Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Veronika Bránišová Lone Mother Narrative in British Fiction in the Sixties Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2017 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 my supervisor prof. Milada Franková for her patience, encouragement and valuable advice. Table of Contents Introduction …………………………………………………………………......1 Chapter One: A Brief Contextualization of the Period …………………………4 Chapter Two: Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone……………..…….…………..19 Chapter Three: Lynn Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room ……………………....36 Chapter Four: Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow ………………………………………….47 Chapter Five: Societal Background in The Millstone, The L-Shaped Room and Poor Cow ………………………………………………………….60 Conclusion ……………………………………………………..………….……68 Works Cited …………………………………………………………………….71 Summary ………………………………………………………………………..75 Resumé ………………………………………………………………..…….…..76 Introduction The Beatles, Pop Art or students’ protests are for many the embodiments of popular and conventional images associated with the sixties. The sixties are depicted and experienced by some as a transformative era of tolerance, freedom, love and new opportunities, but it overshadows the fact that millions of individuals did not encounter any real and instant change and their lives transformed only little if at all. Single mothers make one of these groups of people. Accounted in the 1960s society as a symptom of ‘morality in decline’, their lives significantly differ from the media version of the sixties. Regardless of their class, lone mothers suffer some degree of societal exclusion and, at the same time, they are considered as a threat to the ‘ideal’ or ‘normality’. Single women become more visible in both literature and the film in the sixties (as compared to the 1950s that are conventionally depicted as a decade of the Angry Young Men), and lone mother narrative is one of the forms which portrays women’s lives in this era. The lone mother narrative of the sixties represents a shift towards subjectivity regarding the motif of single motherhood. These novels are not written from the position of received authority; it is not writing on ‘them’ but, on the contrary, the female protagonist is the principal narrator of the story. Therefore, one can observe the problematic from ‘inside’ rather than ‘outside’ with all the problems it entails. In addition to that, lone mother narratives of this period touch on the issue which is still on the front burner today: how to combine motherhood with the career, and if this is even possible and desirable. The aim of the thesis is to explore how single motherhood is depicted in three various lone mother narratives of the period and how it reflects the overall societal 1 climate of the 1960s. To do so, the thesis attempts to identify the common themes in the 1960s lone mother narratives to cover the complexity of its representations. Moreover, the thesis argues that the subject of single motherhood is used in these works to investigate and challenge prevailing notions about femininity, female identity, motherhood and marriage. The novels are analysed on two levels: the first is the level of an individual experience: inner self of each main protagonist, their motivations and circumstances without emphasis on social factors (chapters two, three and four), the second is the level of external (social) reality: how the influence of the social climate is reflected in these works (chapter five). The two levels of analysis reflect the belief that both studies of an individual situation and social circumstances can reveal much about the topic as well as the period. The textual and comparative analyses are the primary methods used. The novels selected are The Millstone (1965) by Margaret Drabble, The L-Shaped Room (1960) by Lynn Reid Banks and Poor Cow (1967) by Nell Dunn. All these novels have two things in common: lone mothers are the main protagonists of these books and the women narrate their stories for themselves. Besides, these novels do not only enjoy great popularity in the 1960s, but they are all still reprinted and read today. Additionally, they all are made into then relatively successful films. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter gives a brief contextualization of the topic: providing a short discussion concerning the 1960s in general, women, and mothers including those without partners as well as common features of lone mother narrative in the sixties. It aims to point out certain aspects of this period that are helpful for the novels’ analysis. Furthermore, the chapter touches upon Raymond Williams’s idea of ‘structure of feeling’ which constitutes the theoretical basis of the thesis. Finally, the works on women that influence the authors of these 2 novels are discussed in brief: predominantly Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962). The second chapter examines the individual experience of single motherhood and its implications on academically gifted, upper-middle class Rosamund in Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone. As the only book from the novels discussed, it touches on the dilemma of maternity and creative career, or more general womanhood and creative career – the theme already considered by Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. The third chapter introduces Lynn Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room. As the story is similar to The Millstone, the comparison with The Millstone is used to discuss this novel. However, the aim of this chapter is to emphasize issues which are unique for The L-Shaped Room. The fourth chapter explores Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow. Situated in the working- class milieu, it provides yet another view on the single motherhood and related topics. The last chapter aims to link all three chapters together while focusing on societal factors influencing the novels. Its purpose is to demonstrate that lone mother narratives can be a source of valuable information concerning the period. The primary sources are the three, already mentioned, novels: Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone, Lynn Reid Banks The L-Shaped Room and Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow. The secondary sources consist of numerous articles and books published from the late 1960s till the beginning of the 21st century. In addition to that, books by other authors are used as secondary sources: Virginia Woolf’s The Room of One’s Own, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, as well as memoirs by Sheila Rowbotham and Jenny Diski, two women ‘who were there’. 3 Chapter One: A Brief Contextualisation of the Period The Sixties Both glorified and hated, romanticised and demonised, the sixties are a period that invokes various responses and feelings. However, above all, the sixties are, like every other period, a complex, diverse and complicated phenomenon that means different things to various groups of people. Moreover, as Sandbrook warns in White Heat, “is always tempting to reduce the period to a parade of gaudy stereotypes” (14) and clichés. Additionally, it is entirely superfluous and irrelevant to make value judgements about the period: its diversity does not allow it anyway. Criticising clichés, it seems peculiar to start with a poem that, in this context, almost become a cliché: Philip Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis (1967). However, it is proper here: Larkin captures economically, in a tongue-in-cheek way, essential elements that would, otherwise, need a long explanation. He concludes with the following stanza: So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban And the Beatles’ first LP1. (Larkin, 121) Larkin’s rather ironic description of the wonderful year 1963 is surely not a lament over his lost opportunities but rather an expression of his fascination with time and inaccessibility of happiness. The important thing is that he marks the year nineteen sixty-three as a year of a change in sexual mores which is, of course, an exaggeration. It 1 The poem refers to the trial of Penguin Books (1960) for publishing D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The trial was an important step towards freedom of the written world in the UK. 4 is true that many historians2, in agreement with Larkin, regard the year nineteen sixty- three as a turning point of change. Although the periodization of historical periods is often tricky and problematic, Arthur Marwick’s time specification is helpful for further analysis of the novels. Marwick employs the term ‘long sixties’, which is for him the period between 1958 and 1974. He regards it as “a period as self-contented as a period can be” (Marwick, 725). Subsequently, he divides the ‘long sixties’ into three sub-periods: ‘First Stirrings’ from 1958 to 63, the ‘High’ Sixties from 1964 to - 8/9, and ‘Catching Up’ from 1969 to 74 (Marwick, 8). In the light of this, Banks’s The L-Shaped Room, situated in the 1950s, is still very much a product of the first period and so is in many ways Drabble’s The Millstone (despite being published in 1965). This pre-pill, pre-Abortion Law, pre-‘permissive legislation’ period is still in many ways an extension of the fifties which “did not”, according to Jenny Diski, “expire until the Sixties were well on in years” (4). This first period is influenced by, to use Marwick’s rather odd term “a gentler, more traditional feminism” (615) that follows in the footsteps of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan3. Dunn’s Poor Cow belongs to the second period, the era which is usually termed as the ‘Swinging Sixties’ or ‘The Sixties’. However, even though the working- class Joy benefits from the ‘affluent society’ of the sixties and, to some extent, from the ongoing changes, her position does not let her ‘swing’ too much and for too long.