Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Mgr. Tereza Výtisková
Englishness in the Novels of Angus Wilson Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D.
2016
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
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Tereza Výtisková
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank my supervisor, Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D., for his advice and encouragement.
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents ...... iv
1. Introduction...... 1
2. Angus Wilson and ‘Condition of England Novel’ ...... 5
2.1. Angus Wilson ...... 5 2.2. The Victorian ‘Condition of England Novel’ ...... 10 2.3. The Post-War ‘Condition of England Novel’ ...... 13 3. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes ...... 22
4. The Old Men at the Zoo ...... 37
5. Conclusion ...... 52
Works Cited ...... 56
Abstract ...... 59
Resumé ...... 60
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1. Introduction
In the contemporary world the issues of national identities and distinct national cultures belong to highly topical and widely discussed subjects. The impact of globalism, European integration or, most recently, new waves of immigration more than ever raises questions, such as what makes a nation unique or the importance of preserving those features that differentiate it from the other ones, as well as its sovereignty. Anti-globalization and nation-focused tendencies spread throughout Europe, which is most evident from the recent referendum on United Kingdom membership of the European Union resulting in vote to leave (Brexit). The question of Britain’s position within Europe and the rest of the world, including her national identity, is not unfamiliar, though, as it held significance already in the period after the Second World War. What it meant to be British and what relationship Britain had towards other nationalities and countries in post-war era is discussed in the following thesis, which aims to analyse the novels of Angus Wilson and their depiction of English society in the post-war period and its characteristic traits and issues, in terms of English national identity and English character. The thesis does not seek to define
Englishness, but, in agreement with David Gervais who in the preface to his book Literary Englands: Versions of ‘Englishness’ in Modern Writing observed that “a full treatment of ‘Englishness’ would involve many different Englands”
(Preface xiii), indicating the subjective and elusive nature of Englishness, rather aims to present Wilson’s perception of the post-war state of England as portrayed in his work. The thesis is divided into two main parts, the first of
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which seeks to provide a theoretical and historical background of the topic. The second part then deals with the analysis of Englishness on the example of two of Wilson’s pieces of work, namely Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and The Old Men at the Zoo.
The second chapter of the thesis introduces the author and the concept of ‘Condition of England novel’, which was employed by Wilson as a tool of commenting on the contemporary state of the nation. The chapter is comprised of three subchapters, the first of which is dedicated to the author himself and seeks to introduce Angus Wilson as a man and an author. Some biographical data and a brief description of his work will help to identify some of the topics he was concerned with, as well as reasons for his viewpoints. In the second subchapter, the Victorian ‘Condition of England novel’ is briefly characterized to introduce the concept itself as it emerged in 1840s England. The third subchapter then follows with the post-war version of ‘Condition of England novel’, which also contains some theoretical and historical background to the novels analysed in the second part of the thesis. Some of the most significant political, social and cultural changes that affected Britain after the World War II and that raised questions about the country’s nationality and its newly acquired position on the international scene are introduced.
In the third chapter the novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is analysed, which deals with Englishness through depiction of a wide range of characters from different backgrounds offering a picture of English society of 1950s and its characteristic traits and issues, as well as revision of traditional view of an
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Englishman. Reflections of shifting notion of national identity of post-war
England in the novel are also the subject of analysis.
The analysis of post-war Englishness as depicted in The Old Men at the
Zoo is the topic of the fourth chapter. Englishness is studied through comparison and contrast with the European counterpart, which is defined by characteristics unfamiliar to English. Through the symbolic meaning of the zoo possible forms of government of English society are discussed as options offered to Britain in post-war world order, as well as the reflections of anxiety about the diminished power of the country on the international scene and the loss of English identity within the integrated Europe.
In the fifth chapter a conclusion to the topic is presented which aims to summarize how Englishness is dealt with by each of the two novels separately and to define some issues and perspectives they both share.
Throughout my work on this thesis I drew on several secondary sources, among which I consulted the most these works:
Steven Connor’s The English Novel in History, 1950-1995 provides a thorough analysis of English novel in post-war period and the interaction between fiction and wider political, socio-economic and cultural context. The book, especially the second chapter “Conditions of England”, gave me an insight into the situation and development of English novel in 1950s and 1960s, as well as the issues it addressed, and also provided me with some observations that were useful for my analysis of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.
The book Society and Literature 1945-1970, edited by Alan Sinfield, particularly its second chapter “Literature, Politics and Society” written by
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Alistair Davies and Peter Saunders, from which I derived a lot of useful information about the major changes that affected the English society in 1950s and 1960s, as well as the major themes appearing in fiction of the time.
From the book Four Contemporary Novelists by Kerry McSweeney, which contains study of all Wilson’s novels, I derived information about Wilson’s development as a writer, as well as some of the topics he was concerned with.
Some of the points he makes about Wilson’s works I found useful for my analysis of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and The Old Men at the Zoo.
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2. Angus Wilson and ‘Condition of England Novel’
Angus Wilson started writing after World War II and soon became famous as a realist author presenting a satirical picture of post-war English society that was struck by changes induced by the war. In this regard he is often described as a writer of a ‘Condition of England Novel’, a form of social novel typical for the industrialist age appearing around the middle of the nineteenth century, which reappeared on the English literary scene in a different form after World War II. Even though separated by approximately a hundred years, the nineteenth-century ‘Condition of England Novel’ and its twentieth-century counterpart both emerged to cope with period of rapid social and political changes affecting the nation, in the first case caused by the
Industrial Revolution, in the latter by the Second World War. Therefore, after introducing some basic information about Angus Wilson and his work in general the following chapter will move to presentation of the concept of the ‘Condition of England Novel’, starting with the original version, followed by the post-war conception which will also provide the thesis with general social, political and cultural context of the post-war era.
2.1. Angus Wilson
Angus Wilson (full name Angus Frank Johnstone-Wilson) was born on 11
August 1913 in Bexhill, Sussex, as the youngest of six brothers, to his upper- middle-class parents, a Scottish father and a South African mother. As Peter
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Conradi writes in his biography of Angus Wilson, “Wilson inhabited many worlds” (1). Due to financial problems of the family the young Wilson felt the difficulties of impoverished life and spent part of his childhood living in “shabby genteel hotels of Kensington and the South Coast” (Conradi 1). Because of the frequent moving and the age difference that separated him from his older brothers young Wilson spent a lot of time with adults whose keen observer he became, and this experience, as Margaret Drabble writes in her article “’No Idle
Rentier’: Angus Wilson and the Nourished Literary Imagination”, “stocked Angus
Wilson’s imagination with some frightening visions” (120), visions that later served as an inspiration for many of his characters of various backgrounds in his short stories and novels.
He got his education at Westminster School and later at Merton College,
Oxford where he read English. In 1937 he started working as a librarian for the
British Museum. During World War II he was employed as a codebreaker at the
Foreign Office where, as Conradi observes, “he suffered a major nervous breakdown” (2). In his book Angus Wilson and His Works S. S. Agarwalla mentions that at the time of the collapse Wilson took up writing as a part of his psychotherapy (2). Wilson’s work for the British Museum, as well as the Foreign
Office provided him with understanding of bureaucracy administration system which he often criticizes in his novels. After the war Wilson returned to the
British Museum where he met his lifelong partner, Tony Garrett.
In 1949 Wilson published his first volume of short stories, The Wrong
Set, followed by Such Darling Dodos in 1950. His first two books of short stories
“brought him immediate critical recognition”, as Kerry McSweeney notes in his
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Four Contemporary Novelists: Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, V. S.
Naipaul (11). But as Margaret Drabble notes, Wilson did not settle for this fame and chose to “[draw] together the random subjects of his stories into a more comprehensive portrait of British life” (119-20). Two years later Wilson published his first novel, presenting a portrait of homosexual life in post-war
Britain - Hemlock and After. After publishing the novel he resigned from his work in the British Museum to become a full-time writer in 1955.
Wilson produced eight novels, each of which involved an extension of his range as a writer. Thanks to the varied scale of his topics and writing techniques, McSweeney takes the view that he was able “to keep from repeating himself” (10). McSweeney also argues that Wilson’s progress in novel writing mirrors post-war development of English novel itself (10). His first two novels, the second being Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, employ some of the social realism typical of nineteenth century novel writing. In his work Wilson was also partially influenced by the modernist movement, however, which he admired for its focus on inner self and consciousness of the characters, and “his attempt to combine nineteenth-century diversity with modernist depth” resulted in his third novel, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (McSweeney 10). Later in his lecture
“Evil in the English Novel” Wilson commented on this move when he described his idea of a desired form of English novel: “I should assert that the struggle to maintain this quality of felt life, this packed, dense world of manners, while somehow finding a place for transcendent values, must be the pursuit of
English novelists” (187).
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As Malcolm Bradbury observes in The Modern British Novel, “as the
Sixties began, Wilson signalled a sharp change in his work” (308). In 1961 he published The Old Men at the Zoo, a horror invasion story from future England where he attempted to retreat from the traditional style of writing which, in
Wilson’s words, “was inhibiting me [Wilson] from saying all that I wanted to say” (qtd. in Agarwalla 28), and where he “opened the way to the much more experimental, text-examining spirit of his later work” (Bradbury 309). Bradbury describes Wilson’s development as a writer as being marked by a shift from the
‘social novel’ to the ‘aesthetic’ one (369). Wilson’s work is characteristic of a successful combination of traditional themes with experimental methods.
