Crome Yellow

Anne is the main female character in the novel. She is Henry Wimbush’s niece and the love interest of Denis, Gombauld, and Ivor. She is 27 years old and has light brown hair, an oval face, and blue eyes with long lashes. Her most unique physical feature is her smile, which Denis compares to a cat’s: when she smiles, her mouth is compressed, and two small wrinkles appear in her cheeks. The expression conveys both amusement and malice but is fundamentally mysterious and unreadable. The novel provides few details about Anne’s life away from Crome, but she implies that she has lived in London at some point when she asks Denis how London has been since she left. She also tells Denis that she is grateful not to have attended a university, and she is open about enjoying the type of popular literature that the more educated guests would not read.

Anne is simultaneously adventurous and reserved: She hurts her ankle running down the grass slope at night, for example, but she does not climb up the towers as several other characters do. She is described as having “many moods,” but she almost always seems in perfect control of her emotions (12). An exception is when Gombauld tells her that she is hurting Denis’s feelings by rejecting him: This visibly upsets her. She flirts enthusiastically with Ivor, Gombauld, and Denis but does not ultimately pursue a relationship with any of them; indeed, she tells them exactly why she is not interested in anything beyond flirtation. In the course of the novel, she and Mary develop a close friendship and help each other navigate their interests in various men.

Mr. Scogan, a middle-aged school friend of Henry Wimbush, simultaneously looks much older and “far more youthfully alive” than Henry (11). Small in stature with rigid posture, a beaked nose, and dry, scaly skin, he resembles “an extinct bird-lizard of the Tertiary” (11). However, he seems unusually confident about his appearance; during his fortune-telling act, he describes himself as “not exactly good looking nor precisely young, but fascinating” (149).

Mr. Scogan enjoys talking to the other houseguests and sometimes ambushes unsuspecting people so as to draw them into conversation. His conversational method typically involves taking a mundane topic and philosophizing deeply about it. For example, he uses the birth of a litter of pigs on Crome’s farm to begin a conversation about reproduction and multiplication; the conversation ends with a declaration that in an ideal society, families will no longer exist, and humans will be grown in bottles. While he offers his opinion about a variety of topics, he seems consistently interested in discussing the value of artificial, manmade objects over natural ones. He believes, for example, that both buildings and works of art should look artificial rather than imitate nature, and he prefers taking the Tube to taking the bus because when he is underground, he sees only manmade objects. His lengthy speeches about these topics allow the novel to foreground them as central to its thematic concerns, including The Nature of Art in the Modern World.

Mary is almost 23 years old but is often described as innocent, naïve, and earnest. She has large blue eyes and blond hair cut short so that it hangs around her face like a bell. She enjoys participating in the group’s conversations but frequently becomes confused, asking people to clarify certain points and seeming unsure if she should actually believe what they are saying. While nothing about her educational background is known, she seems to have read widely in psychology: she refers to Havelock Ellis and theorizes about sexual repression. She also talks fluently about art and tells Gombauld that she has spent time in Paris.

While Mary and Anne become close friends, most of Mary’s interactions throughout the novel are with men. She seems to have a complicated relationship with her own desires and is unsure to whom she is actually attracted. After deciding that marriage is the best way for her to shed the repressive elements of her sexuality, she pursues Denis, believing that he is a safe option. While that does not work out, the two reconnect at the novel’s climax, when Mary inadvertently prevents Denis from jumping off the roof, and the two share their painful secrets. When Mary convinces Denis to leave Crome and formulates the plan to enable his departure, she seems to enjoy the control she gains over him. It also helps her recover from the heartbreak she experienced at Ivor’s hands. Ultimately, Mary treats her relationships like experiments meant to give her more information about herself, but she still feels the very real emotions that accompany attraction, love, and betrayal.