Small Pleasures

30-year-old Gretchen is a Swiss-German woman, seamstress, and the mother of Margaret. Gretchen has dark, curly hair, fine features, and blue eyes. She is always well-dressed, with polished nails and fashionable clothes.

Gretchen is the catalyst for the central mystery of Small Pleasures—she writes to the Echo that her daughter was conceived through parthenogenesis when Gretchen spent months at St. Cecilia’s Home for Convalescents for rheumatoid arthritis. While there, Gretchen also met and fell in love with Martha Campkin. Gretchen’s pregnancy, seemingly an instance of virgin birth since Gretchen never slept with a man, caused the dissolution of the women’s relationship and drives Gretchen to marry Howard to avoid the stigma of single motherhood. Gretchen hopes to use the Echo’s article to prove to Martha that Margaret was born without sperm.

However, when Gretchen leaves Howard to move in with Martha, her romantic notions of living as her authentic self are dashed. Martha remains jealous and chaotic, while Gretchen realizes that the decision is emotionally difficult for Margaret. More illusions are shattered as Jean learns that Margaret’s conception was not miraculous: Gretchen was raped while drugged. Gretchen never discovers this truth, but she does plead for Howard to take her back, unable to bear the social opprobrium and personal difficulties of her choices.

Howard is Gretchen’s husband and, eventually, Jean’s lover. Howard is a jeweler and, a kind and generous man. Howard marries Gretchen because he loves her and stays with her despite their lack of sexual intimacy, out of duty to her and Margaret. Howard soon comes to resist this self-sacrifice to pursue his own romantic interests.

Just as Gretchen and Jean must navigate extremely narrow strictures of social acceptability of Women’s Identity in 1950s England, so too does Howard feel confined by the social values which he is expected to uphold. He is only released from some of these obligations after Gretchen leaves. But, in contrast to his initial sense of duty to his family, he does not accept her back when she asks because he has grown too accustomed to his newfound freedom. He is killed in the railway disaster before he can truly act on his authentic feelings, however.

Margaret is the daughter of Gretchen and Howard Tilbury and Victor Halfyard. Margaret closely resembles her mother, with brown curls and delicate features. She is a happy child, but possibly has inherited the mental illness of Victor, her mother’s rapist and Margaret’s biological father.

Margaret becomes unhappy when her mother disrupts her life by leaving the family for Martha; shuttled between two homes, Margaret becomes a casualty in her parents—and Jean’s—quest for passion.

Jean’s mother relies almost entirely upon Jean for daily caretaking; she lost access to money and social status when her husband left her, and was later killed in WWII. Mrs. Swinney embodies the realities of many older women in postwar Britain in the 1950s: Lacking employable skills, she cannot find work. Her lack of education and age-related frailty prevents her from being self-sufficient in the way women of Jean’s generation are. Perpetually angry and dissatisfied, Mrs. Swinney has alienated all of her friends with her sharp demeanor and judgments. Mrs. Swinney continues to decline throughout the novel, though Jean suspects she also grows accustomed to being waited on from her bed upstairs.

Martha is Gretchen’s lover and a previous resident of St. Cecilia’s. An artist who lives independently in a poor neighborhood in Kent, Martha is disconnected from her family because she does not adhere to the social expectations of the time—she is a lesbian who rejects heteronormative domesticity. Martha is abusively jealous; having broken up with Gretchen when Gretchen became pregnant, she polices Gretchen’s behavior when Gretchen leaves Howard to be with her and does not make her home welcoming to Margaret. The reality is that society makes it impossible for this lesbian couple to find domestic tranquility; even they have internalized the same misogynistic expectations of women’s Duty, Decorum, and Surveillance that prevent them from living authentically in the first place.

Alice Halfyard’s nephew Victor, who is dead at the time of the narrative, provides the resolution to the novel’s mystery: the cause of Gretchen’s pregnancy. Raised by a single mother who could not care for his mental illness, Victor was imprisoned at St. Cecilia’s, but periodically escaped. During one escape, he raped Gretchen while she was in a drugged stupor.