Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Veronika Bránišová

Lone Mother Narrative in British Fiction in the Sixties Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

2017

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

I would like to thank my supervisor prof. Milada Franková for her patience, encouragement and valuable advice.

Table of Contents

Introduction …………………………………………………………………...... 1

Chapter One: A Brief Contextualization of the Period …………………………4

Chapter Two: Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone……………..…….…………..19

Chapter Three: Lynn Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room ……………………....36

Chapter Four: Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow ………………………………………….47

Chapter Five: Societal Background in The Millstone, The L-Shaped Room

and Poor Cow ………………………………………………………….60

Conclusion ……………………………………………………..………….……68

Works Cited …………………………………………………………………….71

Summary ………………………………………………………………………..75

Resumé ………………………………………………………………..…….…..76 Introduction

The Beatles, Pop Art or students’ protests are for many the embodiments of popular and conventional images associated with the sixties. The sixties are depicted and experienced by some as a transformative era of tolerance, freedom, love and new opportunities, but it overshadows the fact that millions of individuals did not encounter any real and instant change and their lives transformed only little if at all. Single mothers make one of these groups of people. Accounted in the 1960s society as a symptom of ‘morality in decline’, their lives significantly differ from the media version of the sixties. Regardless of their class, lone mothers suffer some degree of societal exclusion and, at the same time, they are considered as a threat to the ‘ideal’ or

‘normality’.

Single women become more visible in both literature and the film in the sixties

(as compared to the 1950s that are conventionally depicted as a decade of the Angry

Young Men), and lone mother narrative is one of the forms which portrays women’s lives in this era. The lone mother narrative of the sixties represents a shift towards subjectivity regarding the motif of single motherhood. These novels are not written from the position of received authority; it is not writing on ‘them’ but, on the contrary, the female protagonist is the principal narrator of the story. Therefore, one can observe the problematic from ‘inside’ rather than ‘outside’ with all the problems it entails. In addition to that, lone mother narratives of this period touch on the issue which is still on the front burner today: how to combine motherhood with the career, and if this is even possible and desirable.

The aim of the thesis is to explore how single motherhood is depicted in three various lone mother narratives of the period and how it reflects the overall societal

1 climate of the 1960s. To do so, the thesis attempts to identify the common themes in the

1960s lone mother narratives to cover the complexity of its representations. Moreover, the thesis argues that the subject of single motherhood is used in these works to investigate and challenge prevailing notions about femininity, female identity, motherhood and marriage. The novels are analysed on two levels: the first is the level of an individual experience: inner self of each main protagonist, their motivations and circumstances without emphasis on social factors (chapters two, three and four), the second is the level of external (social) reality: how the influence of the social climate is reflected in these works (chapter five). The two levels of analysis reflect the belief that both studies of an individual situation and social circumstances can reveal much about the topic as well as the period.

The textual and comparative analyses are the primary methods used. The novels selected are The Millstone (1965) by Margaret Drabble, The L-Shaped Room (1960) by

Lynn Reid Banks and Poor Cow (1967) by Nell Dunn. All these novels have two things in common: lone mothers are the main protagonists of these books and the women narrate their stories for themselves. Besides, these novels do not only enjoy great popularity in the 1960s, but they are all still reprinted and read today. Additionally, they all are made into then relatively successful films.

The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter gives a brief contextualization of the topic: providing a short discussion concerning the 1960s in general, women, and mothers including those without partners as well as common features of lone mother narrative in the sixties. It aims to point out certain aspects of this period that are helpful for the novels’ analysis. Furthermore, the chapter touches upon

Raymond Williams’s idea of ‘structure of feeling’ which constitutes the theoretical basis of the thesis. Finally, the works on women that influence the authors of these

2 novels are discussed in brief: predominantly Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

(1949) and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962).

The second chapter examines the individual experience of single motherhood and its implications on academically gifted, upper-middle class Rosamund in Margaret

Drabble’s The Millstone. As the only book from the novels discussed, it touches on the dilemma of maternity and creative career, or more general womanhood and creative career – the theme already considered by Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir.

The third chapter introduces Lynn Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room. As the story is similar to The Millstone, the comparison with The Millstone is used to discuss this novel. However, the aim of this chapter is to emphasize issues which are unique for

The L-Shaped Room.

The fourth chapter explores Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow. Situated in the working- class milieu, it provides yet another view on the single motherhood and related topics.

The last chapter aims to link all three chapters together while focusing on societal factors influencing the novels. Its purpose is to demonstrate that lone mother narratives can be a source of valuable information concerning the period.

The primary sources are the three, already mentioned, novels: Margaret

Drabble’s The Millstone, Lynn Reid Banks The L-Shaped Room and Nell Dunn’s Poor

Cow. The secondary sources consist of numerous articles and books published from the late 1960s till the beginning of the 21st century. In addition to that, books by other authors are used as secondary sources: Virginia Woolf’s The Room of One’s Own,

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, as well as memoirs by Sheila Rowbotham and Jenny Diski, two women ‘who were there’.

3

Chapter One: A Brief Contextualisation of the Period

The Sixties

Both glorified and hated, romanticised and demonised, the sixties are a period that invokes various responses and feelings. However, above all, the sixties are, like every other period, a complex, diverse and complicated phenomenon that means different things to various groups of people. Moreover, as Sandbrook warns in White

Heat, “is always tempting to reduce the period to a parade of gaudy stereotypes” (14) and clichés. Additionally, it is entirely superfluous and irrelevant to make value judgements about the period: its diversity does not allow it anyway.

Criticising clichés, it seems peculiar to start with a poem that, in this context, almost become a cliché: Philip Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis (1967). However, it is proper here: Larkin captures economically, in a tongue-in-cheek way, essential elements that would, otherwise, need a long explanation. He concludes with the following stanza:

So life was never better than

In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me)

Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban

And the Beatles’ first LP1. (Larkin, 121)

Larkin’s rather ironic description of the wonderful year 1963 is surely not a lament over his lost opportunities but rather an expression of his fascination with time and inaccessibility of happiness. The important thing is that he marks the year nineteen sixty-three as a year of a change in sexual mores which is, of course, an exaggeration. It

1 The poem refers to the trial of Penguin Books (1960) for publishing D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The trial was an important step towards freedom of the written world in the UK.

4 is true that many historians2, in agreement with Larkin, regard the year nineteen sixty- three as a turning point of change. Although the periodization of historical periods is often tricky and problematic, Arthur Marwick’s time specification is helpful for further analysis of the novels.

Marwick employs the term ‘long sixties’, which is for him the period between

1958 and 1974. He regards it as “a period as self-contented as a period can be”

(Marwick, 725). Subsequently, he divides the ‘long sixties’ into three sub-periods: ‘First

Stirrings’ from 1958 to 63, the ‘High’ Sixties from 1964 to - 8/9, and ‘Catching Up’ from 1969 to 74 (Marwick, 8).

In the light of this, Banks’s The L-Shaped Room, situated in the 1950s, is still very much a product of the first period and so is in many ways Drabble’s The Millstone

(despite being published in 1965). This pre-pill, pre-Abortion Law, pre-‘permissive legislation’ period is still in many ways an extension of the fifties which “did not”, according to Jenny Diski, “expire until the Sixties were well on in years” (4). This first period is influenced by, to use Marwick’s rather odd term “a gentler, more traditional feminism” (615) that follows in the footsteps of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty

Friedan3. Dunn’s Poor Cow belongs to the second period, the era which is usually termed as the ‘Swinging Sixties’ or ‘The Sixties’. However, even though the working- class Joy benefits from the ‘affluent society’ of the sixties and, to some extent, from the ongoing changes, her position does not let her ‘swing’ too much and for too long.

In this period, the British society is immensely influenced by the middle-class ideal of respectability. Sandbrook in Never Had It So Good equates it with moderation,

2 For example Arthur Marwick or Dominic Sandbrook. On the contrary, Eric Hobsbawm in his book The Age of Extremes: The Short Twenties Century 1914-1991 does not regard the sixties as a separate period but as a part of what he terms ‘The Golden Age’ (1945-73). 3 Both de Beauvoir and Friedan are discussed, at a greater length, in the last section of this chapter.

5 and he explains: “It was not respectable to be voluble, passionate or outspoken; it was certainly not respectable to ‘make a scene’” (47). In addition to that, Diski describes it as follows: “Working-class or middle-class, respectability, in the sense of not doing anything the neighbours don’t want you to think they did, was a very high priority”

(55). And she continues further: “The post-war generation was brought by parents who aimed for respectability and to conceal any suggestion that the body was not under the strict control of the civilised mind. The great weapons were shame and embarrassment”

(Diski, 55). Of course, this ‘ideal of respectability’ applied differently to women and men. However, in any case, it is very much present in all of the novels, even though sometimes only at a subliminal level.

Women

Not only the ‘ideal of respectability’, but also state legislation is restrictive towards women and their bodies. The societal pressures on women are often incompatible with their internal feelings.4 The Women cannot control their bodies and minds and exercise free choices: abortion is illegal; ‘backstreet’ and self-induced abortions extremely dangerous; divorce uncommon and stigmatised; as well as single motherhood; single mothers are forced to give up their children for adoption; there is no protection of pregnant women at the workplace. “Underlying the sexual permissiveness of the 1960s lay the belief that sexual behaviour should be the concern of the individual and that the state should not attempt to regulate this through the imposition of religious and moral precepts enshrined in the law” (Joannou, 43). The first law that enables some women to make a free choice concerning their bodies is in 1961 when the Pill becomes available to married women. However, the ‘breakthrough’ of ‘permissive legislation’

4 Sylvia Plath describes these feeling in her novel The Bell Jar. More about Plath in the last section of this chapter.

6 happens in 1967 when the abortion is legalised, and local authorities provide free contraceptives and advice by need alone (Joannou, 43). The ‘permissive law’ or what

Roy Jenkins called his ‘civilised society legislation’ has its opponents: one of the most vociferous is the anti-permissive campaigner and self-proclaimed housewife Mary

Whitehouse who, as Sandbrook writes in Never Had It So Good, “popularized the issues of permissiveness and moral corruption, and who was undoubtedly one of the best- known and most controversial women of the sixties and seventies” (489).

Despite the major variances in value judgements concerning the period and

Mary Whitehouse in particular, there is a consensus that the sixties are an era of social and cultural changes from which women benefited a great deal. Obviously, as

Sandbrook in White Heat stresses, “it is important to realise that the changes were often halting, fragmentary and bitterly contested” (174). Moreover, it is essential to point out that the development is not linear going from A to B or ‘bad’ to ‘better’. Thus it is apt to describe it as a complicated process with many obstacles and lapses. Sheila Rowbotham remembers:

Determined not to follow the patterns set by our mothers in being women, we

wanted to rely differently on men, but there were no received assumption about

how things might be. We appeared to have no history, no culture, certainly no

movement, just snatches of suggestion to ponder (10).

Women, and particularly those who want to be organised, are not only confused but, also, disappointed with the prevalent sexism in the students’ movement in the sixties.

Diski recollects, “Certainly, most women who lived through the early and late Sixties whether as political molls or psychedelic chicks can recall that they were mostly of ornamental, sexual, domestic or secretarial value to the men striking out for radial

7 shores” (90). Likewise, Marwick talks about the same: “Certainly the leaders in the student movements were almost all male (…) Was it not also true that the young women were expected to do the chores: making the coffee, ironing the jeans, doing the typing and providing the other secretarial services?” (616). And he concludes, “The putative women’s liberationists were operating within this ideological framework as they reflected on Simone de Beauvoir’s earlier revelations about the cultural construction of female behaviour and Betty Friedan’s exposure of the feminine mystique” (617).

Realising this, many women (such as Sheila Rowbotham) shift their focus of attention and start working for Women’s Liberation Movement. Marwick further observes:

“Those women most thoroughly sensitized to the many manifestations and nuances of oppression did begin to articulate their perception that he alleged new sexual freedom was actually intensified sexual slavery” (617). Diski concludes: “But like racial equality, women’s liberation is honoured in legislation more than in the private attitudes of many individuals” (90). What is right for the student movements, is, certainly valid for the whole society. This phenomenon is accurately depicted by Fay Weldon in her novel The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967) when the heroine, Esther, says to her husband,

“You may know that I am equal, with your reason, but you certainly don’t feel that I am” (qtd. in Joannou, 1).

Lone Mothers

“A single mother stands as a glaring rebuke to the ideal,” writes Jacqueline Rose in her article “Mothers”. The ideal – the traditional nuclear, heterosexual family as the best environment to bring up children - still dominates the discourse throughout the sixties partially because “the end of World War Two to the early 1970s was the golden

8 age5 of the long, stable marriage” (Thane, 21). However, the moral panics significantly fuelled by media and professed moralists pervade the society, partly, as an expression of growing concerns over the social changes in the sixties. Single mothers as a deviation from the norm came under severe moral censure. However, in the sixties, their incidence is still rather rare6. “Nevertheless, there was a general consensus that ‘moral standards’ were in decline. (…) The single mother was seen as a symptom of the challenge to conventional moral codes and became a focus for discussions of contemporary social expectations of femininity” (Philips, 43). The single mother is “the focus of official and popular discourse in Britain throughout the decade, and ‘issue’ for moralists and legislators and for fiction” (Philips, 43). While the single mothers in fiction (and partly in cinema and theatre) are discussed in the next section, here follows a little insight into the issues concerning lone motherhood in the fifties and sixties.

