Margaret Drabble: Women and Their Suffering

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In most of the novels by Margaret Drabble, the relationship between mother and daughter is treated as a main subject matter. The stature of the father is shadowy and unimportant as seen in The Millstone. Perhaps, this is because when she was a child her father was away on war and most of her early days were spent with her mother and her older sister. Mrs. Drabble recalls in an interview she gave to People magazine (13th October 1980) that Maggie was a fiery child with a hyperactive mind and gave many sleepless nights to her mother.

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As Margaret recalls in her biography of Bennet, her father, spoke very good English and was a charming man but her mother was rude and aggressive:

My mother ground her teeth and everybody said ‘How unattractive’—and I was in a position because of circumstances of education and money to be able to profit from her having ground her teeth twenty or thirty years ago.

Obviously, drawing from her mother’s life in several books, she has commented:I think she finds it terribly hard to read my books because there is so much that she recognizes and yet it’s all slightly twisted. It must be very hard for her to know that I meant and what I didn’t mean.

Margaret is the second child in the family of four children which includes an elder sister A.S. Byatt who is a noted novelist and critic and for a time senior lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London.

She points out that her family was of the same size and constitution like the famous Bronte sisters of the 19th century. They were all commonly interested in writing and in their childhood composed stories together.

Margaret Drabble got married immediately after graduating from University in June 1960, to Clive Swift, a Cambridge graduate in English, who later became a leading actor. He was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and so they spent the first year of their marriage at Stratford-on-Avon. Margaret Drabble at that time was also related with theatre and was an actress but after the first child was born, she had to abandon her acting career and took up writing. The couple had three children before they separated in 1972 and divorced in 1975.

Margaret Drabble always lived with her children in comfortable house at Harristead and has always been a loving and responsible mother. It is perhaps because of this that she has been able to draw female readers empathetically to her work.

In addition to her eleven novels to date, she has written several stories and screen plays, biography of Arnold Bennet and other literary subjects. She has written scores of reviews and other pieces—from short stories to extended essays—for literary journals and magazines. She writes for both school children and adults, both scholars and laymen.

She has appeared in several televised literary programmes and participated in government councils, Art council committees, and British council lecture tours and for years taught adult education once a week at Morley College in South London. She has just completed an ambitious five-year project, the re-editing of the Oxford Companion to English Literature.As discussed in the previous chapter and as Elaine Showalter has pointed out Feminine, feminist or female, the woman has always had to suffer and struggle. The woman’s movement of course possesses a long history. Its original development goes back to Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote—A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. Throughout the 19th century debates and discussions were carried on to consider the proper sphere of women in society. In fact, feminism was rooted in the doctrine of ‘sympathy’ enunciated most prominently by David Hume and Adam Smith in the 18th century. This doctrine was used by Mary Wollstone craft in preaching feminism in early 19th century.

The doctrine of sympathy had a conscious or an unconscious effect on the writers of the century, to name a few Fanny Wright, Margaret Fuller and John Stuart Mill. We can conclude that their writings forecast the modern feminist ideals. Their contributions are universally acknowledged by those of the movement’s founders. Another name that cannot be forgotten is that of William Godwin, an ardent feminist of the day who wrote An Enquiry Concerning of Political Justice (1793) in which he advocates the rights of women. Godwin did not merely write about feminism but actually put into practice the things he wrote while bringing up his daughters. In days when women’s education was domestic, ornamental and heavily loaded with religion, Godwin taught his daughters the radical social philosophy and English history. He trained them in such a way that they were expected to be on par with men intellectually.P.B. Shelly, the 19th century Romantic poet, too explicitly believed in feminism. Shelly’s feminism becomes obvious in his comments on Plato’s Symposium. He had full sympathy for women who were heaped by male sexism and brutality. He tried to free his sister Elizabeth from this but was disappointed because after some time Elizabeth lost her nerve and went back to the narrow pessimistic world to doom which was the destiny of most of the women.

Shelly always felt that a woman need not necessarily be delicate, neat, trim and traditional. As a feminist he felt that she could do all the things that a man did intellectually. In Mary, who was Godwin’s daughter, he saw all these things. She was bold in behaviour and did not have any domestic accomplishments or any interest in acquiring them. She was “never like most of the female contemporaries’’ explains her biographer Mwriel Spark.

It was exactly this “Womanliness” from which Shelly wanted to rescue woman. In Mary, he saw his promise and dream fulfiled. By showing the example of Mary, he proved to the world his ideas of feminism and what it was possible for woman to become. His contribution is indeed significant.

