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

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. 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

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

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. My thesis is called Margaret Forster’s novels as a social document and there is nothing for it but to agree that in her work Forster not only devotes her art to various problems typical of the society of the end of the millennium and the beginning of the twenty-first century, but that her style of writing often resembling a social document is convincing, attractive by its nature but plain as well. And as Cora Lindsay (2002) adds, for her novels is characteristic ―her ability to integrate factual details into a fictional setting, and her ability to create a fictional narrative within a factual one‖, which might be one of the reasons why her books are so popular. Another one is that Forster is a good writer. To finish with I want to point out one interesting fact about Margaret Forster, the novelist,

which could seem quite strange in the era of computers: she handwrote all her books − she never types.

3. Women and their roles

3.1. Being a mother

The central topic appearing in Forster‘s novels, which also dominates the ones I chose to write about, is the family. In the author‘s eyes, although it may to a great extent sound like a cliché, it is really the smallest atoms of society, people invisibly bound to one another sharing more than could seem, what matters. Here, in everybody‘s home so much affected by those with the same surname, blood, nature or whatever relatives can be connected with, starts any story considered to tell something important about society.

No wonder that in her work Forster puts emphasis on mothers and motherhood, as it is them whose main role should be to create the environment deserving the label home. I mean the home in the most genuine sense of this word. That is not a place defined by objects or any other material things, but a place having its essence in the people who live there. The equation is quite simple; family equals home. With one of its parts missing or being incomplete, you cannot have any result, either for the present time or the future.

―To become a mother is to give oneself, completely, forever‖ (p. 251). No other words than these by Isobel from The Battle for Christabel would better and more cogently illustrate a typical stereotype that could be traced in Forster‘s novels. Her mothers and women by a kind of self-sacrifice and devotion to the family secure ―the home warmth‖. It is them who are supposed to keep the family together. This can be done by many simple ways making a web of strong ties among all people concerned. It is obvious that any occasion on which family members do something together, and therefore communicate, can contribute to good relationships. What is better than, for example, a traditional family lunch? We can suppose that not by chance Have the Men

Had Enough? begins with its description. This way Forster managed to introduce with an easy humorous tone another topic of hers, mentally deteriorated seniors and taking care of them. The picture of a little confused Granny taking her teeth out and using them as a scoop when fishing out a potato from the gravy at big Sunday lunch indicates that a family circle is a place, where one can laugh, but at the same time it provides a lesson of tolerance and understanding between generations. There must not be omitted one thing of great importance; the one who organized, cooked and conduced the whole lunch every Sunday was the mother. She and no one else could and can provide everything that keeps the family together: care, food, motherly understanding, advice and help.

But, especially in the second part of the twentieth century, the role of all mothers has shifted as society itself has changed. To illustrate how motherhood was understood in the past a typical comment taken from The Saturday Review dated 1895 is suitable to be mentioned: ―Woman as the mother, represents the most sacred idea in life‖. Then motherhood was taken as a full-time job, fulfillment of woman‘s life and her highest function, which is naturally something far away from what seems to represent it today:

―Motherhood is regarded now as a sort of personal indulgence‖ (Greer, 2000, p. 250). I understand these words by Germaine Greer that it is something preventing a woman to develop her career, ambitions and individuality or in other words to be a woman in a modern way. It takes too much time and effort so as a consequence of being modern there appeared a phenomenon of ―half-measure motherhood, the having of a child as an accessory, as a perk, as a status symbol, a proof that you are a woman…and then the handing-over of it to a whole chain of substitute mothers − nannies, au pair girls, child- minders‖ (Forster, 1991, p. 251).

The present is really so different from the past. In fact within a hundred years there radically changed attitudes having been formed for centuries. What is more, today

we have got feminism and advertising. These are powerful tools influencing women‘s behavior, attitudes and of course attitudes of men towards women. As for feminists and their radical view of this field, even nowadays when we have got many electrical appliances and other useful things which help us manage everything with ease our ancestors could only dream about, still many of them see motherhood as a form of oppression or even slavery. The liberation of women according to the view of one of them, a French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter, whose latest book The Conflict, The

Woman and The Mother is very popular especially in France, where it started impassionate debates, can take place especially due to powdered milk, jars of baby food and disposable nappies, because those who replaced their tyrannical fathers are children

(Sage, 2010).

Opposite this opinion stands Germaine Greer in her book The Whole Woman, where she expresses a completely different belief in traditional values and roles we know our grandparents had. She disapproves of let us call it the ―Barbie trend‖, which is due to the media plus the pressure of modern marketing spreading throughout society.

―My strong women thrust their muscular feet into high heels and learned to totter; they stuffed their useful breasts into brasseries and instead of mothers‘ milk fed commercial formulae made up with dirty water to their children; they spent their tiny store of cash on lipstick and nail varnish, and were made modern‖ (Greer, 2000, pp. 6-7).

The state of British society proves, no matter how far people can think they have got since the period of Victorian England, when the woman‘s place was in the kitchen and the sense of her life was giving birth, child-rearing and doing everything to secure the family and especially the husband‘s happiness, that although it was the past, some values and ―home truths‖ do not change. Generally speaking, men like to be looked after well and admired for their strength and ability to earn money, therefore they prefer

women who provide them with the service they deserve. If you look around, and for this, in my opinion, no special survey is needed, you will find the real state of things; in fact men are not in favour of a thin model-looking, too independent Barbie to the extent that they would marry her. The reason is obvious. She might be a pretty jewel to represent and decorate their masculinity, however, life with her would not be what the men expect. Again I mean quality service for him and the children. That is why I agree with Greer in this. In the Czech Republic we have got an old proverb illustrating men‘s thinking; it says something in the sense that ―Every love goes though the man‘s stomach‖. To support this opinion, I can refer to a recent study conducted in 2008 by the researchers at the University of Iowa about which Sally Law writes in her article called What Modern Men Want in Women. The study‘s participants valued in a partner mutual attraction and love, dependable character and emotional stability most, but among desirable characteristics were counted good financial prospect, good cook and housekeeper as well. As the participants were college students, naturally they also found education and intelligence to be important. The question is what results such a study would have among the working class. Nevertheless, it is evident that even the young generation of men considers their potential partners in the traditional sense of cooking and housekeeping.

Getting back to Forster‘s novels, a good example of a mother of let us say a

Victorian type concentrating on her traditional role of a married woman who takes care of her family, does not go to work and remains a housewife all her life, is Sheila

Armstrong from the novel Mothers’ Boys. Her home with all the material things, though rather simple and poor, is her little kingdom providing the feeling of security. The thing is that in her home she is a bit out of all too quickly developing society, and even though being a good mother and grandmother, too stuck in her private world to be able

to understand what happened to her beloved grandson Leo that one day he could take drugs, commit a crime or at least be present at it and subsequently refuses to communicate in any way. But Sheila is not the only representative of the mother category we could call ―family happiness is what I live for‖. Even according to the title of the book Have the Men Had Enough? the reader can guess there is something indicating the woman‘s main role of ―a family hearth keeper‖. As old grandmother Mrs.

McKay understands it as well as did her mother and grandmother for many generations going back in history, firstly, wives should feed the men. This might be understood a point marking a division between the old and new generations, where one of the recent problems of modern families might arise from. Nowadays liberated mothers mostly devote themselves to their career development rather than to cooking for the family and similar kind of activities. Provided that they do not cook, there is little chance for all the family members to meet at the table and communicate, thus other problems may naturally appear. If we return to the novel, as the role of each family member is different, not surprisingly we find out that attitudes to the family Sunday dinner vary as well. Father Charlie having dinner is described as ―desperate…, but patient, good- humoured‖, while Adrian ―impatient, resenting the ritual when he‘s just in from football and starving‖ (p. 8), but generally speaking because the men like to be served delicious food prepared with care, which mother Jenny does, they together with Bridget, who wants only the best for Granny enjoying it most of all, see the ritual as an inevitable part of Sunday. Opposite stands Hanna‘s view ―the weekly ordeal, the worst of all ordeals of the week‖ (p. 10), Paula‘s ―weekly pilgrimage‖, because ―women should, women are supposed to keep the family together‖ (p. 12), as well as Jenny‘s, for whom to prepare everything carefully and then watch it being ruined by Granny, is quite a demanding task, so one cannot be surprised by her negative attitude to the Sunday ritual. For Jenny

it is not an inevitable part of Sunday, which we learn in the end after old Mrs. McKay dies: ―Jenny, a perfect daughter-in-law, perceives Granny‘ s sudden death as liberation and uses her terrible experience and newly gained freedom as a means of emancipation.

Next time she refuses to cook Sunday dinners to her husband‘s and son‘s discontent, because this time she ‗had enough‘‖ (Franková, 2004, p. 80, my translation).

I indicated that this way by domino effect, originally coming from such a simple fact that some feminist mothers underestimate cooking, various problems within the family can appear. I admit that many people would oppose this statement calling it too simplifying, and although I realize the complexity of the whole field I touched upon, I think there are some principles the validity of which has already been approved by years. Nevertheless, a woman does not have to be a feminist in case she is not fond of cooking. These days a not inconsiderable number of people are short of time, and therefore they like to have something quick in some kind of fast food chain. What food do we actually get there? Are people trying to change food politics actively? Answers to these questions as well as considering food to be the basic but so often neglected value whose real importance the society has started to realize slowly today, is the main topic of a thought-provoking article The Food Movement, Rising by Michael Pollan (2010).

He writes about American cheap and low-quality food from fast food chains being connected with ―the decline of the family meal as an institution‖, which has been caused by the fact that the family income in the USA since the 1970s has been in decline as well, resulting in cheaper fast food becoming ―a welcome, if not indispensible, option for pinched and harried families‖. Why not to slow down and have ―good food‖ when it is ―one of the most democratic values a society can offer, and is one of those subjects, like sports, that people can talk about across line of class, ethnicity, and race?‖. I do not know how many of the 100,000 members of the Italian organization Slow Food, which

exists since 1986 as a protest against the arrival of McDonald‘s in Rome, are British, but hopefully there could be found some people on the British Isles who would agree with its founder, Carlo Petrini (2010), that ―people‘s daily food choices can rehabilitate the act of consumption, making it something more creative and progressive‖. The movement criticizes industrial food for the reason that it contributed to the collapse of everyday cooking, and consequently an important part of family life in damaging the shared meal as such. In my opinion, the existence of such an organization proves that there are certain kinds of tendencies implying the return to the basic values as the one of family dinners eaten slowly without watching television and enabling sophisticated communication.

Getting back to the variety of motherhood, which is depicted in Forster‘s novels,

I would like to point out that there can be found feminists in Forster‘s work as well. The question is whether Isobel, a feminist character from The Battle for Christabel, a self- centred woman of today keen on travelling and career development, who at the beginning does not intend to give up her lifestyle, have children or marry, would cook for Christabel in case she succeeded in adopting her in the end. As a feminist she also has a pronounced opinion on motherhood worth discussing: ―To give birth, to become a mother was a form of suicide, a suicide of the self. And I did not want to commit a suicide. I loved myself and I loved my life too much‖ (p. 251).

