Analyses Of The Major Characters

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

CHAPTER 4

This novel was Drabble´s third novel at fiction. Like her two other previous novels, it is written in the first person and the main character is similar to the character in those other early novels; she presents us in this early stage with character studies centring around a young, intelligent, female protagonist, we could assume much like she should have perceived herself at the time.

The overall tone of the novel is funny and witty and the central themes of Drabble´s fiction already appear clearly presented, namely fate vs. free will and how chance sometimes brings to us whatever it is we need to fulfil ourselves; if we have the courage to acknowledge it and flow with it. Next section will be the analysis of the main character in "The Millstone" through looking at different perspectives.

4.1.1 Rosamund Stacey:

Rosamund is the main character in the novel, a literary student writing her thesis on Elizabethan poets, a girl who lives in London and has friends and connections mostly around literary circles. Her life changes when she discovers she is pregnant after her first sexual relationship with a man she had no previous romantic relationship prior to the night of the conception of the child.

She decides to continue with the pregnancy after some hesitation, probably because she had always felt alone and in need of someone. In spite of this feeling of loneliness or precisely because of it, she had never been successful in her relationships with men, playing at being promiscuous by dating two men at the same time, but in reality being a virgin by all standards.

The experience of having a child changes not only the way she feels towards discovering what love is all about, but also how she perceives women and her relationship with her own sex, from which she had always feel detached. Moreover, it means her "an initiation to reality" (The Millstone, p.36), from the moment she first walks into the doctor´s waiting room, as opposed to her previous knowledge of life and relationships, which she had referenced a couple of times to be based mostly on "cheap fiction" (The Millstone, p. 5, p. 7).

4.1.1a Social environment:

This section analyses the social environment to which the main character of the novel is subjected. She inhabits the London of the "swinging sixties", though this was barely in the making at the time the novel was being written. Therefore, gender and class distinctions are still the norm and even if she tries to pretend something else by dating two men at the same time, she has to declare herself a Victorian victim, for she still "drags" her virginity around.

Rosamund has a remarkable social conscience. This is the reason she says is behind her teaching, a secondary activity she takes in and that she is consciously underpaid for. She is hard working and relates mostly with people from the literary world, so we can say her friends and acquaintances bring us into this kind of bohemian world, where obviously a mom does not fit at all.

Yet she is much pleased by all the sings of affection she receives while she is in the hospital after delivering her child: flowers, presents, visits, etc. However, on her bed there is a sign with a "U", which she finds out to stand for "unmarried", a distinction that seems to be very important for everybody around her at the time, but though she resents the pin pointing, she does not give a lot of thought to the fact. ‘Independence’ is probably the word that best describes Rosamund´s character and her relationship with her social environment.

In fact, she has a room of her own and not only that but a whole flat to herself in a nice neighbourhood that gives her a certain status, which she is very aware of all throughout the novel. Being picked up by the ambulance men from that address makes the whole difference for her and we should assume that it would be in the London of 1960´s.

It is certainly remarkable how, even though she was raised by her socialist parents, to believe she was everybody´s equal, she is yet so aware of social class differences. When she meets George, her baby´s father and a BBC voice without an accent that can give her an idea of his background, she feels intrigued.

However later on when she invites him up to her apartment, she has "a moment of horrid fright: perhaps he wasn´t quite up to it, perhaps he wasn´t quite up to my kind of thing, perhaps I should never have tried to talk to him for more than five minutes, perhaps we were both about to see each other in an unpleasantly revealing social light which would finish off our distant pleasantries forever" (The Millstone, p. 25).

So even after being raised with such care by her parents to erase social and gender differences, she must recognise her hypocrisy, for it does matter, as it matters to her sister that her children play with the daughter of one of the menials. Rosamund is aware and she resents it to the extent that she comments to herself in the incident she observes while visiting her sister, years before she becomes a mommy; "What a pity it was that resentments should breed so near the cradle" (The Millstone, p. 90).

She also remembers vividly the event that brought conscience on her about the fact that her family was not poor, even though they were probably not as rich as others around them. As a child, she was playing with her sister in the park and they called the attention of some boys that joined them hunting small animals and when the boys asked whether the girl with them was their mother, they laughed and made it clear that she was just the maid, which brings out an honest straightforward comment from the kids; "Blimey them are you rich?" (The Millstone, p. 86).

4.1.1b Family Background:

This section aims to analyse how the character´s family background affects and shapes her behaviour. As most of Drabble´s characters, the reader gets plenty of information about this, mainly through observations on how those early experiences and views relate to their present endeavours.

Rosamund´s parents are described by her as a model of educated socialist professionals. At the time she finds out she is pregnant they are in Africa, where her dad is helping one of the universities to develop a new programme. She admires their continuous effort to make this world a better one, but regarding their parenting skills she acknowledges: "It´s been a disastrous experiment in education" (The Millstone, p. 28).

In spite of all their efforts to rear their children under a new set of coordinates that would make them freer: "My mother, you know, was a great feminist. She brought me up to be equal. She made there be no questions, no difference. I was equal. I am equal" (The Millstone, p. 29). This also shows the reader the ideology Rosamund has been brought up with and perhaps explains the whole ‘independent woman’ figure.

