elfine on a hillside

 

The above video clip is from the film Cold Comfort Farm, in which Elfine explains how she must be alone on the hillsides to be with her poetry and her dreams.

Pagan sprite Elfine is only a secondary character in Cold Comfort Farm, but she has always intrigued me. And while Flora Poste is one of my favorite heroines in English literature, at heart I am much more of an Elfine.

I've been laid up with a back injury lately, on the sofa with pillows and DVDs. It has afforded me the opportunity to revisit some of my favorite films of yesteryear. And an especially beloved specimen is Cold Comfort Farm, the 1995 screen adaptation of Stella Gibbons' 1932 satirical novel.

Although the film takes liberties with Gibbons' original story, it is one of those rare instances where one is compelled to feel that the film made improvements. I hope this highly unorthodox sentiment does not prompt me to become expelled from the Society of Over-Scrupulous English Majors.

Kate Beckinsale is young, adorable and pitch-perfect as Flora Poste, a veritable goddess of good sense and modern efficiency. Flora visits Cold Comfort Farm--and proceeds to tidy up with dazzling success the Gothic excesses of her earthy Starkadder relatives.  

It is far from the typical scenario, where a young innocent is sent to live with distant kindred in a gloomy old house, and then falls prey to various terrors. Flora--known to the Starkadders as 'Robert Poste's child' --is uniquely unflappable and takes matters into her own efficient hands. She quickly and delightfully makes order out of chaos. She is such a marvelous character that by the story's end, I was yearning to go with her--flying off into more adventures in pragmatic miracle management.

But I'm a Bohemian as well as an English lit geek, so I cannot be completely content with all of Flora's improvements. 

When Flora gives Elfine Starkadder--the nature spirit and Emily Brontësque child of the moors--a makeover, she edits from the new-and-improved version all her wild and poetic ways. Flora certainly saw such inclinations as gauche and jejeune.  And thus Elfine is re-booted from a will o' the wisp into a sensible creature, a mannerly debutante to be received at the best houses. Thus, the transformed Elfine wins the heart of the local eligible bachelor. It is a sensible happy ending, and a triumph for Flora.

It is a more pleasing fate for Elfine than the one originally dealt her, undoubtedly, which is to be given in marriage to the loathsome Urk.  But the Bohemian in me mourns that Elfine might not go to Paris to become a dancer, Vienna to study dreams, or just to university to study poetry. She becomes a bland if socially-secure wife to a member of the local gentry. Quite sensible of her, too.

Alas, I cannot help feeling a pang of sad regret for the green-cloaked pagan girl on the hillside, ecstatic in her natural element, alone with her poetry and dreams--and for Elfine's lost Bohemian spirit. Could Flora not have left her alone?