Laura

Historical Context

JOSÉ FRANCISCO FERNÁNDEZ

Margaret Drabble’s TV drama Laura (1964) can be seen as encapsulating the anxieties of young British women of the 1960s, in particular middle-class, urban, educated women. It represents all of the pressures and constraints of their time and place, albeit in a compressed form.

As with her early novels, Drabble drew on her own experience in the process of writing this play. She was a recent Cambridge graduate and would-be novelist who found herself stranded in a distant town, pregnant and bored with her daily life. Just like Laura, the protagonist, she was there because of her husband’s work, and she soon realized that this was not the life she had imagined for an educated woman of her qualifications: “I very soon found myself an incompetent housewife. I knew nothing about keeping house; I knew a great deal about English literature, and I soon found myself expecting my first baby. The combination of being a very poor housewife, being pregnant, and being frustrated at lack of intellectual activity was what encouraged me to embark upon my first novel, and I wrote my first novel in the evenings while I was expecting that first child” (Drabble 1991, 63).

Drabble’s case was not, of course, unique at the time. Since the beginning of the 1960s, Elizabeth Wilson writes, newspapers had been describing the cases of “women from that tiny elite of girls who had made it to university, but who five years later found themselves doing the same job of housework and child care as the girls who had left school at fifteen” (1977, 160). These intelligent women, trapped in marriage and in a lifestyle similar to that of their mothers, discovered that the welfare state, the superstructure that encompassed the lives of British men and women in the decades after the Second World War, was a net that could ensnare and suffocate those within it. The welfare state was grounded on the principle of egalitarianism and aimed at achieving greater social justice. Higher taxation of the rich meant that the state could afford a more democratic distribution of wealth through a comprehensive system of benefits and services that addressed social needs, including a social security system that provided pensions and unemployment benefits, universal health care and education, and housing for the poor.

2. Margaret Drabble rehearsing on stage at Cambridge University in 1959. © John Bulmer. Reproduced with permission from the photographer.

Although the welfare state guaranteed the provision of health care, education, and other benefits to the whole population, it also effectively reinforced specific social roles, including a clear idea of where women should be. Indeed, since its inception in the years prior to the end of the Second World War, the welfare system had discriminated against women. Jeremy Colwill has shown, for example, how the social security scheme developed through the Beveridge Report (1942), in being based on a contributory model not normally applicable to women, simply strengthened patriarchal principles, underlining the role of the husband as the breadwinner in the family. For administrative purposes, women became dependent subjects: “The acquisition of housewife status with its accompanying unpaid domestic labourer role with which women were endowed upon marriage was to be directly reflected for social security purposes in the acquisition of a new identity” (1994, 56).

In Drabble’s play, Laura burns with rage at being treated as an underage person, venting her anger at everyone around her because of a system that has placed her in a cage and that in return demands acquiescence and conformity. She has just had a baby, and her life centers around the twenty-four-hour attention she must give to the newborn child. She does not know anyone in her new surroundings and spends her days alone, frustrated and depressed. Her situation is seen more clearly when a friend from former times, Caroline, pays an unexpected visit. Caroline has just returned from Milan and, being young and single, still lives the life of freedom and leisure that Laura herself, it is implied, had enjoyed just a year or two earlier. When Laura’s husband, Bill, arrives home from work, the suggestion is made that the three of them go out, yet the presence of the baby reminds them how drastically Laura’s and Bill’s lives have changed. Using the structural elements provided by the story of this frustrated housewife, based on the author’s own experiences, Drabble also takes the opportunity to critically observe the state of the nation from the main character’s point of view, thus painting a quite different picture of the welfare society than the official version promoted by the authorities. Drabble seems to confirm the idea that although social planners certainly provided conditions for British citizens that were better than those of the prewar years, they somehow maintained the same social hierarchy: “What was done—and it was a lot—was the result of truly noble vision, but inevitably circumscribed by the country’s economic situation, by the continuing barriers and preoccupations of class, by the nature of traditional welfare institutions, and by the perceptions planners had at the time of major social issues, perceptions clouded by a knowledge of life as it had been, rather than by an understanding of life as it would be” (Marwick 1982, 63).

In the play, we are presented with a depiction of modern, affluent times, an openness to international currents of thought, and the emergence of new technologies and alternative lifestyles that have become a salient feature of Western democracies. In many ways, however, particularly with regard to the position of women, underlying attitudes remain the same, as commentators on the period have remarked: “Yet, perhaps paradoxically, changes in the family and economy have not necessarily altered traditional gender roles or the structures of society that have upheld traditional gender ideals” (Smith Wilson 2005, 245). Laura is basically the story of a woman who does not conform to the role assigned to her and who tries, ineffectually, to revolt. She may not gain independence or intellectual fulfillment by the end of the play, but she is a voice of rebellion within the home, stubbornly resisting the pressures that subdue her. Thus, she obtains an inner satisfaction from the bathetic denouement of the play, when she decides not to go out for a meal. Given the circumstances, this choice can be seen as the only course of action that she can take, but it is a decision that she herself makes, and so she considers it as something close to a triumph.