Apart from his short stories and eight novels Wilson’s work also includes plentiful critical production in the form of articles, review articles, reviews, introductions, lectures, and interviews, as well as biographical studies of Zola1,
Dickens2 and Kipling3, not to forget The Wild Garden or Speaking of Writing, published in 1963, where he explores his own life and early work (McSweeney
11). He was also involved in a broad range of other activities, such as lecturing at English and American universities or participating in institutions like the Royal
Society of Literature or the Dickens Society. A homosexual himself at the time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, Wilson is also described by
1 Emile Zola: An Introductory Study of His Novels. London: Secker & Warburg, 1952.
2 The World of Charles Dickens. London: Secker & Warburg, 1970.
3 The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works. London: Secker & Warburg, 1977.
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Conradi as one of the first openly gay writers and a campaigner for a law reform in the area of ‘queer’ rights (1,2).
Despite the diversity of the areas he explored and the development as for the form of his writing, some themes and issues appear throughout Wilson’s work. He is often praised for his qualities of an observer and documenter of
English society, especially the middle classes, and “his own gifts as a ‘moral scourge’ and . . . his panoramic if not Dickensian sweep” (Bradbury 308). As “a comic writer, who can marry what is comic to what is painful and deeply serious” (Conradi 1), Wilson makes successful use of satire, combining criticism with comedy. No level of British society is spared from his criticism but Wilson is concerned mainly with upper-middle class whose characteristics, moral attitudes and values are scrutinized through the depiction of its representatives’ flaws. The accurate portrayal of British society, as well as the comical effects it entails, are achieved by utilizing Wilson’s talents for caricature and mimicry, in
Drabble’s words by “his skill for spotting the eccentric, for exposing oddities and inconsistencies of speech, dress and attitude” (“’No Idle Rentier’” 120). Since
Wilson himself was a supporter of liberal philosophy, the frequent question in his work is that of “the efficacy of the historic liberal tradition in British politics and culture” in post-war society, in the opinion of Alistair Davies and Peter
Saunders expressed in Society and Literature 1945-1970. Important topics of
Wilson’s short stories and novels are also violence and evil which his characters are often confronted with. Wilson’s concern with evil and its depiction by
English novelists was expressed in one of his lectures called “Evil in the English
Novel” where he explains why he decided to incorporate evil into his writing:
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I have been led to suppose that one of the troubles [of contemporary
English novel] is that we are too much concerned with right and wrong,
and not enough with evil. As an agnostic writer with apprehensions of
evil over and above my ideas of right and wrong, I have also been
concerned to try to find ways of introducing evil into my novels. (167)
Wilson’s works often deal with states of loneliness, inner confusion, doubt and other symptoms of failed life and its characters suffer a breakdown or crisis, being forced to define new selves (Conradi 1,6; Drabble, “’No Idle Rentier’”
119), whereas these crises are reflective of larger issues concerning social change and national identity.
2.2. The Victorian ‘Condition of England Novel’
The origins of the Victorian ‘Condition of England Novel’, which is also referred to as the social novel, social problems novel or industrialist novel, are associated with the period in history of Victorian England, sometimes known as the Hungry Forties, and works belonging to this type of fiction express a concern with the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution brought about a lot of changes in almost all fields of human activity and gave rise to new industrial towns which attracted workers from the impoverished rural areas. But
“so massive and rapid was the onset of the revolution”, as James G. Nelson writes in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, “that it created unprecedented and unfamiliar social and economic problems” (189). The standard of living was increasing but England’s economic prosperity was not shared with the poor.
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Rising population together with the shift of manufacturing to factories in towns led to the abuse of poor people who suffered from terrible working conditions in factories, low wages and miserable living conditions.
The 1830s and 1840s saw economic depression which resulted in food shortage and dismissal of many factory workers, which made the gap between middle-class people and workers even deeper. “The first great industrial depression [with] the increasing economic and social distance between the rich and the poor, as well as other ill effects of industrialization, gave rise to the so- called ‘Condition of England Question’” (Nelson 189), a term that first appeared in the 1839 work Chartism by Thomas Carlyle and that became the central theme of ‘Condition of England Novel’ which “was unique in its focus on social, economic, political, and even religious upheavals occurring throughout the kingdom” (Nelson 190).
The appalling conditions in which some of working-class people lived were the object of concern of a novel which became one of the principal works of the ‘Condition of England Novel’ genre, Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil: Or, The
Two Nations from 1845 where he claimed that in England people lived in “two nations”:
between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as
ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were
dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are
formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered
by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws. [...] THE
RICH AND THE POOR. (Book II, Chapter 5)
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In the novel Disraeli shows the huge divide between the two worlds by
“contrasting the palatial domiciles and idle, frivolous lifestyles of the nobility with that of the miserable dwellings of hard-working, deprived existences of both the industrial labourers […] and the agricultural workers” (Nelson 191).
Another classic work studying the horrible working and living conditions of working-class people during the industrial age is The Condition of the
Working Class in England published in 1845 by German philosopher Friedrich
Engels4, which is based on Engels’ experience from industrial Manchester.
Apart from those two authors typical names that are usually associated with the Victorian ‘Condition of England Novel’ include Charles Dickens,
Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley (Nelson 190). Charles Dickens’ Hard
Times, “a story of growing labor troubles in a desolate factory town named
Coketown”, was praised by George Bernard Shaw for its ability to “trenchantly
[expose] the villainy of the mill owners and their supporters and . . . sympathetically [reveal] the living and working conditions of common laborers”, as observe Claudia Durst Johnson and Vernon Johnson in their The Social
Impact of the Novel: A Reference Guide (94).
In Gaskell’s North and South cruel world of the industrialized north and conflicts between employers and workers in a northern town of Milton are depicted along with contrasting values of different sections of British society, which are by Helen Rappaport in her Encyclopaedia of Women Social Reformers
4 The English editions were published in 1887 in New York and in 1891 in London under the title The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
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described as “the complacency of the middle-class rural south [and] the vigor of the forward-looking, working-class industrial north” (Rappaport 252).
Kingsley’s Alton Locke tells the story of a young tailor with desires surpassing his social background who joins the Chartist movement, and depicts the English social system as ”productive of horrible working conditions, lack of sanitation, health and education, and thriving gin palaces, all of which elicit no concern whatsoever on the part of mainstream English society” (Johnson and
Johnson 89).
Common themes that writers of ‘Condition of England Novel’ engage with, according to Ian Ousby’s The Cambridge Paperback Guide to Literature in
English include “the use of power, mechanical and social; the sense of breach between man and man and the importance of healing it; the need for education; and the fear of revolution” (88-9). Apart from the concern with and portrayal of injustices and inequalities in terms of class, gender and labour relations, an important feature of the Victorian ‘Condition of England Novel’ is also an endeavour to promote changes and enforce reforms, mainly by addressing the middle-class readers and appealing for their sympathy with the disadvantaged, in the view of Johnson and Johnson “revealing that not only industry but government policy and the law itself were equally guilty for producing this indescribable inhuman horror” (90).
2.3. The Post-War ‘Condition of England Novel’
As I have tried to indicate in the previous subchapter, the ‘Condition of
England Novel’ that emerged on the English literary scene in 1840s dealt mainly
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with issues associated with the widening gap between the poor and the rich, caused by social, political and economic changes brought about by the
Industrial Revolution. The present chapter will focus on the period following the
Second World War when this literary genre came back to novelists’ attention and presented a form of coming to terms with contemporary state of the nation affected by the war. It will look at some reasons why writers of that time took up this traditional literary form again and also sum up major social, political and economic changes occurring after the war to provide more general context.
The Second World War had a massive impact on Britain’s both domestic and international affairs and is often seen as a landmark in the process at the end of which Britain lost its position of a political and economic superpower. As
Steven Connor puts it in The English Novel in History, the post-war development in Britain can be characterized by two words: “decline and transformation” (2). Although Britain was one of the war’s victors, the war efforts cost the country huge financial and material resources and 1940s were marked by austerity. The years immediately following the war, which are characterized by Alistair Davies and Peter Saunders as being dominated by “a wave of euphoria and optimism” (14), saw determination for political and social change motivated by the refusal to go back to the 1930s’ unemployment and poverty. This resulted in the landslide victory of the Labour Party in the 1945 general election. As Davies and Saunders observe, “new Labour government set about implementing the wartime reports, laying the basis for free and universal national health, social security and education systems, as part of a new welfare state”, which was accompanied by nationalization of some of the major
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industries and railway transport (14). The idea of the welfare state was continued by the Conservative governments which took office succeeding the victories in the elections of 1951, 1955 and 1959 and the whole decade was characterized, according to Davies and Saunders, “by a remarkable consensus between both main parties” whose agenda was aimed at implementing of “the principles of welfare-capitalism” (20).
In the 1950s Britain entered into an age characterized by Davies and
Saunders as one of “stability and affluence”, sometimes referred to as ‘a new
Elizabethan age’ due to the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 (20). The relative prosperity of British society in 1950s was captured in a famous phrase used by a British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, proclaiming that British people had
‘never had it so good’, referring to the growing British economy which led to the rise of income and living standards of the middle class and some sections of the working class in 1950s. Owning a home, a television or a car was not a privilege of the upper classes anymore. The increasing wealth of middle-class and working-class people contributed also to loosening of former rigid class system. Alan Sinfield in his “Culture, Consensus and Difference” notes that “a job, a pension or social security, a roof over your head, healthcare, education .
. ., these good things, which had been enjoyed customarily by the leisure classes, were now to be available to everyone” (89). However, as Davies and
Saunders observe, other issues connected with consumerism appeared, and focus on material values and feelings of alienation caused by it prompted young people to unite in various youth subcultures that started to emerge in the mid-
1950s (21).
