The Indian proverb that inspired the title of Rumer Godden's third
(and, to date, final) memoir, published in 1989, likens people to
houses with four rooms, each of which represents a primary aspect
of the self: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. "Most of us",
Godden writes, "tend to live in one room most of the time, but
unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it
aired, we are not a complete person". In her art as well as her
life, Godden has placed a high value on personal striving for
completion, that is, for the discovery of the real and mature self.
Lynne Rosenthal, in this study of Godden's fiction for children and
adults, shows how her dozens of works in both genres explore the
"variety of experiences in which self-transformation occurs through
an act of will". The focus of Rosenthal's study is the figure of
the child, which Godden uses in her fiction "as a powerful
mirroring image, reflecting many of society's most profound fears,
struggles, and hopes for redemption". Godden returns again and
again in her work to the theme of the conflicting needs of children
and adults. Her contemplation of this theme - particularly as it
relates to the female artist and mother - predates the feminist
fiction writers and critics who emerged in the early 1970s.
Sympathetic from personal experience to the needs of both
conflicted parent and dependent child, Godden arrives at no easy
resolution of the problem. She is thoroughly sensitive to the
suffering caused in children by parental neglect, yet,
surprisingly, she often shows the absence of a parent to be
ultimately liberating, freeing a child to undertake the journey
toward completion that Godden so values. In adultnovels such as An
Episode of Sparrows, The Greengage Summer, and Pippa Passes, and
even more consistently in such books for children as The Diddakoi,
The Dolls' House, Mouse House, and Thursday's Children, the
independent struggle for personal fulfillment is rewarded.
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