The Plays and Early Novels
Intersections
ÁNGELA RIVERA IZQUIERDO
Margaret Drabble became a writer because writing was a very convenient career to combine with having a family. However, she once declared, “My original ambitions were, in fact, theatrical. I longed to be an actress or a drama critic. I didn’t mind which; I simply wanted to be able to be in the theatre every night of my life” (Drabble 1993, 127). In 1960, at age twenty-one, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon with her then-husband, Clive Swift, and understudied Judi Dench and Vanessa Redgrave. She also had some walk-on parts but soon became pregnant with her first child. Having to comply with the requirements of child rearing and housekeeping, Drabble abandoned her acting career to focus on writing:
But then, in 1960, the feminist lobby had hardly got off the ground . . . and we were all merry little actresses and housewives and housewife-actresses trying to cook nice little meals and look after our babies and learn our lines and clean our silver and please everybody—trying, in short, to be paragons, with hardly a murmur of protest. . . . [W]hat happened was that I came to recognize that there was no place for a person like me either in the theatre or as a housewife in Stratford. Neither role would work. So I settled down to write the novels that eventually brought me a degree of autonomy and allowed me to laugh at the Brussels sprouts. (1993, 135–36)
3. Margaret Drabble rehearsing on stage at Cambridge University in 1959. © John Bulmer. Reproduced with permission from the photographer.
In her early novels of the 1960s, she wrote “about the situation of being a woman—being stuck with a baby, or having an illegitimate baby, or being stuck with a marriage where you couldn’t have a job” (quoted in Rose 1980b, 1). As a woman writer whose work is overtly gynocentric, Drabble has usually been labeled a feminist writer (e.g., Libby 1975; Rose 1980a, 1980b, 1988; Greene 1988). However, some scholars prefer to call her a “cautious feminist” (Beards 1973), highlighting the almost pathological passivity and abnegation of some of her female heroines. Although Drabble’s women stand out for their endurance and resilience (Hardin 1973, 274), they usually find salvation in the most traditional places: men or children or both. Discussing The Waterfall ([1969] 1971), Drabble claimed that “I’ve been attacked really very seriously and I can only respect the attack by people who say that you should not put into people’s heads the idea that one can be saved from fairly pathological conditions by loving a man. People say that’s not how I can approach my life. There’s no guidance in that for me. And that’s true” (in Hardin 1973, 293).
Nevertheless, the British writer has been very explicit in warning that her early fiction was not intended to be a blueprint for everybody’s life but to depict the day-to-day situation of many women of her generation (Hannay 1987, 148). Moreover, she has admitted that those early works contain “an awful lot of incidents out of my own life” (in Hardin 1973, 294), so they can be assumed to be highly autobiographical.
Undeniably, Drabble excels in portraying the development of usually young, intellectual women under the social and cultural constraints imposed upon them by patriarchy. Ellen Cronan Rose has wisely pointed to Simone de Beauvoir’s impact on Drabble’s life, suggesting that Drabble’s first three novels—A Summer Bird-Cage ([1963] 1967), The Garrick Year ([1964] 1982), and The Millstone ([1965] 1968)—be read “as a translation into fictional form of Part II of The Second Sex” (1980a, 81). Rose refers here to book 2 of de Beauvoir’s feminist manifesto, which begins with her single most famous assertion—“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1953, 273). With this claim, de Beauvoir challenges biological essentialist approaches to gender to support a social constructionist position. The volume traces different stages of a woman’s life (from birth to old age) and examines female gender stereotypes (the wife, the mother, the single woman, the lesbian, the prostitute, etc.) to present women’s subjugated position in society as a result of gendered patterns of upbringing that enforce clearly delineated gender roles. Although Drabble’s fiction is concerned with women’s issues and the quest for female self-development, it is worth noticing that Drabble does refer to a certain “female nature,” reproducing—or perhaps ironically deconstructing—the discourse of “biology as destiny.”1 If she can be called a feminist, she nonetheless “lacks the idealism that active feminist politics demands” (Beards 1973, 35). More than anything, Drabble considers herself a realist, and this outlook sometimes clashes with a positive feminist standpoint. In an interview with Drabble published in 1987, John Hannay brought up feminists’ potential dissatisfaction with the more self-sacrificing character of women than of men in her fiction. Drabble’s response was thought-provoking: “Well, they [feminists] may find it unsatisfying, but do they find it unrealistic? I mean, is one portraying life as it is, or life as it should be?” (148).