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As far as the position of Britain in the post-war world is concerned, despite the optimism that was radiated by Winston Churchill’s speech from
1950, quoted in Menno Spiering’s book Englishness: Foreigners and Images of
National Identity in Postwar Literature and expressing the belief that Britain is the only country which lies at the intersection of and participates in “three great circles among the free nations and democracies” (26), it was soon clear that
Britain would not be able to keep up appearances. Britain’s post-war situation was aptly captured by Spiering who described Britain as “a second-rate power
[drifting] between the three ‘circles’: the United States, the Commonwealth
(and the remains of Empire), and Europe – unable to offer much to the one, unwilling to abandon the second, and indecisive about entering the third” (26).
As noted by Davies and Saunders, politically, ideologically and economically,
Britain had been oriented to the USA and in the post-war years British politicians counted on the ‘special relationship’ between the two English- speaking countries to maintain its importance in world politics (28-9). However, the international political scene was now dominated by new global powers, the
USA and the Soviet Union whose opposing world views, democratic capitalism and totalitarian communism, divided the east and the west with the ‘iron curtain’. The uneasy and gloomy nature of the cold war relations is depicted by
Malcolm Bradbury who speaks of “the ‘post-war world’ . . . born, in a web of confrontations, crises, and conspiracies” (266) and also marked by fear of nuclear weapon as entering “the Atomic Age [gave] human beings . . . the power of universal self-annihilation” (265).
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Once an imperial and colonial superpower, in the post-war arrangement
Britain could not afford its vast colonies anymore. The economic situation and growing nationalist movements in the colonies were some of the reasons why
Britain decided to withdraw from the colonized territories. In 1947 India became an independent state and, as noted by Davies and Saunders, in the following twenty years “the empire disappeared, to be replaced, sometimes peaceably, sometimes less so, by a Commonwealth of independent nations”
(15). The event that is often argued to eloquently characterize the position of
Britain as a former world power losing its political influence and force in the post-war and postcolonial period is the Suez Crisis of 1956, an armed conflict between British, French and Israeli allies and Egypt over the control of the Suez
Canal from which the allies’ troops quickly and with embarrassment withdrew on the grounds of negative response from the American and Soviet powers. As
Nick Bentley states in his study of the post-war era, in Radical Fictions: The
English Novel in 1950s, “this international political crisis revealed to the public, and to the government, that Britain was no longer in a position to enforce its colonial power militarily [and] also indicated that the age of British (and French) imperialism was coming to an end” (37). The Suez Crisis alerted Britain and its people that the delusional faith in the possibility of sustaining the Empire and the continuity with the past is not justifiable. 1950s and early 1960s were also marked by significant immigration from colonies and ex-colonies when high numbers of Asian and black population came to the colonial centre, which greatly affected perceptions of one’s national identity (Bentley 38).
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In 1957, the European Economic Community (EEC) was created as an organization of six rich countries of Western Europe aimed at support of economic integration of its member states. In 1960s British Labour government
(which took the office again in 1964) attempted to join the organization, which, in the view of Davies and Saunders, resulted from “the country’s economic decline and its lack of international political significance” (40). For sympathizers with the joining, the membership in a bigger European community meant, according to Davies and Saunders, the only way for Britain to “regain a voice in the modern world” and possibly to be able to compete with the world superpowers (40). The attempted entering into the EEC provoked strong opposition throughout British society which exposed “a strong sense of separation from Europe” that in Britain of 1960s was still deeply rooted (Davies and Saunders 40-41). After two unsuccessful attempts, when Britain’s membership was vetoed by the then French president Charles de Gaulle, Britain joined the EEC in 1973.
As far as the post-war era of British literature is concerned, it is often described as a period lacking any distinct fresh style (such as modernism of the twenties and thirties), a period employing traditional realist literary form rather than experimenting with it. According to Bradbury, the post-war years lacked a new generation of writers who would focus on creating something new and post-war novel “looked back to exploit what it had most of: the past” (277-8).
Similarly Bernard Bergonzi writes about the fifties as the age of “consolidation” and literary scene of the time views as a “convalescent” waiting for his
“strength [to return]” (qtd. in Bentley 15). It is certainly true that British
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literature was affected by and responded to the post-war changes in various ways. Many writers of the post-war era felt the need to record the social and cultural changes that were taking place in British society and cope with the decline of Britain’s power, and so instead of following the experimental style of the modernist movement they opted for “a more socially descriptive form of writing (Bradbury 304). The comeback of traditional nineteenth-century social novel was acknowledged by Wilson himself who in 1961 affirmed that:
The traditional English novel as practised by the great Victorians – the
novel with strong social implications, the novel of man in the community
rather than man in isolation or in coterie, the novel, above all, of firmly
constructed narrative and strong plot rather than verbal and formal
experiment – has made a triumphant return in England in the last ten
years. (qtd. in Bradbury 306)
However, to claim that post-war English literature exploited only the realist form would not be correct. According to McSweeney, Wilson himself, who admired modernist works for their deep psychological study of the characters, later attempted to combine the diversity of the social novel together with the psychological breakdown of his characters, and partially abandoned the traditional form in his novel set in the future, The Old Men at the Zoo (10-11)
(see chapter 2.1.).
Regardless of the form, it is obvious, as Connor argues, that “novelists after the war experienced a cautious return of the nineteenth-century aspiration to diagnose and display in fiction the ‘condition of England’” (45). The same as their predecessors in Victorian England, the post-war novelists felt the need to record and comment on the issues of the nation. The ‘condition of England’ that
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they sought to depict did not refer to the divide between the poor and the rich anymore, the post-war ‘condition of England’ was read in terms of pre-war and post-war states, the past and the present. As Connor puts it, the post-war condition of England was thus “one of marked and troubling transition and redefinition” (45). Welfare state, new prosperity, changing class system, educational opportunities for the working class, together with the decline of international influence and loss of the Empire stirred the established ways and norms and called on the need to redefine what it meant to be British and what
Britain’s position within the world was, as well as to come to terms with the imperial past. Novelists writing under the tradition of ‘Condition of England novel’ seek to draw a representational picture of England and Englishness of the post-war years, reckoning on what Connor describes as “the potential of the novel to imagine, project and preserve forms of national and collective identity”
(47).
After the war the concerns with national identity and the need for its reformulation, which were provoked by the major changes in British society, occupy a significant part of literary works of the time. Menno Spiering argues that in ‘Condition of England novels’ “the characters’ personal crises and their resulting quests for their true identity are correlated to discussions of national crises in England and questions concerning the true national identity” (7). Nick
Bentley states that anxieties about English identity project themselves in literary works as narratives of “transition, evolution, fragility and death” (46). Both views indicate the changing nature of Englishness of post-war era which goes
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hand in hand with the need to define its relationship to the established
Englishness of the past.
The ‘Condition of England novel’ re-emerged on the English literary scene in 1950s as an instrument for reflecting the contemporary state of the nation affected by social, political and cultural changes, as well as for expressing the concerns with Englishness and English national identity. In this regard Wilson’s post-war novels, even though different in their form, can be classified as ‘Condition of England novels’, and following chapters contain analysis of two of them, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and The Old Men at the Zoo.
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3. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
Angus Wilson’s second novel, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which was written in 1956, is a record of the English society of the 1950s, when the main story takes place. Due to its vast scope, covering characters from various strata of society, the novel examines state of the nation, with its characteristic traits and issues of post-war era. Wilson’s satirical scrutiny of post-war Englishness gives a rather unflattering image of English society and reveals a post-war crisis of national identity.
In Anglo-Saxon Attitudes Wilson focuses on the upper-middle class of
English society which still enjoys the benefits of the rank. However, the comfortable life of the upper classes, set securely in English environment, living in country houses and posh flats, spending unearned money, being attended to by personal chauffeurs and servants and reading The Times with a glass of gin or whiskey is in clear contrast with ‘ordinary’ and existential problems of real people living on the margin of English society. The novel provides portraits of several minor characters which are all tied to the fraud in the centre of the novel and which all together offer a picture of temporary England. By including characters holding lower social status or belonging to different minorities, such as an Irish homosexual thief or a cockney speaking lavatory attendant, Wilson manages to portray the real society in its diversity, and while depicting his characters with comical and satirical craft he points to some of their shortcomings and gives us a critical picture of Englishness.
The protagonist of the novel is Gerald Middleton, an ageing, upper- middle-class historian who in course of his life repeatedly fails to confront the 22
truth. At the beginning of the novel he is introduced as a man of “mildly depressive temperament” (3), “a man with large enough private means to scorn complaints against taxation as vulgar and irresponsible” and as “a sixty-year-old failure . . . with a conscience” (5). So far, Gerald has not been able to live up to expectations in either of his roles, as a husband, father, lover or historian.
Gerald tries to avoid reality; however, it keeps haunting him in the form of self- recrimination. As observed by S. S. Agarwalla, Wilson employs here, similarly as in some of his other novels, “the theme of the wasted life” (63), where evading the truth and self-deception seem to stand at the centre of the novel and the criticism of the English middle classes which Gerald represents.
