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Reading Anger in Contemporary British Women's Working-Class Fiction

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0 'The Red Light of Emotion'. Reading Anger in Contemporary British Women's Working-Class Fiction Patricia Ann Wheeler A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Hertfordshire for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The programme of research was carried out in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Humanities, Law and Education, University of Hertfordshire November 2004 Contents Acknowledgments i Abstract ii Introduction Realism and Representation:Women and the Working-Class Novel Pages1-36 Chapter I Anger and Anxiety: Gender and Sexuality in Working-Class Writing Pages37-69 Chapter 2 'An Orange Flame of Rage': Writing with a Vengeance Pages 70-101 Chapter 3 Pat Barker: The Reclamation of Anger Pages102-133 Chapter 4 Anger and Sexual Transgression: Pat Barker's The Man Who Wasn't There Pages 134-169 Chapter 5 Masculinity and Class Antagonism: Billy Prior, Working-Class Hero Pages170-198 Chapter 6 Anger and Alienation: Livi Michael's Invisible Women Pages199-227 Chapter 7 Angry Young Women: Recent Feminist Fictions Pages228- 256 Bibliography Pages 257- 277 i Acknowledgments With very grateful thanks to my two supervisors Dr Nahem Yousaf at Nottingham Trent University and Dr Sharon Monteith at the University of Nottingham (both formerly of the University of Hertfordshire). I fully acknowledge their academic guidance, their rigorous attention to the work in progress and their unfailing support and patience throughout the research and writing of this thesis. I hope they know how much their friendship and guidance means to me. I also thank David Wheeler for his continuing support and for finding the latest IT gadgetsto help in my writing, and for Emily and Benjamin Wheeler for trying to keep me on track. Thanks also to friends and colleagues,especially Simon Avery, Sally Wolstencroft, Pauline and Gordon Tumbull, SharonWilson and Marilyn Evans, for never letting me forget that I had to finish this one day. 11 'The Red Light of Emotion': Reading Anger in Contemporary British Women's Working-Class Writing. I Abstract This thesis investigates the representation of anger in contemporary British women's writing. It argues that Helen Zahavi, Pat Barker, Livi Michael and Anne McManus foreground anger (frequently materialising as anxiety and offset with humour) to pose a series of questions with regard to gender, class and sexuality and that they do so in contemporary 'versions' of the British working-class novel. In exploring the writing of Zahavi, Barker, Michael and McManus I define them as both feminist and working-class writers, but not in an absolute or inviolable way. In this thesis I am more interested in how anger, women's writing and the working-class novel offer what Mikhail Bakhtin calls 'a play of voices in a social context'. The introduction examines antecedent working-class novels and discusses the 4slipperiness' of such literary terms as 'the working-class novel' and 'realism'. I suggest that the male-authored working-class novels of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century frequently objectify the working classes and place working- class women within a literary straitjacket. Chapter I explores how working-class women writers have been silenced and are generally absent from a working-class tradition and explores notions of anger and anxiety that relate to their absence within the paradigms of more recent feminist theory. The subsequent chapters offer close readings of the writers under discussion to exemplify the ways in which their representations of anger offer original, inventive and complex interrogations of a range of issues. The final chapter draws on a range of recent fictions by women writers and argues that they use representations of anger strategically in imaginative and accessible narratives that focus on contemporary British society. 1Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London: Flamingo, 1994), p. 38. I Introduction Realism and Representation: Women and The Working-class Novel It would have been quite impossible for any of the poor, struggling coping women... to have won the time or the quiet to put pen to paper (Nicola Beauman,A Very Great Profession) Throughout much of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century working-class ' women's writing was rarely published. Women had little accessto publishers who, in any event, were not really interested in their (mainly autobiographical) work and working-class women and girls had little earning power and no 'spare' money for books (which could cost at least three to four times the averageweekly wage of a factory girl) or the magazinesin which many novels were serialised.2 There were, however, numerous novels written about the working classes,where working-class women (and working-class men) were habitually inappropriately and reductively represented.In his study of Victorian fiction, P. J. Keating observes that 'most working-class novels are... usually written by