Of course, Shelly as a feminist emerges only recently—after the publication of his comments on Plato’s Symposium in 1931. However, his poetry is full of his ardent support to woman as equal to man or at least many of his poems reveal his desire to see woman intellectually equal to man.

In the 19th century England was literally awakened intellectually. Many social issues were discussed: a major social issue being the cause of women. The 19th century also seemed to be the age of female novelist due to the emergence of great names like Jane Austen, Bronte sisters and George Eliot, and others. In the 20th century also there are a number of great women writers like Rebeca West, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, etc., but Margaret Drabble is perhaps the most ambitious of all, she writes with broad social concern and plays a lively role in popular and literary culture. Drabble also has the strongest sense of connection to female tradition as can be seen in her novels. The novels portray sad existence of woman: “The sexual doom of womanhood, it’s sad inheritance”. Drabble achieved fame and reputation with the publication of her novels one after another since 1960. In all these novels the central character is a woman. She revealed in these novels, a very personal experience, personal to such an extent that in The Waterfall she has described with details the act of delivery of baby by Lane, the protagonist of the novel, thus showing that, becoming a mother is pleasurable but along with this pleasure there are lot of vulnerabilities attached to it.

The Victorian woman writers too perhaps wanted to write about the very personal conflicts, issues, experience and relationship but they did not have the nerve to do so. Perhaps they did not want to hurt their families or offend their friends by unconventional options. Of course, sometimes these woman novelists got around these issues by using pseudonym, e.g., ‘George Eliot’ was adopted by Mary Evans. But in their use of material from life, they were in bondage to the feminine codes of love and loyalty. Drabble wrote these books, just about the time when sociologists and journalists were realising the problems of a housewife. So when Drabble’s books were out, educated young wives and mothers were finding it difficult to adjust to domestic life. They found their own problems discussed in the novels. They identified themselves with the central woman characters and were one with her. Margaret Drabble’s greatest gift lay in her sense of timing. She appeared on the literary scene as the first English woman to give voice to the delusive promise of college life, followed by the cold touch of matrimony and child-rearing.Several elements like fate and coincidence are also to be found in the novels of Drabble, perhaps this needs illustration because she is interested in tradition. The word ‘fate’ has lost its metaphysical doctrine and also its conviction for the modern reader but Drabble deals with fate in a reflective manner which generates self-awareness in characters. Early novels by Drabble have characters who strive to avoid consequences of their actions, to delay or to outwit fate, even though they inevitably fail and are caught. Emma Evans in The Garrick Year withdraws from her conflicts, hoping to defeat them by aesthetic detachment. She sees the consequences of a potential affair with Wyndham, but she maintains an aloof critical pose, inspecting and mocking him rather than risk an embarrassing human involvement. But she gets trapped in the end by Wyndham’s car as she tries to duck out of sight of her husband: a symbol of fate thwarting her attempts at escape and exposing her affair.

Rosamund in The Millstone is Drabble’s first protagonist who begins to understand and to accept her fate. The book begins with her tragic romance with George, tragic because she cannot accept his love and has to shun him off out of her life. But the complication of her pregnancy and motherhood make Rosamund question the Providence: why was her daughter stricken with potentially fatal heart trouble? She has inherited from her parents a sincere concern for those who suffer, a sympathy that her pregnancy heightens. Her struggles have been a test of faith, and her adherence to motherhood gives her the reward of self-knowledge, at least, to some degree.Jerusalem the Golden also structures itself around models of fate: Clara’s fated meetings with Clelia and Gabriel Danham; Clara’s attitude towards her home town and the telegram announcing her mother’s illness, seem to be fateful signs of retribution for her neglect. Clara understands this but despite her understanding she remains rather selfishly fixed in a doomed quest for escape.

When Clara meets Clelia, the narrator tells us:She wondered...whether a conjunction so fateful and fruitful could have been, by some accidental offuseness on her part, avoided, she did not like to think so, she liked to think that inevitability had had her in its grip, but at the same time she uneasily knew that it had in some ways been a near thing (J.G. 10).Could she have missed this fateful conjunction? Her fateful meetings made her seize the opportunity. She overestimates her power and the significance of this meeting, and she could never escape the fate that she meets in Clelia and Gabriel because she could not see beyond the romance of the meeting and its selfish pleasure.The telegram that informs her of her mother’s cancer stuns Clara and challenges her understanding of fate. She had used her mother’s illness as an excuse to leave school and go to Paris with her lover Gabriel. Her guilt seems to prove that there is a moral justice, if somewhat vindictive, in the world:When Clara opened the telegram and saw the news of her mother, she trembled as though she had been stuck from the heavens. She stood there, staring at the fatal yellow paper, and her first thought was, I have killed my mother. By willing her death, I have killed her. By taking her name in vain, I have killed her. She thought let them tell me no more, that we are free; we cannot draw a breath without guilt, for my freedom. And she felt in closing in upon, her relentlessly the hard and narrow clutch of retribution, those iron fingers which she had tried, so wilfully, so desperately to elude: a whole system was after her, and she the final victim, the last sacrifice, the shuddering product merely of her past (J.G. 208).