It is true that, on one hand, motherhood can enrich the woman in many aspects; it brings the positive feelings of fulfillment of her role for which she has been prepared for a long time, about which Leonard and Speakman in their essay Women in the

Family: Companions or Caretakers? (1986, p. 51) write: ―For all the women, whether or not they do eventually have children of their own, the probability of giving birth and bringing up children is part of their lives from early childhood and is a central focus of

their socialization experiences‖. For the woman being the mother is connected with pleasure of holding and taking care of someone who needs her, loves her, but it also provides her with the possibility to perceive the world from a completely different point of view and, what is more, gives her the meaning of life.

On the other hand, nothing is only positive, thus the times when the woman stays at home with the children can be a period of hardship as well. I find a list of negative feelings common to both authors Adrienne Rich and Micheline Wandor to be accurate: ―Exhaustion and the sense of years slipping away; conflict between their own needs and those of their children; a feeling of having no identity outside motherhood; and a guilt at feeling less than totally satisfied with their lot‖, all this is even worsened

Rich adds, ―by the feelings of isolation of mothering from the other areas of life‖

(Leonard and Speakman, 1986, p. 53). I must admit that for someone whose personality is not strong enough to fight these motherhood nightmares, which are, no matter how much people want to eliminate them, to a certain degree present in every household with children and the mother at home, there can appear serious consequences in the form of depression. It is proved by an American study on the incidence of psychological stress in adults, according to which:

…working women were overwhelmingly better than housewives. Far

fewer than expected of the working women and more than expected of the

housewives, for example, had actually had a nervous breakdown. Fewer than

expected of the working women and more than expected of the housewives

suffered from nervousness, inertia, insomnia, trembling hands, nightmares,

perspiring hands, fainting, headaches, dizziness, and heart palpitations. The

housewife syndrome is far from a figment of anyone‘s imagination. (Bernard,

1973, p. 47)

Taking into account this study and experience of many other women, there is nothing but to admit that to a certain degree motherhood can really be viewed by some feminists as a kind of a personal suicide as Isobel from The Battle for Christabel says, however, feminists have a strong tendency to see the situation only from one side of a frustrated, bored mother and a housewife, thus ―they stress marriage and motherhood as institutions, not as a series of individual choices‖ (Leonard and Speakman, 1986, p.21).

I think that this idea is of cardinal importance. It is up to the mother what she will choose; no one forces her to give herself completely to the child, if she has some health problems caused by her current situation or is not satisfied with it, then why not to change it. Today there are so many possibilities to do so. Firstly, it is quite common for mothers to work at least part-time, which is not a problem with better housing conditions and more advanced domestic technology (Lewis, 1992, p. 67). Secondly, women being at home on maternity leave have also many possibilities to communicate and share their everyday problems and experience, for example, on the internet, by mobile phone or meeting in various parent clubs and centres, so we cannot speak about isolation in the genuine sense of this word.

To summarize this discussion of the statement that when the woman becomes the mother, it equals committing a suicide, I would like to say that if some women feel it like this, there are a number of proved methods, which can help to improve the situation. A lot of women complain about something constantly, but in comparison with the hard life of our ancestors, they have not got much to complain about really. Every mother must admit that, no matter how hard life she thinks she lives, positive aspects of motherhood prevail. Above all, and in this I agree with Leonard and Speakman, whether to have a child or not is every single woman‘s choice.

To have a mosaic of approaches to motherhood complete, I should not forget to include one more, fortunately not very usual one to be found when reading Georgy Girl.

It is Meredith. A heartless woman with absolutely no maternal instinct, need to have children or take care of them. Abortion is nearly a daily routine to her and finally when she happens to give birth to a baby not realizing what such a thing means to a woman, refuses to have anything to do with the baby and does not hide that she hates her. Quite a shocking fact seems to me that the biological mother is able to call her newborn baby a brat or even a bug. What characterizes Georgy standing on a completely opposite side is an unceasing obsession with Sara over whom she slaves more than any biological mother would ever do. These characters‘ lives are undoubtedly marked by the free atmosphere of the decade as Nick Renninson sees it ―the story of a gauche, funny and energetic young woman caught up in the sexual and social upheavals of the 1960s, captured both new freedoms that the era offered and the confusing new choices that that freedom involved‖ (p. 73). Thinking about this novel, we must conclude that nearly all relationships Forster depicts are deviant in some way. For example Georgy‘s father‘s anxious loyalty to James Leamington to the extent that Georgy saw herself as ―his gift to James in a way, his living sacrifice on the altar of gratitude he‘d erected‖ (p. 9),

James‘ fatherly support of Georgy whom he eventually asks to become his mistress or the relationship of Jos and Meredith based only on sex and the consequences of which neither of them is willing to bear.

So what was the writer‘s aim? What did she want to tell us about the generation of the 1960s? By Georgy‘s willing slavery on one hand and Meredith‘s refusing motherhood on the other, in my opinion, Forster wanted to highlight the life emptiness and emotional bleakness of both characters coming out from cold family environment both of them experienced. Together with these feelings goes the lack of love as the

basic emotion fulfilling people‘s lives and an attempt to catch at least a glimpse of it in its essential part called sex.

A similarly strong mother-child bond as the one of Georgy and Sara, in some aspects showing pathological sings of behaviour appears in Mothers’ Boys. Here, partially due to a devastating assault on her son Joe, too devoted Harriet Kennedy suffers from constant attacks of maternal angst and, though being an understanding, educated and most of all modern mummy, cannot admit that her protective efforts are more a burden for both of them and so prevent them to get over the horrifying experience. As has been mentioned above, Sheila Armstrong the other mother from the novel is a devoted mother as well, however, in a different, it could be said, traditional way. Placing these women opposite each other when facing the assault and its consequences, a clear distinction between two different worlds and times has been made

(Sheila already a grandmother is an older generation than Harriet). ―Forster confronts the traditional understanding of devoted motherhood with the changing views of the role of the woman and mother in today‘s Western society without diminishing the mother‘s importance. In our time woman is first and foremost posited as an autonomous individual and only then as wife and mother‖ (Franková, 1998, p. 293).

To sum up, I tried to look at motherhood and its understanding. Taking into consideration that every woman in her own time, background and specific conditions can see her role in the family differently, according to Forster‘s novels studied, I traced several basic patterns of their behavior. Two distinctive groups are devoted home hearth keepers who put emphasis on traditional values such as solid home-made meals and feminists inclining to everything modern perceiving the former attitude as a kind slavery or oppression. Of course to cover the span of society in its variety between these two groups there can be found a mixture of both, mothers not strictly belonging to either

of them not in favour of any radical opinions, but living according to their nature, led by common sense, advice of the experienced and instinct as well and of course many others, too.

3.1.1. Single motherhood

A two-parent family can be counted to the family conception which was for centuries in fact the only possibility accepted by not only British, but, generally speaking, except for those practising polygamy, every society. It was a traditional necessity enabling people to survive. Leonard and Speakman (1986, p. 13) argue that in the 1980s many people in Britain married and started their own household as the amazing degree of uniformity of family behaviour was still present. However, today the trend is different and young people often live together without being married. The following chapter will be devoted to the topic of British families, their various problems and the way they are depicted in Margaret Forster‘s novels, but what I will analyze now is the phenomenon of single motherhood.

In the past wives and mothers not being supported and protected by their husbands were in a very difficult position. Apart from the fact that society had never accepted single motherhood as such and single mothers with their children had been pushed towards the edge of society, there was a constant problem of securing sustenance and housing. That is why women very often solved their arduous life situation by quickly looking for a stepfather who did not know about their pregnancy or was willing to marry them under some specific conditions, by leaving the child or they condemned themselves to life in poverty. In other words, women depended upon their husbands, for the breadwinner of the family was usually the man.

In the twentieth century the situation changed in single mothers‘ favour, when the state started to support them by providing benefits and cheaper housing, but, still, even today, their life is not easy: ―The biological family of mother and child is vulnerable; it needs protection and support. Mothers need sustenance, physical, mental and spiritual. In western society the person who is expected to provide that sustenance is the mother‘s husband or partner, but only if he chooses. A woman without a partner and with children is usually a woman in trouble‖ (Greer, 2000, p. 258). I think by highlighting their vulnerability Greer succeeded in pronouncing the main problem of single mother families, which causes subsequently a number of other related problems; the mother, no matter how many children she has, is alone and has to rely on herself.

Besides, she can count on her relatives, provided she has any, and the state, which not only helps, but intervenes as well. Nevertheless, the most important person, the one who would support her and be an indispensable authority for the children is missing.

Though these families seem to be rather problematic, it can be supposed, the society having undergone many other changes, perceives them differently than in the past. The people started to accept single mothers keeping their children as a result of the increasing tolerance to everything ―different‖, which is connected with the aspect of multiculturality. But in spite of this fact, the increasing number of single mother families really deserves to be called a burning issue, because it is single mothers and their children who, together with divorces, contribute to ―fears about the breakdown of the family and associated fears regarding increasing delinquency and social disorder‖

(Lewis, 1992, p. 15). Why to speak about fears and delinquency? Is there any reasonable ground to think that we should be afraid of such families? I can try to answer these questions by defining what characterizes them and subsequent analyzing how problems of single mothers are viewed by Margaret Forster in her novels.

First of all, it is not a family in a traditional sense. As Jane Lewis in her book

Women in Britain since 1945 points out ―lone-mother families have historically been regarded as a problem with both social and moral dimensions… the problem has been defined as one of women with children and without men‖ (p. 33). The fact that the man is missing is related to many other problems: the children miss the male model of behaviour, they can see the family without the father as being ―natural‖ and the mother who does not go to work and lives on state benefits as well. Alarming is not only the poverty into which the family can easily slip under such conditions and the unfortunate consequences this behaviour must have for the state budget, but also not uncommon situations such as the one when there something bad happens to the mother or she dies.

The last case was chosen by Forster as the main topic of her novel The Battle for

Christabel (1991). Here she questions: What about the orphaned child? Who will look after her? Providing there are no relatives or when they refuse to do so as happens in this novel, then it is inevitably the state and its social workers, whose task is to act in favour of the child, thus to choose a ―suitable‖ family as soon as possible. Over the pages of this book we can come across moral dilemmas such as whether a woman has the right to give birth to a baby without letting the father know about it, which also touches a recent discussion about the artificial insemination, or whether it is really the relatives‘ duty to take care of an orphaned child, when there are so many childless couples waiting for adoption, and to what extent this duty can restrict their freedom.

Suppose a person refuses this duty, according to Cora Lindsay (2002), this can result in

―the struggle with the sense of guilt‖ and as she adds ―Forster‘s non-judgemental narratives demonstrate a genuine empathy with the dilemmas faced by women and an understanding of the often unreasonable sense of duty imposed upon them, most painfully often by the women themselves.‖ But I have to ask: What is duty? Does

anybody have the right to judge a person when considering such a serious topic as an adoption of a child? The thing is that we can assume that there would be no dilemma of this kind if Christabel had a father who would know about his child. It was very selfish of Christabel‘s mother to want the child only for herself and to leave the father out of the child‘s life. Modern terminology would describe Rowena as a ―choice mother‖.

