The Millstone Remains Vivid

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

CHAPTER 3

This section will emphasise on the reviews of the books that will be analysed throughout this project. This section aims to give a general overview of all the books in order to shed a light on the character analyses.

3.1.1. The Millstone (1965)

To this day, the narrative in The Millstone remains vivid, awake and relevant, as has been acknowledged in more recent reviews to this book published in 1965 (Bennett, 2010). Like good old classic literature, its views and subject matter are alive today, though in different perspectives. Since the appearance of women´s movements in the second half of the 60´s, there have been a lot of improvements in women´s lives, but most contemporary women facing pregnancy while pursuing a career find similar challenges as those of Rosamund Stacey; one of the characters in the book, which will be analysed in the further sections.

This should not be assumed that the novel is only relevant nowadays because of its feminist claims. As a cogent review in the London Times Literary Supplement succinctly stated, this story is "not just a tale about unmarried pregnancy ... it is rather the story of the awakening of a person, the heightening of perceptions and the softening of attitudes."

Rosamund Stacey, the single mom who holds the narrative voice in the story, has to adjust her perceptions about the world and incorporate qualities that will be necessary for her development into motherhood. In this regard, Drabble´s novels are often considered as character´s "life quests", many times triggered by relevant events in their lives that force change and re-evaluation of one´s goals and attitudes.

There is still a third component to "The Millstone" that adds on its endurance and resiliency as a major piece of writing; its consideration of the erosion of socialist ideals and the danger of neoliberal conceptions taking on British society at the time. This is elaborated by Drabble during the incident that Rosamund is involved in when visiting her child after a major surgery intervention she has to endure only a few months after her birth. At first she is denied access, but she protests and cries until she is allowed in. Then she gets to share table at the canteen with another mom and is curious about her endeavours to be accepted to visit; the answer of this woman represents the views of an old school Tory who is used to having influences and using them to get what she wants. In addition, she does not care about the rest of the mothers who are not allowed in, when inquired by Rosamund. As it has been pointed; "Drabble deftly takes a story that might have sunk into a quagmire of navel-gazing domesticity and blows it out to say something large, and largely disturbing, about the broader world and where it is inevitably heading" (Sampson, 2011).

As it will be discussed in further sections of this study, Margaret Drabble has shown to have a keen social consciousness and her novels depict the changes that the British society has undergone throughout the decades. She has been said to write "fables of her time", stories that ponder and explore through the character´s lives and interactions the reality of modern life in Britain, its challenges and failures.

3.1.2. The Needle’s Eye (1972):

This book meant a stylistic deviation from Drabble´s usual female character-narrators. She chose Simon Camish to introduce us to the main female character, however in doing so, she allowed Camish to become quite a big and an important part of the narrative himself. Both characters are in love with each other, but cannot renounce their life´s responsibilities. It is interesting to note that both of them have moved within the social classes structure that pervades Drabble´s accounts of British life, however ironically they have done so in opposite directions: Rose was born into an upper middle class family and a married Greek expatriate, to end up inhabiting one of the working class neighbourhoods of London, shabby and unsuitable as she fears it might appear to the judge in charge of deciding over her children´s. Yet she loves this neighbourhood and a lighter tone is added at the end of the novel that suggests improvements are being recognised around the area, maybe because or partly because Rose´s favour. On the other hand, Simon´s family was poor, though his mom worked hard to give him an education and he married into a well-to-do family, as he puts it himself, he fell in love with a life style.

Rose Vassiliou, the main character in this novel, represents perhaps the most pessimistic of all the characters analysed in this study. She has led a brave life standing up for what she believed in, but eventually has to give up her freedom. The course of her story is marked by the extremes to which her social responsibility leads her, her views being shaped by the Christian teachings of one of her nannies as a child.

This novel has been said to reflect Drabble´s inheritance of the 19th century realistic tradition, a feature of her fiction often times commented upon her work: "Miss Drabble, in The Needle's Eye, establishes herself in the tradition of George Eliot—and that is meant as a compliment. Quite simply, she has taken a serious, meaty theme and treated it with the seriousness it deserves and again, quite simply, the theme is social responsibility" (Greacen, 1972: 68, 70).