Self-deception takes many different forms in the novel and is performed both in public and private spheres by various characters of different social backgrounds, most apparent of which is the one of the protagonist. Gerald’s inability to face the truth lies in two spheres, in the private and the academic lives which are interconnected by the character of Dollie, Gerald’s lover who is also linked to the academic world as a daughter-in-law of Gerald’s mentor,
Professor Lionel Stokesay. In his private life, Gerald lives estranged from both his wife and his children who all despise him (which is exemplified by the fact how John feels about intimacy towards his father: “a confidence to Gerald appeared to him as something very strange, almost incestuous” (86)). Gerald married his sentimental Danish wife, Inge, as a reaction to having been rejected by his only true love, Dollie. Settling for the second best option, Gerald hopes that his wife will at least provide him with a comfort he needs to focus on his academic career. However, despite his widening dislike of his wife, which
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even develops into disgust, and restoration of his love affair with Dollie, Gerald is able neither to end the marriage nor to confront Inge with his suspicion about Kay’s accident, for which he blames her and which created a barrier of miscommunication between them. The ignorance of non-functioning marriage and maintaining of love affair with Dollie leaves everyone, who is affected by these relationships, aggrieved and injured.
The second serious mistake of his life that Gerald strenuously ignores has to do with an event which lies at the centre of the novel’s plot, the 1912
Melpham excavation of the tomb of an important seventh century missionary,
Eorpwald, which revealed a pagan figure – “little wooden fellow with the respectable-sized piece” (168). This figure, as Gerald is told by his friend and the son of the archaeologist excavating the site, Gilbert Stokesay, was planted there by himself as a form of “a mammoth practical joke” against his father
(165). However, this find drew the attention of the whole scholarly world as it casted doubt upon Christian foundations of the country, which is most apparent on Rose Lorimer, an academic whose obsessive interest in paganism was launched by Stokesay’s find. Since Gilbert died before the novel opens, in the
First World War, Gerald remains the only person, or that is what he initially thinks, aware of this fraud. Partially because he was told about the secret by drunk Gilbert and is not sure of its validity and partially because of his reluctance to “[upset] the balance of the English historical profession, destroying the reputation of a remarkable historian like Stokesay” (164), Gerald remains silent but the suspicion that Gilbert was telling the truth lies heavy on him.
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Living in a self-delusion that none of these problems exists and driving off any reminder of them (like those many American students who Gerald rejects pleading that seventh century history is not his field), Gerald keeps himself in depression and acts as a hypocrite. In his case hypocrisy appears to acquire even higher significance because from the position of a historian and a scholar Gerald represents values of truth and honesty, as he himself asserts in the second part of the novel where he sets out to cope with the unpleasant truth: “If an historian has any function at all, it is to maintain honesty” (285).
Academics might be even more prone to hypocrisies since scholars are held in high esteem by the public who attribute them with almost godlike features, which is apparent from the attitude of the Kershaws when they meet Gerald as they “put on a pious church-going face in reverence for higher education” (88).
Wilson himself noted in his interview with Frederick P. W. McDowell that “the universities and education in a humanist world have, in some degree, taken the place of the church and religion” (McDowell 85). Thus, there is a serious conflict between the values that Gerald stands for as a scholar and the way he behaves in his personal life. As Wilson himself comments on this ignorance of reality
Gerald is “practising the final hypocrisies of the educated and the worldly” (qtd. in Swinden 142).
In a way Gerald leads a double life but he is not the only one. As Steven
Connor suggests in The English Novel in History, 1950-1995 this “divided identity, or blocked self-knowledge” manifests itself by “the division between a disruptive sexuality and the forms and requirements of social life, as seen in the various sexual irregularities and infidelities upon which Gerald broods” (51).
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Apart from his own affair with Dollie, the novel reveals other instances of this doubleness. Gerald’s son Robin, married to a French catholic Marie-Hélene, seems to reproduce his father’s pattern as he is involved in a romantic relationship with another woman, Elvira Portway, and since his wife’s religious beliefs reject the possibility of a divorce, on the outside he carries out his duties of a proper husband, which is apparent for example on those many soirees for important people that Marie-Hélene organizes where the married couple has to save face. Another such example of divided identity can be found in Gerald’s other son, John, a popular television and radio celebrity who hides the fact that in his personal life he is a homosexual. Inge Middleton, who is unable to come to terms with the fact that she harmed her daughter Kay when she was a little girl, and that her marriage fell apart, is stuck in her sweet, cosy, illusional world, completely separated from reality and expecting love from everybody to be compensated for all the injustices in her life.
The depiction of English flaws is not limited to upper-middle classes, though. Frank Rammage, for instance, runs several houses for “petty crooks, drunkards, tricksters and middle-class down-and-outs” (50) but this altruistic activity is exercised to redeem him from his guilt of inheriting money from
Canon Portway, whom he left to his fate. Frank’s humanism is more a form of self-deception, a way to evade an unpleasant truth about himself. Snobbery, one of the post-war misdemeanours that Wilson hated the most (he noted that
“three sins I detest most in England today [are] snobbery, intellectual dishonesty, and the so-called realistic cult of the expedient” (qtd. in Agarwalla
33)), is in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes exercised throughout the social spectrum. Mrs
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Salad, a working-class woman who made her living as a lavatory attendant, cannot conceal her prejudice against foreigners and her snobbish views when she attributes coarseness of Inge’s hair to her foreign and peasant origin – “I thought it wasn’t just foreign. That’s very common ‘air if you’ll excuse my saying so” (137).
Even though the general impression of post-war Englishness depicted in
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is rather critical, Wilson does not moralize and he lets his characters point out the wrongdoings. Patrick Swinden notices that in Wilson’s stories and novels often appears a character, usually female and young, who is
“eager to dispel the deceit and hypocrisy of those around her” (130). In Anglo-
Saxon Attitudes this role is conferred to Elvira Portway, Robin’s mistress who criticizes the English for being egocentric (196), provincial (198) and prone to moralizing (197). She herself is described as a socially superior snob, “I like everything to be as luxurious as it can be” (196), who believes that she is better than others, however, she is the one who demands of Gerald to act responsibly.
Apart from the breadth of characters, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes manages to depict the post-war atmosphere of rapidly changing country and, to provide the novel with sense of inclusiveness characteristic for ‘Condition of England Novel’, it reflects different political, cultural and social attitudes and streams current in post-war England. The novel reflects the atmosphere and state of England as of a country “fighting for its life” (70) after the war has “destroyed vitality, happiness and life” (78). Clear distinctions between classes are still evident in the novel but it also recognizes the social change. The changing character of
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traditional arrangement of English society, which is being replaced by a
“modern, topsy-turvy social order” (24), is acknowledged by the characters themselves, which is evident from the feelings of one of the younger historians,
Jasper Stringwell-Anderson, about his and his colleague’s political preferences:
“Jasper, in fact, rather delighted in the fact that Theo, with his working-class background, should be so staunch a Tory, while he had always voted Labour”
(24).
Nostalgia about the past is manifested by some of the older characters of approximately Gerald’s age who were growing up in different England of the beginning of the century and for whom the changes are the most perceptible, such as Lilian Portway who spends her days “wander[ing] back in memories” and has to have the present administered by her friend Stéphanie (76). Past values clash with the modern ones, instance of which could be the contrast between business philosophies of the pre-war generations represented by
Gerald’s father’s focus on an individual, as “he never allowed the interests of individual human beings, of his workmen and so on, to be subordinated to more powerful interests” (113), and modern impersonal, alienated attitude focused on the economic needs of the country, presented by Robin Middleton or Donald Consett who hold the view that “the lesser has to be sacrificed to the greater” (115). Davies and Saunders describe this new post-war world, presented in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, as “brutal and morally impoverished modern industrial world” where “the state, big business and even the press
[vie] for control” (36). The oppressive bureaucracy, an undesired product of the
Welfare State, is portrayed on “a case of tyranny and injustice in [the]
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overgoverned England” (4), the case of Harold Cressett, a market-gardener who is abused by the Civil Service, which typifies John’s campaign for defending individual rights against arbitrariness of the state and commercial entities; even though it is made clear, for instance by Elvira Portway’s scolding of John:
“Helping individuals against State tyranny, the unit against the monopoly, talent against money power, the old radicalism and all that. It was all right up to a point, when it was simply attacking abuses in the House, but then you found radio and the newspaper” (61), that he only uses the incident to gain publicity for himself through media.
As noted by Harry Blamires, the sense of typicality is also provided by “a variety of types representative of cultural currents in English life from high- powered scholars to second-rate novelists, from the disciples of Bloomsbury to those of Wyndham Lewis” (229), Bloomsbury tradition being endorsed by Elvira
Portway and Wyndham Lewis admired by Gilbert Stokesay. The novel also depicts the world of historians and academics and their image in the post-war era. Wilson’s fictional world of scholars, which was according to Margaret
Drabble inspired by “scholars from Oxford, from the Museum, from the
Warburg” (A Biography 200), is subjected to his criticism. In the novel, the historians’ reputation is harmed by the fraud and Gerald himself has to rediscover his belief in scholarship that he used to possess at the beginning of his career when he wrote a distinguished work on Cnut, as well as come to terms with the intellectual dishonesty of his mentor whose last years of career were marked by “a growing distaste for accuracy, a wider and wider canvas, a life of conferences and pious platitudes” and by his inclination towards
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cooperation with Nazi Germany (113). The historians surrounding Gerald are portrayed as a strange and sometimes even ridiculous group, including highly satirized Rose Lorimer, “outrageously odd”, “mountainous” woman dressed in
“old fur coat, making almost no pretence of the large safety-pins that held it together” (11), whose idealization of Celtic Church and belief in conspiracy of
Roman Christian Church “to suppress historic truth” (215) have robbed this considerable scholar of pre-war years of her sanity. Gerald’s antagonist, grave and arrogant Professor Clun, a bully in his domestic world, views the scholarly world as an elite sphere exclusive of young scholars who do not possess “depth of scholarship tried over years of organized research work” (211), or “breadth of humane study which commands literary ability, worldly experience and all the other penumbra of scholarship” (212). With his focus on facts and rejection of abstractions as being “inapplicable to the study of history” (210) he seems to represent the opposite approach to history of Professor Stokesay’s inclination to wider connections.
