The dissolution of the code of English gentlemanliness and the simultaneous adaptation of specific traits of that code in the literature of postwar, post-imperial England signifies both the decline of the English gentleman and the paradoxical persistence of the ideals that define Englishness and Englishmen. The focus in earlier chapters has been on middle- to lower-class male protagonists who struggle against the weight of an inherited upper-class gentlemanliness that emerged during the halcyon expansiveness of the empire. The struggle occurs in tandem with their attempt to reshape codes of gentlemanliness to suit the possibilities of the welfare state, with its paradoxical associations of renewed national confidence and containment. This final chapter shifts that focus and considers the marginalized stories of middle-class female protagonists against and through which the post-gentlemen defined themselves. At the same time, these narratives by women also challenge the narratives of the post-gentlemen as they are focalized through the female protagonist. The two intertwined tracks in the story of the postwar, middle-class Englishwoman best emerge in the very different works of A. S. Byatt and Barbara Pym, a yoking that might appear violent and counterintuitive, but they both depict the newly opened possibilities and constraints for the middle-class female protagonist effected by the tumultuous socioeconomic restructuring of Britain. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment (1962, 1982) address the changes in the middle-class woman as she negotiates the changes of postwar Britain. This chapter explores not just a reversal where the gentleman and the “new man” are now subject to the middle-class female gaze, but it also addresses how this perspective reevaluates those narratives where women are marginalized and/or represented as tokens of exchange.
This final chapter constitutes a feminist critical response (in a slightly different mode than the earlier chapters) to Englishmen writing about themselves and the women that they either dismiss or attempt to possess on their journey of self-discovery. These particular novels by women about middle-class men and women are crucial to an understanding of post-imperial masculinities and the politics of gender. “Writing Women” is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of the postwar woman: I do not offer a similar genealogical paradigm for the alterations of femininity as I have done with gentlemanliness. It works more inductively than the previous chapters, which read the post-gentleman within an imperial gendered genealogy. My close textual analysis reveals that women novelists frequently invoke characters or tropes from the works of their male counterparts in order to deconstruct them. The two texts examined here speak back to works considered so far, making it clear that the negotiations of the “new man” with his inherited gender scripts intertwines with struggles of the Englishwoman who endeavors to do the same. In other words, Charles Lumley in Hurry on Down and Anna Severell in The Shadow of the Sun work within the concentric and overlapping circles of inherited gender conventions and ideals of Englishness while they attempt to construct a post-imperial gendered subjectivity in what seems to be a modernized, insular England. The double-helix of foreclosed horizons and newly awakened possibility that informs the masculine narratives of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, John Wain’s Hurry on Down, and even Philip Larkin’s poetics of melancholy optimism runs through The Shadow of the Sun and An Unsuitable Attachment. The key difference is that the difficulty of the female protagonist’s struggle is compounded by the aggressive, masculinist presence of the Angry Young Man. Like the works by the male writers, Byatt and Pym’s novels illustrate the raggedness that comes with possibility: the working within and against gendered expectations in a new phase of Englishness, but for the women involved, the horizons are foreshortened by the narratives of domesticity, where female subjectivity is always in danger of being subsumed by the male presence.
A. S. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, though published in 1964, was written between 1954 and 1957 while she was a doctoral student at Cambridge.1 It is the story of the teenage Anna Severell, the daughter of a famous novelist, Henry Severell, who attempts to break free from the circle of her father’s artistic influence, as well as the constraints of her middle-class upbringing. Her mother, Caroline, the archetype of the “self-sacrificing” wife, arranges the life of the family so that her husband’s needs come first: his study is “the centre of the house, and round what went on in it everything else was ordered” (5). Anna struggles to establish her identity as woman and artist, separate from both her mother and father. The Leavisite critic Oliver—who, along with his wife, Margaret, comes to stay with the Severell family over the summer—helps her in the endeavor. Once in Cambridge, Anna and Oliver embark on a secret affair, which contributes to Margaret’s decline and precipitates a crisis in the Severell family. Anna, pregnant by Oliver, decides to marry the upper-class Peter. The novel ends on a note of open-ended possibility: of her striking out on her own, or staying with Oliver, a far more problematic proposition even though he aided in her self-discovery. Byatt’s novel on female artistry and independence, much like the Angry Young Man novels it responds to and challenges, is concerned with the question of female artistic subjectivity that the dynamics of post-imperial gender configuration produces.
In her 1991 introduction, Byatt addresses the problem of finding a narrative voice (distinct from the masculinist comic novels that had attained national status), one that articulates the relationship between a female artistic subjectivity and the gender expectations within which she is inscribed: “I had awful problems with the form of the novel. I had no model I found at all satisfactory. I should say now that the available models, Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamund Lehmann, Forster, Woolf, were all too suffused with ‘sensibility’ but that I disliked the jokey social comedy of Amis and Wain considerably more than I disliked ‘sensibility’” (x). For Byatt, neither the modernist style of Woolf, Forster, et al. nor the masculine social satire of the Movement and Angry Young Man writers proved suitable to represent a middle-class woman in postwar England. Byatt’s hesitant explorations of the realist form replicate her protagonist’s endeavor to move out from under the shadow of her father’s visionary genius. Byatt rejects the violent masculine madness of “the Coleridge of the flashing eyes and floating hair, or the Blake who saw infinity in a grain of sand.” Yet she cannot find appropriate exemplars of female visionaries either, as they are only cast as the “self-abnegating” “mad exploited Sybil” (ix).
The writer in The Shadow of the Sun is therefore a man with the visionary gift for which Byatt secretly longed. And though she yearns for an unambivalent, powerful artistic genius even as she shies away from the “nervous sensibility” of a Virginia Woolf, Byatt, through Anna, strives to represent an alternative model for a female artist. In writing the novel, Byatt implicitly rejects the new masculine form made popular by Amis and Wain, and explicitly disavows the genealogy of authorial paternalism. Fraught with insecurities and tensions, Anna experiences the anxiety of paternal influence before she realizes the value of her own distinct visions. As Anna walks by the river in Cambridge one night, watching the moon, she feels she sees the light of the world in what is represented as an artistic vision: “I must put all of myself into seeing, she told herself” (237). Yet the world is mediated through her father, as she can only see the world as a “second hand reflection.” In comparison to her father’s visionary writing derived from the sun, which has a “violent power”—a “savagery”—her vision is inadequate; she “can’t make it, [she] shall never make it.” Her father’s genius shapes her life and art, since “when it came to writing Henry was crushing” (16). The sun becomes the all-powerful metaphor for Henry’s creativity, which is seen as overwhelming and all-encompassing, against which Anna’s vision of a “blob of concentrated light that must have been the moon” appears paltry and insignificant (236).
And yet, despite the sense of inadequacy that haunt Anna and Byatt, the text regards Henry’s powerful and transcendent visions with some skepticism. Oliver’s common sense routinely undercuts the attendant awe that Henry’s visions produce even though he does not dispute Henry’s creative genius. Similarly, Anna and the third-person narrative frequently use adjectives that connote violence and savagery to describe Henry’s visions; in short, in addition to his being described as a broad-shouldered giant of a man who looks like an Old Testament patriarch, his visions are hypermasculinist. Christien Franken in her reading of the novel argues that Henry, who represents Burkean sublime/masculinity, is always under threat by femininity and love.2 Within Burkean discourse, the sublime is assumed to be masculine while the beautiful is frequently read as feminine. Hence, Burke’s sublime is “deeply gendered” and exists only by virtue of its excluded opposite: women and femininity (Franken 44–45). I agree with this particular interpretation insofar as Henry’s masculine artistry is reliant on his wife’s common sense and self-abnegation. However, this interpretation of masculinity and femininity as monolithic constructs effaces more complex histories of class and nation embodied in the figures of the gentleman and his “others.” Henry’s artistic masculinity emerges from a comfortable gentility, carefully delineated from Oliver’s aggressive, lower-class masculinity that consolidates Henry’s own hegemonic masculine artistry. Crucially, Henry’s hypermasculinist strength, once his “humanity” is engaged, mutates into something smaller and more manageable. In other words, he changes from distant, benevolent father figure around whom everyone’s lives revolve to inadequate father and friend: he descends from his pedestal into complicated, flawed relationships with his daughter and Margaret. His trajectory is from the hypermasculinist, sun-worshipping Lawrentian archetype to a “loss of solitude,” to something “smaller, greyer, more ordinary” (279). Henry realizes that this transition is necessary and inevitable, and sketches, accordingly, the “dramatically suitable punishment for [the] hubris” of his earlier “disproportionate splendour” (279). His masculinity is contained, cut down to size, in keeping with his necessary acquiescence and involvement with his family and friends.
Given the paradoxical envious awe and suspicion that surrounds the metaphor of the sun, it is not surprising that Anna’s visions, despite her myriad insecurities, center on the moon, moonlight, and water. Anna’s most unambiguous vision occurs early in the novel. Significantly, unlike her father’s visions, which occur out in the open country under the fierce sun, Anna’s vision occurs in the beautiful modernized bathroom of her home: she sees “a drowned world, a sunken secret world with pillars and planes of light shining gently in its corners and the odd brightness of a tap, or the sliver of light along the edge of the basin, winking like living creatures, strange fish suspended and swaying in the darkness” (133). The play of refracted light and shadows bouncing off bathroom fixtures, the wash of cool colors on the shelves, the flash and glint of water in a glass make her out-of-body experience blissful, calm, yet brimming with potential. She is held, and holds herself, in a contained, constrained space that nevertheless opens up avenues of imagination and possibility. Feeling “balanced and complete,” she thinks, “I can do something with this. I can do something with this, that matters” (134). Anna’s vision in the modern bathroom shifts the meaning of the title of the novel: in this vision of shadows and contained light produced by water and glass, shadows do not indicate a failed visionary quest, but a positive moment of potential creativity.3 The positive associations of water, glass, and light are repeated later in the text, when Anna, twirling a glass of water, confidently says, “Sometimes … I think perhaps I have no limitations” (135).
The passage also reveals a vision that is different from, and, indeed, antithetical to, the violent monstrous power of Henry’s visions from which he emerges bruised and battered. Anna’s vision, in contrast, allows her to feel balanced, stable, and complete for the first time in her life. While it is possible to read Anna’s vision of water within Helen Cixous’s model of l’ecriture feminine and the traditional associations of female sexuality with water and fluidity, the crucial use of the term “balance” to describe Anna disrupts that particular reading. Anna’s vision, while it sustains the mystery of a vision, nevertheless occurs in the structured space of the home: the sliver of light caught on “the edge of the basin,” the sunken world of pillars, the odd brightness of the tap, and the geometric shapes of green and silver shelves. The ideal of balance and the geography of the cleansing space of the bathroom echo the quotidian of Oliver’s “eternal kitchen sink.” Significantly, she transforms and adapts the quotidian to reflect her own location; she is not trapped, at least at this particular point in the novel, by the practicalities of everyday life. She acknowledges, as Oliver does, her inscription within structural constraints, but she remakes them to fit her potential and artistry.
