PREDICAMENT OF WOMEN IN THE
NOVELS OF MARGARET DRABBLE
Reddy, P. Thirupathi
Margaret Drabble is
one of England’s best novelists, says C. P. Snow.1 Her popularity is due mainly to the appeal
of her work, acclaimed at once by the general public and discerning critics.
She has been called “a central chronicler of contemporary urban middle class
life”. 2 The accent
is on the contemporary, Drabble giving voice to common problems, particularly
as they affect modern British women in the sixties and seventies. Interestingly,
though, she writes from a feminist position, she is known because of her
contribution of a genuinely new kind of character and predicament that is in
conflict with current notions of feminism. An attempt is made in this paper to
highlight this aspect in each of her early novels where it is a predominant
concern.
Though some critics
have labelled her, disdainfully, as “a novelist of maternity”, the truth is
that Drabble’s work is resonant with the problems of modern men and women. She
examines with subtlety and moral acuity the very tissue and structure of
women’s lives, “exposing the social-political-spiritual paucity of traditional
avenues of middle class female self-fulfilment”. 3 Margaret Drabble herself refers to these
issues thus “...in my earlier novels, I 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 could not have a job.” 4 Her female protagonists - who are
predictably central to her novels,
rather than men - are caught in the above predicaments. Sarah Bennet in her first novel, A Summer
Bird-Cage (1963), for example, is indecisive about how to shape her life in
view of the bird-cage of female identity she sees played out in the lives of her
sister and friends. Sarah is a typical Drabblesque heroine sharing with her
later counterparts the situation of a modern, attractive, educated,
emancipated, intellectual, aspiring, but sexually cold young women.
The predicament
featured in A Summer Bird-Cage relates to marriage in the context of
educated women who have just left the universities with good academic records.
At a loose-end, after the comforting routine of a spell with the family and
another at the university, Sarah thinks of “what a girl can do with herself if
overeducated and lacking a sense of vocation.” As one could guess, one answer,
which her sister Louise comes up with, is marriage. But, soon enough, Sarah
feels “sick with myself and sick with the whole idea of marriage and sickest of
all with Louise,” when that empty marriage based wholly on money founders on
the rocks of incompatibility. A Summer Bird-Cage is a study in contrast
of two sisters, Sarah and Louise. They are similar opposites, though, Sarah is
not aware of her similarity with her demanding, selfish sister Louise. Young
and inexperienced, and setting much store by love, unlike Louise, Sarah still
wants to “have one’s cake and eat it.”7 Her brother-in-law, Stephen Halifax, is
neurotic, undersexed and incapable of love. Her friend Gill blunders into
marriage too, only to find that her artist-husband Tony expects her to play the
wife to his dominant male. This is another message for Sarah who is in the
irksome predicament of isolation. In love with her beautiful body yet hesitant
to offer it except on her own terms and to her lover Francis who is away in
America, Sarah feels, “everyone had lovers and babies and husbands but me.” She
is confused about her career, unable to see herself as a sexy don, she tells
John that beyond anything she would like to write a book. The novel ends at
this point, with Sarah waiting to take up her life again, to see if she has
kept faith in Francis who is on his way home.
Motherhood comes to
the fore in Drabble’s second novel The Garrick Year (1965), Already into
marriage, which Sarah contemplates, Emma Evans is caught the predicament of a
young mother who has to sacrifice her career. Burdened by the chores of
housekeeping and child-rearing, she finds that her young daughter Flora,
ironically enough, is the source of her joy and despair. Emma finally “gives up
the here and now for the sake of the hereafter.” 9 She is helpless to prevent herself from extramarital affair with
Wyndham, the friend of her actor-husband, David. She calls it, however, her
failure to grow. She gives up a job in London much to her regret, but she is
also a responsible mother who dives into the river to save her drowning
children even while talking to her lover. She accepts the value and the
limitations of her life with David and the children. Feminists would scoff at
this sentimental turn but for Drabble the mother is as important as the career.