There are other examples of female assertion in the play that indicate that Laura will resist any attempt at being classified in her assigned role. Over the course of the morning, Laura receives visits by three people, and in all three cases she has to stand her ground. In the first, the milkman wants to collect his weekly payment. Laura consciously refuses to establish the kind of familiar and inconsequential banter between the stereotyped housewife and the cheeky milkman, demonstrating her unwillingness to play the game of the happy wife. When the milkman begins the conversation with the mock-affectionate “Morning, love,” she avoids any familiarity and demands her rights as a consumer: “I don’t want homogenized, I want ordinary pasteurized. Ordinary silver top. I don’t want any more of that homogenized, I never asked for it” (p. 14). When the milkman attempts to leave without returning the change of one penny, Laura demands to be treated in a fair manner, even for such a small, insignificant detail as this one: “Who the hell do you think I am, anyway?” She complains aloud when the milkman is gone. “What kind of idiot do you take me for?” (p. 15). The second visit is a clear representation of the emerging consumer society, the door-to-door salesman under the disguise of an interviewer. Again, the masculine mentality is shown to be pervasive in all manner of exchanges. After the cursory presentation, the salesman immediately asks Laura when the man in the house will be in so that he can explain to both of them the benefits of his encyclopedia for their child. What he does not expect is that the tables are turned and that Laura, with her inquisitive mind, puts things in their place: “What did you say you represented? . . . Are you in any way connected with the Education Authority? . . . What exactly are you trying to sell?” (p. 17). When the salesman tries to escape this barrage of unexpected questioning, once again insisting on the presence of the breadwinner, Laura retorts that she is “an unmarried mother” (p. 17), implying that even in the liberated 1960s single motherhood would still be a shocking piece of news.

The third individual who threatens an assault on Laura’s autonomy is a more complex figure than the previous two because she represents more than any other the new social system of welfare. In order to reduce maternal mortality and provide adequate care for newborns, the National Health Service used health visitors and social workers to instruct mothers about hygiene and baby care, although their advice was not normally well received: “[Health visitors] were employed to visit and advise all mothers after the birth of a baby. In practice, visiting targeted the poorest women who viewed the health visitor with a mixture of respect and suspicion. The health visitors were in an awkward position as they were trying to change mothers’ attitudes and behaviour in a very personal context” (Jones 2014, 65–66).

Certain women, in particular those who had had a proper education and belonged to the middle class, often perceived the presence of the health visitor as the intrusion of the state in a citizen’s private life. Accordingly, in Laura, instead of presenting the health visitor as someone interested in people’s well-being, Drabble invests in her the authority of a guardian, keen on controlling and watching citizens instead of providing them with helpful information and advice. Drabble’s description of the health visitor, almost identical to the cliché of a female prison warden or a headmistress in a school, is indicative of the fracture that she sees in the high ideals that informed the creation of the welfare state: “The health visitor is a shabby, well-bred little woman dressed in the regular uniform, which is a bit battered. Her manner is apologetic but at the same time mildly censorious” (p. 19, italics omitted). Health and social workers, such as the one described by Drabble, are to be seen in this context as agents of the dominant ideology that reinforces a particular vision of society and monitors women so that they do not deviate from that model. In social work, according to Elizabeth Wilson, the emphasis was “on the reinforcement of traditional forms of family life” rather than on the official aim of bringing the bureaucracy of the state closer to people (1977, 83–84).

Although it is evident that Laura is a responsible mother who feeds and takes care of her baby, including regular visits to the doctor, the health visitor insists that Laura take the baby to the clinic and that she herself must see the baby right then to check that everything is alright. “You are a good girl, I must say,” she says to a distressed Laura, “keeping on at it” (p. 21). Laura has to hide her disgust at the proceedings and to keep silent about her postnatal depression in order to conform to the role of good motherhood so as to earn the health authorities’ approval. Accordingly, in order to receive a pat on the back by the health visitor, she has to grudgingly submit and give vitamins to the baby even though her doctor has told her not to do it.

In short, the general feeling that the modern reader gets when reading Drabble’s play is that many women of this period felt uncomfortable with the provisions established for them in the new welfare state created in Britain after the war. As Alan Sinfield writes, “A central assumption of welfare capitalism was that the good state had in principle arrived, and only details needed attention” (1997, 203). Women had certainly been given acceptable levels of medical attention and education as well as a noticeable presence in the media, but the “small details” concerning personal autonomy, economic independence, and the breaking down of psychological barriers on gender took on a crucial importance in their daily lives. What Laura exemplifies is that the postwar change experienced in British society, at least in the sphere that affected women, was incomplete and that there was still a long way to go toward equality: “women participating in the great causes of the time became sharply conscious of their own subordinate position, of their own rights, and of the blatant withholding of them” (Marwick [1998] 1999, 679). The voice of the protagonist in Laura is a prime example of this attitude.