Anna’s struggle to find artistic equilibrium mirrors her attempts to find a necessary balance in her life, as she forges an identity in relation to the young men and potential suitors that dominate her life. Anna’s focalized perspective offers a critical female exploration of two stylizations of masculinity: the Angry Young Man, and the gentleman. The narrative is Byatt’s response to the cult of the Angry Young Man. Oliver, the Angry Young Man figure, is unpleasant, frustrated, and insecure. He is not the protagonist; he is, indeed, focalized primarily through the teenage protagonist, Anna. On the one hand, the text illustrates the tensile homosocial relationship between Henry—symbol of established literary upper-class masculinity—and Oliver—example of a rising lower-middle-class decent masculinity—as defined by the exchange of young Anna. On the other hand, the fact that the story is about Anna’s maturation into individual and artist disrupts this trope of homosocial exchange. The emergence of Anna’s individuated female subjectivity is a torturous exercise of navigation between different masculinities, as embodied by Oliver and Peter, and the easy surrender to the patriarchal and institutionalized expectations of marriage and motherhood.
In her introduction Byatt considers Oliver’s place in Anna’s development as artist and independent woman. She situates him within the discourse of the young man from the “coming classes” who, as Green’s “decent man,” saw himself as the vehicle for rejuvenation of English values and the nation itself. She points out that “he would have been the hero of any male version of this story, l’homme moyen sensual, suspicious of Henry’s wilder edges, guilty about his wife and girl, but essentially ‘decent.’ This novel doesn’t see him quite that way. It is afraid of him, though I only understand now how much” (x). Oliver, the Jim Dixon or Charles Lumley figure, is revealed as aggressive, bullying, critical, and, in fact, as someone whom Anna finds wearying and oppressive. He is a defiant victim of his insecurities in relation to the almost mythic figure of Henry Severell. He strives to be “decent” and to educate Anna in order to aid her on her path to an intellectual life and individuality. As Byatt points out, he is the “Other” in the novel; he is as illegible in Anna’s narrative as the female figures in the Angry Young Man novels of the time.
In making Oliver unknowable, Byatt marginalizes the central cultural and literary icon of the coming “new man.” Indeed, much of the text’s energy, and Anna’s, is spent in challenging the power of the Angry Young Man narratives that cast such a powerful shadow on the cultural landscape of the period. The relationship between Anna and Oliver is mined with class and gender anxieties. He is the professional academic (of working/lower-middle-class background) married to an upper-middle-class woman, not entirely at ease in the bohemian yet gentrified country household of the Severell family. He is in awe of Henry Severell as an upper-class patriarch and artistic genius. Oliver is unsure of his own class status: he does not have the stability or certainty that comes of middle-class privilege so pervasive in the Severell family, evident in Jeremy (Anna’s schoolboy brother) and Henry. These anxieties manifest themselves in occasional emotional outbursts that he directs against Anna and Henry, but especially the former. When he meets one of Anna’s secret crushes, Michael, on an errand to the riding stables, Oliver “struts like a fighting cock and tear[s]” into the blond, beautiful, upper-class boy, leaving him bewildered and confused (77). For Oliver, Michael is not a shy, unsure teenager but a symbol for a “dead way of living” (82). Going on the offensive, he impresses upon Anna that Michael signifies everything that is stagnant and oppressive in the English class system: “I’ve taught them. Nice jolly puppies, with no pretensions to brains, normally very friendly. … Once a year they get horribly drunk over some boat that bumped some boat—I may be without humour, I persist in thinking that childish—and they systematically destroy the room of some outsider who can’t run, or went to the wrong school, or works a bit too obviously for a First. … I’m an outsider myself, but call that irresponsible and wicked” (81). Oliver recapitulates and contextualizes the narrative of the outsider who is wittingly or unwittingly harassed by the privileged, public school type at Oxbridge—a figure who appears in such diverse literary texts as Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1929) and Philip Larkin’s Jill (1945). His defensive anger is coupled with his moral high ground, making him self-righteous in what he perceives to be a justified taking down of the public school boy. And yet it is his insecurity vis-à-vis his class status and Michael’s that produces a critical aggressiveness incommensurate with the moment of banal social interaction.
Even as he writhes within his own anxieties, an effect of his uncertain social location, Oliver, as the narrative makes clear, is in a position of masculine power and knowledge in relation to Anna—whose youth and gender make her particularly susceptible. After his confrontation with Michael, for which Anna rebukes him, he directs his anger at her ostensible stupidity. In his jealous anger, he savagely declares that she is making an “exhibition” of herself. In the next breath, he provokes her by insisting that her marriage (a hyperbolic forecast of her future) to Michael would make her mother happy and lead to her own intellectual and emotional death. Anna feels “battered” by him (82). Anna constantly feels that Oliver is “cruel,” “bullying,” “battering,” “fierce, intimidating and a dreadful strain” (144). His hold on her encompasses the psychological, intellectual, and emotional.
The text constructs his wiry physicality and his intellectual precision as a menacing presence that disrupts not just the lives of those around him but the very peace of the pastoral landscape. Even the detached Henry finds Oliver unnerving in his constant excavation and criticism of Henry’s work and as an unwanted judge of Henry’s life. Oliver brings along with him a life and an idea of England with which Henry is unfamiliar and uninterested in exploring (a mark of Henry’s privilege). While rambling around Henry’s orchard and looking beyond the walls, Oliver mentions how artificial and archaic such idyllic slices of England appear to him. It is an unreal England “before subtopia got it, before concrete and corrugated iron and diesel fumes, before London and Birmingham and Manchester started putting out feelers … and spreading smoke further than that” (31). For Henry, Oliver’s England does not even exist within his purview, artistic or otherwise, and he feels that Oliver, through his unsolicited commentary on the state of England, is a forerunner of the subtopia that he apparently condemns, because Oliver “talk[ed] limits into land … that was easily limitless” (32). For Henry, Oliver symbolizes diminished, plebeian, and post-industrial England, like Hooper in Brideshead Revisited. Oliver condemns Henry for dissembling in his novels. Like a “terrier with a rat,” Oliver batters Henry for his reliance on false dichotomies of natural versus unnatural. He insists that “it is a minor version of the William Morris crankiness, the golden age, of beautiful mediævalism, the appeal to nature, whatever nature is” (115). This is a very clear narrative intertextual reference to Jim Dixon’s famous drunken public rant against Merrie Olde England in Amis’s Lucky Jim, where Jim condemns this obsession with a certain kind of nostalgia, arguing that “Merrie England” was “the most un-Merrie period in our history” (227). In a text that assiduously focuses on art and the visionary artist, Oliver stands for an ideal of art and England where there is no place for the limitless paganism of a D. H. Lawrence, nor of the mannered yet mythic pastoral of an E. M. Forster.
For both Henry and the text, Oliver is the harsh and unpleasant presence who embodies constraints and foreshortened horizons of postwar England. While the rest of the Severell family, and Margaret (Oliver’s wife), are awed by, and indulgent of, Henry’s abrupt visionary pilgrimages where he disappears into the country for days and weeks, Oliver is disgusted with this eccentric and flamboyant behavior: “I can’t get away from this feeling that all this struggling with the elements just won’t wash any longer. We’ve got it under control—it’s a lie to pretend we haven’t” (88). Oliver, as the true representative of the postwar empiricist Everyman, looks at Henry’s escapades from the perspective of masculinist common sense, ostensibly integral to the Angry Young Man. Oliver emblematizes the transition from the larger-than-life force of nature that is Henry and his masculine artistry to the resolutely noncreative but precisely critical masculine energy that is suitable to the world of “life as it is lived by most human beings, or at least most English ones, jobs and marriages and culture, town planning and the Obscene Publications Act”—in short, the Larkinesque world of the quotidian and the mundane (91).
Oliver’s alignment with the “new man,” in terms both of literary and masculine stylization and of the Movement and the Angry Young Man, is hammered home in this moment. In keeping with Orwellian ideals of the decent Englishman, and the ethic of the quotidian, Oliver, like the new crop of writers, wants to be seen as an average, ordinary man who just happened to enjoy and write literature. The new writers were employed professionals: Larkin was a librarian, and Amis and Wain were lecturers. The necessity of work as distinct from art was a significant part of their masculinity and perspective on art: if art was a reflection of everyday humanity, then the artist had to be intimately involved in the fabric of social life. A. Alvarez clarifies this point when he says, “The Movement poet is just like the man next door—in fact, he probably is the man next door. His work is aimed at the Common Reader because he is himself a Common Man—an ordinary person whose feelings and experiences are those of ‘everyone else’” (25). Their commitment to work emphasized their bourgeois ethics of masculine labor. Philip Larkin, while speaking of his own inclination to work, ties it specifically to his “solid background in which everybody worked. No question of it. It was immoral not to work” (qtd. in Oakes 65). Oliver clearly speaks from this position of defiant and worthwhile ordinariness, of not just the dignity but the necessity of earning one’s living. As his rant makes clear, art must reflect the life of the ordinary English person, which is about “jobs, marriages … and town planning.”
In stark contrast to Oliver is Peter Hughes-Winterton. Peter is the adult embodiment of the young golden Michael against whom Oliver railed so violently. He is the pattern of the ideal gentleman that Oliver disrupts and condemns, Green’s “Establishment ideal” against whom “the decent man” is pitted. Unlike Michael, who was a befuddled teenager, Peter possesses “a generous indignation and genuine moral superiority” (290). Anna relies on his warmth, “honesty,” “strength,” and “simplicity.” If Oliver is the “decent man,” Peter is timeless Englishness, of the country, the estate, the empire, the public school, and the civil service. However, though he is “solid” and “golden” for Anna, the narrative reveals the stagnancy of the upper-class Englishman and his world. He is not an individual, but rather a mass-produced pattern replicated through generations of the upper classes: “He rowed, and talked, spoke rhetorically and not very well, but with obvious honesty, in the Union, and went out with the Trinity Foot Beagles. These things became him. They were what he had been born and bred for.” Peter’s father, once he had been told that he had a son, had imagined him as “a tall, blond, elegant undergraduate at his own college” and “had waited for the actualization of this … so that Peter, for him, was now ideal Peter.” However, the cracks in the pattern emerge when the narrative slyly informs the reader that it is “more unlikely [Peter] would pass [the civil service examination] than his father’s generation could conceive” (147). Sir Walter Hughes-Winterton and Peter are out of step with the times, unable to imagine that Peter might not make it through the examination they have assumed it is his birthright to pass. Cloistered within their perfect imagined realms of upper-class Englishness, they cannot quite fathom Oliver and his “subtopian” England.
