60 pages • 2 hours read
Richard LlewellynHow Green Was My Valley
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Hiraeth (Cultural Homesickness)
Hiraeth is a word in the Welsh language that has no direct translation in English. The word combines several profound emotions, which all refer to a sense of longing and yearning for the past. This pained nostalgia also refers to a place that is forever consigned to the past, to which a person cannot return. Though the word hiraeth is not used in How Green Was My Valley , the sentiment is found throughout the novel and speaks to the cultural tensions between the Welsh and English. Written in the 1930s, the novel looks back to a version of Wales that vanished during the Industrial Revolution. While the small towns in the Welsh valleys were often founded due to their proximity to the coal mines, the changing nature of the mining industry and the exploitative treatment of the Welsh miners by English company owners led to the degradation and eventual abandonment of these communities. Late in the novel, the Home Secretary Winston Churchill sends a delegation of English soldiers and police officers to violently put down the strikes in the Welsh Valleys. This real-life incident is known as the Tonypandy Riots in 1910, the brutality of which led to a continued resentment of English presence in South Wales, a villainization of Winston Churchill, and the gradual degradation of the mining industry in South Wales. Just as the experience of the strikers is delegitimized by the powerful English, so too is the Welsh language degraded during the time of the novel. Even the title of the novel How Green Was My Valley is structured in the past tense, as the Wales and the valleys portrayed in the novel are gone forever; even as the Welsh people continue to live in Wales, their culture slowly and sometimes violent disappears and seems relegated to the past.
The theme of hiraeth also informs Huw’s character and explains the motivation behind his narration. Though he might never use the word, Huw attempts to keep his memories alive through his nostalgic recollections. His narration is conveyed from an unspecified point in the future, when the Valley has been abandoned and the slag heaps built up around the village are about to collapse and crush the homes below. The community, as it once was, is gone, much like the family members and friends who Huw describes throughout the novel. The reflective nature of the narration imbues Huw’s prose with a sense of longing and urgency. By documenting the forgotten lives of the Welsh people hidden in their remote valley, Huw hopes to preserve their memories for as long as possible. He is aware of the doomed nostalgia of his memories, and he believes that the only way to pay tribute to these people and their community is to ensure that their names are not consigned to the past. The novel becomes a living document as well as a story, a functional attempt to keep a dead world alive a little longer.
An important and cathartic element of hiraeth is the sense of acceptance of the discomfort of loss. Through his descriptions of his immediate surroundings and his narration of the end of the community, Huw acknowledges that his old life has gone forever. He has changed and the world has changed; the Valley, as it once was, is no longer a sustainable location for living in the modern world. By acknowledging the impossibility of return, by accepting that the past is an unreachable place, Huw is able to make his peace with the modern world. He grieves for everyone and everything that he has lost but rather than dwell on the past, he seeks to document the world as he experienced it. In doing so, he can keep these memories alive. The novel becomes an expression of the sense of hiraeth in Huw’s character, an outpouring of the grief and catharsis that he feels in telling the story of the people who shaped his life.
Cultural Identity Through Community
Though How Green Was My Valley is marked by grief for people and places which have gone forever, the novel takes care to cherish the community in which these people lived, specifically as that community creates a cultural identity. Huw is born into a small village in the Valley. The village is never given a name, referred to only as the Valley throughout. In this way, it functions as a stand-in for many such mining communities throughout the valleys of South Wales. The people of this small village are not rich in a material sense, but they are rich in their sense of strong identity. The people identify with the labor done by miners, the traditions of their faith, and the land itself. For pages at a time, Huw provides detailed descriptions of the community activities which bring everyone together. The choir and the rugby team are important elements of Welsh identity but, importantly, they are both low cost and communal in nature. All that is needed for a game of rugby is a ball and a field, while a male voice choir only needs time and space to practice their singing. The people of the Valley—and the Morgan family in particular—excel at both, with Davy representing Wales in an international game of rugby and Ivor being invited to have his choir perform in front of Queen Victoria. Central to all this is the chapel, the hub of religious devotion and the one place where the entire community gathers once a week. The chapel, the choirs, and the sports teams are expressions of the tight, self-sufficient, and proud community which the people built in the small valley in South Wales, illustrating the importance and power of the working-class community spirit.
