Green Dolphin Street

How often is something unexpected the medium for inspiration?

Many would critique the adventure romance as a genre of sentimentality and extenuated drama. Typically, I’d agree – finding in a realist novel a stark truth that illustrates beauty and meaning through bare honesty or the lack thereof. But recently I found in Elizabeth Goudge’s exotic Green Dolphin Street a revelation of life so true it was disturbing.

My limited exposure to Goudge would place her mid-century style as reminiscently Victorian. Her poetic writing is reflective of the best novelists of that era, and her character development follows such a span of years as to make Dickens and Eliot proud. Yet her story carries a realism that is more personal than cultural, a quest into one’s individual significance that only emerges in a post-war Britain.

Her setting is fantastic at best. The epic begins on a beautiful, isolated island steeped in medieval ruins and explorers’ lore. The prime characters are suppressed women of society, uneducated workers fallen from society and fortune but blessed with unflagging hearts, and a merchant captain bearing a most suspicious resemblance to the amiable pirate. They travel to New Zealand, yet unsettled and uncivilized, peopled rather by cannibals and frequented by earthquakes. Indeed, the novel’s dimensions seemingly promise all the adventure of a Dumas tale without much initial hope of substance or true character development.

Yet here we would undermine Goudge’s scope, indicated clearly by her acknowledgement of the story’s two unlikely premises and possible defects. The central action of the tale revolves around the surprising marriage of two uncomplementary characters, all enabled by an incredible drunken-induced letter typo. Goudge recognizes the unbelief each reader must necessarily grapple with to move onward, but notes this plot device is based on a factual counterpart, which occurred in Goudge’s own family tree. The second obvious flaw of the story – her exaggerated descriptions of the Maoris of New Zealand and over-imaginative portrayal of island life is admitted in the same foreword. The reader must decide whether or not to grant the author’s beg for forgiveness of her limited research and entire lack of personal experience in such a setting.

Having set these barriers aside, we come to the story itself. Here, underneath the misleading veneer, we discover many facets of truth.

“The restless traveler, always journeying on to the fairy city on the horizon. And the lover in his gay green cloak who loves so many and comes in the end to worship God alone. And the one who has sought detachment from the place and person for love of the winged state of prayer.”[1]  

The core of Goudge’s talent is her ability to use common emotions and experiences to unveil transcendent reality to her reader. The questions of purpose and the pull of ambition that are present in every life are asked and experienced by each main character. Yet, ordinary life is the mainstay of the plot. Children are excited by the arrival of mail and newcomers to town. Failed business ventures and natural disasters force families to move on and make new starts. Marriages are made without governance of passion but with prudential and cultural concerns.

At the center of the action are two sisters who possess opposite personalities but share the same upbringing, same societal worries, and same love for their childhood playmate. In a dichotomy akin to that of Marianne and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, one sister pursues a match with calculation and forethought, while the other simply moves between experiences with emotion and little analysis. Here, though, the excess lies on the side of reason; the sister full of sensibilities does in fact suffer from her imprudence, yet her fault lies more in a naïve innocence than in passion. Eventually, her sensibility transforms into simplicity and leads her to self-knowledge; her life becomes a personification of wisdom. Another character, the sailor boy who is loved by both sisters, actually exhibits more thoughtless passion but the consequences of a poor choice – spurred by such unexamined actions – jars him into a more realist view and experience of the world. Realizing his need to work hard for a living and acknowledging how obligations family and relationships bind him, he faces life’s “ultimate” challenge: resist suffering and allow bitterness to fester or submit and let virtue flourish. The reasonable sister, contrary to these two, continually finds her plans frustrated and even when they come to fruition, cannot be content with the castles she has built.

Goudge uses the changes within these characters to present three distinct paths to maturity, and even holiness.

Though we view and interact with the world differently, according to our nature and development, she portrays our vocations as really the same: to unlock the door to another world, present within ours and yet metaphysically beyond it too.

As the reader follows the characters’ different travels to this enlightenment, several elements keep them grounded to life’s relentless and harsh demands. Parents disagree on child rearing. Spouses sometimes find persons outside their marriage to be truer soul-mates, and estrangements are sometimes resolved by death and not by reconciliation. Yes, Goudge is attempting to portray a spiritual sphere but it is reached by the concrete and sensible world.

Goudge refrains from painting holiness with sentimentality as well. While those characters who surmount trials find true happiness, it is not the form or by the path they would have naturally chosen. To give an example, our sailor-boy-grown-man does find joy in family life, but must constantly alter his living to keep his loved ones content. Similarly, the character who perhaps seems the most loving and beloved by personality contrarily experiences incredible loneliness while caring for aging parents.

Goudge’s “fairy world” that appears to be the end of every character’s journey ultimately presents certain declarations to trouble the reader: marriage is not truly about finding your soulmate or experiencing “true love” but about being sanctified; saying yes to your vocation does not require a one-time decision but a self-renunciation that is demanded again and again; prudent business planning and powerful talents are still vulnerable to the caprices of men and nature. Yet the harshness of these truths is not presented solitarily;

happiness may not be that which we imagine – it may also be deeper than our expectations could envision.

Thus, Goudge juxtaposes two abstruse beliefs: experience can lead to truth as surely as reason, and the reality of spiritual life does not hide the hardness of the day we live. Her prowess as an author is demonstrated by her recognition that these views are complicated and learned over many years and do not consist of a momentary revelation or change. While many modern pop writers would attempt to convey a theme in one great challenge that must change the protagonist forever, Goudge takes her time and encourages her readers to change their own perspectives little by little as her characters’ lives progress. No character change comes quickly. No lesson is learned without the comic admittance that similar mistakes will be made again. The greatest virtue of this author is that her tone always escapes the didactic: these beautiful insights of the story are experienced, not preached from a pulpit.

Hence, it is even difficult for this critic to mention them apart from the story. Flannery O’Connor stated that a true author knows “the meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience the meaning more fully.”[2] Goudge’s expertise could be described no better; the limitations of this critic reach an impasse.

There are two worlds, her protagonist muses at story’s end. The reader, having completed this fantastic journey that nevertheless feels real, must contradict: there is this world, the fairy world, and the world of Green Dolphin Street.

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[1] Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street, 482.

[2] Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories”, in Mystery and Manners, 96.