The negative portrayal of the single mother in the fifties is fuelled by the works of two well-known and then influential psychiatrists: Leontine Young and John

Bowlby. While Bowlby in Maternal Care and Mental Health (1951) believes that single mothers are psychologically disturbed and, for that reason, they cannot provide emotional support for their children, Leontine Young in Out of Wedlock (1954) does not find unmarried mothers either mentally disturbed or promiscuous. But she still regards them mentally defective: “The serious problem of the unmarried mother is that her urge for a baby has been separated from its normal matrix, love for a mate. The proof of the pathology of her problem lies in this desperately enforced separation and in its compulsive nature” (qtd. in Kiernan, Land, and Lewis, 103). Moreover, she believes

5 “This ‘golden age’ came to an end in the early 1970s when divorce and unmarried cohabitation began to increase rapidly. The post-war period was an unusual time of near universal marriage, early marriage ages and rising life expectancy. There were more divorces than before the war but fewer than later in the century because divorce was still expensive, difficult to obtain and stigmatizing, especially for women” (Thane, 22). 6 About 6 per cent of births ‘outside marriage in the UK’ (Office for National Statistic, 2004) (Philips, 43)

9 that “The higher the unmarried mother’s social class, the more disturbed she was said to be: Almost without exception [a professional woman] … is psychologically a sick person” (qtd. in Kiernan, Land, and Lewis, 103). Young concludes that it is better for the child to be taken from the mother and put up for adoption. Adoptions enforced by state never find support in the UK, but Young’s ideas spread into general discourse.

State enforced adoptions are never put into practice, yet many children born to single mothers end up adopted. There are still persistent non-official pressures to which the pregnant woman is subjected that eventually lead to adoption (this is a common practice of mother and child homes). Moreover, many women are forced to adopt their children to legitimate them. Some have their mothers to bring up their babies.

In the quotes above, Bowlby and Young discuss the situation of unmarried mothers –women that give birth to a child and the baby’s father is not present in her life.

Still, unwed motherhood is just one of many forms of lone motherhood. As Evans points out, “there were many routes to lone motherhood, including relationship breakdown abandonment by men, forced separation, death, affairs with married men and cohabitation” (48). All of these are examples of involuntarily lone motherhood yet there are inevitably cases, although not frequent, of self-imposed lone motherhood.

These might exemplify a certain degree of defiance, as well as unconventionality and bravery on the part of the woman. The claim that a single mother is ‘abnormal’ starts being disproved at the end of the sixties (Kiernan, Land and Lewis, 110) and there is found “increased social acceptability of unmarried motherhood” (Thane, 24). This growing acceptance is closely related to women’s liberation, expansion of women’s rights and narrowing of the gender inequality gap. However, the acceptance is again not even and general; sometimes it is rather slow because as Marwick points out,

“Traditional morality was very largely maintained through the community, family, and

10 peer group pressure, and fear: fear of divine wrath, fear of public humiliation, fear of pregnancy (17).

Still, the majority of single mothers experience some harassment during the sixties. Diski remembers, “It was not only difficult to find yourself unmarried and pregnant, (…), it was a disgrace. Hiding the fact was more important than dealing with it” (55). The importance of class and the network of social contacts is, of course, advantageous also in the case of unwanted pregnancy. Discussing women of middle and upper-class background, Evans and Thane argue that “their lives are often more hidden because they more rarely experienced the intrusive gaze of the social researcher than did working-class women” (6). Moreover, they are often judged with more sympathy than their less privileged counterparts. Philips cites the (what she calls) “supposedly sympathetic and self-proclaimed liberal handbook” Raising Your Child in a Fatherless

Home: A Guidebook for All Mothers without Partners (1963) for unmarried and pregnant middle and upper middle-class women. The book in conformity with the

‘official’ discourse places the blame on the unmarried mother and advises that she

“should construct a narrative to disguise her ‘guilty’ secret; that she should represent herself as a divorced or widowed woman and should move” (Philips 43). Therefore, it is possible to say that the class and financial situation are two of the most important factors that have a decisive influence on how the life of the lone mother is.

Lone Mother’s Narrative of the 1960s

Reading fiction set in a particular period, one wonders about how much the novel mirrors the depicted reality. The question which necessarily follows is whether it is feasible to capture an era from the novels and what the reasons behind those similarities (which are clearly traceable in the novels of the period) are. It is certain that

11 the novel “is never a simple reflection of its times” and “may not be a barometer of social history” (Philips, 3). However, as Philips points out “what it can do is to chart the limits and shifts in social discourse, and so offer insights into what can and cannot be fantasized about and publicly acknowledged” (Philips, 3). Moreover, Raymond

Williams’s ‘structure of feeling’ comes in useful here:

The structure of feeling which is tangible in a particular set of works is

undoubtedly an articulation of an area of experience which lies beyond them.

This is especially evident of those specific and historically definable moments

when new work produces a sudden shock of recognition. (…) What must be

happening on these occasions is that an experience which is really very wide

suddenly finds a semantic figure which articulates it (qt. in Joannou, 3).

The 1960s first-person confessional narratives about lone motherhood comprise such a

‘set of works’. Williams conceives a ‘structure in feeling’ in “an attempt to capture a mood, sensibility or atmosphere of particular historical period or generation” (Fink,

146). Williams notes: “this characteristic is likely to be expressed; often not consciously, but by the fact that here, in the only examples we have of recorded communication (…), the actual living sense, the deep community that makes the communication possible, is naturally drawn upon” (65).

The novels explored in the thesis constitute only a fraction of cultural products with the motif of single motherhood produced during this period; others are for example

Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1959), Kate and Emma (1965) by Monica

Dickens, or Georgy Girl (1965) by Margaret Forster. Moreover, not only do most of these novels and plays become relatively successful films, but other films including TV dramas have as a motif single motherhood. The lone mother novels are very dissimilar

12 to each other with respect to genre, style, and targeted readership, yet they constitute a close-knit group with common denominators in their approach to lone motherhood and many period problems. The motif of lone motherhood is there to communicate issues such as female identity, morality, reproductive rights, sexuality or motherhood. They voice “the sexual anxieties of a generation of young women and also provided a site for the negotiation of changes in moral attitudes” (Philips, 15). Moreover, they are valuable as their “apprehensive pregnant women offer a sharp contrast to the received notion of the ‘swinging sixties’ as an era of the pill and sexual liberation” (Philips, 15).

Still written before the enactment of the ‘permissive’ legislation in the late

1960s and before the Women’s Liberation movement, they are pre-feminist novels which capture “entirely individualized experiences” (Philips 15) and issues depicted are

“not recognized as causes for political action and collective campaigns, as they would later become” (…) “Nonetheless, the pregnant single woman does provide an image of female independence that is not so much chosen as necessitated” (Philips, 15). Young observes, “These are not consciously feminist texts in the way that Plath’s or Lessing’s might be said to be, but they do provide a window on to some of the alternative expressions of femininity” (80). This is, in many ways, their primary value: they bring up, often unconsciously, issues of great importance in a debate about women in society and they do so often by communicating the everyday lives of their heroines.

Although the novels depict various social classes and social milieus, they are principally middle-class in their attitudes due to their author’s origins and thoughts7.

Rosamund in The Millstone and Jane in The L-Shaped Room are both distinctively

7 It is hard (verging on the impossible) to find some British lone mother narrative from the sixties that is written by someone outside the middle and upper-class milieu. However, they exist in the early seventies, such as Buchi Emecheta’s In the Ditch and Second-Class Citizen. Emecheta, despite all her differences, shares the view on motherhood with these authors. She also finds it unconditionally empowering.

13 upper middle-class. Moreover, Rosamund is further privileged by her background in academia. On the contrary, Joy in Poor Cow is a working-class girl. However, Dunn’s view on her is a perspective of an outsider (she alone is from an upper-class family) irrespective of how hard she tries to avoid any stereotyping of her characters and milieu.

The lone mothers of these books are not all unmarried women: both Rosamund and Jane are unwed and remain so even at the end of the novel. Joy has a broken marriage behind her. However, eventually, she gives in to social pressure and decides to give her marriage another try despite its incorrigible hopelessness. Men in those narratives are rather peripheral and often non-existent often to accentuate the position of women.

Philips regards both The L-Shaped Room and The Millstone” to be “iconic women’s’ novels which addressed the tensions of femininity through the experience of single motherhood” (43). Poor Cow might not be iconic but shows the striking contrast of lone motherhood in a working-class milieu that it is not protected by class, social and financial privileges. Moreover, Poor Cow offers a completely different perspective on female sexuality.

For this thesis, the terms lone mother and single mother narrative are used as equivalents8. The term unmarried mother narrative is a narrower term: it includes just one group of lone/single mothers: the mothers who are not married.

Influences

As Patricia Waugh observes “in the late fifties and early sixties an expression of women’s dissatisfaction with the life options available to them [circulates].” (qtd. in

8 The term ‘Lone mother narrative’ is more often used in the UK context, while ‘single mother narrative’ in the US.

14

Young, 80). The primary focus of interest is their “experiences as wives, mothers, and lovers and how their sense of themselves as individuals was suffocated in these roles”

(qtd. in Young, 80)9. In literature, Doris Lessing and Sylvia Plath10 articulate the feminine consciousness. Although Lessing repeatedly refuses the feminist label,

Drabble says in the article “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, 50 Years On” about her “of course, we read her as a feminist”. Lessing is of particular importance in the

British context. Even though she is often connected to the second wave of feminism, her approach is more universal. Natalie Hanman in the article “Doris Lessing’s The Golden

Notebook, 50 Years On” argues: “The debates Anna has in the novel, with herself and others, I think start to conceive of gender as a relational thing: not just about women, and a particular type of woman at that (white, middle class and so on), versus men, but about all the ways in which people struggle together, through complex intersections of sex, class, race and location”)11.

In the article “Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, 50 Years On”, Drabble says of Lessing, “She spoke for us, in the sexual confusion of the 1960s”). In The

Golden Notebook, Lessing writes among other things about, what she calls, “the solution to the conundrum of work and motherhood”. The Golden Notebook is about a search for human identity which is, according to Lessing, both chaotic and fragmented.

On the contrary, as Joannou observes, “her attitude to motherhood is essentialist, e.g. fixed and unchanging” (27). The main protagonist, single mother Anna Wulf, is saved

9 Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) is an example of such a text. Friedan is, in her seminal book, interested in – what she calls – “the problem that has no name”, and describes the empty and unsatisfactory lives of white, middle-class, suburban wives who have no reason to complain yet they feel entrapped in their domestic situation. 10 Sylvia Plath publishes a novel The Bell Jar (1963), just a few months before her death. The Bell Jar and later her book of poetry, posthumously published Ariel (1965) with poems such as ‘Daddy’ or ‘Lady Lazarus’ attract much attention and many women start to identify with her. 11 It makes her unique in a sense because Friedan, Woolf and de Beauvoir are often criticised for writing only about and for white, middle-class women.

15 by her maternal role when she is on the brink of mental collapse: “I have been very depressed. I have depended a great deal on that personality-Janet’s mother. I continually ask myself – how extraordinary, that when inside I am flat, nervous, dead, I can still, for

Janet, be calm, responsible, alive?” (Lessing, 434).

Anna and Molly, two single, divorced mothers in the 1950s London regard themselves as a “new type of women” (Lessing, 26) who are ‘free’. Nevertheless, their freedom is “more of an aspiration than a reality” (Brooks, 102); they are free in a sense that they are not married but they are not free at the emotional level: their lives are still influenced by the emotional dependency on men. The theme of liberation is, therefore, one of the central in the book. Lessing discusses the “women’s emotions” (empathy and concern for another) which can eventually lead to the extension of one’s being. This is however achieved only by “moving beyond the established values, roles, and institutions, for these are the means which humanity is fragmented and separated”

(Brooks, 108). Lessing in The Golden Notebook raises numerous questions about female identity, sexuality, liberation, freedom, independence, motherhood, love and relationships. One might not necessarily find the answers to these issues in The Golden

Notebook but, by raising them, she oversteps the boundaries of what can be discussed publicly and influence the debate and thinking of the time. And this is the level of influence she exercises both on Drabble and Dunn in the mid-1960s.

Moreover, Lessing is very much concerned with the situation of a woman as an artist; the theme she shares with Virginia Woolf and her A Room of One’s Own.

Although narrated as ‘I’, the narrator seems more universal – she speaks for all women.

In chapter one is Woolf’s famous statement that almost becomes cliché: “a woman must have money and a room of one’s own to write fiction” (2). Here, Woolf points to the inequality between men and women that prevents women from writing fiction: the first

16 is a lack of money, and the second is the non-existence of a room of one’s own both as an actual space and in a figurative sense (such as time and leisure). Woolf then advises,

“give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days”

(Woolf, 102). Drabble makes a direct reference to Woolf in The Millstone by awarding

Rosamund an income of five hundred a year. Rosamund also has “a room of one’s own” in a literal sense. A room of one’s own in a figurative sense is for her, as is later argued, her daughter Rosamund.

Woolf contemplates the issue of inequality between the sexes. She points out that “women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (36). However, she does not blame men for this, she muses: “I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race” (39).

Moreover, she admits that “Life for both sexes (…) is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength” (36). She calls for confidence in oneself and points out that women’s lack of self-confidence is the reason why they produce a second-rate art. Woolf also in A Room of One’s Own writes that “it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly (…) it is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; (…); [it is fatal] in any way to speak consciously as a woman” (112).

Simone de Beauvoir is a similarly important figure in this period as Doris

Lessing is with her books The Mandarins (1956), a novel where she raises questions about identity and gender relationships, and The Second Sex. Drabble is directly

17 influenced by Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in her early novels: she occupies herself with the question of “what it was like to be a woman in a world which calls woman the second sex. Drabble has called this condition: ‘the situation of being a woman’” (Rose,

Ellen Cronan, 1-2). And she seems to come to the same conclusion as Beauvoir that

“she [woman] is confined to a sphere created and ordained for her by men” (Rose, Ellen

Cronan, 2).

Beauvoir in The Second Sex claims that “humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being (…) He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other” (23). Moreover, “man thinks himself without woman. Woman does not think herself without man (…) and she is nothing other than what man decides; (…) the male sees her essentially as a sexed being” (23). The concept of what Beauvoir calls Alterity (the Other) is bad enough for women, even worse is, according to Beauvoir, the motherhood. Her theoretical concept of motherhood is bleak: the maternal dilemma is unsolvable. Taylor argues that

Beauvoir regards motherhood under the existing conditions as slavery. She never changes this opinion until her death (235) so persistent and persuaded she is.

