The Old Wives' Tale

The final chapters of Book 3 show Sophia dealing with a transposed image of Constance’s experience at the end of Book 2. In their joint lives as teenagers, their experience was shaped by the dual demands of their family relations and the business of running the shop. These dual concerns then appear in separate forms at the ends of Books 2 and 3—Constance’s life is consumed with family relations (her relationship with her son Cyril), while Sophia’s is consumed with business. Both are essentially widows now, just as their mother was in the middle of Book 1, but their stories are still marked by the dual concerns of life as a Baines: family relationships and running a business.

One of the most interesting features of Book 3 is Bennett’s decision to avoid centering his narrative on the political circumstances in Paris. Most authors would be tempted to make the geopolitical story the dominant thread in the narrative, but Bennett mentions it in only the barest of terms, even revealing that it had little impact on Sophia and was of almost no interest to her. This is a startling choice given that Paris was the epicenter of one of the pivotal events of 19th-century Europe, as the Franco-Prussian War culminated in the siege of Paris, the fall of the French Empire, and the radical political experimentation of the Paris Commune immediately thereafter. Bennett, however, chooses to write a story about how Sophia manages a small boardinghouse in the middle of it all, with only a few passing mentions of the broader catastrophe unfolding around her. When considering this aspect of Bennett’s narrative in the context of the effects of place on one’s life, it becomes clear that Sophia is still a Bursley girl and doesn’t yet consider herself a Parisian. Her habits of industriousness and levelheaded common sense are the virtues of middle-class England, not of the grand romance of Paris. The place that exerts its influence on her at this juncture is not Paris as a whole but the little boardinghouse itself.

Regarding the changes of life and the unchangeableness of temperament, Sophia’s story shows both elements. She undergoes radical changes during this season of her life, going from being abandoned by her husband to becoming a successful businesswoman, all while negotiating a foreign culture and an unstable social environment. Since the action of Book 3 is compressed into just a few years of Sophia’s early adulthood, the outward changes to her physical appearance are not yet as pronounced as Constance’s are by the end of Book 2. Sophia’s character, however, has gone through a process of moving from her youthful impulsivity to an entirely different aspect of focus and hard work yet one that she still recognizes as “the essential her” (406). The necessity of living on her own has hardened and clarified her independent nature into a keen, highly disciplined sense of resolve.

One of the contrasts between Constance and Sophia in the period of their adulthood is in their relationships with those around them. Constance shows a perpetual desire to maintain her relationships, even to strengthen them, as is particularly the case in her hopes for her son, Cyril. Sophia, however, is a lonelier character, one whom others desire to get close to but who perpetually resists those attempts. She has pushed away any thoughts of writing to her family again, and the characters who grow close to her in the boardinghouse—Madame Foucault, Laurence, and Chirac—eventually drift away. Even as her success in business grows, her relationships diminish; the reverse of the pattern is seen in Constance, for whom business fades away and her focus on family intensifies as Cyril grows up.