Many authors are in agreement in their view that besides analysing
English moral stands and hypocrisies Anglo-Saxon Attitudes also reflects questions of national identity. Dominic Head in his The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction argues that “Wilson makes the dilemmas of another
English liberal speak to the larger problems of nationhood” (21). It could be argued that Gerald’s crisis of consciousness resulting from his living in a lie symbolizes the crisis of identity which England was experiencing in post-war years. Same as Gerald the country has to come to terms with its present situation and break away from its past to be able to prosper in the future. At
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the beginning of this quest for the truth of Gerald’s he returns in flashbacks to his past experiences. This process of recalling Gerald’s memories is, according to Steven Connor, “offered as a model for a much larger act of cultural self- understanding [which] is necessary, both to connect the past with the present in a significant and honest fashion, and to loosen the condition of historical fixation” (50). Connor also adds that this lingering on the past is in the novel humorously manifested by different forms of blocked body functions, such as speech disorder of one of the side characters, Barker (50), who worked as a driver on the Melpham estate where Eorpwald’s tomb with the pagan symbol was found, helping Gilbert with its recovering. After Gilbert’s death Barker is the only living witness of the fraud but due to his paralysis, “Father’s paralysed.
He’s lost his speech” (321), the truth about the fraud remains untold.
The key for the ability to successfully cope with the past and not to live in self-deception (on personal or national level), that the novel proposes seems to be the acceptance of one’s responsibility. As Head states about Wilson’s novels, “the possibility of low impact living, and the social disengagement it implies, is exposed as a false option” (33). In the second part of the novel
Gerald decides to confront the unpleasant reality and act to set things right. He accepts the truth and assumes responsibility for the current state of affairs in his family and professional life. His detective efforts finally reveal the truth about the Melpham fraud, which provides Gerald with some inner peace and restores his faith in the importance and validity of his historical discipline. That is demonstrated by the fact that he accepts the chairmanship of the Historical
Association from resigning Sir Edgar Iffley (395). In his domestic affairs, he
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attempts to get involved in his children’s lives when he tries to protect John and
Inge from being manipulated and harmed by Larrie or when he advises Robin against sacrificing his relationship with Elvira to non-functioning marriage, as well as to revive his relationship with Dollie. His efforts in personal sphere do not prove as satisfactory as his professional achievements but in general Gerald is much more balanced and he decides to do what he has “always wanted”
(395) and flies to Mexico to seek some “pleasure” (395).
Alistair Davies and Peter Saunders, who read the novel in terms of a failure of liberal humanism, liken Gerald’s ignorance of the truth to liberals’ underestimation of the dangers of European fascism in 1930s (37-8) and mention concerns of post-war intellectuals, Wilson being one of them, with the validity of traditional liberal values in the latter half of the twentieth century after the terrors of the Second World War (38). They conclude that Anglo-
Saxon Attitudes indicates sustainability of the liberal tradition as long as it, apart from focusing on “psychological complexity of the individual”, also embraces “individual’s social and political obligations” (Davies and Saunders
38). They add that “the wellbeing of a ‘civilized’ society . . . could be sustained only by the active and critical participation of individuals” (Davies and Saunders
38-9). Responsibility and sceptical awareness, which are exercised by Gerald, are in contrast with ‘cosiness’ which in Wilson’s work stands for the equivalent to strongly negative concepts, like “evil”, according to Swinden (145) or
“escapis[m]”, in the view of Conradi (4), and which is in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes represented by Inge Middleton who, unlike Gerald, is not able to reinvent
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herself and keeps herself locked in the “world of indulgent sweetness and syrupy intimacy” (108).
The crisis of Englishness and English identity is in the novel re-enacted also in the archeologic fraud. Head argues that “the historical implications of the hoax are enormous, since it suggests that the accepted version of the conversion of Britain to Christianity may be flawed” (21). Eorpwald was a missionary who contributed to establishment of Christian religion in Anglo-
Saxon period of Britain’s history which is sometimes being associated with the origin of a nation state. Given that history of a nation is believed to present one of the elements that constitute national identity, a fraud from these early times of English nation would certainly affect today’s notion of Englishness. In fact, the impact of history on nationhood is supported with a real fraud, ‘The
Piltdown Man’ scandal, which, as noted by Margaret Drabble, served Wilson as an inspiration for Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (A Biography 201). The discovery of a human-like skull which could mean the missing link between human and ape took place in Sussex in 1912 and established Britain as an important place in human evolution. When it was disclosed as a forgery in 1953, “during [the] period of declining national prestige, the loss of such an apparently significant memory affected not only scholarly reputations but also national pride and the country’s view of its place in the world”, as observed by Huw Marsh in
“Unlearning Empire: Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger” (163).
The question of to what extent a person should rely on their nation’s history as far as one’s national consciousness is concerned, raised by Anglo-
Saxon Attitudes, is dealt with by Connor who ponders on “the authenticating
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force of historical origins in a narrative of Englishness” (49) and concludes that
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes “suggests that such appeals to origins always run the risk either of fraudulence and self-delusion . . . or of the discovery that, at the point of historical origin, where identity should spring single and entire, it is in fact composite and compromised” (49-50). In the novel, two historians manipulate history, one faking it (Gilbert) and the other concealing the fact that important information about English past is counterfeit (Gerald). There is no genuine, first-hand source of knowledge of historical events, it is mainly through historians, as well as literature, that we learn about our origins. Besides the issues with authenticity of historical events there is always a threat of their false presentation or interpretation, either by historians themselves or by authors of (historical) fiction, which can be marked by a tendency to eliminate unpleasant or undesirable facts, same as Gerald did with his memories. Writers of fiction are in the novel represented by Clarissa Crane, a novelist whose work on the Melpham discovery is, according to Connor, “an example of [a] vacuously sentimental generalisation” (56). Authenticity and credibility of historical facts is doubted by the chairman of the Historical Association himself,
Sir Edgar, who responds to Clarissa’s complaining that she was not able to finish her novel because of the fraud revelation (“No more fiction for me now, historical or otherwise, just dreary old fact”) as follows: “You are lucky . . . to be able to distinguish between them” (396). In this respect, Anglo-Saxon
Attitudes seems to question the extent to which history should be taken for granted and should constitute a nation’s identity.
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The title of the novel itself, which is a phrase borrowed from Lewis
Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, is quite revealing about Wilson’s conception of Englishness. The phrase ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes’ indicates behaviour that is considered typically English and in accordance with it Kerry
McSweeney writes that apart from “the Anglo-Saxon period, the subject of the researches of Middleton and his colleagues” the title also refers to “the complex of attitudes and prejudices that made up the English temperament of the
1950s” (15). However, the title can also refer to the fact that today’s
Englishness is a result of historic blending and mutual affecting of different peoples with different cultures, such as the Germanic tribes of Angles or Saxons which had inhabited the British Isles since the 5th century. According to Connor,
“the attitudes and identities of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ are themselves a matter of uncomfortable adjustments to and relationships with other peoples, even and especially with the ‘Saxon’ adversary who seemed the opposite of the principles of Englishness” (49). Taking into account the uncertainty expressed about establishing national identity on the grounds of historical origins, Anglo-Saxon
Attitudes seems to advocate the notion that there is no such thing as pure
Englishness, the notion which was aptly captured by Daniel Defoe’s famous satirical poem The True-Born Englishman: A Satire where English race is depicted as having “Deriv’d from all the nations under heaven” and speaking
“Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English” (8). The significance of the role that other nations played in history of England and establishment of Englishness is also supported by appearance of many foreign characters in the novel with nationalities of countries that had strong impact on the development of English
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nation, such as Robin’s wife Marie-Hélene or Stephanie Houdet and her son
Yves, with French origins, Inge Middleton from Denmark, or professor
Pforzheim from Germany.
Even though Anglo-Saxon Attitudes seems to be ironical and sceptical about the whole concept of Englishness, as Connor notes it does not refrain from employing popular stereotypes about national character for comic purposes (58). According to professor Pforzheim, for instance, typical
Englishmen despise showing off (24) and delight in “a joke against themselves”
(27). In Elvira Portway’s case, decent English behaviour based on “a nice
English girl’s upbringing” (57) is contrasted with cosmopolitan Bohemianism
(57, 58). English sentimentality (69) is confronted with French logical and cold temperament, represented by Marie Hélene who understands family bonds as duties, defeating her broke aunt who has survived Auschwitz in a lawsuit only to offer her money afterwards because it is the right thing to do (69), and who is able to dispassionately accept her husband’s infidelity and justify it as
“Robin’s indulgence of lust” (68). It could be argued that foreign characters in the novel serve to provide the otherness which can highlight some elements of
English character when comparing and contrasting it to the foreign counterpart.
Post-war England’s “continuing disdain of foreigners” (Connor 49) could be traced in the way these non-English characters are portrayed like there is something wrong with them. The most evil personalities in the novel are possessed by foreign characters, like Yves Houdet or Larrie Rourke.
