A three-part novel about the three great romances in the life of its protagonist, the sculptor Mark Lennan, this novel was one of its author’s particular favorites. The third-person omniscient narrator delivers an intimate view of the emotion of passion as it overwhelms Mark and the three women he has loved in his life, and the structure of the story neatly reverses the first and third parts.

Unlike the traditional novel, which covers the entire life of a protagonist or even of an entire family or town, The Dark Flower concentrates on short periods of intense emotion; it almost forms three novellas about the same character. The three sections bear the titles “Spring,” “Summer,” and “Autumn,” corresponding to Mark’s life as a 17-year-old college student, as a 20-something single artist in London, and as a mature married man of about 50.

Mark’s first experience of passion occurs when the wife of his college tutor develops a crush on him; when his tutor invites Mark along on their summer vacation, the young man and the middle-aged woman are thrown together in the beautiful scenery of the Alps. The dark red flower his beloved wears, a clove carnation, becomes Mark’s favorite, but before this intense swirl of emotion can turn itself into an indiscretion, the party breaks up. Mark must attend the wedding of his sister, and back at the family’s estate, the maid of honor, 16-year-old Sylvia, proves to be an enjoyable companion. Mark attends art school in Rome instead of returning to his college, and so he leaves his first love behind and pursues his muse.

As an aspiring artist with some successful commissions behind him in the novel’s second part, Mark meets an unhappily married woman, and the two of them fall passionately in love. After meeting secretly to elude her wealthy husband, they are confronted by him with his complete refusal to be parted from his wife. In spite of her coldness, he loves her as passionately as Mark does, and he has the advantage of legal rights. When the lovers try to flee, a disaster puts a tragic close to the affair. Mark once again finds himself in the comforting company of Sylvia, and soon afterward they are married.

With more than 20 years of satisfactory marriage behind him, middle-aged Mark meets the teenage daughter of one of his old school friends. The girl had been born out of wedlock and reared by her father; she is a modern young woman with a forthright manner, and she initiates the passionate connection and repeatedly tries to draw Mark into infidelity. For his part, he too is passionately in love, but he is also tormented by the memory of previous disaster and by the weight of conscience: an affair with this willing young woman would be a betrayal of his wife and his friend. Mark has now taken the position of the woman he first loved, obsessed with an inappropriate love object and on the verge of hurting those who have been faithful to him. In a neat twist that sheds light on the events of the novel’s first part, Mark copes with the emotion that has taken possession of him.

Galsworthy’s novel has a surprisingly frank erotic element for a mainstream work written under the long shadow of the Victorian era. His sensuous prose points toward the work, much more explicit, of D. H. Lawrence, and his detailed exploration of the thoughts and feelings of his characters, male and female, demonstrates the depth of his insight into the workings of the human heart. Everyone who has been passionately in love will recognize the psychological anxieties that Mark and his three love objects suffer and the social games they play in desperate attempts to sustain and perpetuate their inappropriate and yet inescapable passions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gindin, James. John Galsworthy’s Life and Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987.
Rønning, Anne Holden. Hidden and Visible Suffrage: Emancipation and the Edwardian Woman in Galsworthy, Wells, and Forster. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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