This theme is also recurrent in her novels, from the Fabian inclinations of Rosamund Stacey’s character in The Millstone, to the discussions around mental disease through class structure held by Liz and Alix in The Radiant Way. It is this trait that has led some critics to compare her with another great female writer of the 20th century British tradition. An example of such comment is as follows;

"Like Doris Lessing, that genius of the forcefully "creating" work of fiction, Miss Drabble presents characters who are not passively witnessing their lives (and ours); she is not a writer who reflects the helplessness of the stereotyped "sick society," but one who has taken upon herself the task, largely ignored today, of attempting the active, vital, energetic, mysterious re-creation of a set of values by which human beings can live […]" (Oates, 1972).

As it will be shown in this study, Drabble´s concern as a writer is to explore human behaviour and by doing so she is creating the framework for her ideals about it within a society she knows well. Her character choices are brave but coherent, a trait quite missing from everyday life and fiction nowadays.

3.1.3. The Radiant Way (1987):

For her return to fiction after seven years of working on The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Margaret Drabble built a much acclaimed book that looks into the state of British society in the early 80´s, a time that was marked by Thatcherism, strikes, new social menaces like AIDS and so on.

The novel has three main female characters, whereas her previous works had focused on one single heroin. This allows her to dive deeper into different subjects: class status, racial discrimination, etc. by exploring the lives and background of these three friends, whose relationship goes back to their university days. They are all in their mid forties, and their middle-age crisis can be read as a comment on the state of British society: "In earlier books, particularly The Needle's Eye, Drabble chronicles the shabbiness of England in decline: the failure of businesses, the brutalization of architecture, the diminishing of expectations. In the ironically titled The Radiant Way, which deals with the first half of the 1980s, the situation is even bleaker. What is new here is the way fear and violence has come to replace resignation in English life. Avoiding, for the most part, the easy target of Margaret Thatcher and her party, Drabble describes the influences, big and small, of this ruthless decade on the lives of her characters" (Wisner, 1987).

Thus, the characters allow the readers to explore and understand the situation of Britain at this time, one which could not have left indifferent to any one and specially Margaret Drabble, whose social awareness and concerns are always present as a recurrent theme in her fiction:

"In England in 1980 innocence and idealism are things of the past, factories face bankruptcy and closure, and violence and social division are on the increase. British society is seen to have abandoned ‘the radiant way’, a title which sums up the welfare-state optimism of earlier decades. The Radiant Way was the title of a child’s reading primer, and then of a television series portraying the diversity of the British educational system. Now the assumption that individual and social salvation could be pursued in harmony with one another looks distinctly outmoded, a diehard, not an avant-garde attitude." (Patrick Parrinder, The London Review of Books, Vol. 9 No. 10, 21 May 1987).

So the characters are at a stage in their life when self-deception is no longer an option, they must face the consequences of their life´s choices and act accordingly. Yet they are mature enough to do so, having overcome the hardest part of their vital experience, and facing their fate bravely, as is the norm in Drabble´s novels.

3.2. Literary Review about the works cited

Next an analysis of the works cited in this study will follow. The sources vary from reference books to master thesis, but attention to the author´s voice is also reflected through the use of interviews. An account of the impact of the works analysed will be given through reviews published in different media.

3.2.1. Lorber, Judith. (2011)

Judith Lorber is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies at The CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She has played a key role in the formation and transformation of gender studies and is a foundational theorist of social construction of gender difference.

The work we are looking at takes a close look at the different types of feminism that can be traced in the history of criticism, trying to return feminist studies to its academic vantage point, and more importantly, saving feminism as a theory from the popular approaches to it that have led many to misread it, men and women.

Lorber starts by giving a definition of feminism´s goals: to achieve equality. Next she goes on to examine gender inequality through cultures around the globe, and specially in the light of western patriatchy and its institutions: marriage, families, economic structure, etc.

She also makes a distinction between feminist theories and feminist politics. To this end she defines the gendered social order as being the norm that allows society to define human beings in two exclusive categories: male and female, that have traditionally been hierarchical as well. This order and its origins are examined by feminist theories, but it is the aim of feminist politics to find ways of exposing, denouncing and reverting the repression enforced by this system of control.