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4. The Old Men at the Zoo
The novel The Old Men at the Zoo, first published in 1961, is an allegorical fiction from the near future, set in England of the 1970s and depicting a dystopian society attacked and violated by European troops. The story revolves around the London Zoo with its management and employees which the author uses as a model of England itself and as a metaphor for the decline of the Empire. Through the depiction of the Zoo Wilson offers a picture of English society and its character. At the same time, placing the story into the future, as for the timeline, and into a war conflict with united continental
Europe, regarding the context, the author reflects concerns with future close co-operation and unification with the rest of Europe which could result in losing
English uniqueness and identity, whereas this Englishness is in the novel defined negatively in contrast to European characteristics.
The novel opens with a scene where the main character of Simon Carter, the Zoo’s administrative secretary, learns about a young caretaker, Filson, being unhappily and tragically killed by an old and ill giraffe. The incident provokes different reactions from the management of the Zoo, as well as fellow employees, which immediately introduces the readers into the situation at the
Zoo and gives them the first idea of the novel’s characters’ relationships, motivations and aims. Simon, in the beginning determined to investigate the affair thoroughly and find the person truly responsible for the disaster, encounters some resistance and unwillingness from the side of the men who govern the Zoo, who are in many instances referred to as “the Old Men”, especially the Zoo’s director, Edwin Leacock, who needs to avoid any public 37
inquiries in order not to threaten his project of creating a Natural Reserve where all the animals from the Zoo should be transported.
The first half of the novel then follows the events leading to and succeeding the opening of the Natural Reserve, until the project fails and
Leacock is forced to resign from his position of a director and his chair is seized by Sir Robert Falcon whose idea of a perfect Zoo is represented by an old- fashioned Victorian garden. During preparations for The British Day, on the occasion of re-opening of the London Zoo, England is hit by a nuclear bomb and Simon, trying to protect at least some of the rare animals from the hungry and savage Londoners, embarks on a journey to the country where he gets ill and is saved by a country woman and her son. After arriving back to London,
Simon finds himself in a totalitarian system under regime of continental Europe, with Dr Englander as the current director of the Zoo.
As mentioned above, The Old Men at the Zoo makes use of allegory and, often, comedy to convey more complex and serious notions and issues in a way more easily comprehensible to readers. Even though set in the future, the novel is usually not interpreted as a work of prophetic or predictive aims. Evelyn
Waugh, who was very fond of the book, observed that “Old Men at the Zoo is not a novel like Brave New World or 1984 in which a warning is offered of the dangers to posterity if existing social tendencies fructify” (qtd. in McSweeney
28). Wilson’s depiction of the events around the London Zoo should rather be read as an exaggerated and satirical portrayal of the current state of England and its society, where the zoological gardens serve as a metaphor for the country and its management, which is in agreement with James Wood’s
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statement expressed in his article “An Activity Not an Attribute: Mobilising
Englishness” that “Angus Wilson has used ... a zoo as an explicit microcosm of
England at a time of emergency” (58). In the narrative of the Zoo’s management, the author also explores the position of a man as an object of the exercised power and the relation between freedom and restriction or the instinctual and rational sides of a man’s life.
Given the time when the novel was written (after the Suez Crisis), it could be also argued that the different schemes of governing the Zoo, represented by its directors throughout the story, symbolize the country’s post- war impotence (which is metaphorically conveyed by the death of young Filson who was killed by a kick to his testicles) and indecision about its future direction, related to the need to define her new position in the world. As Kerry
McSweeney argues, “it is in these figures [the directors] and their different conceptions of the Zoo, not in the futuristic background elements per se, that the novel’s parabolic suggestiveness concerning the condition of England is found” (28-9). Thus, Wilson uses the Zoo’s administration as a means of surveying the post-war state of the nation.
The first of these conceptions belongs to Edwin Leacock, the man at the helm as the story opens, whose dream is to replace the “minute spaces” (114) of the Zoo’s pens and cages with a National Wild Life Reserve at the Stretton
Estate where animals from the whole world – British, European and exotic - should roam freely. As observed by S. S. Agarwalla, all the directors of the Zoo realize the need to exercise some kind of control over the animals (99),
Leacock’s vision, however, most gravitates towards freedom and natural life of
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instinct. Limited Liberty, as his scheme is called, is in Leacock’s mind the only way to “restore the psychic balance, the soul’s health of a very sick civilization”
(118). Leacock perceives England as a nation affected by illness, which he views in the “modern strangled, frustrated existence, . . . dismal, hopeless claustrophobia” of life in a city (113) marked by expansion of technology and business to the detriment of English countryside, and the cure to which he finds in balancing the modern claustrophobic way of life by keeping in touch with nature in its untamed form, by getting to “know animal life as it should be known through the senses and the instincts” (118). If we admit that the London
Zoo represents the nation, Leacock’s liberal conception of “a new and revolutionary relationship between wildlife and the British public” (193) might, according to Menno Spiering, advocate the coexistence of British people together with other nations that do not come from British Islands in “a free and multi-racial society” (133). Patrick Swinden views the wildlife reserve more as a typically Wilsonian experimental place which is artificially created within and isolated from the society to try the notion of freedom in practise (140).
However, as noted by McSweeney, Leacock is “an old-fashioned liberal, big on visionary schemes, but . . . politically and morally naïve” (29), and thus his idea of Limited Liberty proves to be rather foolish in the end as some of the animals manage to escape the Reserve, which causes distaste and anxiety among the public. The wildlife reserve also turns out as not being beneficial to political goals of Lord Godmanchester, the president of the Zoo and the owner of the
Stretton estate, who decides to sacrifice the Exotic Park to his resolution to
“save the country” (225). Thus, it is inevitable that, finally, a free society will be
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corrupted from the inside or will yield to the influence of the outer world. The naiveté of a concept which provides the individuals with too extensive liberties is also manifested on the example of Leacock’s nymphomaniac daughter
Harriet, a supporter of absolute freedom, who is ironically killed by her dog when she is devoting to sexual pleasures with it.
Leacock’s opponent and his successor in the position of a director,
“famous soldier-explorer” (27) Robert Falcon, holds a totally different view of the Zoo’s conception, and thus represents an opposing philosophy of what should be the best course of action for post-war Britain. After being appointed,
Falcon, an admirer of the glorious times of the British Empire, who is in the novel described as an “extremist neo-Victorian” (165) “[belonging] to the old order of things” (26), starts working on the transformation of the place to a
“revived Victorian Zoo” (18) in effort to “bring back the good old days” (230).
“Bobby’s nostalgia for the past” (29) is evident also from the way he dresses in his “small, curly brimmed bowler hat, his broadly checked tweeds, his umbrella, gloves and vivid chestnut suede shoes” (33). The re-opening of the Victorian
Zoo is to take place on a so-called British Day that should commemorate and celebrate the old British Empire, with the entire opening show, as well as all the exhibitions focusing exclusively on Britain itself and her colonies - with fireworks inspired by “a British lion and an Indian elephant” (253), with “birds from every corner of the earth that was now or ever had been British” and with “strictly
European animals or those creatures . . . whose species had never known the glories of British rule [being] temporarily banished to a remote corner of the
North Side of the Gardens” (254). In terms of the novel, Falcon’s views
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represent the belief that Britain’s golden age lies in the vanished and glorious time of the Empire which, as at the London Zoo, may still be brought back.
However, like the vision of liberal and open society this glorification of
British past does not show to be realistic, either. At the time when the process of the Zoo’s transformation is finishing, the relationship between Britain and
Europe is escalating and finally grows into an open war conflict, with British cities and ports being bombarded. Resolved to realize his dream of opening a
Victorian zoo, desperate Robert Falcon launches the illuminations, music, as well as the fireworks prepared for the British Day, and thus attracts bombs which destroy the whole Old Victorian Zoo. This dramatic and violent passage, the message of which Spiering summarizes with: “The Empire days of yore are gone forever” (134), expresses Britain’s realization of its diminished power in the post-war period and unsustainability of the Empire, most notably after the
Suez Crisis.
With dismissal of Britain being a free and open country or becoming a mighty country from the times of the Empire again, Wilson offers a third option which is the most pro-European of all three and which is, paradoxically enough considering his name, represented by Dr Emile Englander who manages the
Zoo at the time of European occupation of Britain. Dr Englander, curator of reptiles, is portrayed as a snobbish old materialist who thinks that society can make better use of wealthy rather than intelligent people (46). His ideal model of the Zoo is based on close cooperation between the Zoo and private sector, with activities of the Zoo being funded by business companies, in the manner of
France or Germany where “they get three times the salary and six times the
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laboratory grant. But then they are subsidized, by chemical firms, pest control producers, and patent medicine companies” (47). Englander embodies a pro-
European attitude which is clear from his admiration of European business skillfulness or from his approach to the London Zoo which is planned to re-open on a so-called European Day, offering “the exhibition of European fauna only”
(315). He regards England’s act of making peace with Europe as “com[ing] to its senses” (305), which shows his conviction that England is not able to act reasonably on its own and will be better off as a part of a bigger European whole.
As demonstrated above, Englander is the advocate of necessity and beneficial effects of collaboration with the rest of Europe but his interests lie more in the economic and business sphere. In contrast, another character symbolizing European values, Mr Hilary Blanchard-White, one of the Uni-
Europeans who “organized a lot of the underground work” (305) and as a kind of a reward was appointed by the Government to a post of an advisor on public exhibitions, including zoos, is in his view rather uncompromising and brutish.
