The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark

First published: 1974

Type of work: Political satire and roman a clef

Time of work: The early 1970’s

Locale: Crewe, England, about thirty miles south of Manchester

Principal Characters:

• Alexandra, the Abbess of Crewe, the middle-aged head of the abbey, a blue-blooded, physically imposing, Oxford educated woman who is driven to achieve power and success; a semblance of President Richard M. Nixon
• Sister Felicity, Alexandra’s middle-aged unprepossessing rival in the election for abbess; a semblance of both Senator George McGovern and presidential counsel John Dean
• Sister Walburga, the middle-aged Prioress and the Abbess’ top aide; a semblance of Nixon’s White House chief of staff H. R. Haldemann
• Sister Mildred, the middle-aged Mistress of the Novices and the Abbess’ most important supporter after Walburga; a semblance of Nixon’s domestic affairs adviser John D. Ehrlichman
• Sister Winiprede, a loyal but obtuse lackey for the Abbess and her two top aides; loosely a semblance of John Dean and White House lawyer Charles W. Colson
• Sister Gertrude, the abbey’s deep-thinking, deep-voiced global peacemaker, devoted to ecumenism; a semblance of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger

The Novel

The Abbess of Crewe satirizes politics in the United States as well as most of the principals and details of the Watergate affair (which eventually caused President Richard M. Nixon to resign, following a congressional committee’s vote for impeachment), humorously criticizes shortcomings in human nature and in the Catholic Church, and enunciates many of Muriel Spark’s favorite themes.

Using the present tense of her later novels but the narrative looping she has employed from her first works onward, Spark opens in chapter I with events far advanced (two years’ worth), enabling her to inject her trademark of mystery and strangeness into the plot, puzzling the reader with questions such as what the Abbess means by “the traditional keyhole method” she seems to advocate to Sister Winifrede and why police and police dogs roam the abbey’s grounds, which should be free of such sordid reminders of the outside world. In an extended flashback, chapters 2 through 4 explain how after the death of Abbess Hildegarde, sub-Prioress Alexandra and her cohorts became concerned that Sister Felicity, given little chance to be elected the next abbess, was gaining on Alexandra with a flabby, sentimentally vague philosophy of love. Spark here satirizes both the Alexandra (Nixon) faction’s oxymoronic “evident happiness of shared anxiety,” since no action was necessary for Alexandra to win in any case (the group simply created adversity for adversity’s sake), and also the 1960’s-style insipidity of the Felicity (McGovern) faction—the latter nun’s name being ideologically apposite.

Alexandra then enlists the support of the Jesuit Fathers Baudouin and Maximilian (who appear to represent Watergate conspirators G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, with the Jesuits equated to the Central Intelligence Agency). She leaves the meeting, however, and lets her subordinates intrigue with the Fathers, enabling her legalistic, dishonest rationalization that she has no firsthand knowledge of their schemes. One of these covert activities is the two clandestine trespasses of two Jesuit novices into the abbey to rifle Sister Felicity’s prize possession, her sewing or work-box, once to prove to the Jesuit Fathers how easily the mission could be accomplished (which satirizes Jesuit overzealousness for detail and complication) and once to perform it thoroughly (during which time, ironically, the burglars are apprehended by the authorities). The loss of Sister Felicity’s thimble, which satirizes the pettiness of the original aim of the Watergate affair, unnerves her, helping to assure her political defeat, as does a speech by Alexandra appealing to the voting nuns’ snobbish allegiance to the upper rather than middle class (one of Spark’s gibes at the American voting public) and complaining about the thimble’s loss being characterized as bourgeois rather than ladylike.

With the election won and Sister Felicity expelled (and then excommunicated, for continuing her long-running love affair with Thomas the Jesuit), the plans of the Alexandra faction continue to unravel because of the Jesuit novices’ demands for blackmail (a category of crime occurring in most of Spark’s novels) and Felicity’s unending charges of wrongdoing at the abbey. By the middle of chapter 5, the narration has reached the point of the novel’s opening sentences—which are specifically referred to by Alexandra, representing (the reader now understands in an ironic revelation) the commencement of her attempted cover-up. New arrests, evidence, and charges provoke Rome’s Congregational Committee of Investigation (equaling the Nixon-era congressional committee for impeachment) to summon the Abbess to the Vatican, the novel ending in chapter 6 with Alexandra on deck, beginning her voyage by ship (the cunning Sister Gertrude having recommended taking the slowest means of transportation to the tribunal).

The Characters

Despite the novel’s pervasive symbolism of black and white, through emphatic descriptions of the nuns’ and Abbess’ attire, Spark’s portrait of the adversaries, Alexandra and Felicity, is neither all one nor all the other, an absolutism perhaps anticipated of a Watergate satire (villains against the heroes). Alexandra is on occasion treated sympathetically and Felicity, caustically. Mixed with ironically implied censure for the Abbess’ misuse of her talents or natural endowments is Spark’s admiration for them and scorn for their lack in Felicity.

Furthermore, Spark’s satiric characterization at times has the added complexity of reproving her historical targets by antithetical rather than parallel traits in the fictional equivalents.

The Abbess, for example, is fond of quoting from memory passages from masterpieces of British poetry. She is advised by Sister Gertrude to delete these passages from the audiotapes of her surreptitiously recorded conversations because the Congregational Committee at Rome will be outraged by these quotations more than by her actual misdeeds.