authors who are not working class, for an audiencethat is not working class, and character and environment are 3 presentedso as to contain, implicitly or explicitly, a classjudgement. The class position of the writer, the classposition of the consumersof the novels and the ideological position from which the novels were conceived are determining factors in the representationof the working classes.The novels were written for a minority of the population and they were driven by views of society that were determined by social, economic and political factors that frequently stood in conflict to their subject matter. While it is evident that cultural, political and economic relations oppress 'ordinary people', what becomes apparent in many of these novels is that working-class women are 4 more oppressedthan their male counterparts. This is evidencedin a range of nineteenth-and 2 twentieth-century novels. For example, Mrs Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) is a novel that is overtly concerned with class relations and throughout Gaskell attempts to evoke sympathy for the conditions of the working classes.5 However, she detaches herself from political attitudes towards the making of these conditions and makes John Barton the 'hero' of the novel insofar as he becomespoliticised, joins a Trade Union (pp. 59-60) and later becomesa Chartist and a Communist and is 'all that is wild and visionary' (p. 220). He has the vision and it is he who understands that 'class distrusted class' and that 'their want of mutual confidence wrought sorrow to both' (p. 220). It is his class antagonismthat is apparent;the only feeling he has is the 'clear and undisturbed... tumult of his heart' and the 'hatred of one class and keen sympathy with the other' (p. 219). Mary Barton is as much a victim of social, moral and economic injustices as her father; so much so that her oppressionmade her 'weary of her life' (p. 224). As with the majority of working-class women characters in what are termed 'condition of England novels' she is acted upon rather than being active herself and the fact that Mary escapesto a new life at the end of the novel does not really redressthe balance of representation.Again, in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (184 1) and Hard Times (1854) it is the working-class women (Nancy and Rachel respectively) who suffer extreme economic and sexual oppression. George Gissing's The Nether World (1889) depicts working-class women in the most abject circumstances:Jane Snowdon has to make a bed for herself each night 'dragging together a little heap of rags' (p. 11), and sleepson the floor of the Peckover's. Mrs Hewett is twenty-seven years of age 'but looks years older' and is 'wrapped up rather than dressed'. She has five children, one a baby who 'moaned at her 6 bosom in the act of sucking' (p. 16). It is the women here who carry the burden of abjection. In the twentieth century Robert Tressell, Walter Greenwood and Lewis Grassic Gibbon in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914), Love on the Dole (1933) and A 3 Scots Quair (1946) respectively, continue the somewhat restricted representation of economically and sexually oppressedworking-class women. In A Scots Quair, for example, Chris's father tells her 'I can do with you what I will'. He says she must 'come to him' and do what 'they'd done... in Old Testamenttimes'. She is forced to suffer his 'glooming and glaring... his whisperings' until all she could do was 'drag herself around.7 All of these representations of women fall into what Raymond Williams calls 'a choral mode, a generalising description... of attitudes towards suffering'. 8 They also represent a certain 9 attitude towards working-class women. Their misrepresentation in literature and more significantly, their absence from the analysis of culture is significant as literature performs what Catherine Belsey calls 'the work of ideology'. Literature not only represents 'a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action', it also portrays 'charactersand situations that are understandable',and offers an ideal position from which to debate the inequalities that feminists see as inherent in gender and class relationships. A reader who recognises the situation and the charactersthereby determines the 'truth' of a text. Belsey calls this person the 'knowledgeable reader'.10 Insofar as it is possible to say how a text will be read, realism is, or can be, the ideal medium for readersto reflect upon narrative and to read it in relation to their own subj ectivity, their own 'real' lives. Belsey's debate on classic realism in nineteenth-centurynovels seesthe predominanceof characters whose 'traits of character, understood as essential and predominantly given, constrain the choices they make' and whose development is always in relation to any given personality trait or situation." While this may be true of classic nineteenth-century novels such as those Belsey provides as examples, it implies that the 'knowledgeable reader' will find affirmation and recognition of themselves in these texts.
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