The House with the Green Shutters was written as a response to the major changes of industrialism, capitalism and the loss of a spiritual centre in Scotland. When it was published, critics described the novel as an attack on the trend for ‘Kailyard fiction,’ which offered escape and security in an ever-changing world and catharsis against the pressures of life and a haven from Victorian doubt.
Kailyard fiction tended towards stereotypes of Scottish rural life, showing small communities working together to overcome life’s difficulties. In part, Brown’s novel is a reply to the Kailyard myth. In this novel there is no united community, instead there is only cruel gossip, the failure of youth and a yawning absence of faith in anything. Lacking the perspective of any social or spiritual context with which to view the world, Brown’s fictional village, ‘Barbie’, which may have been based on Ochiltree, has retracted to social competition. It is a nest of jealousy and spite, often expressed in the ‘barbed’ comments of the ‘bodies’ or local gossips. They are, as Brown phrases it, the ‘big men in the small world’.
Gourlay is the black cavity at the centre of that diseased society. The people resent Gourlay’s success, which is symbolised by his imposing house with the green shutters. Yet they fear him; he is the most successful among them because the desire for power and domination are greatest in him.
He is portrayed as a devil-like figure with almost demonic powers. This demonic figure can be traced in the writing of Burns, Walter Scott, James Hogg and R. L. Stevenson. The effect of this ‘unnatural’ driving force is that Gourlay strips the community of its own force and dignity. There is no ‘God as Father’ in the novel, no House of God, only Gourlay the patriarch and the House of Gourlay. The church exerts no influence in Barbie. The community is emasculated, divested of its own power: moral or otherwise. It is a community characterised by ‘gossipy’ or effeminate men who live in various states of fear. These ‘bodies’ are described as ‘old maids’ with ‘impotent’ power.
There is beauty in the novel but the tragedy is that the community, cut off from the powerful sources of natural order, are blind to it. Instead they are trapped by the small-minded insecurities of a society reigned in by a longing for money, progress and power. Brown blames this introverted lack of perspective upon the cult of individualism. His comments on ‘the Scot’ are rarely complementary.
Gourlay’s symbolic house is grand and orderly on the outside but chaotic within. Mrs Gourlay dotes on her son, so Gourlay, to spite her, rejects and criticises him. Stifled by maternal love and paternal domination, Gourlay Junior learns to stand in awe of his father’s wrath but to be fearful of life itself. He has an overdeveloped mental perception but his imagination is not a source of fertility and creativity. Instead, it is as barren as the desolate landscape depicted in the story he writes. The house has no fireplace, no warm hearth, no family heart, only ‘the gaping place where the warmth should have been.’ Temperamentally unstable, young Gourlay slides into alcoholism, and provoked by the ‘bodies’, murders his father in a fit of drunken resentment.
There are moments of redemption in the novel. Beauty and softness are there, but they are thwarted by pride and greed. The creation of the novel itself, the use of language and the structure all emphasise that creativity is not dead. The novel concludes that the house is the diseased heart of a society which no longer perceives external beauty. Yet, in the final sentence, there is a sense of hope; the house with the green shutters still blights the landscape but its inhabitants are all dead through murder or disease, and in its final, impotent artfulness, it sits beneath ‘the radiant arch of the dawn.’