3.1.1.1. Choice Motherhood

Among single mothers can be counted widows, women abandoned by their husbands or partners or those who left men for some serious reason, for example, domestic violence, but some women take care of their children alone intentionally; they planned their motherhood with the vision of living without the father of their children, in other words, they are single mothers by choice. It is good that Forster opened a discussion about intended leaving the fathers out of children‘s life, because today this case happens more and more often. In the past to have a child without the man, who would be the support of the family, was very presumptuous. People had to rely on each other for there were no social benefits. On the contrary, the current situation is completely different to the extent that there appeared a new social phenomenon called

―choice motherhood‖. It has become quite common that some women, probably after some unpleasant experience with men, arrive at the conclusion that the only thing they miss in their life is a child but not his or her father. Unfortunately, to this fact contributes the state with its support, as the researcher Geoff Dench (2010), of the

Young Foundation social action group, said: ―The existence of state benefits as a source of economic security seems to be encouraging young mothers not to bother with male resident partners.‖ So after he fulfills his function by conceiving, the man becomes

useless for who would bother with marriage or, in other words, serving him for the rest of life? Some radical feminists would certainly agree. Not a long time ago, in the 1970s, even male radical psychiatrists such as R. D. Laing and David Cooper together with feminists declared ―the two-parent family dysfunctional because… it produced neurotic individuals and women‘s oppression within the family‖ (Lewis, 1992, p. 62). Provided that this statement was true, nearly all the people would be neurotic and the majority of women would suffer seriously alongside their husbands. I do not want to start a discussion on the topic of women and their oppression in marriage now as I will analyze this topic in the next chapter devoted to the family, however, it seems to me quite strange that especially to the older generation one-parent families still pose a moral threat, while two-parent families are perceived by some people as problematic, too.

However, to get back to the new social issue called ―choice motherhood‖. As it has already been written, the state in order to help lone mothers in fact undermines basic principles of society, which were here for hundreds of years, and, though hard to lone mothers, they enabled the mankind to survive. This unfortunate intervention results in the unprecedented expansion of single-parent families. According to the report by a sociologist Geoff Dench (2010), the proportion of lone mothers in Great Britain had risen from 10 per cent to 25 per cent in the last 20 years; in other words, one in four families is now headed by a single mother. From the data Dench found that, 57 per cent of single mothers have never lived with a male partner, it is evident that lone motherhood is their lifestyle choice. To learn this information might be unpleasant and surprising at the same time, but really alarming is when we realize that there are many families where three generations of women live without men. We can suppose, since every child‘s family is a model one, that most probably the children living in such a family will see families without men relying on state support to be natural, therefore

there is a high probability that in the future they will start a family of the same kind.

How is this fact viewed by Geoff Dench?

This has far-reaching effects. A lone mother with conventional parents has a lot of

contact through them with mainstream society. But three-generational lone mother

families – extended families without men – are developing a new family sub-

culture which involves little paid work by mothers or grandmothers… They are

taking support and services from other sectors without contributing very much in

return… such families were in the last analysis parasitic on the rest of society with

more conventional families.

Considering Dench‘s explanation of the actual situation in Britain, we should understand why he is so worried. This new sub-culture not only produces other young people of the same or similar attitude to life, work, society and state (which becomes a mere source of benefits), but, from the general point of view, it is the society itself who suffers most. After admitting the fact that these people very often live in poverty, everyone using common sense must arrive at the conclusion that by their parasitic lifestyle they contribute to reducing the life standard of the rest of the society. One cannot be surprised that one-parent families have been viewed by governments as an undesirable family form which would be only bolstered by the state support. That is why a very cautious attitude of the state as for providing material or any kind of support, which was present here for many decades (Lewis, 1992, p.33), appears to be reasonable. The rise of lone-mother families from 10 to 25 per cent in the last 20 years proves it best.

Unfortunately, the poverty into which families headed only by women can slip very easily is real. According to Eekelaar and Maclean (1986), ―Fewer than one in ten

of one-parent families enjoyed an ‗average family‘ standard of living in the 1980s‖.

And naturally delinquency and other related negative social issues are connected with poverty. Steve Doughty (2010) completes the unfortunate statistics: ―Children of single parents are statistically more likely than others to suffer poor health, do badly at school, fall into trouble with authorities and the police, and become unemployed or single mothers themselves.‖

I must ask why a mother makes this unfortunate (I see it unfortunate after considering all the negatives discussed above) but intentional choice to have the child only for herself, which equals to make the living herself and not to rely on the man.

Naturally, the reasons can be as various as are the women, their character, life experience and especially social background. The last case, in my opinion, is the most frequent. Everybody‘s character, whether we like it or not, is formed by the social background. Therefore, as Lewis (1992, p. 60) points out, ―the meaning of motherhood may be very different to a young ill-educated woman from a poor family, for whom a baby may represent one of the few ways to achieve adulthood, than for a young well- educated middle-class woman, for whom there is a much greater chance of realizing a planned entry into both a career and motherhood‖. I agree with the fact that gaining the status of adulthood can play its role as well, nevertheless, as Jane Hutchinson, the eldest mother from a three-generational lone mother family, says after expressing her disappointment over her daughter becoming single mother, ―Having known the heartache of single parenthood, it was the last thing I wanted for my own daughter‖, she adds, ―I do feel women don‘t try hard enough with their relationships. I also feel that too many young girls simply see getting pregnant as a way of gaining a council flat and benefits‖. Thus Hutchinson highlights another important and very complicated cause of more frequent single mother family incidence; people simply do not live together

because they don’t try hard enough with their relationships. I agree with this statement, although it is questionable, therefore a long debate on it could follow as human relationships are very complicated. I will analyze this in the chapter devoted to family ties, marriage and cohabitation.

To conclude the topic of single motherhood in general and the way Margaret

Forster deals with it in her novels, I must repeat that negatives prevail. In spite of the fact that the state provides some kind of support, for a mother to look after the children only by herself is not an easy task. Although there are many of them who live in such an incomplete family deliberately, such as Rowena from The Battle for Christabel whose decision to exclude the father from her child‘s life turns to be fatal as Christabel after her mother‘s death and subsequent insensitive intervention of social workers ends up in an adoptive family without a possibility to meet her relatives, mostly they have to battle with poverty. The children, apart from many other problems, not knowing the authority of the father may tend to do badly at school and later in their lives as well because they will probably follow the same pattern of behaviour they experienced in their family.

Another negative of this issue is a parasitical nature of these families‘ lifestyle resulting in ―normal‖− two-parent families unwilling support. The question is whether in the future two-parent families will be considered as being ―normal‖ for single parent ones and cohabitating couples are becoming more and more common. A different direction of social policy may contribute to changing this sociological trend, but to what extent it is difficult to guess. I agree with Michael Gerson (2009) whose comment on the consequences of young people‘s attitudes to marriage, cohabitation and sex in the article called Lost in a World Without Courtship catches the situation in the changing society of today fittingly: ―There is little use in preaching against a hurricane of social change‖.

3.2. Women’s work

Women have always worked as well as men, but the difference is significant as women‘s work is characteristic by having two main fields: unpaid and paid. Although men‘s work can be divided this way too, which means that apart from their jobs men do some unpaid work such as DIY, repairs in the household, or they help with children and housework, still, it is not so common as with women and the amount of unpaid work men usually do is much smaller as Lewis (1992, p. 88) points out: ―In the mid-1970s, the husbands performed less than one quarter of all domestic work and less than 10 percent of routine domestic work. Almost three-quarters of wives in the 1980 Woman and Employment Survey reported that they did all or most of the housework‖. Such findings are not surprising, but it should be pointed out that they are connected with

―deep-seated ideas as to the content of masculinity‖ (Lewis, 1992, p. 89).

Among unpaid work belongs housework, voluntary work, taking care of children, handicapped and old people, provided there are any in the household.

Women‘s paid employment has not got a long history. In fact in Britain it appeared first with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution before the start of which the household was the basic unit of production and women, men and children worked together on the land, on spinning and weaving the cloth, and making food and clothing (Beechey, 1986, p. 79). Naturally, only working-class women worked in the factories, but because of the strong influence of the Victorian ideology emphasizing the family as such, thus requiring women to stay at home and become the home hearth keepers in the first place, their number was reduced as Veronica Beechey (1986, p. 79) puts it in more precise terms: ―The 1851 Census recorded 25 per cent of married women with an ‗extraneous occupation‘, whereas, by the turn of the century, only 10 per cent of married women were in paid employment‖. Not only was it undesirable for women to work outside

home during the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, but as Leonard and Speakman (1986, p. 30) add, ―For a wife to go out to work was considered shameful, indeed unnatural, and even to undertake paid work within her own home (e.g. by taking in laundry, wet-nursing babies, or being a landlady) or to work in other people‘s homes (as washerwoman, needlewoman or children‘s nurse) lowered the family status‖. It was not until after the Second World War that women‘s paid employment was perceived differently. Since then more and more women have started to participate in the labour market.

I found out that, for example, in the USA, where the situation can be supposed to be very similar to Britain, the labour force participation of women with children and, in particular, mothers of infants, has risen substantially during the last four decades. In their article The Timing of Mothers’ Employment after Childbirth Han, Ruhm,

Waldfogel and Washbrook (2008) analyze the data taken from the official statistics of the U.S.: ―In 1968 just 21 per cent of women with a child younger than 1 year old were in the labour force. By 1986, this figure exceeded 50 per cent and, although the increase has slowed since that time and appears to have stabilized since 2000, more than half of mothers of infants have participated in the labour force in every year since‖, which is confirmed by the investigation of a recent large and nationally representative study, the

Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort of children born in 2001, ― more than half (59 per cent) of U.S. mothers were working by 9 months after their children‘s births‖. Despite the period of time women spend on childcare being shortened considerably during the last few decades, it is still true that women‘s employment possibility is negatively affected by these breaks. Because of childrearing women‘s career is interrupted and becomes a so-called two-phase career, which was preferred to part-time work by Myrdal and Klein in their influential book Women’s Two Roles

(1956). Lewis (1992) finds their idea that women should not have to choose between paid work on the one hand and unpaid work and motherhood on the other to be radical in that time. Today the situation is different and every woman chooses what suits her best, however, no matter whether women work part-time or full-time with a two-phase career, in feminists‘ view the fact that they can work is an unambiguous liberation enabling women to equal men. Moreover, paid work is for women an important source of self-fulfillment, companionship and at the same time it guarantees their financial independence (Lewis, 1992, p. 69).

On the other hand, these days the majority of women have to manage both their household and the job, which is possible due to better housing conditions and more advanced domestic technology, but still, the time spent by women on housework has not declined dramatically (Lewis, 1992, p. 69). What is more, women often have to become

―superwomen‖ to manage all their time-consuming duties, which is true especially speaking of single mothers who cannot rely on men‘s help.

But how are working women depicted by Margaret Forster? Are her heroines doing paid or unpaid work? Do they manage it? First of all I would like to emphasize the fact that in the novels I analyzed the women were busy with both paid and unpaid work. Some of them such as Sheila (Mothers’ Boys), Mrs. McKay, Jenny (Have the

Men Had Enough?) and Doris (Georgy‘s mother from Georgy Girl) are in the first place housewives and carers who give up careers and devote their lives to the household management and childrearing instead; in other words, mostly they do unpaid work.

Opposite stand independent characters like Harriet (Mothers’ Boys), Georgy (Georgy

Girl) and Bridget (Have the Men Had Enough?) for whom having the family does not equal giving up their work outside home. But it is true that Bridget is single without any children, however, the sense of duty and love to her sick mother are so strong that

finally before Mrs. McKay dies, she decides to give up her loved job to be able to take care of her in her home.

