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Authorship and Strategies of Representation in the Fiction of A View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Open Research Exeter Authorship and Strategies of Representation in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt Submitted by Kate Elizabeth Limond to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in June 2017 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has been previously submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University Signature: ………………………………………………… 1 Abstract This thesis examines the portrayal of authorship in Byatt’s novels with a particular focus on her use of character-authors as a site for the destabilisation of dominant literary and cultural paradigms. Byatt has been perceived as a liberal-humanist author, ambivalent to postmodern, post-structuralist and feminist literary theory. Whilst Byatt’s frame narratives are realist and align with liberal-humanist values, she employs many different genres in the embedded texts written by her character-authors, including fairy-tale, life-writing and historical drama. The diverse representational practices in the novels construct a metafictional commentary on realism, undermining its conventions and conservative politics. My analysis focuses on the relationship between the embedded texts and the frame narrative to demonstrate that Byatt’s strategies of representation enact a postmodern complicitous critique of literary conventions and grand narratives. Many of the female protagonists and minor characters are authors, in the broad sense of cultural production, and Byatt uses their engagement with representation of women in literature to pose questions about how cultural narratives naturalise patriarchal definitions of femininity. That Byatt’s female characters resist patriarchal power relations by undermining the cultural script of conventional femininity has been under-explored and consequently critics have overlooked significant instances of female agency. Whilst some branches of postmodern and feminism literary theory have conceptualised agency differently, this thesis emphasises their shared analysis of the discursive construction of subjectivity, as it illuminates Byatt’s disruption of literary conventions. My focus on the embedded texts and the discursive construction of authorship in Byatt’s fiction enables me to address the 2 numerous paradoxes and inconsistencies in the novels as fertile sites that undermine Byatt’s presumed politics. 3 Contents Introduction 5 Chapter 1: A. S. Byatt: Texts and Contexts 24 1. Byatt Studies and the Politics of the Novel 32 2. Postmodernism and Byatt’s Fiction 47 3. Feminism and Byatt’s Female Characters 53 Chapter 2: History and Narrative in The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life 63 1. The Failure of History in the Embedded Text 71 2. Prolepsis and the Writing of National History 80 3. Women, History and Subjectivity 92 Chapter 3: Gender and Narrative in Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman 115 1. Regulating Gender Narratives in Babel Tower 124 2. A Whistling Woman, Gender and Narrative Strategies of Resistance 139 3. Rereading Endings 158 Chapter 4: Gender and the Act of Writing in Possession 164 1. The Economy of Literary Value in Possession 176 2. Narrating the Woman Author in Ellen’s Journal 185 3. Femininity and Reading Female Writing 198 Chapter 5: Narrating Subjectivity in The Biographer’s Tale 209 1. Structure and Unreliable Narration in The Biographer’s Tale 219 2. The Embedded Text and the Quest for the Referent 229 3. The Role of the Reader in The Biographer’s Tale 240 Conclusion 247 Works Cited 269 4 Introduction The novels of A. S. Byatt thematise the intersection between the contemporary period in which she published (1962 onwards) and the historical and literary antecedents that shaped the contemporary period. Her first two novels, The Shadow of the Sun (1962) and The Game (1967), are set largely contemporaneously to the time of publication. The Quartet, a Condition of England series, begins with The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and Still Life (1985), set in the 1950s, concluding with Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002), set in the 1960s. Byatt’s Booker Prize winning novel, Possession (1990), has generated the most critical attention and is a partly neo- Victorian work, following a double plot framed by the 1980s contemporary setting and the Victorian period. The doubled plot allows for reflections on and destabilisations of the ideological dominants of each period. The two complementary novellas that comprise Angels and Insects (1992) are not considered here but continue Byatt’s neo-Victorian experimentations. The Biographer’s Tale (2000) has a contemporary setting and represents the effect of inherited forms of narrative and how the present is partly constructed through historical (specifically biographical) representations in narrative. Byatt’s most recent long work of fiction, The Children’s Book (2009) is set at the transformation of the Victorian epoch into the Edwardian, up to the First World War. The novel uses its historical context to build on Byatt’s prior neo-Victorian concern with the lost voices of women, but also foregrounds the gaining momentum of emancipatory movements for gender, class and sexuality. All of Byatt’s novels feature characters who are authors, often portraying numerous authors of different genres and discourses, and she refers to their writing frequently, whether by description or embedding its text in the novels. 