When I finally set out to read The Forsyte Saga, I expected it to be entertaining and mildly thought-provoking, but something easily forgotten as soon as the last page is read and the book is placed upon the shelf. Instead, I found the book to be a little creepy, but in a persistently disturbing way, so that my thoughts keep returning to it. Now, a novel can be something of a Rorschach test, so it may be just me. To find out if it is just me, I have decided to openly muse about this trilogy here, in hopes that others may have read it too, and may inform me in the comment section whether they had a similar reaction, or whether I have got it all wrong, and the only the only thing creepy is my imagination. In order to do so, however, much must be given away, and so those wishing to avoid spoilers should stop reading here.
The theme of the first novel, The Man of Property, is completely revealed in its title, and Soames Forsyte is the man. Unfortunately, among the many things he regards as his property is his wife, Irene. This might not be so bad were it not for the fact she has detested Soames since the first week of their marriage. She had doubts about marrying him in the first place, but she needed a meal ticket, and I guess she thought she could stand it. Eventually, she finds Soames to be so repulsive to her physically, that she cuts him off completely.
She has a friend named June Forsyte, who is the daughter of Soames’s cousin, and a woman whom Soames dislikes, for he suspects she puts ideas into Irene’s head. To get her away from June and other such people, he decides to build a house in the country where he can have Irene all to himself. Then it would be just the two of them, side by side. And this at a time when there was no such thing as television!
Soames hires Philip Bosinney to build the house for him. Bosinney is an architect, and the fiancé of June. Boy, if that is not asking for trouble. When it comes to business, I always prefer to deal with strangers. You may think you are going to get first class work at bargain rates when doing business with friends and family, but as often as not, there is a misunderstanding that leads to grief, and thus it is in the novel as well.
To make matters worse, Irene and Bosinney fall in love and have an affair. Soames suspects as much, which only adds to his frustration at being estranged from his wife, and so one night he decides to exercise his conjugal rights by force. In short, he rapes Irene. Now, Soames is a bit of a stuffed shirt and not very likeable, but we do not expect something like this. The result of this violation is that whereas before, Irene had merely been repulsed, now she is thoroughly traumatized. Soames feels guilty and ashamed, but at the same time, he believes he was in his rights, and that Irene was just being unreasonable. When Bosinney finds out about it, he becomes so distracted that he walks into the path of a carriage, is run over, and killed.
Irene leaves Soames, and years later they get a divorce. She then marries “young Jolyon,” June’s father. Speaking as a man, if my best friend had an affair with my fiancée, and then after she died, proceeded to marry my mother, no one in my family would ever see me again; so this must have been pretty rough on June, but she manages to hold up reasonably well. In any event, Jolyon and Irene end up living in the house out in the country that Bosinney had built for Soames, just the two of them, side by side. And still, television had not yet been invented. However, this marriage turns out to be idyllic. They eventually have a child, whom they name “Jon.” Soames remarries, hoping to have a boy, but his wife has a girl instead, after which she can no longer have children. They name her “Fleur.”
When they grow up, Fleur and Jon meet and fall in love. So we have a Romeo and Juliet story, in which the two feuding families are two main branches of the Forsyte family, that of Soames and that of Jolyon. Both sides of the family try to keep them apart, but at the behest of his daughter, Soames visits Irene and assures her that if their children marry, she need have no fear of having to meet him again socially. He promises her that whatever else happens, she will never have to see him again. He offers to shake hands, but she refuses, thus recalling an earlier point in the story, where June offered to shake hands, but Irene refused. It is at this point that my sentiments begin to change. In the beginning, Soames comes across as a monster, while Irene is a sympathetic victim. But by this point, I find myself feeling a bit sorry for Soames, while Irene is beginning to make me feel uneasy.
Since this is a Romeo and Juliet story, I expected Jon and Fleur to marry or die trying. Instead, we have a very different outcome. Jolyon writes his son a letter, in which he explains why he and Irene object so strenuously to his marrying Fleur. He tells Jon that if he marries Fleur, it will “utterly destroy your mother’s happiness,” that it will be a “nightmare,” causing her “pain and humiliation,” and whatever children Jon and Fleur have, they will be a constant reminder of the “horror and aversion” that she can never forget. And in the end, since Jolyon knows he will soon die from a bad heart, he tells Jon that his mother would be all alone. As for the part about Irene being all alone, I guess that is what happens when you betray your best friend, marry her father, and then move out to the country, where you practically never see anyone but your husband, your son, and the maid.
The result is that Jon breaks off his engagement with Fleur, and subsequently buys a farm in British Columbia where he and his mother can live, just the two of them, side by side. He thought about moving to California, but the weather was too nice there. In other words, instead of moving to, say, San Diego, where his mother could get out and make some friends, or, since friendship does not seem to be Irene’s thing, at least she could socialize and find some activities she might enjoy, Jon buys a farm in a part of the world where they are likely to be snowed in eight months out of the year. And they wouldn’t even have television!
If this situation between Jon and his mother seems a little strange, it is made all the more so by the oedipal adumbrations in Jon’s youth. As a child, he tells his mother that he does not want to go to school: “I want to stay with you, and be your lover, Mum.” And this is followed by a protracted scene in which Jon, finding out that his father will not be in his mother’s room that night, asks if he can sleep with her. All right, I know that children sometimes sleep with their parents, although it was never something I wanted to do. And I know that little boys sometimes say they want to marry their mothers. But real life is one thing, and novels are another. John Galsworthy would not have written this scene into the novel if it were not important. At the very least, Jon is a mama’s boy, something Fleur clearly sees when she tells Jon he is tied to his mother’s apron strings; for Fleur was ready to get married anyway, their parents’ problems be damned. Knowing how Irene betrayed June, Fleur regards Jon’s mother as someone who will not hesitate to destroy the lives of others, but in the end, Fleur is defeated.
So Jon and his mother live happily ever after. Well, not quite, because Galsworthy wrote another trilogy, in which Jon and Irene move to North Carolina, where Jon finally gets married, almost as if Galsworthy realized what he had written, and decided to undo the damage. A lot of readers, me included, have been bemused by the fact that Jolyon, who was appalled at the idea of Soames’s attitude that a wife was the property of her husband, and Irene, who was the victim of that attitude, should end up enslaving their son to his mother. In the preface to the first trilogy, Galsworthy makes the following remark: “A criticism one might pass on the last phase of the Saga is the complaint that Irene and Jolyon, those rebels against property—claim spiritual property in their son Jon. But it would be hypercriticism, as the tale is told.” He points out that Irene said to Jon, "Don't think of me, think of yourself!" But she approved the letter her husband wrote to Jon, and that single sentence, especially in the way she says it, is more likely to augment Jon’s feelings of guilt than diminish them.
There is a theory in literary criticism that rejects authorial intent as being the final word concerning the meaning of a novel. I never paid much attention to that theory until now. Galsworthy may deny that Jon’s parents have enslaved him, and he may have subsequently tried to undo the oedipal implications of Jon and Irene, but at the expense of being charged with “hypercriticism,” I think it is there in the way “the tale is told.”