As Virginia Beards contends, Drabble’s outlook on male oppression and sexual liberation is rather grim, and “her conclusions are often nihilistic and suggest sexual tyranny is here to stay” (1973, 35–36). In fact, Drabble has expressed disapproval of fairy-tale endings, in particular Jane Austen’s, which she finds deeply immoral and unrealistic (as stated in Stovel 1994, 163). Unlike the Regency writer, she “follows her heroines beyond the happy-ever-after ending” (Stovel 1994, 164), offering a comprehensive insight into the problems of marriage and motherhood.
Drabble’s novels of the 1960s share the thematic scope of her two plays. The protagonists of these novels are usually middle-class, university-educated women, whose concerns reflect those of the author at the time. They all are “extremely difficult women,”2 full of contradictions and “destroyed by diametrically opposed forces” (Hardin 1973, 281). Sarah Bennett of A Summer Bird-Cage is an Oxford University graduate, suspicious of marriage but afraid to be single. Although she asserts that “the days are over, thank God, when a woman justifies her existence by marrying,” she eventually abandons her academic career because “you can’t be a sexy don. It’s alright for men, being learned and attractive, but for a woman it’s a mistake” (Drabble [1963] 1967, 74, 183–84). In The Garrick Year, Emma Evans declines a job offer in London so that she can accompany her actor husband to the Garrick Theatre Festival in Hereford. Emma blames her marriage for stripping “my independence, my income, my twenty-two inch waist, my sleep, most of my friends . . . and many more indefinite attributes like hope and expectation” (Drabble [1964] 1982, 10). Tired of the dullness of her role as housewife and mother, she decides to have an affair with her husband’s director. However, she never consummates the affair and eventually reconciles with her husband because “one just has to keep on and to pretend, for the sake of the children, not to notice” (172). The protagonist of The Millstone, Rosamund Stacey, does choose economical and emotional independence, deciding not to marry but to raise her illegitimate child on her own. Nonetheless, she is obsessed with her academic career and her selfish love for her daughter and rejects her sexuality and any significant relationship with another human being. In Jerusalem the Golden ([1967] 1969), Clara Maugham escapes not from an unhappy marriage but from a hostile mother. She is given a grant to study in London and abandons her provincial town to pursue freedom and a sense of independence. However, she reaches autonomy only by avoiding reconciliation, instead rejecting her past and disowning her mother. The neurotic heroine of The Waterfall, Jane Gray, is an agoraphobic poet recently deserted by her husband and about to bear her second child. Cocooned in her solitary, womblike room, she is nursed through childbirth by her cousin and her cousin’s husband. She is resigned to lethargy and inactivity, and her meaningless existence seems to make sense only through motherhood and her incestuous love affair with her cousin-in-law. This affair simultaneously liberates and subjugates her; she relishes her newly discovered bodily pleasures but falls into sexual bondage, feeling “inarticulate, compelled, from such depths of need that it frightened her” (Drabble [1969] 1971, 149).
Drabble’s protagonists suffer from alienation and deal with existential angst. As Mary Eagleton eloquently puts it, “All these young women are caught within expectations, conflicting desires, and social change. They want sexual liberation but are still close to convention, want marriage but not at the price of losing independence, want to pursue qualifications but think of babies” (2014, 184).
