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Overview
British women in the second half of the 20th century have produced a body of work that is as diverse as it is entertaining. This book offers an informal, jargon-free introduction to the fiction of sixteen contemporary writers either brought up or now living in England, from Muriel Spark to Jeanette Winterson.
British Women Writing Fiction presents a balanced view comprising women writing since the 1950s and 1960s, those who attracted critical attention during the 1970s and 1980s, and those who have burst upon the literary scene more recently, including African-Caribbean and African women. The essays show how all of these writers treat British subjects and themes, sometimes from radically different perspectives, and how those who are daughters of immigrants see themselves as women writing on the margins of society.
Abby Werlock's introduction explores the historical and aesthetic factors that have contributed to the genre, showing how even those writers who began in a traditional vein have created experimental work. The contributors provide complete bibliographies of each writer's works and selected bibliographies of criticism. Exceptional both in its breadth of subjects covered and critical approaches taken, this book provides essential background that will enable readers to appreciate the singular merits of each writer. It offers an approach toward better understanding favorite authors and provides a way to become acquainted with new ones.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817391348 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 08/30/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 820 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
British Women Writing Fiction
By Abby H. P. Werlock
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2000 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9134-8
CHAPTER 1
Iris Murdoch: Mapping the Country of Desire
Roberta S. White
[Murdoch] uses love the way some Arab tribes in North Africa used mud to build whole cities. Sometimes she uses it as various agricultural people use fire to clear the land.
ANATOLE BROYARD
Love is the stuff of Iris Murdoch's twenty-four novels, out of which she erects her fictional structures. Love is also a narrative strategy she uses to burn off her own talkiness and tendency to abstraction, blasting away her characters' assumptions about themselves and making way for new growth. Murdoch seldom describes the workaday world; her settings, London and the English countryside, are heightened and energized by desire. In all its varieties, perverse and possessive to ennobling, love obsesses her characters and drives her plots; love is also one of the supreme, problematic concepts — love and the good — which she attempts to illuminate in both her philosophical writings and her novels.
Murdoch evidently conceives of her fiction as new space to be opened up and explored. In her first novel, Under the Net (1954), Jake observes that a novel is like a natural landscape: "Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape: you can see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing" (177–78). Fiction provides space for the discovery of experience and the testing of ideas. In the grand tradition of the nineteenth-century novel, Murdoch creates serious-minded characters, ample settings, and big old-fashioned plots with many twists. Her modernity manifests itself in the rootlessness of her characters, their uncertainty of identity, the dark comedy of their erotic life, and their sometimes desperate search for values in a world from which God is conspicuously absent.
Despite the length of her novels, Murdoch has no interest in producing histories or sagas. One therefore need not observe chronology in exploring her anatomy of love. Her novels resemble a series of experiments performed to reveal moral, psychological, and spiritual aspects of human behavior. Frequently she puts in motion an instance of obsessive love or desire and then scrutinizes, in a sympathetic but rather clinical way, the psychological and moral states induced in the lover, who is usually male and rather weak. The results often prove comic, but only because Murdoch judges humans by the highest standards of behavior; her novels are suffused with human sympathy as well as high intelligence. Moreover, according to Murdoch's Platonic philosophy, sexual love, for all its inherent comedy, is also a powerful energy capable of assuming higher forms. In her book on Plato and art, The Fire and the Sun (1977), she claims that "Plato's Eros is a principle which connects the commonest human desire to the highest morality and to the pattern of divine creativity in the universe" (33). The event of falling in love, she writes, "is for many people the most extraordinary and most revealing experience of their lives, whereby the centre of significance is suddenly ripped out of the self, and the dreamy ego is shocked into awareness of an entirely separate reality" (36). On yet another level, the literary artist, like Plato's Demiurge, creates worlds out of a love that resembles the lower forms of love, with all the usual attendant dangers of egotism and delusion.
Instances of obsessive love in Murdoch's novels range across a wide spectrum. At one extreme, revelation of hidden perversity, such as the sibling incest in A Severed Head (1961) or the father-daughter incest in The Time of the Angels (1966), impels melodramatic plots in which unsuspecting persons are abruptly exposed to the breaking of taboos. A revelation of Dionysian forces rends the screen of civilized behavior, and the onlooker's world turns upside down. This is not to label these novels themselves Dionysian; they do not provide steamy reading. On the contrary, Murdoch emphasizes not the gratification of desire, but the aching experience of desire and the dislocations it causes in the psyche. Despite her various experiments with gothic horror — additional examples include The Unicorn (1963) and The Italian Girl (1964) — Murdoch's fictional mode remains Apollonian and comic. In no more than four or five of her twenty-four novels does death, betrayal, or unfathomable evil overwhelm the potential for comedy, and even in these novels the dailiness of life frequently asserts itself in comic fashion.
