Language and Change Theme Analysis

“It’s possible, I suppose, that once the meaning is written down it will become fixed.”

“So you and Dr. Murray could make the words mean whatever you want them to mean, and we’ll all have to use them that way forever?”

“Of course not. Our job is to find consensus. We search through books to see how a word is used, then we come up with meanings that make sense of them all. It’s quite scientific, actually.”

“What does it mean?”

“Consensus? Well, it means everyone agrees.”

“Do you ask everyone?”

“No, clever-boots. But I doubt a book’s been written that we haven’t consulted.”

“And who writes the books?” I asked.

“All sorts of people.”

Menstruosity was the condition of being menstruous. And menstruous had once meant horribly filthy or polluted.

Menstruous. Like monstrous. It came closest to explaining how I felt.

Lizzie had called it “The Curse.” She’d never heard of menstruation before and laughed when I said it. “Probably a doctor’s word,” she’d said. “They have their own language, and it hardly ever makes sense.”

[…]

I looked around the Scriptorium and tried to guess how many words were stored in the pigeon-holes and the books and in the heads of Dr. Murray and his assistants. Not one of them could fully explain what had happened to me. Not one.

The Editor’s response was louder again. “Neither her sex nor her age disqualifies her, Mr. Nicholson. As long as she is employed in scholarship—and I assure you, she is—she has grounds for becoming a reader.”

Dr. Murray called me over. Mr. Nicholson passed me a card.

“Recite this,” said Mr. Nicholson, with obvious reluctance.

I looked at the card. Then I looked around at all the young men in their short gowns and the older men in their long gowns. The words would scarcely come.

“Louder, please.”

A woman walked past: a student in a short gown. She slowed and smiled and nodded. I straightened up, looked Mr. Nicholson in the eye and recited[.]

Bondmaid was no fledgling word, and its meaning disturbed me. Lizzie was right; it referred to her as it referred to a Roman slave girl.

Dr. Murray’s rage came back to me then and I felt mine rising to meet it. It should not be, this word, I thought. It shouldn’t exist. Its meaning should be obscure and unthinkable. It should be a relic, and yet it was as easily understood now as at any time in history. The joy of telling the story faded.

“I’m glad it isn’t in the Dictionary, Lizzie. It’s a horrible word.”

“That it may be, but it’s a true word. Dictionary or no, bondmaids will always exist.”

“I’m sure there are plenty of wonderful words flying around that have never been written on a slip of paper. I want to record them.”

“Whatever for?”

“Because I think they’re just as important as the words Dr. Murray and Da collect,” I said.

“’Course they’s—” She stopped, corrected herself. “What I mean to say is, of course they are not. They’re just words use ‘cos we don’t know anything better.”

“I don’t think so. I think sometimes the proper words mustn’t be quite right, and so people make new words up, or use old words differently.”

“The Dictionary is a history book, Esme. If it has taught me anything, it is that the way we conceive of things now will most certainly change. How will they change? Well, I can only hope and speculate, but I do know that your future will be different from the one your mother might have looked forward to at your age. If your new friends have something to teach you about it, I suggest you listen. But trust your judgement, Essy, about what ideas and experiences should be included, and what should not. I will always give you my opinion, if you ask for it, but you are a grown woman. While some would disagree, I believe it is your right to make your own choices, and I can’t insist on approving.”

“Every woman wants to be married, Essymay.”

“If that’s true, then why isn’t Ditte married, or her sister? Why not Elsie or Rosfrith or Eleanor Bradley? Why not you?”

“Not all women get the chance. And some…well, some are just brought up with too many books and too many ideas, and they can’t settle to it.”

“I don’t think I could settle to it, Lizzie.”

[…]

“What do you want?”

“I want things to stay as they are. I want to keep sorting words and understanding what they mean. I want to get better at it and be given more responsibility, and I want to keep earning my own money. I feel as though I’ve only begun to understand who I am. Being a wife or a mother just doesn’t fit.”

“Do women usually swear when they have their babies?”

[…]

“Some words are more than letters on a page, don’t you think?” she said, tying the sash around my belly as best she could. “They have shape and texture. They are like bullets, full of energy, and when you give one breath you can feel its sharp edge against your lip. It can be quite cathartic in the right context.”

But I was realizing that, in fact, everything that comes after that first utterance is a corruption.

I had forgotten, already, the exact shape of Her ear, the particular blue of Her eyes. They got darker in the weeks I nursed Her; they may have got darker still. I woke every night to Her phantom cry and knew I would never hear a single word wrapped in the music of Her voice. She was perfect when I held Her. Unambiguous. The texture of Her skin, Her smell and the gentle sound of Her sucking could be nothing other than what they were. I had understood Her perfectly.

[…]

She couldn’t be defined by any of the words I found, and eventually I stopped looking.

When Mabel’s coughing stopped and my tears dried, I asked, “Morbs, Mabel? What does it mean?”