In her two plays, Drabble further develops the thematic preoccupations of her novels. They include women’s domestic entrapment, the conflict between marriage and career—the “brains and breasts dichotomy” (Cunningham 1982, 137)—and Drabble’s “bleak pessimism” regarding loving and marriage (Beards 1973, 35). Like Sarah, Rosamund, and Clara, the protagonist of Laura (1964) is a young, well-educated woman facing a personal crisis. She resembles Emma Evans the most, being both approximately the same age and a married mother. Laura was aired the same year as the publication of The Garrick Year and undeniably represents a particular moment in the author’s life. Like her female heroines, Drabble had to give up her initial career aspirations to devote herself to the domestic sphere. Emma’s words could have been Drabble’s: “I was condemned to familiarity, which beyond anything I find hard to maintain with ease. There seemed to be nobody in the company that I would like, and no opportunity to meet anyone out of it, apart from the girl who handed me my books in the public library” (Drabble [1964] 1982, 69).
Laura, sometimes with apathy and other times with antipathy, also faces loneliness. Confined to her house and the care of her newborn, she is denied the possibility of seeing another adult human face before her husband comes back from work—excluding the milkman and the health visitor. Laura’s monotonous routine is interrupted by the unexpected visit of her friend Caroline, which recalls that of Mary Summers in The Garrick Year. In that novel, Emma thinks to herself: “It did cross my mind as we talked that our lives had turned out quite neatly upside down: she was to have had the early marriage and the children, I was to have had the independent and faintly intellectual career. I wondered what had turned us over ourselves: the world, or accident” (Drabble [1964] 1982, 76).
These women’s happiness seems to have been strained by marriage and motherhood. In fact, both The Garrick Year and Laura offer interesting insights into Drabble’s stance on motherhood. The author has been widely regarded as the “novelist of maternity” (Showalter 1977, 305) for her detailed depiction of the mother–child relationship. Ann Rayson argues that Drabble “views motherhood not as an institution under male control . . . but as the relationship of a woman to her powers of reproduction and to her children” (1978, 43). She further states that “domesticity, instead of contributing to her depression and sapping her creativity, spurs a Drabble woman to achievement,” with childbearing being depicted as “a positive aspect of female sexuality and self-identity” (43). She concludes that the Drabble woman is “a natural for pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood” (46), able to accept easily her maternal responsibilities. But Rayson’s description of Drabble’s women is completely at odds with Emma’s and Laura’s reality. Emma accuses her husband of committing legalized rape (Drabble [1964] 1982, 63) and rages about her domestic situation: “After thirteen months we had Flora. I was furious: she was David’s responsibility, we owed her to his carelessness. I was appalled by the filthy mess of pregnancy and birth, and for the last two months before she was born I could hardly speak to him for misery” (27).
Nonetheless, Emma also acknowledges that “somehow, after she was born . . . I was devoted to Flora, entirely against my expectations, so that every time I saw her I was filled with delight and amazed relief” (27). As Drabble herself has commented, “Emma’s trying very hard to be sensible. She is one of the women who suspects that her nature is really rather wild and dangerous. Emma says, yes, although I’m a mad modern woman, I will do this for a little bit” (in Hardin 1973, 281).
In The Garrick Year, Drabble depicts motherhood as a source of both frustration and great joy. In Laura, she pays particular attention to the potential negative side of it. Laura suffers from postpartum depression and can barely feel anything for her baby: “I hang around waiting for a great flow of maternal love to overwhelm me, like it says in the books. But it just doesn’t happen” (p. 27). However, her husband depicts her behavior as almost bipolar: “One minute she can’t bear the sight of the baby and the next she’s hugging it and kissing it like nothing on earth” (p. 39). Laura is very much aware of the fact that her maternal responsibilities and her economic enslavement prevent her from having a life of her own. Nonetheless, like Emma Evans, she is stubborn and contentious and rebels against her situation. She tells her husband, “I hate this house, I hate every corner of this horrid, ugly, boring little house. I’d bloody well leave you and everything in it this instant if I could” (p. 31). Yet although she considers men “a nasty, selfish, thoughtless lot,” she also acknowledges, “However much I may dislike men, that doesn’t mean they’re not necessary. In fact, precisely what I dislike about them is the fact that they’re necessary” (p. 43). Laura does not fit in the category of the passive, self-sacrificing woman who revels in domesticity. As such, the play certainly contributes to a deeper understanding of Drabble’s oeuvre and impels a reassessment of her view of womanhood, housewifery, and maternity. Unlike Rosamund or Emma, Laura does not find salvation in her role as a mother but rather considers it the direct cause of her frustration. In the play, Drabble moves away from the conception of the young, intelligent woman who despises marriage but embraces maternity to disestablish the myth of motherhood as women’s true, unquestionable destiny.