In my opinion, somewhere between these opposites can be found Rowena (The

Battle for Christabel), a character not matching any category, a woman deserving at least a few words. I wrote about her due to the fact that she is a single mother, who worked as a nanny before Christabel was born, but she was useless with babies and without any British qualification. Then she lived from a supplementary benefit and was a burden for the others till her death. Rowena tries to deal with either paid work of a nanny or everyday duties of a single mother, but she mostly fails. What I would like to point out is her independence, fastidiousness, the fact that she is only used to taking and not willing to give, her desperate need to experience excitement, action, and especially to have a child, who would give the meaning to her life. She wants a lover too, but at the same time is unable to live with him. I think this is a characteristic matching many of the young generation of people raised and spoiled in the abundance of Western society of the end of the twentieth century, who are not able to have a stable relationship looking for something constantly, feeling emptiness. Moreover, they suffer from self- pity and depression.

It is worth comparing Harriet with Sheila. Each of them represents a different life attitude. While Harriet, a modern and ambitious woman, manages to combine her paid work of a businesswoman which provides her with the feeling of self-realization and housework, Sheila, as written in the chapter about motherhood, is used only to spending her time in the household that she understands with all the objects it contains as a part of her identity giving her the feeling of security. She cannot imagine that apart from cooking and other everyday routines of a housewife she would do any other job.

Today such an attitude is mostly an exception for the majority of women work at least

part-time, however, it is important to say that the contrast between these two characters has more reasons:

Not only are they a generation apart and a class apart, with Sheila drawing on for

seventy, a lower-middle-class housewife, all her life accustomed to the old

notions of female acceptance, while Harriet is a dynamic, outspoken

businesswoman of forty-five, a successful new woman of today, educated,

independent, able to handle a job and a family; but most of all, they cannot

negotiate the gulf that separates the opposite sides of the disastrous event which

has thrown them together (Franková, 1998, p. 292).

The novel Have the Men Had Enough? is a good example how a three- generational difference can be reduced when women‘s unpaid care of the elderly is needed. Even the youngest Hannah helps with a senile Grandma as much as possible, though one could suppose that the representative of the youngest generation would not bother with it. The opposite is true, it might be really surprising how much interest and care a teenage girl is able to perform. Mrs. McKay, Jenny and Hannah help us understand how women‘s work, lives and attitudes changed during the decades of the twentieth century as well. Mrs. McKay‘s thriftiness, constant need to feed the men and the fear whether they ―had enough‖ have got their origin most probably in her past experience of hard times, when she was widowed and herself had to provide a living for her children; therefore she had to save really every penny. How difficult her life was can be illustrated by Stuart‘s accident, when he as a small boy was scalded seriously and she, though scalded too, ran with him to the bus station and had to wait for the bus to be able to get him to hospital. Old Mrs. McKay, a person not being able to get rid of the burden of old times, has difficulty in understanding the notion of ―holiday‖ resulting from the fact that she experienced none. Also the word ―pleasure‖ has a completely

different meaning for her as can be seen from a short dialogue, when Hannah is trying to explain that her daughter Bridget went on holiday:

On holiday? What for?

Pleasure.

Pleasure? Whatever next, if we all thought of pleasure.

You should have done.

What?

Thought of your own pleasures in life.

That would have been a fine thing, who‘d have done the work?

…

I wasn‘t wanting pleasure, I had my bairns. (p. 169)

This dialogue is a good example of how difficult sometimes it can be to understand someone belonging to a different generation with a different life experience and priorities.

Getting back to Jenny and Hannah, they have also troubles, but in comparison with Mrs. McKay ones of a very different kind. In fact the main problem of theirs is how to manage the care of a senile Grandma and what to do with her later when her state becomes quickly worse and worse and they have no assistants to help. With regard to the material and financial aspects, they do not have to worry about anything. They have got Charlie, the husband and father, who earns money to secure their and

Grandma‘s needs as it is him who pays all the bills. He, being a typical man, does not help with the care itself, however, he provides so important ―guilt‖ money (according to

Charley‘s sister Bridget, it is the money Charley pays for not taking Grandma in their flat and renting her own one), which is not inappreciable. The demanding care for

Granny suffering from Alzheimer‘s disease is considered women‘s work as Hannah comments on it: ―The women do the nasty bits and aren‘t supposed to mind. It‘s all part of being a woman‖ (p. 196). It is true that care for children and the old has always been taken as a part of women‘s nature. During the 1980s researchers were trying to find out the extent to which such care provides women with part of their feminine identity

(Graham, 1983, pp. 13-30), resulting from the fact that the work of caring combines

―labour and love‖ and is both activity and identity, it is powerfully connected with the creation of female personality. Thus, ―failure‖ to care may be perceived as failure to be feminine (Lewis, 1992, p. 90). Not only is caring connected with love in the sense of creating the female identity, but it is also supposed to be done ―from and for love‖ and together with housework it is usually not seen as ―real work‖ as Leonard and Speakman

(1986, p. 8) add, which I find to be a widespread opinion deeply rooted in society.

Jenny feels that Grandma deserves better treatment and living conditions any

Home could offer, therefore she is against Grandma going there and perceives her going there as her own failure as well. This feeling is even stronger especially after visiting a few Homes. Terrible things she sees there only intensify her feeling of guilt for not being able to give Grandma what she would deserve. Jenny feels trapped because, on one hand, she can see that without assistants the family cannot manage the care for

Grandma, whose health state is quickly getting worse, but, on the other hand, she does not want to put her into any terrifying place a Home or mental hospital certainly is.

Despite all the negative feelings connected with it, in the end the family gives up their efforts for keeping her at home and choose a Home.

4. Family

In this chapter I will analyze how Margaret Forster deals with the central topic on which she focuses in her novels, the topic of family with its varieties and background. I will also look at British society and search what is the current situation like as for the changing attitude to the institution of marriage. This chapter will be also devoted to the state involvement into family and in the end there will be described the topic of home − how it was perceived in the past, what this notion means today and how it is understood by Forster‘s characters.

4.1. Family ties, marriage

As I intend to write about the family and marriage, I find it to be important to define both first because today by the term family is generally understood a number of its varieties including unmarried couples with children living together or divorced or separated people living with a new partner in one household with his or her children from the first marriage and their common children as well and single parents with their children, which would not be considered to be a family some decades ago. Cambridge

International Dictionary of English defines the family as ―a social group of people consisting of a parent, or parents, and their children, or your husband/wife and children, or your parents, brothers and sisters and sometimes grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc.‖ (p.

500), while by marriage is meant ―a legally accepted relationship between a woman and a man in which they live as husband and wife, or the official ceremony which results in this‖ (p. 867). I would like to point out the words husband, wife and official, for there increases the number of people who do not have the need to have a husband or wife, and therefore their relationship to be acknowledged officially. They do not consider it to

be modern any more, though Leonard and Speakman (1986, p. 9) claim that the family is usually perceived as ―the normal and natural, indeed the only possible way of life‖. It is true that this was written more than twenty years ago and since that time, the situation in society has changed, so the question is whether for the couples from the young generation preferring to live in one household with or without being married makes any significant difference. Nowadays people often just live and have children together and do not bother with formalities such as marriage. They live together because they want to and when they feel like leaving the relationship, they leave and start a new one without being bothered by a divorce. Moreover, as has been written above, the state supports single parents by providing social benefits and cheaper housing so young people only take advantage of the situation. That is why I consider ―an abstraction, an idea, a concept covering a group of people with particular sorts of relationships and legal ties, some of which are based on what we recognize as biological relationships, others on marriage‖ (p. 11), another definition of family by Leonard and Speakman to be more precise. In other words, they say that the family should include ―legal ties and interaction and feelings of affection‖ (p. 11), which seems to me to be the most accurate.

In the past if a woman did not marry, which was the only possible way to start a family, an alternative for her was to remain an old maid. She was not usually lucky enough to get married due to various reasons; she might have been unattractive, with a small or no dowry, but important was how the society saw her as Calder (1977) adds,

―The stereotype of the sterile and useless old maid was general‖ (p. 125). Her life had to be dedicated to someone or something. However, I should mention the fact that even in the past some women did not want to marry and devoted their life not to the family, but to the others: they were active in the field of, for example, nursing, charity or church,

which was naturally chosen mostly for religious motives. Nowadays if a woman decides not to marry and to stay single, her situation is completely different as Greer points out in her book The Whole Woman, stating that ―unmarriedness now has nothing whatever to do with virginity… Many people who are not married are not single either, because they have what is now called a partner, meaning a person they have sex with‖ (p. 311). I think that Forster managed to picture this in The Battle for Christabel and Georgy Girl very well. Rowena from the former novel is a complicated character with a prodigious sexual appetite being unable to have a stable relationship with a man, which would last longer than a few weeks. Her friend Isobel says about her that she was ―a girl for whom sex was like an introductory handshake‖ (p. 17). Although from the beginning she wants to have a loving man, the fact that she always tries to dictate him what is to happen and makes too many demands he is not able to meet, she repeatedly fails in all her relationships with no vision of a family and children. And when there finally appears an exotic handsome student from Barbados called Amos, who loves her and proposes to her, she refuses arguing: ―I do not want to share my son‖ (p. 35). I find this to be the top of selfishness itself because, in my opinion, every child should have a possibility if not to live in a traditional two-parent family, so at least to know his or her parents, therefore to have a possibility to know his or her roots and to understand his or her self better. Here the inability to understand the men, their needs and thinking results in resenting them and using them only as ―breeding machines‖ (p. 35) as has been written above. What suffering such an attitude can bring to the children being thrown into the wheels of officialdom will be described in the following chapter.

In the latter novel Georgy has got a problem with sexual partners too, but of a different kind. In this case it is not resentment, but desperation for not being able to find a partner to have sex with, coming from low self-confidence and the fact that she was

educated in the best boarding schools but without the possibility of contact with men except for her father and James Leamington who could be called her stepfather supporting her financially, which is evident from her words: ―Desperate, that‘s me.

Twenty- seven and never been asked out by a fella, let alone kissed‖ (p. 38), ―I enjoy anyone kissing me…. I‘m sex-starved‖ (p. 59), and proves that the generation of the

1960s put emphasis on sex. They were in favour of free relationships, which would not limit their own self, but they should enable them to enjoy life as Jos, Georgy‘s friend and later boyfriend explains: ―Enjoying myself is first‖ (p. 37). On Jos‘ and Meredith‘s sex-based relationship Forster shows how irresponsibly and superficially young people sometimes take their relationships and even marriage, which is unfortunately followed by the suffering of their children; here it is little Sara whom neither of her parents loves or looks after, but fortunately Georgy with her strong need to have someone to live for is prepared to become her loving mother. However, this is preceded by a short episode of Meredith‘s and Jos‘ marriage when one day after a few months of sleeping together

Meredith admits that she is pregnant, so they decide to have a wedding, which is enjoyed by Georgy most. Inevitably this shows to be a thoughtless mistake of two complete strangers who in spite of their relationship show to have nothing in common and to know nearly nothing about each other. One night before the wedding Meredith not surprisingly even admits that she does not know her future husband‘s surname. Of course for the marriage to be happy there are more important things than the husband‘s surname, but Meredith‘s attitude only proves her indifference.

