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Identity, Culture, Class and Gender in the Novels of Margaret Drabble

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Identity, Culture, Class and Gender in the Novels of Margaret Drabble The Question Of "Englishnessff. Identity, culture, Class and Gender in the Novels of Margaret Drabble Elizabeth Eastman Somerton Submitted in partial fuifiilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia September 1998 Q Copyright by Elizabeth Easmian Somerton, 1998 Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie SeMces seNices bibliographiques The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowbg the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distriiute or seli reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic fonnats. la forme de rnicrofiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains owership of the L'auteur consewe la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette îhèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fkom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or othemise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. Acknowledgements 1want to thank Dr. Victor Li, my supervisor, without whose help and encouragement this thesis would not have been writîen. I also want to thank Dr. Roberta Rubenstein of American University, Wa~hhgtonD.C. for taking the from a busy schedule to be the external examiner of my thesis and for making her report available to me. 1 also want to thank the intemal readers-Drs. Stephen Brooke. Anthony Stewart and Rohan Maitzen-for their constructive criticisrn of my work. Findy, 1want to thank Gary Somerton for help with word processing. Table of Contents Acknowledgements Chapter 1 : "Ghosts"of "Engiishness" Chapter 2: "An Unacceptable Excess of Identity" A Swnmer Bird-Cage The Garrick Year fie Millstone Jemalem the Golden The Watelfall Chapter 3: "A Real Art of Misrepresentation" The Needle's Eye The Realms of Gold The Ice Age The Middle Gromd Chapter 4: "Out of Plausibility into the Unknown" nie Radiant Way A Natural Cun'osis, The Gates of Zvury Chapter 5: "Jump For It" The Witch of Emtoor Notes Chapter 1: "Ghosts" of "Englishness" The publisher's blurb for a recent book by David Gewais on "Englishness" and literary tradition notes that "[iln our time Englishness has become a theme for speculation rather than dogma" and that "twentieth-century writers have found it an elusive and ambivalent concept" (Gervais i). There are, however, some wrïters of our the for whom the concept has had a more certain resonance. Delive~gthe Cheltenham Festival Annual Literature Lecture in 1980, Q. D. Leavis spoke confidentiy on "The Englishness of the English Novel." For her, there was nothing elusive or problematic about "Englishness" as a culairal or iiterary concept: coiiapsing "regional cultures" and ali kinds of other differences (class and gender among them) into "a auly national iiteranire" synonymous with "an essentially Protestant [national] culture" (3 18-20), she spoke eloquently of a homogeneous culturaVliterary identity that she claimed was embodied in the "great tradition" of the Engiish novel. In somewhat less lucid, but no less forcible, te- she spoke of the imminent loss of this tradition and wound up with a diatribe on the state of the contemporary English novel and, indeed, of the novelists themselves: "Our novelists," she said, "seem to have abdicated kom moral responsibility, to have become sub-human" (324). In the course of her lecture it becarne ciear that what most bothered Q. D. Leavis about these writers was that they were no longer confidently affimiing the moral/'iitemy values that she and F. R. Leavis placed at the heart of "Englishness"; and by thus wittingly or unwittingly questioning those values they were also chdienging the literary/culd superionty that she claimed for "Englishness" (implied in the equation of humanity-king human rather than "sub-human"-with taking moral responsibility and of both with "Engiishness"). For her, "Englishness" comoted an absolute or "universal" value, dependent upon a particular "history" (303) yet tianscending it, the particular king, "in the English way" (306), a representation of the univenal. In this account of the "Englishness" of the "great tradition" as a universal human nom-a standard by which other accounts must be measured and against which some may be found wanting-Q. D. Leavis was reaffirmllig the basic assumption (and presumption) of Leavisite criticisrn. Distinguishing the universality of "Engiishness" from internationalism, Q. D. Leavis reserved her most derogatory remarks for contemporaiy women novelists who aU seemed to her, she said, to be ... determined, forgoing their heritage as English novelists, to belong to an international women wrïtefs movement, a movement characterized by a jargon that is the opposite of wisdom or maturity . (304) She reproved contemporary Enghsh women writers for bringing to an end the formerly "unique" English "great tradition of women novelists," and castigated them for king indistinguishable in their concerns