Bird of Paradise (1969) also thematically parallels Drabble’s early works. The protagonist, Sophy West, is a very complex and contradictory character, similar to Drabble’s previous heroines. She is a successful entrepreneur leading a fashion company, but she is also an unhappy housewife and mother, physically abused by her insensitive husband. In front of the media, she behaves as a frivolous, vain woman who overtly depends on her husband. However, she is the mastermind behind the company and the one who makes the business decisions. Quite significantly, in both The Millstone and Bird of Paradise Drabble introduces the figure of the effeminate man: George and Lacey, respectively. Moreover, she takes up the theme of appearance versus reality, explored in depth in The Garrick Year.3
It is relevant to compare Drabble’s early novels and plays not only in terms of their themes but also in terms of narrative strategy. In her first three novels (A Summer Bird-Cage, The Garrick Year, and The Millstone), Drabble uses first-person narration, restricted to her solipsistic female protagonists’ point of view. In Jerusalem the Golden, she turns to third person solely, moving from Clara’s point of view to her lover’s. These four novels are deeply rooted in reality, with relatively simple plots and linear chronologies. Similarly, Laura is a conventional television kitchen-sink drama in the naturalistic tradition. In her article “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in the Post-war Novel” (1987), Drabble comments upon this tradition: “In the drama also, though perhaps more hesitantly, realism had entered, and the smell of frying liver and onions that filled the auditorium on the first night of Arnold Wesker’s kitchen-sink drama Roots in 1959 marked yet another stage in the representation of reality” (3).
In this article, Drabble extols the work of Charles Percy Snow, which she laments was “mocked by a younger generation of writers as prosaic, unadventurous stylistically and, in an old-fashioned derogatory sense, ‘realistic’—‘realistic’ being used here in contradistinction from the more favorable term ‘experimental’” (1987, 4). Nonetheless, she also observes that the English writer never pressed against the limits of decorum; he did not question the nature of the reality he attempted to represent, nor did he question his own relationship as author to that reality (6). Snow’s positivism separates him from other younger, “gloomier” writers, who stand out for “their bad manners, their deliberate overstepping of the bounds of decorum, their unwillingness to conform to literary or social conventions” (6). As examples of these writers, Drabble mentions the Angry Young Man school of provincial or lower-middle-class novelists and playwrights such as John Wain, John Braine, Kingsley Amis, Arnold Wesker, Alan Sillitoe, and John Osborne, who most certainly influenced her. However, these writers’ innovation was mainly one of subject matter; they dealt with issues that had not been “previously exposed to the wearied gaze . . ., admitted to the general literate consciousness” (6). One of these new striking subjects was that of women’s experiences. Although Laura is conventional in form, it is not so much in theme. As Drabble herself has noticed, the Angry works were mostly “aggressively masculine and frequently misogynist,” whereas “women’s voices, in these post-war decades, were quiet and ladylike” (1995, 219). Laura helped subvert this view of women, contributing to the limited tradition of “Angry Young Women,” represented primarily by Shelagh Delaney and Ann Jellicoe.
More importantly, Drabble also refers to certain innovations in women’s writing in terms of narrative technique. As she notices, the “new woman” writing in the postwar world needed to forge new modes to express her reality. As an example, she mentions Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), which she describes as follows: “This complex, experimental, synthesizing work is truly original, and it attempts through its very form to represent the multifaceted, irreducible, shocking, shifting, contradictory nature of experience itself, in its personal, physical, sexual, political, public, psychological entirety, in its weird jumble of the accidental and the deeply-rooted—an attempt to represent reality without omissions” (1987, 7–8).