Moreover, Sheila Rowbotham emphasizes in the Introduction to the new translation of The Second Sex, “For my generation the excitement of Beauvoir’s thesis lay both in its exposure of the con trick of blaming women for not being in accord with men’s fantasies and in the possibility she held out of women making themselves anew”

(6). At the core of the discussed novels is this very observation: the heroines, refusing the traditional marriage, struggle to create a new way of life for themselves.

18

Chapter Two: Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone

Introducing Rosamund

Rosamund Stacey in The Millstone seems to ‘have it all’: she successfully learns to combine motherhood and a career. Well-educated, academically brilliant, and self- sufficient, she does not rely on a man for either economic or psychological support. So far, it looks like a feminist triumph in the making. However, one realises on a closer examination that the message of Drabble’s The Millstone is somewhat more complicated, not as straightforward and that it is biased both by Rosamund’s nature and her social and economic privilege.

Drabble uses the first-person narrative in The Millstone. It proves both beneficial and disadvantageous for the story’s narration, and, particularly, for the assessment of the importance of single-motherhood in the novel. The first person narrative form enables Drabble to provide broad, thorough and rather convincing insight into psychology of the main protagonist Rosamund, but, at the same time, it prevents one from distinguishing between the ‘objective truth’ and what Rosamund’s ‘believes or pretends is the truth’ (and which can be termed as her defence mechanisms). This is a significant problem in Rosamund’s narrative because the deeper one dives into

Rosamund’s narration, the more apparent is the gap between ‘objectivity’ and

‘subjectivity’. However, the lack of other voices makes it hard to identify these defence mechanisms, and, therefore, the given level of uncertainty remains. The usage of defence mechanism is most evident in Rosamund’s relationship to other people and her one-time lover George. The defence mechanisms serve her as a tool for protecting herself from the reality which she finds (consciously or unconsciously) hurtful or threatening. The identification of these defence mechanisms is of particular importance

19 as it can shed light on the most important issues concerning Rosamund’s life and help to approach them from a different perspective.

The occasions when is Rosamund viewed from the standpoint of other person are rare in the book. The first is when Rosamund’s sister Beatrice sends her a letter to prevent her from carrying on with her pregnancy. Despite being rather insensitive and self-righteous, Beatrice reveals valuable information about Rosamund’s character.

Beatrice writes, “I just can’t see you adapting yourself to the demands it would make on you, you’ve always been so set on your independence, and having your own way (…) A baby isn’t just something you can have just because you feel you ought” (Drabble, 90).

Knowing Rosamund, Beatrice does not expect her to change after the birth and finds this threatening both for the baby and for Rosamund herself. The other such occasion is

Lydia’s novel. Lydia, a friend of Rosamund, who lives with her in return for domestic services writes behind Rosamund’s back a novel about Rosamund. After reading it,

Rosamund does not agree with Lydia’s portrayal of her

However, I did object very strongly to the way, (…), that she hinted that the

Rosamund character’s obsession with scholarly detail and discovery was nothing

more nor less than an escape route, and attempt to evade the personal crisis of

her life and the realities of life in general (108).

By including these passages, Ellen Cronan Rose believes that “Drabble hints in the most subtle way that Rosamund’s independence, competence, and self-reliance are (…) attempts to avoid acknowledging her existential vulnerability, her need for other people and her responsibilities to them” (22).

Rosamund describes herself as exceptionally intelligent throughout the whole book, for example, she talks about “my isolation (through superiority of intellect) as a

20 child” (Drabble, 20). According to her, this is her most distinctive feature and a trait of which she is enormously proud. There is no reason to doubt her, but it sounds very smug on many occasions. Her academic achievements are proofs of that; after her daughter, Octavia is born, she finishes her thesis, which is published and she secures a place as a lecturer at the university. Libby comments on Rosamund’s academic achievements (this is further developed later in the chapter), “This accomplishment is actually rather chilling-her capacity to split mind and spirit suggests that she has internalized the masculine, compartmentalized mode of perception at the price of a failure to achieve an integrated selfhood” (182). What is problematic with her opinion of her intelligence is that she blames her inability to connect with people and build close and firm relationships with them on her intelligence. This might or might not be true – in any case, it enables her to view her loneliness in a positive way (it is the price she pays for her exceptionality, and for her brilliance) rather than in a negative way (as a consequence of her almost pathological secretiveness, her oddity, or her inability to warm towards others, to rely on them, and to share thoughts or life with them). This outlook on herself in terms of exceptionality, or superiority rather than some deficiency is one of her principal, unsubstantiated personality traits.

Although she mentions a lot of friends throughout the book, she does not bond with people and women in particular. George, her one-time lover and father of her daughter Octavia, is a bit of exception. Their relationship is as shallow as any other in the book, but Rosamund seems to desire him a lot. However, this rather self-absorbed longing is a safe haven as she is convinced that George is gay. His homosexuality means a safe place for her - both at the psychological (she cannot get hurt by his rejection) and physiological (no sexual threats) levels. Thus, she does not risk anything when she repeatedly expresses deep feelings for him (but she never says it to him), and

21 she also considers revealing his paternity to him. Such a (in her mind) close (but never in reality existing) relationship is for her possible only because of the ‘shield’ of his alleged homosexuality; otherwise, she would possibly treat him the same way as she treats Hamish, Joe, or Rogers (her pretended lovers). As Pamela S. Bromberg observes:

‘Her desire is masochistic in the extreme; what she loves is her own unlovability’ (181).

And it is particularly this whole resourceful system of arguments and actions by which she separates herself from George and subsequently drives him out of her life which seem especially wrong. More so, because, by doing this, she deprives herself of the only chance to have a genuine relationship.

Although Rosamund repeatedly talks about George’s homosexuality, nothing supports her hypothesis. On the contrary, their first encounter tells a different story.

There is nothing that would imply that George is gay: after an evening out, she invites him for a drink in her flat, and her invitation, quite straightforwardly, results in them having sex. Nevertheless, she must keep the narrative on about his homosexuality (or possibly extend it to consider his bisexuality) if she wishes to protect herself from hurt and involvement. To ‘love’ a gay is a safe escape which eventually leads nowhere between them, does not threaten her single status, and particularly her status of a single mother. Her relationship to George is one of the many clues that suggest (as it is argued later) that Rosamund’s single motherhood is more the desired choice than a mere coincidence.

Rosamund’s intellectuality also acts for her as a tool for singling herself out from other people, especially women. Her refusal to identify with other women is particularly self-evident in many hospital scenes. She does not sympathise with other women/mothers-to-be; on the contrary, she finds them repulsive, and she distances herself from them with vehemence. She describes her first encounter with pregnant

22 women as follows: ‘Those who looked worst of all were, ominously enough, the mothers: there were four mothers with young children, and they looked uniformly worn out’ (Drabble 43). Later she talks about her first hospital visit:

And there we all were, and it struck me that I felt nothing in common with any

of these people, that I disliked the look of them, that I felt a stranger and a

foreigner there, and yet I was one of them, I was like that too, I was trapped in a

human limit for the first time in my life, and I was going to have to learn how to

live inside it (66).

Here, suddenly and for the first time in her life, she is forced to admit her own limits, and she means the limits of being a woman. She realises she is not free (in the way she thinks of the freedom) and, at the same time, that she is a woman. By being confronted with the commonality of women’s lot and her femininity; she struggles to accept it, again, on the grounds of her alleged superiority.

Although the sense of belonging sometimes permeates Rosamund’s conscious refusal of commonality (for example, when she is forced to hold the baby of a worn-out and unkempt mother of two who is already pregnant with her third), these events do not change her attitudes or behaviour much in a long term, and they are, more or less, a nuisance for her. However, even on those occasions or when she finds in herself some resemblance with other women, she cannot help but stress out that the similarity is a mere coincidence: “… anyway, if all other women did feel it, then that was precisely what made it so remarkable in my case, as I could not recall a single other instance in my life when I had felt what all other women feel” (Drabble 119). The birth experience is yet another reason for proving her singularity. She informs that her recovery is quick after the birth of Octavia, and she is completely unlike all the other mothers who remain

23 fat and exhausted after giving birth - her body is instantly back in shape, and her mind is immediately ready to return to her challenging, and highly intellectually demanding work. She comments it with her dismissive smugness, “I am haunted even now by a memory of the way they walked, large and tied into shapeless dressing gowns, padding softly and stiffly, careful not to disturb the pain that still lay between the legs” (126).

Her attitude is utterly self-absorbed, and superior. Moreover, this approach extends to

Octavia after she is born. From that moment on, in Rosamund’s eyes, the little Octavia is, likewise her mother, superior to anyone else in the whole world.

Therefore, her personal traits make her more or less isolated from people who could be useful to her during her pregnancy and birth. This is even exaggerated by the fact that her family is distant, both emotionally, and spatially – her parents are comfortably dispatched to Africa leaving her a rent-free flat in a posh neighbourhood; moreover, she despises her brother and his wife as shallow bourgeois; and she is let down by her sister who refuses to give an approval to Rosamund’s single pregnancy and subsequent single motherhood, and refuses it as a shallow, and selfish act. Rosamund is clearly on her own for the whole journey of pregnancy, birth, and single motherhood.

This is a situation that Drabble intended while writing this book. In an interview with

Glenda Leeming Drabble says that ‘she had decided to write about the way that childbirth can change a character, and deliberately arranged the circumstances so that her heroine would be as isolated as possible from other influences’ (Leeming 25). But, as it is argued later, Rosamund does not significantly develop throughout the book, and the birth experience reasserts her deep-rooted defence mechanisms. Moreover, by isolating her character, Drabble produces an emotionally unbalanced person who, lacking all social contacts, excessively fixates herself on her child.

24

Rosamund and Her Pregnancy

Rosamund’s pregnancy is regarded as accidental. Ellen Cronan Rose sees her pregnancy “accidental and incidental to Rosamund’s real concerns, which are with her graduate research and her prospective career” (15). However, it is not accidental in the sense that it is a doing of fate. The link between someone’s nature and fate is one of

Drabble’s favourite theme. Nonetheless, describing Rosamund’s pregnancy as a stroke of fate is dubious at least. It is true that she gets pregnant from her first and only sexual encounter – something highly unlikely, but in any way not impossible. However, no matter how high the probability, this is still an occurrence that can be at least partially anticipated. Even in an era of the early and mid-sixties, which Sheila Rowbotham remembers: “Not only were we all ignorant about contraception, but we had no idea who we could ask for advice. We felt terrified of asking the college doctor about contraception in case we would be exposed to the dons” (48). But Rosamund is not a college girl anymore, and despite her sexual inexperience, and excessive prudishness and her unwillingness to mature, the event in question cannot be considered as a mere accident and fate even in her case with all mitigating circumstances in mind. Besides, she is a daughter of a progressive feminist mother – a fact which must certainly influence her, and not a little but to the extent she is unwilling to admit: ‘My mother, you know, was a great feminist. … I have to live up to her, you know’ (Drabble 33). In any way, given Rosamund’s intelligence and range of knowledge, her ignorance about contraception, pregnancy, birth and the working of the real world in general is quite remarkable.

Moreover, after she learns about her pregnancy, she attempts an abortion with gin and a hot bath and is ‘interrupted’ by the arrival of her friends. She can easily deal with the friends (her ‘fate’) if she wants to, and, proceed with the abortion, or have

25 another try the following day. It is, similarly, with her call to the abortionist. She gives up after one attempt when the phone is busy. All these strokes of fate are so easily prevented and overcome that it is difficult to believe that they might function as an obstacle to a proceeding. There is still an eventuality that her failing to act is a part of her nature and as Libby believes ‘Rosamund continues her pregnancy not because she consciously refuses to conform to social expectations but because she is unable to make a serious choice about her life’ (181). However, a much simpler explanation would be that Rosamund’s behaviour indicates that she unconsciously wants the baby and, therefore, foils everything that can spoil her wish. If this is true, her attempts to get rid of the baby are only show-offs, mainly for herself - for her reassurance that she does as much as possible to get rid of the problem. She needs the pregnancy, and she needs the baby. It gives her strength, purpose, and subsequently the way of life to which she aspires. She realizes during one of her discussions with Joe: “Though, as a matter of fact, he was quite right and I was in some perverse and painful way quite proud of my evident fertility. ‘In that case,’ said Joe, ‘I don’t see why you didn’t have something done about it.’ I was silent because I did not see why not either” (Drabble 48-9). This again repeats with her flatmate Lydia when she says to Rosamund “‘I suppose the truth is,’ she concluded, ‘that you must really want it. On some level, don’t you think?’ I shrugged my shoulders, for I did not know the answer” (72).

As Pandey observes for Rosamund, “the choice of single motherhood is a source of empowering herself” (ii). Her pregnancy is not a catalyst of her life change, on the contrary, it is its continuation. By having the baby, she can easily and completely withdraw from most of her closer social relationships (her natural state even before her falling pregnant), and, at the same time, ‘blame’ her social loneliness on her status of the single mother. The situation of single mother enables her to live her life, at least to

26 some degree, according to herself, and to her wishes, and not a live a life of dependency, subordination, and married state, which most of the women in the 1960s live (including her sister, of whom Rosamund thinks very highly otherwise, but reflects with all contempt the effect the marriage has on Beatrice). And this returns the argument back to Rosamund’s unsympathetic behaviour to other women. Rosamund’s fear, and inability to conform to the norms of then society (such as by getting married) are a partial explanation for her refusal to sympathise, and connect with other women.

However, Ellen Cronan Rose offers another explanation and sees Rosamund’s pregnancy as a way to free herself from the vicious circle of loneliness,

For becoming a mother does offer Rosamund an opportunity to break down the

walls of her isolation and connect, lovingly and vulnerably, with another. If

becoming a mother were a significant development in Rosamund’s life, it would

affect her relationship not only with Octavia, but with people in general (18-9).

Because Rosamund is the same at the beginning as is at the end of the novel, it is evident that she does not use the opportunity and chooses (again either consciously or unconsciously to remain in her isolation).