The experiment indeed proves to be not quite successful, for Rosamund´s siblings fall into the regular patterns of patriarchal families and frown upon her state and regarding Rosamund herself, she acknowledges in spite of her independence, that her physical fear of sexual relationships must be blamed on the Victorian morale that still clings to her character inevitably. Her comment explains this as well; "But being at heart a Victorian, I paid the Victorian penalty" (The Millstone, p. 18).

Regarding her parents, as she describes them to George, "an extraordinary blend of socialist principle and middle class scruple" (The Millstone, p. 27). Very illustrative of the British society at the time, when people were fighting everyday to achieve that sense of equality around them, but still fighting with their own preconceptions about the world being too much shaped around classes.

4.1.1c Relationship with the male characters:

Following the focus, Rosamund´s relationships with the male characters in the novel will be evaluated in this section. This section will prove particularly interesting in this novel, as shall be examined. The consequences of the character´s almost superficial interactions are what set her development in motion and her to that point shallow experiences lose all importance in the face of her new motherhood.

We are introduced to Rosamund through her first awkward experiences with men. She feels inadequate and unlucky, not worthy almost of anybody´s attention and always so worried about bothering others that any gentle manner towards her would prove futile.

She feels no connection to the notion of love as she perceives others’ experience and she takes solace in her work: "Lucky in work, unlucky in love. Love is of man´s life a thing apart, ´tis woman´s whole existence, as Byron mistakenly remarked" (The Millstone, p. 8).

She does not seem to have a keen interest in men and she lives her first sexual encounter as liberation of the chastity she had imposed in herself, though the consequences of this act appear gloomy to her at first: "My crime was my suspicion, my fear, my apprehensive terror of the very idea of sex" (The Millstone, p. 17). In other words, she feels that she is being punished for her unnatural chastity; her pregnancy appears to her to be at first a consequence of her avoidance of intimacy. She likes the romance, but feels horrified about the sexual act, though her state as a virgin weighs on her and inevitably feels relief after she sleeps with George: "I walked around with a scarlet letter embroidered upon my bosom, visible enough in the end, but the A stood for Abstinence, nor for Adultery" (The Millstone, p. 18).

She sees herself as a victim of this at first, as if her fate was doomed because of her irreversible chastity. However, luckily she manages to turn the doom into grace by accepting her fate. It is her nature and she finally accepts it though she perceives it as a burden at the beginning: "He was naturally prolific, as I was naturally chaste. Or unnaturally, do I mean?" (The Millstone, p. 21). This might allow for further readings about Rosamund´s natural sexual tendencies. The fact that she feels attracted to a feminine man might suggest that she might be attracted to this feminine side in George. Also, it is the only hint the author gives us as a consideration of homosexuality, the norm in her novels being heterosexuality.

She has created this image of herself being promiscuous by dating two men at the same time, thought there is nothing in her account of these relationships that point to any intimacy existing between them. It is indeed significant that the man to take her virginity and the only one she seems to have a real affection for is not masculine at all: "Knowing that he was queer, I was not frightened of him at all, because I thought that he would expect no more from me" (The Millstone, p. 29).

Ant then when they finally meet again: "He looked as mild and frail and non-masculine as he had appeared at our first meeting when I had been so sure that it was Joe he fancied" (The Millstone, p. 165).

4.1.1d Feminist Check:

This section will evaluate how the character can be regarded from a feminist perspective. If feminism is taken to be a critical position in the face of the stereotypes about women from common to modern Western civilization, then there is definitely no doubt that Rosamund Stacey stands out to be as feminist character as could be devised; she has no experience to connect her with any other woman (apart from her desire towards men´s company) until the moment she gives birth to her daughter Octavia:

"If all other women did feel it, then that was precisely what made it so remarkable in my case, as I could not recall a single other instance in my life when I had felt what all other women feel" (The Millstone, p. 103).

Drabble is getting here into a theme very much discussed in feminist theory: do we have to feel like women because we are born like women? The debate of constructivism as opposed to essentialism is at the core of feminist enquiries: "The recognition of the social construction of gender and the coercive nature of gendered subjectivities has been at the centre of feminist literary criticism" (Plain and Sellers, 2007: 9).

One of her boyfriends points at this when she is first trying to bring on the subject of her pregnancy: "A very unwomanly woman, that´s what you are" (The Millstone, p. 40). If women are considered by the society Drabble portrays to be physically weak, emotionally unstable or intellectually ill-equipped, Rosamund is the perfect feminist heroine: she is a scholar writer, her body does resist and never whither under the hardships of pregnancy or child-labour, even though she fears it all throughout her pregnancy, alarmed at the sight of other pregnant women and at her own weakness at the latter stages of it.

All throughout the novel, she mocks most of women´s experiences around her, dismissing them as silly or useless and does not identify at all with the domesticity attached to her sex. Even though her story focuses around her becoming a mother, at first she rejects passionately motherhood as a woman´s way of realisation:

"What utter rubbish", I said with incipient fury, "what absolutely stupid reactionary childish rubbish. Don’t tell me that any human being ever endured the physical discomforts of babies for something as vague and pointless as a sense of purpose" (The Millstone, p. 42).

