Harriet Said by Beryl Bainbridge
"Harriet Said" by Beryl Bainbridge is a novel centered around the tumultuous summer holidays of two teenage girls, an unnamed narrator and her more dominant friend, Harriet. Set against the backdrop of 1960s England, the story unfolds as the girls engage in a disturbing exploration of power dynamics, sexuality, and manipulation, particularly targeting Peter Biggs, a middle-aged man whom they refer to as "Tsar." The novel presents a dark Bildungsroman, where the innocence of adolescence clashes with a sinister desire to control and harm those around them, particularly adults who represent authority.
As the plot unfolds, Harriet's influence over the narrator becomes increasingly evident, leading to acts of voyeurism and ultimately violence. Their relationship is marked by jealousy and a troubling quest for dominance, with Harriet's character embodying a more frightening, rebellious nature. The narrative challenges readers to reflect on themes of moral ambiguity, the complexities of female friendships, and the often-hidden rage beneath seemingly ordinary lives. Bainbridge's work is notable for its psychological depth and its capacity to transform mundane settings into arenas of horror, echoing the struggles of adolescents grappling with the adult world. Through its exploration of twisted innocence and manipulation, "Harriet Said" offers a compelling and unsettling portrait of youth.
Harriet Said by Beryl Bainbridge
First published: 1972
Type of work: Psychological realism
Time of work: Mid-twentieth century
Locale: Formby, England
Principal Characters:
The first-person Narrator , a thirteen-year-old girlHarriet , her fourteen-year-old best friendPeter “Tsar” Biggs , a fifty-six-year-old businessman who falls in love with the narratorMrs. Biggs , his wife
The Novel
The action of the novel takes place in an extended flashback that covers the summer holidays of two young teenage girls: the unnamed narrator and her friend Harriet. The narrator tells a dispassionate story of how she and her friend destroy the self-effacing Peter Biggs, whom they have named “Tsar.” The choice of this name highlights their childish romanticism and ignorance. The summer for them is no innocent rite of passage into young womanhood but rather the working out of their twisted need to control and destroy those adults who get in their way.
The narrator has returned from her year at boarding school, where she was sent because her behavior was so unruly. Like her friend Harriet, she is wise beyond her years, but she lacks the necessary maliciousness to act on her desires without the prodding of Harriet. When Harriet returns from her holiday in Wales, the two girls take an interest in the life and activities of Peter Biggs and his wife. Capitalizing on Biggs’s friendliness toward her earlier in the summer, Harriet begins—with an almost scientific detachment—to engineer ways for the narrator to be thrown together with him.
Harriet is the real troublemaker. She has already experimented with the power of her sexuality in her flirtations with the Italian prisoners of war interned in Formby as well as with a young man she met while on holiday. She subtly forces the narrator to entrap Biggs by alluding to “something” she did with that young man but that she cannot bring herself to talk about “just yet.” The two girls have kept a diary chronicling their sexual coming-of-age. Harriet dictates; the narrator transcribes. Biggs becomes the focus of their information gathering and the target of their experiment.
Early in the novel, the two girls spy on Biggs and his wife as they make love in their front parlor. The girls are discovered, and their nosiness only adds fuel to Mrs. Biggs’s already growing suspicions that these two children are at least acting improperly toward her husband, if not actually trying to seduce him. The knowledge that Biggs’s wife “knows” about their intentions provides Harriet with a perfect rationale for first disliking her and later feeling no remorse for what eventually occurs.
Goaded by Harriet’s inferred sexual initiation, the narrator follows Biggs on his walks to the seashore and allows him to express his unhealthy attraction to her, first verbally, later through a kiss, and finally sexually. Harriet, in a fit of jealousy, provides the two with the needed opportunity by locking Biggs and her friend in the parish church one night. Then, when they learn that Mrs. Biggs will be away for several days, the girls invite themselves over to Biggs’s house. Harriet cruelly derides his affection for her friend as the sign of a weak man. At this point, the narrator turns away from Harriet but not from Biggs. Believing that the more worldly-wise Harriet has already lost her virginity in Wales, the narrator gives hers to Biggs one night on the beach.
Harriet has, however, misled her friend; she retains her virginity and is shocked that the narrator gave hers away so casually. Later, just before the narrator is due to return to school, the two girls return to Biggs’s house. When he goes out to buy cigarettes, his wife unexpectedly returns. Trapped in the house, Harriet concocts a perfect solution: She makes the narrator knock Mrs. Biggs out—but the force of the blow kills, rather than stuns, her. The story concludes with Harriet telling the narrator that they will return home and tell their parents that they saw Mr. Biggs murder his wife. After all, they are only children, they cannot be held accountable.
