Department of English and American Studies Margaret Forster's Novels

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies Teaching English Language and Literature for Secondary Schools Marie Lenochová Margaret Forster’s Novels as a Social Document Master‘s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2010 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 prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for her help, support and encouragement. Table of Contents 1. Introduction …………………………………...…………...………….......................... 1 2. Margaret Forster, the novelist ……………………….……………………………… 3 3. Woman and their roles ………………………………….…………………………… 7 3.1. Being a mother ………………………………………………………………… 7 3.1.1. Single motherhood ……………………………………...…….……… 18 3.1.1.1. Choice motherhood ……………………..…………………… 21 3.2. Women‘s work ….………………………………….………………………… 26 4. Family …………………………………………………...…………………………… 33 4.1. Family ties, marriage ………………………………………………………… 33 4.2. State involvement into the family …………………..………………...……… 42 4.3. Home ………………………………………………………………….……… 48 5. Negative sides of the 20th century ……………………………………………..…… 52 5.1. Divided society …………………………………………………….………… 52 5.1.1. Class-divided society ………………………………………………… 52 5.1.2. Racial prejudices ………………………………………..…………… 56 5.2. Juvenile violence ……………………………………………...……………… 59 6. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………… 63 7. Bibliography ……………………………………………………...………………….. 66 8. Summary …………………………………………………………………………….. 70 9. Resumé ………………………………………………………....……………………..71 1. Introduction British literature of the second part of the twentieth century came through a number of various tendencies beginning with the postwar return to traditional realism. The authors tried to avoid the modernist experimental approach which was typical of the period before the war. Later there appeared some attempts to do some literary experiments such as enriching the novel with Gothic mysterious elements and sci-fi by authors such as Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark or modernist and metafictional approaches such as John Fowles or Anthony Burghes. By the 1980s postmodernist concerns using especially experiments with, for example, text fragmentation, multiple narrative voices, intertextual allusions and various time references, became an important part of novel writing. Among the novelists whose works are considered experimental can be named Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Salman Rushdie, Iain Sinclair and others. Nowadays, it can be said that nearly all the modern novels by British authors have at least to some extent certain experimental features, therefore it is very difficult to find a clearly realistic novel. It is important to point out that there cannot be found many signs of experiment in Margaret Forster‘s novels. From the first impression they may seem to be more a kind of a realistic document than a literary work of art worthy of attention of the critics who mostly do not consider it to be, let us call it, ―high literature‖; therefore not many articles concerning her books can be found. In my thesis I would like to show that, even though to a great extent these novels are written in a realistic and documentary style, they are written well and deserve attention especially because of the fact that their content and the questions they put are generally valid and touch not only British but any contemporary society. Although a lot has already been written on topics such as 1 motherhood, position of women in society and family relationships, I think that they are so enriching and vast one can always find some surprising facts when researching them; therefore they are worth in-depth studying and discussing. As Nick Renninson (2005, p. 72) puts it, ―most of Forster‘s fiction deals with the domestic lives of women and their place in family relationships as wives, mothers and daughters and is informed by a strong awareness of the social issues which can affect them‖. These are the topics that the thesis will deal with: women as mothers and wives, women‘s work, family relationships and marriage with the emphasis put on home environment, differences between generations and the state involvement into the family. In the last part of this thesis I will analyze the negative sides of the twentieth century society such as society divided by class, racial prejudices and violence and the way they are depicted in Margaret Forster‘s novels. For my analysis I have chosen her novels: Georgy Girl (1965), Have the Men Had Enough? (1989), The Battle For Christabel (1991) and Mothers’ Boys (1994). I will also include a short chapter devoted to Forster the novelist. 