For her, realisation and fulfilment come through her work, but does not stop to think about how the lives of many women that were not allowed by a patriarchal society to develop a career. She does not openly claim herself to be a feminist, though she does say her mom was and reared her as such. Rather Drabble prefers to show us an emancipated woman living her life independently from men than telling us about why women should take control of their own lives. This we can claim to be the influence of her teacher at Cambridge, F. R. Leavis, as she unveils in an interview to The Oklahoma Review: "A work of art should enact its moral meaning (…) one should have an incident or theme or a story line that carries that idea, rather than just telling people what one means".

4.2 The Needle´s Eye (1972):

This section will be analysing Drabble´s sixth novel, in which two characters, Simon Camish and Rose Vassiliou, develop a life long relationship that they cannot fulfil out of their own responsibility towards their pre-existing families.

At this stage of her career the author is exploring new techniques, namely the use of different narrative voices that allow us to approach the plot and the development of the characters from various perspectives, enriching our experience and allowing the reader to grasp more aspects of the character development through the overlapping accounts of the protagonists.

Drabble chose as the main character for this novel a male figure: Simon Camish, who falls in love with the main female character of the novel, Rose Vassiliou, though platonically, as they never allow themselves the opportunity to let that love (which is indeed requited on Rose´s part) develop and evolve into a romantic relationship. Both have complicated family issues and their friendship will prove healing and meaningful for each of them. In spite of this, at the end of the novel we can say Simon´s life has certainly improved thanks to Rose´s positive influence not only on him but on his wife, but Rose herself has lost her freedom and is back with her husband in a toxic and harmful relationship for her children´s sake. It is the character of Rose that will be explored in this study.

4.2.1 Rose Vassiliou:

Next our focus will be in the main female character in the novel, Rose Vassiliou, whom we discover by her own stream of consciousness, but also through her relationship with Simon Camish, who is the main narrator of the story. It is hard to say whether this is a part of Drabble´s strategy to justify the character, as often we get an idealised version of Rose through Simon´s account, as he is in love with her.

Rose is a generous, creative character, whose positive influence seems to be noticed everywhere she is called to, but she acknowledges her biggest failure to be at her impossibility to control her character with the only person she might have cared for: her husband. Though at first Simon is led to believe by the details of her story that her husband is a wicked, warped character, he also finds parallelisms in his own life that make it easy for him to identify with Christopher and question her innocence and Rose herself admits her guilt in the long account of disrespect and misery that their marriage appears to be. After that, when Rose and her husband get back together, she realises that her sacrifice is not only ruining her freedom but her temper and disposition to others, specially those closer to her, whom ironically she is trying to save from misery by her own self-denial.

4.2.1a Social environment:

In this section, Rose Vassiliou´s social environment and how it has been depicted in the novel by the author will be analysed.

Rose grew up in a wealthy family in the countryside, bored to death all through her childhood. However, her life´s choices led her to dwell in a low class neighbourhood in London, where she learns to love throughout the years and that surprisingly ends up turning into a not so bad place after the Vassiliou family is re-united by the end of the book.

She is considered to be mad by many; mainly because she gave away her money she had inherited to a charity organization to build a school in Africa. This act of generosity cannot be accepted or understood by many around her, but her personal standards of morality she holds above everything else, for she grew up with firm religious beliefs, mainly transmitted by Noreen, a girl employed to take care of her through most of her childhood. The camel going through the needle´s eye, an image she will never be able to detach herself from, is in the title of the book calling our attention to Rose´s character central moral issue; those that accumulate wealth disregarding the needs of other around them do not deserve to enter the kingdom of heaven.

This sticks to little Rose´s memory with such a force that she renounces her father´s inheritance, but it also marks her daily behaviour, as she for example is unable to deny help to a teenage mother that lives in her neighbourhood, feeling somewhat responsible for the young girl "going to the bad", having fuelled the young girl´s dreams of becoming something she would never be.

Rose is harassed by the yellow press, being followed by journalists ever since she decides to marry a poor Greek boy, contradicting her father´s wishes. However, it is this curiosity that the general public feels towards her that somewhat keeps

Rose Vassiliou in the agenda of the high class society and their charity events, where she is often summoned to contribute and arise consciousness, knowing that she can never say no. For, how could she deny other people´s misery from the comfort of her own house? How can she not listen to the desperate cries of those that are in need and have nothing when she knows she has everything one can wish for?

She is born into a class that does not seem to fit her and she is happy to do without any house service as soon as she leaves her parents, it is indeed a relief to be able to cope with the life without them: "It was possible to get through life cleaning one´s own shoes, cooking one´s own meals, washing one´s own pants (…) it was not a law of nature that decreed her to suffer for ever the humiliation of having these things done for her by people who despised her" (The Needle's Eye, p. 344).

In this sense, Drabble here depicts perfectly the natural tensions that arise in class relationships. Of course in this case the masters (Rose´s parents) are extremely demanding and their attitude creates a reaction on the servant´s part that will affect and predetermine their daughter´s view for life.