Nevertheless, this does not mean that Rosamund is not transformed by the experience of pregnancy, and later by motherhood. Of course, she is and in great deal, but these changes are rather subtle – she does not alter her outlook on life, and the way she wants to live it, but she can change her everyday behaviour and habits. One of the most prominent scenes of the whole book is about her screaming when she is not allowed to visit her baby daughter Olivia in hospital after a severe heart operation. Her shouting and total loss of emotional control - which is both so much not like her, and also very improper for the English person - pushes her beyond her comfort zone, and

27 she realizes that there begins a new era of her life – an era when she cannot accept and tolerate things the way they happen in everyday life if they influence her baby girl in a negative way. She is willing to do for Olivia things she can’t or is not bothered to do for herself, “Partly it is because, with Octavia, I cannot inflict all hardship on myself alone: what I take for myself, she gets too (Drabble, 167). The very existence of her daughter teaches her to sacrifice something for another human being, and the hospital shouting scene is transformative in this respect: it strengthens her motherhood, and it helps her to realise the vast power of it – the force that is to propel her now and forever. She comes to understand that her maternal love is superior to any other kind of love she might experience but she never experiences in her life. However, the topic of ‘love for the other’ is again ambiguous in Rosamund’s case and it depends on how one views her relationship to Octavia. There are clues throughout the book that Rosamund does not regard Octavia as a separate person but as a “small living extension of herself”

(Drabble, 170). In this case, Rosamund is alone again with Octavia being her alter ego.

The end of the novel is not surprising at all. Rosamund takes the unaware

George to look at their sleeping baby girl Octavia, and she confirms her (beforehand formed) opinion that there is an enormous and insurmountable gap between them because she feels so much for Octavia while George feels nothing. And although there are hints that if one of them makes a move (and George seems willing to do so), they end up together; however, the inevitable happens, and they part their ways without

George knowing the truth about his paternity. This seems rather heartless as Octavia is prevented from the contact with her father, and George is refused the chance to be involved in the life of his daughter. Moreover, she repeatedly stresses out that she spares him something, such as “So I spared him and myself” (134) and “I found myself glad that George had been spared this quite unnecessary sorrow” (139) after Octavia’s

28 operation. By withdrawing the information about his paternity, she consistently denies him the right to make his own choice. She does it for her own protection and it never occurs to her that she hurts both Octavia and George. In addition to that, there is not much to lose for her but gain. She thinks during their last meeting in her flat: “Words kept forming inside my head into phrases like I love you, George, don’t leave me,

George. I wondered what would happen if I let one of them out into the air. I wondered how much damage it would do” (196). The inevitable question is what damage

Rosamund has in her mind. As Ellen Cronan Rose asks, “What could possibly be damaged? Decorum? Pride? On the other hand, what might possibly be gained? An end to solitude, true intimacy, the sharing of responsibility for Octavia” (20).

Motherhood and Mothering in The Millstone

Although Drabble’s approach in The Millstone is notably individualistic (telling a story of one particular person omitting most of the external circumstances), still the book reveals much (often in a subliminal way) about the social issues concerning the early and mid-sixties (this is mainly discussed in the fifth chapter). Nonetheless, by isolating Rosamund almost entirely from the external world, “[she] remain[s] resolutely unaware of the extent to which their [single mothers’] situation was under discussion in this period” (Philips, 44). Drabble must be influenced by this debate although she does not, explicitly, express it in the book. At the same time, Drabble distances herself and her character from any form of commonality, particularly from any processes of cooperation with other women in thought or action. Therefore, there are no such things as the sisterhood or a common cause in The Millstone. On the contrary, there is only one lone person’s plight in the society that is hostile to her. The influence of Simone de

Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is identifiable in The Millstone. Drabble’s character shares with de Beauvoir an outlook on feminism,

29

[Simone de Beauvoir] was uninterested in feminist movements, which she

considered to have outlived their relevance. As a prominent author and

intellectual, she felt little need of legal emancipation. Rather, her engagement

with the question “what is a woman” arose from her personal situation, which

she acknowledged had been shaped by her gender (Bair 382-6, qt. in Allen

Taylor 216-7).

At the same time, Rosamund dislikes for feminism is quite usual in the sixties.

Sandbrook writes in Never Had It So Good that in the sixties “feminists were dusty, old fashioned harridans” (Sandbrook, 588). Moreover, precisely as de Beauvoir, Drabble is interested with the question ‘what is a woman’ on an individual level and investigates the ways how it is to as the ‘Other’ in the world that is masculine. But her findings are not encouraging for women as she tends to suggest that women should adjust to the men’s world to succeed. Her views are biased by her determinism, and as Libby puts it:

“For through Rosamund, Drabble creates a vision of a universe gratuitously limited beyond the limitations of a thoroughly patriarchal society” (181). Drabble carefully moves within these limits, using patriarchal schemes and ways of expressions. Joe, for example, praises Rosamund by stressing her male qualities “A very unwomanly woman, that’s what you are” (Drabble 46).

Moreover, the whole narrative about her maternity and her academic achievements is built creating opposites: the emotions of one side versus the rationality on the other side. And Drabble makes sure to stress out that Rosamund prefers the latter.

She says: “I do not wish to suggest, as perhaps I seem to be suggesting, that the irrational was taking its famed feminine grip upon me. … On the contrary, I found I was working extremely well at this time and with great concentration and clarity”

(Drabble 78). This is again apparent in the hospital: not only that Rosamund reads a

30

‘serious’ book during her labour (not as the other women who give in to their emotions), but she also starts working immediately after giving birth. The description of her birth is in a similar manner. Her birth (again, by contrast to other women’s) is clean, quick, almost antiseptic. Furthermore, there is no hassle. It takes place almost unnoticed. “She prides herself on her ability to control her body” (Rose, Ellen Cronan,

16) because the body is, of course, feminine. This is also visible in her refusal of, what

Ellen Cronan Rose calls, “mess of mothering” (17) - she gives up breastfeeding quickly because of its connotation with irrationality, uncleanness, and femininity.

The (male - female categorisation and effort to lean towards the man’s which is in her view the better) causes internal confusions and suppressed feelings in her. She suffers from “the repressed female-identified part” (Spitzer, 244). She does not create her own way, she is just adjusting to the man’s one, and therefore, Rosamund’s triumph of the successful combination of motherhood and a career is then somehow lost. As

Head concludes, “for Rosamund gender expectations have produced an emotional deformity, and an irresolvable double bin. She combines independence with motherhood in the face of convention, only to perceive this a pyrrhic victory, owned by nurturing her deadening solipsism”(89).

Drabble sharply differs from de Beauvoir on the topic of motherhood. For

Drabble, children are the creative force and inspiration in any society. And they are always welcome. This attitude is expressed by Rosamund’s sister: “You don’t decide to have children. They decide to be born’” (Drabble 77). So, what The Millstone is above all is the celebration of motherhood and mothering. Ann Rayson observes:

Drabble ushers in a new era for the woman writer in which the relationship

between a mother and her children is catalytic rather than destructive.

31

Domesticity, instead of contributing to her depression and sapping her creativity,

spurs a Drabble woman to achievement … Having a child, in Drabble’s novels,

is not an end in itself, but one effective way available to a woman - and not to a

man - of growing and coping with change, of learning to live. Children, she

says, give her the greatest pleasure in life and are more important to her

characters than anything else. (43).

Besides, there is no need of men in this close-knit unit of a mother and her children. It is about her and her only. Therefore, as Rayson emphasizes, “Motherhood is central to a woman's experience; it shapes and defines her and gives her a purpose in life” (Rayson

46). This is, of course, certainly true for Rosamund. As Snowalter puts it, “For a

Drabble heroine, a room of one’s own is usually a place to have a baby, but it is at the same time a testing-ground for resilience and charity and wisdom. Thus Drabble finds a female resolution to the feminine conflict between biological and artistic creativity”

(250-1). Drabble introduces the discussion about how to combine the career and motherhood, the topic that is still topical and unresolved today. Rosamund is a ‘real champion’ and ‘role model’ to follow. Forgotten is a torment of Sylvia Plath and suchlike. Forgotten are countless mothers who struggle with this dilemma every day.

The motherhood and successful career are not in contradiction in Rosamund’s world, on the contrary, the motherhood drives her to further achievements and successes, as

Snowalter muses, “pregnancy is a way of knowing, a process of education” (251).

Mothers and Children

“All I can say is that mine was beautiful and in my defence I must add that others said she was beautiful too” (118), describes Rosamund her daughter Octavia in the hospital. As mentioned before, Rosamund’s family is distant, and their relationships

32 are not developed enough to analyse them. Rosamund is less bohemian and liberal than her parents (Philips 27). She refuses her mother’s feminism as outdated, and their relationship seems not to be very close. At first sight, the relationship between

Rosamund and her mother resembles the relationship between Anna Wulf and her daughter Janet in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook – a feminist, progressive mother vs. a rather conservative daughter. However, the dynamic of mutual dependency differs in these books: Anna, the mother, seems to be emotionally dependent on Janet, her daughter in The Golden Notebook; in The Millstone, it is the other way round:

Rosamund misses her mother’s emotional support.

Susan Spitzer explains this from the psychoanalytical point of view:

Rosamund’s self-proclaimed need of independence which as she claims she learnt from her parents (and she stresses it many times throughout the book) is an opposite of what she claims. Because she is disappointed with her parents’ partial attention and she “is frustrated in her need, which can never be fully satisfied, of the parental couple and the mother, in particular, the child turns to dreams of autonomy wherein these primary love objects are scorned or stripped of all importance” (231). This, of course, extends to the baby and Spitzer claims that “Rosamund will be both parent and child vis-a-vis her offspring. She will lavish upon her child the love she feels, at some level, deprived of herself (her parents, she remarks, infuriate her by their refusal to see things in terms of love and hate, by their overweening preoccupation with justice alone” (231). From this point of view, Octavia is again only an extension of Rosamund. Moreover, Rosamund can take care of Octavia the way she wants to be cared for and compensate for the lack of things she misses as a child and adult. This opinion is shared by Bromberg; she argues that Octavia is “an entirely self-created alter ego” (Bromberg, 181). Then, “the bond with her baby serves only to make her more withdrawn” (89). Bromberg, then,

33 worries about Rosamund and Octavia’s future, “we have no evidence (…), that she

[Rosamund] will ever be able to open up her frightened ego to another autonomous adult” (181).

The rather long exploration of Rosamund’s character reveals the ambiguity in the critical readings of the novel. Ellen Cronan Rose attributes this to the use of the first-person narrative mode (24). However, she identifies “a more profound difficulty

Drabble was having in achieving sufficient detachment from experience she shared with other women in her age group to analyse and understand it” (25). In the light of this, a clear vision which is traceable in The Millstone regardless various readings of the novel is discussed as well as the reason why it fails to take the intended effect.

Drabble’s determinism and her outlook on motherhood as a stepping stone to a women’s transformation and fulfilment are the basic premises for further discussion. In her deterministic view, the idea of social change is unfeasible. Therefore, it is essential for women to adapt to the patriarchal world to achieve their goals. One of the possible ways, how to accomplish it, is sketched in The Millstone. By remaining single,

Rosamund effectively frees herself from a male dominance, and she creates a personal space for her decisions and, more generally, her long wished-for life. Of course, this has an impact on her motherhood. Pandey says “motherhood, if viewed outside the patriarchal world, is indeed pleasure” (112). And this is the situation that Rosamund wilfully creates in The Millstone: she is free to bring up her child outside the world of the patriarchy. Furthermore, it is suggested that the child gives the strength so she is able to overcome the before unimaginable things: Drabble explains this in the interview with Hardin: “I know people who have gone through unbelievable torments and have still got up in the morning and got their children to school whereas unmarried women or men tend to have a lower breaking point” (282). Therefore, “the problem faced by

34 women is,” according to Drabble, “not so much the physical as the mental emancipation from patriarchal shackles” (Pandey, 41).

The most common reading of The Millstone is that “Rosamund has achieved that desirable feminist synthesis (…) that by remaining single she has established her independence, while in her motherhood she has affirmed both her flesh and her bonds with humanity (Rose, Ellen Cronan, 21). But this cannot be so. Firstly, she is not a feminist heroine, simply because she “does not define herself in relation to non- patriarchal values” (Rose, Ellen Cronan 21). Secondly, Rosamund’s motherhood cannot be viewed in such positive terms as suggested here for the reasons which are thoroughly explored earlier in this chapter. In addition to that, Drabble’s intent is certainly not to create a feminist heroine. Pandey points out that Drabble “resents any suggestion that, as a writer, she should confine herself to the women’s point of view” (Pandey, 40).

In The Millstone, there are references to Woolf, de Beauvoir and Lessing. Such as Lessing, Drabble does not view motherhood as an obstacle to a creative career (this is, however, in contradiction with Woolf and de Beauvoir). She answers de Beauvoir’s question of ‘what is a woman’ in the most positive way. However, this fails her.

Although Rosamund seems to be a success and Hardin suggests “she achieves a true synthesis both within herself and with the outside world” (25), the opposite is true: she is shaken and experiences an existential crisis similarly as Esther in Plath’s The Bell Jar or Anna in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. The difference between them is that

Rosamund would not show it and cannot bring herself to admit it. Thus she hides instead.

35

Chapter Three: Lynn Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room

Introducing Jane

The main story line of The L-Shaped resembles that of The Millstone: a young, well-educated, upper-middle class girl without any substantial financial worries falls pregnant by her only sexual encounter with a man for whom she has rather ambivalent feelings. Philips says,

[t]he novel is in many ways looking back in nostalgia at the 1950s and the

Angry Young Man, to whom there are frequent references. The narrative begins

with the heroine, Jane, arriving at the dingy bed-sitting room of the title, a scene

evokes Joe Lampton’s arrival in Dufton in John Braine’s 1957 novel Room at

the Top (Braine, 1969) (45-6).