“It’s a sadness that comes and goes,” she said, pausing for breath. “I get the morbs, you get the morbs, even Miss Lizzie ‘ere gets the morbs, though she’d never let on. A woman’s lot, I reckon.”

“It must derive from morbid,” I said to myself as I began to write out the slip.

“I reckon it derives from grief,” said Mabel. “From what we’ve lost and what we’ve never ‘ad and never will. As I said, a woman’s lot. It should be in your dictionary. It’s too common not to be understood.”

I thought about all the words I’d collected from Mabel and from Lizzie and from other women: women who gutted fish or cut cloth or cleaned the ladies’ public convenience on Magdalen Street. They spoke their minds in words that suited them, and were reverent as I wrote their words on slips. These slips were precious to me, and I hid them in the trunk to keep them safe. But from what? Did I fear they would be scrutinised and found deficient? Or were those fears I had for myself?

I never dreamed the givers had any hopes for their words beyond my slips, but it was suddenly clear that no one but me would ever read them. The women’s names, so carefully written, would never be set in type. Their words and their names would be lost as soon as I began to forget them.

Bondmaid. It came back to me then, and I realised that the words most often used to define us were words that described our function in relation to others. Even the most benign words—maiden, wife, mother—told the world whether we were virgins or not. What was the male equivalent of maiden? I could not think of it. […] Which words would define me? Which would be used to judge or contain? I was no maiden, yet I was no man’s wife. And I had no desire to be.

As I read how the “treatment” was administered, I felt the ghost of a gag reflex and the pain of a tube scraping membrane from cheek to throat to stomach. It was a kind of rape. The weight of bodies holding you down, restraining your clawing hands and kicking feet. Forcing you open. At that moment, I wasn’t sure whose humanity was more compromised: the women’s or the authorities’.

“I want the same things as you, Till, but this isn’t the right way. It can’t be.”

“There is no right way, Esme. If there was, we’d have voted in the last election.”

“Are you sure it’s the vote you have your eye on, and not the attention?”

She smiled weakly. “You’re not wrong. But if it makes people take notice it might make them think.”

“They might just think you’re mad and dangerous. They won’t negotiate with that.”

Tilda looked up at me. “Well, perhaps that’s when the sensible words of your suffragists come in.”

“I suddenly couldn’t see the point,” he said.

“We have to keep doing what we do, Gareth. No matter what that is. Otherwise we’re just waiting.”

“It would be good to feel I was doing something useful. Typesetting sorrow won’t take the sorrow away. Jed’s mother will feel what she feels, no matter what is written in a dictionary.”

“But maybe it will help others to understand what she is feeling.”

Even as I said it, I wasn’t convinced. Of some experiences, the Dictionary would only ever provide an approximation. Sorrow, I already knew, was one of them.

I remembered lily. Back then, I had thought that if I saved the word something of my mother would be remembered. It was not my place to erase what war meant to Phyllis Campbell; what it was to those Belgian women. Among the propaganda of glory, and the men’s experiences of the trenches and death, something needed to be known of what happened to women. I returned to my desk, opened Back of the Front and began again. Once more, I forced each terrible sentence from my trembling pen.

If war could change the nature of men, it would surely change the nature of words, I thought.

As I walked towards my desk, trailing my fingers along the shelves of slips, I remembered Da reading me the story of Ala-ed-Din. The Scriptorium had been my cave then. But unlike Ala-ed-Din, I’d had no desire to be released. I belonged to the Scriptorium; I was its willing prisoner. My only wish had been to serve the Dictionary, and that had come true. But my service was contained within these walls. I was bonded to this place as surely as Lizzie was bonded to the kitchen and her room at the top of the stairs.

It is my job, tonight, to censor them, and I have blacked out the words of boys who are barely literate as well as boys who might become poets, so their mothers continue to think the war a glory and a good fight. I do it gladly, for their mothers, but from the start I have thought of you, Es, and how you would try to rescue what these boys have said so you can understand them better. Their words are ordinary, but they are assembled into sentences that are grotesque. I’ve transcribed every one, and I include the pages with this letter. I have not corrected or truncated, and each sentence has its owner’s name beside it. I could think of no one better to honour them than you.

Bondmaid had come to me—twice now—and I was reluctant to restore it to the Dictionary. It’s a vulgar word, I thought. More offensive to me than cunt. Would that give me the right to leave it out if I was editor?

[…]

“You’ve always said that a word can change its meaning depending on who uses it. So maybe bondmaid can mean something more than what those slips say. I’ve been a bondmaid to you since you were small, Essymay, and I’ve been glad for every day of it.”

Was that what it meant to be a daughter? To have hair that smelled of your mother’s? To use the same soap? Or was it a shared passion, a shared frustration? Meg had never wanted to kneel in the dirt and plant bulbs like her mum; she longed to be considered—not with kindness, but with curiosity, with regard for her thoughts, with respect for her words.

Was that what the mess on the floor was? Evidence of a curious mind? Fragments of frustration? An effort to understand and explain? Were Meg’s longings akin to Esme’s, and was that what it meant to be a daughter?