4.2.1b Family Background:

In this section, the analysis will centre on Rose´s family background. Particular anecdotes about her parents are scarce, for they did not spend much of their time with her as a child, but they are indeed powerful. There is as well a mother-like figure in the nanny character, Noreen, whose religious teachings will highly affect Rose´s values and life choices.

When Simon finally meets Rose´s family at the end of the book, he can only feel sorry for the kind of childhood she might have gone through. She was neglected by both her mother and father: he was being too busy building himself up, a perfect example of the self-made man that forgets about where he comes from, she was a hypochondriac to the extreme, a terrible person unable of thinking about anybody else but her. The only time her father seems to acknowledge her and worry about her is when he raises suspicions that she might be involved with the communist party.

"At times she tried to trace a more natural connection between herself and her parentage, discovering in herself her mother´s hypochondria with every sore throat, her father´s inhumanity with her own preference for the total as opposed to the individual. I, like him, she would say to herself, am stubborn beyond belief, I too am partisan, and it is simply that accident has forced me to take the other part." (The Needle’s Eye, p. 343).

With this appreciation, Rose is trying to make sense of her own character, but the only true conclusion she reaches is that she rejected to everything around her as a child. In spite of this, she longs for a more natural connection with her parents and thus tries to find something in her that will connect her to them.

It is difficult not to see in Noreen a mother figure for the young Rose. Noreen taught her how to pray and how to fear; so many things she had warned her about and she had found to be inoffensive that she thought this to be all exaggerated lies to keep her from doing things she was not supposed to.

Still being a child, once she sets out to explore her dad´s toiletries, facing a razor blade and convinced that all the terrible qualities Noreen had told her about it must also be exaggerations, just as laying in the grass would cause rheum and she finds when the blade cuts through her finger like butter all of the exaggerations to be true accounts of its power. No wonder she must have taken the camel through the needle´s eye image so seriously and allow it to be so determining for her character and choices for the rest of her life.

4.2.1c Relationship with male characters:

In this section, the relationships of Rose Vassiliou with the male characters will be examined. Recalling her childhood experiences and her family background, it is not hard to think about Freud when examining this; going back to the notions of the Edipus complex, Rose has a massive gap to fill in her affections and thus will give everything away for love.

Rose´s first act of rebellion towards her father is her choice of Christopher Vassiliou as her man. She is deeply in love and would defy anything to protect that feeling that she has been neglected all throughout her life. She idealises him all through the eight months of exile she is forced to wonder around Europe with her cousin, sufficient time and her parents must have thought at the time to forget and move on.

However, her passion only grows and her yearning for Christopher remains untouched, in spite of the letters she receives about his cheating. When they are re-united, something is not quite the same as she felt it to be before her departure, though, there is a spark missing, but she cannot undo what she has begun.

The Rose character we get to know through Simon is idealised. Their platonic love leaves him always wondering about her generous character, her selflessness.

On the other hand, her own remembrances of her marriage days leave no doubt that she is also to blame for her husband´s abuses somehow, or she believes so, even though such extreme abuse cannot ever be excused. She acknowledges in herself that inability to hold the defiant responses, the belittling attitudes, the quarrelsome tendencies that build up towards disrespect and disdain.

Is it only Christopher that has the power to transform her into this? It seems so, for at the end of the book, when they go back to living together, she feels her peace is gone and she finds these toxic attitudes to be poisoning her daily life again, not only in her attitudes towards Christopher, but also towards her children, which she finds very sad and ironic, since her main reason to accept Christopher back is to protect their children.

"Christopher´s effect upon her was not for the good: she became increasingly querulous, strained, and irritable. She and Christopher would quarrel, even in public, for no reason, idly, bitterly, tiresomely and Rose always emerged from these disputes without credit. She appeared she was, petty, vindictive, and resentful" (The Needle´s Eye, p. 384).

Drabble makes it clear that Rose has given away her soul, she has resigned her own essence, and thus is unable to avoid these signals of unhappiness. She has lost her spirit and her power of conviction in the eyes of Simon. Her compromise on behalf of her children proves to have a high price. Is this a common compromise for most women? Do women have to relinquish their personal growth and well being pursuing the stability of their family?

4.2.1d Feminist Check:

A kind of question that will be addressed in this section is: What kind of feminist concerns are posed by Rose´s character? Her main driving force all throughout her life seems to be pure and simply love, but for women under the patriarchal repression love was the biggest excuse preventing them to step out of their given roles as wives and mothers.

If Rosamund represented the prototype of feminist heroine, by her independence and self-sustainability, Rose portrays the victim of the modern myth that a lot of women hold and that leads them to believe they will be saved by romantic love, rescued from the tower of boredom and lack of meaning by a blue prince.

She sees Christopher as her saviour and her mistake leads her to a life of misery and regret: only when she is on her own, when she can enjoy her evenings to herself and disposes of her own time and money at her will, does she feel complete and happy. He makes her miserable, but she knew no other way out of her father´s grasp but romance. We could say that it is actually her lack of self esteem and faith in her own capabilities that leads her once and again to depend on a man, and inevitably on her husband, for he is after all the father of her children and they are the most important thing for her in the world. She is indeed aware of this, but cannot see a way out: "[…]Her second and more serious anxiety, which was the complete and hopeless irredeemability of her own nature" (The Needle´s Eye, p. 56).

