The Transit of Venus

“Professor Thrale did not much care for the fact that Grace came from Australia. Australia required apologies, and was almost a subject for ribaldry.” 

Professor Thrale’s disparaging attitude towards Australia, a former British colony, is typical of upper-class Britons who are smarting from the loss of their empire and global influence in the postwar period. By resorting to jokes about a supposedly backwards and buffoonish Australia, Professor Thrale pretends that the old status quo is in place and Britain firmly superior in culture and power. He also makes it clear that Grace’s nationality is embarrassing to him. 

“He found these women uncommonly self-possessed for their situation. They seemed scarcely conscious of being Australians in a furnished flat. He would have liked them to be more impressed by his having come, and instead caught himself living up to what he thought might be their standards and hoping they would not guess the effort incurred.” 

Christian, who has been raised in the hierarchical British class system with all of its expectations of social deference, is shocked at how at ease in their own skin the Bell sisters seem. They do not feel that they have to apologize for what seem to him markers of social inferiority, such as being Australian or living in rented accommodation. Ironically, their confidence undoes his own, as he feels himself having to perform to impress them. This is one of many points in the novel where female confidence threatens men’s sense of their own power and position. 

“What was natural was hedgerows, hawthorn, skylarks, the chaffinch on the orchard bough. You had never seen these things but believe in them with perfect faith […] Literature had not simply made these things true. It had placed Australia in perpetual, flagrant violation of reality.” 

The Bell sisters’ education in Australia was so centered on British wildlife, literature, and ideas that it made them feel that their native continent was unreal and even irrelevant. While the sisters are able to dismiss much of Christian’s British snobbery, their education has nevertheless prepared them to feel inferior. It also prepares them to feel that when they arrive in London, they have gone from a backwater to the real world. However, the novel itself suggests that it is London that is stagnant and in need of the reinvigoration that the Bell sisters bring. 

“Since his moods had come to refer to her, his watchfulness roused Caro’s exasperation. As a child, Caroline Bell had abhorred Dora’s ceaseless scrutiny and the sensation of being observed […] with possessive attention. She now said to Ted what had been left unsaid to Dora: ‘You must not be so interested in me.’” 

Ted’s advances repulse Caro because his manner reminds her of her half-sister Dora’s overbearing behavior. As Caro has sought to escape Dora, she seeks to distance herself from Ted. Her need to protect her freedom at this stage is more important to her than her need for intimacy. This will change over the course of the novel.

“Tertia offered fingertips in a gesture not so much exhausted as reserving strength for something more worth while […] Having shaken hands, Tertia touched her bodice, her hair: an animal fastidiously expunging traces of contact.” 

Hazzard portrays Tertia, Paul’s fiancée, as the epitome of British aristocratic coldness. Tertia’s listlessness in greeting the Bell sisters indicates the low esteem in which she holds them (and others in general). Her gesture of touching her own person after the greeting indicates Tertia’s self-absorption and her sense that contact with the Bell sisters is in some way contaminating. Although Tertia is physically attractive, her fastidious manner is unappealing and no match for the effect that the more forthright Caro will have on Paul. Tertia’s indifferent demeanor also means that the reader does not judge Caro too harshly when she enters into an affair with Paul. 

“Only Charmian Thrale, at the open door, made a contrast between this auspicious arrival and the way in which Ted Tice had been washed up out of a storm; remembering how Caro had looked down that morning from the staircase, and gone away.” 

Charmian Thrale, the underestimated matriarch of the Thrale household, is there to witness how warmly the Bell sisters receive Paul in comparison to Ted. In a show of pathetic fallacy, the weather mirrors the women’s favorable response to Paul, whereas Ted arrives during a storm. The act of Caro slinking away at Ted’s approach indicates the extent of her dismissal of him.