Drabble has admitted to having “a particular affection for the realist tradition of the novel” and to descrying “its persistence in perhaps unlikely forms” (1987, 12). Moreover, she “distrust[s] fictions that have become so self-reflecting that they cease to reflect the outside world in any recognizable way” (12).4 If Drabble admires Lessing, it is for the effect produced by the devices Lessing uses. For Drabble, they “are not fictive devices introduced for the entertainment of literary critics; they are deeply serious, important, engaging”; they “never appear artificial or indulgent, and never hold up the narrative drive” (8–9). In Drabble’s view, Doris Lessing manages to depict “an increasingly complex, post-Freudian, self-aware, plural, fragmented society,” but the effect “is not one of self-doubt, of fragmentation, or failed experiment, but of a rich and varied representation of reality” (12). These comments are worth considering when looking at Drabble’s fifth novel, The Waterfall, and at her play Bird of Paradise.
The Waterfall features a protagonist who is an author; she writes the story of her own affair with her cousin-in-law. Like The Golden Notebook, Drabble’s novel is a work of metafiction, concerned with the complex nature of reality and the problems in representing it. The narrative switches between first and third person, subject and object, or autodiegesis and extreme heterodiegesis.5 According to Gayle Greene, Drabble’s manipulation of novelistic convention is revolutionary, “representing no less than a renegotiation of the ‘contract’ of the realist novel” (1988, 46). Greene describes The Waterfall as a “polyphonic,” scriptible, or “writerly” text, which makes the reader an active producer of meaning (46). In The Waterfall, Jane writes her own story in the third person, but this narrative is repeatedly interrupted as she comments on it in the first person. After the first forty-five pages, the narrative flow is suddenly disrupted as Jane addresses the readers directly: “It won’t, of course, do: as an account, I mean of what took place. I tried, I tried for so long to reconcile, to find a style that would express it, to find a system that would excuse me, to construct a new meaning, having kicked the old one out, but I couldn’t do it, so here I am resorting to that old broken medium. Don’t let me deceive myself, I see no virtue in confusion, I see true virtue in clarity, in consistency, in communication, in honesty” (Drabble [1969] 1971, 46).
Jane expresses herself in this way because she feels that the story told in the third person is dishonest, that she has not told the whole truth. She adds, “And yet I haven’t lied. I’ve merely omitted: merely, professionally, edited. This is dishonest, but not as dishonest as deliberately falsehood” (Drabble [1969] 1971, 46). Drabble comments on this self-concious manipulation of voice: “While employing many of the techniques of both the realist and the modernist novel, [the postwar writer] increasingly, over these last two decades, interrupts his own narrative to remind us that he is a factor in the narrative, that his presence must be taken into account, that he or she may fail, out of blindness or bias, or out of sheer embarrassment, to tell us all, to represent the whole” (Drabble 1987, 13).
In an interview with Peter Firchow, Drabble further stated, “I hate books which are deliberately confusing. I aim to be lucid. . . . I wrote the first chunk [of The Waterfall] in the third person and found it impossible to continue with, because it did not seem to me to tell anything like the whole story. And so I evolved. I didn’t intend when I started the book to have this shifting, but it did seem quite a useful device, having got it set up” (quoted in Rose 1980b, 58).
This response is fully consistent with Drabble’s own comments on mimesis and women’s writing, previously discussed in this essay. Drabble’s narrative strategy, like Jane’s, aims not to be deliberately confusing, deliberately experimental, but to represent the multifaceted nature of reality, to show how unattainable this reality is and how difficult it is to know anything like the whole story from a single perspective. Rose further suggests that this “transgression of traditional narrative forms” (1988, 88) may also be a sign of the author’s refusal to accept the oppresive phalogocentrism of Western culture and determination to provide alternative narrative strategies to articulate the feminine. Ellen Peel (1989) makes this same argument and identifies Drabble’s alternating narration as part of a “feminist aesthetic.” Peel remarks that this device often appears in feminist fiction with female protagonists and contends that it is particularly effective for expressing a feminist awareness of women’s condition, representing women as patriarchy has constructed them: as both subject and object.
