967), which opens in 1860 and ends in 1944. However, the historical events she researched—the shift from coal-mining to ship-building, the rise and decline of Palmer’s Shipyard in Jarrow, the economic collapse of the 1930s, the Jarrow Hunger Marches, the First and Second World Wars—become what Cookson in the Acknowledgements calls a “backcloth” for “the story of a woman’s life.” Like Kate Hannigan, the title uses a variation on Cookson’s own name, itself a repetition of her mother’s name, for the heroine; brought up by her grandmother and step-grandfather, Cookson was known as “Katie McMullen” as a child, but the name on her birth certificate was “Catherine Ann Davies,” and her mother’s name was Kate—or Catherine—Fawcett. Such repetitions seem actively to encourage biographical readings, as does Cookson’s own comment in My Land of the North: Memories of a Northern Childhood (1999) that her women characters are strong “because they are me” (198). Katie Mulholland also repeats the basic plot of Kate Hannigan, although it transposes it into the past and stretches it across three generations.

As a 15-year-old scullery maid, Katie Mulholland is raped by Bernard Rosier, the son and heir of the mine-owning family for whom she works. As a result of her pregnancy, her miner father loses his job and the family live for a while in a makeshift shelter on the fells. To rescue her family Katie marries the violent and abusive “keeker” (checkweighman), Bunting, who has been paid £100 by Rosier to take her on. When Bunting “flays” Katie after the baby is born, her father beats him up and is then unjustly hanged for his murder. Taking refuge in the country with her mother, brother Joe, and Downs Syndrome sister Lizzie, Katie is manipulated into giving her daughter Sarah up for adoption by a pair of gentry sisters, the Misses Chapman. Returning to Jarrow, where her mother dies, Katie looks after Lizzie, until she is left destitute when Joe leaves to find work. She is rescued by an educated and wealthy but married Norwegian-Swedish sea captain, Andree Fraenkel. After she is imprisoned on a charge of “procuring” set up by Bernard Rosier, Andree buys her three houses, establishing her as a property owner in her own right, arranges for her to be educated as a “lady,” and, when his wife finally dies, marries her.

Trouble persists and patterns repeat in the next generations. Katie’s daughter Sarah falls in love with and marries her half-brother, Rosier’s son Daniel, raising the specter of unknowing incest. After killing a man, Bernard Rosier is convicted on Andree’s evidence and imprisoned for seven years. The “old pattern” (359) of unmarried pregnancy is repeated when Katie’s great-niece Catherine (Joe’s granddaughter), is raped by Andree’s son, Nils, and conceives a daughter, Bridget. In the third generation, Katie’s great-grandson, the American Daniel Rosier the Third (son of Sarah), falls in love with Bridget. The family feud keeps them apart for over a decade, and both marry other people. Finally, a healing reconciliation is effected when Daniel, now divorced and wounded in the war, returns and they determine to marry, although Bridget is still married to Peter Conway, a Labour organizer. Symbolically, Daniel and Bridget consummate their love in the bed in Greenwall Manor where Bernard raped Katie, the originary moment of the text. They conceive yet another illegitimate child, whom Daniel determines will be “Daniel the Fourth.” The novel ends with Katie’s death in the arms of Daniel Rosier the Third during a bombing raid in 1944, just after he has told her that he has bought Greenwall Manor for Bridget. As Katie’s body is lifted from the rubble (Daniel survives the blast), a bystander comments, “Well, that’s the end of the old girl. A legend she was in her day, Katie Mulholland” (496).

I have given the plot in such detail because, as Bridget Fowler rightly points out, Katie Mulholland “contains the archetypal narrative organisation of [Cookson’s] historical novels” (87). It is, she argues,

a narrative sequence which has its origin in the Greek Oedipus myth, so that its structural rhythm of dehumanised sexuality, bastardy, adoption, and unknowing incest, could be reduced to a simple psychoanalytic level. (88)

This archetypal narrative of illegitimacy, repeated across the generations within Katie Mulholland, structures many of Cookson’s other historical novels. In The Glass Virgin (1970) Annabella Lagrange discovers that she is the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute; in The Dwelling Place (1971) Cissie Brodie conceives an illegitimate daughter after being raped; in The Mallen Streak (1973) Barbara Farington, raped by her guardian Thomas Mallen, dies giving birth to a daughter, also named Barbara, while her sister, Constance, marries one of Thomas Mallen’s illegitimate sons while already pregnant by her husband’s half-brother; Hannah in The Girl (1977) believes she is the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute until she is given a letter from her mother revealing she is the child of a legal marriage; Biddy Millican in The Black Velvet Gown (1984) gives a home to the illegitimate child of her gentry husband’s sister, a girl who everyone assumes is Biddy’s own child; in A Dinner of Herbs (1985) Mary Ellen Lee has an illegitimate daughter she names Kate after the old woman who gives her a home when her parents reject her; the fey Millie, nicknamed “Thorman’s Moth,” in The Moth (1986) is revealed to be the product of her mother’s adulterous love affair, while Carrie in the same novel dies giving birth to an illegitimate child; the “Gillyvors” in the novel of that name (1990) are a family of “baseborn” children, although the story focuses on the daughter, Anna. What is notable in this selection is Cookson’s presentation of illegitimacy as something that primarily affects women, not only because it is women who bear the shame of unmarried pregnancy but because in her novels the offspring themselves are so often female. It is telling that in Katie Mulholland the repeating patterns of illegitimacy are to be brought to a close with the birth of a male child.

