Character Development: National Velvet

Odd Coincidence Update: I posted this early this morning before I had heard the incredibly sad news that Elizabeth Taylor has died. I wanted this to be a commentary on the book and the character development in the book, but I had to update the post to note the passing of this great long-lasting American actress. Her performance in National Velvet is a revelation, to this day. Much more to be said, but I’m too sad right now. This one is really getting to me. Just needed to update this post – it was too weird to leave it there without acknowledging what has just happened.

I have had almost no time to read in 2011, and unlike 2009 – when my ability to read abandoned me – this latest situation has just been a matter of time-management. I honestly don’t have time to read. I read on the subway, and that’s good, I read on the bus, but for the most part, I’m usually writing. Which means I can’t read. Which means I don’t feel like myself! I’m getting ready for a mini-project which will involve National Velvet, so I picked up the book again. It was one of my favorites when I was a child, but it has been so long since I read it that much of it seems quite new to me. I love the writing. It is a lesson in character development. Here is our introduction to Velvet’s mother, Mrs. Brown, she who swam the English Channel when she was 19.

All the Browns tilted their chairs. Nobody ever told them it would hurt the carpet. They ate, ruminated, and tilted. Only Mrs. Brown sat solid and silent. She did not talk much, but managed the till down at the shop in the street. She knew all about courage and endurance, to the last ounce of strength, from the first swallow of overcome timidity. She valued and appraised each daughter, she knew what each daughter could do. She was glad too that her daughters were not boys because she could not understand the courage of men, but only the courage of women. Mr. Brown was with dignity the head of the family. But Mrs. Brown was the standard of the family. When Velvet had fallen off the pier at the age of six her mother went in thirty feet after her, sixteen stone, royal-blue afternoon dress. A straight dive, like the dive of an ageing mammoth. The reporter from the West Worthing News came to make a story of it and said to Edwina, “Your mother swam the Channel, didn’t she?” Edwina nodded towards her mother. “Better ask her.” “What’s past’s past, young man,” said Mrs. Brown heavily and shut her mouth and her door.

Mi Taylor’s father had trained Mrs. Brown for her swim, trained her when she had been a great girl of nineteen, neckless, clumsy, and incredibly enduring. Mi himself had been a flyweight boxer, killed his man, got exonerated and yet somehow disqualified, tramped the country, held horses, cleaned stables, and drifted nearer and nearer to the racing world, till he knew all about it except the feel of a horse’s back. Arriving somehow in the ebb of Lewes races he had been taken on by Mr. Brown for the slaughterhouse, for running errands, and lately even for negotiating for stock.

Mrs. Brown stared at him when he came with a look of strange pleasure in her hooded eyes. Mi Taylor, the son of Father Taylor! He knew all about her, Taylor did. The only one who ever did. He knew what she was made of. He’d had the last ounce out of her. He and the doctor at her five confinements, those men knew. Nobody else, ever. Mi was his son. Mi was welcome. He could stay. Henceforth he ate with the family and lodged in the extra loose-box. And Araminty Brown, embedded in fat, her keen, hooded eyes hardly lifting the rolls above them, cooked admirably, ran the accounts, watched the shop, looked after the till, spoke seldom, interfered hardly ever, sighed sometimes (because it would have taken a war on her home soil, the birth of a colony, or a great cataclysm to have dug her from what she was born for), moved about the house, brought up her four taut daughters under her heavy eye, and thought of death occasionally with a kind of sardonic shrug. Nobody could have said exactly whether she had a dull brain or no. Ed and Mally and Meredith behaved themselves at the wink of one of her heavy eyes. Velvet would have laid down her stringy life for her.

Fantastic.