Furthermore, “the motley collection of characters in this ‘gone-to-see’ house also have a connotation of the era of kitchen-sink drama (Philips, 45). The L-Shaped Room also draws heavily on the hit play by Shelagh Delaney A Taste of Honey (1958): there is both a similarity in characters and the subject matter. But A Taste of Honey is more daring as the man who makes the main character Jo pregnant is a black sailor Jimmy. In

The L-Shaped Room, Banks precisely depicts the times of pending social changes and creates, albeit more or less unconsciously, a novel with proto-feminist features. The l- shaped room on the top of the run-down Fulham boarding house where she finds a refuge, and that eventually becomes her home is both a substitute for her missing family and a stepping stone to her emotional maturity.

Banks, just as Drabble, uses a first person narrative for telling the story of Jane

Gardner. Compared to Rosamund, Jane has ‘less internal issues’; she is a less complicated person. Her inner monologue and observations are pertinent, but they are

36 primarily descriptive and mostly lacking the telling inner depth. Thus Banks concentrates on the ‘external’ rather than the ‘internal’. That is not to say that Jane does not analyse her emotions and feelings of the people around her, she does and very skilfully but it is more or less incidental. The difference between Drabble and Banks in the approach to their main characters is primarily evident in the way Rosamund and

Jane deal with their pregnancies. Rosamund withdraws from her social life and remains solitary; on the contrary, Jane opens up to (for her) unlikely friendships and personal relationships12. She even fears that she ends up lonely because she sees it as an inevitable result of her single pregnancy, “I felt as if I was alone in a trap. Nothing mattered if only I could tell someone. If only I didn’t have to be alone with it” (Banks,

17).

She is rescued by a group of “‘flotsam’ rejected by contemporary respectability”

(Philips, 46) who she meets in her new Fulham home. “Jane belongs to this environment because of her outsider status as a single mother” (Philips, 46). Her new friends and acquaintances, as Banks suggests, are irreplaceable for her emotional maturation which is a process that is initiated by her pregnancy. Therefore, the single pregnancy functions here as a catalyst for change. Jane observes,

It was as if I hated my own face and wanted to escape from the mirrors which

reflected it … only the mirrors turned into people, and it wasn’t my face that

was ugly, but me, as a person. Now that was changed somehow, and the L-

12 Her friends include a black musician and a Jewish writer. Banks’s treatment of these characters is, from today’s point of view, problematic at least. Casual racism is very much present in The L-Shaped Room. This is also true for Dunn’s writing in the next chapter. Moreover, there are anti-Semitic and homophobic remarks in Banks’s novel. In any case, this mirrors, to a certain extent, the conventional thinking of the late fifties and the early sixties. Moreover, it is interesting that Banks does not realise that Jane is in a similar situation to these characters. She is ostracised, and so are they. It is then inconsistent to criticise it and, at the same time, do it to someone else.

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shaped room had served its purpose – as a mirror-less house would no longer be

needed by someone whose blemish had gone (Banks, 251).

Even though Jane seeks a company to be able to handle her pregnancy, she is, at the same time, very individualistic in the way she deals with her situation. Philips points out that Jane, like Rosamund, is entirely unaware of the discussions about single mothers and that “the discourse of the condition of the single mother was, however, on the agenda for the Church of England and for sociologists, educationalists and legislators; all were preoccupied with discussions of the ‘unmarried mother’, the ‘fatherless family”

(43-4). At the same time, she does not have or actively seek a support of other women

(again, it is a recurrent pattern of all analysed novels).

Relationships

Similarly, like in The Millstone, the father of Jane’s baby is a distant figure without any real relationship to her. As the primary focus is on the pregnancy, it is rather odd that the themes of sex and love are absent in the narrative: after a brief, insignificant sexual intercourse which leads directly to pregnancy, there is a sudden transformation that changes both heroines from women immediately into mothers (and mothers only). This eventually further developes in The L-Shaped Room when love and sensuality are awakened in Jane. However, at the beginning of the book, it is correct what Joannou observes, “The babies in The L-Shaped Room and The Millstone are not conceived in passion, neither are their mothers strongly libidinous, but, on the contrary, are characterised by English emotional reserve” (58). Joannou finds puzzling “the absence of sexual need” in the novels because, according to her, “[f]or women to admit to sexual need is a troubling break both with sexual morality and literary convention”

(58). If so, neither Drabble nor Banks are willing to stride over this boundary.

38

In any case, the matter is much more complicated and puzzling in The Millstone.

It is true that the mix of prudery, reserve and middle-class respectability can serve as a sufficient explanation for the lack of sexual desire in Rosamund’s character. Moreover,

Ellen Cronan Rose connects Rosamund’s refusal of sex to her denial of love, “What

Rosamund is actually rejecting is one of the consequences of sex, intimate involvement with another human being. It is love she is rejecting, not sex” (15). Even though this explanation is plausible and in full agreement with the conclusions of the second chapter, there is a further possible conclusion. Rosamund’s abstaining from sex can be an answer to de Beauvoir’s question from The Second Sex – the issue that concern

Drabble in her early novels: Can a woman become “an autonomous and transcendent subject” if she is for men “the sex” (“a sexed being”)? Pandey observes,

These early heroines of Drabble feel that yielding to ‘the impersonal pulls’ of

sex would result in what de Beauvoir calls ‘immanence’, ‘confinement’ or

‘restriction’. At the same time, they are aware that their identity as women is

inseparably connected with their sexuality” (38).

However, this is certainly not true for Rosamund because she does not connect her identity with her sexuality. She is rather indifferent to it and seems not to be concerned with it at all, and she wants to avoid it. Her identity is only connected to her maternity and her work. The novel even gives an impressing that the only sexual encounter she has, and which leads to the conception of Octavia, remains the first and the last in her life. Moreover, as Showalter observes, “Of all the contemporary English women novelists, Margaret Drabble is the most ardent traditionalist” with a “connection to female tradition,” (Showalter, 249) and “with her personal commitment to nineteenth- century social realism” (Showalter, 250). In the light of this, the most plausible explanation is that Drabble, at this stage of her career, does not want to get involved

39 with this topic at all. This is also in compliance with the tradition of the English novel as Drabble discusses it in the next chapter.

Banks’s Jane develops a loving but complicated relationship with one of the tenants, Toby. Philips observes that “the scenes with her lover, Toby, are erotic and tender” (48). Therefore, unlike Drabble, Banks introduces the ‘female desire’ into the narrative and deals with it carefully: she timidly tiptoes around the subject, and her references are rare. Furthermore, unlike Rosamund whose single status seems to be for her a lifelong, permanent and chosen situation (something to what she even aspires or, at least, it is unwilling to change), Jane doesn’t shield herself from love. She even admits that “the ugly truth about the sin I’d committed, the blasphemy of creating a life by accident, without understanding the true pleasure and beauty of love” (89).

Rosamund does not share this opinion: she does not believe that ‘creating a life’ without love is a sin. But she finds sinful her own situation: her lack of sex and her animosity towards the very idea of sex, “I was guilty of a crime, all right, but it was a brand new, twentieth-century crime, not the good old traditional one of lust and greed.

My crime was my suspicion, my fear, my apprehensive terror of the very idea of sex”

(20). Beards sees Rosamund, together with the heroines of Drabble’s previous novels A

Summer Bird-Cage (1963) and The Garrick Year (1964), as “[p]roperly brought up and repressed middle-class women tell their sexual reticences, silences, and strategies of avoidance result in full-drawn portraits of the class and culturally eroded female libido”

(Beards, 41).

The lack of men and genuine relationships between men and women is very present in The L-Shaped Room (as it is in The Millstone and in Poor Cow). It signifies both a refusal of individual men and, also, men in general as a symbol of patriarchy

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(this is discussed earlier: single motherhood as a tool for creating for the main protagonist a ‘world outside patriarchy’). On the individual level, this is presented as the alleged insufficiency of men: a topic under discussion back then as it is a common theme presented in, among others, Lessing, Drabble and Banks. Drabble talks about it with Hardin, “It seems to me that sublime, romantic passion is something very special and that perhaps everybody expects it, but very few people get it. The lucky ones get it.

Those that wait sometimes get it and sometimes don’t” (292). And she mentions The

Golden Notebook where Lessing discusses it in a great length, “As Doris Lessing would say, there are not all that many men in the world these days who are worth looking for.

She said in The Golden Notebook that the Englishman isn’t worth tuppence and that no

Englishman knows how to love. Well, that’s true” (293). The disappointment with men is articulated in The L-Shaped Room as well. When Jane asks her aunt Addy why her lover to whom she writes touching letters never writes back to her, Addy replays,

‘“Because he doesn’t exist’, she said matter-of-factly. ‘Men like that never do. They always have to be invented’” (198). The similar notion about men pervades the whole book.

Moreover, men are usually portrayed as those who pass judgments, ridicule and belittle women and, therefore, serve as a means for exposing hypocrisy and double standards at the everyday level. The father of Jane’s baby Terry is one of them: he proposes to Jane after learning about her pregnancy, but Jane dismisses his offer as “an attempt at expiation” (Banks, 253). She muses, “I was fond of him, but I didn’t respect him, any more than he did me. Which wasn’t much, whatever he might say. To him, I was irretrievably that sort of girl forever” (Banks, 253). Moreover, she adds that “I would be that sort of girl in most men’s eyes from now on” (Banks, 253). So, she takes the blame for both of them although they do the same (having sex together and creating

41 their baby). Moreover, the incident does not change his status at all, and he is in a position when he can pass judgments on her. Although Jane feels betrayed and frustrated by this injustice, Banks does not allow her to break free from the vicious circle of such a cruel hypocrisy, on the contrary, Jane blames herself as well and agrees with others who label her as ‘that sort of girl’. Moreover, she continues in the same pattern after this experience, clings to another man, her lover Toby, and becomes emotionally dependent on him. “This didn’t alarm me unduly, partly because Toby didn’t regard me as that sort of girl” (Banks, 253). Of course, it is positive that Toby doesn’t share the popular conviction about fallen women yet it is problematic to build one’s self-assurance on it.

Fighting Back

One can draw an analogy between Rosamund’s and Jane’s conception. Both pregnancies are unplanned; they are accidental. As the second chapter implies,

Rosamund’s pregnancy is to some extent deliberate, but this is not the case of Jane’s pregnancy at all. However, her pregnancy starts a transformation process, and she begins to seek a control of her life. She learns (albeit out of necessity) to assert her will and stand up to men. There are several incidents in the book that support this claim.

The first of such events is Jane’s encounter with her doctor. This is on Jane’s part, according to Head, a display of “the explicitly feminist’s consciousness” (85). Jane courageously defies an authority of a patronising man with a superordinate status and persistently asserts her rights. By proclaiming “It’s my baby and I want it to live!”

(139), she refuses not only his authority but, in a figurative way, the patriarchal model and the hypocrisy of the ideal of respectability. Then, the doctor, who forces upon her an abortion on the grounds of her mental deficiency, even before he hears her out, is the

42 quintessence of this era of routine patronising and belittling women in all possible situations of everyday life. The doctor even tries to discuss with her “acts of fornication” (Banks, 26), so deterrent the whole situation is. Significantly, the whole scene shows how readily accessible the abortion is to a middle-class, relatively wealthy woman even in pre-Abortion Law London.

The topic of men’s dominance over women in medical profession, particularly their monopolising of the pregnancy and birth in hospital settings, is repeatedly expressed in the novel, such as in the situation when Jane reads a book about pregnancy: “Another, written by a man, of course, suggested that morning sickness was a matter which a strong-minded woman could easily bring under control” (68). This again highly patronising, self-righteous approach from a received authority of men is something so pervasive in obstetrics and gynaecology that it, still, survives until today.

Her boss, who is described as rather sympathetic to her, even after she becomes pregnant, is a symbol of another situation during which Jane can assert herself and which Head regards as a manifestation of “the explicitly feminist’s consciousness” (85).

Despite his sympathy for her, he again as every man deserves a special treatment because “even the most broadminded men are apt to be funny about things like this”

(16). Therefore, she cannot approach him directly, she has to find ways to get what she needs and wants to get to survive. There is no protection of pregnant women at the workplace in the late fifties, and the social security is hard to get (it is usually a husband who can claim benefits). So, Jane needs to keep her job as long as possible to receive money. However, she is fired anyway after her pregnancy starts to show.

She is exposed to the everyday harassment. “Perhaps I would have enjoyed the shopping even more if I had brought a ring to wear. But I didn’t; somehow it seemed

43 too big a lie. I let people give me looks, and returned them with interest (Banks, 217).

She repeatedly expresses her inner conflict with the society that forces her to live a lie to remain respectable, and she occasionally opposes such treatment.

Particularly remarkable is Jane’s attitude to her pregnancy. Not surprisingly, she regrets it, but the reason for her remorse is rather unexpected. She does not regret having the baby; she regrets the circumstances of its happening: “the fact that one raw, mismanaged, unhappy night could result in this, this huge, frightening vista opening in front of me, this mountains of responsibility” (Banks, 26). And further, she adds, “That so little – a wrong decision, and two inept, unsatisfactory performances of the sexual act, which gave so little pleasure – could result in a changed world” (Banks, 26). She repeats this over and over, “The whole disproportionate aftermath would be a thousand times easier to bear if I could only have felt it was a payment for something I’d truly wanted and enjoyed” (Banks, 53). Therefore, the problem, for her, is not the pregnancy itself, it is the way it happens. Here, again, she feels remorseful about the impossibility to alter her past and the way the baby is conceived, but she is in no way dejected about her present situation: the situation she can control thanks to her determinant, brave and self-contained nature.