There appear another wedding and marriage without love at the end of Georgy

Girl indirectly caused by the one described above. It is a marriage of convenience to which Georgy agrees only after realizing that without a husband, powerful and rich

James Leamington and his financial support she would not have any chance to become

Sara‘s adoptive mother. In fact by marrying ―uncle‖ James, who supported her all her life, but regardless of her emotional needs, Georgy agrees with his offer to become his mistress. Forster managed to describe how the heroine is considering the reasons for such a ―business marriage‖ with a surprising ease and objectivity. ―He was marrying her now out of loneliness, not for any twisted psychological reason. She was handy and accessible. And she was marrying him for security and ease and babies, babies she would probably never have. It would be the most negative marriage of all time‖ (p.

165). Georgy is no more a young girl, but a sudden vision of a forthcoming motherhood and a stable family background, even without a romantic love she has always dreamt about, enabled her to turn from a spoiled girl with manners of a teenager and little self-confidence suffering from self-pity into an adult woman, who knows what she wants. From this point of view, it can be said that marriage enriches and changes her life in a considerable way because she becomes ―somebody‖. In other words, due to her husband, though he is neither young nor handsome, she gains a very good status in society. It only supports an opinion Lewis (1992) puts emphasis on: she says that there can appear some inequalities between a husband and wife, however, she argues that ―the husband might become ‗somebody‘ at the expense of his wife‖ (p. 13), which is the opposite of the situation described in the novel. It can be said that as every marriage is different, the inequalities it brings naturally vary to a great extent as well.

Apart from families where marriage is too hasty resulting in its failure, or where marriage of convenience helps two lonely people to gain something they were missing in their lives, or families with no husband-wife relationship, Forster depicts ―ordinary‖ families in which problems appear as in any other long-term relationship, but which prove by the fact that a husband and wife represent by no means substitutable support of each other and that marriage has still its legitimate place in British society. Such

marriage is undoubtedly the one of Jenny and Charlie in Have the Men Had Enough?

The couple has to face a whole number of difficult life situations resulting from old

Mrs. McKay, Charlie‘s mother, suffering from Alzheimer‘s disease, which often require to be solved quickly and resolutely and though they are very complicated, it is possible to find a better solution when all the family makes a unit within which people help one another. As the situation with the gradually worsening state of at first only a little confused old lady becomes more and more serious and as her granddaughter Hannah says, she finally turns into ―a zombie‖, it becomes clear that it would be impossible for the family to work without each other‘s help. The novel is an in-depth study of family ties and the effect which a serious disease can have on them.

The marriage of Jenny and Charlie could be labeled as a traditional one as for gender division of labour. Lewis (1992, p. 88) refers to structural functionalist sociologists and neo-classical economists who saw in specialization of tasks in the traditional family where the man is a breadwinner and the woman a housewife and carer a rational division maximizing the welfare of the household. In the case of this family the fact that Charlie earns enough money so that they are able to pay all the bills, especially those for Grandma, and Jenny with daughter Hannah‘s help does all the housework and caring, really enables the family to keep working even in a complicated situation. All the family members help as much as possible, even a teenage boy Adrian, who could be expected to have other interests, cleans Grandma‘s windows, digs the garden and drives her whenever is needed.

Grandma with her complicated disease stands for a really demanding task testing the strength of family ties. She has a pronounced opinion on marriage worth mentioning. When speaking with granddaughter Hannah she gives her a piece of advice

typical of a woman who experienced a lot in her life and is quite doubtful of men:

―Don‘t marry young, always keep a hundred pounds to yourself. So you can always run away‖ (p. 33).

Her daughter Bridget is single though Mrs. McKay wanted her to get married, but Bridget‘s love to her mother is unusually strong. It is so strong that it ruins Bridget‘s personal life to the extent that she lives only for her mother. However, it is true that finally she finds a boyfriend Karl and starts to realize that no matter how strong personality she has, she also needs to have some private life, someone to live for besides her mother.

The only person in the McKay family who refuses to help with Grandma is her son Stuart. His attitude to her illness is indifferent. He cannot be said not to like her, but he does not see any point in visiting her if she does not know who he is. Stuart is the one expressing his opinion on Grandma openly: ―She has ‗had her day‘ and should be

‗packed off‘‖ (p. 50). Paying for an assistant is for him ―pouring good money down the sink‖ (p. 50). His attitude to his mother may seem a bit cruel, but, on the other hand, practical and rational as well. By showing different opinions Forster focuses on the fact that everybody can perceive the situation in a different way, which depends on the kind of personality. Every problem has a variety of solutions and everybody has his or her own way of seeing things. Nevertheless, it is true that finally as Grandma‘s state becomes unbearable, all the members of the family, except for Bridget, arrive at the conclusion that she has to be placed in a Home, in spite of the fact that they tried to avoid it as long as possible. Before old Mrs. McKay finally dies, the McKays experience a lot of troublesome moments when trying to find suitable assistants and

later even a Home where she would feel as good as is possible in such an institution.

Because of all the martyrdom the family gets together and withstands it.

However, in the novel Mothers’ Boys the effect of a hard life situation on family ties is devastating. A violent attack on a teenage Joe Kennedy results not only in his and his family suffering, but it also brings damage to the Armstrongs, the attacker‘s family.

Joe has to face such a cruel attack of juvenile delinquents that it inevitably affects all his relationships. For a sensitive young boy to live and deal with this kind of experience is very difficult. He therefore also suffers from the overprotective attitude of his mother

Harriet, whose treating him differently, more attentively, only makes the situation worse. His father Sam disagrees by telling the truth: ―Joe is wrecking our lives. Wants to make us suffer because he did‖ (p. 68). Joe‘s helplessness turns into anger and treating badly those who love him. In other words, Forster shows here how violence and suffering produce the same and how difficult it is to get out of this vicious circle. Even confident and strong Harriet admits: ―The horror of what happened continues to spoil my life, however hard I try‖ (p. 58). The suffering of both families is a complex issue covering a whole number of related consequences. Nevertheless, as the title Mothers’

Boys itself suggests, not only the victim Joe and the attacker Leo have to deal with what happened, but it is all their families and mothers as well whose lives changed forever.

They still cannot believe ―it‖ and constantly search for the things they should have done and did not do to prevent the attack as Milada Franková (1998, p. 290) confirms: ―Their immediate and persisting reaction is an overwhelming sense of guilt. Hardly a relic of the old puritan guilt, theirs is the pain of motherhood‖.

No matter how hideous and devastating the attack was, the life goes on and each of the people involved must overcome it either with the help of the closest ones or by

himself or herself. Joe realizes that his precious understanding mummy with her maternal angst and constant reminding him of the dreadful memories and pain is a burden for him; a burden he must get rid of so as to mature and let the things go. So he finally finds a girlfriend, passes his driving test while Harriet cannot bear the inevitable fact that a mother has to give her child freedom not to lose him. Sheila is also worried about Leo who escaped from prison. Although not being his mother but grandmother, she is tortured with the feelings of helplessness over a boy to whom she has given all that was possible, but it turns out that in spite of that he may have committed a crime, though under the influence of drugs.

In both families ties between the mothers and their sons are strong, which could be expected because it is nothing unusual, however, the effect of the attack is that the mothers want to keep the ties and, what is more, make them even stronger. Both Harriet and Sheila are filled with the horror of losing their children. As Sheila asks after Leo escapes from prison and disappears: ―Did mothers really die not knowing what had happened to their sons? Knowing they were out there in the world somewhere, but not knowing where or how they lived or with whom?‖ (p. 239). Her desperate question remains unanswered, as it is only up to the children whether they will remain in contact with their families and return to the mother‘s nest. There is nothing for the mothers but to hope.

Despite the unanswered questions and the scars, which remain hidden somewhere deep, both families manage to recover from the shock and disbelief following the attack, but only to the extent which such a terrible experience allows, and so prove that if there were not strong family relationships and mutual support, many people would not be able to deal with demanding life situations everybody experiences

from time to time. In her essay Margaret Forster’s Troubled Mothers in This Violent

Century Milada Franková (1998, p. 294) asserts this opinion and emphasizes the importance of the family as such:

Forster tends to uphold the usefulness of the institution of the family. In the face

of growing unease about the effects of the pressures of current life styles and

attitudes to divorce, partnership outside marriage and single parenthood. Forster‘s

world is a family world, where the family continues to be a vibrant organism and

a vehicle of the necessary intergenerational relationships, despite her indignation

that it is still the mother who carries the burden of its functioning.

4.2. State involvement into the family

It was not earlier than in the 1940s that the family got into the centre of political attention in Britain. Because it was perceived as the main supplier of welfare in society, there appeared the need to ―rebuild‖ the family to secure social stability disrupted by the

Second World War. Politicians were worried about the falling birth rate, so even a

Royal Commission was set up in 1945 to consider the issue (Lewis, 1992, p. 16).

However, the post-war baby boom helped to solve the worrying situation. Anxiety about the family was later typical of the 1980s and was caused by the dramatic increase in the divorce and illegitimacy rates. British policy in the 1980s turned to promoting two-parent families with traditional roles for husbands and wives by restricting provision for the care of dependent family members (Lewis, 1992, p. 31). This effort resulted from the threat of the ―culture of dependency‖ meaning that families tended to rely on the support of the welfare state. Nevertheless, the demographic changes included the increase in the numbers of dependent elderly people and the new types of

need were not covered by the state, whose aim was especially to curtail public expenditure (Marwick, 1996, p. 353).

The state providing insufficient or little possibility of help to the old and disabled is evident especially in Forster‘s novel Have the Men Had Enough?. Forster herself points out that it was anger coming from the real experience of her mother-in- law suffering from Alzheimer‘s disease and the subsequent witnessing the misery of the people who have to live in terrible conditions of the geriatric wards of mental hospitals that was the reason for writing this novel: ―I‘d found myself raging at the stupidity and horror of how she died‖ (1993, p. 160). On the whole, social services are being depicted as limited and very poor if any. That is why the word ―Home‖ for elderly people is like a taboo none of the family wants or is able to pronounce. The care for the old depends completely on the relatives and provided that they are not able to manage it or they have not got enough money to pay for expensive assistants, they have to place the old person in such a ―Home‖. The novel reveals depressing facts not only about the living conditions of inhabitants of these ―Homes‖ but, what is worse, the way they are treated by professional nurses and assistants. The treatment of the old and sick people, who are more or less deteriorated and confused, is being described as with ―inanimate objects and idiots‖ (p. 45), when nurses speak in front of them as though they were not there in spite of the fact that they are human beings having their dignity, but at the same time it is important to say that to work with them is not easy at all and that they are sometimes really difficult to deal with. Even humilitation of these people is nothing unusual, as

Grandma and her relatives must feel it, when they finally find at least a Day Centre, where she is accepted to stay a part of a few days a week and where environment and care are quite good. The fact that they accept her and Grandma succeeds in getting used to it is a positive sign, however, as her illness naturally but very quickly proceeds, one

day she suddenly happens to be confused more than before and unfortunately she starts to have problems with incontinence. One would suppose that it is nothing unusual for an old lady and that a Day Centre of this kind should be prepared to look after such clients, but the opposite is true. After finding out that her health state is worse, they simply refuse to take care of her any more, therefore all the relief resulting from a newly found suitable Day Centre disappears and all the problems are here again. But still the family hopes to find some place, where the environment and care would be satisfactory and where Grandma‘s name would not be put down at the end of a long waiting list as it is now, not in a few years, that she needs a place to live and be cared for. All the family members agree that she had a hard life, is a good woman and so deserves to be treated with love, kindness and tenderness. Unfortunately, as they find out, none of the institutions available can offer these. It is only the loving care of those who know her personality and needs that can guarantee her to live in the best conditions. Teenage

Hannah can see how difficult it is to manage Grandma‘s care, which makes her ask the kind of surprisingly direct and maybe quite cruel questions one would not expect to be asked by a sensitive young girl whose life is ahead of her: ―Why don‘t more people kill themselves when they get old? Why do relatives not kill old people more? What is the point of keeping the old people alive anyway?‖ (p. 13). The ethics of human behaviour to the old people and at the same time the level of care provided by the state are questioned, when her mother Jenny describes one of such ―Homes‖, the Green Valley

Home, its depressing atmosphere and especially the references of other people:

It was highly recommended by so many people who swore their elderly relatives

were blissfully happy there, never better looked after, wished they had gone there

years ago, a pleasure to visit… I cannot wait to see again some of these people

who raved about the Green Valley Home. They are either blind or deaf or wilfully

wicked. Did they not see the six beds in a room, all jammed together? The lack of

pictures, of any decoration, anything personal?... Did they not smell the urine,

certainly not masked by disinfectant? Did they not hear the silence, the lack of

activity? Did they not sense the utter despair? (pp. 60-61).