To consider Anna, Oliver, and Peter within the frame of changing Englishness and masculinities is to understand how this particular text, though published in the 1960s, sought to correct, and complicate, the sympathetic cultural reading of the Angry Young Man. The narrative does not only read Oliver’s insecurities and aggression as a rebellion against the oppressive straitjacket of the Establishment and the class system. More important, it locates Oliver within a web of gendered and classed relationships in the post-imperial period where his ascendance and assertion are connected to the decline of the hegemonic model and the quest for female empowerment. While Peter Hughes-Winterton is far more sympathetic than Oliver, he nevertheless signifies the mindless routinization of privileged upper-class life. The narrative draws particular attention to the unacknowledged power and stagnation of the landed gentry. However, what is most striking, of course, is that Anna’s quest for self-assertion is determined within the contours of her relationship with men, different though they are, and the stringent expectations of a patriarchal society.
Anna experiences both the possibility and the limitations of being an educated, independent woman in the 1950s. While Anna attempts to assert her independent (artistic) identity, she does so against already extant models of idealized middle-class femininity as represented by Oliver’s wife, Margaret. Margaret conforms to, or at least desperately clings to, the ideal of the perfect homemaker. Elizabeth Wilson argues that “special role of the homemaker” whose sole role was the welfare of her family constituted one of the central tenets of postwar discourse of womanhood. As befitting an affluent society, this “special role” was integrated with an “acquisitive slant” (37). The growth and orientation of women’s magazines promoted the ideas of the glamorous yet pragmatic housewife who fills her home with the most tasteful and up-to-date objects and gadgets, which reflect both her and her husband’s status.4 Margaret, whom Anna initially envisions as the perfect woman inhabiting a fulfilled married life, can only imagine herself in terms of tropes offered to her by magazines: of idealized wife and mother, particularly in terms of the self-abnegation apparently required in these roles. She denotes the beautiful and poised but personality-less women who marry the lower-class, virile man in the Angry Young Man narratives. Indeed, her descent into madness is Byatt’s interpretation of what happens to these disposable women who are merely counters to mark the successful upward movement of the Angry protagonist. Margaret’s ideas about home, family, and love are shaped by women’s magazines, though she feigns condescension toward them. She is “addicted” to them, not following the “bright little hints for improving one’s ‘home’ and appearance” but “[knowing] her way about it altogether” (22). Indeed, when her marriage falls apart, and Oliver no longer pays any attention to her, her apathy and depression morph into a maniacal loss of proportion as she gazes at the magnified images of eyes and lips in a fashion magazine. She slips inside the magnified images, becoming one of the “jumble of bright dead things” cataloged and photographed in Vogue. She begins to think that bits of her were “separate and falling irretrievably away” (182). For her, being a wife means reworking herself to become what her husband wants. She longs to be formed by Oliver, waiting as a “willing tabula rasa,” and the deliberate withdrawal of his attentions leaves her floundering without any sense of who she is, having repudiated her old self, her life, her parents, and her friends in order to reshape herself for him (129). Her madness and breakdown occur precisely because without the “male eye” to please, “Margaret was lost” (177). Margaret stands at the extreme limit of conforming to the social-cultural practices of middle-class womanhood.
These cultural expectations shape Anna’s life and choices. She goes to Cambridge and has the potential to forge whatever career she might choose. However, as a woman, and as her mother’s daughter, marriage and domesticity haunt her as an expected gender trajectory, and a potential foreclosure to any attempts at writing or self-discovery. As a woman, she is “constantly tempted as [her father] would never have been, to give up, to rest on someone else’s endeavour, to expend her energy ‘usefully’ at the kitchen sink.” She has to withstand the “socially approved” temptation “to stay where one was” (201). It must be stressed here that social approval refers to the pervasive discourse of motherhood and marriage institutionalized by the welfare state. It is not merely the effect of the accumulated weight of patriarchal conventions, but rather those conventions that are enshrined in postwar governmental and media practices.
The welfare state, even as it eased the burden of mothers and married women, did so by institutionalizing and making explicit the gendered nature of the nation-state. McClintock contends that the gendering of the nation is multidimensional; it is based on gendering both space and time. Imagining the nation as community relies on the “prior naturalizing of women and children within the domestic sphere” and at the same time signifies the female body as primordial and the repository of national tradition (“No Longer” 89). In this narrative, the female symbolizes the unchanging past, while the male is the active, dynamic agent of progress, looking to the future. Elleke Boehmer, too, notes this aspect of national processes, emphasizing the discursive link between the rhetoric of the modern family and the larger national community, which idealize and entrench gender roles. Even as women are citizens, they continue to be subordinated within national discourse through the containment of “their sexuality, mobility, the trope of motherhood, [and] rights of citizenship” (De Mel 2). As discussed briefly in the previous chapter, welfare state policies legitimized this particular discourse of the nation. Wilson argues that the welfare state is “not just a set of services, it is also a set of ideas about society, about the family, and—not least important—about women, who have a centrally important role within the family, as its lynchpin” (Wilson 9). The assumption underpinning the proposals of the Beveridge Report was that in a “domestic partnership” the wife would be economically dependent (the husband would make insurance payments for both himself and his wife) while she would bear and rear children for king and country. Indeed, in a particularly infamous passage, Beveridge points out that “the attitude of the housewife to gainful employment outside the home is not and should not be the same as that of a single woman. She has other duties” (para. 114). The report institutionalized women’s citizenship as ultimately determined by their reproductive function and familial role of being unpaid caretakers of the family; the corollary to this enshrining of the heteronormative family was the fundamental duty of every man to be gainfully employed and be the family breadwinner/head of household.5
Anna’s options are circumscribed by a set of gendered assumptions that set her at a disadvantage from the male protagonists who similarly struggle with their own class and inherited gender ideals. Indeed, the narrative hammers this point home through her pregnancy. Her pregnancy means that she has to leave Cambridge, and instead of telling Oliver, she decides to marry the chivalric and eminently suitable Peter Hughes-Winterton, who is “a pillar of strength,” “blond, solid and confident” (148). She believes she has decided on the perfect escape: she can please her mother, fulfill gender expectations, repudiate Oliver, and avoid the stigma of unwed motherhood. However, she discovers that the comfortable world of “hunting, rowing, and politics” is deadening and cyclical. Anna is expected to shed any individuality and conform to the faceless pattern of country gentry (148). Her prospective mother-in-law assumes that once Peter and Anna marry, Anna will drop the pursuit of a degree and live at home with her so as to allow Peter to finish his degree without any distractions. Her wishes are not consulted, nor is there any doubt that this would be the course that Anna herself would choose to take. For Anna, this most suitable and expected of trajectories is stifling, claustrophobic, and soul-destroying. The reality of the “kitchen sink” here is the material consequence of being a middle-class woman, of biology as destiny. Even as she remakes herself as an independent writing subject, separating herself from her father, she links her future to two different types of men: the “socially approved” temptation of marriage and love frame Anna’s search for independence.
The novel’s title, as well its epigraph, emphasizes this crucial role of love in Anna’s trajectory. The title is drawn from Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem “A Farewell to False Love,” which is also the epigraph:
A fortress foil’d which reason did defend,
A siren song, a fever of the mind,
A maze wherein affection finds no end,
A ranging cloud that runs before the wind,
A substance like the shadow of the sun,
A goal of grief for which the wisest run.
Byatt declares that she chose it “as a wry comment on the female belief in, or illusion of, the need to be ‘in love’ which was the danger which threatened the autonomy of my heroine” (xi). Although acquiring girlfriends was an integral part of successfully asserting their independent masculinity for protagonists like Jim Dixon and Charles Lumley, it did not imply the curtailment of autonomy, nor were these new men steeped in, or shaped by, the discourse of love. On the contrary, having a suitable (ladylike) upper-class girlfriend enabled their upward mobility in what they saw as a homosocial environment, and only served to concretize their independence and triumph. While this is not to discount the fear of domesticity and what was seen as potential emasculation through marriage, the Angry Young Man novels of wish-fulfillment resolved those fears by depicting beautiful and submissive women as love objects and vilifying “high-powered,” educated women. To return to Anna, the gendered importance of love and the discursive imperative of marriage determine her trajectory of self-assertion. Significantly, Anna does not quite submit nor is she consumed by the power of love in the same way as Margaret. She “feels distant from things,” including Oliver (229). As Oliver tells her, she is not capable of devotion. She is not particularly interested in Oliver’s life or his difficulties. Nor is she consumed by her love for him; rather, through the course of their relationship, she insists that she wants “someone to talk to” and to not have to “worry about people’s feelings all the time” (231). Yet, for all her lack of interest, Anna’s choice is set up as necessarily foreclosed: if she chooses companionship and a sexual relationship, she has no choice but to follow that into domesticity and marriage because of her pregnancy. Her identity is determined in terms of her relationships within a strictly patriarchal frame. She will reflect others rather than assert herself through art, although, at the end of the novel, there is a slight hint of an alternative path, of independence in, and through, companionship.
Toward the end of the novel, Anna vacillates between Peter, Oliver, and her independence. There are several key moments in the text where Anna’s horizons open up, precisely because she is the intelligent daughter of a well-known and wealthy author. At Cambridge, when Henry finds that she is unhappy, he offers to support her endeavors to find herself. The sensation of freedom and flight is palpable in the narrative energy focalized through Anna: “And to be alone. What not escape? … Why not fly in the face of this bureaucratic deity, why not take what was offered, what one could get … ?” (202). This sensation of breaking loose reoccurs when Anna decides to leave Peter and Oliver for Mexico. For the only time in the text, Anna, who is usually passive to the point of paralysis, is caught up in a “blaze of decision” (297). However, in both these moments, her relationship with Oliver impels her to alter her decision. When she meets Oliver as she heads out the door to leave for Mexico, she says:
“I was just going,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t have gone far, I suspect.”
