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Adele Jones and Claire O'callaghan AFTERWORD: SARAH WATERS AND THE FUTURE OF FEMINISMS Adele Jones and Claire O’Callaghan BRIDGING THE DIVIDE: FEMINIST PASTS AND PRESENTS At the time this collection was being fi nalised, Sarah Waters published her hugely anticipated sixth novel, The Paying Guests (2014). The novel has met with more mixed reviews than Waters’s previous fi ve novels, with it being described both as ‘the apotheosis of her talent’ 1 and a ‘squander[ing]’ of Waters’s writing abilities ‘on the production of middlebrow entertain- ment’. 2 Yet The Paying Guests is no less ambitious in scope, less carefully plotted, nor less poignant and satirical by turn, than her other works. Most importantly for this collection, though, the novel is explicitly feminist in terms of its representations of the heteropatriarchal structures that bind women into oppressive gender roles. Set in 1922, the novel appropriates the infamous Thompson-Bywaters case as the basis for its characters’ tangled stories. On 9 January 1923, Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters were hanged for the murder of Thompson’s husband, Percy Thompson. The case against them focused on their love affair as the prosecution maintained that both Thompson and Bywaters had plotted to kill Percy Thompson (though both Thompson and Bywaters always maintained that Edith was innocent and a mere witness to her husband’s fatal attack). Some lascivious (for the time) details from Thompson’s letters to Bywaters were revealed in court and the case became notorious, focusing particularly on the perceived dichotomy between Thompson as innocent victim and fallen woman. That notoriety was sealed when Thompson haemorrhaged spectacularly upon falling from the gallows. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 215 A. Jones, C. O’Callaghan (eds.), Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50608-5 216 AFTERWORD: SARAH WATERS AND THE FUTURE OF FEMINISMS Appropriating the premise of this early twentieth-century scandal, The Paying Guests focuses on the love triangle between Frances Wray and the Barbers, the paying guests of the title. After falling on hard times after the war, Frances and her mother take in lodgers to make ends meet and, in quintessential Waters style, Frances and Lilian Barber fall in love and begin a clandestine affair. The affair leads (almost inevitably) to a violent showdown between the women and Leonard Barber, a scene that results in a fatal blow being delivered to his head by Lilian. The aftermath of this accident—or murder, depending on whether Lilian is viewed as a downtrodden housewife or scheming adulteress—results in a gripping trial in which a young man is wrongly convicted of kill- ing Leonard. Although troubled by the incident, neither Frances nor Lilian confesses knowledge of the murder. At the close of the novel, as Frances and Lilian discuss the possibility of a future together, the reader is left with an uncomfortable ambiguity about the justice that has (not) been done. Is a man’s condemnation a fair payment for Lilian’s freedom from a life of oppressive, loveless marriage? Can love really conquer all, particularly a love that has murder and lies at its core? Is this the story of women’s crying out against the patriarchal confi nes which seek to defi ne them? It is these complex questions that reinforce the fact that, at its heart, The Paying Guests is a story of women and, in particular, a story of the love—and desire—between women. Given the early interwar setting, the novel is inherently concerned with women’s history and its secret spaces. If, as one interviewer says, ‘Waters is ours, the women’s writer, chroni- cler of our lives, passions and struggles’, then this is because—as Waters says of herself in response to this characterisation—‘[she] pay[s] attention to women’s history […] To their secret history and lives, acknowledging meaning in their domestic lives’. 3 It is telling that in this statement and the response to this statement, past and present are elided. As we stated in our introduction, Waters uses particular moments in women’s history to highlight seminal points or moments in feminist history. This collec- tion and her continuing engagement with women’s history in The Paying Guests demonstrate how Waters’s feminist historiography refuses any easy relationship between the feminist past and present. She aims instead to provide the reader with a way of conceptualising her own relationship to, and responsibility for, the collective memory of a feminist past and the way in which that past informs our present and futures. 