Bridget, being a professional nurse with a lot of experience, has seen many of these ―Homes‖ and has a pronounced opinion on the way old people are treated there:

―They are cattle, shunted off to the slaughter house and given a long drawn-out tortured death‖ (p. 224). Old Mrs. McKay does not have to wait long for something like that.

Before Bridget resolutely decides to give up everything to be able to look after her mother only by herself, Grandma falls ill with pneumonia and dies, which solves the difficult situation to the relief of most of the family.

The words such as cattle and slaughter house used for the description may seem to be too strong, but why not believe that it was reality; especially considering the fact that the state cut public expenditure in the field of social security to a great extent and expected the family members to provide the needy care as it happened in the times when there was no or little support from the state either. The dismal conditions of these institutions for elderly people provided by the public system which Forster describes are only confirmed by the words of Arthur Marwick (1996, p. 356), when he points out that in the 1980s, ―the increased numbers of elderly people needing treatment imposed a special burden‖. He also adds that it was not only the elderly who felt ―the running down of the social services and the introduction of ‗reforms‘‖, but abused youth, alcoholics, addicts and mentally sick, in other words, ―those least able to help themselves‖ (p. 439).

In the novel The Battle for Christabel the role of the state intervention into the family is significant as well. This time it is not the elderly, whose situation is being described in a document-like form, but a child going through a complicated procedure of adoption. As has been written above, Christabel‘s mother tragically dies in the mountains and because she was a single or choice mother, Christabel‘s only relative is now her grandmother. Unfortunately, Mrs. Blake, an old middle-class lady, admits, though Christabel is her granddaughter, she is not prepared to take care of a small child and therefore she will not adopt her, thinking that she, with the help of social workers, will choose a suitable middle-class family for her. Naturally, Mrs. Blake, being

Christabel‘s only relative, supposes she will have a possibility to meet Christabel in her new family whenever she wants. However, the reality is far from her expectations.

Moreover Isobel, Rowena‘s flatmate and a friend who helped with rearing Christabel and is a narrator of the story, cannot believe how much damage the impersonal system of adoption procedure can cause to a small child. It is a very sad story so much influenced not by personal help and understanding assistance of professional social workers, but, on the contrary, the wheels of the complicated state bureaucracy represented by a number of professionals such as social workers, barristers and solicitors that became imprinted both on Christabel‘s and her closest ones‘ lives. Even

Isobel, who from the beginning did not think about adopting Christabel herself, seeing what the state machinery placing the child into an unsuitable family with little possibility of contact with her closest does with such a fragile personality of the little girl, changes her mind and starts to struggle for the child. As could be expected her battle is lost and even though she marries to make a complete and stable family ―they‖ require, the social worker condemns her behaviour saying: ―You are marrying out of expediency. That‘s suspicious‖ (p. 213).

As Cora Lindsay (2002) summarizes cogently the main idea of the novel: ―In

The Battle for Christabel Forster reflects ways in which bureaucracy applies inflexible rules and regulations to emotional situations‖, which is absolutely true. She also adds that as for both books I analyzed in this chapter, Have the Men Had Enough? and The

Battle for Christabel, they ―contrast the complexity of personal feelings and dilemmas with the implacable judgements and restricted choices imposed by officialdom‖ (2002).

I agree with her opinion, but at the same time it is important to be able to see the story from the opposite side as well and to say that the social workers only did their job. They tried to protect the child as much as possible, so they had to be suspicious of the quick marriage. If Christabel‘s mother had not been a single mother with no father to look after her child, there would not have been any dilemma of the social workers as to which family was the most suitable for adoption:

Rowena‘s responsibility for all this mess was now almost forgotten. We could not

speak ill of the dead, nor was there any point in doing so. We had become so

antagonistic towards the social workers and then towards the legal profession that

Rowena‘s negligence seemed nothing and yet from it all else stemmed. We made

Maureen and Phyllis suffer for Rowena‘s sins, and yet never once did they point

this out, never once did they turn on us and say they had not wanted this burden

we thrust upon them (pp. 260-261).

As Isobel admits in the end, in the first place it is the responsibility of the parents for their children which is the most important factor influencing their happiness. If the parent did her best, no intervention of the officialdom might have been necessary, but it is very difficult to judge someone‘s behaviour.

4.3. Home

Taken from the general point of view, home is a place associated especially with the feelings of security and warmth, where one lives with one‘s family, however, it should be said that looking back to the past and comparing it with the present understanding there are big differences. What is still the same is the fact that a home and a woman belong together. It is mainly she who has always cared and made this place comfortable so that all members of the family would like to return there. Jenni

Calder in her book The Victorian Home (1977, p. 128) puts emphasis on a close connection of home and feminity in the times of Victorian England. They were seen as

―dependent on each other − and the woman who was neither wife nor mother, through choice or through misfortune, was seen as less feminine than her domesticated counterpart‖. A traditional view deeply rooted in society was that a woman‘s place was in the home, but ―the home was not a context for a woman‘s personality, not an area of freedom for her, but an environment that tested her qualities‖ (Calder, 1977, p. 105).

Today with the increasing living standards the situation has changed in the sense that both men and women expect this place to provide especially privacy and independence

(Leonard and Speakman, 1986, p. 13). The opinion that has changed little during the times is that ―the strength of the nation is believed to depend on the quality of its homes‖ (Lewis, 1992, p. 12), so the family and home being a bedrock on one hand and a fragile structure on the other one, are still in the centre of political attention.

Looking at Forster‘s novels I analyze, I think that home is the most important in

Have the Men Had Enough?. Firstly, it represents a place old Mrs. McKay feels best and secure in, therefore she constantly wants to ―go home‖, meaning the poor, cramped and crowded flat of her Glasgow childhood located in a very poor neighbourhood.

Though she had to go through very hard and modest times there, nothing can replace its

unique and cosy atmosphere. Even her comfortable flat with a garden, her son Charlie pays for so that she would have some privacy, is still only a place where she lives, but not a real home:

I think I‘ll away home.

This is home, Grandma.

It might be to you but it isn‘t to me.

You have lived here five years.

Get away.

Don‘t you like it here?

I think I‘ll away home (p. 69).

Secondly, ―Home‖ is an appalling place, where old people are put up so that their relatives do not have to look after them and most of all, it is a place, where they wait to die. Not surprisingly, because nothing there reminds Grandma of her childhood, there is neither cosy or pleasant atmosphere, nor friendly and willing attitude of the staff, she does not like any of these places which deprive her from all that was meaningful.

Unfortunately, Georgy Girl had no possibility to feel the real kindness of her home, for both her parents only live for James Leamington and concentrate all their efforts on serving him as good as possible. The fact that they have got a daughter who needs more than good education, a flat of hers, something to eat and put on escapes them. Their function in life is to serve. That is why Georgina so much longs for having someone to look after; her friend, boyfriend, child or her own family. It becomes her obsession to slave over someone, which might be better understood considering the cold and formal relationships in her family. As has been written above, finally she manages

to get a home with a man to look after, but one of the most important things for most people to start a family and build a new home, the positive emotion of love, is missing.

In The Battle for Christabel a small girl loses her home in the moment of her mother‘s accidental death for Rowena was the only person representing the security and stability of this unique environment, except for Isobel, her friend and flatmate, who not being her relative, has no possibility to keep Christabel in her home. Instead, Isobel has to watch how the shocked and confused child is put up in a foster family, on one hand, providing warmth and stability, but on the other hand, it is a working-class family with very different cultural values than Christabel is used to. What is more, she has to go through a kind of brainwashing there, when her foster mother Betty, for example, speaks badly about her father whom she does not know either. In the end the Adoption

Panel meeting, taking into consideration the Council‘s recommendation while ignoring

Christabel‘s grandmother opinion, unanimously decides about Christabel‘s new home in the family of the Carmichaels. This family is considered to be the most suitable of all families available, even though these foster parents are not married, but, apart from other things, the most influential factor is that they are black as well as little Christabel.

The social workers think that in a white family she would feel an alien, which is only their assumption, but it is them who decide which place will be Christabel‘s new home.

Naturally, Christabel has problems to get used to a completely new environment and people she does not know, which is reflected in her nightmares, tantrums and negative attitude to everything. But hopefully as children can adopt to new things easily, she will manage it as well.

Leo from Mothers’ Boys is in a similar situation as Christabel. His parents also die tragically in a car accident and he becomes an orphaned child being only three years old. Another similarity is that he is black as well. Unlike Christabel who is two years

older and whose grandmother does not want to adopt her, his grandparents become his foster parents. Nevertheless, the change of the nature of his home and lifestyle is radical too, as he moves from a simple dwelling of two young doctors in Africa to a lower- middle class terraced house in British provincial town Carlaisle of a generation older grandparents. Not surprisingly, such a sudden change influences him negatively too, which is seen on the fact that he stops speaking while Christabel refuses to grieve and suffers from nightmares. After some time Leo starts speaking again, gets used to new living conditions and when it seems that all the things are as they should be, the fatal assault comes and he loses his home for the second time. In prison he changes completely. As if some horror from the loss of his parents returned and caused that he turns to himself and refuses to communicate, thus he neither denies to being at the assault and holding a knife, nor speaks to defend himself.

Joe‘s home is a place of security and stability, where he can forget for a while what has happened to him. However, for his mother it is difficult to realize she cannot protect him everywhere. The more she wants to protect the teenage boy, the more annoying it is for him, which turns against all the members of the family who feel that he only by himself has to overcome it and succeed in living with his terrible experience.

5. Negative sides of the 20th century

5.1. Divided society

5.1.1. Class-divided society

An upper middle class merchant banker aged 37, whose views and life philosophy are described in the book British Society since 1945 (Marwick, 1996) managed to express, in my opinion, what a class is precisely by saying: ―Class is a combination of values, your approach to life, employment, as well as how you have been brought up. But above all else, education conditions attitudes that last a long time‖

(p. 454). As for British society in the 1990s, he adds, ―although we have more of an egalitarian society I do feel class divisions are still very pronounced, as if the mixing has made people more aware of it, more self-conscious‖, which is affirmed by

Professors Goldthorpe and Marshall, who expressed their opinion in the sociology journal Sociology in August 1992 that ―class was still a very important phenomenon in

Britain‖. According to Marwick the differences in income and living conditions between the rich and the poor were more and more intensifying and the basic class framework remained (1996, p. 449).