Clara’s thoughts, above circle round her foolish attempts to escape her fate, her mother, her ties to the past. She cannot escape her fate, yet she cannot see it in terms other than ‘sacrifice’.In The Waterfall, Jane Gray struggles to escape her fate but it catches her up everywhere: she can neither escape the tragic romance nor live with it in peace. Quite opposite with Rose, in The Needle’s Eye. She enters permanent conflicts of her family on her own and makes no attempt to escape her fate. Unlike Clara, Rose accepts the consequences of these family ties in spite of the unpleasant things present there. This does not bring her happiness because most of the time she feels bitterly embroiled in a marriage she may well wish has never been. But at times we see in moments of grace that Rose is blessed with a side to her character that is simplicity and sincerity, which in some ways the opposite of self-consciousness. She stands as Drabble’s main example of the good that comes from accepting fate.

In The Realms of Gold, Frances Wingate has both, simplicity and sophistication but she is lesser heroine than Rose because everything comes to her easily. She is lucky and her fate brings her luck because unlike other heroines of Drabble she marries her lover in the end and has a happy family.

Drabble, in trying to reconcile character and fate, refers to the story of Oedipus and expresses her belief about fate:

I feel that the arbitrary is significant, but it’s your fate to do the things that reveal the truth to you. Or perhaps it’s your fate to see it later. I do believe in fate. I have had a peculiarly fated life, I sometimes think, but then if you look at it in another light, all that things happen to you and you are the kind of person that responds in a certain way .

After the life assumes a recognizable form, one thinks one sees the fate one has lived. But the fate may only be a way of tidying up what happens, away of tidying up of the mess of circumstances. Frances Wingate, as said above is lucky in her fate because in the end she can marry the man she loves. The novel ends on a happy note, but in an interview Drabble has said that an happy ending can be achieved only by a lot of tricks in the plot, and one such trick seems the use of the ‘coincidences.’ But there is a limit to the coincidences which provides this novel’s happy ending. The narrator tells us:The picture post-card which Frances Wingate has written to Karel Schmidt at the beginning of the year was at that moment lifted from its resting place at the bottom of a mail bag a thousand miles away, and sent upon its way. Its journey from box to bag had taken nine months: the rest of its journey was to take a mere ten days. And to those who object to too much coincidences in fiction, perhaps one could point out that there is very little real coincidence in the post-card motif, though there are many other coincidences in this book (R.G. 218).

The other coincidences are that Frances and David should meet in Africa, that Karel and David should miss a plane that crashes in the English channel, that Karel’s wife should discover that she’s lesbian just when Karel and Frances want to get married.Even minor details in the novel are coincidental. In Tockley, Frances makes two phone calls—to Vicar and to Janet Bird. The Vicar is eating his supper when she calls; Janet Bird was also eating her supper when Frances calls. The Vicar had been eating Shepherd’s pie, cauliflower and frozen peas. Janet Bird was also eating Shepherd’s pie and frozen peas, though she had no cauliflower. There is some limit to life’s coincidences. When asked about this, Drabble remarked:

In The Needle’s Eye, I made life as difficult as possible for the characters: In the Realms of Gold I made it as easy as possible. The truth probably lies half way between as far as probability goes

Drabble’s earlier novels, specially The Summer Bird Cage, The Garrick Year and The Millstone are in the first-person narration and since all the three are in the first-person, it is hard to know when the protagonists are self-portraits of Margaret Drabble and when they are simply intended to represent members of her own age group. When she was asked whether she was working out her own problems in her first three novels, Drabble answered:

It’s almost inevitable, I think, that one should write about ones age group and the preoccupations of it .