In actuality, tapes released by President Nixon had, in the notorious phrase of the time, “expletives deleted” because of vulgarity in inner-circle White House conversations. In this instance, the Abbess’ learning and tastefulness are admirable. Yet Alexandra’s private recollection and substitution of these poetic passages (many drawn, allusively, from seventeenth century lyric poetry) for parts of the service in which she is participating show a tendency toward secularism and also hypocrisy, since the Abbess publicly advocates a rigid, reactionary ,conservatism in returning to the original Latin language in all ritual. Also satirized here, through the Congregational Committee, are the American Congress and public for Victorian prudery (more concern for scurrility than content or wrongdoing), and the Congress, public, and Church for fundamental anti-intellectualism or antipathy to culture.

Alexandra’s intellectual superiority to most of the other characters, including Felicity, is indicated by her having majored in classics and English literature at Oxford University’s Lady Margaret Hall (which, in Spark’s esoterically allusive irony, was originally quartered in a building known as “the white house”). Yet while the Abbess has noble descent analogous to the fifteenth century Lady Margaret Beaufort as well as the college namesake’s passion for culture, she does not have Lady Margaret’s generosity, as demonstrated by the ironic revelation of her having in the interest of amassing funds approved the feeding of cat or dog food to the rest of the nuns (though she and her coterie dine on expensive pate). In chapter 2, both Felicity and her following are implicitly condemned by her appeal to ignorance in asking if anyone has ever heard of such names as Sextus Propertius, Hamlet, Werther, Rousseau, and Kierkegaard, which the Abbess finds philosophically attractive. Yet beyond indicating Alexandra’s admirable intellect and learning, these names also suggest the Abbess’ secularism and her shared inclination with them toward egocentric and theatrical self-dramatization.

The Abbess also surpasses her rival and the other nuns physically, her imposing stature several times being contrasted with Felicity’s puniness. Indeed, the image most frequently associated with Alexandra throughout the novel is some sort of tower: a Lombardy poplar soaring over prostrate shadows, an ivory tower, a tall spire, a Maharajah aloft on his elephant, the masthead of an ancient ship, an obelisk, and the white funnel of a ship. Yet though the erect bearing and physical stature of the Abbess are estimable, both individually and collectively the images also point to her faults. In contrast to a poplar, Alexandra is unwilling to let nature take its course, feeling compelled to rig the election; she is addicted to technology (especially electronic eavesdropping equipment) rather than devoted to God’s natural world, even having “bugged” the poplar grove. She has neither the purity of ivory nor the detachment suggested by an ivory tower (though later, like the Nixon circle, Alexandra’s becomes isolated from the surrounding world and dedicated to the practice of “stonewalling,” a favorite expression among the Watergate conspirators).

Most important, as suggested by the image of the tall spire, instead of the aspirations of rising above the concerns of the material world and elevating one’s view and one’s thoughts to God and Heaven, which are the ideas behind the soaring spires of Gothic cathedrals, Alexandra has more affinities with the builders of the Tower of Babel and their product: attachment to materialism and technology as well as pride or egotism. In this image pattern, comparisons of Alexandra to the ship, a conventional religious symbol of the Church, intimate that she is not concerned enough with navigating herself and her convent to God and Heaven.

Critical Context

The Abbess of Crewe in many ways preserves a continuity with Spark’s earlier work and immediately preceding novels The Driver’s Seat (1970), Not to Disturb (1971), and The Hothouse by the East River (1973), though there are important variations. All the later novels are narrated in the present tense and contain Spark’s distinctive narrative looping (the return to an earlier incident or statement) to achieve ironic revelation. In addition, all these novels are set at the time of their publication and focus on a small and self-contained group of characters. Differences in technique and tone include the more driving straightforward plot line, emphasizing inevitability or fate, of the aptly named The Driver’s Seat (a young woman on the way to her predestined rape and murder) and Not to Disturb (the twenty-four-hour period of the servants’ preparations to gain advantage from their confidently expected employers’ inevitable and lucratively lurid deaths), versus the flashbacks of The Hothouse by the East River (Paul’s World War II days versus the 1970’s) and The Abbess of Crewe. In tone, The Abbess of Crewe is most like Not to Disturb (probably Spark’s most amusing work, parodying the Gothic genre and thus herself); both The Driver’s Seat and The Hothouse by the East River are gloomier and more melancholy.

As a specific political satire, The Abbess of Crewe differs from Spark’s other works, and, like all such satires, risks the dangers of becoming dated and thus unintelligible to readers unfamiliar with the original incidents, people, and details forming the original targets of the mockery. Yet like the satires of Aristophanes, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope (the latter quoted by the Abbess), this one by Spark will probably continue to illumine readers with its own light because of the author’s broadening of the work’s scope to apply to general human types, social institutions, and enduring moral and philosophical concerns.

Bibliography

Bold, Alan. Muriel Spark, 1986.

Bold, Alan, ed. Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision, 1984.

Keyser, Barbara Y. “Muriel Spark, Watergate, and the Mass Media,” in Arizona Quarterly. XXXII (1976), pp. 146-153.

Richmond, Velma B. Muriel Spark, 1985.

Whittaker, Ruth. The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark, 1982.