Oliver’s grip was like a claw on her elbow; he was holding himself together terribly; he looked at her directly, with a tremendous effort, but his face twitched, and Anna noticed suddenly that his knees were trembling. (279)
On the one hand, the novel seems to indicate Anna’s failure to achieve independence as an individuated writing subject, since Oliver has his claws in Anna. She watches “her last chance, or illusion, which? slip away as Oliver held her from it” (297). On the other hand, though her independence is certainly curtailed and Oliver’s oppressive presence seems entrenched in her life, the end still carries a suggestion (not a very strong one) for her movement toward a mature, assured writer. Even if she were to continue with Oliver, the dynamic of power appears to have shifted slightly in her favor, as it is she who supports him through his moment of extreme emotion, for he is “shaking” while she is calm. Further, in choosing Oliver over Peter, the lesser of two evils, Anna has chosen the possibility of a more equitable relationship, as Oliver’s insecurities match her own struggles to establish her identity, while staying with Peter would have resulted in her absorption into the chivalric, homosocial world in which she would only produce more Peter Hughes-Wintertons. But the text, for its particular dislike of Oliver, nevertheless connects Anna’s neuroses with Oliver’s; they perceive themselves to be mirror images of one another. It is the “eternal reality of the kitchen sink”—of the double bind of possibilities and limitations that frame both Anna and Oliver’s lives—that ultimately brings them together. Anna and Oliver experience the “world of love and the sun [in] manageable proportions” (210). Their lives are the lives of containment and practicalities, of “greyness, and remembered brightness” (298). Unlike Henry, who stands for the Lawrentian pastoral and Blakean vision, and Peter, who is the comforting but bland representative of a gentlemanly pattern, Anna and Oliver represent the straitened possibilities of postwar England.
In a similar vein, Barbara Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment engages with the potential egalitarianism and cautious hopefulness of a postwar future, even as her narrative is steeped in a melancholy for a bygone era. The novel depicts the alterations in the men and women of the upper-middle class as they continue to live their self-contained parish lives while West Indian immigrants and lucky Jims arrive in their midst. Pym’s novel of manners ironizes and sympathizes with these circumscribed lives, but at the same time anthropologically documents them as part of a changing, or fading, Englishness.
It is fitting that this chapter, and this book, ends with an examination of Barbara Pym’s ironic, detached style in An Unsuitable Attachment (1963, 1982), with its upper-middle-class women, ineffective gentlemen, and the titular “unsuitable attachment” between a “new man” and upper-middle-class (gentle)woman. In considering Pym’s style, her novel of manners, and her engagement with community, this final section moves away from the central argument about men with which this book has so far been concerned. The focus on Pym’s women inevitably necessitates a shift in terms of both analytical and generic concerns. And yet, Pym is integral to the vision of this book as she considers the eruption of the “new man” in the context of upper-middle-class men and women who usually circulate in the background in Wain, Amis, and even Fleming. Pym’s anthropological detachment mediated by gendered and classed sympathy, her Austenian irony, and her perfectly crafted “miniatures”6—worlds inhabited by “excellent women,” suitable men, and the clergy in self-contained parish communities centered on the church—make her oeuvre unique, as it shows a very specific segment of the English middle class in a time of the Angry Young Man. Her miniature worlds focused on very specific kinds of Englishwomen, and their lives rendered them both middlebrow and anachronistic, to the point that contemporary critical works on the literature and culture of the period ranging from Kenneth Allsop to Rubin Rabinovitz did not include Pym in their list of significant postwar writers.7 In contrast to what was seen as zeitgeist literature, Pym’s narratives represent an upper-class churchgoing English world that is at once timeless and dying.8 She offers the view from the other side; paradoxically, hers is a response to the Angries, and also, perhaps more surprisingly, to Evelyn Waugh. In An Unsuitable Attachment, she connects the Angry Young Man to the lower echelons of the upper-middle class, the realm occupied by Wavian protagonists such as Charles Ryder and Paul Pennyfeather.
Written between 1960 and 1962, An Unsuitable Attachment was Pym’s seventh novel. Ianthe Broome, a chinchilla-wearing librarian and canon’s daughter, buys a house and moves into a quiet North London parish on the death of her mother. The parish of St. Basil is the center around which all events occur. The parish as community gives Pym’s novels a distinctly English flavor.9 Ianthe Brooke meets and falls in love with John Challow, the new librarian and an unsuitable man, while being courted by Rupert Stonebird and Mervyn Cantrell, who want to marry her for her ornamentalism and her good furniture respectively. The second protagonist is Sophia Ainger, the vicar’s wife, who does not possess the humanity, tolerance, and warmth that vicar’s wives are supposed to inherently possess. She has an unsuitable attachment to her cat, Faustina, and Emma-like, she tries to engineer a marriage between her sister Penelope, who is desperate to get married, and the suitable Rupert Stonebird. The novel ends with Ianthe’s wedding to John and his joining the parish, a return to the equilibrium of quintessential Englishness.10
Hazel Holt, Pym’s friend, colleague, and literary executor, noted that the phrase “very Barbara Pym” became convenient literary shorthand that readers used to invoke the very particular postwar English world and style of Pym’s novels (Holt xiii). In fact, it is used as shorthand to invoke Englishness itself, as Pym and her novels became synonymous with an evanescent but distinctive national culture. Pym’s Englishness signifies the “ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane things” (Larkin, Selected Letters 376–78). In this, her worlds align with the versions that have appeared in this book (those of Orwell, Wain, and Larkin), but what makes her take different is that it is underpinned by the Anglican Church. In Jane and Prudence, she observes the church during Harvest Festival, “an English scene … and a precious thing” (26). Pym’s understanding of Christianity’s place in English culture matched T. S. Eliot’s view that culture and religion were “different aspects of the same thing” (Eliot, Notes 27).11 Her English world is gentler and happier than that of Philip Larkin, with whom she had the most in common in terms of both literary style and tone of Englishness. Larkin’s bicycle-clipped Englishman in “Church Going” who stands “up at the holy end,” “[b]ored, uninformed,” and out of place in a church, doesn’t seem to share much with Pym’s ardent churchgoers who religiously participate in church fairs (58–59). Yet they undoubtedly belong to the same England, an England of containment, pragmatism tinged with melancholia, and the quotidian far removed from the center of things. Brian Firth noted the similarity between the two and pointed out that, like Larkin, Pym writes with “an unpretentious stoicism and an unscornful but ironic view of man’s potential.”12
If Larkin’s poetic personae are the conflicted, solitary, middle-class Englishmen trying to find their place in postwar society, Pym’s novel of manners describe the upper-middle-class English gentlemen who continue to exist within a gentlemanly purview—as clergymen, Oxford dons, anthropologists, and civil servants. However, these gentlemen too, like Larkin’s Englishmen (and Waugh’s), are distanced, detached, and curiously ineffective. There are, however, other differences: Pym’s Englishmen are resolutely upper-middle-class; more significant, they are objects of the female gaze, and the reader rarely has access to their thoughts. Pym’s novels famously focus on and are focalized through women who, in other narratives, would be on the margins of the central romance plot, unmarried “on-the-shelf” gentlewomen or, to use her term, “spinsters.” Though these women conform to social and gendered expectations of upper-class womanhood, or at least their version of it—of modesty, piety, and service—they are often pointedly critical and ironic about them. The Pym narrator is observant and sharply ironic, particularly in her depictions of men.
An Unsuitable Attachment signaled the end of Pym’s career, when Jonathan Cape, Pym’s publisher since 1949, curtly rejected it, as did twenty-three other publishers.13 This rejection indicated the marginalization of a certain kind of Englishness interleaved with rejection of a particular literary style and tradition, especially since Pym and her world were seen as being out of step with the contemporary reconfiguration of nation and national identity. Pym did not publish again, though she continued to write novels, until she was named the most underrated writer of the past seventy-five years by two literary judges (the only living writer to be named by more than one participant) in a Times Literary Supplement poll, published on January 21, 1977. Both Philip Larkin, poet and national monument, and Lord David Cecil, former Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, praised her; Larkin celebrated her “unique eye … for the small poignancies and comedies of everyday life” (“Reputations Revisited” 66) while Cecil held up her novels as “the finest examples of high comedy” (67). A day later, TLS did a front-page feature on Pym. In the wake of such a singular turn of media events, she was courted by a number of presses, and Macmillan published Quartet in Autumn, while An Unsuitable Attachment was published posthumously in 1982.14
One of the most often cited reasons for the strange death and revival of Pym’s career is that Tom Maschler, the new senior editor at Cape, rejected it.15 Maschler had been brought in to revolutionize their lists and update them to the spirit of the 1960s, a time of sexual revolution and racial unrest in Britain, where Pym’s closed world of spinsters and church jumble sales did not possess cultural interest or importance. Pym acknowledged this fact when she says of her book, “It seemed to be me that it might appear naïve and unsophisticated, though it isn’t really, to an unsympathetic publisher’s reader hoping for that novel about negro homosexuals, young men in advertising, etc.” (Private 220). Critics often cite this letter as evidence of her ability to distance herself from her pain, but seem to ignore the implications of the phrase. Though the letter is undoubtedly written during a time of rejection and crisis of self-confidence, Pym’s bitterness manifests itself in the throwaway lines about advertising, negroes, and homosexuals—a reference to James Baldwin—with its casual snobbery, racism, and homophobia (this last is possibly an unfair charge, as her novels consistently featured many sympathetic portrayals of queer men, both stereotypical and not, but they certainly were not “negro homosexuals”). Larkin returned to the “negro-Homosexual rubbish” when he wrote caustically to Charles Monteith of Faber and Faber encouraging him to consider Pym’s work. Indeed, Larkin went so far as to ridicule everything extant in the market: “I feel it is a great shame if ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane things can’t find a publisher these days. This is the tradition of Jane Austen and Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today. Why should I have to choose between spy rubbish, science fiction rubbish, Negro-homosexual rubbish, or dope-take nervous-breakdown rubbish?” (Monteith 552). For Larkin, Pym followed in the Great Tradition of Austen and Trollope, while genre fiction with its mixed heritage had flooded the book market. In his catalog, the fiction he cites does not merit the label of art, while Pym’s does. Furthermore, he compares her novels about “sane ordinary things” to the “rubbish” that publishers appear to favor. Sane, ordinary novels about ordinary English things are contrasted to the “negro homosexual,” exemplar of the outlandish and bizarre. The latter threatens the cultural insularity of Pym’s English worlds, since narratives about his life edge out her understated novels about fading gentlewomen and gentlemen.