Although English, he chose to live his life in continental Europe rather than in
“illogical, sentimental England” (309), so it is not surprising that the concept of a zoo he tries to realize in Regent’s Park does not come out of the English tradition. Far from that, it is inspired by ancient Roman menageries where animals were kept to be used in gladiator fights which served as an amusement for emperors and common people, as Blanchard-White intends to arrange combats with political prisoners fighting for their lives against wild animals:
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I shall select only the most splendid physical specimens of both sexes,
the youngest and the strongest, those in fact most qualified to give the
longest and most charming spectacles when pitted against the lithe
grace of the leopard or the clumsy tenderness of the bear. This will be
something truly Roman, truly European in its majesty. (340-41)
In Blanchard-White’s view, the ideals of a civilized society derive from the ancient Roman civilization, with brutality forming a significant part of its principles, which England “has been moving for so many centuries farther and farther away from” (309).
Though evident dissimilarities can be noted in the Zoo’s models of
Blanchard-White and Englander, as well as in their approach to the incorporation of Britain into the European Federation, in The Old Men at the
Zoo both characters stand for evil European values that threaten the British way of life. The manner in which the two pro-Europeans are depicted, and even more importantly the omnipresent theme of fear of war against Europe resulting in invasion of Britain by European troops and subjecting Britain to the
European regime, reflects the anxiety of losing English identity, present in
English society. Concerns connected with Britain’s integration into Europe and their projection into The Old Men at the Zoo are mentioned by Alistair Davies and Peter Saunders, according to whom “Angus Wilson expressed his deep reservations about British entry to the Common Market” in a symposium on the
European Question conducted by the Encounter (41). Similarly, in his book
Corridors of Mirrors: The Spirit of Europe in Contemporary British and Romanian
Fiction, Pia Brinzeu summarizes the message of The Old Men at the Zoo saying
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that “the danger of an evil continental spirit should make the British avoid any entanglements” (27).
Apart from these reflections of political situation at that time the unfavourable depiction of Europeans in the novel reflects on Englishness and does so by contrasting the English values and culture with their European counterpart. The opposing nature of Englishness (Britishness) and
Europeanness is discussed by Pia Brinzeu who states that “both Englishness and Britishness insist on the insularity and non-Europeanness of Britons
[whose] mentality is clearly marked by isolation from the continent and by the obvious feeling that they are different from the rest of Europe” (27). To support this statement he mentions the results of the survey conducted by Encounter to discover British intellectuals’ opinion on the question of Britain joining the
European Economic Community which revealed a belief that “the English character was pragmatic and democratic, whereas the Europeans were . . . prone to absolutism” (Brinzeu 27).
European character is in The Old Men at the Zoo firstly represented by
Mr Blanchard-White (double white) who suggests that English people need “to see justice done and to have a little fun” (310), where, on the example of the combats of a man against a beast described above, justice is done by sending traitors, unwilling to support the regime, to certain and horrible death, and thus a little fun is offered to be enjoyed by the compliant Englishmen who are ready to free themselves from the English puritanism: “in throwing off the puritan legacy, we get closer to the rich vein of Mediterranean brutality on which our
European legacy so much depends” (310). Europeanness embodied in
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Blanchard-White is established on viciousness and malevolence. Even though the Uni-European Blanchard-White represents the bestial evil in the story,
Wilson makes evil part of the English society, too. Evil and violence is present in a number of scenes, such as when Leacock orders to exemplarily kill the harmless refugee lynx or when Matthew Price is brutally killed by a mob of
Londoners. The European regime is portrayed as inhumane and cruel but its establishment was made possible by complacency of the English, personified in
Simon who adaptively works for each of the directors and zoo conceptions.
Unlike Blanchard-White, Dr Englander does not identify himself with the brutality of the latter and Simon Carter more than once expresses his sympathies and his faith in him, “he was a model of competence, good sense, and, above all, moderation” (314). However Englander never defies Blanchard-
White’s ideas actively and, at the court summoned to inquire into the practices performed at the Zoo before the liberation, claims in his defence that he considered the gladiator fights a joke. Englander is portrayed as a hireling, “If I was in charge here, we’d have cash from every big company that thought they could make use of us” (46), and an opportunist taking advantage of a situation to pursue his personal interests disregarding morality of his actions. Despite calling the Uni-Europeans “scum” (331) or “a product of violence” (306), in order to retain the dinners of porterhouse steaks in times of starvation and other privileges (303), Englander is willing to compromise himself with the totalitarian regime. Another example of his calculating nature could be found in his refusal to help a colleague from the Zoo, who was arrested for no reason, because he did not want to risk harming his position: “But one thing I promised
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Harmer was that we wouldn’t on any account kick against the pricks at the moment” (331). These characteristics correspond very well with Englander’s zoological discipline, as his position at the Zoo is the curator of reptiles.
The otherness of Englishness in relation to Europeanness is also obvious from the attitude of the English characters in the novel towards the ones that represent Europe. As Spiering remarks:
It will be clear, then, that in this novel the English basically are not like
the ‘Europeans’ Englander and Blanchard-White. They instinctively
dislike the insensitive, over-rational herpetologist, and only a handful of
misérables follow the cruel Uni-European leader. (139)
When marching into the Zoo on European’s Day reopening, Blanchard-White’s followers, the Uni-Europeans, are depicted as “sad-faced men and women of every age; they were the handicapped or handicap prone in all their many kinds, the ranks of those who had been our proles ever since the end of the
Hitler war” (321). The reactions of “the important people” watching the spectacle reveal somewhat amused, yet slightly concerned impression: “I can’t think where they’ve found them all from. I hope we shan’t see them march about too often.” (321) More severe anxiety about the European regime is expressed by a member of the Secretary’s Office, Mrs Purrett, who tearfully makes a prediction about the London Zoo: “They’ll change it. They’ll do something terrible with it” (324).
After the pro-Europe regime is established, a much more significant role is handed over to the police which is now present everywhere. During the speech made by Englander on the ceremonial European Day, two people from the crowd responding with exclamations like “a London Zoo and a free England” 47
are brutally silenced and taken off by the police (322-3). Moreover, realizing the
Government’s policy, the police take in homeless people from the streets, and even execute “emergency imprisonments . . . as a measure of warning” (328).
Habeas corpus, one of the most important and fundamental instruments for ensuring human rights, which offers a defence against an unlawful imprisonment, “had been suspended” (328). These practices and measures contribute to the portrayal of England under the European regime as a police state denying basic human rights to its people.
On no account does the novel depict the English as faultless, however, which is demonstrated primarily by the Old Men’s muddled and incompetent governing of the Zoo, their “obstinacy, shiftiness, laziness and weariness” (64), which as Antony Taylor observes in his London’s Burning. Pulp Fiction, the
Politics of Terrorism and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular
Culture, 1840-2005, leaves the Zoo (and England) “nostalgic and in disarray, and incapable of dealing with the realities of the rise of a Uni-European movement from which it is expelled, both by choice and by history” (135). The
Zoo is the object of the ‘Old Men’s’ disputes and selfish power fights, with each director aiming to build their vision of a Zoo, very often without taking the employees’ and animals’ interests into consideration: “Young Filson’s death like everything else at Regent’s Park would have been made to serve in the endless struggle between Leacock and Bobby Falcon for their opposing views on the
Zoo’s future” (18). However, compared to the barbaric and opportunist Uni-
Europeans, their English counterparts, despite their chaos, selfish visions and naiveté, seem to possess more humane and liberal characteristics.
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The Old Men at the Zoo also reflects, even though not so thoroughly, the
English-American post-war relationship, which is achieved by Simon’s marriage to Martha who is half American and half British. Martha comments on the
English ways with a more detached view and compares England to a country with a very different culture. From the beginning she insists on Simon taking action in the matter of the young Filson’s death to get justice, to confront the men in the Zoo’s management, saying that “it’s only another example of British make do and muddle. It has to be fought” (87). After taking her children to her family in the USA to secure their safety she writes to her husband about “how good it is to be in a country that’s big” (210). Martha’s comments reflect the dominance of the USA on the post-war international scene and its position of a self-appointed policeman of the world. In her view, the British are a mad nation occupied with petty fights and the sensible Americans have to “stop all you little whiners [all Europeans] from blowing up the civilization” (95). Discomfort about this new world order is expressed by some English characters in the novel who dislike the idea of Britain conforming to demands of superpowers like the USA or Russia. After releasing the Russo-American Declaration, pronouncing to interfere in case that the British-European relations escalate, even Matthew
Price, the curator of birds who is normally unconcerned about public affairs of the modern world, feels the need to express his annoyance: “Well we’re not children, are we? We’ve had wars before, and we’ll have them again I suppose, if it’s necessary. Anyhow it’s hardly for the Russians or Americans to tell us what we’re to have” (90-1). The same belief that Britain is capable and experienced enough a country to resolve her foreign affairs without any outer
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interference is held by Price’s sister, Diana Price: “If we do this or that, they will annihilate us with their combined strength. Like a lot of self-appointed nannies!” (102).
As was argued above, in The Old Men at the Zoo the London Zoo stands for the country of England. However, England and its post-war state and quest for a renewed identity are also symbolized by the main character himself,
Simon Carter. Like the country itself Simon is not sure who he is and who he should become in the future, either. As noted by McSweeney he is “pulled programmatically between desire and duty” (29). He took the post of the Zoo
Secretary because he wanted to escape the previous job at the Treasury but again and again he questions this decision and with nostalgia recollects the pleasures of “watching and studying English wildlife far away from all the incompetence and humbug that seemed inseparable from dealing with human beings” (18-9) that he experienced during his era of an active zoologist observing British mammals, especially badgers. That is also one of the reasons why Simon is so excited about Leacock’s plan to establish the British Reserve where he is to become “Warden of this region of fox and badger and marten - the British Reserve” (152) and where he can merge the rational and instinctual sides of his personality.