Her analysis of feminist theories divides them in three major grouops that correlate also with different decades:

Gender reform feminisms: predominant in the 1970s. They do not challenge the existing social order, but call for opportunities for women to interact at the same level with men in different public spheres, seeking a balance in participation.

Gender resistance feminisms: in vogue in the 80s. These feminist theories claim that equality makes women artificially try to fit a men´s world, and try to explore femininity and the female essence, arguing for a new sensibility, a change of perspective or standpoint.

Gender rebellion feminisms: also known as third wave or postmodern, act out the performativity of gender by creating new categories within the gendered structure: queer, transsexual, etc. Thus they break down the parameters by which the patriarchal matrix of domination had been enacted previously.

Lorber´s feminisms allows for a close insight into the different theoretical approaches to the feminist perspective throughout history, exposing the options left to individuals nowadays. Individualities are political and acceptance of the established social order is no longer seen as the status quo, but more and more challenging positions and approaches to sexuality and gender enactment can be found throughout the globe.

3.2.3. Plain, G. & Sellers, S. (2007)

Plain and Sellers compilation of essays puts together testimonies throughout history of women´s resistance to men´s social hegemony. The work itself stems from "the need to challenge patriarchal power or to analyse the complexities of gendered subjectivities" (Introduction, p. I), a claim that has been posed by women in very different ways since medieval times.

Though feminist criticism can be said to have formarly started after the so called "second wave", in the "swinging sixties" when civil rights became the target and main concern of a number of social movements, the authors look back in history to find texts that resist male dominance way before the second half of the 20th century.

A clear distinction is drawn between feminist literary criticism and feminist theories or politics. Thus, the concern of the former revolves around representations of women in literature, and how they have anticipated the latter throughout the centuries.

Protofeminism refers to women writers who were articulating these views somehow hundreds of years before they started being openly posed in front of the public eye. They look at "the power of the feminine as symbol even as it worked to contain and constrain women in practice" (p.6) Chaucer and Margery Kempe amongst others are studied in this section.

After a chapter examining the issue of female representation throughout the Renaissance period and the 17th century, the focus goes on to Mary Wollstonecraft´s legacy, and her impact on her contemporaries and Victorian society as a whole.

Next the authors place their interest in the work o fone of the most influential woman writers of the early 20th century: Virginia Wolf. She is regarded as, "the founder of modern feminist literary criticism" (p.9). Her essay "A Room Of One´s Own" put in the spotlight a series of issues fundamental to understanding women position in the economic and artistic world shaped by men. From her influential work onwards the issues dealt with are familiar to other sources relating feminism theories and politics. Intertwined with civil rights movements, the latter call for the exposition of the constructivism of categories such as gender, race, class and sexuality.

In their analysis, the lens of representation is held to look at the transformation of the role of women in private and public life:

Throughout these theoretical and political transformations, though, the text has remained a space within which actual women have constructed and reconstructed the narrative possibilities of their lives, where the unthinkable is imagined and the impossible is achieved (p.213).

At the end of their exposition, they offer a reflection on the challenges that feminist literary criticism faces in the coming years, calling for a purification of the critical theory discourse and demanding generally the elimination of all kinds of discrimination as constructed by power around traditional divisions in society.

3.2.4. Thesis and Journals: Hartigová, L. (2009); Sheard, Robert F. (1988) and Motta,S., Flesher Fominaya, C.,; Eschle,C., Cox, L. (2011).

In this section the focus will be on studies included in the reference section of this project. In the first place the commentary will focus on Hartigova´s analysis of the development of major female characters in Margaret Drabble´s novels.

In the first place the commentary will focus on Hartigova´s analysis of the development of major female characters in Margaret Drabble´s novels and those of her sister A. S. Byatt. This thesis was presented in the Masaryk University Faculty of Arts in 2009.

The analysis is divided in three parts. First a theoretical approach looks at the role of the literary character within the work of fiction, and also an introduction to feminism is outlined.

