Towards a Theory of Working Class Literature : Lewis Grassic Gibbon's a Scots Ouair in the Context of Earlier Working Class Writing

TOWARDS A THEORY OF WORKING CLASS LITERATURE : LEWIS GRASSIC GIBBON'S A SCOTS OUAIR IN THE CONTEXT OF EARLIER WORKING CLASS WRITING by Olivia Michael Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English October 1992 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis is dedicated to my husband, Ian Pople, for his constant support and occasional bullying. I should also like to thank: My supervisor, Dr. David Richards, for his invaluable help in gathering my scattered ideas into a coherent structure, Kate Swann for proof-reading, Andy Croft for advice, information and the loan of many books, and the librarians of the Working Class Movement Library, Salford, for their endless patience with my many enquiries. ABSTRACT The main aim of this thesis is to develop a theoretical approach to working class literature, up to and including the 1930's, in order to place Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Ouair within the context of working class writing. In developing this approach I have drawn on the critical models of Marxist, feminist, post-colonial and post-structuralist literary theories. These have enabled me to explore issues of economic marginalisation, imperialism and the construction of gender and identity, as raised both by Gibbon's distinctive narrative and linguistic style and by earlier texts. The main argument of my thesis is that many of the themes and issues found in earlier working class literature, such as poverty and unemployment, find expression in A Scots Ouair, and that Gibbon's narrative and linguistic style constitutes an aesthetic realisation of his political vision. In addition I consider the idea of silencing and ellipsis as a defining characteristic of Gibbon"s work and of working class fiction as a whole, affecting all aspects of a text, including the construction of identity, the presentation of plot and the narrative voice. In selecting a range of material from the eighteenth century to the 1930's, I hope to establish both the continuity between Gibbon's work and earlier texts and in the ways which his trilogy may be seen as a distinctive and innovative contribution to working class fiction. This thesis is my own original work. I have acknowledged in full all other reference works I have used. TABLE OF CONTENTS page INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I: THE FIELD OF STUDY 9 CHAPTER II: 64 LANGUAGE AND THE NATION CHAPTER III: 101 A POLITICAL EPIC CHAPTER IV: 152 IDEOLOGY AND INDENTITY CHAPTER V: 189 CHRIS CALEDONIA; COLONISING THE WOMAN CONCLUSION: 262 BIBLIOGRAPHY: 292 1 INTRODUCTION When I first began to consider Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Ouair as a possible subject for a thesis, I read the available criticism, and concluded that whilst the text had already been placed in the context of Scottish literature and of the literature of the 1930's, little attempt had been made to apply more recent literary theories to the trilogy. The Quair seemed to me to be a pre-eminently suitable text for the application of feminist, post-colonial and post- structuralist theories, raising as it does complex issues of gender, language and imperialism, and narrative structure. Using 'the speak' as a medium Gibbon decentres the unified subject with a single authoritative world view or version of history; thus his characters are frequently represented as being fragmented and unstable. As I became more interested in this area of study, however, it seemed to me that I could not ignore the subject of class. Chris's powerful presence in the Ouair is fascinating as a construction of feminine identity. However, the issue of how she is placed, or places herself with respect to the rest of society, her changing class position, seemed to be a fraught but crucial area within the text. And the same kind of difficulty surrounds her son, Ewan, who has a basically middle class upbringing, but who comes to identify himself (not unproblematically) with 'the keelies', and then with the organisation that will take control of the keelies come 2 the Revolution. On a larger scale also the uai concerns itself with the displacement of the Scottish peasantry and the way in which, dispossessed of their lands, they can only fit into society at the lowest economic level, as factory workers or the unemployed, as rank and file soldiers or as emigrants. The last book of the trilogy in particular concerns itself with the creation and politicisation of the industrial proletariat. Given that issues of class and dispossession seemed to constitute a central theme within the Quair therefore, I began to be interested in other novels written about working class life and economic deprivation. Although at this time I had limited knowledge of such novels, I was studying one book, Greenwood's Love on the Dole at approximately the same time as A Scots ouair, and was struck by certain similarities - the theme of the criminalisation of political protest, for instance, and the working class leader falling foul of the law. In addition both novels feature the strong presence of a female character who eventually surrenders both her place in the community and her identity. I thought it would be interesting to make comparisons between the texts and began to explore further into the idea of working class literature as a whole. Hawthorn's book, The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, convinced me of two things; firstly that it would be fruitful to apply a modern critical approach to the texts, and secondly that there were certainly more texts by working class writers than I 3 had ever realised. P. J. Keating's The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction also made me aware that the field was much larger than I had previously supposed, and the problem of finding some original texts rather than relying on critical studies presented itself. Initially I pursued publisher's lists to see which novels if any were currently available, and also sent lists to second- hand bookshops, but the results were limited (and expensive). Finally the existence of the Working Class Movement Library in Salford was brought to my attention, and my problem seemed to be solved; except that I was totally unprepared for the wealth of lost and neglected texts I found there. The more I read the more hopeless the whole idea of a thesis seemed to become. My primary difficulty was in setting boundaries for my study. Eventually I eliminated the middle class writer who had concerned him/herself with working class life, since most had received far more critical attention than the worker writers I was discovering. I also limited my study to those writers who preceded Gibbon, or who were writing in the same era; not on the grounds that Gibbon might have been influenced by earlier working class writers, it is almost certain that he was not, since he wrote extensively on a variety of subjects and most of his interests and influences seem to have been documented in his other writings, but in order to see what had previously been written about the issues of class, poverty, unemployment, etc.,. I hoped that this would 4 enable me to foreground the areas in which Gibbon had been innovative. Even given these parameters the field of study was enormous, and shapeless in the sense of being untheorised and therefore unstructured. The working class movement library has approximately thirty thousand documents on catalogue, including novels, poetry, autobiographies and political pamphlets, and a vast amount of uncatalogued material. The great difficulty however lies in ascertaining precisely which documents were actually written by working class writers rather than by writers who interested themselves in the working classes or in radical movements of various kinds, since much of the material either anonymous or has yet to be properly identified and referenced. I have ascertained the authorship of the texts I have used in this thesis, however, and from studying these texts it seemed to me, that it ought to be possible to theorise the field if for no other reason than the remarkable homogeneity of subject matter, poverty, alcoholism, unemployment etc., treated by each writer in a different way. The construction of a theory also seemed to be a necessary step before I could usefully place Gibbon's uair into a working-class context. Finally the parameters I applied were necessarily arbitrary; I stopped reading. There was enough material in the Working Class Movement library for to be me reading still without having written anything. I had to decide at some point that I had enough substance 5 for a thesis, and the guidance of those critics who had already made inroads into the field, Klaus, Vicinus, Ashraf, was invaluable here. I used their books in order to compare my own observations with theirs and to extend my knowledge of the field. It might be objected that there are many differences between Grassic Gibbon and earlier working-class writers; that his background was in the Scottish peasantry and in no way typical. However, my studies lead me to conclude that there is, in fact, no such thing as a typical working-class writer; that most have some additional factor to be taken into account, (nationality, region or trade for instance) and that it is more fruitful to consider the work from the point of view of the themes and issues it contains rather than the personal history of the writer. Having said this, a large part of my thesis concerns the issue of economic marginalisation as a primary category of experience, ultimately affecting the way in which perceptions are organised into text.

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