Root and Branch

Root and Branch a novel, and a critical commentary on the representation of masculinities in the novels of contemporary Welsh women writers in English by Robert Walton A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Writing) Cardiff University, May 2017 1 PREFACE In a very different kind of novel from Root and Branch, and in a context that is far more extreme than any situation that appears in my novel, the character called Mother - or the Great Parricide, or the Grand Emasculator - in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve declares to the protagonist, Evelyn, that, ‘To be a man is not a given condition but a continuous effort’.1 With the origins of the word ‘effort’ lying in the Old French ‘esforcier’ meaning to force,2 Mother’s statement chimes with the arguments of feminists and Women’s and Gender Studies theorists from the 1970s to the present day who have challenged the idea that our notions of masculinity and femininity are ‘natural’ and have asserted the significance of gender as cultural construction, if not cultural enforcement. This submission for the candidature of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing consists of a novel that is in many ways concerned with masculinity as well as other facets of individual identity - family, class, nationality, social and political allegiance - and a critical commentary that examines the representation of masculinity in the novels of a number of contemporary Welsh women writers in English. Together, these two components of the thesis explore the contestability of male status, behaviour and values when the established patriarchal models are in a condition of terminal decline3 - which I believe to be the case, however much it sometimes appears that the forces of reaction are holding out. Set in Wales and Burma, the novel, Root and Branch, examines the ways in which one’s sense of identity and values can be challenged and stripped away when lines of demarcation, boundaries and borders are crossed. It tells of the transformational experience that the protagonist, Daniel Griffiths, goes through as a man whose personal and family life comes under pressure as a result of his divided affections and grief in Cardiff and in his role as a relief worker operating ‘under the radar’ in Burma after the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis in 2008. The novel is organised into three parts, each of four chapters: in each part, two chapters are set in Yangon and the Irrawaddy Delta; one in an old people’s home in Cardiff; and one on a kayaking trip down the Rhondda Fawr River. These interwoven narrative strands are told in the continuous first-person present tense, negotiating the shifts between past and present through letters, dialogue and memory to convey the sense of Daniel’s 1 Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago Press, 1991, first published 1982) p.63, italics as in the original. 2 Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition Revised (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) p. 556. 3 I have not examined the texts from the perspective of queer theory but this is undoubtedly an area for further research into contemporary writing from Wales. Queer Wales: the History, Culture and Politics of Queer Life in Wales, Huw Osborne (ed.), (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016) is perhaps the first comprehensive collection of such essays though it contains little analysis of contemporary queer fiction. I have referred to the Sapphic features of Random Deaths and Custard and Into Suez but there is scope to examine homo-erotic behaviour amongst the male characters in these and a number of other texts by contemporary Welsh writers. On a broader level, the intervention of Judith Halberstam in Feminine Masculinity should be taken into account: uncoupling masculinity from the male, and contesting the ‘protected status’ of male masculinity, Halberstam’s argument that female masculinity offers a cogent alternative has extended the field of gender theory in a way that provides a more nuanced reading and understanding of gender categories than I have addressed in this dissertation. 2 individual consciousness interrogating his class, gender, social, cultural and political identities and recalibrating his relationships with family, women, friends and colleagues. A presiding spirit in the novel is the writer, Alun Lewis, who died in disputable circumstances in Burma in 1944 shortly before his 29th birthday. Daniel Griffiths is the same age and often recalls his grandfather’s stories of growing up with Lewis in Cwmaman in the Rhondda Valley as well as drawing on quotations from Lewis’s poems on occasions. Finally, with all attachments lost, and standing on the brink of the estuary where the Irrawaddy flows into the Andaman Sea, Daniel is confronted by something similar to the sense of ‘alone-ness’ that Lewis experienced before his death. In this condition, he is well placed to make unconditional decisions. In focusing on the representation of masculinities in the novels of contemporary Welsh women writers in English, the critical commentary brings literary gender theory to bear on a range of significant texts from Wales. A central thesis of the commentary is that the fictional representation of the world by female writers through the eyes and experiences of female protagonists provides the reader with what I have termed a ‘female regard’: not simply the antithesis of the desire-laden ‘male gaze’, but infused with a female sensibility that is at least as much about resilience, esteem and aspiration as it is about desire. As a male who has found feminism to be a liberating force in my sense of masculinity for almost fifty years, my reading of these novels has been disturbing because, although their settings range, collectively, across a period extending from the Second World War to the present day, they depict a cast of male characters who, individually and culturally, maintain a ‘continuous effort’ to resist change and to preserve and enforce their patriarchal status by any means available - emotional, physical, sexual, economic, linguistic or spatial. In scrutinising the fictional narratives of men and women in modern Wales and elsewhere through a ‘female regard’, the writers present readers with dominant forms of masculinity that go defiantly against the grain of contemporary liberal values. This is not to say, however, that these regressive forms of masculinity are portrayed as being successful in turning back the tide. An examination of the behaviour of fictional male characters casts light on the roles, responses, values and conduct of women characters, too. The process of seeking to redress the balance of rights and responsibilities in relationships invariably challenges established definitions, boundaries and lines of demarcation. Breaches, cracks, gaps appear, willingly or circumstantially. In these interstitial spaces, with their uncertainties, disputes and rivalries, narratives occur. This is writers’ territory. The Introduction and first chapter in the critical commentary place masculinities in context by examining the significance of the second wave of feminism in challenging the patriarchal establishment and securing greater advantage for women not only politically and socially but also in terms of literary visibility in the U.S.A., the U.K. - in Wales in particular - and to some degree in Burma. Chapter 2 explores the representation of the Valleys of south Wales as a stronghold of traditional masculinity through two novels by Rachel Trezise in which the female protagonists survive male sexual predation and abnegation of responsibility. Two novels by Catrin Dafydd and one by Deborah Kay Davies provide the basis for consideration in Chapter 3 of the ways in which male domination of the voice - of language, dialogue and the mouth - operates against women’s sense of worth. Whatever other angle is explored, the challenge to spatial hegemony is an important feature in every chapter of the 3 critical commentary. This is especially so in Trezza Azzopardi’s depiction of the Maltese community in Cardiff in the 1960s - examined in Chapter 4 - as well as in the portrayal of masculine-imperialist forces at work in Hong Kong and Egypt during the Second World War in novels by Francesca Rhydderch and Stevie Davies that is the focus of Chapter 5. What are the implications of this interrogation of the work of six important contemporary Welsh women writers? In Azzopardi’s The Song House - my reading of which is the subject of the second half of the fourth chapter - the central characters, Maggie and Kenneth, transform their initial differences of social status, emotional needs and grasp of the past into a hard-won relationship as a result of the processes of negotiation that they learn from each other and from the bats they watch one evening that are using their natural instincts of echolocation. It is this readiness to enter into negotiation that is absent from the behaviour of so many male characters in the other novels studied. In addition, there are implications for the contemporary male writer: to negotiate those unoccupied spaces in relationships between male and female characters by writing stories that do not reinforce the gender boundaries in their resonances for readers but amplify our awareness of the pathways open to us; so that in our fiction a process of echolocation comes into play between characters and between readers and text. None of the novels examined in the critical commentary finishes on a pessimistic note, not even for the tragic, desperate, anonymous female

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