"… and she wept also because of her character, because she was always like this, always indecisive…" (The Needle´s Eye, p. 59).

In these quotes from the text above the readers can perhaps read Drabble´s critique to the patriarchal weakening of the female character. Women are brought up to avoid decision making, as decisions will inevitable be done by the male figures in their lives.

Though Rose contradicts her father and then divorces her husband, she lacks self confidence and is unable to find creative solutions at the end of the story to preserve her independence and her happiness. She gives up and therefore delivers her soul in a self sacrifice to protect her children´s future.

In spite of her bad feelings about what she is doing at the end of the novel, and her acknowledgment that such course of action makes her be a worse person to herself and her family, something indeed changes around her: Drabble leaves a door open to optimism by describing how the neighbourhood starts improving after Rose and Christopher are back together.

4.3 The Radiant Way (1987):

In this section the focus of the analysis will be The Radiant Way, her tenth novel. This is a mature work and she chooses three female characters as the central triangle of the narrative. Drabble is still much concerned about social changes in Britain, and she shows through her characters and plot how these affect their lives, and the lives of those around them.

Margaret Drabble had not written a novel for seven years when she published this novel. Her narrative voice has changed a lot form the previous novel we analysed, she has incorporated postmodernist techniques that deconstruct the illusion of fiction, allowing for the author´s voice to stand out in the middle of the work, giving opinions about the details of the story, anticipating sometimes, explaining or justifying the absence of further explanation:

"Alix was offered places at both colleges of her choice. In fact, she was offered a better deal (let us not go into historic technicalities) in Oxford…" (The Radiant Way, p. 87). In addition, the author goes even as far as to talk directly about what is the purpose of the narrative and what is the reasoning behind the choice of characters: "But that is another part of this story, and not to be pursued here, for Brian is not a woman and reflections on his prospects or lack of prospects in 1952 would at this juncture muddy the narrative tendency" (The Radiant Way, p. 88).

Another characteristic of the book that calls on for this postmodernist twist is the inclusion of real characters in the story, interacting with the fictional ones, as for example Dr. Leavis, one of Drabble´s own professors at Cambridge: "… but she chose Cambridge because of Flora Piercey´s eye shadow, and because of Dr. Leavis" (The Radiant Way, p. 87).

Another postmodern trait is meta-fiction: Drabble includes in the party at the beginning of the story of characters from her previous novels, creating a world of her own that she shares with her readers.

The novel breaks with the other two novels that have focused this study by offering three female protagonists, instead of the one heroin that the author had centred her previous works around. The account rendered in this study will offer an overview of all three of them: Liz, Alix and Esther.

The narrative also moves much quickly through space, taking us from one neighbourhood to another almost abruptly, descriptions of people and places are alive, we can almost feel them moving and hear their tumultuous interactions, as it is exemplified by the account of the different celebrations and characters up at Northam´s New Year´s Eve at the beginning of the second chapter.

The structure of the narrative is different from her previous novels as well: in The Needle´s Eye sections marked changes of perspective from one character to another, but all accounts followed a similar pace: interior monologue, some dialogue, reflections of the character.

In The Radiant Way sections are much more spontaneous, moving the reader not only from one perspective to another, but offering much shorter sections introducing shocking surprises, such as the account of Charles infidelity we are given in the first part through his children´s dialogue (The Radiant Way, p. 36). The reader does not yet know what the children are talking about, but this anticipation is meant to bring us closer to the character of Liz, who is also completely unaware of what is going on at the moment. We will discover little by little and through her own account, but the authorial voice will voice some concerns, especially those coming from the children.

4.3.1 Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen and Esther Breuer:

Next section will be about the three main characters in the novel. The protagonists of the novel are linked by an old friendship, but there is something else that bounds them together, far more meaningful and that shall be analysed further ahead:

"They did not know then, were not to know for many years, were never fully to understand what it was that held them together- a sense of being in the margins of English life, perhaps, a sense of being outsiders, looking in from a cold street through a lighted window into a warm lit room that later might prove to be their own?" (The Radiant Way, p. 90).

All three of them come for the corners of reality, from experiences that rendered them out of the norm. This is what makes them converge in Cambridge, and on this basis they will build a twenty year long friendship.

4.4 Liz Headland:

The focus of this section is the character of Liz Headland. She is a successful therapist that has her dream house at the very centre of the city of London. She married at a young age, but divorced less than a year after.

When the novel starts Liz is the host for a big house New Year´s party. Of all the guests in her house there is one that she finds especially boring, and cannot recall why she was invited. Later in the night she will find out this lady to be her husband´s new lover, who is moving to New York with her.

Liz is an intelligent, independent woman that appears to be at the top of her possibilities when the novel opens. Little by little she discovers the life she had built around her was built on sand, and everything starts to crumble down.

4.4a Social environment:

In this section the social environment surrounding the character of Liz Headland will be addressed. She is a self-made woman, who comes from a working-class neighbour hood, but managed to get herself a better life through earning a university degree.

