Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, by Alice Jolly
"Tis a story of these Valleys / Of the small things of my work"
Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly (Unbound, 2018)
Took me ages, this one. I started it in October 2022, then read it in four or five chunks over the next few months and then finished it January 2 of this new year. In my defence, it's a six hundred page brick of a thing; except it isn't, because none of the pages are full. This is the second thing you notice about this novel: it's all written in punctuationless idiolectical free verse, littered with wonky little contractions and misspellings.
That same night I lie awake along From down below I hear Ambrose and Mr Woebegone I get up watch them seen them pointing up Hear fragments of words mysterial and veild
That kind of thing. Took me ages to get the hang of it. Which makes me very silly, because the clue's right there in the first thing you notice, the extra word in the title. "Imbecile." This word crops up here and then throughout the book, thrown in anger at our narrator, Mary Ann Sate, or sometimes gently and thoughtlessly dropped around her, which is somehow worse.
The novel is framed as a found text, written by Mary Ann Sate towards the end of the nineteenth century, hidden behind a cupboard, and then discovered in 1938. Another framing: as well as being right there on the title page, "imbecile" is very nearly the last word of the book as well, in a note from the woman who uncovered the manuscript. "I never found any further evidence of her existence. All I could find was the record of her death in the Stroud Workhouse as noted down in the registers held by the Urban District Council. There it is written, 'Mary Ann Sate, 9 October 1887, Imbecile.'"
It's not a nice word, is it? It's also not a word you encounter very often, at least not in official documentation; over time it's slipped from a pseudo-medical diagnosis to a straightforward and even quite childish insult. I'm pretty sure the last time I said it I was directing it at myself, and likely for something incredibly minor. Forgetting to get bread while I was at the shop.
So why do a good portion of the people around her, and finally whoever was responsible for writing her into the historical record, think Mary Ann Sate to be an imbecile? In the course of her story she is widely known to be literate, she is appreciated as an entertaining and compelling storyteller, and she is, at all times, a reliable, capable and trustworthy worker, both in general domestic service and later in an industrial mill. In part it's a question of her physique: she is unusually short and has a cleft palate. And from time to time she undergoes vaguely Blakean religious experiences, finds herself visited on country paths and in fields by angels, by the Devil and God. Her faith is strong and strange.
But mostly, you come to realise, it's a question of presumption. She's short, she looks weird, she bangs on about God with an uncomfortable intensity: what else could she be but an imbecile? That seems to be the rationalisation of those around her, even as they trust her to mix their medicines, to carry their messages, to tend to their newborn babies. Too odd, too other. Not normal.
And the same is true of her narrative voice: odd, other, defiantly abnormal. "Leaves russet scarlet flame / A sweet smell of rot all around / The sun low slung in the skye / The light polishd bronze". Fine, I'll buy that she's not an imbecile; indeed, as a morally sound person of the twenty-first century, I'd never call anybody an imbecile. Except myself. But she's still a poor, uneducated, working woman, surviving in circumstances that are often brutal and never better than tolerable, and yet there is so much lyrical beauty here, so much close attention to the fabric of life as it unfolds around her, so much craft and skill in this found work. Am I really expected to believe that… ah. Oh dear.
I'm sending myself up a little here, I promise. (Most of the delay was down to losing the book for a bit.) But it did take me a while to grasp the effect of that ", Imbecile" in the title: it calls attention to categories. This is a novel of and against social taxonomy, of and against boxes and envelopes, of and against the reduction of the individual into this or that or the other. Mary Ann Sate, imbecile, is not an imbecile. She is a nurse, a friend, a confidante, a social agitator, a traitor, a visionary, a victim, a person of compassion and grace and fury and spite, above all and through it all a worker, and a narrator and character of remarkable power; more to the point, she is every one of those things at once, which rather renders the list redundant.
I don't have a literary comparison to point to here - the Guardian's review mentions Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which I haven't read - but it reminded me of Marcus Rediker's ongoing call for "history from below". Fiction from below, but not just that. Not just a story of the complicated life of the working poor - there's a lot of that about - but a story that in its telling, in the method of its telling, unsettles the precepts of such stories.
Saying that, though, there's a lot of Blake in here. Perhaps this is what you get you fire Blakean commentary and Blakean mysticism through an imagined Blakean character, a chimney sweep that never escapes the coffin but gets to see the angels anyway. Mary Ann Sate reads Blake, after all. She knows what reading Blake does to a person.
Hearing again those same rolling words Fires in yr head like a gasp of cider Time then falls away The days fall in upon each other
Sounds like a fascinating book. When I read Normal People (Sally Rooney) it took me about 1/4 of it to get used to the omission of quote marks denoting character speech, definitely think this would take even more getting used to.