Parents and Children

Jane’s relationship with her father is the most prominent relationship in The L-

Shaped Room because it overshadows all the other. It is partly so because she does not have a mother. She feels guilty because she believes that she is the cause of her mother’s death (her mother died at the childbirth), “This won’t go far to make up for my shortcomings, like not being a son and like killing my mother by getting born” (Banks,

18). Both the longing for her mother and the sense of guilt is a recurrent motif in The L-

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Shaped Room. They are expressed explicitly, “Somehow I felt what I really needed was an older woman, someone who understood all the implications, who could see the thing in the perspective of wisdom and experience. It took me some months to realize that these dim yearnings of mine must be for my mother” (Banks, 78). And at the same time indirectly, as in the situation when she associates the bed-bug-riddled Fulham boarding house with her longing for her mother, “the house embraced me with the slightly reproachful, but forgiving arms of a mother” (Banks, 54). The mother does not only represent the missing maternal presence in Jane’s life but also, in a more general sense, the lost refuge from the hostile men-dominated world symbolised by the figure of her father.

Therefore, it is entirely justifiable to draw an analogy between the then society and Jane’s father. On the basic level, “the nuclear family is depicted as an oppressive institution whereas friends and neighbours are a reliable source of support. The L-

Shaped Room traces Jane’s transition from emotionally inhibited middle-class respectability to enjoyment of bohemian life” (Joannou, 58). But this is not as straightforward as that: firstly, the father is for Jane both appealing and repelling. She wants to rebel against him but, at the same time, she seeks his approval and finds it difficult to live without it. She says before telling him about her pregnancy, “I felt a bit the way I felt before my first bullfight. I didn’t want to see the bull killed; I just wanted to know what it would do to me to see it” (Banks, 27). She lacks both the strength and the will to break free of him. The same applies to the society: although she finds the alternative world of bohemia (the milieu which is according to Banks in opposition to the notion of the middle-class respectability), her escape is only provisional as she eventually returns to her forgiving father. In a very strange but perfectly expected twist at the end, the worlds of the middle-class respectability and bohemia meet in the

45 hospital, and in mutual understanding expect the birth of the baby boy David. The restoration of the status quo is successfully accomplished.

However, as Head points out, “the limits of Banks’s novel are contextual limits, rather than a failure of authoritarian imagination. (…) With this climate in mind, it is the issue of restricted opportunities for Banks’s protagonist what strikes the most resonant feminist chord” (86). This is to some degree true for all three novels. Except for The

Millstone, these books do not deal with how to combine a career and motherhood and, therefore, they cannot offer a solution for single mothers who want to live independently of men and support themselves by working (and not by inherited money like Jane does). This contextual problem these authors encounter is demonstrated in the next chapter on Nell Dunn’s sequel to Poor Cow, My Silver Shoes, which shows how

Jo’s life is influenced by the context of the 1990s. Nevertheless, Banks is the most willing out of these three authors to restore the status quo. Jane’s maturation then seems more like a teenage revolt when, at the end of the day, she reassures herself that parents are right after all.

Disregarding Banks’s devotion to the status quo, “The L-Shaped Room was significant in that it did allow for an unapologetic expression of female desire, and that it was not at all judgmental about Jane’s pregnancy. Jane may not experience any pleasure from the conception of her baby, but the scenes with her lover, Toby, are erotic and tender” (Philips, 48). Moreover, Banks makes some remarkable points concerning the medical profession, pregnancy and abortion. Further, Jane is a heroine that stands on her own two feet and tries actively come to grips with her situation. She is a courageous, resolute and active young woman who undergoes a radical change in attitude and grows mature.

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Chapter Four: Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow

Introducing Joy

Joy has barely anything: she does not have a job or a permanent place to live; she struggles through the days with hardly any money left and waits (in a cold sweat) for her husband Tom and (in eager anticipation) for her lover Dave to return from prison. At the same time, she is disobedient and does not understand rules. She expects much but is unable to give anything. And she has Jonny, ‘her little Jonny’: the son who is both a salvation and a hindrance for her.

Her life is a sequence of catastrophes she brings about on herself by her reckless decisions: she marries an abusive thief Tom very young; they have a baby, she is not ready for; her husband is sent down for thieving; her short-lived affair with her husband’s accomplice Dave is abruptly interrupted when he is sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment; she moves on the verge of criminal subculture, and she does not have a permanent place to live. Joy is a ‘poor cow’, which is a label that is according to

Peter Bradshaw, “a masterstroke of deadpan irony and tragedy: a despairing insult born of pity and condescension, hurled at women by men, or at women by themselves”. It is a collective term denoting a shared condition of women like Joy whose lives are influenced by circumstances and events that spin out of control. However, Joy is not only one of many, an interchangeable woman; she is more than that; she is a fighter.

Drabble writes in the Introduction to Poor Cow, “she is by no means a helpless victim: she is a survivor who admits to herself that she can’t take too much security” (ii).

Moreover, Joy never seems defeated despite all her troubles, and she is always ready to carry on. Therefore, she is not only ‘poor cow, but she is also ‘joy’ as her first name suggests.

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Poor Cow is set in Fulham but it seems to be very different Fulham to Fulham as it is portrayed in The L-Shaped Room: for Joy, Fulham is a real place, the only one she has; it is inescapable for her; it is not a place of redemption, of a transient reality as it is for Jane in The L-Shaped Room. Dunn haphazardly juxtaposes the first and third person narrative. It proves rather beneficial as it enables one to keep the distance from Joy’s intense, confessional narration and it gives the story so much needed energy; however, sometimes, at the expense of an occasional confusion and lack of clarity. Joy’s parts

“seem frank, uncensored and are all the more affecting for that” (Head, 90). Her narration together with the letters she writes Dave to prison offers a profound and convincing insight into a full and complex character of Joy. There is “a strong emphasis on subjectivity, on the complex and unquantifiable universe of desires and affects”

(Alcala, 50). However, this subjectivity is inextricably intertwined with the lots of other women similar to Joy and communicated as such.

Moreover, Joy has “a raucous exuberance” (Philips, 56) that is missing both in

Drabble and Banks’s women. Unlike Rosamund and Jane’s, Joy’s story is raw and unrestrained, but, also, at the same time, despairing, and, for some, shocking. Where

Drabble and Banks tiptoe about some issue with decency and middle-class respectability, there is a blow of depressing reality in Poor Cow. This is the case of abortion (which is discussed in more details in the fifth chapter). On the contrary to

Banks’s sentimentalized depiction of the working-class milieu, Dunn is not prone to sentimentality. In addition to that, she is very sympathetic and not at least patronizing.

In the introduction to Poor Cow, Drabble points out another essential quality of Dunn’s book “the innocence of the emotions” (ii), and she believes that it is “the combination of

48 scandal and innocence that gives them [Up to Junction13 and Poor Cow] peculiar grace”

(ii). Dunn certainly likes Joy and her social milieu, and she treats many occurrences and doings matter-of-factly, without judging or moralising, as Drabble observes “without ideology, without a superimposed interpretation” (ii).

However, the working-class milieu is not Dunn’s natural habitat: she moves to working-class Battersea from Chelsea and goes into raptures by the atmosphere there.

As Drabble explains,

The humour and the energy, the violence and the freedom were exciting.

Nobody pretended, nobody was pretentious. It seemed a real world, where

women could lead their lives. They did not seem oppressed, despite their low

pay. There was a sense of matriarchy. Women were strong, openly strong, rather

than deviously influential (ii).

Becoming a part of this social milieu, Dunn in Poor Cow describes what’s happening around her; what it is like to be a young working-class woman at that time with no money or job. Of course, Dunn’s background raises the questions of authenticity of the novel, particularly in a more recent feminist analysis (Wilson, 158). However, her approach is sincere and helpful. Moreover, Poor Cow is a work of fiction, not a sociological study. What is important is the fact that Dunn is among the first who portrays working-class women’s lives in literature from their point of view. She is also concerned with, until then, utterly unacceptable topics such as backstreet abortion or prostitution from the women’s perspective; as well as with the themes earlier reserved

13 Up the Junction (1963) is Nell Dunn’s first book which is a collection of short stories depicting lives of working class women in South London. It became notorious for its ‘raw’ backstreet abortion scene which provokes outrage among many people, including the famous housewife Mary Whitehouse.

49 only for middle and upper-class women, such as married women’s entrapment at home and their problems with domesticity and sole responsibility for bringing up children.

Ambitions

Roberto del Valle Alcala correctly observes that there is “a central ambivalence

[is] in Joy’s attitude towards ‘security’” (57). This ambivalence, then, problematizes both marriage and domesticity as well as exposes the difficulties of being, at the same time, a mother and a self-contained individual. As Wilson points out, “Apart from the short period of time that she spends with Dave, Joy is most happy working in a bar and as a glamour model: independent, sexually active and having fun, while living with her

Aunt who helps with childcare” (158). However, her ambitions and ‘independency’ are firmly limited to what life brings to her as her passivity prevents her from doing anything. She has dreams, but she has no will or “idea how to fulfil them; a ‘career’ is an abstract desire that she has little sense how to achieve (…) While she has ambitions to take evening classes in Elocution and Deportment, she never gets as far as finding out where they might be held, and the classes never happen” (Philips, 57). She is just drifting without any real purpose or aim. Her plans are just momentary ideas that change at high speed and never come to be materialized.

She wants to be independent but, at the same time, she is very much tempted into relationships. She is oscillating between the feelings of full emotional and physical dependency on men and some independence. She finds it superfluous and annoying to be married, “When I first married, in two years I only went out nine times. I just lost all interest in life – in everything. That’s why I’m frightened of settling down perhaps I’m not destined for security. Some people need change” (Dunn, 108). But, simultaneously, she repeatedly writes letters to Dave expressing her desire to marry him.

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Her cohabitation with Dave – her only happy ‘long-term’ relationship by then – is “a model of home-life that seems to be (…) more of a possibility to be invested in”

(Wilson, 161). She not only fulfils her dreams of perfect home with him (which in her case means decorating his flat according to her taste) but they share the domestic responsibilities: “Sometimes he’d cook the dinner and sometimes she would, and after dinner all three would have a lay down” (Dunn, 27). They also talk, make themselves laugh, spend time together and are attentive to themselves and their needs, “Later he made her cup of tea and brought it to her in bed (…) ‘I’ll look after you,’ he says, pressing her head against his chest” (Dunn, 28). And, on top of that, Dave is good to

Jonny. “Their life together was a serious of treats” (Dunn, 35) but, unfortunately, interrupted, by Dave’s imprisonment. So, it is interesting to know what would happen without Dave’s incarceration because it can reveal much about Joy’s real attitudes towards marriage and about her willingness and ability to stay in a long-term, happy relationship.

Joy’s cohabitation with Dave is conspicuously dissimilar to her marriage to

Tom: there is no mutual understanding, respect or time spent together. On the contrary, there is lots of violence, power play and misogyny. Still, Joy decides to give her marriage another try after Tom’s release from prison. Her motivation for doing so is rather ambivalent again: Joannou argues that “she stays in an unfulfilled marriage for reasons which are very much of their time: she does not want her son to be product of a broken home” (74). But also, simultaneously, there is a more selfish reason: Joy is, in fact, partially enthralled by Tom’s assurances and a promise of material possessions although she knows deep down that she cannot trust him. In the last chapter of the book which is aptly called “Desolation”, she feels more and more entrapped in the emptiness of her marriage, “I clean all me stairs down then I put a bit of Harpic down the lavatory

51 and it’s done, then I go down the laundrette and get me shopping. If yer heart’s in yer home it’s all right, otherwise it’s useless” (Dunn, 120). And as Wilson observes “This chimes strongly with (…) popular feminist critique of the typical roles available to married women in the post-war period (Betty Friedan’s influential The Feminine

Mystique was published in 1963)” (163).

She is strongly individualistic, and therefore, lonely in her situation of a broken marriage. There is no community of women in her life on which she can rely and with which she can share her problems. It is partly because she does not like or trust women.

Moreover, she relates the misery of marriage to women in general, to this women’s world that she despises: “How can I go to all this – I’m not the same any more. I can’t stick all these women and their kids. I love kids, I’d break the world in half for my

Jonny but it’s being bogged down every blessed moment and all day among women.

You go in the shops, it’s bleeding women-you go to the park, it’s bleeding women, all so sure, so full of themselves” (128). After her experience of being self-reliant during

Tom’s imprisonment and after her relationship with Dave, she finds it hard to continue such an empty and abusive marriage even though she has only limited possibilities to support herself otherwise. Philips argues:

The women in these narratives are offered no options beyond menial

factory work or financial dependence upon men, whether through

marriage or forms of prostitution. It is not until the much later sequel to

Poor Cow, My Silver Shoes (1996), that Joy can finally have her career,

working in a state-supported Job Club, and at last achieving the domestic

environment of her dreams (58).

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Therefore, it is certainly true that Joy never gives up her dream about her ideal family.

Initially, she has to re-evaluate it as her original sixties “dreams and desires are shaped by advertisements and popular songs, with contemporary lyrics and advertising slogans scattered throughout the narrative” (Philips, 57). Moreover, as Joannou observes,

“[a]part from her identity as a mother, Joy is the happiest in her identity as a consumer”

(72). She, soon, comes to “a sharp recognition that both marriage and sex are means of exploiting men financially” (Philips, 57) and she is more than willing to utilize it and make the most of it as all she has is her body and her youthfulness which she is very well aware that they do not last long.

However, as Philips argues, “while Dunn does (…) allow Joy to articulate her dreams, in her 1960s writings she gives her no means of fulfilling them, and offers her no way out of becoming the ‘Poor Cow’ of the title” (58) and she compares Joy’s circumstances in Poor Cow to her later life in My Silver Shoes (1995), where Joy achieves financial independence and appreciates herself and her friendship with women.

She stresses that “these are possibilities that 1960s fiction could not allow” (Philips, 58).

This is certainly essential for the understanding of Joy and her situation because there is not much more what she can do but compromise as much as the outside world allows her.

Joannou classifies Joy as “a member of a much-reviled group at this time: the

‘sponger’ who gives nothing to society and whose philosophy of ‘get-rich-quick’ is an affront to the work ethic to which others around her subscribe” (71). However, her unwillingness to work is, at least, disputable: she works in a pub during her

‘independent’ years and, later, she is prevented from work by her husband. Her conditions notwithstanding, she tries hard to survive as best as she can. To condemn her as a ‘sponger’ is an unnecessary simplification of the matter. And Dunn does precisely

53 this as Joannou adds, she “distances herself from any detached sociological perspective” and avoids “the superimposition of middle-class values and morality on Joy by commenting on her taste in furnishing and clothes or her material aspirations” (72). It is true that her ‘work’ (even in a pub) is mainly connected with her sexual attractiveness and an exploitation of her sexuality (both by herself and others – men). But she does not see it this way, at least, on the conscious level.