Publishers, Pym argues, ignored her works for novels about strangers and interlopers. Funnily enough, her rejected novel engages with the question of strangers in England, more so than any earlier or later novels. I will return to the issue of the West Indian presence in An Unsuitable Attachment, which doesn’t quite construct them as interlopers but seems ambiguous about their being in London. While secondary to the issue of the queer black man, Pym also classes the novel about the “young man in advertising” as more desirable to publishers, since he is a sign of the times. Indeed, the Angries and their descendants were exactly this group of people; John Wain’s Hurry on Down springs to mind: lucky Jims blithely crossing class boundaries to land new-fangled jobs in television, radio, and advertising, though, again, her rejected novel does feature one of these young men as a love interest for the protagonist. This rejection of her novels, which is a rejection of her literary style and her fictional worlds, mimics the lives of English men and women in her novels. The parishes and villages in Pym’s worlds seem to be “push[ed]/To the side of their own lives,” to appropriate a line from Philip Larkin (115).16 The life of the nation seems to happen off the pages, somewhere else, far away from Ianthe Broome and Mark and Sophia Ainger. The reader is made aware of this when Ianthe goes to visit John in his bedsit, the representative dwelling in many popular literary and cultural texts of the period, but seen through Ianthe’s eyes, it seems to be another country with which she is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Of course, the presence of West Indians in the parish, and the brief throwaway mention of the Notting Hill riots of 1958, also emphasize the sense of distance from the change, even as the narrative notes the shift: “Race relations seemed almost cozy discussed at this distance from Notting Hill or Brixton … But that had been last month” (86).
Notting Hill was, of course, the event that forced Britain to confront its history of empire, race, and class at home. It was sparked when a group of Teddy Boys (a working-class youth subculture that emerged in response to the simultaneous decline of working-class communal networks and increased spending power) attacked several West Indian men in different incidents over the course of a week. These attacks occurred in the wake of increasing aggressiveness by the Teddy Boys (influenced by the right-wing Union Movement founded by Sir Oswald Mosley) toward West Indian immigrants in North Kensington. The Notting Hills Riots of 1958 lasted two weeks and shaped government policy toward immigration, discourses of assimilation, policy on race relations, and, most important, all subsequent discussions of British national identity. In Pym’s novel it is cordoned off as a distant event and the subject of a “cozy” chat in a landlady’s flat. Pym, unsurprisingly, felt that her novels were seen as naïve and unsophisticated because they were neither about, nor written by, “men and Americans”; they also did not deal with the issues on the front pages of newspapers.
Barbara Pym’s narratives, of course, did engage with men, but they were the antitheses of the men favored by the book market. John Halperin argues that the men and women in Pym’s novels are engaged in “a war of the sexes,” where men are “overbearing and egotistical, on the one hand, and on the other, weak and incompetent” dependent on the tireless and unselfish support of “excellent women” (89). While Pym’s clear-eyed, ironic narrator consistently punctures patriarchal and masculine assumptions, to read women as good and men as bad is patently reductive. Pym, in fact, locates Mark and Rupert within their gentlemanly and professional milieu. Mark, as vicar and shepherd of souls, clearly believes he has a vocation. He also operates within the gentlemanly ideal of service. Hence he chooses the poor, marginal parish of St. Basil’s Church in North London rather than the more fashionable and wealthy neighborhoods of Kensington. Mark fits into the literary tradition of the good clergymen traced back to Austen and Trollope; he believes in Christian charity and fraternity. However, his practice of it is uncertain and awkward.
The reader first encounters Mark as he walks to the “fringe” of his parish, to the “big gaunt houses” too “near to railway to ever become residentially desirable,” in order to “establish some kind of contact” with his “exotic parishioners” (16).17 Both Mark and the narrator are clearly outside their comfort zone of Englishness. As is evident from Mark’s thoughts, he thinks of the West Indian immigrants in his parish, in London, as exotic strangers and the street that separates his respectable neighborhood from theirs becomes the “contact zone.”18 The street where the West Indians live has “brightly—almost garishly—painted houses” and is forever marked off as an Othered space, ever since Sophia Ainger mistook tomatoes in a window as exotic fruit, prompting her to name the district “love apple” (16). Mark constantly returns to the exoticism and strangeness of the West Indians even as he refers to them as “his” parishioners. He is never quite able to view them as people like him or his English church members. In fact, the West Indians are never individuated either in his mind or in the narrative; they always exist as a group, as the “strangers in our midst” (21).
Even as he does not succeed in fully integrating his parish, Mark’s sense of duty and distant benevolence speaks directly to both his profession as a clergyman and his gentlemanly ancestry.19 He visits the West Indian families in the hope of discovering “likely boys and men to sing in the choir and serve at the altar” (16).20 However, he does not seem to have much luck, nor does he seem to pursue the matter. This reveals the apparently unbridgeable distance between the new immigrants and the English natives—even the most well-meaning yet ineffectual churchman cannot connect.21 The inability to connect lies in the continued exoticization and Othering of the West Indians; as a corollary, the inability to individuate them repeats the imperial affect in the new contact zone. This attempted interaction also shows Mark’s central character trait and possible failing, his remoteness, further emphasized during a conversation with Sister Dew. The narrative deliberately contrasts Mark with Sister Dew, physically, spiritually, and socially: “Sister Dew smiled up at Mark, for she was a little dumpy woman. Her prominent blue eyes, seeming to bulge with curiosity, met Mark’s eyes, which were also blue, but with that remote expression sometimes found in the eyes of sailors or explorers. Although invariably kind and courteous he had the air of seeming not to be particularly interested in human beings—a somewhat doubtful quality in a parish priest, though it has its advantages” (17). Sister Dew is “dumpy,” “tedious,” and “petty-minded” in spite of her belonging to the “noble profession” of nursing (17–18). In contrast, Mark is tall and spare with “remote” blue eyes. Moreover, his courtesy and gravi-tas contrast with her officiousness. They embody their class differences. Sister Dew’s speech further marks this difference when she tells Mark, “But you wouldn’t want pussy going on in your lounge, would you?” (17). Mark silently contemplates whether a vicarage could ever have a lounge, with its associations of classless modernity. He also silently judges Sister Dew’s inappropriately playful reference to their cat, Faustina, as “pussy.” The juxtaposition between the lower-class tedious woman and the upper-class remote clergyman becomes particularly striking in the description of Mark’s detachment: his eyes have the “remote expression sometimes found in sailors and explorers” (17). This evocative phrase invokes and condenses the entire history of the imperial Englishman. He is detached from his immediate setting to always contemplate something beyond the horizon, unable to get involved in the petty concerns of Sister Dew, church fairs, and jumble sales, though he is at the center of these events. As his wife says of him, “he is not of this world” (99). And yet he is a clergyman in a North London parish, and content to be so.
Mark could fit into either of the two versions of bourgeois gentlemanliness that Jimmy Porter delineates in Look Back in Anger. Porter empathizes with his upper-middle-class wife Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern, the old military man recently retired from the Indian Army, while despising Alison’s mother. Porter calls Colonel Redfern “one of those sturdy old plants left over from the Edwardian Wilderness that can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more” (Osborne, Look Back 66). The textual rendering of Mark in An Unsuitable Attachment as remote and forever looking off into an ever-receding horizon carries the same note of melancholy and circumscription. Porter interprets Alison’s brother, Nigel, a member of his own generation, differently, stripping him of any imperial authority even though he has been educated in the same mold of command and restraint. He accuses Nigel of “Vaguery in the Field” because “his knowledge of life and ordinary human beings is so hazy, he really deserves some sort of decoration for it” (20). Pym and Osborne, though they come from opposite ends of the gender and class spectrum, offer similar depictions of upper-middle-class men. However, while Osborne’s play is condemnatory and Pym’s novel is more sympathetic, both recognize the shifts of empire and nation as registering in individual men’s lives and temperaments, especially in terms of remoteness and distance.
In the case of Rupert Stonebird, this gentlemanly detachment is exacerbated or rather professionalized in his occupation as an anthropologist. Rupert, a university lecturer and researcher, spends most of his time marking student papers, reading, writing articles for scholarly journals, and attending lectures. He is disengaged from social and communal rituals, but he is a keen observer, as befitting his profession and his gentlemanly antecedents. The novel opens with Rupert watching two women walking down the street, and his metaphor to describe their mutual observation is once again striking and instructive: “For as an anthropologist he knew that men and women may observe each other as warily as wild animals hidden in long grass” (13). Rupert’s description brings the empire (Africa) and the site of his research into tribal kinship patterns right into the heart of the parish. This world is apparently antithetical to the primitive tribes, but ever since Joseph Conrad read London as the heart of darkness, the civilized/primitive divide when invoked is always ironic, and Pym with her anthropologically inflected style is especially so. In the parish Rupert observes Sophia and Penelope, Sophia observes and speculates upon Rupert and Ianthe, and Ianthe observes Rupert and Sophia. Each individual hides and considers the others, assessing and measuring before establishing contact.
As a social anthropologist who examines “the behavior of men in society,” Rupert examines his neighborhood with the same detachment as his usual object of study (34). As a consequence, he consciously attempts to fade into the background, changing into a “dark suit, so that he could sit quietly observing rather than being observed” (38). Rupert’s detachment prevents him from fully participating in the activities of the community, which makes him unmanly. He fades into the background and does not assert himself as men have been normalized to do. He, like Larkin’s post-gentlemen, turns that detachment into an examination of his own patterns of behavior, studying if, and when, he deviates from his normative routine, and why. He finds himself returning to the church that he had left in his youth, which leaves him with an “uncomfortable and disturbing” sensation (35). Indeed, the manner of his contemplation of his own belief is illustrative of his distance and consequent uncertainty: “And now … in a poorly attended North London church of hideous architecture and amid clouds of strong incense, he seemed to have regained that faith” (35). He notices the minutiae of his return to belief: the poorly attended church, the hideous architecture, and the strong incense. In other words, he notes the decline in belief in the neighborhood that reflects national decline. In the 1950s only 10 percent of the population were regular churchgoers (Marwick 101). He passes judgment on the ugliness of the architecture and the overly strong incense. And yet the doubt implicit in the syntax undercuts the possible authenticity and absoluteness of faith. He “seemed to have regained his faith”; he does not know if he has, and he is not certain. His self-aware detachment leads him to speculate if it wasn’t merely “nostalgia for his boyhood” brought on by the smell of incense and the feel of the spring evening that prompted him to go to church (35). Despite an absence of certainty in his faith, he does attempt to reintegrate into Englishness, as he decides to attend the social functions that are integral to the practice of churchgoing.
