MARGARET DRABBLE - AS A FEMINIST

 

G. SUCHITRA

 

            Margaret Drabble, a British writer, is a recipient of Rhys Memorial Prize, (1966) Black Memorial Prize, (1968) John Llewelyn Rhys Prize 1969, James Tait Black Prize (1968) E. M. Forster Award (1973).

 

            She has for her contemporaries Doris Lessing, Mary Mac earthy, Iris Murdoch, P. D. James, Maureen Duffy, Jean Rhys.

 

            A number of women writers among the British novelists have made a significant contribution to feminism. Jane Austen, George Eliot, Brontes, Dorothy Richardson and certainly Virginia Woolf are among them. The themes they inaugurated had grown out of a new Feminine experience.1

 

            Feminism was not invented in the 20th century. It already entered English literature with the works of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1970’s. It later disappeared for 50 years and became an important strand of opinion in the second half of the 19th century. During the same period enor­mous changes were taking place in women’s daily lives and they were steadily gaining more power and freedom. This new stream of thought penetrated into the themes of writers.

 

            Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) of 19th century explo­res the question of how a woman ought to live in her Belinda. Susan Ferrier (1782-1854) differs from the average woman novelists. She shows how her heroine does not mind whom she marries, but now she lives in her marriage. Com­ing to Brontes, they had their sympathy with working women. Emily’s Wuthering Heights gives a moral equality between the women and men. Josephine was a religious feminist. Elizabeth Gaskell, like Charlotte Bronte, was inte­rested in the problems of single women.2 The female Shakespeare, George Eliot, was different from others in holding an exclusively feminine angle. Like Dickens she felt that the highest type of woman was the one who did beautiful loving deeds.3 Women novelists writing after 1850 could hardly have been unaware of ‘The Woman Question’. Margaret Oliphant had fresh and original claims of a wom­anly family.

 

            The cataclysmic social changes and radical cultural alterations in the last 20th century have brought new free­dom and along with it awesome responsibility to women. They have significantly altered the nature of reality for women. This has raised some of the deepest philosophical and psychological questions of our age. It is inevitable that these queries are embodied in the fiction of the period. It is equally inevitable they be probed by women. ‘These particular qualities’ in serious women-fiction are not limita­tions or confined insights, but rather revelations. They are experiences for all of us. So what took place was an evolution, not a revolution, in the portrayal of woman4 Moira Monteith in her A Challenge to Theory wants wri­ters, to have androgynous condition to depict an apt “new female model”.5 This is the “second stage” as a Freudian terms it. 6

 

            Margaret Drabble leisurely inspects patterns of female development and also the nuances of both male oppression and sexual liberation. Neither a missionary, nor an idealist, nor a prophet, she offers to the reader practi­cal limitations of the real world.7 The novels incisively diagnose female complaints. She explores the various opti­ons of women of today. The conversion of the sexual pro­test into novels is what makes her work interesting.

 

            Margaret Drabble’s first five novels–A Summer Bird Cage, The Garrick Year, The Millstone, Jerusalem the Golden, The Water Fall, focus on the bleak pessimism, regarding love and marriage. She aptly portrays the casual disasters of the women locked into heterosexuality and less radical life style. Her later novels are The Needle’s Eye and The Radiant Way. They deal with the question of women’s liberation.

 

            Bungled and achieved female self-definitions are consistent themes of her novels. Actually her women out to pay homage to patriarchy’s dearest forms. At a later stage, their increasing awareness of the absurdity of their sexual, social, and economic positions results in their befuddlement and self defeat-within the system.

 

            “The inevitable problems of the mid-twentieth century, woman provide the specific plot complications in all Drabble’s novels. Both female and male character is revealed and developed in relation to familiar feminist issues of educa­tion, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and economic dependence.

 

            In Drabble’s first novel A Summer Bird Cage (1963); Sarah comes down from Oxford with “lovely shiny, useless new degree”. She works as a tutor in Paris. She returns to England terminating her tutorship to attend to her sister’s marriage. In London her increased awareness of sexual in­equalities never frees herself from acting on her own. She becomes employed in BBC “filling things” and rejects an academic career.

 

            A Summer Bird Cage title indicated Drabble’s arti­stic preoccupation. She compares Sarah to a caged bird, which always longs for freedom. The themes of sexual conflict and domestic entrapment are developed in relation to several other “birds” as well as Sarah.

 

            She rejects to become a don. This rejection pro­vides a blow to patriarchy’s absurd attitudes about female attachment to the kitchen or bedroom. Her sister, Lousie, heavily drunk wearing a dirty underwear but elegantly dressed outside gets ready to marry a wealthy, irascible homosexual novelist as a way out of “The secretarial course­coffee bar degradation”. Her bizarre alternative shows the enormity of the marriage value in her upper middle class society and also as its corollary, female laziness and non­aggression.

