I Capture the Castle
I have always loved a good coming-of-age novel. When, in October, I scanned my to-be-read stacks for comfort reads, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1948) caught my eye. From its opening line---“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink”—Smith’s heroine and novel kept me entertained and engaged. Imagine coming-of-age with a bohemian stepmother, a reclusive writer father, a wildly handsome servant turned friend, a sister who longs for wealth and the comforts it provides like Austen or Brontë heroines of old, and a younger brother who is both young and somehow wise beyond his years. Imagine facing young womanhood after many years of isolation living in a castle with little more than this cast of quirky characters to inform your world view. Then, imagine two eligible young men—brothers—exploding the quiet repetition of your family’s days as the elder inherits the local manor house. Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle provides all this and more, as her heroine struggles to find herself and wade through first love, all the while setting it down in writing.
Set in the early twentieth-century English county side, I Capture the Castle, is the first-person journal of Cassandra Mortmain in year of her eighteenth birthday. Cassandra is the middle child of a once famous modernist writer. When the novel opens, however, her father’s ongoing writer’s block leads their family finances to crumble alongside the castle ruins in which they live. Cassandra attempts to capture the nature of each member of the wild cast of characters which comprise her family. She also documents the challenges of poverty and its impending crisis they face together. Comedy and epiphany collide as Cassandra meticulously details daily life in her unconventional family existing precariously on the brink of financial ruin.
Smith’s I Capture the Castle is a delightful read as it is both poignantly dramatic, even tragic at times, but also laugh-out-loud funny. The earnestness with which Cassandra and her sister Rose approach life and love perfectly captures the drama of first love as childhood blurs into adulthood. And while the Mortmain sisters may blunder in love, Cassandra’s coming-of-age inspires her own literary pursuits as well as those of her father.
The theme of authorship and the nature of the tormented author, the struggle through writer’s block, and the impact of being family to a creative genius ran throughout I Capture the Castle. Cassandra, her siblings, and her stepmother live their lives while her father broods, fails to write, and witnesses years passing by. A part of coming-of-age for Cassandra is grappling with her disappointment and her faith in her father as a writer. Through his process, and her interjection into it, she certainly learns important lessons about being a writer and finding one’s way in words even when others do not recognize the process. Through Mr. Mortmain’s character, Smith inserts a modernist author into the heart of her novel. As such her reader contemplates the literary process alongside her characters. Any attempt to capture the world in words, Cassandra discovers, is a personal act of contemplation and reflection. Writing, Cassandra learns, takes a great deal of dedication and time; it is a process that can be both gratifying and isolating.
In this novel, Smith certainly puts a modernist spin on Austen or Brontë, placing her unconventional but also naïve heroines in the countryside amidst the romantic setting of an old castle. She introduces two eligible bachelors to its plot. She provides both a well-meaning, but often slightly misguided old maid as well as a steady country vicar as characters. Romantic attachments become entangled. But amidst all these tropes Smith’s novel focuses on a young woman finding herself. Rather than being a love story, this is the story of one young woman growing up (even when romance consumes major plot points). It is the playfulness, as well the painful maturation from girl to woman, recognizable, no doubt, to many a reader, that makes Cassandra and her story so entertaining. As Cassandra finds herself, scrutinizes her motives and perspectives as she comes of age, each reader has the opportunity to do the same all over again. I Capture the Castle is quintessential bildungsroman as Smith refuses to wield the theme of Cassandra’s coming-of-age to a love story; rather, any love story is secondary to her heroine’s process of emerging from childhood into young adulthood as a writer.
A Few Great Passages:
“Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return—that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness. For a moment I felt that I had discovered a great truth” (223-24).
“I have grown more and more ravenous as I have grown more and more miserable. Sleep is wonderful, too—I never thought of it as a pleasure before, but now I long for it. The best time of all is before I fall asleep at night” (232).
“Who says you always have to understand things? You can like them without understanding them—like ‘em better sometimes” (295).
Bibliography:
Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle. St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1948.
