Moonlight

As he says in the Preface to this novel, Joyce Cary wrote THE MOONLIGHT in response to Tolstoy's short novel, THE KREUTZER SONATA. He was appalled by Tolstoy's negativity toward women and marriage and decided to write a novel illustrating his own ideas about women. The novel centers around three women: Rose, her younger sister Ella, and Ella's illegitimate daughter Amanda. When Rose and Ella's mother had died, Rose took over caring for the family, sacrificing a marriage proposal in the process. (The man, James Groom, ends up marrying another sister, Bessie.) When Ella fell in love with a married man, Rose tried to come between them - and succeeded; Rose is able to take Ella's child, Amanda, away from her and gives her to another sister to raise. Now Amanda wants to marry, which delights Ella but is not satisfactory to Rose. Rose goes so far as to change her will so that Amanda will not inherit her money, which Amanda will need to get her marriage off to a good financial start. Ella sees that this will is not enforced by purposely "losing" it, but Amanda decides not to marry her intended anyway. Most readers see Rose as a tyrannical meddler, which surprised Cary, who thought of her as a "woman of character and unselfish goodness, who had sacrificed her own happiness to her duty." There is some truth to this: Rose seems to interfere where Ella and Amanda are making obvious bad decisions. Each reader will decide for herself, but I think Cary might be off the mark here, at least the way he presents Rose. Ella is especially well drawn by Cary as she emotionally battles her stronger older sister (and loses). The scenes with Amanda, however, are the least satisfactory and don't amount to very much. Cary said he "wanted to show the different sexual ideas of two or three generations in their relation with each other, ... of the woman who serves, the woman who rebels, and the woman who is taught to conform for her own good." In this, especially of the first two types of woman, he succeeded fairly well.