 

            Drabble’s clear vision of the damaged female ego is never better expressed than in the Gillian anecdote in the novel A Summer Bird Cage. After bitterly complaining of her boredom to her painter husband, Gillian said she felt like a “still life”, He demanded her services as a “model, a domestic, and sexual partner”. Gillian is a female of developing consciousness. Her status in a marri­age of this type is untenable and so, like Nora, she leaves.

 

            Drabble’s consideration of what happens to intelli­gent but traditionally educated women in marriage is further developed in her later novels. The Garrick Year (1964) opens with a chilling scene. Its central character Emma Evans is literally being devoured by men. She is verbally assaulted by her actor-husband. She is forced to turn down an offer in television. Ironically he thinks that it offers equality of the sexes. Exhausted and aware that arguing will make her milk stop (to her voracious infant son) she passively listens to him in a classic double dumbness. A pathetic fear of loneliness, belief in family unity, twisted commitment to marriage stops her bidding farewell to her husband. Her devotion to marriage is suspect, since she has rejected him sexually. In fact, she practises appease­ment in agreeing to provincial theater adventure, that is enjoying sex with the company’s manager.

 

            The novel forces the reader to acknowledge the lopsidedness of patriarchal arrangements. The atmosphere of subjugation and up - against-the household wall fills The Garrick Year. The horror of the condition is clarified in the novel as it rarely is in life. It explores most tho­roughly the tension between domestic responsibility and wider ambition.

 

            Unmarried women who operate somewhat outside patriarchal values function better in Drabble’s world. With The Millstone (1965) she moves away from unhappy ma­rried traditional woman. It suggests a change in the author’s feminist consciousness, a search for alternatives.

 

            It is Margaret Drabble’s particular contribution to have devised a genuinely new kind of character and predicament. For many novelists the emancipated woman and the mother are two sharply different types. Drabble has shown that in the modern world the two roles are often combined in the same person. The Millstone is a lucid and moving exploration of the above problem. Her heroine, Rosamund Stacey, is a dedicated scholar completing a Ph.D., thesis (on Elizabethan poetry). After a single brief encounter with a young man with whom she has no particularly strong feelings about, she becomes pregnant. Drabble gives a compelling account of the complexities of pregnancy, as they impinge on a young woman who is psychologically quite unprepared for them. In her encoun­ter with gynecologists and midwives, Rosamund not only discovers unexpected things about her own physical and psychological makeup but by meeting the other expectant mothers who attend the clinic she is forced into an aware­ness of ordinary life and its attendant suffering, from which she is cut off in the enclosed world of scholarship. There develops a remarkable compassion and humility in her. Rosa­mund rejects not only abortion but also marriage that could legitimise her pregnancy. The knowledge that she is equi­pped to earn her living as a scholar allows her the free­dom to have a child. Conversely this is a common middle­class “female” reaction to motherhood. That is to use it as an excuse, not to succeed outside the home. Significantly, Rosamund successfully defines herself in relation to male values. That is, she does not want to get marry and live under male superiority. The Millstone about a guiltily vir­ginal intellectual whose one sexual encounter produces an illegitimate child, makes a neat inversion of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (but the ‘A’ stood for Abstinence not for Adultery). Rosamund’s position as unmarried mother and career woman, superficially a paradigm of modern feminism is firmly linked with its parallels like Bernard Shaw’s womes who want children but no husband.

 

            Drabble moves from the sexually inhibited female to the sexual usurer in Jerusalem the Golden. This covers still more liberationist’s territory. The social content of female sexuality and its usefulness, as barter is the focus. It also shows the female aimlessness caused by the pressure of cultural values. Unlike Sarah and Emma she is neither cha­ste nor too tired of excess sex. She effortlessly uses to gain deliverance from her humdrum provincial background of London. The pleasures, however, are neither sacred nor healthily profane. Clara admits to her lover Gabriel, “it doesn’t matter where I come from, but where you come from, that matters to me.....    All you are to me......is a

means of self advancement”. This idea culminated in sex as a social advancement. Like Emma of The Garrick Year and as Lousie, the sister of narrator of A Summer Bird Cage, she uses men to gain a dubious sort of identity and security. None of these women are able to relate themselves significantly to any activity apart or different from being a woman. This awareness of one dimensional nature of many women is at the center of all her novels.

 

            From A Summer Bird Cage to Jerusalem the Golden were associated with the new feminism of the 1960’s. They are less ambitious in moral and spiritual range, but correspondingly more specific about the day to day dichotomies between woman’s ambitions and the restrictions placed on her.