from writers who are "American or what used to be called coloniais," for "fail[ing] to rise above" what were then cunent women's issues (325). As for Margaret Drabble. Q. D. Leavis repeated the substance of "some awful crack" Drabble said F. R. Leavis had made about her work earlier and which Drabble took to hply that she was "beneath contempt" (Interview with Hannay 105). In Mrs. Leavis's estimation, Drabble's work was "simply an upto-date variety of women's magazine fiction" (325) not even worthy of king cailed "novels" in fact. As Batsleer et ai point out in Rewriting English: Culntral Politics of Gender and Class, the Leavises took over the value judgrnent implied in Henry James's "defense of the novel (as opposed, sharply, to 'mere' fiction) as an art forrn" (17), and, as we see here, this aesthetic standard became for them an important part of the serious cuituraVliterary domain defmed as/by "Englishness," hmwhich a writer like Drabble couid be excluded. Not surprisingly, various cntics have begged to differ from the Leavises. "Drabbleans" have differed hmthem in their estimation of the culnual andfor iiterary value of Drabble's novels. Some have even done so by emphasuing those aspects of her work which meet (or seem to meet) the "hi& standards" of the Leavisite conception of the "Great Tradition." Valene Grosvenor Myer (who has written both the fitbook on Drabble and one of the latest) notes, as do most of the critics on Drabble, that Drabble's fiction is characterized by some fom of "tension," the very presence of which, it might be argued, is an &ont to the Leavisite notion of a unified, stable or assured identity, but she concludes: "Drabble's works are essentiaily Engiish in that they are infiuenced by earlier literature, by his tory, b y Protestantism and eclecti&sm" Focushg on Drabble's ambivalent attitude towards F. R. Leavis (who taught Drabble at Cambridge in the 1950s) rather than on the Leavises' uncompromising attitude towards Drabble, Myer concludes: "as weii as hostility to p. R.] Leavis, prabble] has expressed gratitude for what has moulded us, and she exempMes bis ideal of culture: literate, liberal, humane" (A Reader's Guide 165). This is puzzling. How can Drabble's work exempli@ F. R. Leavis's "ideal of culture" and be "beneath [his] contempt" at the same the? How can it be "essentially Engiish" and yet be excluded by Q. D. Leavis fiom "the Englishness of the English novel"? Myer is one of the critics who recognize the tension in Drabble's fiction but do not examine the importance of it as a potential challenge to the Leavisite construction of "Englishness" as a homogeneous culhuaVliterary identity. Nom Foster Stovel is another cntic who has read Drabble's equivocal statements about F. R. Leavis's "influence" upon her only in a positive sense that might make Drabble seem an undisputed heir to the "great tradition." In Margaret Drabble: S'leMordis, Stovel seems to undertake a Leavisite revaluation of Drabble by arguing that she is "not sirnply a journalist" or "merely a popular" miter, but "an artist" whose work meets "the traditional cnteria for evaluating quality in Literature." The cnteria Stovel uses-''momi profùndity and imaginative artistryW-are recognizably Leavisite. Aiso Leavisite is her focus on the symbolism of Drabble's novels to reveal "the puetic imagination beneath the surface reportage" (2-3). Francis MUem argues that the shift in focus hm"narrative" to "poetic" elements (such as patterns of "agery and symbolism) is an important strategy in the Leavisite "revaluation"of the English novel and one which Leavis used for "silencing" narrative "anxieties" or for "repressing" the "unsettling" elements that appear in the course of most narratives, even those that effect closure ("Engiish Reading" 256). In the course of her examination of Drabble's work, however, what Stovel alerts us to is the fact that symbolic patterning need not, in itself, be the kind of "closure" that silences narrative anxieties. In "'A Ferninine Ending?': Symbolism as Closure in the Novels of Margaret Drabble," Stovel distinguishes the "feminine ending" fiom the "masculine" and while arguing that "Drabble's version of the feminine ending does demonstrate closure," she shows that the combination of "an openended narrative" with "artistic and thematic closure" (8 1-82) is used by Drabble to achieve an "ideal 'feminine ending'" which is not, in effect, conclusive; rather, it supports a "profoundly equivocai" vision and allows Drabble to maintain her characteristically "ambivalent" stance (86). By using a Leavisite critical methai, Stovel demoostrates, 1think, a way in which Drabble's education in Leavisite cnticism allows her to subvert one of its strategies for affirming the "Englishness" of the "great tradition": that is, Drabble uses "poetic" elements such as symbolic patterning not, as Mulhem says Leavis uses them, "to reorder the field of critical perception at the expense of narrative" ("English Reading" 255), but rather to prevent such a reorde~gand to reinforce narrative uncertainties.
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