Like Larkin’s personae, who also do not quite fit into their “customs and establishments” (Poems 105) and are painfully self-conscious, Stonebird, uncomfortable in England, is the object of his own studious detachment.22 However, Rupert’s desire to engage with the community signals his desire to assimilate into his English social structure even though he is never quite at home. He attempts to “retribalize” himself. His detachment is directed both toward his social setting, and inward, to consider how he does or does not conform to classed norms of manhood. His acquaintances and friends can see his discomfort in being an Englishman in England among others of his class. For instance, Rupert confuses Penelope (Sophia’s sister), since he does not quite conform to ideas of masculinity to which she is accustomed. He is “inhibited in his conversation, and unresponsive to her semi-flirtatious looks and remarks” (83). He is shy and restrained. Because Rupert fails to read social cues and does not participate in courtship rituals, Penelope reads him as not “quite manly, or not manly in the way she was used to” (83). He is not a modern postwar man, like the men in “the City, or in advertising, chartered accountancy, or even television” (83). Except for the City, all of the fields listed are representative of postwar modernity and professionalism. Rupert, a retiring and detached academic, appears unmanly and anachronistic to Penelope. He is out of step.
However, Rupert perseveres in his awkward attempts to join in the rituals that bind the community together: he attends Ianthe’s wedding. When confronted by teary-eyed Penelope and Sophia, Rupert responds “stiffly” and pedantically that the whole atmosphere of a wedding “generates emotion,” emotion that he quite clearly does not feel (250). When informed that the ivory prayer book that the bride held in her hand belonged to her mother, Rupert, the anthropologist, connects a personal memento to the larger imperial flows of goods and raw materials determined by unequal power dynamics: “When I was in East Africa I didn’t somehow associate the tusks of elephants with covers for Anglican devotional books” (251). He is absolutely right, of course. However, his statement disrupts the flow of emotion that constitutes the conversation. He connects colonial exploitation directly to the English quotidian and ornamental. In the process he has moved from the emotional to the impersonal, from the human to the structural. Indeed, this is further evidence of his detachment and his inability to participate. Penelope and Sophia, put off by his impersonality, leave him to “observe the scene. After all, [he is] used to doing that” (251). The final scene, like the opening sequence, involves Rupert observing. Though he is left alone and dispirited, there is the possibility of forging a connection when he sees Penelope eating her lunch alone and decides to join her. Once again, Rupert observes her from afar, and contemplates approaching her. His continued awareness of his inability to fulfill the requirements of middle-class English manhood haunts him. For all that, in this final scene, he is poised for emotional investment and connection.
Rupert and Mark, unlike Larkin’s personae, are gentlemen in that they are comfortably upper-middle class and products of Oxbridge and public schools, although the latter is never made explicitly clear. By virtue of class, educational background, and descent, they are the Establishment against which Philip Larkin, John Wain, Kinsgley Amis, and John Osborne rebelled. Yet they, too, are post-gentlemen, gentlemen in the process of alteration, unsure of themselves and their place in the world, as the imperial ethic that sustained the gentleman ideal slowly fades into obsolescence. By the early sixties, Britain had been forced to withdraw from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Malaysia, the Gold Coast, and South Africa. Britain withdrew from Palestine, leaving the impending Israel/Palestine conflict for the United Nations to resolve. Most significantly, the Suez crisis of 1956, a watershed moment in imperial disintegration, had already occurred, hastening the decolonization process in Africa through the course of the 1960s. It seems far-fetched to see the empire in Pym’s tight, insular miniatures, but that, as I have already demonstrated, is not the case. The empire is present everywhere in Pym’s world-building—in her language, her method, her content, and, of course, the delineation of her male characters. Mark has the “remote eyes” of a sailor, while Rupert as one who codifies and studies primitive tribes in former and decolonizing imperial spaces is detached to the point of alienation from his society. Meanwhile, the presence of the “exotic” West Indians on “love apple” road across the street brings the contact zone right into the heart of this English upper-middle-class North London parish.
In direct contrast to these upper-middle-class men, John Challow is neither remote nor detached. Unlike Rupert and Mark, who are unquestionably suitable by virtue of their unimpeachable class credentials—Rupert is the son of an archdeacon, and Mark, though not possessed of a private income like his wife, is the son of a clergyman—John seems to erupt into the quiet parish from obscure origins that the narrative leaves deliberately vague. He is mysterious within the diegetic space of the narrative, but only because he is incomprehensible to the upper-middle-class characters, and lies outside their purview of knowability. John’s unusual status as a hypermasculine figure is signaled by Ianthe’s immediate discomfort. He is a handsome young man “whose brown eyes looked at her in a way she found slightly disturbing” (45). Physical attraction and the frisson of sexual interest mark him off from the men that Ianthe knows, especially the eminently suitable but dull Rupert. John always looks at her “intently,” with a “penetrating gaze” (114). He is forthright, almost aggressive in his interest (50). Ianthe becomes fully aware of John’s hypermasculinity when she finally acknowledges that she is not merely taking a sisterly interest in John’s well-being. He is “different from the men she had been seeing on her holiday and indeed all her life—different from Mark Ainger and Basil Branche, from Edwin Pettigrew and Rupert Stonebird, and from all the ranks of clergymen and schoolmasters stretching back into the past like pale imitations of men, it now seemed” (198). While Mark and Rupert, caught within their remoteness and detachment, are “pale imitations of men,” Ianthe perceives John, who lives paycheck to paycheck and whose previous employment was doing “crowd work” and “dancing in a night club scene” in films, as a real man, unlike any man she has ever encountered within her own class (46). For Ianthe, despite his unsuitability, John, then, is manlier, more forthright, more assertive, more emotionally invested, more sincere than any other man. Significantly, this matches the characterization of the Angry Young Men by the Angry Young Men, especially in the way the upper-class women in these texts saw the often violent protagonists. In Look Back in Anger, when the upper-class Alison describes her first encounter with the lower-class Jimmy to a friend, she says, “Everything about him seemed to burn, his face, the edges of his hair glistened and seemed to spring off his head, and his eyes were so blue and full of the sun” (Osborne 45). Of course, this is an extreme glorification of the virility and authenticity of the lower-class man who blazes into a phlegmatic and restrained upper-class world. Ianthe’s perspective on John Challow is a much more measured version of the same sentiment.
Larkin, in his critique of the novel, argued that this relationship between John and Ianthe was never fully realized—a critique with which Pym agreed. Pym struggled with the romance.23 In one of the earlier drafts, the relationship ends once John is exposed as the cad, and Ianthe marries the more appropriate Rupert. Pym’s struggles with the relationship reveal the difficulty of breaking the almost hermetically sealed space of the upper-middle-class parish community, of bringing an external factor that does not quite conform to the unspoken rules of gendered and respectable behavior. The relationship in its final form occurs in fits and starts and is left deliberately inchoate. In fact, the final revelation of love happens off the page.
The narrative’s take on the relationship successfully illustrates the complications of crossing class boundaries in a constrained world where women are overdetermined by scripts of respectability. The relationship mirrors the central romances in the novels of the Angry Young Men where the lower-middle-class man marries a woman who is his social superior, but a cipher; in the Angry narratives she functions as an appropriately beautiful token in a homosocial exchange. The primary focus of the Angry narrative is the successful upward mobility of the lucky lower-middle-class man, such as Jim, and the necessary accomplishment of that goal occurs through the triumphant acquisition of an upper-class woman, usually won from an upper-class man. Though there is a triangle here, where Ianthe is at the center, fought over by John Challow and Mervyn Cantrell, the narrative ridicules both the triangle and the Angry narratives, when Cantrell, the suitable man, though coded queer, only takes an interest in Ianthe once he finds she has “a Pembroke table” that he covets (239). The effeminacy of the upper-class man in the triangle was always shown as one of the reasons that the Angry Young Man triumphed, because he was an authentically masculine man as opposed to the ineffective effeminacy of the gentleman. However, Pym takes that narrative trope and ridicules it by coding Cantrell as queer, eliminating the idea of sexual competition over the female body. Moreover, Ianthe as the focalizer of the romance defamiliarizes the standard triangle and trope. The narrative catalogs the shifts in Ianthe’s subjectivity as she consciously acknowledges her desire for John. It also follows the ripple effect of this relationship, as it lays bare the prejudices of the parish so implicit that it is never actually vocalized and forces the community to alter its view of Ianthe. The parish comes to see her as an individual rather than a symbol of chaste and respectable womanhood who is “one of the pillars of the Church and whom the Church certainly couldn’t do without” (195). Indeed, Sophia goes so far as to counsel her not to marry because Ianthe is “one of those women who shouldn’t marry … [a woman] somehow destined not to marry” (194).
The narrative charts the shifts in Ianthe’s understanding of herself, of her sense of selfhood, as it traces her slow awareness into a growing sexual attraction, possessiveness, and love for John. It portrays her personal struggles with the inculcated values of gendered respectability, as well as her courage in repudiating her class-bound prejudices. For example, Ianthe shies away from John after he surprises her with violets at an office Christmas present exchange: “She often found herself making excuses to avoid him though in some ways she was interested in him, even attracted to him. But he was younger than she was and so very much not the type of person she was used to meeting. Ianthe was not as yet bold enough to break away from her upbringing and background, and while she did not often think of herself as marrying now, she still hoped, perhaps even expected, that somebody ‘suitable’ would turn up one day” (93–94). The third-person narrator slips in and out of Ianthe’s consciousness. In an ironic style reminiscent of Austen’s free indirect discourse, the narrator delineates Ianthe’s thoughts—her retreat from John, her attempts to repress her own attraction to him, as well as her hope that she might marry someone appropriate. It then briefly separates from Ianthe’s inner monologue when it points out that Ianthe was not yet ready to “reject her upbringing and background.” Although, later on, Ianthe does exactly that, at this point in the text she is only beginning to realize the extent of her desire and endeavors to channel her expectations in a more respectable direction.
The novel attempts to similarly defamiliarize Sophia, who, as a clergyman’s wife, never quite fulfills her role—although it must be said that Pym’s clergymen’s wives never quite fit the stereotype of the jolly and helpful vicar’s wife. This is most notably illustrated by Jane in Jane and Prudence; Jane is neither domestic nor interested in, nor skilled at, organizing church events to weld the parish together. Her primary interests are in her literary pursuits (though she is not particularly dedicated to them) and her friendship with Prudence, an unmarried friend. Sophia is a little more outspoken than Pym’s other protagonists. However, she too is consistently judged and perceived within the diktats of the conventions of gender. When Rupert ventures his opinion of Sophia, Ianthe is appalled. Rupert contends that Sophia might be a “pessimistic Victorian,” and quotes Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” to describe what he believes to be Sophia’s attitude to life, that “there really is neither joy nor love nor light” (216). Ianthe is offended even though it is an accurate description of the cynical Sophia, because she cannot comprehend that a clergyman’s wife might be pessimistic and cynical. Ianthe tries to fit Sophia back into the mold of the clergyman’s wife, or the stereotype of the good-natured and kind helpmeet to the vicar.