5 The texts by Byatt’s authors are significantly informed by literary history and their authorial ancestors; she uses this to explore the discourse of literature and construct the relationship between the novel’s setting and central themes. Authorship in Byatt’s major novels is the focus of this thesis. To take authorship as a theme is to draw attention to the key concerns of her fiction, the most prominent of which are evidence and truth, gender and subjectivity, as well as the practice of representation and its effects. The image of the author in Byatt’s novels has not been analysed in a long critical study that discusses The Virgin in the Garden through to The Children’s Book as yet, and this has led to slippage in how Byatt’s fiction engages with feminism and postmodernism. Critics of Byatt’s fiction recognise that there are problems with relating these fields to the novels, as Byatt has a complex relation to both. This thesis engages with particular aspects of postmodernism’s analysis of historical representation, particularly Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, as well as feminist theories of authorship, which will clarify the relevance of these fields of thought to Byatt’s fiction. This thesis will show, without claiming Byatt unproblematically as a postmodern or feminist author, that feminism and postmodernism can help to analyse the fiction by clarifying the construction of the novels and the status of authorship within them. This then helps to indicate, without resolving, some of the apparent contradictions of Byatt’s fiction, as the novels appear, at times, to equally endorse and criticise both postmodernism and feminism. All of the novels discussed in this thesis feature texts-within-texts – in other words, invented forms of representation embedded within the primary or frame narrative. These are always the work of her various characters, such as Olive’s fairy tales in The Children’s Book, and they comprise various literary 6 modes from the play within a play of Virgin to the embedded poetry of Possession to the pages of life writing in The Biographer’s Tale. The relationship between the texts attributed to Byatt’s characters and the novels that contain them is used to challenge and question the realist form of those novels and to destabilise the conservative politics perceived as inherent to realism. However, the conventional, inherited plots of Victorian realism significantly inform Byatt’s fiction, as does the deployment of characters that conform to the liberal-humanist definition of self, such as Roland in Possession and Phineas in The Biographer’s Tale. In his major study of subjectivity, Inventing Our Selves, Nikolas Rose notes that some thinkers reacted against the destabilisation of the core, stable, universal self in the twentieth-century and attempted to reassert a humanist selfhood against its detractors (5). However, as Rose states: “it has proved impossible convincingly to reuniversalize and renaturalize this image of the person as a stable, self-conscious, self-identical center of agency” (5). Part of the reason Byatt’s fiction appears reactionary are its efforts to stabilise a liberal- humanist self through realism. As a literary form, realism is perceived as valorising a model of self prior to the twentieth-century developments that destabilise the self as a coherent core of identity in favour of a new understanding of the discursive nature of the subject and of subjectivity. Catherine Belsey has noted that post-Saussurean linguistics questions expressive realism: “this is the theory that literature reflects the reality of experience, as it is perceived by one (especially gifted) individual, who expresses this perception in a text which enables other individuals to recognize its truth” (Critical 6; emphasis original). The use of realism and its conventional middle-class marriage plots, as well as of a stable liberal-humanist selfhood are, 7 however, complicated and undermined by Byatt’s strategies of representation. Byatt defines her approach to literature as “self-conscious realism” (Passions 4). It is the interrogation of authorship through the relationship established by the texts attributed to the characters and the novels that contain them, as well as other strategies of representation that Byatt’s employs, that makes her realism self-conscious.
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