365betÓéÀÖ

PREDICAMENT OF WOMEN IN THE
NOVELS OF MARGARET DRABBLE

Reddy, P. Thirupathi

Margaret Drabble is one of England’s best novelists, says C. P. Snow.¹ Her popularity is due mainly to the appeal of her work, acclaimed at once by the general public and discerning critics. She has been called “a central chronicler of contemporary urban middle class lifeâ€�. ² The accent is on the contemporary, Drabble giving voice to common problems, particularly as they affect modern British women in the sixties and seventies. Interestingly, though, she writes from a feminist position, she is known because of her contribution of a genuinely new kind of character and predicament that is in conflict with current notions of feminism. An attempt is made in this paper to highlight this aspect in each of her early novels where it is a predominant concern.

Though some critics have labelled her, disdainfully, as “a novelist of maternityâ€�, the truth is that Drabble’s work is resonant with the problems of modern men and women. She examines with subtlety and moral acuity the very tissue and structure of women’s lives, “exposing the social-political-spiritual paucity of traditional avenues of middle class female self-fulfilmentâ€�. ³ Margaret Drabble herself refers to these issues thus â€�...in my earlier novels, I wrote about the situation of being a woman - being stuck with a baby, or having an illegitimate baby, or being stuck with a marriage where you could not have a job.â€� ⁴ Her female protagonists - who are predictably central to her novels, rather than men - are caught in the above predicaments. Sarah Bennet in her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), for example, is indecisive about how to shape her life in view of the bird-cage of female identity she sees played out in the lives of her sister and friends. Sarah is a typical Drabblesque heroine sharing with her later counterparts the situation of a modern, attractive, educated, emancipated, intellectual, aspiring, but sexually cold young women.

The predicament featured in A Summer Bird-Cage relates to marriage in the context of educated women who have just left the universities with good academic records. At a loose-end, after the comforting routine of a spell with the family and another at the university, Sarah thinks of “what a girl can do with herself if overeducated and lacking a sense of vocation.â€� As one could guess, one answer, which her sister Louise comes up with, is marriage. But, soon enough, Sarah feels “sick with myself and sick with the whole idea of marriage and sickest of all with Louise,â€� when that empty marriage based wholly on money founders on the rocks of incompatibility. A Summer Bird-Cage is a study in contrast of two sisters, Sarah and Louise. They are similar opposites, though, Sarah is not aware of her similarity with her demanding, selfish sister Louise. Young and inexperienced, and setting much store by love, unlike Louise, Sarah still wants to “have one’s cake and eat it.â€�⁷ Her brother-in-law, Stephen Halifax, is neurotic, undersexed and incapable of love. Her friend Gill blunders into marriage too, only to find that her artist-husband Tony expects her to play the wife to his dominant male. This is another message for Sarah who is in the irksome predicament of isolation. In love with her beautiful body yet hesitant to offer it except on her own terms and to her lover Francis who is away in America, Sarah feels, “everyone had lovers and babies and husbands but me.â€� She is confused about her career, unable to see herself as a sexy don, she tells John that beyond anything she would like to write a book. The novel ends at this point, with Sarah waiting to take up her life again, to see if she has kept faith in Francis who is on his way home.

Motherhood comes to the fore in Drabble’s second novel The Garrick Year (1965), Already into marriage, which Sarah contemplates, Emma Evans is caught the predicament of a young mother who has to sacrifice her career. Burdened by the chores of housekeeping and child-rearing, she finds that her young daughter Flora, ironically enough, is the source of her joy and despair. Emma finally “gives up the here and now for the sake of the hereafter.â€� ⁹ She is helpless to prevent herself from extramarital affair with Wyndham, the friend of her actor-husband, David. She calls it, however, her failure to grow. She gives up a job in London much to her regret, but she is also a responsible mother who dives into the river to save her drowning children even while talking to her lover. She accepts the value and the limitations of her life with David and the children. Feminists would scoff at this sentimental turn but for Drabble the mother is as important as the career.

            The Millstone marks a new phase in the evolving motif of the predicament of women. More credibly than in The Garrick Year, motherhood poses a serious and subtle dilemma in The Millstone.     As Marion Libby points out in an important article on Drabble, fate plays havoc with the life of Rosamund Stacey, the lovable and sociable heroine of the novel. Hardly enough, Rosamud’s sin is not adultery or licentiousness but abstinence. “My crime was my suspicion, my fear, my apprehensive terror of the very idea of Sex.â€� ¹⁰ She pays a Victorian penalty for being a Victorian at heart. A single, half-­hearted sexual encounter leads to pregnancy, this being seen as a stroke of fate by Marion Libby. ¹¹ She decides, being a woman of strong will, to bring up the  child herself. Engaged in serious research and keen on a satisfying career based on it, She still has enough humanity left to tell herself: “It was no longer a question of what, I wanted: this time there was someone else involved. Life would never be a simple question of self-denial again.â€� ¹²