The Characters
The narrator is a curiously weak individual. She allows herself to be driven by her friend Harriet to commit acts of increasing anger and violence, yet on her own she acts passively and as one would expect a thirteen-year-old girl to behave. Her curiosity about sex and the power of her sexuality is not unusual, nor are her shallow infatuation and fantasizing about the much older Peter Biggs. Even a diary such as the two girls keep is unremarkable for girls in early adolescence. Beryl Bainbridge captures a thirteen-year-old’s personality well in her use of the first-person narrative and presents an accurate picture of the girls’ parents and of the Biggses as seen through adolescent eyes. In some ways, the narrator is the dullest character in the story, acting primarily as the medium through which Harriet’s plans are carried out.
Harriet’s, on the other hand, is truly a frightening personality. The anger she feels toward adults, and toward men in particular, is apparent in her behavior toward her father and Biggs, not to mention the Italian soldiers or the young man with whom she had some sort of physical relationship earlier that same summer. Her relationship with her father is stormy, reflecting the tempestuous nature of her parents’ marriage. Thus, her behavior toward the men in the novel could be explained as her attempt to control or dominate men, all of whom represent her moody, explosive father. Her use of her sexual attractiveness to tease interested males rather than to satisfy them—as she did with Douglas Hind, Biggs’s houseguest—demonstrates her anger at, or hatred of, men. At fourteen—one year older than the narrator—she is the dominant figure in this friendship, and she controls the narrator in much the same way that she controls everyone else, by virtue of her angry will. Perhaps her attitude concerning love best expresses her nature: She tells the narrator that, “at thirteen there is very little you can expect from loving someone but experience.” Now she can also add killing to her list of experiences.
Peter Biggs is a pathetic man of fifty-six. He is a mousy, little white-collar worker married to a fat harpy. For his entire life he has allowed himself to be told what to do, so it is hardly surprising that he surrenders so easily to the flirtations of the two girls. He has been married for thirty years to a woman who won their house in a raffle; he married her because the house needed to be occupied. Over time, Mrs. Biggs has grown fat and angry; she dominates her husband with the bulk of her aggressive will as well as with her greater size. The scene in their parlor in which she forces him to have sex with her exemplifies the way in which she has overwhelmed him. Something in the narrator’s youthful sexuality arouses Biggs, and he is too weak to turn away from an obviously destructive attraction. His weakness not only causes his wife’s death but also enables Harriet to pin her murder on him.
Critical Context
Harriet Said resembles Bainbridge’s other novels in its careful examination of psychological motivation, jealousy, and the results of an unhealthy sexual tension or preoccupation. Like many contemporary British novels—Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) or John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), for example—this book focuses on working-class characters trapped in the backwaters of industrialized England, people who would ordinarily fade into a crowd. It is exactly this “invisible” person who affords Bainbridge the perfect means by which to shock her readers. Her fiction could be described as domestic horror because it focuses on unassuming people only to reveal the startling, and frequently frightening, hostilities hidden beneath their weak exteriors. In Bainbridge’s novels, the everyday world is transformed into one of terror when a character’s repressed anger erupts and destroys the entrapped victim. In this regard her interests parallel those of such contemporary writers of horror fiction as Thomas Tryon, Peter Straub, and Stephen King, who, like Bainbridge, focus on the banal somehow transformed into the horrifying.
As a Bildungsroman, Bainbridge’s novel treats themes similar to those in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) or Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). Like the main characters in both of those books, Harriet and the narrator are adolescents at odds with a world which they perceive to be ruled by stupid, repressive adults. All these characters are misfits who refuse to be socialized; they are also streetwise survivors. What distinguishes Harriet and her friend from Brown’s or Salinger’s adolescent rebels is the form that their rebellion takes: They murder or otherwise destroy the adults who block their way. In this respect, Harriet Said may be compared to Thomas Tryon’s The Other (1971), whose young protagonist kills not only his alter ego (his identical twin) but also any adult who tries to make him take responsibility for his actions.
Bibliography
Godwin, Gail. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXVIII (September 30, 1973), p. 38.
Ms. Review. III (December, 1974), p. 39.
The New Yorker. Review. XLIX (October 29, 1973), p. 49.
Wimble, Barton. Review in Library Journal. XCVIII (November 1, 1973), p.3280.