Liz is very much concerned about how people view her and her husband, and status is a key part of her identity. She organizes a party for two hundred guests, hires a catering to forget about cooking anxieties, and she and her husband put special care in balancing the different political views amongst their guest list. Ironically, at the end of the party a political argument ends up with a scene, a guest fallen on one of the house plants and a slap.

She has achieved socially everything she could wish for, and her desire not o return to her home neighbour hood is very strong, but after her marriage fails she is also very concerned about how will people evaluate her and decides to pretend she had known all the time and she bids her husband farewell on a light note. Reality is quite the opposite, actually, and she will have to work out a whole lot of things after the incident.

4.4b Family background:

The focus of the study should now move towards the analysis of Liz´s family. She prides herself in her career, but after her marriage is dissolved she has to start acknowledging that she is no model to follow by any means.

During the minutes previous to the party, she thinks idly in front of the mirror about many things. One of them is she should call her mother, but that task seems to be always last in the list, and she lets time slip through her fingers without calling her.

"Liz Headland’s mother sits alone, ever alone untelephoned, distant, uncomprehending, in comprehended, remote, mad, long mad, imprisoned, secret, silent, silenced, listening to the silence of her house" (The Radiant Way, p. 6).

Her mother is several times called "mad" by both her daughters, and she is indeed a mysterious character even for them. Her relationship with her mother is therefore highly dysfunctional, and she is reluctant to face it.

Regarding her father, she never met him, though she thinks she might have vague memories of a male figure, smelling of tobacco, holding her in his knees. This absence proves very problematic to her and her mother´s detachment and silence leaves Liz to face puberty unarmed and confused: she thinks she has a venereal disease when she starts having her period, and also has sexual fantasies that involve her father.

There is a third member of her family that deserves our attention, her sister Shirley. Through her accounts we get to know a whole lot more about Liz´s background. Shirley resents that the roles they both had as teenagers seem to have been reversed: Liz was the studious, obedient daughter staying at home with their mother; Shirley was the rebel, always outside, exploring her sexuality through much natural means than her sister.

When her marriage collapses, a patient´s story takes her back to thinking about her dad, as she is reorganizing her life with her own kids, who are now grown up and do not seem to need her anymore. It is by no chance that her specialty as a therapist revolves around family relationships, and she is recurrently recalling the image of the healer´s healing: "Physician, heal thyself. Physician, know thyself" (The Radiant Way, p. 144). By this quote she acknowledges that being a professional care taker, she has neglected herself. It is now at this stage of her life that she will retort to heal her own wounds, and recuperate her inner self.

4.4c Relationships with male characters:

In this section, Liz Headland’s relationships with men will be approached. Having an absent father, it is obvious that these relationships are not going to be as average as Liz herself would wish.

When she first arrived in Cambridge she started exploring the party scene and men. She married shortly after finishing her degree, something both her and Alix resent as both their first marriages were a failure. In Liz´s case the marriage lasted less than a year and this is how she feels about it when recalling it:

"Later, she could hardly remember what the issues were that had so aroused them to mutual abuse. Her own domestic incompetence (which was indeed extreme, but what had Edgar expected from a wife with an upbringing like hers?), Edgard´s male chauvinism (though this was a phrase not yet current) and his expectation that his work was always, would always be of greater importance" (The Radiant Way, p. 99-100).

In other words, none of them was ready for marriage and could not handle the challenges it poses. After their divorce, they are able to maintain a relationship of friendship and Liz will try to analyse for him their inadequacies as if he had been her patient, justifying their failure. According to this, Edgard´s refusal to pursue his career as an actor embittered him to an extreme, making her life miserable.

Shortly after her first divorce she marries again to Charles, a widower with three children with whom Liz will feel secure and ready to triumph in all aspects: career wise, but also socially. Charles seems also to be her perfect sexual match, for his sadistic tendencies prove to have a great effect on masochism in bed.

After twenty years, though, they sleep in separate rooms and their intimacy, that she takes fro granted, has vanished.

In fact, what happens is she has grown accustomed to using Charles, her second husband, for her social purposes only, and finds it very comfortable and "modern" not to have to bother about spending time with him or leading a normal life as a couple. Now that her children have grown, she is focusing in her career, but neglecting her marriage.

4.4d Feminist check:

Here we will examine Liz´s character in the light of feminist criticism. She is a professional, independent woman, so independent that she can even contradict her husband to the point of neglecting him, until he abandons her for another woman.

In a sense Liz is a portrait of an almighty mother figure, taking care of her husband´s children and her own, succeeding in her profession, throwing fabulous parties in her wonderful house. And she is not aware of any problems in her marriage; she is not concerned, until she finds out about her husband´s adultery. She cries and behaves like a child, but earlier in the novel she had acknowledged feeling somewhat satisfied and relieved at the sight of not having to deal with men anymore, not having to worry about sexual intercourse with them: "They would attack her no more, weaken her no more. She had closed the gates" (The Radiant Way, p. 14).

In other words, in her middle age, Liz is discovering that she does not need men, but will still go back to thinking about her father. She has liberated herself from men, but has to deal yet with the most important male figure in her life.