Looking at the results of a more recent Guardian/ICM poll (2007) it shows that there has not changed much in British society as for class division, because it says that

―Britain remains a nation dominated by class division, with a huge majority certain that their social standing determines the way they are judged… Despite huge economic change and the government‘s efforts to build what it calls an opportunity society, people who think of themselves as middle class are still in a minority‖. Julian Glover, the author of the article referring about the poll, concludes that it ―paints a picture of a nation divided by social attitudes and life-chances‖.

Class division is not what dominates Forster‘s novels, however, writing about

British society of the end of the 20th century she cannot omit this issue forming its important part, therefore she touches upon it nearly in all her novels I analyze. In my opinion, most of all the differences between classes are depicted in Mothers’ Boys. Here

Forster contrasts the Armstrong and Kennedy families who happen to meet at the court for being the families of the attacker and the victim of a violent assault. Sheila

Armstrong feels responsible for her grandson‘s behaviour, in spite of the fact that he is an individual human being with his own responsibility for his behaviour, and so is afraid of being attacked by Harriet Kennedy, the victim‘s mother. Of course nothing

―vulgar‖ like this would ever happen, for Harriet belonging to the upper class it would be unacceptable. The difference is visible at first sight, when Sheila perceives the other family to be handsome, well and fashionably dressed and to behave infinitely superior.

The following sentence describes the atmosphere at the court perfectly: ―Class hung in the air and she recognized it‖ (p. 29).

The different nature of their origin can be seen again when they meet each other in their homes. Both Harriet and Sheila feel uncomfortable not only because of the division made by the attack, but by their different class as well:

There were no threes anywhere, no gardens, and yet these narrow streets were not

entirely bleak. She noticed all the doors were brightly painted and most had brass

knockers…. There was no litter at all, not a speck of dirt anywhere… The kitchen

was small. Cosy means cramped, Harriet thought. Hardly room for the table

between the cooker and fridge and cupboards. The table had a cloth on it, an

embroidered cloth, she was sure Mrs Armstrong had made it herself, and a white

jug of some pink flowers, she didn‘t know what (pp. 101, 104).

Divisions made by class are felt by Georgy Girl most especially in the moment, when she decides to visit a posh hair salon. Not only does she feel uncomfortable in the environment, where people are judged especially according to the elegance of their clothes and the amount of money in their purse, but it is the way the hairdresser behaves to his new client that makes a problem. He treats Georgy like an object, not a person with her own will and opinion, therefore she is very disappointed with the hairstyle she did not want him to create and tries to get rid of it as soon as possible. But in the first place it is the receptionist who, by overlooking her, indicates she is not worth being their customer:

―If you‘re waiting for someone, please have a seat,‖ said the receptionist. She

waved a hand graciously to one of the mauve and white striped chairs.

―Why should you think that?‖ said George.

―I beg your pardon?‖

―Why did you automatically think that I was waiting for someone? Didn‘t you

expect me to be a customer myself?‖

The receptionist froze. Conversation didn‘t come within the strictly marked limits

of her role in life.

―I don‘t know, I‘m sure,‖ she said severely.

―Well, I‘m a customer.‖

―What do you wish?‖ said the girl frigidly.

―My hair done, of course‖ (p. 14).

At least for a while she wants to be in the centre of attention, to be cared for, enjoy the fact that she has enough money to pay for it, nevertheless, the result is more than disappointing as it is written in her not really stylish leather coat and mainly

behaviour that she is not upper class and does not deserve what she would do if she were. However, it is true that in the end Georgy manages to marry wealthy James

Leaminton, which enables her to get to the upper class and to have a comfortable life of a woman who does not have to worry about material things.

In The Battle for Christabel Forster emphasizes how big differences between various families belonging to working and middle class there can be considering the attitude to child rearing and the values the children assume. Mrs. Blake would like

Christabel to get to a middle-class family, where she would keep similar living standard and is horrified by the effect which has the stay at the working-class family of Betty, a professional foster parent: ―She can no longer speak correctly. She has forgotten how to read and write, she is saturated in what I can only call tabloid values and I shudder to think what all this is doing to a sensitive child‖ (p. 131). An excellent illustration how different these two worlds, the one of the working class and the other one of the middle class, can be is presented on the example of Christmas celebration. According to Mrs.

Blake at Betty‘s Christabel is exposed to an explosion of materialistic things starting with awful and tasteless presents to horrible decorations while most time in this household is being spent in front of TV, which is on all the time regardless of the period of year. Mrs. Blake‘s opinion is that ―Christmas is not about money, it is about the spirit of giving‖ (p. 117), but no matter how much idealized vision of Christmas celebration she keeps, the reality is that she can no longer influence her granddaughter‘s life simply because she refused to adopt her and therefore it is only up to Christabel‘s new family what values they will offer her. Finally Christabel gets into the Carmichael family, whose home is a far more better environment than the one of Betty‘s. Her new foster parents are middle-class educated people, which does not guarantee anything, but the fact that it is at least a similar home to the one she came from.

5.1.2. Racial prejudices

At the end of the 20th century, especially in the 1980s, Britain still had difficulty in facing up to problems of racial prejudice and tension (Marwick, 1996, p. 457).

During the following decade the situation improved, but as Marwick adds, ―at the bottom of the scale black youths were still suffering disproportionately, but this (as in

America) was becoming more and more a class, rather than a purely racial, issue − in the ‗enterprise culture‘ all of the poorest were getting poorer‖ (p. 457). These words testify how closely both issues of class and race are connected and influence each other.

As the author of the article Racial prejudice declines in Britain; increased heterogeneity spurs increased racial tolerance Cynthia Wagner (2009) informs, a study of British social attitudes by Rob Ford from the University of Manchester shows that British society is becoming a more tolerant society, considering the young generation while

―the attitudes of older cohorts reflect the fact that their perceptions were shaped by growing up in an ethnically homogenous Britain before mass immigration began. Those cohorts express much more hostility about social contact with minority groups than their children and grandchildren‖ (2009). Britain of the end of the 20th century and of today being a multicultural country, its inhabitants being used to meeting people of different origins tend not to have racial prejudices in the extent their parents and grandparents did. But despite the increasing level of tolerance to ethnic minorities, Ford warns that it is a slow process and that even among the youngest generation there remains a number of people with ―significant levels of hostility to ethnic minorities‖.

Searching for prejudices against race in Forster‘s novels, I found two people in two books who can be called racists. First of all it is Leo‘s great-grandfather Eric James from Mothers’ Boys and then Christabel‘s grandmother Mrs. Blake from The Battle for

Christabel. It is probably not a coincidence that both of them belong to an older

generation of the British which did not come in touch with various ethnic minorities much, which only confirms the results of the survey I wrote about above.

From the beginning Eric James was strongly against Pat, his granddaughter and

Leo‘s mother, going her own way of a young independent woman who was not afraid to leave her family and to go to Africa. She married a black doctor there, therefore their son Leo is a mixed race similarly to Christabel. When Sheila brings only a three-year- old orphaned Leo to her home, it is for the first time Eric James can see a black person, so one cannot be surprised by his reserved attitude to the boy. By the time Leo gets older, their relationship changes. Leo becomes a source endless fascination to him and the old man is fond of the ―darkie‖, as he calls him, no matter how much Leo hates it.

However, Eric‘s good relationship with his great-grandson changes suddenly after the attack. Probably not knowing how to react to the shocking news that Leo turns overnight from a clever, good boy into a violent criminal, Eric refuses him completely and his positive affection changes into hatred in spite of the fact that it was him who supported violence in him and wanted him to become a boxer: ―Send him back to

Africa… That‘s where he belongs, in the jungle, carrying on like that, just an animal‖

(p. 98). By these cruel and racist words he expresses his grief over the loss of illusion of his good boy. But it is true that he does not mean his words because when Leo escapes from prison, he hides him at his home and even gives him a sum of money as a proof of his support.

Mrs. Blake disapproves of Rowena going out with black boyfriends as well.

Rowena‘s friend Isobel describes her attitude to them: ―Racism, of course, racism pure and simple, or rather tainted and very complicated. Mrs. Blake had no black friends. I daresay she went through years and years in Stockdale, in Edinburgh, without ever even seeing a black face‖ (p. 16). What a shock it must have been, when her daughter gave

birth to a girl on it whom was seen that her father was black. She had to accept that

Christabel was a mixed race.

The race plays an important role in Christabel‘s life once more. As has been written above, one of the reasons why the Carmichaels and not Rowena‘s friend Isobel with her husband become her foster parents is that the former get the custody of her because they are of the same race as the social worker Phyllis explains:

As a Black child growing up in a predominantly white society she will need to be

in an environment in which she can be supported and learn to deal with the racism

she will inevitably encounter. This is an area of childcare practice where there has

been considerable debate, but where the weight of evidence supports the proposal,

that white families are not equipped to offer this support to Black children in an

effective way (p. 229).

It is true that most probably a black person has to tackle with racism more often than a white one, however, it is a question to which extent the support of a family is bigger just because of the fact that it is black as well. In my opinion, the other races can understand the issue too and the attitude of the social workers in the novel only reflects the opinion which was widely accepted at that time. An assumption that Christabel would feel an alien in a white family remains only an assumption as one never knows how a child will react under some specific circumstances, because every child is unique as well as the family environment and there are no universal guidelines for choosing a suitable foster family for a child and no one can guarantee that the child will feel secure and supported enough there. What is more, there are more reasons for a child than his or her race why a person can be made to feel alien. The whole issue is rather questionable and it should be said that only time shows what is right for the child who will be

influenced negatively by the loss of her mother for the rest of her life and the home which can be never fully substituted by any other family.

5.2. Juvenile violence

The 1980s in Great Britain were marked by appalling episodes of violence in which members of racial minorities were both attackers and victims (Marwick, 1996, p.

457), which proves that the problems of violence, racism and class-divided society often make a web of related connections. In the following decades the situation has not changed much. David Lammy (2008) in his article Youth violence is not about race points out the fact that British teenage boys, not only from minorities, are provided with little opportunity to experience ―meaningful occupations, worthy role models or hope for the future‖, which might be among the causes why some of them belong to the so- called ―gang culture‖ being very close to violence. Lammy sees in young men carrying knives or guns mainly a presentation of masculinity, in other words, status and power and this fact should be considered when trying to reduce the amount of violence in the streets. Worth discussing is also his idea that ―some of the old images and expressions of masculinity are disappearing from society‖ being replaced by ―an emphasis on intellectual and emotional labour‖. Taking into account this opinion, it is nothing surprising that the demonstration of power and masculinity by young men is becoming more popular.

What is striking is the increasing incidence and brutality characteristic of some of these assaults. George Hosking, a founder and chief executive of WAVE (World- wide Alternatives to Violence), a London-based international charity specializing in youth violence, reports that ―serious violence has tripled between 1991 and 2004, and

was at 20 times the level of 1950, costing Britain more than 20 billion pounds a year‖

(2007) and adds ―what is certainly getting worse is gun violence and teen-on-teen serious violence at younger ages‖. And what contributes to such an alarming situation?

In his opinion, not surprisingly, an important role is played by factors such as a growth in screen violence, the increasing breakdown of marriages and broken homes. WAVE‘s studies have found out that for the child‘s development and his or her attitude to violence are crucial the first three years: ―It is created as a result of the interactions between the carers, obviously usually the parents, and the child during that period.

