From the beginning of his Forsyte Saga, the long admired series of novels about upper-middle class English social life, the Nobel prizewinning English author John Galsworthy treated the subject of spousal abuse, and of marital rape in particular.
This was a topic about which Galsworthy felt keenly, having married, after a long affair, the writer Ada Nemesis Pearson, the wife of his cousin Arthur. Arthur evidently mistreated Ada, the details unknown but likely reflected in Galsworthy’s novelistic portrayals of sadistic husbands treating their wives as sexual property.
Thus, in the first of the Forsyte novels, A Man of Property (1906), Soames Forsyte rapes his wife, while in the last of Galsworthy’s novels, the posthumously published One More River (1933), Clare Charwell flees her sadist husband who inflicts the same abuse upon her.
James Whale directed a luminous film version of this last, released in 1934, a year after Galsworthy’s death and two years after he won the Nobel. The cast, especially Diana Wynyard as Clare, is superb. Whale and his cinematographer delight in making the most of the sets contrived as steamships and country houses, and capture the femininity and strength of their women: Wynyard; Jane Wyatt as Clare’s sister Dinny; and the eccentric stage actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell (her preferred name) as their equally eccentric aunt.
We first meet Clare on board ship as she is returning to England from Ceylon and hoping her husband does not pursue her. When she arrives, her sympathetic sister asks if what she has mentioned in her letters is true, that Clare’s husband, “struck you across the face with the handle of his riding crop and kicked you.”
In Galsworthy’s novel, we are given to understand that the use of the crop was not a simple beating but part of the husband’s penchant for sexual sadism, an element the Hollywood Code supervisors insisted be excised from the film.
Dinny wants her sister to seek a divorce, but Clare can’t imagine it, both because of her uncertain legal standing and the scandal it would entail: “How? It’s my word against his,” Clare says. “Besides, how could I make a public show of that sort of thing? I couldn’t.”
The husband, played by a perfect pencil mustached Colin Clive, shows up to claim his property, utterly indifferent to his wife’s dignity and adamant that no divorce will be granted because it might reflect poorly on his career in government service. He again mauls her against her will until she manages to break free and ring for the servants.
Later, he shows up at her flat and, though none of this is onscreen, rapes her. The episode is so understated that viewers might wonder what happened: we see Dinny, concerned, show up at her sister’s residence, and, learning that Clare’s husband had been there earlier, give a look of horror at the disordered bedsheets. Clare is a bit down, but chides herself for having let her husband in the flat, and meanwhile makes her sister tea. Talk about stiff upper lip.
Clare inquires into the possibility of divorce, but to do so there must be adultery proven by one of the parties. This is usually arranged, amicably, as a legal fiction (as we have seen in other films) by the husband, which is not going to happen in this case. Clare realizes she is legally trapped: “if I want to divorce him I’ve got to be unfaithful.” She can have her freedom or her reputation, but not both.
Except that, on the boat, she met a kind young man named Tony (Frank Lawton) who is head-over-heels in love with Clare. In England, they spend much time together, Tony clear about his feelings but never overstepping bounds, and Clare just as honest about her appreciation of his affection and determination not to compromise her morals.
Yet Clare’s husband has put a detective on their track, who easily accumulates enough data to convince those with less self-restraint than Clare and Tony (who spend the night together in a car without even a kiss), that there is a steamy affair going on. She is served with divorce papers based on her alleged adultery.
The centerpiece of the film is the divorce trial. While restrained, certainly in comparison with his Bride of Frankenstein the following year, Whale deploys the angles afforded by the dizzyingly high-ceilinged courtroom and crisp camera tracking and turns to add subtle yet kinetic touches to Clare’s battle.
Refusing to offer any of what might be called intimate details, Clare can only affirm that to remain in her marriage would be untenable for her dignity, and that despite all evidence to the contrary she has never been intimate with Tony. She tells but one lie, when her husband, to her shock, testifies that “the marital relationship. . .was reestablished,” which is his way—and the legal system’s—of referring to the rape. To spare Tony’s feelings, she denies that this happened.
Clare is legally martyred and loses the case, yet in cinematic terms holds her own with dignity and force. Though she is now to be known as an adulteress, her family rallies around her and Tony and she are united at the end. At first, though, Tony is disgusted at the suspicion that Clare might have voluntarily slept with her husband, as well as her cavalier way of offering herself to Tony as a kind of sexual reward for the legal hell they have been through.
In fact, in Galsworthy’s novel, Clare writes quite calmly to her sister of her offer to have sex with Tony, and his scandalized departure in response: “I tried to pay, but Tony would have none of it, and went off like a rocket.” And when he finally rejoins her, she says, when Dinny asks if they are getting married: “No, we shall live in sin. Later, I suppose, we shall see.” Meanwhile, being divorced, she is enjoying being able to spend all the time she likes with Tony: “And all so legal.”
The film of course skips this sort of thing and gives us a Hollywood ending in which Clare confesses her shame for her casual sexual proposition, blames it on the emotional trauma she suffered in her marriage, and professes that she will love Tony forever. Then she goes to serve him breakfast. This satisfaction of the genre (and Code) requirements is intelligently written but still a couple of notches too pat in comparison with the rest of the film.
And it is only a tiny slice, and not the most important, of the ending of Galsworthy’s novel and his whole sequence of Forsyte novels. (The Forsyte family in this novel is represented by Clare’s divorce lawyer.) For Galsworthy, Clare’s travails are only one part of a series of meditations on modernity and the shifts of time and custom.
A focus of both film and novel is the way in which Clare and her sister understand what is happening to them in terms of individual autonomy and personal dignity, while their parents generation (especially their father), rely on values of family honor and protectiveness toward women. If the latter potentially darkens into spousal abuse, Clare’s husband in the film nevertheless sounds quite modern in his insistence that marriage isn’t personal, but a combination of sexual desire and mutual interest, less of the one and more of the other over time.
Moreover, Galsworthy does not see Clare and Tony as the only sort of relationship and marital (or post-marital) ethic possible. Indeed, the more important relationship at the end of the book is Dinny’s with the reformist politician and Catholic Dornford, and they will get married, albeit with a more modern set of principles informing their love.
And there is, understandably, no room in the film for the character of Adrian, an older relative of Clare, and whose letter to his wife forms the final chapter of the novel. But here, in Adrian’s words, is the real theme of the book, a theme of which Whale’s movie is a very finely made instance but not a Galsworthyan meditation upon it:
Everything’s changing, and has got to change, no doubt, and how to save the old that’s worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about. We save our works of art, our old furniture, we have our cult—and a strong one—of “antiques,” and not even the most go-ahead modern thought objects to that. Why not the same throughout our social life? “The old order changeth”—yes, but we ought to be able to preserve beauty and dignity, and the sense of service, and manners—things that have come very slowly, and can be made to vanish very fast if we aren’t set on preserving them somehow. Human nature being what it is, nothing seems to me more futile than to level to the ground and start again. The old order had many excrescences, and was by no means “all werry capital,” but, now that the housebreakers are in, one does see that you can smash in an hour what has taken centuries to produce; and that, unless you can see your way pretty clearly to replace what admittedly wasn't perfect with something more perfect, you're throwing human life back instead of advancing it.