Yet for all her lack of verbal repression, Sophia seems more regressive than Ianthe. At Ianthe’s wedding she confesses to Rupert that it was dreadful, and she “hoped that somebody might stand up at the back of the church and forbid the marriage … and expose John as an impostor” (254). Not only does she disapprove of Ianthe’s choice of husband as someone who is not of her class, but she also does not appreciate the fact that Ianthe shattered the image that Sophia had built for her. She is perhaps the least likeable of Pym’s heroines, excluding Leonara in The Sweet Dove Died. She deliberately and carefully manipulates social situations in order to throw together Rupert and her sister, Penelope, because she has decided that Rupert would be a good choice for Penelope. She disregards any possible conflict in taste, interests, or even temperaments between the two of them. Though this behavior is clearly Emma-like in trying to work for her sister’s happiness, Sophia’s interference becomes ethically problematic: she maliciously attempts to remove Ianthe from the picture, and routinely attempts to control Ianthe’s life. It is interesting to note that both Sophia and Ianthe, despite being the closest in age and background, misunderstand and misinterpret each other. More important, each wants to firmly locate the other within the image of conventional models of upper-class femininity—of spinster devoted to the church, and happy, doting clergyman’s wife. However, in each case, the woman in question disrupts the image of acceptable womanhood to forge her own identity and live her life on her own terms.
Pym’s gendered narrative style and her novel of manners represent a slice of upper-class life in the mid-fifties. Her particular adaptation of the novel of manners is determined by her anthropological, auto-ethnographic perspective. Pym’s novels capture the melancholia and the shifts in an Englishwoman’s way of life that is “pushed to the side,” that is, culturally and nationally marginalized. In contrast to Waugh’s gentlemanly narrative voice, Pym’s gendered voice is that of the upper-middle-class woman. While she, too, is detached, this detachment is not inflected by the lineage of gentlemanliness. In the case of Waugh, and later Larkin, such detachment floating free of its imperial structural moorings spirals into either anarchy in the case of the former, or paralysis in the case of the latter. Pym’s Austenian dual-voiced, detached narrative style is anthropologically inflected and as a consequence is self-consciously auto-ethnographic. It is a style that is anchored in a fast-fading structure of the church community.
Pym’s involvement with anthropology is well documented. After her stint in the Wrens in World War II, Pym worked as an assistant editor at the International African Institute, where she edited both scholarly monographs and the institute’s journal, Africa. She was fully versed in shifts in the academic language of anthropology, simultaneously mocking and using it in her novels and private journals. She was cognizant of the change in the discipline as it moved from amateur enterprise to streamlined professionalism in the postwar period.24 She notes the shifts in methodology and the attitudes of the anthropologists as the discipline changes in her novels. Though she was frequently conflicted about her employment, finding it “dull” (Private 220), she nevertheless very carefully adopted elements of its methodology and sensibility in her own work. In a BBC radio address in 1978, she acknowledged the influence of her “day-job” on her narrative aesthetics: “I learned how it was possible and even essential to cultivate an attitude of detachment towards life and people, and how the novelist could even do ‘field-work’ as the anthropologist did” (“Finding a Voice” 384). This particular emphasis on detachment in British anthropology was an influence of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, who is credited with having introduced the intellectual discipline of French sociology to British anthropology. Radcliffe-Brown’s main concern was always with the “formal situation of rules and rituals” (Kuper 39).
This self-conscious anthropological distance marks a distinction between Pym’s detached irony and that of the male writers in this book. Though Pym’s works and the writers examined thus far are shaped by the larger national turn, Pym’s narrative style, unlike the carefully crafted works of Waugh and Larkin, for instance, is not produced within a distinct inheritance of cultural and national masculine expectations. Pym’s novels of manners are structured by the disciplinary practices of anthropology. For Pym, the minute anthropological study of her own immediate community constitutes “field work.” The novels produced through her “field work” closely scrutinize manners, hierarchy, and cultural gender ideals.
Pym elaborates on her anthropologist-novelist desire to collect facts and yokes the need for precision in observed fact to literature and a vanishing civilization in a series of journal entries. In this she draws on the well-worn ideas of Bronislaw Malinowski, where he insists that the field worker must work out “the rules and regularities of native custom” and focus on the “imponderabilia of everyday life” (Malinowski 17–24). On November 10, 1971, “She observes Mr. C in the library—he is having his lunch, eating a sandwich with a knife and fork, a glass of milk near at hand. Oh, why can’t I write things like that any more—why is this kind of thing no longer acceptable?” The entry for February 4 of the following year notes “the unimaginable horror” of the imminent closing of the London department store Gamages, which she reads as the sign of a “whole period of civilization gone” (Private 266–67). On March 6, she once again wonders, “What is the future of my kind of writing? What can my notebooks contain except the normal kinds of bits and pieces that can never (?) now be worked into fiction” (Private 267). Pym connects the noting of trivia—of Mr. C’s eating a sandwich with a knife and fork, an instance of how dining etiquette carries over into fast-food—as the illustration of a moment in a middle-class life, a nuance that indicates the changes in a whole way of being. The tying together of the mundane to the larger issue of national-cultural shifts is made explicit when she marks the closing down of Gamages (the store that opened in the late nineteenth century and served as a consumer institution for generations of the British middle class via its mailing catalog) as the passing of a civilization.25 This notion of the passing of a way of life is a recurring theme in the journals, almost inevitably expressed through the consistent rejection of “her kind of writing” with “its normal kinds of bits and pieces.”
Her interest in the everyday and minutiae of lived life takes an interesting turn, since privileging of trivia and routine is very specifically gendered.26 Judy Little notes this and points to how Pym “textualizes the trivial” (76, 116). Pym follows in Virginia Woolf’s literary and ideological footsteps in validating the trivial and reverses the gendered discourse where women’s contributions, interests, and lives are devalued as “trivial,” whereas men’s activities are frequently read as “important” (Room 76–77). After reading a review of The Sweet Dove Died, Pym asked in her journal, “What is wrong with being obsessed with trivia? What are the minds of critics filled with? What nobler and more worthwhile things?” (Private 260). While the gendered discourse of trivia is noteworthy, I am more interested in connecting Pym’s narrative focus on the gendered “imponderabilia of daily life” and customs to the larger narrative of Englishness. In the mode of Claude Levi Strauss, Pym produces a thick description of her corner of Englishness, drawing meta-cultural conclusions through the meticulous collection and cataloging of the trivia. For Pym, trivia is the very stuff of life; “the boring cozyness of the everyday” (Private 245) constitutes “normal” life. The daily round constructs a sense of self, binds this self to the culture of the nation and community. This fact is what prompted Larkin to name her as one of most underrated writers of the century, when he celebrated her for “small poignancies and comedies of everyday life” (Larkin 66).27 The description is appropriate for almost all her novels. It is not about life as dull and unimportant, but life as both ordinary and full. This is, of course, a marked contrast from the movement-driven plots of the Angries, where young men lurch from place to place and from one profession to another trying to find their niche in the postwar world. Nevertheless, it also speaks to the diminished horizons of postwar Britain, of making a virtue of necessity, which links her to Wain, Larkin, and Amis.28 For instance, the narrative takes the time to describe Ianthe’s daily life, her morning commute, her work at the library, where and what she has for lunch (including the awkwardness of eating alone), her shopping trip, and her commute home. Through the careful cataloging of the trivial, the narrator creates and sums up an entire way of life and way of being. The mundane act of being offered a seat in a crowded train reveals how Ianthe’s innate “lady-like” fragility invokes chivalry from a stranger. It becomes an occasion to where the “graceful” Ianthe is shown to be distinct and anachronistic, since the narrative juxtaposes Ianthe’s elegance and restraint/timidity with the “modern” postwar woman who is “aggressive,” and “thrusting.” In some ways this particular incident echoes Charles Lumley’s feelings whilst being in a working-class pub, where he feels that he had “been equipped with an upbringing devised to meet the needs of a more fortunate age” (Wain, Hurry on Down 25).
Legitimizing trivia while maintaining distance are Pym’s adaptations from anthropology; each act complicates the other. While the focus on trivia and detachment both imply a sense of distance on the part of the observer—that is, one who stands apart from the community to note and classify the mundane on who does what and why—the attention to the quotidian customs simultaneously produces a sense of routine and commitment. Pym’s revival and appropriation of the novel of manners is an effect of this dialectic of push-and-pull of detachment and community, of reserve and emotional and communal networks, and of the observation of minutiae of ritual and custom. While Pym’s novels have frequently been read as novels of manners, it is important to consider how her careful anthropological representations of self-contained upper-middle-class English parish life contour Pym’s take on the genre.29 Her detached style documents native rituals and customs, what they represent to the community and the nation, as well as individual deviations from these cultural community-building norms. Pym’s auto-ethnographic novel of manners offers a perspective that is simultaneously intimate and distanced. The focus on intimate, daily routines implies distance even as it connects at the most private and personal level of a middle-class Englishwoman’s daily life.
Like the picaresque, “the novel of manners” as a genre appears rather difficult to pin down. Attempts to delineate the form always write it back into a broad generic frame of realism, as, for instance, when Bege K. Bowers and Barbara Brothers define it as being “concerned with selfhood and morality within a cultural context and thus depict the inevitable conflict between private and public persona and between illusion (imagination and desire and the actualities of everyday life” (Bowers and Brothers 4). However, what is of interest in this definition is the phrase “actualities of everyday life.” This addresses an earlier, perhaps more apropos, definition of the genre by Lionel Trilling, especially as it pertains to Pym’s work. Trilling contends that the novel of manners represents “culture’s hum and buzz of implication, … the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made, … that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value [and in which] assumption rules” (200–201). Pym’s particular anthropological reshaping of the genre attends to “the manners, customs, folkways, conventions, traditions, and mores” of a specific social group (Tuttleton 10). As we shall see below, her novels tease out the nuances of the observable and observed rituals of conversation and social practice (with all its attendant disciplinary connotations). They foreground the everyday as it links up to national culture, and in the process they pay attention to the half-expressed and the evanescent within a community. This also enables a connection with the past, even as it offers an image of a whole identifiable community in the present.