2 2. Margaret Forster, the novelist Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle on 25 May 1938. The poor working-class background provided her with an urgent need to escape such hard life her mother lived, which she finally managed, but at the same time this experience inspired her a lot. During her studies she attended Somerville College in Oxford where she studied history. Her historian‘s eye for detail, especially for the domestic detail of women‘s lives, can be seen in both her fiction and non-fiction (Lindsay, 2002). Although being a prolific novelist, biographer and memoirist popular with many fans, Margaret Forster still remains unknown to the public, which is probably caused by the fact that she rarely gives interviews and does not promote her books herself (Macdonald, 2000). Her husband Hunter Davies is a journalist and writer as well, which I mention because her family life is a great source of inspiration to her. Forster‘s first literary success was Georgy Girl (1965) to the popularity of which contributed its film version from 1965, but as Renninson (2005, p. 72) points out ―much of her best and most characteristic work, in both fiction and non-fiction, belongs to the last twenty years‖. I do not want to make a list of her books and comment on each of them, as this is not the purpose of this short chapter, besides, this information is available, but I would like to highlight the topics Forster writes about, her style and the process of the writing itself. In her books Forster focuses on women‘s issues and parent-child dynamics, which is connected with her fascination with motherhood making the common thread of her work. Although these are probably the topics one can be sure to find in Forster‘s works, it is not only women, their relationships between them, within families and between mothers and daughters, but also social hierarchies and relationships between the sexes she depicts (Sage, 1999). And because in all relationships there appear some 3 conflicts, naturally, Forster devotes attention to them as well, especially to family and domestic ones. As has been written above, what she explores most of all are from the first impression ordinary domestic lives of women and their changes through the twentieth century. Forster‘s heroines break conventions as well as ―battle with our turn- of-the-century uncertainties and mixed moods of modern confidence versus age-old pessimism over the unresolved mysteries of the human psyche‖ (Franková, 1998, p.289). Another feature typical of Forster‘s characters is their great strength to fight the battles to assert their individuality despite the others and the social forces which try to suppress it (Renninson, 2005, p. 72). When trying to describe the style of writing Forster manages to imprint in her works, I must use expressions like plain, workmanlike with little experimentation, except for using overlapping narratives and different points of view, which can be found for example in her novels Have the Men Had Enough? (1989), where the story is told by two first-person narrators, mother and daughter, in turn and her fictionalized autobiographical memoir of Thackeray, William Makespeace Thackeray: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman (1978). In Private Papers (1986) also the diary form is used. In most of Forster‘s books there can be found the impersonal third-person narrator. As Hana Sambrook adds, her style is also ―deliberately downbeat, letting the pathos and the irony speak for themselves‖. The reason why some of Forster‘s novels resemble a document is that she likes to use short sentences and various elements of journalistic practice, for example, there appear ―scraps of police investigation, identity parades and courtroom scenes‖ in her novel Moters’ Boys (1994) (Franková, 1998, p. 288), which really contributes to the effect of the reader being drawn into the plot. The process of writing itself has been described well in Forster‘s essay called appositely Cooking the Books (1993). Here Forster explains that several times the 4 purpose of writing happened to appear first or, in other words, she only wrote a story that already happened, albeit originally she thought that the story ―boils up in the interior‖, and that in the process of writing the most important was the writer‘s imagination and she wanted to ―pull people into mine‖ (p. 159). Instead of that she put down her own experience with looking after her mother-in-law suffering from Alzheimer‘s disease and so used the novel to arouse a debate on this issue. Similarly, The Battle for Christabel (1991) has been written as ―propaganda‖, which was meant to start a debate on the topic of lone mothers ―cutting men out of their plans for having children and… to use men as studs just as women were for centuries used as breeding machines‖ (p. 162). Exploring the ethics of such behavior proved to be a burning issue really as it started to be more and more frequent, but this problem will be analyzed in detail in the chapter devoted to choice motherhood. I think that it does not matter whether something ―boiled up in the interior‖ or ―it was all boiled up already‖ (p. 162). And although the process of writing has many secrets and only the writer knows what ―spices from his or her kitchen‖ was the story sprinkled with, for the reader the most important is the result, the novel itself.

Load more