Support Structures: Envisioning the Post-Community In
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2005 Support Structures: Envisioning the Post- Community in Contemporary British Fiction and Film Rebecca S. Godlasky Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Support Structures: Envisioning the Post-Community in Contemporary British Fiction and Film By REBECCA S. GODLASKY A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2005 Copyright © 2005 Rebecca S. Godlasky All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Rebecca S. Godlasky defended on 18 August 2005 S. E. Gontarski Professor Directing Dissertation William Cloonan Outside Committee Member Barry Faulk Committee Member Approved: Bruce M. Boehrer Director of Graduate Studies English Department The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii For Hazel Spellman Beam, who knew everything about developing a caring community iii ABSTRACT The starting point for this work is the exigency of community in the contemporary world. A number of British novels and films written and produced during Margaret Thatcher’s term in office illustrate the deep social and economic divisions in Britain and the crippling effects of a society dedicated to possessive individualism rather than to altruism and community. The novels and films of this study present Britain as a nation whose social network has already collapsed, and individuals are left to fend for themselves. Those who cannot are suffering, and they reach out to one another for assistance. Community development becomes the natural response to combating the careless society created by the individualist ethos. The communities developed in Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album, and Mike Leigh’s film High Hopes are very different from previous considerations of community. Traditional communities tend to suppress differences. The communities that develop in these works, however, conceive of social organization in a way that collapses the binary between individualism and community and allows both to exist simultaneously. These communities are also significant because they are anything but homogeneous in terms of social rank, political leanings, or ethnicity. The only common ground between the members of each group represented is rather simple—none can survive on their own. Caring for one another supersedes any consideration of differences. These works suggest, however, that communities are only effective when their members allow for an interplay of difference between one another. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract.........................................................................................................................vi Introduction....................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Rethinking Community.........................................................................15 Chapter Two: Between Two Worlds: The Community of Outsiders in Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore...................................38 Chapter Three: “Two Aren’t Enough”: Developing a Support Structure through Community in Nick Hornby’s About A Boy.........................61 Chapter Four: Redefining Englishness: Shattering the Monolithic Community in British Asian Fiction....................................................83 Chapter Five: Nowhere to Go But Up: The Death and Rebirth of Community in Mike Leigh’s High Hopes.........................................112 Conclusion.................................................................................................................141 Notes..........................................................................................................................146 References..................................................................................................................152 Biographical Sketch...................................................................................................159 v INTRODUCTION I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. [. .] They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. —Margaret Thatcher The only thing I’m going to do for you is to make you freer to do things for yourself. If you can’t do it, I’m sorry. I’ll have nothing to offer you. —Margaret Thatcher1 We live in a world of niches, where each individual is separated from, wholly indifferent to and even hostile to the values, interests and wishes of those in other niches. A good society must offer the concept of citizenship that relates to others, sees citizens in the round, and adds what they have in common to what they are entitled to have for themselves. —John Tusa, Independent, 30 January 1997 Margaret Thatcher was a polarizing figure during her tenure as Britain’s Prime Minister, and she still receives a mixed public response. In 2002, the BBC conducted a poll for their Great Britons program, and they published the results in a list of “100 Great British Heroes.” Margaret Thatcher was placed near the top of the list. Responding to the poll’s popularity, Channel 4 proceeded to survey people for the “100 Worst Britons.” Thatcher moved up to third place.2 The poll results are relatively harmless, but other responses to Margaret Thatcher reveal a deep- seated hatred for her. Elvis Costello included a song entitled “Tramp the Dirt Down” on his 1989 1 album, Spike. In the lyrics, Costello refers directly to Margaret Thatcher, and he makes his distaste for her abundantly clear: There’s one thing I know I'd like to live long enough to savour, That’s when they finally put you in the ground, I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down. Costello was, by no means, the only person to feel strongly about the British Prime Minister whom many referred to as the “Iron Lady.” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown vituperates, “Nearly two decades were wasted by a woman of dubious national aspirations and a thunderous disregard for the cultural and political needs of a modern nation. We all, black and white Britons, lost out” (78). When Margaret Thatcher resigned her position as Prime Minister, a large portion of the British population breathed a collective sigh of relief. Lester Friedman reveals that the working- class, in particular, felt as if a dark period of British history had finally ended: “‘Mrs. Thatcher has resigned from No. 10. Thank God!’ So read the scrawled message that greeted harried commuters at the Bethnal Green subway stop in the East end, a working-class section of London” (xii). Although her legacy may be disputed, Thatcher’s impact on British politics and culture cannot be denied. She effectively eliminated the postwar consensus and changed the social landscape. Those who hated Thatcher cited her callous disregard for anyone who needed and requested assistance from the government as the reason for their ire. Throughout her tenure as Britain’s Prime Minister, Thatcher advocated a rugged individualism, and her government encouraged Britons to concern themselves with their own well-being and to accumulate property and goods in order to strengthen the British economy. What was lost, however, was the idea of a caring society. Margaret Thatcher was once asked for the title of the most important book she had read. Her response was somewhat surprising—Herbert Agar’s A Time for Greatness, which argued strongly that creating equality among people would resolve many of the world’s problems. In The Iron Lady: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher, Hugo Young describes another aspect of Agar’s ethos that runs counter to Thatcher’s own ideology: “He was also scornful of the business culture—‘The lives of many businessmen are pathetic because their emotional and imaginative 2 range is so immature’—and had a passionate mistrust of naked individualism, which he contrasted with the idea of society based on community and mutual support” (405). Thatcher writes in her memoir that her politics, however, were heavily influenced by Colm Brogan’s anti- socialist satire, Our New Masters, and Friedrich von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, in which Hayek views “economic planning as a threat to individual liberty” (Waugh 17). Shortly after she became the leader of the conservative party in 1975, Thatcher openly announced that Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty was the basis of her belief system and should be the basis of the conservative party’s system, as well. She made the individual the center of her ideology and pushed collectivism to the margins of British society. Margaret Thatcher faced serious challenges when she walked through the door of No. 10 Downing Street. She was the ninth Prime Minister elected since the end of World War II, and the high turnover rate was directly linked with Britain’s continual deterioration. Leonard Quart enumerates the problems that Britain faced when Thatcher took office in 1979: “Margaret Thatcher took power during a time of profound economic trouble,