At the other extreme looms a higher, selfless, transcendent Eros, more often pointed to as an ideal or felt in moments of epiphany than actually practiced; as Jake learns from his pursuit of Anna in Under the Net, such ideal love would mark the end of desire and even of longing to know the other person. It would amount to full acceptance of the otherness of the other, "and this too is one of the guises of love" (268). Ideally, as Murdoch writes in The Fire in the Sun, "Carnal love teaches that what we want is always 'beyond,' and it gives us an energy which can be transformed into creative virtue" (34). But the path to creative virtue is rarely taken, and usually Murdoch deals with more common themes — love triangles, adultery, unreciprocated desire — though often with a bizarre twist, such as sixty-year-old Charles Arrowby's obsession with Hartley in The Sea, the Sea (1978). Long ago Hartley was his youthful sweetheart, "the jewel of the world" to him; she continues to obsess Charles to such an extent that he kidnaps her and holds her as a prisoner of love even though she is now a confused and rather decrepit old woman.
In Murdoch's novels love proves so capricious, unpredictable, irrational, and contrary to the conscious wishes and intents of the ego and practical needs of the self as to seem like an external force. As Hugh Balfounder insists in Under the Net, "anyone can love anyone, or prefer anyone to anyone" (255). A memorable instance of this arbitrariness occurs in The Book and the Brotherhood (1987). Gerard Hernshaw experienced the most intense love of his life at age eleven, a passion whose object was a small parrot named Grey with clever yellow eyes and scarlet wing tips. Although he symbolically equates his lifelong grief for the absence of Grey with his sorrow for his dead lover Sinclair and for "all the agony and helpless suffering of created things" (590), it is nonetheless Grey whom Gerard so poignantly and rather ludicrously mourns, the particular other being, beautiful and replete.
Desire portrayed as a force contrary to the will of the ego invites Freudian interpretation. But in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), Blaise Gavender, a psychotherapist, finds that his understanding of Freudian mechanisms neither helps nor inhibits the treatment of his patients any more than it offers him the least guidance in his own wayward love life, which entangles him in the usual messes. One might just as well call upon any old notions or superstitions to explain the inexplicable phenomenon of love's arbitrariness. In The Black Prince (1973), one of her finest novels, Murdoch amusingly draws upon the psychology of love in Shakespeare's time, when, for example, Robert Burton diagnosed love as a melancholic disease of the liver that drives lovers "headlong like so many brute beasts." Despite all the counsels of reason, "they will do it," Burton writes in his Anatomy of Melancholy "they will do it, and become at last void of sense; degenerate into dogs, hogs, asses."
In The Black Prince, Bradley Pearson narrates, from prison, the story of his ill-fated love for Julian Baffin, a young woman nearly forty years his junior. Julian's mother, Rachel, herself in pursuit of Bradley, warns him, "it's nearly midsummer and you are, perhaps, reaching the age when men make asses of themselves" (239). Even before the publication of The Black Prince, critic Robert Hoskins noted that several of Murdoch's novels resemble midsummer night's dreams, comic novels of love gone awry in summery settings. Here Bradley, a writer and serious intellectual, ironically plays the role of Bottom. Bradley's life is already complicated by three other women — Rachel, his suicidal sister Priscilla, and his ex-wife Christian — when he feels helplessly drawn to Julian in a fetishistic way: her legs, feet, body smells, and hair overwhelm and madden him. From the moment he falls for her in the middle of their Hamlet tutorial, his stomach feels hollow, his knees dissolve, his teeth chatter, and his face takes on a waxen smile (172). This aging lover comically experiences transcendence, anxiety, longing, jealousy ("like a red-hot knitting needle thrust into the liver"), desire, humiliation, and so on (209). Murdoch details every phase of love's foolishness. Bradley confesses his love to Julian only after listening to the opening of Der Rosenkavalier, and then vomiting in Covent Garden out of sheer lovesickness. When he loses Julian and goes to prison for a crime that Rachel commits, the bludgeoning of Julian's father, Bradley narrates his story in a posthumous novel within the novel, The Black Prince, subtitled "A Celebration of Love," edited by P. Loxias (Apollo in disguise).