 

            The Waterfall pushes aside the social aspects of sexual relations to examine female sexuality per se. Drabble writes of a female destroyed by her physiology and culture. She rejects the cliche that eras of the way to happiness. Like its traditional prototypes (Sons and Lovers, A Portrait of the Artist Young Man, and The Magic Mountain), it concludes with the protagonist’s sense of isolation. The WaterFall, decimates the patriarchal cliche that women are content when loved. Thematically it refracts a vision of woman that is feminist as well as modernist. Jane Gray’s problem is isolation in a world of her own hypersentitive perceptions. The novel gets beyond specific feminist issues even while clarifying them. Jane learns of passion, but the desperation she experiences as a frigid semi-catatonic wife is largely converted into despair. It is one who is locked into the loneliness of “sexual bondage” a condition possible for either sex. Jane concedes in the arms of James:

           

            “I was released from my enclosure. I was able to go out now, with the children into the sun, because I was no longer bending upon these trivial fears and excur­sions. The whole force of my ridiculously powerful passi­ons .... one is not saved from neurosis, one is not released from the fated pattern.....but......one may find a way walking that predestined path more willingly”.(V)

 

            The belief in determinism is also clear in Drabble’s consistent equation of sex with death. Jane feels that she has been condemned “to an endless ritual of desire”, that sex is “dreadful, insatiable, addictive, black”. She is doo­med like her predecessors both in the fiction of Drabble and other novelists. She is trapped by the pressures of patriarchal society. Jerusalem the Golden, The Waterfall are attempts at revealing the consciousness of young women in love with more or less unsuitable men. They have mo­ments of psychological insight. They represent that aspect of Drabble’s art which is closer to women’s magazine fiction than to George Eliot or Henry James.

 

            In her influential commentary on women and writ­ing, The Laugh of the Medusa. Helene Cixious argues that women must “write woman” – (write of their own experience as sexual beings). Drabble indeed “writes woman” by revising several figures of classical tradition – named by Cixious like Medusa in The Radiant Way.8 She explores the sexual as well as the social experiences of three female characters Liz, Alix and Jilly Fox. They pass through a triangular friendship, which flourishes through marriage, divorce, motherhood and so on.

 

            Liz is a psycho-analyst. Alix marries - like many women of her generation – as “an alternative to a job” P. (98). Alix group includes the troubled young woman, Jilly Fox, incarcerated for drug-related offences. Claudio Volpe’s and Jilly Fox’s obsessional neuroses and their iden­tification with classical monsters amplify the less sensa­tional fears and neurotic elements in contemporary life.

 

            Jilly Fox’s grisly death forces Alix out of “stifled sexuality....... i.e., her desire to avoid normal sexual intercourse”. Like Liz Alix also learns at her New Year’s Eve party Charles’ adultery which makes her resort to self cho­sen celibacy. Liz had also read the text of sexual know­ledge literally silting astride her child-molester father’s knee. It is the guilt and shame of exploited “infantile’ sexuality”. This novel describes Drabble’s absorbing explorations of female sexual experiences through individual, and social contexts. Ultimately, Drabble balances the blood knowledge associated with sexuality with the potentially illuminating knowledge of emotional truth.9 Liz confronts the truth of her father’s sexual aberration. She experiences “a great sun....burning dully, in the back of her mind, just beyond vision” P. (396). At the conclusion, the three women friends, approaching “the devious way” homeward ascent is framed by the sun’s “dull.........red radiance.........The sun bleeds, the earth too........the earth too......The sun stands still”. The symbolism suggests the sobering truths of adulthood. Also the possibility of renewal through knowledge and female bonding. Each of the three female characters achieves a qualified self-affirmation. They also suggest the “complications in the sex lives of emancipated women today”.

 

            Also the novel focuses on the modern spiritual hollowness recalling Virginia Woolfian characters at the Liz’s  party. Delia (as in The Years), laments ‘time passing, times changing, the difficulties of keeping in touch”. Alix attends Liz’s party and later muses in a strikingly Woolfian insight.

 

            “In these discrete anonymous dark curtained avenues......we are all but a part of a whole which has its own, its distinct, its other meanings; we are not oursel­ves; we are cross roads, meeting places, points on a curve, we cannot exist independently for we are nothing but signs, conjunctions, agressions.”

 

            Alix Bowen’s Woolfian conviction brings out that human personality is a process, at once fluid and inter-connected.

 

            Drabble’s women are ill at ease with their bodies in the novels. We have much fake thrashing about and little real passion until The Waterfall. Drabble’s use of the first-person narrative works beautifully. A Summer Bird Cage is surely about marriage and sexual politics. But the narrator evades describing sex altogether. We have analysis but no explicit presentation of sex.