Motherhood and Mothering in Poor Cow

Joy is sensual, and she is not afraid to manifest it openly. Such a treatment of female sexuality is quite a novelty in English literature that time. In the introduction to

Poor Cow Drabble writes about it,

The English novel has always tended to treat sex with reverence, prudery

or titillation, and the woman’s novel, until the 1960s and 70s, remained

remarkably evasive and discreet. This [Poor Cow] was one of the first

post-Chatterley books to speak out, to treat women’s sexuality as though

it were entirely natural, as natural as man’s (ii).

Poor Cow is in stark contrast to both The Millstone and The L-Shaped Room where both heroines are more or less asexual or, at least, completely uninterested in sex.

Furthermore, the asexuality is something how the mother figure is perceived. Jacqueline

Rose says that “a mother is a woman whose sexual being must be invisible” and this patriarchal ‘code’ Joy wilfully violates. She wants to be both a good mother (and as it is argued later she is a caring and capable mother) and ‘glamour girl’. However, after the return of her husband from prison, “he put an end to any thought of her being allowed to separate sexual pleasure from reproduction and its responsibilities; of being permitted to be a ‘glamour girl’ and a mother at the same time” (Joannou, 74). Still, Dunn “reminds

54 us that the sensuality of sex and the sensuality of motherhood are not distinct, separate, watertight compartments: they are intimately, naturally connected, they spring from a single bodily source” (iii).

The treatment of Joy’s sexuality in Poor Cow is, more than anything else, open to various readings. In the introduction to Poor Cow, Drabble warns against reading her

“not as a symbol of liberation, but as someone to be liberated” (iii). Both labels are misleading as they, again, pointlessly simplify the issue. It is evident that Joy uses sex as a tradeable commodity and that she has too low expectations; therefore, she sells herself too cheap (in a figurative sense). Philips observes that “The spectre of prostitution as a means of survival (and also as a means of acquiring small luxuries) constantly hovers over the narrative” (57). However, she refuses prostitution as her professional ‘career’ choice; she is just, more or less, open to ‘more possibilities’ and she genuinely believes to what she proclaims that “I need different men to satisfy my different moods” (Dunn, 62). Moreover, she does not feel used by the men with whom she has sex; she treats it as fun. This is definitely in contrast with what she feels in the relationship with her husband: there, she feels humiliated and used. The oppressiveness of marriage is clearly demonstrated by this: marriage which is in accordance with morality is more oppressive for Joy than (by society perceived as amoral or immoral) casual sexuality. To bring up the immorality of Joy’s taking money from her casual sexual contacts does not stand up as she does the same in her marriage: her marriage is for her also the way of gaining economic profit.

Similarly, her ‘modelling’ career is, paradoxically, a source of Joy’s self-worth, and Head argues that “even Joy’s pride in her success as a photographer’s nude model seems genuine, impervious to the threat of exploitation” (90). Joannou, on the contrary, talks about “the commodification of women” (73) and stresses out that “Poor Cow

55 constructs Joy not only as a desiring subject but, more problematically, as an object of desire. Because her body is fetishized and its parts itemised and proudly displayed – ostensibly for the gratification of the men who pay for her services (…) – she is reduced to her body as the total of its constituent parts” (73). However, this goes entirely against how Joy views herself: by doing so, she is reduced to an unthinking subject who cannot hold opinions and needs to be liberated almost against her will. In addition to that, the context is not considered enough. Her steps towards her personal ‘freedom’ (or whatever she calls it) might seem minimal, but they are still considerable (she tries to leave a violent marriage and become independent which is a very rare decision then).

Still, this is not a favourable time for trying to become a mother and a ‘glamour model’ at the same time. The echoes of Bowlby and Young with their ‘blaming the mother for everything’ doctrine are still very present in the society. Therefore, it is almost unimaginable that mothers like Joy can love their children and, at the same time, be fit mothers as they are expected to raise love-deprived, juvenile criminals. Joy does not conform to this stereotype either: she is a genuine, loving and tender mother of little

Jonny.

Mothers and Children

Joy and Johnny’s relationship has a difficult start. At the beginning of the novel,

Joy walks down Fulham Broadway with a one-week-old son in her arms and “she still wore her maternity dress hitched up with her coat belt” (Dunn, 1) because her husband

Tom does not come to the hospital to bring her home. She goes to a café, and she heaves a sigh, “What did I go and get landed with him for, I used to be a smart girl?”

(Dunn, 2). But this manifestation of dissatisfaction with Jonny’s existence is relatively rare in Poor Cow. Although Joy’s general view of motherhood is rather shallow and

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“also shaped by advertising imagery” (Philips, 57), she would “take Jonny out of the pram and lay him down on the floor, and herself down beside him, like she’d seen in the advertisements” (Dunn, 8), she is, a caring and attentive mother otherwise, “Sometimes little Jonny would go quite hysterical and scream and scream (…) then I’d have to lie him, belly against mine, and rock him on my body till he’d go quiet, (…) We got very close him and I that winter” (Dunn, 10) or “Even when she [Joy] wasn’t with him

[Jonny] she could feel his weight in her arms (…) she thought of him as he raced in front of her down the road, feet splaying out like a runaway horse” (Dunn, 66). Her mothering is something that is naturally a part of her, something she does not have to learn, and something that constitutes her nature. And it is precisely this part of her character which strikes as the most genuine.

It is precisely Dunn’s treatment of the relationship between Joy and Jonny that is, according to Drabble, “delicate, deeply sensual and startlingly observed. There are sentences that evoke infancy with a stunning immediacy, and make no wonder how one could have forgotten, could ever forget” (ii) that is worthwhile to point out. The attention to the child and her development is something that Drabble herself employs later in her novels. However, according to Drabble, Dunn is one of the first who writes about children and childhood in this way (ii). She creates an intimate portrayal of motherhood which is based on love, tenderness, understanding and physical and mental proximity.

Like Lessing, Drabble, and Banks, Dunn sees motherhood in a positive way, as an uplifting and decidedly transformative experience. Moreover, similarly the other writers discussed in the thesis, she views it as primarily women’s matter and concern where men are peripheral. The bond with the child is the strongest and helps women to overcome many obstacles and problems in life and carry on with their lives even when

57 it seems unimaginable. Joy, at the end of the novel, slowly starts to realize that her life

“is over – you only get one chance” (Dunn, 132) and that her dreams and hopes never materialize, she realises that Jonny is all she has – her only genuine, long-standing relationship and she comes to be aware of the fact that “all that really mattered was that the child should be all right and that they should be together” (Dunn, 138).

With the realization that her dreams slip away and she cannot do anything about it, she turns her attention to Jonny. She begins to project herself onto him by extending her former dreams to him as a continuation of her. Then, the whole book concludes with her sigh which has a bittersweet overtone, “‘Oh gawd, what a state I’m in,’ she said, as, hand in hand they walked back down the deserted road. ‘To think when I was a kid I planned to conquer the world and if anyone saw me now they’d say, “she had a rough night, poor cow’” (Dunn, 138). However, her tone is not quite resigned: there is still hope, and the hope’s name is Jonny.

Despite the hardship, Joy apparently enjoys herself throughout the book, and she is not fettered by rules, obligation or morals. However, it does not mean that she is unscrupulous: she does not understand rules that are imposed on her and, at the same time, she has her own rules she obeys (such as she strictly rejects to become a professional prostitute). Moreover, “throughout the novel Joy is a free spirit, comfortable with her precocious sexuality, self-possessed rather than man-possessed, preferring the excitement of cohabitation to the boredom of marriage” (Joannou, 74).

And she is ‘poor cow’, one of many who are connected by similar circumstances and background.

Joe might be egocentric and shallow, but she is in no way self-righteous, or judgemental. Similarly, the whole narrative lacks any priggish, moralistic, self-

58 righteous, judgemental or mawkishly sentimental overtone which is so often present in writings about people who fail to live according to the shared values. The events in the book and even the horrible ones are not treated, as Bradshaw in the Poor Cow Review puts it, “anything other than a fact of life.” And as Joannou argues, “The narrative resists any attempt to punish Joy for her transgressive sexual behaviour or to restore women to their ‘proper place’ within the family and normative social relations” (74).

And Drabble in the Introduction notes “She is not subjected to authorial disapproval or satire. She is allowed her choices, her autonomy” (ii). Her impartiality is arguably one the Dunn’s most remarkable achievements in the book: she is not biased in either way: not against Joy and suchlike and not in favour of them. Therefore, the whole narrative is not loaded with moralistic messages and interpretation, but also it avoids any suggestions that she sides with Joy’s character (albeit her position is a sympathetic observer).

Still, the question whether Dunn’s portrayal of the working-classes is not an idealization, a myth that is unjustifiable even more so as the working-classes are fashionable in the sixties, arises here. However, as Drabble argues in the Introduction to

Poor Cow, “If there is a myth here, a myth of escape and liberation, it is a positive one, an enlarging one” (iii). Moreover, ‘if there is a myth here’, it is, again, highly restricted one: Joy is granted her ‘freedom’ for a limited period and then she is returned to her

‘happy’ family life, and the original order is restored once more.

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Chapter Five: Societal Background in The Millstone, The L-Shaped

Room and Poor Cow

Outside Marriage

Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women (1965) contains nine conversations with various women Dunn held at the beginning of the sixties. These women are of different professions (writers, painters, actresses, factory workers and mothers) but as Dunn writes at the beginning they all have something in common, “a belief in personal fulfilment - that a woman’s life should not solely be the struggle to make men happy but more than that a progress towards the development of one’s own body and soul”

(Talking to Women, 9). These women discuss the position of women in society from their individual perspective. Their testimonies are, for us, a valuable source of information about the thinking of women who live in an era of ongoing changes. Their reflections on motherhood and career, relationships, marriage and cohabitation, personal identity are both very close and very distant to today. While their internal desires and wishes are very familiar, the societal issues and opinions seem much more restrictive and binding. There have been too many changes since the sixties, and the sixties look in many respects so far away. All the discussed novels as well as Talking to Women offer a unique insight into the problems that people, and in this case women, encounter to negotiate and balance their needs for individual integrity. These novels work as time capsules showing some realities of the sixties and, at the same time, reveals both the subtle and more obvious transgressions against what was conceived as a norm back then. Thus, the aim of this chapter is, by considering all three novels at once, to look into social factors that make an impact on their contents.

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Literature of the sixties gradually begins to take more of an interest in the description of women’s lives dealing with issues such as motherhood, work and relationships. Lone Mother Narratives belong to this category of fiction. In the most general sense, they rebel against conventional marriage patterns but, at the same time, they expose many other issues of a particular importance then. According to Joannou, they are “a rebellion against the dominance of romance and marriage plots, which show marriage as the closure of the novel. In formulating how best to live a life outside marriage the contemporary ‘unmarried mother’ narratives question the conventions of the novel as well as the social order” (57). Moreover, Maggie Humm argues that both

Drabble and Dunn by “relocating motherhood outside the bounds of conventional marriage” make “one major and transgressive dissent from postwar conservatism” (44).

In short, these novels are very much daring in the context of the 1960s and suffer a considerable backlash because of the topic then.

As it is discussed before, one of the most important factors which influence the position of the lone mother is her background: her class, social network and financial situation. In this light, the novels serve different purposes. Working-class women are more or less ignored in literature until the sixties, and they are never allowed their own voice. By comparing the middle and upper-class single mothers to their working-class counterparts, one can see the limits of possibilities on one side as well as various problems that look very different from various perspectives. “That woman should choose to live outside patriarchal arrangements is, of course, deeply threatening to those who believed such arrangements to be essential to the stability of the social order”

(Joannou, 60). However, how Joannou points out “the threat is compounded if the women who eschew marriage are articulate, educated and middle class” (Joannou, 60)

61 because the working-class single mothers are more likely to be dismissed as social problems, scroungers and concerns for the social services.

Rosamund and Jane live “outside marriage enabling their authors to create narratives which function as critiques of the ideological foundations upon which the dominant narratives of courtship and marriage have been erected” (Joannou, 56).

However, both main protagonists in compliance with a handbook (discussed in the first chapter) Raising Your Child in a Fatherless Home: A Guidebook for All Mothers without Partners hide and disguise their situation: Rosamund does that by her withdrawal from all her social contacts and by remaining a solitary figure; and Jane by moving to Fulham where she can escape the unwanted attention which accompanies her condition. Moreover, in the case of Jane, her compliance with the social rules is accentuated by her feelings of shame and guilt. She muses, “In some obscure way I wanted to punish myself, I wanted to put myself in the setting that seemed proper to my situation” (Banks, 30). Therefore, her moving to Fulham serves as a punishment for her bad deed (pregnancy). This is, also, apparent in the scene when she moves to the house,

“For years I’ve been struggling to base my life on the supposition that it doesn’t matter what other people think, so long as you know what you think. But some stubbornly suburban piece of social conditioning has impeded my efforts to the extent I couldn’t even bring myself to let the taxi-man help me carry my thing into the house” (Banks,

56).

Similarly, Rosamund is relieved that her academic success enables her to use the academic title ‘Dr’ instead of ‘Miss’, “It was gratifying, too, that my name would be in the near future Dr Rosamund Stacey, a form of address which would go a long way towards obviating the anomaly of Octavia’s existence” (Drabble, 179-180). She, also, does not object to the initial ‘U’ which is written on her hospital bed and which stood,

62 as she was told, for unmarried (Drabble, 120). Both Rosamund and Jane struggle with this practice and occasionally act otherwise: Rosamund tells the nurse that she is Miss instead of Missis and Jane refuses to wear a fake wedding ring while pregnant.