The Millstone marks a new phase in the evolving motif of
the predicament of women. More credibly than in The Garrick Year, motherhood
poses a serious and subtle dilemma in The Millstone. As Marion Libby points out in an important
article on Drabble, fate plays havoc with the life of Rosamund Stacey, the
lovable and sociable heroine of the novel. Hardly enough, Rosamud’s sin is not
adultery or licentiousness but abstinence. “My crime was my suspicion, my fear,
my apprehensive terror of the very idea of Sex.” 10 She
pays a Victorian penalty for being
a Victorian at heart. A single, half-hearted sexual encounter leads to
pregnancy, this being seen as a stroke of fate by Marion Libby. 11 She decides, being a woman of strong will, to bring up the child herself. Engaged in serious research
and keen on a satisfying career based on it, She still has enough humanity left
to tell herself: “It was no longer a question of what, I wanted: this time
there was someone else involved. Life would never be a simple question of
self-denial again.” 12
Rosamund’s brush with
reality is painful once she decides in favour of the baby. Her sense of justice
is deeply offended at the way the weaker and the poorer mothers are given an
unfair deal in the maternity
homes. She realises that this
world of suffering is more real than her academic world of Elizebethan
literature. The predicament comes into focus when her motherhood and career
clash. These are two sides of the same coin according to Drabble. The
beginnings of hope in arriving at a positive solution for the apparently
inescapable trap that fate laid for her are seen in Rosamund’s insistence on
the life of the child to the astonishment of her friends. Finally she fulfills
herself by raising the baby, sticking to her career and sternly avoiding
marriage. She was very much like George, “I neither envied nor pitied his
indifference, for he was myself, the self that but for accident, but for fate,
but for chance, but for womanhood, I would still have been.”13 Rosamund has known love and known her child
Octavia with certainty, which raises her above the level of George.
In Jerusalem the
Golden (1967), we come across Clara Maugham, who is haunted by her family
and poor social origins. She is a naive, provincial girl with beauty, brains,
cunning, and sexual opportunism who leaves behind her a painful childhood in
the grim, industrial North (of England). Her search for life and survival as an
escape from her past, takes her across a familiar British landscape to a more
open, but ambiguous world. She finds in the Denhams her new fate to invalidate
the old. One finds in the Denhams her new fate to invalidate the old. One finds
in Clara Denham of her adopted family her news elf and in Gabriel Denham a
brother and a lover. Her own powerful will becomes an obstacle to her faith in
election. In a rare moment of self confrontation, she grasps the bare bones of
her existential and moral dilemma - “I am too full of will to love.”14 She gives up her mother who is dying, in
favour of her own future, “become she did not have it in her to die.”15 Clara is a survivor who does not hesitate to
buy her future at the cost of her past.
The tender and the
romantic is in focus in The Water Fall (1969) in which the protagonist
Jane Gray is caught in a peculiar predicament. She is saddled with a cold and
unromantic husband in Malcom who is nevertheless a responsible father though
she is passive and helpless to save herself, she is drawn to James, the husband
of her cousin Lucy, in whom she finds a romantic lover who allows her to pet
him. She is gnawed by a sense of guilt for snatching James away from her
cousin. The readers know more about Jane Gray because she turns out to be an
unreliable narrator. She is muddled. The novel questions the very stability of
character and their ability to understand one’s self and the world with
certainty.
The Needle’s Eye (1972) is perhaps Drabble’s best novel and it
captures the moral and emotional dilemma of Rose Vassiliou. There are two
central characters whose recollections and reflections generate and sustain the
reader’s interest. The predicament of Rose is again, that of Simon Camish -
both are married and in love with each other. It is Rose’s sweet, helpful
nature that precipitates the crisis when she donates a large sum of money to an
African charity. The incensed husband, Christopher walks out while she applies
for a divorce. The marriage stagnates; Rose’s gift to the charity proves
futile. In this impasse the children accentuate her predicament when
Christopher serves notice for the possession of the children.
The mother in her asserts herself as she fights a legal battle. Years
later, she gives in, the resolving her predicament through acquiescence. She
accepts a mellowed Christopher who is liked by the children. Drabble shows
repeatedly that she values such acceptance of responsibilities leading to
reconciliations.
This survey of the
theme of predicament of women shows that Margaret Drabble appeals to her Indian
readership because of her humanism. Love and children are things of value which
appeal to the Indian sensibility. The theme also emphasizes Drabble’s
perception of the changing realities in England in terms of the relations
between men and women, and the importance of family and marriage in modern
context.
References:
1 Quoted by Nancy Poland, Midwest Quarterly, 16,
3, 1975, P. 255.
2 Jualme V. Creighton, Margaret Drabble, (London:
Methuen and Company, 195), P. 14.
3 Ibid., P. 38.
4 Nancy Polan, Midwest Quarterly, P. 262.
5 A Summer Bird-Cage, (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London), P.
(All future references to page numbers of Drabble’s novels are to this
edition).
6 Ibid., P. 21.
7 Ibid., P. 63.
8 Ibid., P. 187.
9 The Garrick Year, P. 207.
10 The Millstone, P. 20.
11 Marion Libby, “Fate and Feminism in the Novels
of Margaret Drabble”, Contemporary Literature, 16, 5, 1975, P. 182.
12 The Millstone, P. 147.
13 Ibid., P. 199.
14 Jerusalem the Golden, P. 193.
15 Jerusalem the Golden, P. 239.