The birth of an illegitimate child is, then, the starting point for Cookson’s fictions and her work returns repeatedly in one way or another to this question of illegitimate origins and the way in which consciousness is shaped and scarred by the ensuing trauma of marginalization. “He was a bastard, and all bastards know rejection” (142), as a character puts it in The Mallen Streak. It is a trauma, moreover, which is passed down the generations in what Cookson presents as patterns or cycles. The notion that life is “a pattern that’s already cut” (Mallen Streak, 1973: 246), or that “the sins of the fathers [are] visited upon the children” (Mulholland, 1967: 382) structures her novels in important ways. It is Cookson’s turn to the past as a setting for this psychological drama that I want to explore here. Rather than simply reducing it to an example of Cookson’s own pathology (or “selfabsorption” as Colls terms it), I want to argue that Cookson’s use of a historical setting is part of the way she makes illegitimacy available as a key symbol for the disenfranchised position of those marginalized and excluded by a patriarchal, patrilineal, and class-divided society, specifically working-class women, but also working-class men and those middle-class women who are disinherited because of their gender. Cookson’s fictions can be read as an expression of the dreams, traumas, and fantasies of what Carolyn Steedman in Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) calls “lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretative devices of our culture don’t quite work” (6).

This is one way of explaining their appeal to a largely female and working-class audience whose lives rarely find expression in literature.³ Obsessively rereading the “small corpus” of female working-class autobiography in her twenties and early thirties, Steedman remembers weeping over and yet feeling distanced from the “Edwardian child” depicted in Cookson’s autobiography Our Kate (1969) (9). Steedman’s childhood was “really not like that,” she insists, and yet Our Kate captures something crucial for her: “What I see now in the book is its fine delineation of the feeling of being on the outside, outside the law; for Catherine Cookson was illegitimate” (9). Steedman’s own book uses autobiography—including her own discovery as an adult that she and her sister were illegitimate—to examine “how people use the past to tell the stories of their life” (8), and how certain stories dominate while others are denied validity. Certain stories, that is, are “legitimate” or “authorized,” while others, specifically those of working-class women, are not. Reflecting on her final visit to her mother before she died, Steedman concludes, “We were truly illegitimate, outside any law of recognition” (142). Recognizing Cookson’s fictions as an expression of the needs, desires, and fantasies of those who experience themselves as being “on the outside, outside the law” (“illegitimate” in either or both senses of the word) offers one way of reading texts for which, to adapt Steedman’s comment, the “central interpretative devices” of literary criticism don’t quite seem to “work.”

A Challenge for Criticism?

Despite her phenomenal readership, Cookson’s fiction has been surprisingly neglected, even by feminist critics who have discussed other popular genres used by women writers. Her critical neglect cannot simply be attributed to the fact that she is popular, female, or a writer of genre fiction. Cookson herself, of course, repeatedly rejected the suggestion that her work be seen as “romance,” categorizing it in My Land of the North as the “social history of the North East, readable social history interwoven with the lives of the people” (30). But even the relative neglect of historical fiction does not quite explain the absence of critical engagement with her work at a time when historical fiction is attracting increased critical attention. At an important recent conference at Newcastle University on women’s historical fiction, “Echoes of the Past: Women, History, and Memory in Fiction and Film” (June 2009), for instance, there was not a single paper on Cookson’s work, despite the ironic fact that the conference was supported by the Catherine Cookson Foundation. There are notable exceptions to this neglect, of course—the work of Sue Thornham, Elaine Brown, and Angela Werndly, as well as Bridget Fowler, Tess Cosslett and, most recently, Julie Anne Taddeo, to all of whom I am indebted.⁴

The work of the one male critic who has engaged with Cookson’s work at any length is particularly interesting. Robert Colls discusses her, along with two male writers (Sid Chaplin and Jack Common), as a regional writer. His article, however, is one long sneer at the woman he refers to as “St Catherine” and castigates for “aspir[ing] to history” (173), “capitalist novel-making” (173), and, finally, for being “not at all a regional novelist” (184). Colls only discusses Kate Hannigan in any detail and he reads it as barely disguised autobiography. For him there seem to be two problems with her work, both connected to issues of gender and to a perceived lack of class loyalty. The first is her focus on the personal rather than what we might call “real history”:

There is not a word on the General Strike in Our Kate. The laundry checker (“St Catherine” to her workmates) went out with miners, “real pit lads,” and she worked just down the road from Harton Colliery, but she was thinking of fiddle, fencing, French grammar and Indian clubs while the miners were fighting for their lives. While the mining families of South Shields starved, St Catherine was reading a Lord and planning to marry a Duke. (181)

The second is a lack of authenticity epitomized by her invention and “performance” (183) of two equally fictional identities: “‘Catherine Cookson,’ grammar school master’s wife of Hastings [and] ‘Katie McMullen,’ poor unlettered girl of East Jarrow” (182). For Colls, to be authentically working class and regional seems to mean being male. Part of what Colls is saying, and does, indeed, acknowledge, is that Cookson’s work doesn’t fit the “stories” told about the North East: “The region’s dominant representations were male representations” (184). The only genre left open to her was t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Literary Paradigms and (Il)legitimacy
• Part 2 Catherine Cookson and Her Readers
• Part 3 Cookson in Context: The North East, Social History, and the Culture Industry
• Afterword
• Index