4.5 Alix Bowen:

This part of the analysis will deal with the second of the main characters of the novel, Alix Bowen. She is a teacher working part time in a women´s prison. She is also in her second marriage, a happy one, as she describes it and has two sons, one from her previous marriage and one from her second husband. She is more down-to-earth than Liz and her contact with reality is shaped by her experiences with less favoured classes than Liz usually deals with.

Thus she cannot prevent thinking dismissively of Liz´s anxieties about money after she is divorced. Alix had to face being a widow mother and dealt with all kinds of financial trouble back after her first husband died, and Liz´s doubts make her laugh, having been she at much worse situations.

Whereas Liz has managed to remove anything old or ugly from her life (Northam, her mom), Alix keeps in touch with this more realistic world, and has a better understanding of life´s miseries and poverty. On this behalf, she reflects; "Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer" (The Radiant Way, p. 103).

In other words, having been at different times in her life in different parts of the sliding scale, Alix has learnt to look at this concept, and others such as intelligence, from a detached, unassuming point of view.

This attitude matches her spontaneous character; she flows naturally through life, as a contrast to Liz, who sacrificed her youth studying hard to achieve her current status. Alix wonders at this, and reflects on people´s roles:

"What an ill-organized, hotchpotch, casually assembled, patchwork life. Everything seemed to have happened by accident, even the things that lasted. (…) However did people manage to discipline themselves and stick to a single line for long enough to gain control, to come out on top, to become the boss instead of the employee?" (The Radiant Way, p. 71).

In other words, how could Liz achieve all she has? It is easy to assume that Alix has certain feelings of envy towards Liz, but certainly healthy ones, as she cannot envy for example her personal failure at marriage, or her detachment with the real world. Alix would wish she could be like Liz, but cannot bother too much about it, could not apply to that discipline, it is not her nature.

4.5a Social environment:

The character’s social environment will be analysed, having a lot of things in common with Liz´s own, for both of them have a similar background and are determined by the same time and space coordinates. The main difference is actually where they stand twenty years after their arrival to Cambridge, at the beginning of their friendship.

Education was indeed their way out of their provincial lives, which they all deplored. It rendered them the chance to step out in the world, see new things, and experience different people: "In the 1950s, one of the surest ways forward for an intellectual young woman from the provinces, for a socially disadvantaged young woman from the provinces, was through Oxford, through Cambridge" (The Radiant Way, p. 86).

This is to say that the university title would render not only the skills required to join the work force with an adequate advantage, but the status that would recognize them as worthy of entering other realms, namely those restricted to people born into other social classes.

Alix mixed with a very different crowd from the theatrical friends where Liz met her first husband. She first met her husband in a political event. Her marriage was more a ticket to security than an act of love. On the very day of her wedding she was already resenting her choice, but prior to this she had contemplated marriage to Sebastian as a way out: "She would marry Sebastian, she would never have to go back to cold and sooty Leeds to drink brown soup and eat gristle stew with dark greens and mashed potatoes" (The Radiant Way, p. 95).

In other words, marriage was for Alix a way out, a quick and direct way to move up in the class scale, something that appears in other novels by Margaret Drabble (Simon Camish, in The Needle´s Eye).

4.5b Family background:

In this section the character´s family background will be examined. Alix´s parents live in the boarding school where they both work, and where she has therefore grown up. She was very happy to leave all this behind her, and she does not have very good memories of her times there, or any high considerations about her parents: "Dotty Doddrige, Deputy Head, French teacher. What a buffoon, what a butt, what a caricature. How she had suffered for him, for her pitiable ridiculous father" (The Radiant Way, p. 78).

The quote is certainly illustrative enough, and she does not have anything better to say about her mother: "And her mother, in revenge, in reaction, brusque, tart, offhand, cutting, feared, fearing and avoided, uneasily detached, dismissively remote" (The Radiant Way, p. 78).

However, probably the most remarkable feature of Alix´s parents is their political stand. They are old school socialists, of a kind that Alix already perceives as going extinct. This will shape her view of the world, of course, and explains her keen sense of social justice. It will also determine the kind of people she will relate to and the nature and form of these relationships, and will cause more than a discussion with her friend Liz about social classes and mental diseases.

4.5c Relationships with male characters:

Next the focus will be about evaluating Alix´s relationships with male characters in the book. She also felt relieved when she moved to Cambridge, as Liz did, with a new world of possibilities open in front of her, but her previous experience living in a coeducational boarding school gave her certain advantage regarding men, although her natural kindness put her in awkward situations out of her inability to refuse or let down lovers-to-be.

In a political rally she met her first husband, Sebastian, whose family also had socialist views, though coming from a better off family. Alix does not marry him out of love, though. It is easy to be with him and he is a good alternative to finding a job for her.

Fate gets her, as it often happens in Drabble´s novels, and she is tired of him as soon as she is pregnant, though her child makes her forget about her lack of love towards her husband. When he dies drowned in the pool she feels horribly guilty and has to survive as a widow mother with barely any support. The action of the novel finds her married with Brian Bowen, a happy marriage for her, and one that also brings her closer to Liz, as her husband Brian has family ties with Liz´s sister, Shirley.