But Sarah, Emma and Rosamund seem to be more than fictional members because they represent their creator in certain very detailed ways. Sarah and Rosamund are Oxford English majors like Drabble and like her they have important and complex relationship with their sisters. For example, in The Millstone when Rosamund becomes pregnant she writes about it to her sister Beatrice. Beatrice’s response is worth quoting:I must say you didn’t go into many details about the whole thing, but from what you said I gathered you were intending to keep the child. I feel I must tell you that I think this is the most dreadful mistake and would be frightful for both you and the child—just think, if you had it adopted, you could forget about the whole business in six months and carry on exactly where you left off....I just can’t see you adapting yourself to the demands it would make on you, you have always been so set on your independence and having your own way....However, it isn’t just you that I am thinking of. It would be bad enough for you but it would be far, far worse for the child. Through no fault of its own it would have to have the shun of illegitimacy all its life and I can’t tell you how odiously cruel and vicious children can be to each other, once they get hold of something like that A baby isn’t something you can have just because you feel you ought to (M 66-67).

This letter says some good things about Beatrice. First, she knows her sister well and that there would be a conflict in Rosamund’s life in raising the child and her own independence because throughout the novel Rosamund’s independent nature has been stressed. Secondly, the letter also shows that Beatrice truly loves her sister and does not want her to suffer because of wrong decision. Besides, she also thinks about the child and its welfare.

Rosamund’s response to the letter is one of full of anger because she feels nobody has the faintest right to advice about her child. She remarks:

Nobody had the faintest right to offer me any advice about my own child...her letter revealed to me the depth of my determination to keep the baby. The determination at this stage cannot have been based, as it later was, on love, for I felt no love and little hope of feeling it; it was based rather on an extraordinary confidence in myself, in a conviction, quite irrational, that no adoptive parents could ever be as excellent as I myself would be (M., 67-68).

The above response of Rosamund to Beatrice’s letter is rather crude. Beatrice is full of concern for her sister but Rosamund’s response to it is full of anger, showing the complex relationship between the sisters.

Further autobiographical evidences are to be found in Drabble’s other works. The Garrick Year is clearly based on a year Drabble and her husband spent in Stratford-on-Avon and it is an open secret that the novel arose out of Drabble’s boredom and resentment when she followed her husband to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon. In The Needle’s Eye the heroine Rose goes back to her husband at the end of the novel. Actually this is not good for her but Drabble ends the novel with this moral tone and she has admitted that “Rose’s return to Christopher paralleled her own inability to break with her husband at the time she was writing the novel”.

Jerusalem the Golden is even more candidly autobiographical. In her biography of Bennet, Drabble says she based the novel on her childhood memories of Sheffield: “I wrote the book from memory”8. Like Drabble, the heroine of Jerusalem the Golden grows up in the barren territory of the industrial north of England. Her mother is both dour and self righteous or as Drabble has said of her own mother, “depressed and depressing.”. Clara views winning a scholarship to London University (as Drabble may have anticipated going to Cambridge) as her chance to escape to “some less obstinately alien world” (J.G. 73). In her final year at the university she finds that and more, “a truly terrestrial paradise, where beautiful people in beautiful houses spoke of beautiful things” (J.G 37). Clara meets in short, the Denhams, a large colourful, affectionate family, the antithesis of her own. In her interview with Drabble, Nancy Hardin observed:A significant characteristic of the young women in your novels is their inability to accept the values of their parents. Instead they commit themselves to a search for ‘chosen’ or ‘extended’ families with whom they work through their identities and beliefs. Clara Mangham of Jerusalem the Golden comes to mind.Drabble’s response is revealing:I have often wondered whether this is a problem that is particular to me in any way, or whether it’s a problem that afflicts almost all girls, and men too—that one has to escape from one’s own family and find substitute families or substitute patterns of living, I don’t know whether this might reveal my own feeling about my own family background. For many years my mother was very depressed. She’s now not, thanks, to well quite frankly, thanks to drugs. So throughout my adolescence I was struggling with the fact that adult life seemed to be incredibly depressing...one had to find some image of liveliness or colour or love that was different from what one had been brought upon. I don’t know how I would have developed if I’d known my mother as she is now. She is so much more cheerful and active. I might have had a completely different view of needing to leave the family or having to find other mother figures. But I certainly do—did, I think—look for other mother figures...what one is looking for is just patterns of living in other people.

