In her novel Old Filth,
Jane Gardam gives readers a glimpse of the life of Edward Feathers, a judge
known by his contemporaries as “Old Filth” for his successful career in Hong
Kong. Despite his decorated career, Filth and other thriving characters in
Gardam’s novel are deeply shaped by their turbulent childhoods.
Because Filth is the novel’s protagonist, the effects his childhood
on his adult life are most the most apparent to readers. When Filth visits the
inner temple in the early stages of the novel, one of his contemporaries makes
the ironic remark that he has had a “pretty easy life. Nothing ever seems to
have happened to [Filth]” (50). Such a comment could not be farther from the
truth. When he was young his mother died and he was taken from his father in
Malaya to be raised in England as if he were an orphan (44-45). As Filth grows
up in England without his father, their relationship is almost non-existent.
“From Malaya, there was silence, except for another cheque” (69). Filth’s
childhood is clearly detrimental to his emotional wellbeing, and even his younger
caretaker Auntie May recognizes the flawed concept of sending children with
English roots back home to be raised. She states, “Some children forgot their
parents, clung to their adoptive families who later often forgot them. There
were bad tales” (41).
Aside from Filth, another character that is deeply disturbed
by her childhood is Edward’s cousin Claire. When he goes to visit her after the
death of his wife, Filth remembers “[b]eing told that she had ruled her
children by a mysterious silence, her adoration of them never expressed…she
believed that marriage and motherhood meant pain” (64). Gardam blatantly
expresses that like Filth, Claire is scarred by the separation from her parents
that they both experienced as children.
While there are many interpretations of what Gardam could be
saying through the character development of both Filth and Claire, it seems to
me that the central focus is the negative effects of the British Empire. Both
Claire and Filth were separated because of the “tradition” to raise English
children in their homeland. However, if they had stayed in the colonies they
were born in and been raised by their real parents, their lives may have been
drastically better in the long term.
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ReplyDeleteThe repetition of abandonment in Filth’s childhood has left an obviously damaging affect on him. This is seen through his appearance as immaculate (“He was spectacularly clean. You might say ostentatiously clean” (17).), as well as many of his later behaviors throughout the novel, such as his stutter.
ReplyDeleteThe first lines of the novel explain Filth as magnificent, expensive, and important. He is described as having, “few still-gold hairs”, “still-bronze hair”, and “[a]lways a Victorian silk handkerchief”(17). The word “freshly” (17), is used multiple times in describing him. Immediately, Filth is portrayed as a spotless, wealthy, and accomplished man. Soon after, this image is quickly fractured. Revealed is a broken man, ruined from abandonment, and a lack of belonging.
With so much of his life out of control, his location, his family, his friends, Filth attempts to overcompensate in areas of his life he believes he can control. Being abandoned by both his father, and two of the people he loves the most, Ada and Auntie May, profoundly impacts him. Although both abandonments were in favor of promoting Filth’s best favor of growing up speaking and immersed in the English culture, both had quite the opposite affect. By forcing Filth to grow up in this English culture, he was uprooted from where he had felt he belonged, and away from people he felt he belonged too. This alienated him in a foreign society, and caused perhaps caused an unspoken animosity towards this culture that was supposed to be his own.
This alienation took one shape in the form of his stutter. Not only was it brought on through this alienation, but also through Filth’s desire to be in control. When Auntie May writes to Filth’s father about his stutter, she says, “You longed to say the word for him. You sometimes almost wanted to shake him for he seemed to be doing it on purpose" (47). He developed a stutter in hopes to fight back, to prove he didn’t belong in England. Many of Filth’s attributes and behaviors, such as his clean, fresh appearance, and his childhood stutter, can be traced back to Filth’s feeling that he has a lack of control, and can be explained as Filth trying to regain his own governance over his life.