4.5d Feminist check:

In this section, the discussion will touch upon Alix´s character from the feminist point of view. Margaret Drabble, in her realist depiction of the society she keenly observes, has sometimes chosen attitudes and situations for their characters that put them in a certain spot to illustrate her point through exemplification. Thus she explains how women were expected to marry as soon as finishing their degree, and how they play a functional role in the patriarchal scheme: "Such was the imbalance between the sexes, women were much in demand as status symbols, as sleeping partners, as lovers, as party ballast" (The Radiant Way, p. 91).

In other words, women were like commodities, and it must have been quite comfortable for some of them, as it was for Alix, to settle down and gain financial security, even at the expense of personal freedom.

4.6 Esther Breuer:

The third major female character in the narrative will be explored: Esther Breuer. An exile from Germany after the war due to her Jewish origin, she seems to take shelter in a mysterious eccentricity that contrasts against Liz´s materialism and Alix´s social and economic concerns. Her self when arriving at Cambridge was already peculiar, having had to elaborate a past of discrimination and social fear: "I would like," said Liz Ablewhite, after midnight, staring into the white flaming chalky cracked pitted flaring columns of the gas fire, "to make sense of things. To understand." By things, she meant herself. Or she thought she meant herself. "I would like," said Alix, "to change things." By things, she did not mean herself. Or thought she did not mean herself. "You reach too high," said Esther. "I wish to acquire interesting information. That is all" (The Radiant Way, p. 85).

This brilliant and simple account of the character´s life dreams when they first meet is extremely significant. Perhaps because she had already gone through extremely harsh experiences, Esther´s desire is the most down-to-earth, the most realistic and simple, though we wouldn´t believe it of somebody whose eccentric behaviour is so frequently described.

4.6a Social environment:

This section will focus on the analysis of Esther´s social environment. Her experience is undoubtedly marked by her early experiences with the worst part of humanity: she is an exiled Jew, her family being forced out of their native country due to racial hatred and discrimination. She seems to redeem this dark side of humanity by a creative impulse that results in a marked eccentric behaviour.

Her eccentricities gain her a whole lot of adepts that visit her in her room while staying in Cambridge: "In Cambridge she quickly established herself as a cult figure of mysterious portent: she claimed to be in love with her brother, whom nobody had ever seen, and went in for gnomic utterances and baroque clutter" (The Radiant Way, p. 87).

All these weird utterances and behaviours sometimes are overridden by certain impressions and quotes that leave us wondering whether Esther is indeed the most sensible of all three characters. Take, for example, her comment on sickness and health, and on her own perception of reality: "She tended to argue that her own grasp of the norm was so weak that she would not see what distinguished the sick from the healthy. We are all very, very sick, and it does not matter much, is Esther´s line" (The Radiant Way, p. 108). This remark can point at Drabble´s postmodern hint towards reconsidering the absolutes that we handle our daily life with: what is the norm? Who decides what is health and disease? These considerations echo the though of French philosopher Michel Foucault, and resonate with the expansion of constructivism from the feminist criticism to other cultural studies realms.

4.6b Family background:

Following, an examination of Esther Breuer´s family background will be developed. She comes from a family marked by racial prosecution, moving with her brother and mother to Britain at the onset of the war. Her father eventually joined them, but it is easy to see how her family background must have been imbued with horror and fear throughout the early years of her life.

Of all the members of her family, she claims a special attachment to her brother Saul: "They were both lucky to be alive. They had huddled together, small exiles, refugees, in a boarding-house in Manchester, while their mother looked for work and their father hung on Berlin trying to assemble his papers" (The Radiant Way, p. 93). She explains thus her passionate feelings towards her brother, in one of many hints at incestuous love that can be found in the novel. There is also reference to a niece that lives with her, though Liz and Alix cannot say for sure whether she is actually a niece, or what is the nature of their relationship. Again, everything relating to Esther is a mystery.

4.6c Relationships with male chracters:

In this section Esther Breuer´s relationships with men will be analysed. As it has been said earlier when dealing with family background, Esther feels a special attachment towards her brother Saul, and claims to be in love with him.

She had herself different acquaintances with men during college days, from an American art historian she met in Italy, a young postgraduate architect with drinking problems, and "other, older, even weightier men" (The Radiant Way, p. 93).

But she clings on to a lover who is a Satanist, and this irony makes a full circle: a Jew who studies religious Christian art, having a relationship with a Satanist married man. Drabble pushes the character´s buttons looking for explanations on human behaviour. The Italian anthropologist will become an obsession for her, who seems to be doomed for complicated relationships. After his death, she will move to Italy to live with his sister Elena.

4.6d Feminist check:

Finally, the analysis of Esther´s character will take place by giving attention to the relevance of her depiction in the light of feminist criticism.

Esther stands enigmatic in the novel, strange, eccentric, herself detached and unreadable. As a representation of a woman she offers the mysterious air that pervaded most representations of female characters throughout classic fictional works.

We have to take into account that a character is what it is by the choice that the author decides on: what is going to be revealed and how. In this sense Esther becomes a representation within a representation: the choices of the author are further restricted by the choices of the character.

It is this resistance to be read and the exposed constructivism of the character that we want to highlight, as opposed to the other characters in the novel with which identification comes more naturally. They all offer different ways of representation of the reality of women.