“Sefton Thrale told Ted Tice, ‘Paul will make his mark.’ Like praising a pretty girl to a plain one. And yet there was the sense that Paul Ivory and Ted Tice were both marked men, and symbolically opposed. It was not merely that the world had set the two of them at odds. More irrationally, it seemed that one of them must lose if the other were to win.” 

Professor Thrale is more comfortable with upper-class Paul “making his mark” than with working-class Ted, his successor (and potential rival) in science. Paul’s success fits in with the worldview he knows. The analogy of pretty and plain girls is apt, as Paul also has the good looks that Ted lacks. However, the omniscient narrator positions the two men as equals, describing both men as “marked” and prominent enough to be “symbolically opposed.” In doing so, however, it also strips them of their agency; they go from men who will “make their mark” on the world to men destiny has ”marked” for particular and potentially ominous fates. The notion that one of them must lose for the other to win refers to both their status as love rivals and to their competing vision of the truth of Paul’s lover’s death. However, it also refers to the patriarchal pitting of men against each other as rivals.  

“As yet he and she had merely guessed at each other’s essence, and her show of self-sufficiency had given her some small degree of power over him—power that could only be reversed by an act of possession.”

Power play is at the heart of Caro and Paul’s relationship, as neither party feels comfortable with letting another person influence them. Paul finds that Caro’s apparent disinterest in any sort of commitment from him lends her a sense of power. The only way for him to regain control is to possess her, both in body and thoughts. 

“What were their overalls to me, who’d have given anything to see my mother in a decent dress? In themselves, rags confer morality no more than they do disgrace. The poor don’t want solidarity with their lot, they want it changed.” 

In a letter to Caroline, Ted writes about how patronized he felt when social reformers would come round to his childhood home dressed in overalls in order to make themselves seem approachable. Ted felt insulted by this allegedly empathetic gesture, given that he was hungry to better his position in life. He would rather have the dignity of his mother being well-dressed than see middle-class people dressing down and revealing their condescending and romanticized view of what it means to be working class. 

“He had opened her dress, and the exposed streak of flesh within outdoor clothes was oddly shocking. There was the loosed raincoat and red unbuttoned bodice, then the secret slit of white. Unlike many images of Caroline Bell he later sought to preserve, this one did fix itself in Paul Ivory’s memory: the stark wall, the stairs up and down, her red dress; and the flare of her breast which she left gravely revealed, like a confession.” 

Paul finds that this particular memory of Caro becomes reified in his mind. The raincoat, the red of the bodice, and the secret white slit form a memorable, painterly image. The idea that the exposed breast, which would normally tantalize, is “gravely revealed, like a confession” indicates that Paul and Caro’s love affair is less light-hearted than serious. They have gotten under each other’s skin and changed each other irreparably. The word choice is also striking; Caro’s “confession” is an unusual display of vulnerability from someone typically self-contained, and it foreshadows Paul’s later, literal confession of his involvement in his lover’s death.  

“Like a detective he noted callousness, the lover’s indifference to the unbeloved. And there is nothing I can do to alter or stop any of it. She can destroy me and there is nothing I can do. I can’t prevent her from sleeping with her lover this night, or from loving it and him.”

When Ted, who is ever the student of Caro, notes changes in her that signal a lover, he feels a sense of helpless despair regarding her feelings and actions. His feelings overwhelm him to the extent that he imagines that Caro could destroy him against his will. This foreshadows what Hazzard tells us of his future suicide in the second chapter; it is likely that an act or event relating to Caro kills him. 

“It is hard to say what they had least of—past, present, or future. It is hard to say how or why they stood it, the cold room, the wet walk to the bus, the office in which they had no prospects and no fun […] No two, however, were identical: which was the victory of nature over conditioning, advertising and the behavioral sciences—no triumph, but an achievement against the odds.” 

In this passage Hazzard zooms out from Caro to describe the lives of the generation of working women like her. They are in a struggle of endurance against sexist male bosses and low pay, and though it is a miserable existence in which they often lose their history and sense of the future, they feel compelled to go through with it. Despite the monotonousness of their days and the impossibility of advancement, the women maintain a sense of dignity through retaining their individuality. As individuals who keep their distinction in the face of all the pressures that would have them lose it, the women resist being swallowed up by a system that seeks to objectify them. 