The examination of the literary characters touches on classical definitions like E. M Forster´s, and highlights the constructive nature of the authorial process: we only count on the information the author gives in the text and therefore our perception of the character is shaped by the authorial choice. The section finishes with the appreciation that it is characters that constitute the literary work mostly,

The second part of this theoretical approach is concerned with an overview of the feminist movement, examining its origins and providing a characterization of the subsequent waves that have been already dealt with in previous sections of the analysis of the study undertaken.

Also a recount of feminist literary criticism is included, and an important point is made to consider within this category works written by male authors, such as Ibsen´s A Doll´s House, whose account of a wife´s rebellion against her husband´s legal authority placed the Swedish writer amongst the imaginary corpus of feminist literature.

An interesting distinction establishes three stages in the history of feminist literature: feminine, feminist and female writing. The first stage would concern writers trying to "fit" in the male canon by looking at the reality through the patriarchal veil. Writers at this stage usually recurred to pseudonyms to sign their works, as they still held insecurities regarding their creative work.

The second stage, the so called feminist, would occupy most of the 2oth century with works whose content radically objects to the patriarchal system and whose goal is to question and call attention to the subordinate role of women within the order established.

The female stage developed parallel to the feminist stage, and points to an approach focused on the developing of an inner voice, a new sensibility that would defy male´s dominance buy establishing a new voice. The experience of women is taken hitherto onto fiction obliterating the filter of traditional men´s literature by introducing perspectives and subject matters uniquely female.

To wrap up this section, the author of the thesis examines whether the writers she has chosen for her analysis can be considered feminists. Though traditionally included in the so called female stage by their choice of subject matter and the nature of the experiences depicted by their characters, both authors have claimed certain distance from the feminist movement.

The second section of this thesis focus on the literary careers and the works of the authors explored. Also a review of the works selected for the analysis is provided, as well as a brief biographical note on both authors.

The final section looks at the development of the female characters in the selected novels and how their maturation processes are portrayed by the different authors. A comparison is finally drawn between the two main authors examined. Their female characters seem to have certain things in common: they take after their author´s experiences and they are modern and independent women that have to find a balance in life, between the way they want to live and how society and the circumstances around them shape their lives.

3.2.4.b Sheard, Robert F. (1988)

Next a summary of the findings contained in Robert F. Sheard´s thesis. This study focuses on the examination of Margaret Drabble´s work from the treatment of the theme of fate vs. free will in her novels. Sheard explores the author´s purposes and achievements in the light of these two concepts, that appear to be present in the character development of all of her novels.

The function of the novel for Drabble is ciphered in her interest to explore the world and human behaviour. She chooses universal themes, trying to lead the reader into learning something out of the character´s endeavours. This dichotomy between free will or choice and determinism seems to be central in her fiction, and the didactic aim they envision has led critics to name her novels as "fables of our time."

After this general apprehension of the thematic coherence of Drabble´s works, the author of the study sets on to analyse the technical developments in her novels. Under this light her works can be divided into two different stages:

Her first three novels, written using a first person narrator, are portrayed as "character studies centring around a young, intelligent, female protagonist" (p. 8).

Experiments in technical control and form. In these novels, Drabbles explores multiple points of view from different perspectives and narrators.

Next the analysis moves on to examine three major critical works that have been published around Drabble´s fiction:

Vlastos Libby´s 1975 article "Fate and feminism in the novels of Margaret Drabble", that Sheard criticises for bein constricting in the sense that the character´s struggle is tied to the feminist perspective, whereas it is a universal one.

Mary Hurley Moran´s book concerning Margaret Drabble´s use of fate: "Margaret Drabble: Existing within the structures" (1983). In this work a distinction is drawn between fate, nature and family as being the determining factors of the character´s development, but to Sheard this distinction is also forces and artificial, since fate is irredimably shaped by our family, and our nature explained from this two. Thus all of them are different aspects of the same issue.

John Hanay´s "The Intertextuality of Fate: A study of Margaret Drabble" (1986). The structural/historical approach seems relevant to explain Drabble´s choices as an author, but again Sheard criticises as far fetched to extend this assumption to her characters themselves.

Thus the study sets out to explore a number of questions that are yet unanswered to the author: To what larger context does the model relate? What do her theories teach us? How can we apply them to our situations, regardless of our age, sex, or social status? How are the novels of Margaret Drabble "fables for our times"? (p. 11).