Simon’s ambivalence manifests itself in relation to the directors and their conceptions, too, and is, according to McSweeney the object of “Wilson’s critique of administrative man” (30) as Simon, “in his unswerving devotion to his administrative responsibilities at the Zoo . . . his passion for organization, his obsession with means, and his Vicar of Bray adaptability to ends, . . . seems
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. . . a model bureaucrat” (30). From the beginning Simon’s intentions are good and he tries to do his job as best he can but he becomes so absorbed in the
Zoo administration that he ignores the larger moral implications. As the story progresses, with each new director Simon is willing to support their, though significantly dissimilar, schemes. His devotion and ignorance of reality is so big that he even chooses to co-operate with Englander in his sinister Uni-European
Zoo over his wife, who leaves him with disgust (“’Are you going to leave this vile place now, Simon, or are you not?’ . . . ‘No, I am not. What do you think I am, a weathercock?...’”) (326). As Spiering observes, this way “he acts out the aimlessness and the emptiness which according to so many late invasion stories defines the condition of England. As far as this administrator is concerned, the
London Zoo (or England) can be made into anything” (143). Through Simon’s self-deceptions and moral ambivalence Wilson also ponders the theme of the dilemma of liberal values in post-war England.
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5. Conclusion
Both Wilson’s novels, which were analysed in previous chapters, depict
English society of post-war period and thus offer a picture of post-war
Englishness, as Wilson saw it. As shown in the second chapter of the thesis, after World War II England (Britain) was struck by major political, social and economic changes which among other things affected the traditional notion of
Englishness that was associated with the mighty Empire and established social structures. The feeling of change and disillusionment from the new position of the country, and the need for redefinition of Englishness and English identity are reflected in both novels, but each of them approaches the problem from a different point of view. While Anglo-Saxon Attitudes focuses on the situation inside the country, The Old Men at the Zoo reflects more closely the diminished position of the country within the world, which could be explained by the fact that the latter novel was written after the Suez Crisis which marked the end of
British imperial power.
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes offers a study of post-war Englishness through depiction of different spheres of English society and its representatives’ moral attitudes, as well as of the changes that affect them. Englishness is presented in a series of deceptive and hypocritical behaviour of the characters in both domestic and professional lives. The typicality of this conduct is conveyed through the title of the novel itself, as well as through setting the story into different worlds of academics, commerce or marginal groups of society.
The Old Men at the Zoo analyses Englishness in terms of its relation to the rest of the world and reflects England’s (Britain’s) position of a country that 52
needs to redefine its new role in the world of post-war era. The end of the
British imperial power and the loss of the status of a superpower to the United
States manifest themselves in the novel on the depiction of England as a country that is impotent, which is reflected by images of impotence in the story, most notably the death of the young zoo-keeper Filson who died after being kicked to the testicles. The picture of disempowered country is in the novel also evoked by the omnipresent muddle and chaos, especially in the administration of the zoo.
The themes of Englishness and national identity are introduced through symbolism that Wilson uses in both novels. In Anglo-Saxon Attitudes the symbolic quality is given to the pagan fertility figure found in the coffin of a 7th century bishop, which stands for double identities of the characters and their self-deceptions practised in order to avoid the painful truth about their lives.
The symbol is also used to point out the insecurity of the authenticity of historical facts about a nation’s past, when the past plays an important role in the forming of national identity. That is revealing in case of post-war England whose Englishness, associated with the power of ‘the Empire on which the sun never sets’, was marked by the loss of the country’s position of a leading world power, as well as by the political and social changes taking place within the society, insinuating that the country should not overly cling to and base its identity on its past. The need to come to terms with one’s past and to take responsibility for one’s deeds is also supported by Gerald’s story line who needs to confront the two unresolved issues from his past, the Melpham fraud and
Kay’s accident, to be able to find some peace of mind.
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In The Old Men at the Zoo Englishness is dealt with through the symbolic meaning of the zoo and its administration which stand for the England itself and possible forms of governing the country in post-war period. The zoo serves as a model of the country and is used for discussion of the issues of the whole nation. All the directors, who in the course of the novel take charge of the zoo’s management, have their own specific visions of the best course of action for the future zoo (England) and engage in power struggles, leaving the animals the ones who suffer the greatest. On behaviour of the egoist and muddled ‘old men’ Wilson satirizes the English Civil Service. In The Old Men at the Zoo
Wilson also indirectly comments on Englishness through its contrasting with
European qualities, as the fictional England is attacked by troops of continental
Europe and later subdued to the Uni-European regime. The zoo, controlled by the Uni-Europeans, becomes an evil place, promoting brutality, materialism and opportunism, compared to which the visions of Leacock and Falcon, even though sentimental and ridiculous, appear humane.
Both novels convey Wilson’s criticism of post-war English society, especially the middle classes. Wilson’s heavily satirized characters are subjected to ridicule and critique, however, he also portrays his characters, with the exception of those who embody pure evil (Blanchard-White or Yves Houdet), with compassion of a humanist. Wilson’s critique in both novels seems to focus on self-deceptive behaviour displayed by complacency and ignorance of reality.
The consequences of such conduct are serious, as in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes the avoidance of confrontation of reality leads to personal, as well as professional failures and even influence the interpretation of the nation’s past; in The Old
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Men at the Zoo the complacency and ignorance open door to brutal and inhumane regime. Wilson rejects detachment from real life and its responsibilities, and in both novels critical awareness and acceptance of responsibility are favoured and contrasted to evasions and cosiness of the characters. Both protagonists, Gerald Middleton and Simon Carter, manifest some kind of self-deception and evasion of reality, however, in the end each is willing to acknowledge his past mistakes and attempts to resolve his dilemma and accept the consequences. Only then can they both come to peace. Being characterized as liberal protagonists, their behaviour and attitudes reflect some of the dilemmas of liberal humanism present after the Second World War.
Although different in their form and their approach to Englishness, both
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and The Old Men at the Zoo attempt to depict the contemporary state of the nation and its issues and respond to the rapidly changing socio-economic and political conditions in post-war England, as well as its diminishing influence on the world stage. Nostalgia about the past finds its place in both works, in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes it is represented most apparently by the elderly actress Lillian Portway who spends her days wandering in her memories, in The Old Men at the Zoo the most nostalgic reminiscence of the past is Bobby Falcon’s vision of bringing back the Victorian zoo of the old times. However, it is made clear that the old times of imperial glory are not to come back (in fact, both Lillian Portway and Bobby Falcon die in the stories). Thus, both novels seem to favour the need to come to terms with reality over a ridiculous clinging to the past.
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Abstract
The thesis focuses on depiction of post-war Englishness in novels of
Angus Wilson. It seeks to analyse the state of the nation and its characteristic traits and issues in post-war era, as they are reflected in Wilson’s work. The thesis deals with approximately two decades after the end of World War II when the two analysed novels were published, namely Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and The Old Men at the Zoo.
The first part of the thesis (chapter 2) provides the analyses with some theoretical and historical context. It introduces the author and his development as a writer, as well as the themes he often addressed in his work. The chapter then presents the concept of ‘Condition of England Novel’, which Wilson employed as a means of commenting on the post-war state of the nation, as well as the most important political, social and cultural changes that affected
Britain in post-war era.
The second part of the thesis (chapters 3 and 4) then examines how these major changes project themselves in the two analysed novels. In Anglo-
Saxon Attitudes the analysis deals mainly with moral attitudes and hypocrisies of the characters that come from different worlds of English society, as well as the question of national identity that is in the novel conveyed through a fictional fraud in the country’s history. The analysis of The Old Men at the Zoo focuses on how the novel reflects, on the model of a zoo and its administration, the diminished position of Britain on the world stage.
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Resumé
Tato bakalářská práce se zabývá zobrazením poválečného angličanství v románech Anguse Wilsona. Jejím cílem je analýza stavu národa a jeho charakteristických rysů a problémů v poválečné době, tak jak jsou tato témata zobrazena ve Wilsonově díle. Bakalářská práce se zabývá přibližně dvěma desetiletími po skončení druhé světové války, obdobím, ve kterém byly vydány dva analyzované romány, jmenovitě Anglo-Saxon Attitudes a The Old Men at the Zoo.
První část práce (kapitola 2) poskytuje teoretický a historický kontext analyzovaných děl. Tato část je věnována autorovi a vývoji jeho literární tvorby, jakož i tématům, kterými se ve svých dílech často zabýval. Kapitola rovněž představuje literární koncept ‘Condition of England Novel’, prostřednictvím něhož se Wilson vyjadřoval k poválečnému stavu národa, a dále nejdůležitější politické, sociální a kulturní změny, které ovlivňovaly poválečnou Británii.
Druhá část bakalářské práce (kapitoly 3 a 4) se zabývá tím, jak jsou tyto zásadní změny promítnuty v analyzovaných dílech. V románu Anglo-Saxon
Attitudes se analýza soustředí zejména na morální postoje a přetvářku postav, pocházejících z různých částí anglické společnosti, a zabývá se otázkou národní identity, ke které se autor vyjadřuje prostřednictvím ústřední zápletky prozrazující archeologický podvrh. Analýza románu The Old Men at the Zoo se, na modelu zoologické zahrady a jejího řízení, zabývá zobrazením Británie jako válkou oslabené země, ztrácející vliv na světové scéně.
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