The Innocents by Carol Chappell

"Creeper Cottage" by Carol Chappell

Editor’s note: In this short blog series, artist and von Arnim fan Carol Chappell explores a taxonomy of the writer’s most memorable female characters. In this post, she draws our attention to…The Innocents.

In this series of guest blog posts, I have discussed the three categories of female characters that I recognize in von Arnim’s novels–The Breakaways, the Almosts, and the Betrayed–but there’s a final category that occurs to me: the Innocents.

Carol Chappell portrait
Carol Chappell

When I refer to the “Innocents”, I mean those characters who are rather naive about the ways of the world. For example, we might focus on Anna in The Benefactress [1901]Her determination to help gentlewomen who had fallen on hard times was laudable,  but she was innocent in her belief that people could be made to be happy and astounded at the intolerance existing between women of different classes.  Anna had imagined women living together in harmony, but it was not to be.  

Innocence does not have an age limit. In the novel Christopher and Columbus [1919]sisters Ann-Rose and Anna-Felicitas are young, very naive, and very trusting as they come to America. Similarly, Sally, in  Introduction to Sally [1926]  grows up in a poor family and is hidden away because of her great beauty, leaving her with no idea about the world outside her small home and town. All she wants is a good husband and babies playing at her feet.  Her innocence results in a charming series of events and proves that it is not necessary for an innocent to change her accent, her goals, or her naivete, nor for her to want to change the world.  

Being innocent or naive is found in both men and women as well as in the young and old in von Arnim’s fiction, a good example of which can be found in Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight: the novel’s young heroine, Her Ducal Grand Highness the Princess Priscilla of Lothan-Kunitz and her elderly tutor Herr Fritzing Geheimrath are both innocents in the von Arnim sense

One theme that runs through several of von Arnim’s novels is that of finding an isolated cottage and running away from society. Living a plain life is another. Princess Priscilla describes her life as being smothered by feather beds. She learns philosophy from her teacher,  and from this Priscilla decides that the life of a princess is one of excess and luxury that she cannot tolerate. Fritzi, as Priscilla calls her tutor, thinks to himself, “Priscilla’s ignorance of the outside world was pathetic.” 17 The last straw is when a prince falls in love with her and proposes marriage.  Priscilla believes Fritzing when he tells her that if she marries she will be lost forever. She and Fritzing run away to Creeper Cottage in a small village in England. Priscilla continues her habits as a princess, and in one week causes much disturbance in Symford. 

These thoughts of running away to live a simpler life recur in several of von Arnim’s novels. One can find examples in Father, The Jasmine Farm, The Enchanted April, and In the Mountains. What other examples of finding a plain and satisfying life can you find in von Arnim’s novels?

In running away without much of a plan, Fritzing finds himself in charge of the maid Annalise and the financial affairs of himself and Priscilla. Both Fritzing and Priscilla are clueless about the expenses of living an ordinary life.  One would think that the very small cottage would not take much in the way of money, but Priscilla has no idea how to manage, as everything she ever wanted was paid for by her father, the King of Lothen-Kunitz. She gives away five-pound notes, has tea for the children of Symford, and does other things that put the small household in debt. Managing a Princess who has no idea of the value of money becomes terrifying for Fritzing. He did not bring much money with them and had no idea how to get more or to tell Priscilla that she must not spend so much.

Living in a cottage with no running water, where she must go into the street to get to Frirtzing’s rooms is totally inconvenient. They find they must hire a cook. Annalise refuses to cook, clean, get water, or draw Priscilla’s bath. Life in Creeper Cottage proves to be less appealing than Priscilla had imagined. She does not perceive the troubles that lay in wait for her living a simple life. She is often hungry and must wear the same dress every day. Her help to the poor of the village only causes trouble. Priscilla has no idea of ways in which she might really help the poor when the parties and passing out of five-pound notes prove to be failures.

When the prince finds Priscilla, she is not happy. She admits to him that the life she has led in the previous fortnight is not all that she had imagined and hoped for.  Prince convinces Priscilla to return to Lothen-Kunitz and marry him. They become King and Queen of his country and she is happy. But, as the narrator says, she was not always happy. Like all of us, Priscilla had her troubles and disappointments. In my opinion, the moral of this novel is that none of us can run away from unhappiness and death. We must try to find happiness in whatever the circumstances of our lives. That is not always possible as the narrator implies. 

In Priscilla, von Arnim was also playing with a fairytale. Fairytales always end in the prince marrying a commoner or a woman of royalty and they live happily ever after. In Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight, we are left with Priscilla and her prince not living happily ever after, but with the thought that in their marriage there were good and rough patches just as in any other marriage. Perhaps Priscilla’s adventure in the small cottage in England had given her some insight into how others had to live and how to best help those less fortunate. She and her prince perhaps had more compassion for others and that made their partnership a more solid one. Von Arnim played with the fairy tale in this novel, but she also gives us irony, relationships between men and women, her feelings about clergy, and her early feminist ideas in her many novels. The categories into which I have placed some of her characters certainly overlap. If we dig further, we can find other categories which fit some of von Arnim’s characters.

"Creeper Cottage" by Carol Chappell
“Creeper Cottage” by Carol Chappell

If there are other novels that fit into the categories that I have defined, please, find them and send your own thoughts along. Thank you for reading! 

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