In conclusion, Margaret Drabble teaches the reader through fiction what her particular vision of life is: there is a pattern, a fate we have to yield to, and if we learn to accept it, we might be saved, but if we resist it, we will not be able to live our lives fully and in peace. This is the lesson that might be extracted from the study, the lesson that Drabble´s fiction is trying to bring to the reader in all of the works.

3.2.4.c Motta,S., Flesher Fominaya, C.,; Eschle,C., Cox, L. (2011):

Interface is a journal concerned with social movements. Its aim is to be a meeting point for activists from different movements and placess, researchers working with movements, and engaged academics from different disciplines. The Editorial in its third volume contained the analysis that has been included in the reference list for this study. This section will deal with this paper and analyse its contributions to the overall analysis of this study.

The text opens up with a commentary on the opening of national economies to international capital, a process embedded in the pervasive globalising process that Western societies seem to be immersed in. This process is accompanied by a neoliberal restructuration in the last decades that has meant effectively the erosion of rights and guarantees won previously by organised labour. Also a feminisation of poverty is appreciated as a consequence of this restructuration.

The paper looks at the crisis of feminism by exploring the history of feminism itself. The examination looks at liberal feminists since the 19th century as being concerned with freeing contemporaneous societies from "patriarchal throwbacks in law and culture, investing in legal, educational and media strategies as a form of feminist civilising process as well as lobbying the states for a formal equality within the public sphere" (p. 5).

In other words, as it has been discussed else where, these approaches aim for equality and balance without forsaking the very terms of patriarchy, playing the rules established throughout centuries, negotiating spaces rather than frameworks.

The role of feminist radicals in the 1970s is also examined, pointing at the "emphasis on patriarchy as the foundational system of power from which all other injustices spring, and often pursuing separatist organising strategies that celebrate and defend women´s difference from men, under the headings of political lesbianism and global sisterhood." (p. 5).

This reading of the so called "second wave" of feminism sheds light onto its political activism implications: the personal embodies the political, as staged out throughout the 60s by Civil Rights movements mostly in America, but that eventually changed the way political activism had been performed up to this moment.

An extended analysis of this second wave looks at different approaches. Marxist feminists, defended that "gender oppression will be overcome with the end of capitalism and class society" (p. 5), a social structure they perceived to be intrinsic to the patriarchal society itself. This is a natural offshoot of the feminist theory as understood by socialist feminists that considered their struggle as being the same of the working class, therefore looking for alliances that would render the overall final goal: the overcoming of both patriarchy and capitalism.

Black feminists looked at the same issues through the lens of racial discrimination to "add racism to this mix, perceiving it to be deeply intertwined with both capitalism and patriarchy within a complex matrix of domination" (p. 5). Once the constructive nature of social categories was uncovered, the key to the role of oppression within the white male power and control system known as patriarchy is deciphered and the urge to unmask it and fight it is made clear and urgent.

Anarchist feminism challenges the very notions of state held power as being embedded in everyday life, exposing the intrinsic patriarchal nature of the institutions themselves, and calling for a new beginning in the dawn of a rebirth of feminist categories, conceptions and processes.

Finally the text looks at postmodern and poststructuralist feminisms as the most recent demonstrations of feminist theory, and points at how they "move beyond the essentialisms of gendered binaries and fixed identities towards a queering of our practices of self and other." (p. 5).

This reconstruction of current trends in the critical feminist field point towards a new conception of the state of the fight for women´s rights that will definitely be challenged by a world as described by the initial assessment of the consequences of globilisation: the erosion and undermining of traditional rights as acquired by decades of struggling in the light of neoliberal practices that leave the weakest (women being still at the top of the list) exposed to the cruelty of the markets and the inequities of the economic game.

3.2.5. Articles and reviews: Interviews with the author and Reviews

A series of interviews and reviews of the works used in this study have been consulted trying to get an approach on how the works were appreciated at the time they were published and in the subsequent years.

The personal interviews with the author have provided rich analysis of her position towards the criticism generated by her works, as well as shedding some light into her considerations regarding the work of a writer. Notions fundamental to understanding her work, such as her influences and the purpose of the creative process have been extracted from conversations with the journalists and scholars that approached her work.