However, these ‘revolts’ are only haphazard and short-lived; they never make any lasting impact and are not meant to have one. Issues of guilt, shame and disguise never appear in Poor Cow because the single motherhood is not seen as a problem in Joy’s life: it is treated as a fact of life; something that happens on a regular basis and needs to be handled in this way. However, similarly to Rosamund, Jo is a very lonely figure despite her casual ‘friendships’ with men. She completely lacks any female companionships but for her aunt and her ‘partner in crime’ Beryl. Joy’s lack of friendships, particularly with other women, might suggest that her behaviour is disapproved of in her community although this is never, directly, discussed in the novel.

Several hints are dropped throughout the novels which show the disapproval and the lack of acceptance of single mothers. Apart from the notorious arrogance of medical professionals who from the position of an authority patronize women in the Banks’s novel, there is an open critique of the British National Health Service in The Millstone,

“I was not prepared for being examined by five medical students, one after the other. I lay there, my eyes shut, and quietly smiling to conceal my outrage because I knew that these things must happen” (Drabble, 68). Also, the vivid description of Rosamund’s birth depicts how obstetrics is impersonal: the nurses discuss their love lives and births that go wrong when she is in labour. Moreover, in the most prominent scene when

Rosamund screams to be allowed to see her critically ill baby girl (already discussed in the second chapter), Drabble dismisses as cruel the practice of not allowing mothers to spend time with their hospitalized children.

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Then, there are the reactions of family members, friends and acquaintances. Jane is, as Joannou puts it, “like an errant Victorian daughter expelled from her comfortable suburban family home” (58) because her father considers her to be worse than a prostitute. And “her response to an authoritarian father is one of defiance: she’ll prove to herself that she can manage alone” (Joannou, 58). She proves it but, then, she does not hesitate to return to him at the end of the novel, which disproves the original intent.

Rosamund, on the contrary, hides her conditions from all of her family but her sister

Beatrice. Writing her a letter, she expects support from her but receives the opposite:

“(…) if you had it adopted you could forget about the whole business in six months and carry on exactly where you left off (…) it would have to have the slur of illegitimacy all its life (…) It’s your duty to have it adopted (…) I can’t bear the thought of what your baby would have to go through, and what you would have to go through on its account”

(Drabble, 90). Also, her pretended lover Joe warns her: ‘“You won’t be able to keep it, though. They won’t let you keep it. So you’ll go and get yourself all upset about nothing, the whole thing’ll be a complete waste of time and emotion.’” (Drabble, 48).

These are two kinds of pressures to which the women are subjected: an adoption

(Beatrice’s advice) and abortion (Joe’s suggestion). Her resistance to “the socially acceptable acts for an upper-class British girl” (Hardin, 25), to the abortion and the adoption, is a courageous act regardless her motives. Thus, her refusal to succumb to the social pressures gains her a space within the whole patriarchal society when she can act according to her will.

Similarly, Jane is pressured to both abortion and an adoption by people around her. When it all fails, and she resists and continues her pregnancy, her aunt advises her to adopt her baby to legitimate it, “Yes, yes, I mean to adopt it legally. Then it becomes sort of quasi legitimate. You give it your name, and it’s all aboveboard or something.

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The law then pretends it’s a waif or stray and that you’re doing it a favour, and all is forgiven. The child becomes officially your adopted child, instead of irregularly your own” (Banks, 188). This long-standing practice, still prevalent in the sixties, is one of the ways how to be able to keep one’s baby without experiencing the shame that usually accompanies the illegitimacy.

Social class

As argued above, the class is one of the decisive factors which significantly influences the experience of the single motherhood. The juxtaposition of middle and working-class narratives shows that the position of single mothers is in no way even and that resources available to the middle and upper-class women are incomparable. On the contrary, the middle-class women in these novels are more under pressure to meet the middle-class ideal of respectability. As Fink observes, “[y]et the experiences of the financially independent, professional middle-class woman, who is able to give birth to her illegitimate child in comfortable, discreet surroundings and to continue her career, are in stark contrast to the situations faced by the working-class women” (156). Both

Rosamund and Jane are distinctly upper-middle-class. As Philips observes “Rosamund is still more privileged than Jane, her superior education and cultural capital signalled very loudly” (Philips, 48). Thus, it seems quite easy for Rosamund to become a single mother even in comparison with Jane: in The L-Shaped Room, Jane’s single motherhood is portrayed in a much bleaker way, and the very existence of her baby is an insurmountable obstacle in her job. Rosamund, by contrast, can develop her career and support herself financially because the academic milieu proves to be more liberal than the hospitality industry where Jane works. Then, to come to the happy ending, Banks must resort to the implausible resolution to her heroine’s financial difficulties: the

65 inheritance. Otherwise, Jane is to face a financial hardship which is unmanageable for her.

Even though Rosamund and Jane are in difficulties, it is nothing compared to

Joy’s situation. As said before, the middle-class heroines are freed of all financial worries. Rosamund’s parents supply her with a flat in a posh neighbourhood, and Jane, in the right moment, inherits a cottage and money from her aunt who conveniently dies when Jane needs it the most. Moreover, Jane is reconciled with her father which gives her even more support. As Head observes, “There is also a reassertion of class differentials, which, in the form of Jane’s legacy from her great aunt Addy, utilizes a hoary literary convention that spirits Jane away from her L-shaped room, and the social and racial mix that characterizes the dilapidated Fulham house” (85-6).

Their situation is in stark contrast to Jo’s position: Joy survives on five pounds a week and she does not have any support at all: she is self-reliant out of the necessity and she is forced to make more unpleasant choices, something that is hardly imagined in

Rosamund and Jane’s world. As Terry Eagleton writes rather harshly discussing

Richardson’s Pamela: ‘Pleasantness is for those who can afford it’ (Eagleton, 53). And

Jo, unfortunately, cannot. In any case, this puts her retreat to casual sex from which she gains money and small luxuries in entirely different perspective. This is not to excuse her behaviour, only to point out that the social conditioning works to her disadvantage.

The class divide is most clearly demonstrated if the practice of abortion is considered. As abortion is still not readily available, the heroines resort to the illegal or unofficial ways of abortion. Rosamund and Jane briefly consider gin and a hot bath which is a traditional way to try to abort the baby. However, they are not dependent on this option as this ‘solution’ is in no way their last resort: they have access to

66 professionals who can perform it on the ground of psychological necessity.

Considerably later, Joy does not have this option at all. Both Up to the Junction and

Poor Cow is full of references to the self-induced and backstreet abortions – activities that pose serious risks to women’s health and influence their emotional frame of mind.

The abortion of one of Joy’s neighbour in Poor Cow is in stark contrast to Lydia’s attempt to abort her baby in The Millstone. While Lydia can pay a high amount of money to seek a top professional who carefully evaluates her mental state, the raw and frightening scene of an abortion using potash in Poor Cow are worlds apart, “[a]nyway he put it down the toilet, and she was sick, oh she was bad, anyway I washed her, and she started shivering then so we put her in bed and make a cup of tea for her, and then he done that with the baby and that was it” (Dunn, 92).

The societal factors play, beyond all doubt, a significant role in the single motherhood. The sixties are times when women are routinely patronised and humiliated on an everyday basis. The single mother accentuates this practice as the novels clearly demonstrate. Being a single mother means to be exposed to daily harassment regardless of the class. However, the class is a crucial factor that influences the life of a single mother. The authors of these novels use the single motherhood as a motif to stress the issues that concern the women in the sixties and the treatment to which the women in the sixties are exposed. Moreover, lone mother narratives expose many societal ills that are connected with women and motherhood at that time, and that are on the agenda, such as health service, abortion practices, questioning of traditional marriage and others.

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Conclusion

By exploring three different novels of the period, Drabble’s The Millstone,

Banks’s The L-Shaped Room and Dunn’s Poor Cow, it is possible to identify common themes and repetitive patterns which help to get some understanding about the period of their origin. The thesis argues that for such an understanding, these lone mother narratives are significant sources of information and that it is relevant to gain some period knowledge from them. The single motherhood in all of them is central for exposing topical societal issues, primarily the oppressiveness of marriage, the incompatibility of motherhood with a career, and the identity crisis of women in the late fifties and at the beginning of the sixties. Moreover, at the core level, the novels inform about the motherhood and mothering, and about the approach to the babies and small children at that time.

All of these novels put motherhood on the pedestal. Disregarding class, financial position or social background in general, these women regard their motherhood as a certain value that is a source of pleasure and also empowerment. The main protagonists are not able (or not willing) to question motherhood as an oppressive institution and mothering as an emotional and physical drudgery as it is done later by the Women’s

Liberation Movement. They view motherhood as primarily a woman’s thing when a woman can assert her rights and autonomy (albeit only if she can free herself from the bonds of the patriarchal family) and achieve, through the motherhood and mothering, emotional growth and maturation.

The approach to motherhood is in stark contrast to the way marriage is depicted and thought of in these novels: they all regard marriage as an oppressive, male- dominated institution that does not bring anything worthwhile to women (perhaps only

68 a questionable feeling of ‘security’ which is not worth the suffering) and its only purpose is to maintain the status quo, preserve prevailing norms and values; and in general, limit women and restrict their growth and independence. Therefore, it is permissible in these novels to rebel against the institution of marriage. However, the rebellion is always only provisional, and, later the status quo is carefully maintained.

Therefore, the novels do not suggest that lone motherhood is a better option for women than marriage, it provides only an alternative, one of the few which are available to women of this era. In this way, the novels demonstrate the contextual limits of the period. The lack of solutions for women is stressed out (such as in the development of

Joy’s character between the sixties and the ninetieth). The availability of possibilities is feasible only for Rosamund (which is very unusual thanks to her academic background) but is impossible in all other cases.

Moreover, by portraying independent and autonomous women who can live their lives and make decisions, the novels shift boundaries of what is acceptable.

However, these books clearly show that the ideal of respectability is still pretty much alive and influential throughout the sixties including the working class communities.

Therefore, the transgressions are always minimal but still significant (and they include a range of topics such as female desire, casual sex, the connection between love for a man and love for a child, and mothering). Both Rosamund and Jane are rather conservative, quite traditional and not rebellious; Joy, on the contrary, does not rebel, she just tries to do what is the best for her at the particular time.

These novels also prove the importance of class for single motherhood.

The availability of the services and the net of social contacts protect middle-class women from the harsher treatment to which working-class women are subjected. The middle-class women are considered a greater threat to the social order as they are less

69 likely to be deemed scroungers and concerns for the social services. Moreover, the critique from the middle-class women is more visible and vociferous. However, these novels do not call for social change: their individualistic heroines try to adjust to the male-dominated world. The world depicted in these novels is still the world before

‘permissive’ legislation and changes that, eventually, happen in the society and at the institutional level. In any case, these novels communicate very well the desires and dreams of women who are young in the transition period and who are confused about their situation, who can, to some degree, articulate their demands but who are trapped in the society that is still in the process of getting used to the changing world.

From today’s point of view, the debate about the single motherhood might seem too irrelevant and in the distant past; after all, the lone parenthood is nothing unusual in this day and age. However, many issues from this novels remain topical: the combination of a career and motherhood (discussed in The Millstone), the male- domination in obstetrics and gynaecology (in The L-Shaped Room) and the disparagement of poor, single women as woefully inadequate in their role of mothers (in

Poor Cow). Moreover, all three novels deal with the issue of mothering: the problem that is still a concern of a literary debate today (such as in the work of Rachel Cusk).

Also, the core of these novels - the conflict between the inner self and the societal expectations - remains, even though in a changed form, the same.

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Summary

The aim of the thesis is to explore the topic of lone motherhood in three 1960s novels: Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1965), Lynn Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped

Room (1960) and Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow (1967) to argue that the motif of single motherhood is used in these novels to challenge prevailing notions about marriage, motherhood, femininity and identity. The textual and comparative analyses are used to achieve this aim.

The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter provides a brief contextualisation of the period. The individualised experiences of the single mothers

Rosamund (The Millstone), Jane (The L-Shaped Room) and Joe (Poor Cow) are discussed in the chapters two, three and four respectively. The fifth chapter links all the previous chapters together and depicts the societal factors that are apparent in the novels and that significantly influence the position of lone mothers.

In conclusion, the thesis argues that it is possible to identify common themes and repetitive patterns in these three novels. Therefore, it is possible to gain some period knowledge from them. Further, the thesis argues that motherhood (unlike the marriage) is viewed in these novels as a source of empowerment for women. Finally, the thesis claims that these novels and discussed issues are still topical today (such as the combination of motherhood and a career or the identity problems).

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Resumé

Cílem magisterské diplomové práce je analýza tématu svobodných (osamělých) matek ve třech románech ze šedesátých let dvacátého století: románu Margaret

Drabbleové The Millstone (1965), Lynn Reid Banksové The L-Shaped Room (1960) a

Nell Dunnové Poor Cow (1967). Diplomová práce vychází z teze, že téma svobodné matky je v románech použito za účelem zpochybnění v té době převládajících představ o manželství, mateřství, ženství a identitě.

Práce je rozdělena do pěti kapitol. První kapitola uvádí základní souvislosti potřebné pro pochopení kontextu šedesátých let dvacátého století. Kapitoly dvě, tři a

čtyři se zabývají rozborem individuální zkušenosti každé hrdinky – Drabbleové

Rosamund (kapitola dvě), Banksové Jane (kapitola tři) a Dunnové Joy (kapitola čtyři).

Pátá kapitola analyzuje všechny tři romány dohromady a zaměřuje se na sociální faktory, které jsou zřejmé z románů, a které měly vliv na situaci svobodných matek v šedesátých letech.

V závěru práce ukazuje, že je možné nalézt společná témata a opakující se prvky ve všech třech románech. Dále práce tvrdí, že mateřství (na rozdíl od manželství) je v románech zdrojem posílení sebevědomí, sebeuvědomění a kontroly nad vlastním

životem. Na samém konci, práce poukazuje na to, že některá témata, která se řeší v románech, jsou nadále aktuální i v dnešní době.

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