To add to the text’s self-reflexivity, Jane claims authorship of The Waterfall and constantly makes references to the narrative itself: “At the beginning of this book, I deliberately exaggerated my helplessness,” and “So to plead its past imminence, as I did in this first chapter of this book, is illegitimate: a false plea, falsely based” ([1969] 1971, 226, 228). Moreover, when Jane speaks of finding an ending to the narrative (e.g., 230, 231, 238), she refers simultaneously to the narrative of her own tale and that of The Waterfall. The open-ended quality of the story, Greene contends, represents Drabble’s “repudiation of the telos of romance and of narrative’s tendency to ‘closure which is also disclosure’ of a single truth and a ‘containment’ of contradictions” (1988, 58). For Greene, this endlessness allows us to classify Drabble’s novel as an example of what Hélène Cixous called écriture féminine—the expression of the female body and sexuality in writing, a “female-sexed text” that rejects closure and privileges nonlinearity (Cixous 1976, 877).
Drabble’s path to innovation started with The Waterfall but also with her play of the same year, Bird of Paradise. Unlike Laura, Drabble’s second play is far from conventional, introducing many antinaturalistic features. Once again, Drabble presents the conflict between appearance and reality, the public and the private. Through the public interventions by Sophy and Lady Garfield, the spectator is led to judge the former’s behavior as superficial and bird-brained. However, the audience is then invited to witness Sophy’s private life (both domestic and professional), which radically changes their perception of the character. In the same way that Drabble breaks the narrative frame in The Waterfall, she breaks the fourth wall in the play, having both Sophy and her husband, Derek, address the audience directly. After appearing in an interview as “glamorous and stupid” (p. 50, italics omitted), Sophy walks to the center of the stage and tells the audience: “That was my public life. I appear to enjoy it, although I claim to dislike it. Now you can see an extract from my home life. Heavily edited, need I say” (p. 54). Soon after that, in a “didactic, factual tone” (p. 59, italics omitted), she steps out of character once more and presents the next scene to the spectators: “The next scene will be a brief and somewhat static tableau presenting my business—or one might call it professional life. To portray this, I will have to change my clothes” (pp. 59–60). She does so in full view while saying, “In a more natural time sequence, I’m allowed a little more time to get out of one costume and into another—but not much more, in fact. Sometimes I feel I’m doing what I’m doing right here—struggling out of one life into another, without time for a rest in between. I omit those sordid events, bed and breakfast; we can take it that they have been endured” (p. 60).
These two interventions certainly remind one of Jane in The Waterfall. Sophy also addresses the audience in a confessional mode to tell them the reasons for declining Mrs. Huntley Jones’s offer to buy Sophy’s business. Similarly, Derek steps out of character to justify his violent behavior toward his wife and to present himself as the victim of the story. All these metatheatrical elements serve to draw attention to the artifice of the fictional world and to expose the limitations of a single viewpoint. With both The Waterfall and Bird of Paradise, Drabble offers a plurality of perspectives—multiple points of view that add up to a deeper understanding of reality, getting as close as possible to the “whole truth.”