 

            In The Garrick Year Drabble wryly deploys the most subversive sexual myths of our time and moves clo­ser to sex. Unlike A Summer Bird Cage where other peo­ple’s sexual relations are analysed by a chaste narrator, the narrator’s emotional life is here under scrutiny. Emma Evans drifts into an affair to be consummated and, alas, simultaneously finished. As a portrait of the frigid sedu­ctive woman with a muddled concept of both male and female sexual rights, the novel is complete.

 

            Both technique and theme depend on the author’s manipulation of female awareness. The psychosexual vortex of the novel The WaterFall is fear, together with secrecy and dishonesty Drabble uses a personal narrative, Jane Grey, whose erotic development is the plot, nervously alternates from first to third person point of view. For inst­ance, in the novel’s Beginning the intimacies of an incho­ate love affair and child birth are sexually too volatile for Jane to tell directly. So she retreats behind third person pronouns. Narrative technique thus helps define the heroine and conflict. Jane after second child birth, after moribund marriage eases into first person point of view with emotional intensity and expression. One aspect of the Woolfian psyche in Drabble’s narrative, as in Mrs. Dalloway, is the explora­tion of the sources and meaning of deviancy, whether social, psychological, or sexual norms.

 

            As Gail Cunningham points out in her essay Dra­bble’s literary roots are clearly Victorian and Edwardian but her heroines provide a careful portrait of the contemporary women with crisis and conflicts unknown to her predece­ssors.10 Like the Victorian novelists she constantly insists in her work that moral problems are to be treated seriously. They ought be investigated within a meticulously charted social framework. Her themes and preoccupations suggest a high level of consistency. The dilemma of the centra­lity yet inadequacy of heterosexual relations for females runs through her novels,   but is fully expressed in the The Water Fall. Being both a feminist and a compassion­ate pessimist she has an interest also in man, society and civilization. She can relate isolation to causes deeper than those which are temporal and political. She undoubtedly, as Virginia K. Beards says, can explore questions that are finally human and impartial to sexual distinction........ 11

 

            Drabble herself sees nothing restrictive or unnatu­ral in novels being identified with the sex of the author. She is surprised at the claim made by some writers that no difference can be discerned between the products of male and female novelists. This does not, of course, necessarily imply that her own novels take a starkly feminist stance. A common accusation against Drabble’s fiction is that it remains essentially middle class, is too clearly reflective of the author’s own background and manifest advantages. The most admirable qualities of Drabble’s writing are as apparent in her first novel as in her latter too. The controlling intelligence, the deft handling of theme and structure, the ability to create genuine and original illumi­nation from the ordinary concerns of life, remain consistent.

 

 

PRIMARY SOURCES

 

I.          Margaret Drabble:        A Summer Bird Cage (Penguin-1963 - New York.)

 

II.         Margaret Drabble         A Garrick Year (Penguin-1964-New York.)

 

III.       Margaret Drabble         The Millstone (Penguin - 1968 - New York)

 

IV.       Margaret Drabble         Jerusalem The Golden (Penguin - 1967 - New York)

 

V.        Margaret Drabble         The Water Fall (Penguin - 1971 - New York)

 

VI.       Margaret Drabble         The Needle’s Eye (Penguin - 1973 - New York)

 

VII.      Margaret Drabble         The Radiant Way (Knopf - 1977 - New York)

 

REFERENCES

 

1 Merryn Williams: Women in English Novel – 1800-1900 (Macmillan - 1984, Lon­don) P. ix.

2 Virginia K. Beards: Margaret Drabble’s : Novels of a Cautious Feminist. (Prentice-Hall-1977 U. K) P-18 to 29.

3 Ibid

4 Mary Anne Dolan: ‘When Feminism Failed’ P. xi-xvi

5 Patricia Stubbs: Women and Fiction-Feminism and The Novel - 1800 - 1920 (Harvester Press-London - 1979) P. xv.

6 Moria Monteith: Women’s writing: A Challenge to theory. (Harvester Press-1986 London) P. 5.

7 Patricia Meyerspacks: Contemporary Women Novelists A Collection of critical Essays. (Prentice-Hall 1977 New Jersey) P. 18.

8 Roberta Rubenstein: Sexuality and intertexuality Margaret Drabble’s. The Radi­ant Way. (Contemporary Literature xxxi-­1989) P. 94 and 111.

9 Ibid

10 Thomas F. Staley: 20th Century Women novelists (Macmillan - London - 1985) P. 130-151.

11 Ibid: Page 29.

 

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