“Caro would have known what to say: not the right thing, but the truth. Caro would have spoken truly or kept a true silence. In accepting to be the sweet one of the sisters, tame and tractable, Grace had by no means intended to cast herself away. She had enjoyed being sweet, and being thought sweet, but had believed she held in reserve an untapped bounty of more difficult humanity; which was not now forthcoming […] she could rouse no true instinct with which to feel his pain or comfort him.” 

When Grace encounters Ted in Harrods and has to break the news of Caro’s engagement to him, she braces herself for the awkward confession and imagines how Caro would have shared the news. However, she finds that she does not have Caro’s capacity for blunt words and candor, instead searching for a docile, feminine way of expressing the truth. She finds that her learned habits have nothing in them to comfort the rawness of Ted’s feelings. This is the beginning of Grace’s questioning of herself and the upbringing that has led her to be compliant.

“On Caro’s street, the houses were at first all the same, expensively uniform […] The last terrace was less regular, and when Ted came to Caro’s house it was to him lively and graceful—a vivacious child between stodgy parents. This was sorcery he could never get the truth of—whether the house was really distinctive, or if it was only for him it held incomparable charm.” 

Ted’s impressions of Caro’s house in New York City, a town where all the other houses are uniform, acts as metaphor for his continued love for Caro. Although Ted is a scientist who sets store by empirical observations, Caro confounds his perception of reality and causes him to wonder whether the distinction he sees in her house is real or the result of his bias. 

“He had heard that girls were ironing their hair that year, in order to wear it long and flat, but did not think that would apply to her. It would not be possible to do this oneself—perhaps their mothers did it for them. He tried to picture the little kitchen at Dulwich, neat as a new pin, the mother shapeless in a flowered apron, and she with her head laid on the ironing board. It was like an execution.” 

This passage shows the generational gap between Christian and the object of his affections, Cordelia Ware. While Christian finds Cordelia’s long-haired appearance ravishing, he is baffled by stories of girls ironing their hair straight and comes up with the hyperbole of an execution to describe it. The fact that Christian imagines Cordelia in her childhood home also indicates how much younger she is and his attraction to her youth. The comic misunderstanding between stuffy Christian and girls of Cordelia’s generation casts their affair in a humorous light, undercutting Christian’s self-importance.

“With features like hers she might have been sensitive. A generation earlier and this episode would have had to mean something to her. She would even have had to pretend it meant something to me. That deception is the one thing we are being spared.” 

Ted contemplates the generational change that allows one-night stands to be just that, unencumbered by pretenses of great romance. Ted, who is cheating on his wife and still hooked on Caro, feels liberated by this separation of sex from love. With this woman he meets at a conference, he can get his physical needs met while casting his emotional problems to the side.

“As she came forward she put her face to the cat’s fur, offering the caress her husband might decline. She shifted the cat in her arms, since it seemed to expect something more. Ted stood in the shade, by the table. They were quiet, facing each other: not united, not opposed. He said, ‘If you knew your beauty.’ Even the cat listened. Margaret said, ‘If I did, what then?’ ‘You’d set the world swinging.’ They knew he meant, You would find a man who truly loved you.” 

This passage shows the tragic understanding between Ted and Margaret: that she is lovely and worthy of love, but that he himself does not love her. The cat, which Margaret caresses instead of her husband, is an outlet for the love she feels she cannot show him. When Ted makes the comment about Margaret’s beauty, the anthropomorphized cat’s propensity to listen indicates the profoundness of Ted’s statement. The idea that Margaret could “set the world swinging” if she were free of Ted creates a sense of lost potential.