The community is not only a way to bring the people of the Valley together in happy times. In adverse moments, the community also steps in to provide the safety net which is not offered to the people of South Wales by the government in London, which further solidifies their Welsh identity as one separate from the English. The mines may be situated in Wales, but they are almost all owned by Englishmen (or Welsh people with an affiliation with the English). When the workers go on strike, they no longer have their wages to pay for food and supplies. The community responds by emphasizing their unity. The same people who gather together at the chapel or play rugby together now help to provide one another with food, clothes, and labor. Beth and Bronwen go out of their way to cook and clean for their pregnant neighbors, while Gwilym provides financial support for the businesses struggling due to the strike. Reverend Gruffydd, even without the donations that keep the church going, does not cease in his devotion to the community and he helps that the people of the Valley make it through the difficult time with the minimum amount of suffering. Most evident of all is the choir. The men of the choir spend each night of the strike marching together through the streets, singing hymns to maintain the spirits of the community in the most trying time. Regardless of the circumstances, good or bad, the community supports one another.
The tight-knit nature of the community in the Valley is informed by the shared Welsh identity, particularly in opposition to the external English. The community draws a clear distinction between Welsh law and English law. The former is direct, self-governing, and often invented in the moment based on sentiment or religion, while the latter is external, alien, and slow to respond. When a girl is attacked, Welsh law leads the community to take action in their own right. When the English police officer arrives, the community ignores him. The community yearns for self-determination in the face of material poverty, particularly in comparison to the foreign English who own the mines and set the laws. The English outlaw the Welsh language in schools and beat children who speak it; such rules are even enforced by self-loathing Welshmen like Mr. Jonas. The Valley is a Welsh community, which speaks Welsh and practices Welsh law. England, to the community of the Valley, is a foreign and loathsome country.
Ill-Fated Love
How Green Was My Valley features many instances of love that is doomed. The relationship between Bronwen and Huw is a fundamental part of the novel, introduced when Huw first meets his sister-in-law when he is still a young boy. Though there is a large age difference between them, they are closer than many people in the family. While growing up, Huw never quite knows how to address his romantic feelings for Bronwen. After the death of her husband, Bronwen grows closer to Huw, and they form a co-dependent relationship which remains platonic despite their shared affection for one another. Each character refuses to disclose their love throughout the novel, though their feelings comes to a head in the closing chapters. After Bronwen receives marriage proposals from other men, Huw discovers that the people of the Valley are gossiping about him and Bronwen. The rumors suggest that they are a romantic couple, even though a man is forbidden by law from marrying his brother’s wife. Huw is shocked by these rumors. He believed that he had buried his love for Bronwen deep enough to hide it from the outside world. Bronwen is not shocked. She knows that Huw loves her, and she loves him too, even though he reminds her of her dead husband. This love is never fulfilled, and Huw mentions that Bronwen has gone away from him like so many others, providing something of a resolution. Similar to hiraeth, the ill-fated love between Huw and Bronwen is destined to exist a longing.
A similar relationship is found between Angharad and Reverend Gruffydd. Their age difference is even more pronounced, and, given that Angharad’s husband is still alive, the circumstances of any potential love are even more controversial. Angharad marries Iestyn because Reverend Gruffydd refuses her. To him, Iestyn is a match that will help Angharad’s family and keep her from the social shame of marrying a much older, much poorer village priest. Angharad accepts his choice, but her marriage makes her miserable. Later, when Iestyn goes to South Africa, she and Reverend Gruffydd indulge their affection for one another. Like Bronwen and Huw, their relationship becomes an item of gossip in the town. The rumors alone are enough to end the relationship. Angharad joins her husband in South Africa and Reverend Gruffydd is voted out of the church and shamefully departs for Argentina. Their love is ill-fated and they both accept misery. For a brief moment, however, they were able to enjoy each other’s company and imagine what their life might have been like together, making the fate of their love all the more devastating.
Love in How Green is my Valley is also tragically explored in the familial sense. Beth has a large family with many sons who seem to be following in their father’s footsteps. One by one, however, they all seem to leave her. She devotes her life to her family, and, over the years, her house begins to feel emptier and emptier as her boys grow up and move away. Beth never stops loving her sons but their physical removal from her tries her emotions. She feels lonely and strained, even though she still has family members around her. These departures take a toll on her mental health, and, by the end of the novel, she shows signs of a mental health crisis. When Huw goes to tell her about the strike and Gwilym in the final chapters, for example, Beth claims that her dead son Ivor is nearby. Her mind is fractured by the intensity of her love for her family and the way in which she is denied an opportunity to express that love, either by circumstance or fate. Beth’s love for her children is as tragic as the heartbreaking relationships between Bronwen and Huw and Angharad and Reverend Gruffydd; even if this love is not romantic, it is clearly unable to satisfy itself.
