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Writing on the Poverty Line Working-Class Fiction by British Women Writers, 1974-2008

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Writing on the Poverty Line Working-Class Fiction by British Women Writers, 1974-2008 WRITING ON THE POVERTY LINE WORKING-CLASS FICTION BY BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS, 1974-2008 Dissertation angefertigt von Maike Behrends zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie, vorgelegt im Fachbereich Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft der Universität Osnabrück, Juli 2011 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor Dr. Kathleen Starck for her support and advice and for enabling me to write this dissertation, Professor Dr. Thomas Kullmann for his interest in my dissertation and for taking the time to read and assess it, Professor Dr. Wolfgang Karrer for his advice and comments, Claas Drechsler for his corrections, support and unshakable patience, Sonja Behrends for everything she did to help me with this project, Sabrina Wölper for her corrections and for sharing her knowledge with me. Also, I would like to thank my parents, my friends, “Eggens”, “Meyers” and “Raschdorffs” for the encouragements. Contents INTRODUCTION 1 1. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 6 - Subalternity and the Silencing of the Working Classes 6 - The Subaltern as a Split Subject 10 - Division and Alienation 11 - The Dynamics between Historical and Literary Representation of the Working Classes and the Issue of “Authentic” Representation 13 - Literary Working-Class Characters as Split Selves 17 2. THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH WORKING-CLASS FICTION BY WOMEN 20 - Late Nineteenth Century - End of World-War II 20 - The Post-War Years 33 - The Nineteen-Sixties 41 - Introducing Post-Colonialism to Women’s Working-Class Writing 45 - The Thatcher Era 50 - Late Twentieth Century and Early Twenty-First Century 54 TEXT ANALYSES 62 3. THE REPRESENTATION OF CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS 62 - Livi Michael: Under a Thin Moon (1992) 68 - Bethan Roberts: The Good Plain Cook (2008) 84 - Andrea Levy: Never Far From Nowhere (1996) 91 - Yasmin Hai: The Making of Mr. Hai’s Daughter (2008) 104 4. THE MOTHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP 110 - Valerie Mason-John: The Banana Kid (2005) 115 - Carolyn Steedman: Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) 129 - Joyce Storey: The House in South Road (2004) 136 5. RAPE, BATTERING, TRAUMA 145 5.1 RAPE AND TRAUMA 145 - Andrea Ashworth: Once in a House on Fire (1992) 153 - Rachel Trezise: In and Out of The Goldfish Bowl (2000) 160 - Pat Barker: Union Street (1982) (Kelly Brown) 170 5.2 BATTERING AND TRAUMA 178 - Buchi Emecheta: Second-Class Citizen (1974) 183 - Pat Barker: Union Street (1982) (Lisa Goddard) 192 - Trezza Azzopardi: The Hiding Place (2000) 196 6. CONCLUSION 202 7. WORKS CITED 208 Introduction “With a brilliant eye for the comic in the tragic [...] Joyce Storey charts the ordinary story of an extra-ordinary working-class woman’s life” (Pat Thorne). These lines, written on the back cover of Joyce Storey’s The House in South Road (2004), attracted my attention to this novel; which I discovered at a second-hand book store situated in London’s East End. It was shelved in a section labelled “Women’s Literature” and it admittedly surprised me to encounter a working-class narrative literally placed right next to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). During my degree studies, I have been focussing on reportages of the industrial, “masculine” working-class world by a German male author and was oblivious to the fact that there are numerous British women writing about working-class life. Joyce Storey’s The House in South Road proved to be just one out of many contemporary novels of the kind. Likewise, there are scholars, predominantly women, who endeavoured to tackle this field of research. Relevant examinations on British working-class writers are Mary Ashraf’s Introduction to Working-Class Literature in Great Britain (1978), Pamela Fox’s Class Fictions (1994), Merlyn Cherry’s Towards a Recognition of Working-Class Women Writers (1994), Gustav Klaus’ The Socialist Novel in Britain (1982), as well as his essays The Literature of Labour (1986) and To Hell with Culture (2005); and certain excerpts of Ian Haywood’s From Chartism to Trainspotting (1998). In their examinations on working-class writing, these critics largely focus on novels. This is the literary form I shall be concerned with in this thesis. Merlyn Cherry remarks: In the course of my degree studies it became apparent that there was little historical evidence of British working-class women writers. This led me to the question whether such women actually wrote or whether it was the case that their writing was not deemed good enough for publication. (Cherry 75) In her essay entitled Towards a Recognition of Working-Class Women Writers, Cherry discusses the omission of these writers within British literary studies. She asserts that their (supposed) underrepresentation is not only a matter of publication, but is due to the fact that these authors have largely been ignored by literary critics (115-118). The text corpus of working-class fiction is clearly male-dominated, both in terms of male authorship and the depiction of working-men characters and their living 1 environments in the novels. Yet there is evidence of women writing about the working classes. These authors, who frequently produce(d) female pendants to the working- men characters, have fallen into oblivion. Cherry argues that there has been a tendency to bracket ‘working women with working-class men as too ‘marginal to literary consideration. [...] The notion that literature has been constructed with middle-class values and ideologies is frequently underlined. Gagnier states that ‘individualist aesthetics have been used to disqualify women’s and worker’s lifewriting.’ (quoted in: Cherry 84) Hence women writing about the working classes face(d) a double discrimination: first, in terms of a selection and canonisation along middle-class ideologies and second, in terms of gender. Cherry names some of those writers whose work will be discussed in this thesis; however she does not specify what is to be understood by “British women’s working-class writers”. Various questions arise at this point. What are the distinctive features of a contemporary working-class novel written by a woman author? Which narrative strategies are employed to create the literary working-class world of female characters? What type of work is being performed by such characters in the story? The difficulty of finding answers to these questions lies in the attempt of determining a typology of such novels. Ian Haywood, for instance, ignores three significant Welsh women writers of this category, even though his anthology entitled Working-Class Fiction, From Chartism to Trainspotting (1998) focuses on British writers. Gustav Klaus, however, identifies these authors as working-class writers in his examinations cited above. Uncovering these female writers and demonstrating the development of their fiction will be part of this thesis. Subsequent to the first chapter (Theoretical Background), where I discuss the intricate matter of representing the working classes mainly from Gayatri Spivak’s point of view1, I will provide a literary history of British women writing about the working classes. This chapter, entitled The Development of British Working-Class Fiction by Women Writers, shall form a basis to approach a typology. Each traceable author of the kind shall be mentioned in chronological order. The developments of 1 She presents her viewpoint in an essay called Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988). 2 themes and also narrative form shall be described in depth – up to the year of publication 19742, which is the starting point of novels I include in the text analyses. It will be become clear that the contemporary women’s working-class novel emerged out of a “patchwork” of different writing traditions; and that the typology which I endeavour to establish in this thesis cannot be based on common characterisations. None of the characters in my anthology can be labelled a “prototype”, since the characterisations vary greatly across the novels. So, I have to find an approach different to characterisations to find a typology. Tony Shaw, specialist on working-class fiction by male authors, argues on his homepage British Working-Class Fiction and Lionel Britton’s Place in It, that the essence of working- class fiction can most effectively be “carved out” via a categorisation of common topics. He declares: “I describe this literature as a sub-genre because it is operating within the framework of the dominant bourgeois novel and shares many features with it; the essential differences are thematic, and therefore I deal with the texts thematically” (Shaw: “British Working-Class Fiction”). Although I share Shaw’s modus operandi of finding common topics, I do not agree with the label “sub-genre”. In this respect I suggest to concur with Mary Ashraf, whose research work on women working-class writings is geared towards a recognition of these as part of the literary mainstream; rather than being a deviation from it (cf. Ashraf 17). This thought shall also be discussed in the framework of my thesis. The three main topics which predominantly appear across the novels are: women’s class consciousness, the mother-daughter relationship and trauma caused by sexual abuse and battering. These topics respectively occur in the twelve novels which I will examine in the section Text Analyses. This section constitutes the largest part of this thesis. Thus, in addition to demonstrating the development of women writing about the working classes, I work towards a typology via a detailed text analysis according to these topics. Hereby, I raise no claim to completeness. I have chosen twelve texts which I consider to be representative; and I will proceed like the literary critic Gustav Klaus, who argued in his anthology entitled The Socialist Novel in Britain: “I have chosen to introduce many writers, limiting myself, however, to the discussion of one 2 Why I have chosen this year of publication as a starting point to analyse the texts will become clear later in this introduction, when I come to explain the choice of my texts.
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