An additional aspect must be considered here to gain the fullest picture of the social environment depicted in the play: the issue of class. Just as Laura and Bill are geographically apart from the hubbub of London, where they think they belong, they are also installed in a no-man’s-land in their new surroundings: the city where they live may not be a small town, but rather “the sixth-biggest city in England” (probably Sheffield), yet from their point of view it is still a remote province. They are members of the lower middle class who were raised in the new culture of equality, and therefore they had become accustomed to the provision of certain services: “The children who grew up with free milk, orange juice and cod liver oil, alongside the new educational opportunities also established in the 1940s, are often seen as a distinctive generation with a sense of entitlement” (Hill 2005, 151).

However, Laura and her husband, despite being educated, lack the means to lead the comfortable life of the professional middle class, and therefore they find themselves in the paradoxical situation of sharing the habits and attitudes of the middle class but not the means of achieving the associated lifestyle. “Money” is the blunt answer Laura gives to Caroline when she inquires about what compelled them to move up north. Bill, who used to do research in the past, has been offered some kind of administrative work, and, says Laura, “since we hadn’t a penny between us we thought we’d better come” (p. 25). Caroline, who represents the affluent youth of the 1960s (she has just come from Milan to attend her grandfather’s funeral), considers it “frightful” (p. 25) having to work for money in this way. From their conversation, it becomes evident that things such as going to the cinema, going out for a meal, shopping, and so on were part of their past habits just two years earlier, when they had an active social life (presumably in London). In their new situation, before the married couple can establish themselves in better economic circumstances, they must share some of the traits of the working class: Bill cannot offer Caroline a proper drink; they cannot afford a dryer and hang wet nappies in the kitchen; and going out for dinner is an extraordinary event. It is significant that Bill cannot find anyone to babysit, nor can he find an acquaintance or a coworker to stay with the baby that night, which reinforces their awkward social position: they do not have the money to have an au pair (“A great status symbol, you know, a girl,” says Bill [p. 38]), but they do not have the social skills to turn to their neighbors, either, to which Caroline retorts: “Too well bred, that’s what you are. The isolation of the middle classes. Now if you were ye good old working stock, you’d all be in and out of each other’s houses all day long, wouldn’t you? And you’d be able to park your baby on anyone, wouldn’t you?” (p. 38).

Drabble herself has always been fascinated by the ideal of working-class solidarity, and this image is a recurrent feature in her novels. The loss of the sense of community, which was characteristic of socially cohesive neighborhoods in England in the period before the war, appears to be the price that the educated middle class had to pay as part of their progress up the social ladder in the postwar decades. In comparison to middle-class detachment, the working class for Drabble might seem to represent a lost arcadia of sharing and belonging, especially for women. This is how Drabble, for instance, re-creates the affective and emotional atmosphere experienced by the group of factory women who are the protagonists of Up the Junction, the book by her friend and fellow novelist Nell Dunn: “The humour and the energy, the violence and the freedom were exciting. Nobody pretended, nobody was pretentious. It seemed a real world, where women could lead real lives. They did not seem oppressed, despite their low pay. There was a sense of matriarchy. Women were strong, openly strong, rather than deviously influential” (Drabble 1988, x–xi).

The achievement of dignity and status, eventually provided by the inclusion of the couple in the comfortable realm of the middle class, also implies the abandonment of the dream of living in a caring community. What Drabble’s plays articulate is the idea that this progress is not achieved without leaving valuable things behind and that class boundaries do still matter in the democratic society of the postwar era.

Works Cited

Colwill, Jeremy. 1994. “Beveridge, Women, and the Welfare State.” Critical Social Policy 14, no. 41: 53–78.

Drabble, Margaret. 1988. Introduction to Nell Dunn, Poor Cow, ix–xvi. London: Virago.

————. 1991. Margaret Drabble in Tokyo. Edited by Fumi Takano. Tokyo: Kenkyusha.

Hill, Lesley A. 2005. “Sexuality.” In A Companion to Contemporary Britain 1939–2000, edited by Paul Addison and Harriet Jones, 145–63. Oxford: Blackwell.

Jones, Helen. 2014. Health and Society in Twentieth Century Britain. New York: Routledge.

Marwick, Arthur. 1982. British Society since 1945. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

————. [1998] 1999. The Sixties. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Sinfield, Alan. 1997. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain. London: Athlone Press.

Smith Wilson, Dolly. 2005. “Gender: Change and Continuity.” In A Companion to Contemporary Britain 1939–2000, edited by Paul Addison and Harriet Jones, 245–62. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wilson, Elizabeth. 1977. Women and the Welfare State. London: Tavistock.