An Unsuitable Attachment is a perfect example of Pym’s novel of manners. The narrative turns its ethnographic eye on the men and women of an insular upper-middle-class parish in North London even as strangers hover on the outskirts. It documents the rituals and deviations from those rituals within a self-contained and thoroughly English community. The narrative emphasizes this sense of self-containment through the circulation of a half-expressed assumption that underlies the community, fully coherent only to its members: the titular “unsuitable.” Most of the parish members, including Ianthe, consistently reiterate John Challow’s “unsuitability.” What it means to be unsuitable is never clearly defined by any of those who insist upon it, other than Ianthe’s uncle and aunt who make their class snobbery explicit when they argue that John is “inferior to [Ianthe] socially” (222). Penelope, on meeting John at a party, instantly dismisses him as a potential suitor, saying that “one could hardly count John as being in the running” (69). Sophia echoes exactly the same sentiment when Ianthe gently hints that there might be an attraction between John and herself, when she cynically and offensively points out, “He isn’t the sort of person one would marry” (194). The repeated dismissal of John as “unsuitable” to the point that the reasons do not need to be vocalized reveals the implicitness (and prejudices) of a shared value system where people who belong to the same socioeconomic, cultural background can innately parse the nuances of behavioral codes. No explanations or elaborations are necessary; codes are unspoken and understood, an effect of the closed and homogenous nature of the upper-middle-class community. Indeed, one of the reviews of the posthumously published novel addresses this anthropological tendency, linking the minute to the civilizational, when it points out that the narrative gestured “beyond its miniature exactness to the vast panorama of a vanished civilization” (Milton 11). The review captures how Pym’s narratives of the trivial, the quotidian, and the minutiae of social behavior are intertwined with the larger narratives of Englishness, class, and gender. The novel of manners, with its attention to the evanescent “actualities of everyday life,” perfectly captures this connection to the capacious issues of national culture. While it is perhaps a little hyperbolic to cast Englishness as a “vanished civilization,” the review nevertheless does call attention to the fact that Pym’s narrative offers a “thick description” of a mode of being and a culture.
Indeed, love and marriage, central themes in the novel of manners, become instruments to mark the shifts in the parish community of St. Basil. Barbara Brothers contends that Pym’s novels about love (or the absence thereof) situate them within the tradition of the novel of manners.30 The marriage in An Unsuitable Attachment, as in novels by Jane Austen, for instance, is a matter of public consumption and signifies the gradual alteration of the parameters of the community, moving from an exclusive group of upper-class people of the same socioeconomic background to the incorporation of someone who has crossed class boundaries, thereby expanding the frames of the parish community. While it engages with the intimacies of romance, as discussed earlier, the narrative focuses on Ianthe’s gradual alterations of self as she sheds her class-bound prejudices to fall in love with someone outside her ken, to someone unsuitable. The narrative demonstrates that John and Ianthe’s love and marriage is not just an exchange of romantic emotions between two people, but one that is structured by classed and gendered rules that Ianthe slowly but thoroughly repudiates. Sophia, on hearing of Ianthe’s impending nuptials, is disappointed that “Ianthe should be acting out of character” (222). With the arrival of John Challow, there is a ripple of acknowledgment, or at least a strong undercurrent of the awareness of a different stylization of masculinity in their midst. Once again, this change, or the presence of something alien as a different masculinity, is focalized through Sophia, who, when she is told that John is putting up shelves in Ianthe’s home, thinks “there is a certain type of man who is always putting up shelves” and immediately follows this up with “Mark is rather hopeless” (Unsuitable 245). The narrative, through its demonstration of conversational cues and thoughts, documents the changing parish. The unpleasantness of change and the resistance to it is rendered explicit at the wedding, or, to put it in anthropological terms as the text does, at the “marriage ceremonies” (249). Sophia and Rupert comment on its being “dreadful” and how they had “hope that somebody might stand up at the back and forbid the marriage” (254). Rupert mimics the ironic detachment of the narrator and points out, “How dreadful we are basically in our so-called civilized society” (254). Both Rupert and the narrator scrutinize “the wedding ceremony” through the disciplinary eye of anthropology and come to similar conclusions—although the narrator is at one further remove than Rupert, as she studies Rupert making the observation and points out that he does so “smugly.”
Continuing with its focus on customs and their signification, but drawing attention to the most routine of daily practices, the narrative shows the English upper-middle classes in terms of how individuals conform to, or deviate from, gendered conventions. Gender and culture emerge in the minutiae of everyday life, in the manners that men and women must follow. For instance, at dinner in Rome, while Mark and Basil Branche, a vicar they met in Rome, consult on the wine, Rupert Stonebird feels that he was “showing himself to be not quite a man by allowing them to do this” (178). As an anthropologist, he assumes the place of the narrator’s anthropological eye, and assesses upper-class English masculinity as a conventional practice emerging in the quotidian ritual of choosing the appropriate wine for the table, and in particular for the ladies present. Rupert becomes aware that he does not know anything about wine, nor does he take charge of the wine selection along with other men. He feels that he does not quite measure up to gendered, classed, and even national norms in such a moment. He connects his personal gendered inadequacy to larger social expectations that are signified by Penelope. The passage reflects on how personal relations only flow through the well-worn tracks of classed, cultural traditions. Rupert’s masculinity, then, lies in its performance and perception, which, in turn, only emerges through the right practice of etiquette and manners of English men and women at dinner.
While Pym’s detached and ironic narrative style catalogs English conventions, and implicit half-expressed assumptions of the community, there is a particularly gendered inflection that emerges when it intersects with the focalized consciousness of a female protagonist, evident from the earlier discussion of the dissonance between Sophia and Ianthe’s inner thoughts and outward expression. Laura L. Doan describes this as “the dual-voiced narrative” where the on the surface, the narrative voice is “fully compliant with normal social expectations” (74), but underneath “another voice speaks to challenge, even to ridicule, a social order that calls for the repression of unkind retorts” (63–64).31 Orphia Jane Allen also notes the “polyphonic narrative style” and contends that it is an effect of the tensile relationship between an individual’s desires and social expectation.32 I would argue that this narrative format is symptomatic of Pym’s anthropologically detached style. Rather than read this particular style as radical or resistant, which is how critics usually read Pym’s form, I believe it is more accurate to interpret the detachment as an ethnographic style that captures the duality inherent in the study of men and women in a transitioning community. The irony lies in how individual women deviate from the conventions of gendered affect and behavior. In the process the narrator delineates the norm, the woman’s attitude toward the norm, and her negotiation of it. In a throwaway incident as Ianthe attempts to locate John’s bedsit on a sickroom visit, her dressmaker points out that she is in front of a lodging house that has mostly “Indians and commercial travelers.” The implication, of course, is that Ianthe could not possibly have anything to do with such a place, nor should she. Ianthe’s response is a firm but neutral, “Yes, my friend lives here,” but she is “tempted to add” (italics mine) that “he was an Indian commercial traveler” as a deliberate attempt to subvert all the assumptions about herself, Indians, and commercial travelers (110). In a few economical strokes, the narrator classifies the dressmaker’s social and gendered assumptions; Ianthe’s deviation as she is going to see an “unsuitable” young man; and how Ianthe represses what she actually wants to say, which would dismantle stereotypes about Englishwomen, Indians, and commercial travelers. Similarly, when Rupert and Sophia converse about Ianthe and John’s engagement, Sophia mouths the appropriate and well-mannered platitudes expected of a clergyman’s wife: “Oh, he seems charming and is obviously devoted to her” (248). However, when she contemplates the two together, her spontaneous response is not remotely generous; rather, she “trie[s] to feel glad for them” (248). In this instance, Doan’s “dual-voiced narrative” is very much in evidence: Sophia conforms to the expectations of her position, but what she actually feels is antithetical to what she should feel. Even though Sophia later voices her disapproval, this disapproval eventually fades in the face of John and Ianthe’s happiness. The polyphonic narrative style reiterates not so much fracture and disruption, but rather a running ironic undercurrent to patriarchal classed norms.
Pym’s narratives—because of their detached anthropological documentation, their precise attention to everyday life of a community and alterations in gendered and classed ideals of Englishness—are surprisingly invested in the idea of the continuation of the community/Englishness even as it alters. In An Unsuitable Attachment, the narrative ends on the potentiality of forged connections, especially as it occurs in and through the rituals of the parish. John, on marrying Ianthe, becomes a member of the church, even though he is not religious. While originally considered unsuitable, he is welcomed into the parish. Rupert, uncertain about his faith, nevertheless commits to church rituals, attending weddings and church fairs and seeking out Penelope. In her narratives, upper-middle-class women and post-gentlemen struggle to work through inherited gender scripts while they come to terms with the new horizons of postwar Britain. Pym’s style, for all its ironic distanciation, is about community, which, even as it might be on the margins of the nation, stands for Englishness. Contrary to the solitary solipsism in Larkin’s poems, or the isolated couples in Lucky Jim and Hurry on Down, the end of An Unsuitable Attachment sees the parish changing and growing. It has accepted and absorbed John, and Mark Ainger holds out the perennial hope that the West Indians from “love apple” road will join the congregation. While the nature of the parish might be different, the end of the narrative offers the fragile hope that the close-knit community will continue to survive.
While An Unsuitable Attachment is simultaneously melancholy and hopeful about the future of Englishness as exemplified by the parish community of North London, Pym’s novel of manners also notes changes in the minutiae of English life and character as evidenced through the marriage of Ianthe Broom and John Challow. In Ianthe, the narrative illustrates the adaptability and alteration of the Englishwoman in response to not just the “new man” but also the changing hierarchy of her corner of London. The Shadow of the Sun, too, foregrounds the trajectory of the educated middle-class woman in relation to the “new man” as Anna endeavors to access an independent artistic identity. This complicated realist narrative is as much about the attempt to find a form that can tell the story of the modern Englishwoman as it is about the protagonist’s struggle against the oppressive aggression of the “new man” and the institutionalized expectations of postwar womanhood. This novel too ends on a note of hesitant hope, but has the possibility of tipping over into despair for the young Anna. Both Pym and Byatt explore the difficulties of the formation of a female subjectivity as it butts up against postwar men. Both novels critically engage with the celebratory tropes of the narratives of the “new man” as written by Englishmen, deconstructing the homosocial triangle at the center of the Angry narratives and revealing the “new man” to be either oppressive or opportunistic or both. Yet both Ianthe Broome and Anna Severell, like the men with whom they are partnered, signal newness.