That‘s not to say things both good and bad can‘t happen afterwards but the first three years are incredibly powerful‖, Hosking (2007) says.

Being exposed to violent behaviour in his early age is not the case of Leo

Jackson, but in spite of the fact that he grew up in a loving and thought-provoking environment definitely not suffering from social deprivation, he takes part in an assault which causes damage to his and his relatives‘ lives. Sheila Jackson in Mothers’ Boys is tortured constantly by thinking about the reasons why her good boy Leo turned overnight into a violent criminal. She is looking for mistakes she or her family made during his rearing, but she cannot find any: ―Bound to have something to do with upbringing, bound to. He couldn‘t just turn into a monster. We went wrong somewhere‖

(p. 107). Similarly, the victim‘s mother Harriet Kennedy blames herself for not preventing Joe from the assault. Joe being the victim, has also difficulties in understanding why the attackers chose him: ―I wasn‘t doing anything. I hadn‘t done anything to them. I was just walking down the street, it wasn‘t even dark or late. Why did they pick on me‖ (p. 116). One tends to ask what must happen to a young unproblematic and decent man that he happens to be at such a demonstration of cruelty

Joe had to experience. There can be many factors contributing to what happened;

among these can be counted alcohol and LSD, which Leo took as well. And what about the influence of the other attackers? Could not he simply become a part their group when searching for any group he needed to identify with? Did not he only want to demonstrate his power, masculinity in order to feel a ―real‖ man? All these questions will remain unanswered. The only one who would be able to answer them does not want to speak about it, not even to defend himself. Instead Leo escapes from prison, after

Gary Robinson a typical criminal coming from poor background is found guilty, as if to show that there is some guilt in him as well.

Regardless of the fact whether Leo is guilty or not, there remain the unanswered questions and many others to think about that are included between the lines. As Milada

Franková (1998, p. 295) expresses her view of the novel:

Mothers’ Boys reads like a document of the closing decade of the violent

twentieth century, unabating violence being a pressing concern of our time.

Forster debates here one of the painful inconsistencies of contemporary life: in the

age of psychology, with its new insights and promise of solutions, we are faced

with increasing juvenile violence which leaves us speechless and helpless.

It is good that by writing this, in many aspects shocking and sad story of two suffering families Forster opened a discussion of the new phenomenon of ―violence for fun‖, which appears to be more frequent than one would assume from the statistics quoted above. Generally speaking, people should consider the issue in a different way than they were used to because the situation in society has changed and the topic of violence starts to touch more and more people coming not only from the poor social background as Milada Franková adds (1998, p. 289): ―With the current shift to lower age groups and children‘s criminality fuelling the debate about the negative influence of

violence on television and in computer games on the child‘s psyche, the problem of the ghetto and the psychologist has become everybody‘s problem‖.

To conclude the last chapter of my thesis dealing with negative sides of the twentieth century, I would like to emphasize the fact that apart from the topics that were touched upon, that is society divided by class, race and violence, there are many other problems which are connected with society of the end of the last century. Nevertheless, in the novels I chose for my analysis, Forster focuses mainly on these three issues. On the other hand, each of the three fields is so complex that to cover them fully would require many pages, which is not the purpose of this thesis. So I only included some data from recent surveys and statistics to introduce the topics and then concentrated especially on the novels themselves.

6. Conclusion

The aim of this thesis was to analyze four novels by Margaret Forster: Georgy

Girl, Have the Men Had Enough?, The Battle for Christabel and Mothers’ Boys taking into account the fact that they can be seen as a social document referring about the state of British society of the end of the twentieth century. After a short introduction of

Margaret Forster and her work I came to the main topics she deals in her novels with.

There are three main fields Forster focuses on in these works: women and their roles, family relationships and negative sides of the twentieth century such as society divided by class, race and violence. I tried to look at them from various points of view, analyze them carefully as well as the main characters and their actions from each novel. Before doing this, I searched all materials and articles available so as to be able to support my views by recent surveys and studies by various sociologists and professionals. Therefore an essential part of each chapter is a general introduction of the topic discussed and naturally I also included comments by experts and various quotations relevant to the problem discussed whenever I needed to support my opinions.

As has been written in the chapter about the author, the topic of motherhood, women, their position in society and within the family is Forster‘s favourite one. As for motherhood, by analyzing various women characters and their environment and living conditions I wanted to show how different the attitudes of women to this essential part of their life can be and how these correspond with traditional and modern views of society. I divided mothers according to their basic patterns of behaviour into two main groups of devoted home hearth keepers and modern feminists, while there can be found a number of attitudes which are a mixture of both. Apart from various kinds of approaches to motherhood I focused on the aspects which belong to it as well, such as

women‘s attitudes to cooking and the decline of the family meal as an institution. As

Forster in The Battle for Christabel opens a discussion of single motherhood to which a special category of choice mothers belongs, I made an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon as well considering the fact that this novel was written as ―propaganda‖ against choice mothers highlighting the negative consequences of their decision to rear children on their own. The last part of the chapter called Women and their roles deals with women‘s work. Here I searched for the fact how various heroines manage both paid and unpaid work and I have to conclude that despite having modern household equipment, most women are still very busy with unpaid work of caring for the old, children and housework too, such as Jenny in Have the Men Had Enough? and Sheila in

Mothers’ Boys. On the other hand, some independent characters like Harriet are not willing to give up their career because of their family. I also included a three- generational comparison of women‘s attitude to work in the McKay family, which I would like to point out because it shows that it is not always age what is significant.

In the chapter devoted to the family, first, I defined what exactly is understood by this word today and how family relationships changed during the years. I was interested in how family relationships, marriage and being single are perceived by society in general and then by Forster‘s characters. Some of them such as Rowena prefer singlesness, while for example Georgy longs for a stable family environment even without love. On the McKay family looking after Grandma suffering from

Alzheimer‘s disease Forster portrays how a difficult life situation can strengthen the relationships. On the other hand, in Mothers’ Boys the assault has a devastating effect, which both families manage to overcome after all. How the state interferes negatively into the family is depicted especially in the sad story of Christabel‘s adoption and when the McKay family looks for a suitable Home for Grandma, but cannot find any they

would like. When writing about Forster‘s novels and home, an interesting contrast of two different meanings appears. Firstly, it is a place of warmth and security, secondly, an appalling building where old people wait to die. I also compared Christabel and Leo who both lose their home being small, which negatively reflects on their lives.

In the last chapter is analyzed how Forster depicts negative sides of the twentieth century. She shows that even today British society is still divided by class and race, which is only confirmed by recent surveys. In the end my thesis deals with the threat of juvenile violence and the fact how widespread it becomes in spite of developing society.

Describing the topic of juvenile ―violence for fun‖ from the personal point of view of the attacker‘s and the victim‘s mothers, Forster provides an unusually strong story with several dimensions carrying a worrying message that attackers do not have to come from poor and deprived backgrounds. I find the originality of Forster‘s novels in her ability to capture a story, which could seem at first sight an ordinary one, and to imprint on it a strong emotional and social potential.

7. Bibliography

Primary Sources

Forster, Margaret. Georgy Girl. London: Penguin Books, 1978.

---. Have the Men Had Enough?. London: Penguin Books, 1990.

---. The Battle for Christabel. London: Penguin Books, 1992.

---. Mothers‘ Boys. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

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Veronica Beechey and Elizabeth Whitelegg, eds. Women in Britain Today.

Milton Keynes: Open University Press. 1986.

Bernard, Jessie. The Future of Marriage: His and Hers. New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1982.

Calder, Jenni. The Victorian Home. London: B. T. Batsford, 1977.

Cambridge International Dictionary of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1995.

Doughty, Steve. ―Half of Single Mothers Never Live with Partner; Study Shows

Thousands Make ‗Lifestyle Choice‘ to Rely on Benefits.‖ The Daily Mail. The

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Doughty, Steve. ―Three Generations…All of Them Single Mothers.‖ The Daily Mail.

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Eeklar, John and Maclean, Mavis. Maintenance after Divorce. Oxford: Clarendon,

1986.

Forster, Margaret. ―Cooking the Books‖. In: Clare Boylan, eds. The Agony and the Ego.

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993.

Franková, Milada. ―Margaret Forster‘s Troubled Mothers in This Violent Century‖. In:

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Restlessness. Heidelberg: Winter, 1998.

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Graham, Hilary. ―Caring: a labour of love‖. In: Finch, Janet and Groves, Dulcie, eds.

Labour of Love. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1983.

Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. London: Anchor Books, 2000.

Han, Wen-Jui; Ruhm, Christopher J.; Waldfogel, Jane; Washbrook, Elizabeth. ―The

Timing of Mothers‘ Employment after Childbirth‖. Monthly Labour Review.

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Holden, Michael. ―Intervene Early to Stop Youth Violence‖. Reuters.com. 2007. Ed.

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Macdonald, Marianne. ―A Wife Less.‖ Night & Day 30 July 2000: 10-13.

Marwick, Arthur. British Society Since 1945. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1996.

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8. Summary

The subject of this thesis is a detailed analysis of four novels by Margaret

Forster: Gorgy Girl, Have the Men Had Enough?, The Battle for Christabel and

Mothers’ Boys. Because in these works Margaret Forster puts emphasis on various sociological issues, they can be seen as an interesting sociological document, which the thesis focuses on. Therefore, it shows how the novels refer about the British society of the end of the twentieth century. In an in-depth analysis of Forster‘s heroines and their stories as well as recent surveys and opinions of various sociologists it was found out that there is a wide range of women‘s attitudes to motherhood and work within British society. Some women perceive their roles from the traditional point of view, while some tend to be more emancipated. However, the most significant trend is single or choice motherhood, which is related with the decreasing popularity of marriage. Family ties are viewed as a necessary tool for overcoming difficult life situations while state involvement into family is mostly seen as negative as for poor social care for the elderly and children. The last finding of this thesis is that a significant part of Forster‘s novels is made by depicting negative sides of the twentieth century such as society divided by class, racial prejudices and violence, which she skillfully shows on individual stories of characters affected by them.

9. Resumé

Cílem této diplomové práce je analýza čtyř románů Margater Forsterové:

Georgy Girl, Have the Men Had Enough?, The Battle for Chrislabel a Mothers’ Boys.

Základním tématem práce je skutečnost, že tyto romány lze číst jako sociologický dokument vypovídající o stavu britské společnosti konce dvacátého století. Mezi hlavní poznatky, ke kterým práce dospěla, patří skutečnost, že britské ženy mají celou řadu postojů k mateřství. Některé své role vnímají tradičně, zatímco jiné jsou více emancipované. Dále bylo také zjištěno, že mezi jeden z významných sociologických trendů spojených s poklesem popularity manželství je vzrůstající počet svobodných matek. Velký význam je analyzovaných románech také přikládán rodinným vazbám, které se jeví jako nezbytnost pro překonání náročných životních situací. Zasahování státu do rodiny je hodnoceno spíše jako záporné s ohledem na nízkou úroveň péče o staré lidi a děti. Posledním poznatkem, ke kterému dospěla tato práce, je skutečnost, že významnou část románů Margaret Forsterové tvoří zobrazení společnosti dvacátého století jako společnosti rozdělené společenskou třídou, rasovými předsudky a násilím, což dobře ukazuje na jednotlivých příbězích svých postav.