“Grace told him how her parents had died in the wreck of an Australian ferry when she was a child. Next—so it seemed, as she came to relate it—there had been Christian. Recounting these things, she felt her story was underdeveloped, without event. Years were missing, as from amnesia, and the only influential action of her life had been the common one of giving birth. The accidental foundering of her parents had remained larger than any conscious exploit of her own, and was still her only way to cause a stir.” 

When Grace meets Angus, a man she is interested in, she fears that the most interesting thing about her is the sudden orphanhood she faced as a child. She dismisses her achievements as a housewife and mother as uneventful, as though they merely happened to her passively. In fact, even the thing that distinguishes her was not the result of anything she or anyone else did; it was simply an “accident” that underscored how little control people have over their lives. The metaphor of amnesia relates to Grace’s sense that she has lost herself in service to others.

“In an oval mirror they had bought at Bath she saw the room, tame with floral charm and carpeted, like England, wall to wall in green. And herself, in this field of flowers—practically indistinguishable from cushions and curtains, and from ornaments that, lacking temperament, caused no unrest. In the mirror, she could see, rather than hear, her husband saying ‘Let’s face it.’” 

Grace’s view of her living room in the mirror indicates that she is distancing herself from her domestic life to observe it. The mirror, oval-shaped in approximation of an eye, offers a fresh perspective on Grace’s existence. She, an Australian, has been entirely “colonized” by and now blends into this room that is as green as the English landscape. The fact that she can see but not hear her husband indicates that she does not feel like a participant in the scene, but a passive feature of it.

“Had it been possible to observe their meeting from above or alongside, like a sequence on film, they would have been seen at first precipitate, heads lowered against weather; then slowed in realization; and finally arrested. The arrestation being itself some peak of impetus, a consummation. They were then facing, about a yard apart, and rain was falling on Dance’s hair and, like gauze, on Grace’s coat of calamine blue. Ignored, the heavy rain was a cosmic attestation, more conclusive than an embrace.” 

This moment of pathetic fallacy brings Grace, Angus, and their charged feelings for one another into confrontation. As they lower their heads to protect them from the inclement weather, the business of daily life ceases and they focus on each other. The liquidity of the rain also suggests the fluids of sexual consummation. This forms part of the novel’s idea that cosmic forces bring lovers together, although in this case, the figurative consummation is the only kind that ever takes place.

“He watched her red coat pass the barrier, move with the Down escalator, gliding, diminishing, descending: a rush-hour Eurydice. At the last moment she looked back, knowing he would be there.” 

This passage shows how Caro has come to depend on Ted’s affection for her; she looks back to confirm what she believes to be almost certain. This marks a turning point in the novel, just before she realizes that he is the only man for her. The classical allusion to Eurydice—the wife of the Greek poet Orpheus, whom he followed and attempted to retrieve from the underworld—emphasizes Ted’s continuous devotion and foreshadows that Caro herself may soon be dead.

“Now there was her ignorance of the greater, inner deception: that Paul had possessed her in the place—the room, the bed—of his lover. Her ignorance of his deepest pleasure.”

Caro is astounded to learn that the love affair with Paul that she deemed so important was, to him, a stand-in for his real greatest pleasure: his romantic relationship with Victor. While Paul was attesting to Caro’s being so unique, she was a mere substitute for Victor—a secondary presence in the room and even the bed that was designed for someone else. This diminishment of Caro and Paul’s affair paves the way for Ted to emerge as her only true romantic prospect. 

“In Caroline Vail’s own life and thought, Ted Tice had become supreme. Consciousness of Ted Tice was the event that pervaded her waking and sleeping life. His greatest strength had been his secret; his very truth enclosed his mystery.” 

Ever since learning that Ted kept Paul’s secret, Caro has become possessed by Ted. The man who once seemed too obvious a lover because he watched and scrutinized her unabashedly is now endowed with the seductive quality of mystery. She loves the fact that Ted has an inner life that she cannot know firsthand. Because of his complexity and ability to keep a secret, Ted becomes a man Caro can fall in love with.