Rosamund’s brush with reality is painful once she decides in favour of the baby. Her sense of justice is deeply offended at the way the weaker and the poorer mothers are given an unfair deal in the maternity homes. She realises that this world of suffering is more real than her academic world of Elizebethan literature. The predicament comes into focus when her motherhood and career clash. These are two sides of the same coin according to Drabble. The beginnings of hope in arriving at a positive solution for the apparently inescapable trap that fate laid for her are seen in Rosamund’s insistence on the life of the child to the astonishment of her friends. Finally she fulfills herself by raising the baby, sticking to her career and sternly avoiding marriage. She was very much like George, “I neither envied nor pitied his indifference, for he was myself, the self that but for accident, but for fate, but for chance, but for womanhood, I would still have been.â€�¹³ Rosamund has known love and known her child Octavia with certainty, which raises her above the level of George.

In Jerusalem the Golden (1967), we come across Clara Maugham, who is haunted by her family and poor social origins. She is a naive, provincial girl with beauty, brains, cunning, and sexual opportunism who leaves behind her a painful childhood in the grim, industrial North (of England). Her search for life and survival as an escape from her past, takes her across a familiar British landscape to a more open, but ambiguous world. She finds in the Denhams her new fate to invalidate the old. One finds in the Denhams her new fate to invalidate the old. One finds in Clara Denham of her adopted family her news elf and in Gabriel Denham a brother and a lover. Her own powerful will becomes an obstacle to her faith in election. In a rare moment of self­ confrontation, she grasps the bare bones of her existential and moral dilemma - “I am too full of will to love.â€�¹⁴ She gives up her mother who is dying, in favour of her own future, “become she did not have it in her to die.â€�¹⁵ Clara is a survivor who does not hesitate to buy her future at the cost of her past.

The tender and the romantic is in focus in The Water Fall (1969) in which the protagonist Jane Gray is caught in a peculiar predicament. She is saddled with a cold and unromantic husband in Malcom who is nevertheless a responsible father though she is passive and helpless to save herself, she is drawn to James, the husband of her cousin Lucy, in whom she finds a romantic lover who allows her to pet him. She is gnawed by a sense of guilt for snatching James away from her cousin. The readers know more about Jane Gray because she turns out to be an unreliable narrator. She is muddled. The novel questions the very stability of character and their ability to understand one’s self and the world with certainty.

            The Needle’s Eye (1972) is perhaps Drabble’s best novel and it captures the moral and emotional dilemma of Rose Vassiliou. There are two central characters whose recollections and reflections generate and sustain the reader’s interest. The predicament of Rose is again, that of Simon Camish - both are married and in love with each other. It is Rose’s sweet, helpful nature that precipitates the crisis when she donates a large sum of money to an African charity. The incensed husband, Christopher walks out while she applies for a divorce. The marriage stagnates; Rose’s gift to the charity proves futile. In this impasse the children accentuate her predicament when Christopher serves notice for the possession of the children.
The mother in her asserts herself as she fights a legal battle. Years later, she gives in, the resolving her predicament through acquiescence. She accepts a mellowed Christopher who is liked by the children. Drabble shows repeatedly that she values such acceptance of responsibilities leading to reconciliations.

This survey of the theme of predicament of women shows that Margaret Drabble appeals to her Indian readership because of her humanism. Love and children are things of value which appeal to the Indian sensibility. The theme also emphasizes Drabble’s perception of the changing realities in England in terms of the relations between men and women, and the importance of family and marriage in modern context.

References:

¹ Quoted by Nancy Poland, Midwest Quarterly, 16, 3, 1975, P. 255.

² Jualme V. Creighton, Margaret Drabble, (London: Methuen and Company, 195), P. 14.

³ Ibid., P. 38.

⁴ Nancy Polan, Midwest Quarterly, P. 262.

⁵ A Summer Bird-Cage, (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London), P. (All future references to page numbers of Drabble’s novels are to this edition).

⁶ Ibid., P. 21.

⁷ Ibid., P. 63.

⁸ Ibid., P. 187.

⁹ The Garrick Year, P. 207.
¹⁰ The Millstone, P. 20.

¹¹ Marion Libby, “Fate and Feminism in the Novels of Margaret Drabbleâ€�, Contemporary Literature, 16, 5, 1975, P. 182.

¹² The Millstone, P. 147.

¹³ Ibid., P. 199.

¹⁴ Jerusalem the Golden, P.193.

¹⁵ Jerusalem the Golden, P. 239.