Drabble’s steady departure from tradition has led Roberta Rubenstein to speak of her “postmodern turn.” However, she places the author’s shift from realist and modernist conventions specifically in the mid-1970s (although she mentions in passing The Waterfall, published in 1969). According to Rubenstein, Drabble’s intrusive narrators and their references to the fictionality of the story as well as her use of intertextuality evince “her rather awkward position out on a limb, suspended somewhere between realism and postmodernism” (1994, 153). But can Drabble be called a postmodern writer? Dominic Head considers Drabble’s work part of a particular type of British postmodernism, one that sees postmodernist expression as a hybrid form that renegotiates tradition, as “a reworking of realism, rather than a rejection of it, and as a mode capable of generating an emotional response, beyond the distractions of self-conscious tricksiness” (2002, 229). In Head’s view, Drabble’s work represents an outstanding example of “how a version of realism might respond to the implications of postmodernity whilst retaining its own integrity and identity” (231). Undeniably, Drabble’s plays help us understand the development of her narrative technique, which began moving away from traditional social realism as early as the late 1960s. In particular, the metatheatrical devices that she uses in Bird of Paradise, which resemble the “postmodern” devices used in The Waterfall, planted the seed of her subsequent “experimentation” in her later works, which increasingly became more complex and self-referential. Drabble’s preoccupation with the long-silenced female experience of not-so-passive women such as Laura, together with her growing attempts to represent reality in rich and varied ways, lead one to think of her as a much more innovative writer than is sometimes thought.
Works Cited
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Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4: 875–93.
Cunningham, Gail. 1982. “Women and Children First: The Novels of Margaret Drabble.” In Twentieth-Century Women Novelists, edited by Thomas F. Staley, 130–52. Hampshire, UK: Macmillan.
De Beauvoir, Simone. 1953. The Second Sex. Edited and translated by Howard M. Parshely. London: Jonathan Cape.
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————. 1993. “Stratford Revisited: A Legacy of the Sixties.” In Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-visions of Shakespeare, edited by Marianne Novy, 127–36. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
————. 1995. Angus Wilson: A Biography. London: Secker & Warburg.
Eagleton, Mary. 2014. “The Anxious Lives of Clever Girls: The University Novels of Drabble, A. S. Byatt, and Hilary Mantel.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 33, no. 2: 103–21.
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1. In her chapter on Drabble in Women Novelists Today (1988), Olga Kenyon observes that Drabble “does not draw the sharp distinction made by later feminists between ‘female’ which implies biology, and ‘feminine’ which implies a cultural construct” (88). With regard to maternity, Kenyon argues, Drabble “merely glimpses what is problematic in the term ‘maternal instinct,’” but she “does not question how far women’s desire to have babies and maternal love are ‘innate’ or ‘constructs’” (88–89).
2. In her article “Rebelling against the Regency: Jane Austen and Margaret Drabble” (1994), Nora Foster Stovel discusses Drabble’s ambivalent attitute toward Jane Austen. She quotes Drabble’s interview with Bernard Bergonzi, in which Drabble accuses Austen of leading her heroines up to the altar and then leaving them there, “when clearly they were all extremely difficult women and were not for a happy life” (163). Stovel observes that Drabble’s protagonists are precisely that sort of women and praises the writer as “one of the first novelists to take us beyond the altar to show us the reality of marriage through gritty domestic detail” (165).
3. For a detailed analysis of this theme, see Stovel 1984.
4. Nonetheless, it is worth noticing that from a very young age Drabble was aware of the possibility or even necessity to subvert genre conventions. In “The Unheroic Mode,” Drabble’s Cambridge University senior thesis, she discusses “the curious impulse on the part of Euripides and late Shakespeare to play games with their own plots.” She refers to the magnificence of Shakespeare’s “games of illusion and deception and mistaking” and argues that in Cymbeline “Shakespeare was, effectively, in a deliberately posmodernist manner, deconstructing his own text, exposing his own stage devices to our incredulity, and inviting a very complex response.” She further contends that Shakespeare, “commenting on the very nature of the theatrical materials,” was “attempting some kind of apologia for the misuse of power,” for “within the implausibilities, ordinary, unheroic reality rings out,” introducing us into “the realm of bathos and survival” (Drabble 1993, 131, quoting her thesis).
5. Ellen Peel (1989) uses these terms as employed by Gérard Genette and refined by Susan S. Lanser. The term autodiegesis refers to first-person narration by a narrator who is the sole protagonist. The term heterodiegesis refers to third-person narration by a narrator with no place in the story world.