As Drabble has said in her interview, Clara too finds patterns of living in the Denham house but unlike Drabble and her husband, Clara and her lover do not separate at the end of the novel. Further striking parallels are found between Kate Armstrong, the heroine of The Middle Ground and Margaret Drabble. Both of them have generated their early works out of their identity as women and both of them were viewed as writers of women’s work and champions of feminist perspectives. Kate Armstrong in the novel is tired of dealing with women. At one point she remarks:

I am bloody sick of bloody women....I am sick to death of them, I wish I’d never invented them, but they won’t just go away because I am tired of them. Will they? (M.G. 8)Margaret Drabble too, initially wrote enthusiastically about women and their problems but was later, tired of being labelled as a women’s writer and so from The Ice Age onwards turned increasingly to the social scene from the individual psyche.These autobiographical elements are found in Drabble’s work because she wrote from real experience, particularly women’s experience and it is here that her feminine sensibility is evident. She has commented that she was profoundly affected by reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex while she was at Cambridge, she remarks:This seemed to me to be wonderful material and so important to me as a person. It was material that nobody had used, and I could use, as nobody had ever used as far as I would use it 1

The second sex is an anatomy of what Drabble has called ‘the situation of being a woman’ in a man’s world. It asserts that one is not born but becomes a woman, de Beauvoir describes “how woman undergoes her apprenticeship, how she experiences her situation, in what kind of universe she is confined, what modes of escape are vouchsafed her” .

The crucial discovery a woman makes during her apprenticeship to life is that she is confined to a sphere created and ordained for her by men, and Drabble’s early novels resound with this discovery. As she told one interviewer:...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 couldn’t have a job. But what a woman is really stuck with in our culture is the condition de Beauvoir describes as ‘alterity’ which means that she is defined in relation to man. “Now what unusually signalizes the condition of woman is that she—a liberated and independent individual like all human creatures—nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to presume the condition of the other” (T.S.S. 28). In parental society, “kindness is male and man defines woman not in herself but as next of kin to him.... He is the subject matter, he is the complete—she is the other.” Specifically, de Beauvoir says, man has decreed that woman is, “the sex, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male, as sexual being” (T.S.S. 16). Men, “propose to stabilise her as sexual object and to doom her to immanence” (T.S.S. 28). Can a woman in this situation, de Beauvoir asks, become “an autonomous and transcendent subject?” (T.S.S. 278). Without employing, perhaps, without even fully understanding de Beauvoir’s existentialist vocabulary, Margaret Drabble seems in her early novels to be exploring some of the practical implication of The Second Sex.

There is a deeply personal, honest and exploratory quality about Margaret Drabble’s work. Her works are moral and humanistic in nature. Her strength as a writer is in the way she has turned herself to her time and her concern with social determinism and historical change has in some ways made her more of a realist with an acute feminine sensibility.Taken as a whole, her work shows new morality against the old, incorporating the viewpoint of the intellectual socialist wife and mother. She is sometimes dismissed as a ‘Hamstead novelist’ because her characters live in or around that fashionable and expensive area of London, inhabited by rich socialists and famous writers like herself. Drabble’s novels draw the reader to the tension exemplified by Drabble and experienced by many contemporary women who are struggling to define themselves within a patriarchal frame of reference. The strength of these characterizations stems from her own unresolved questioning and her experience of living in what she has termed as the ‘unchartered world’ of modern female identity:We do not want to resemble the woman of the past, but where is our future? This is precisely the question that many novels written by women are trying to answer: some in comic terms, some in tragic, some in speculative. We live in an unchartered world, as far as manners and morals are concerned, we have to make up our morality as we go. Our subject matter is enormous, there are whole new patterns to create .

REFERENCES

(1) Iris Rozenewajof, Interview with Margaret Drabble. Women’s Studies, 1979, 335-339

(2 ) ibid

(3) Margaret Drabble, A Women Writer. Book, 1973, 6

(4) Dee Preussner, Talking with Margaret Drabble. Mordern Fiction Studies, 1980, 567

(5) Monica Mannheimer, The Search for Identity in Margaret Drabble’s The Needle’s Eye. Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo American Letters, Vol-I, 2005, 38

(6) Peter Firchow , Margaret Drabble in the Writer’s Place: Interview on the Literary Situation in Contemporary Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974, 121

(7) Nancy Hardin, An Interview with Margaret Drabble. Contemporary Literatute, Summer , 2003, 227

(8) Arnold Bennet, Margaret Drabble. New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1974, 5

(9) Nancy Hardin, An Interview with Margaret Drabble. Contemporary Literatute, Summer , 2003, 295

(10) Peter Firchow, Margaret Drabble in the Writer’s Place: Interview on the Literary Situation in Contemporary Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974, 107

(11) De BeauvoirThe Second Sex,Trans. H. M. Parsuley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960, 24

(12) Nancy Poland, Interview,Margaret Drabble: There Must be a lot of people Like Me. Midwest Quarterly,Vol-16, 1975, 267

(13) Margaret Drabble, A Woman Writer. Book, 1973, 6