In The Black Prince we thus have the curious situation, often repeated in Murdoch's novels, of a woman novelist anatomizing and memorializing the erotic features of a woman character through the transfixing gaze of an adoring male. (A useful study could be made of the importance of hair in her novels as an erotic and aesthetic display of the vital, enticing "otherness" of the adored person.) This intertwining of genders, reminiscent of Shakespeare's playfulness with gender-shifting characters like Rosalind and Olivia (male actors playing women who play men), produces startlingly actual and vivid views of women — they seem wholly present. Murdoch supports the feminist movement, but she rarely brings feminist issues into her fiction; rather, she sets out to break down what she sees as arbitrary and limiting definitions of gender and of love. Delicate males and boyish women with androgynous names abound in her work; not just homosexuals and bisexuals, but virtually everyone is capable of same-sex love, often hovering somewhere between friendship and Eros. Like Virginia Woolf before her, Murdoch sets out to define and hence legitimize varieties of human attraction previously undefined and therefore unacknowledged.
Ambivalence about gender abounds in The Black Prince. When Bradley first sees Julian strewing bits of love letters in the street, he thinks she is a boy in dark trousers and jacket. He becomes aroused by her when she is wearing his socks, and he cannot make love until she dons her Hamlet costume, breeches, tunic, and chain. The comedy of the gender-bending and the lovesickness is at once dark, funny, and tragic because the first-person narration traps us inside Bradley's confession and his pain.
A self-conscious narrator, Bradley also theorizes about his own dilemma and its relation to his writing. Like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, Bradley presents a theory of Hamlet at the center of The Black Prince, that is, in the tutorial scene with Julian. Hamlet is postmodern in its intricate self-reflexiveness. Bradley describes it as "a work endlessly reflecting upon itself ... in its very substance, a Chinese box of words ... a meditation upon the bottomless trickery of consciousness and the redemptive role of words in the lives of those without identity, that is human beings" (166). Yet paradoxically Hamlet also reveals Shakespeare's deepest beliefs: "He is speaking as few artists can speak, in the first person and yet at the pinnacle of artifice" (166). Here Murdoch gives us a clue to her own work: The Black Prince is an intricate fiction within a fiction, and yet we may assume that, as Shakespeare revealed himself most when most disguised, so Murdoch speaks most candidly when artfully hidden in the guise of Bradley Pearson (BP, Black Prince, B. Person). Bradley comments: "Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep [as Bradley has just made a pun on Bottom]. ... Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool" (58). Irony is dangerous because it kills sentiment, and a necessary tool because it converts life's horrors into something bearable, a dark joke, a rhetorical gesture, or a work of literary art that distances us one step away from the pain, allowing us to contemplate it. More recently, in her philosophical lectures entitled Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), Murdoch argues that "Novels are, however sad or catastrophic, essentially comic" (97). The novel is an "open" form that embraces more of life's ordinariness than other genres do: "Characters in novels partake of the funniness and absurdity and contingent incompleteness and lack of dignity of people in ordinary life" (97).
The comedy of ordinary life often arises in Murdoch's novels when, like Bottom, people delude themselves with dreams of romance. As Joyce Carol Oates notes in a review, "Murdoch's philosophical position is austere, classical, rigorously unromantic, and pessimistic. Not that the pessimism precludes comedy: on the contrary, it is probably the basis of the comic spirit." In An Unofficial Rose (1962) the traditional plot device of the love triangle, an unstable situation always conducive to irony, is repeated in three generations of would-be lovers, representing a continuity of foolishness that seems as ingrained as original sin. As the novel opens, Hugh Peronette, a retired civil servant aged sixty-seven, realizes at his wife's funeral that "he had not really known what was in her heart" (20). Ignorance of the hearts of others repeats itself, realistically, in virtually every relationship in this novel and throughout Murdoch's work, leading to possibilities of both illusion and disenchantment. In this most Jamesian of Murdoch's novels, Hugh feels an unpleasant touch of complicity in his desire to help his son Randall leave his dutiful wife Ann and daughter Miranda to run off with the big blonde Lindsay Rimmer. Randall, once a talented horticulturist now given to drink and self-indulgence, feels, probably rightly, that Ann's unselfishness is ruinous to him; she lacks "form," lives too much for others, and seems amorphous. His father, Hugh, who failed to make his own leap to "freedom" in an affair with Emma Sands many years ago, sells his treasured Tintoretto to finance Randall's high-style elopement with Lindsay, thus freeing Emma, so Hugh hopes, from her own involvement with Lindsay, her secretary and "gaiety girl." In the third generation, Hugh's grandson Penn imagines himself the courtly lover of his cousin Miranda, a demonic pubescent girl-woman who plays with dolls but cherishes a secret crush on her mother's admirer Felix Meecham.
