33 pages • 1 hour read
Stella GibbonsCold Comfort Farm
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1932A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Attachment to the Past
From the start of the novel, Flora demonstrates a tendency to tackle all of life’s problems head-on. Flora’s forward-thinking behavior contrasts sharply with the Starkadders’ backward views and their attachment to the past. ‘Backward’ is a term that can describe unsophisticated country folk like the Starkadders, but it can also refer to the tendency of the Starkadders to live their lives with focus on the past rather than the present.
Tradition dictates much of the clan’s behavior. At different points in the story, various characters repeat the same mantra, asserting over and over that there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm. Nobody in the family questions whether this continuity is a good or a bad thing. The fact that it has always been this way is reason enough to continue the practice. Aunt Ada is the character most responsible for enforcing the status quo, and she does so by withdrawing from the outer world. Nobody questions Ada’s long-established rules from the past, and the family tendency towards silent acceptance reinforces their commitment to the past and their resistance to change.
One clear example of the Starkadders’ characteristic resistance to change can be found in Judith’s disturbed reaction to Aunt Ada’s announcement that she will descend the stairs on a day that isn’t traditional for her to perform the Counting. Judith says: “Mother, you’re mistaken. ‘Tes not the first o’ May nor the seventeenth o’ October. You’d better bide here” (123). May 1 or October 17 are random dates that are meaningful to Judith only because they are the dates on which Aunt Ada has previously made an appearance. Judith treats the arbitrary dates with a reverence typically reserved for recognized dates of significance, illustrating the importance of past patterns of behavior to Judith and the other members of her family.
Because Flora looks forward into the future instead of back into the past, she finds ways to turn the Starkadders’ attention from the way things have always been done to new possibilities. Her greatest triumph is getting Ada to leave her state of isolation and rejoin the ever-changing world outside, a decision that is symbolized by Aunt Ada’s leather flying suit and the plane that lands on the farm to take Aunt Ada away to Paris.
Internal Obsessions Versus External Realities
In addition to feeling pressure to conform to external but meaningless tradition, the Starkadders are also afflicted by their own individual internal obsessions, all of which hold them back from experiencing reality as it occurs in the present moment. Each member of the family has their own peculiar compulsion, which Flora describes succinctly in this passage:
Most of the family got a kick out of something. Amos got one from religion, Judith got one out of Seth, Adam got his from coddling the dumb beasts, and Elfine got hers from dancing about on the Downs in the fog in a peculiar green dress, while Seth got his from mollicking. But Reuben just didn’t seem to get a kick out of anything (63-64).
Once she has identified the obsessions of each family member, Flora begins to dismantle the obsessions in order to enable the family member in question to move on from the obsession. Flora begins with the easiest case. She notes Amos’s religious obsession and appeals to his desire to be a traveling preacher. It takes very little convincing to get him to abandon the farm to pursue his grandiose interests elsewhere. Amos’s absence clears the way for Reuben to take over the farm. He demonstrates the smallest level of obsession of all the Starkadders since all he cares about is the farm. Once Flora alleviates his fear that she has come to steal his inheritance, he relaxes and adapts to changed circumstances with relative ease.
Getting Seth to move forward is also a simple matter once Flora arranges a film deal for him. He is willing to abandon his voracious female relatives with shocking detachment. Elfine too is an uncomplicated case to solve. All she wants is Richard. Once Flora shows her how to realize her dream, the girl also departs the farm quickly. The loss of Seth and Elfine sends shock waves through the remainder of the family. This upset in the status quo enables Flora to reach the two Starkadders who wield the most influence over everyone else–Judith and Ada.
With the aid of a psychiatrist friend, Flora is able to disconnect Judith from her obsession with Seth and convince her to leave the farm to take a rest cure. Of course, the most difficult case for Flora to solve is Aunt Ada. The precedent for the entire household’s aberrant behavior has been set by the matriarch. Seven decades later, she is still fixated on whatever she saw in the woodshed at the age of two. It takes Flora all of nine hours to persuade Ada to come out of her room and live in the world again. If Ada was the evil witch who held the Starkadders under a dark spell, then Flora is the exorcist who expels Ada’s demons and brings life back to Cold Comfort Farm.
Melodrama: A New Approach
In writing Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons is intentionally mocking a style of British fiction that became popular between the world wars. This style was called the “loam and lovechild” genre, which usually involved a romanticized country setting populated by large families of emotionally dysfunctional people living bombastic, tragic lives.
Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith were two of the most popular authors in this genre, and their writing irritated Gibbons because of its overwrought doom-and-gloom rural atmosphere. The loam and lovechild genre had already peaked in popularity by the time Gibbons started writing, which meant that the public was ready for a satirical treatment of this familiar material. Gibbons’s own no-nonsense approach to life found rich comic fodder in characters who take themselves too seriously for their own good. She intentionally modeled the novel’s main characters on figures from both Webb’s and Kaye-Smith’s body of work.
To some extent, similar loam and lovechild material can also be found a generation earlier in the novels of Thomas Hardy and the Bronte sisters, to whose works Gibbons alludes. Gibbons is consciously aware of the parallel since she has her character Mr. Mybug put forth the theory that the alcoholic Branwell Bronte actually wrote his sisters’ novels. Mybug explains:
You see, it’s obvious that it’s his book and not Emily’s. No woman could have written that. It’s male stuff. I’ve worked out a theory about his drunkenness too—you see, he wasn’t really a drunkard. He was a tremendous genius, a sort of second Chatterton—and his sisters hated him because of his genius (83).
Mybug’s spurious authorship theory notwithstanding, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights contains the charismatic but tortured hero Heathcliff who is comparable to Seth. Catherine Earnshaw is a wild child who wanders the moors just as Elfine does at the beginning of Cold Comfort Farm. The religious bigot Amos Starkadder and stolid farmhand Adam are a composite of Heathcliff’s dour servant Joseph. The rational Mrs. Beetle is a parallel to the sensible servant Nellie Dean.
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is also parodied in Gibbons’s novel. Mr. Rochester’s mad wife is comparable to Aunt Ada, who sequesters herself upstairs and pretends to be mad. While Rochester’s wife sets fire to the house, the worst Aunt Ada does is to swat members of her family with a farmer’s gazette. Gibbons’s allusions to the fraught antics created by her literary predecessors reflects her own pragmatism and a new approach to the loam and lovechild world.
