Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part VII

This is the final article in the series inspired by Stella Benson’s fantasy novella Living Alone. There is still more to say about Sarah Brown and the House of Living Alone and some related issues, and there is a very strange statement about the nature of reality that deserves to be highlighted.

Science fictional solipsism

The woman who holds the weekly gatherings where the occult is discussed is called Miss Meta Mostyn Ford. Miss Ford is the one who helps herself to a packet of magic powder in Angela’s absence and lets the magic loose, causing all sorts of damage.

She says something very strange while under the influence:

“No place and no person matters when I am not there. There are no places and no people existing where I am not. I have suspected it before, and now I am sure that everything is all a pretence, except me. Look how easy it was to dismiss that gross grocer from sight. He was just a bit of background. I have painted him out."

The ‘gross grocer’ is the Mayor, who was made invisible by her actions.

So while Sarah Brown believes that she is not real but most other people are, Miss Ford believes the opposite.

Such ideas remind me very much of themes such as constructed reality and pantheistic solipsism that are often found in science fiction.

Only the narrator or main character is real, everyone else is an actor or construct. The environment is all specially constructed too, like a stage set. The Truman Story is a good example of this. 

Robert A. Heinlein wrote a short story called They about a man who suffers from the delusion that he is one of the few ‘real’ entities in the universe, and that the other ‘real’ entities have created the rest of the universe in a conspiracy to deceive him.

I would not have expected to see similar ideas put forward as early as 1919. Where did Stella Benson’s inspiration come from?

The House: prison or refuge?

Miss Ford is one of the people responsible for the destruction of the House of Living Alone, which is owned by Richard the Wizard:

"’It was I who burnt your house down, Richard,’ said Miss Ford. ‘But it doesn't matter. It wasn't a real house.’

‘You are right,’ said Richard. ‘To such as you, dear Meta, it was not a real house. It was the House of Living Alone, and only to people who live alone was it real. It is dark and deserted now, and levelled with the cold ground; it is as though it were a tent, being moved from its position to follow the fortunes of those dwellers alone who wander continually in silence up and down the world’...He looked at Sarah Brown.” 

As previously mentioned, Angela the Witch says much the same thing just before she abandons Sarah Brown in New York:

"How can you ever be far from home, you, a dweller in the greatest home of all. Did you think you had destroyed the House of Living Alone? Did you think you could escape from it?"

This is all very alarming and depressing. It sounds to me like a pronouncement of doom, a sinister warning that people can run but they can’t hide and there is no escaping from this prison.

However, it could be taken as a reassurance that there will always be a special place of refuge available for any special people who need it. Perhaps they are saying that the House of Living Alone is an unreal home for unreal people.

Where did the idea of the House of Living Alone come from?

Is the House a metaphor for a desolate state of mind that people who are not real people will never escape from?  Or perhaps it is an inner state of self-sufficient solitude that they will always be able to escape to.

The story suggests that Stella Benson saw the occupants of the House as privileged rather than condemned to live there; for her the unique benefits outweighed the obvious disadvantages.

Sarah Brown: destroyed or set free? 
Is what happens to Sarah Brown all for the best in the end, or is she led by Angela the Witch to destruction? Burning her bridges behind her and losing what little she has seems like a disaster to me, but who knows how she would have ended up if she had never met Angela. Maybe Angela got Sarah out of a rut and opened new horizons for her.

Maybe Sarah’s doom, or at least a very restricted life, was determined by her personality or even predestined. Perhaps she always had and always would live in the House of Living Alone, and there was no escape or deliverance - or loss or expulsion - no matter what she did or didn’t do.

The title of the story

Stella Benson had this to say:

“I don’t know whether to call it Living Alone or Witches and Wizards. I think the latter.”

She changed her mind soon after this and the book was subsequently published as Living Alone.

This may be the last article that primarily consists of material from Living Alone and is based on the characters and storyline, but as the book contains a few more points of interest there will be further references to this strange story in forthcoming articles.