Randall's love for Lindsay, like his father's love for Emma and his nephew's love for Miranda, is delusory and romantic in the extreme: "Randall's love for Lindsay has come violently and suddenly, the entire transformation of the world in a second, a wild cry after a long silence, the plunge of a still stream into a deep ravine" (65). Randall understands neither Emma's lesbian interest in Lindsay nor her control of Lindsay through the purse strings, and not until after the elopement does he learn what is in Lindsay's heart, mainly self-interest and vulgar avarice. Having taken the plunge, he will soon tire of her and move on to other aimless affairs. And Hugh, no better off for having abetted Randall, loses Emma, who finds herself another "gaiety girl," Jocelyn.
Randall's rose nursery at Grayhallock, which once provided meaningful work for him, no longer holds meaning, and the pervasive motif of the rose symbolizes disenchantment rather than love. An Unofficial Rose is Murdoch's anti-romance of the rose, a work of comic irony in which three types of characters disastrously interact. The manipulators, who, like Emma Sands and young Miranda, resemble the Medusa-women in several of Murdoch's novels, keep their hearts to themselves, act in their own self-interest, and sometimes manage to attain their desires. The selfish fools, or erotic dreamers, Hugh, Randall, and Penn, obsessed and deluded with love, always act in their own self-interest yet ironically fail to attain their desires. Unselfish fools, like Ann, act against their own self-interest, convinced they serve a higher good. When soldier Felix offers to Ann his love and a more felicitous life, she bungles her own chance for happiness by concealing her feelings from him, imagining herself attached forever to the worthless Randall and letting herself be manipulated by her daughter Miranda. An interesting variation on the unselfish fool is Hugh's old friend Mildred, an amiable, elderly woman married to a suspected pederast, who wants Hugh for herself but acts against her own interest by encouraging him to sell the Tintoretto, thus freeing Ann for marriage to Felix, Mildred's brother. Mildred's unselfishness pays off in the end because, although her matchmaking fails, she gets Hugh to herself on a slow boat to India.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from British Women Writing Fiction by Abby H. P. Werlock. Copyright © 2000 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword Regina Barreca,Acknowledgments,
Introduction Abby H. P. Werlock,
1. Iris Murdoch: Mapping the Country of Desire Roberta S. White,
2. "Transformed and Translated": The Colonized Reader of Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos Space Fiction Susan Rowland,
3. P. D. James and the Dissociation of Sensibility Eric Nelson,
4. Retrofitting the Raj: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the Uses and Abuses of the Past Judie Newman,
5. Anita Brookner: On Reaching for the Sun Kate Fullbrook,
6. "Witness to Their Vanishing": Elaine Feinstein's Fictions of Jewish Continuity Phyllis Lassner,
7. "Women Like Us Must Learn to Stick Together": Lesbians in the Novels of Fay Weldon Patricia Juliana Smith,
8. Crossing Boundaries: The Female Artist and the Sacred Word in A. S. Byatt's Possession Deborah Denenholz Morse,
9. Emma Tennant: The Secret Lives of Girls Marilyn C. Wesley,
10. Margaret Drabble: Chronicler, Moralist, Artist Mary Rose Sullivan,
11. To Pose or Not to Pose: The Interplay of Object and Subject in the Works of Angela Carter Dee Goertz,
12. During Mother's Absence: The Fiction of Michèle Roberts Clare Hanson,
13. Navigating the Interior Journey: The Fiction of Jeanette Winterson Jan Rosemergy,
14. Sea Changes: African-Caribbean and African Women Writers in England Laura Niesen de Abruña,
15. Muriel Spark: Beginning Again John Glavin,
Contributors,
Index,