Amelia de Grier
Wendell's wife — a Tittencote girl who gave up a violin, a legacy and a country for him, and got a log cabin and a rival.
To be the only one. She corrects her sister's warning about Wendell by saying that his theory of many women is held for the race in general and surely not for persons in particular.
The book
At a glance
- Wendell's wife; mother of Julie, Timothy and others
- Tittencote, England; one of twelve de Grier children
- Violin and singing, eight months at a London conservatory
- Her whole legacy, handed to Sophia rather than to Wendell
- Charring in her brother-in-law's mansion, to keep the household
- Ann, who stayed in England and expected the worst
- Elizabeth Chappell Barnes · A violinist; Barnes's mother
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeAmelia de Grier is an invented character in Ryder, the 1928 first novel by the American writer Djuna Barnes, and Wendell Ryder's wife. She grew up at Tittencote, an English country place, the favourite of the twelve children of John Johannes de Grier, a builder of Huguenot descent who liked his furniture better than his wife and his daughter best of all. She was dark and thin, feared Irishmen because she had been told to, read little, and turned over leaves in the woods looking for moss and bugs.
At twenty-four she went up to London with her share of her mother's estate, took violin and singing at the Conservatory, and lasted eight months — long enough, the book notes precisely, to play Schumann's "Spring Song" but not the great rhapsodies. Then she met Wendell over a garden wall, handed her legacy to his mother, and sailed for America.
She is drawn from Barnes's mother, Elizabeth Chappell Barnes, a violinist who followed Wald Barnes to Cornwall-on-Hudson and lived in the house he ran on his own principles.
How the book draws them
- Her mother's adviceDelivered once, at the window, without crying: never let a man touch you, never show anything, keep your legs in your own life, and when you grow to be a woman keep that a secret even from yourself. Then: never have children, and God forgive me — for making you mortal.
- The night before the boatShe and her sister Ann pack a steamer trunk and quarrel and weep for a whole chapter. Ann says "Oh, my God!" six times before noon, each time asking what will become of them all, predicts that Amelia will be murdered and eaten, and settles on the certainty that Amelia's ear will arrive by post — and what, she keeps asking, is she to do with it?
- The bed with the labelWarned that husbands can never identify the one piece of furniture they most often use, she proposes to solve marriage by getting a bed no man could mistake: painted bright red, tied up in sashes, draped in lace, with "Here I be!" stitched in scarlet twist across the middle of the coverlet.
- Charring for the respectable brotherIn America she goes down the hill every day to clean the mansion of Wendell's brother Gaybert, a doctor, because Wendell will not work and Sophia is prostrate with grief. She comes back up to the cabin at nightfall. It is the arrangement the whole household rests on and nobody in it remarks upon.
- The speech while giving birthHer labour is set out as a script, with stage directions, and she wanders in it: I am a rock thrown down, and heaviness is in me. She turns on Wendell in the middle of it — who taught you a woman's body had a way for you? — and then says she will be fond of him again in some way she knows nothing of. A row of asterisks interrupts her, marking a passage the publisher removed.
- The dream of the oxThe night after the birth she dreams she is watching through a keyhole as a great black ox climbs three steps into a woman's bedroom, lies down beside her and says "I am also." It asks for a place in her Saviour, is refused, and kneels at the crucifix to pray on her behalf: remember the woman. The book is explicit that she dreamt it to get the black man a place in God's mercies, after Wendell looked at her newborn and said it was black.
- The lullabyShe sings a nonsense ballad with a refrain about a London woman whose boy fell head first into the water butt. Since three-quarters of him was already lost, the song reasons, she made him whole at any cost by pushing the lagging heels in after. It ends: good night, my little boy, good night.