4 In addition, given the bridging position occupied by The Paying Guests —between the AFTERWORD: SARAH WATERS AND THE FUTURE OF FEMINISMS 217 neo- Victorian and the neo-forties—the novel guides the reader to a con- sideration of the changing nature of women’s position within historical moments. This collection has been concerned precisely with that changing position, charting how Waters’s writing draws out the inherent complexities of con- sidering feminist history(ies); The Paying Guests speaks to those concerns and explorations. Despite the move backwards in time (from the forties to 1922), the novel continues Waters’s journey from her early concerns with the queer to, as Natasha Alden argues, a more explicit engagement with overtly feminist politics. Through her representations of the “spinster”, Frances, Waters questions the role of marriage, and indeed, normative het- erosexuality, in women’s lives; the ultimate tragedy of the Barber’s marriage can only lead the reader to question the validity of the forced, gendered role of wife. Ironically, it is Lilian’s killing of her husband that allows her escape from this institution and therefore, to explore the possibility that her lesbian relationship with Frances, the only woman in the novel free from the con- straints of marriage, may afford her the happiness denied to her by marriage. This echo from the second wave—of those women who valorised the idea of lesbian separatism—speaks to the patriarchal “before” and the utopian “after” idea of marriage and lesbian desire in The Paying Guests , though as the uncertainty of the end of the novel shows, this utopian ideal cannot be the only answer to freeing women from heteropatriarchal constraints. As Kathryn Simpson argues, it is the interplay between agency (which Lilian gains) and sexuality (which Lilian is now able to explore as a choice) that becomes the feminist strategy in combatting the effects of heteropatriachal structures. Simpson’s point, that derives from her discussion of Waters’s intertextual play with Virginia Woolf, reinforces Lucie Armitt’s assertion, in the fi rst chapter of this collection, that the connections between storytelling and/or creativity and women’s bodies is an avowedly second-wave feminist strategy. Not only does The Paying Guests situate Lilian’s entrapment within marriage in her fi rst unwanted pregnancy, her body becoming the locus of heteropatriarchal power, it locates the burgeoning passion between her and Frances in Lilian’s ability to create Frances anew, in her fundamental creativity. On seeing Frances’s new haircut by Lilian, for example, Mrs Wray exclaims ‘I hadn’t an idea she was so talented […] Oh, but it’s charming, Frances’. 5 Thus Waters explicitly links the personal and the political; the personal lives of women come to undermine the social and cultural chains that bind them and the public (male-defi ned) personas of the women cease to hold power within the private spaces between them. 218 AFTERWORD: SARAH WATERS AND THE FUTURE OF FEMINISMS This inherently second-wave notion (as Armitt also asserts here) speaks to the idea of sisterhood that has become a trope of feminism since the 1960s and 1970s. Jessica Gildersleeve and Adele Jones argue in this collection that communities of and relationships between women have been subject to and have absorbed fears and hysteria. This is exemplifi ed in The Paying Guests by the ever-watchful eye of the Victorian mother fi gure, Mrs Wray (recall- ing the vigilant Mrs Prior in Affi nity [1999]), who displays constant anxiety about Frances’s relationships with other women. Frances, however, defi antly engages with feminist and socialist politics and opens Lilian’s eyes to the pos- sibilities of fulfi lling her desires through a relationship with another woman. As Gina Wisker argues in relation to The Little Stranger , this defi ance is a strategy adopted by Waters to demonstrate how women can, in fact, escape their marginalisation by patriarchy. It also speaks to the contention made by Jones that lesbian desire can undermine the panoptic patriarchal impulse and subtly reinscribe women’s identities into precisely the structures from which they are made liminal. As Mari Hughes-Edwards shows, however, through her exploration of Waters’s representations of spatial confi nement, the fi ght against this liminality is ongoing for women and undermines those postfemi- nist assertions that the concerns of the second-wave battle have been resolved. Indeed, although Lilian and Frances escape the scrutiny of the courtroom, the fi nal scene of the novel (discussed below) by no means offers a resolved nar- rative and the possibilities for the women are left open. This is not to say, however, that feminist discourse(s) have not evolved to incorporate the overlap in critiques of the position of women and other marginalised identities. Helen Davies provides an insightful discussion of disability and ugliness in The Little Stranger , and these notions of (un)attrac- tiveness are again explored by Waters in The Paying Guests . Frances, as a spinster, not only sees herself as unattractive but is also perceived by both her mother and Lilian to function outside normative femininity.
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