The Columbia History of the British Novel

Ruth's sad heart «patches» its wounds by rejecting the Biblical Ruth's traditional role as the virtuous and obedient matron. Weldon's Ruth instead abandons her two small children when she loses her husband (who leaves her for another woman). Transformed by her rage at his abandonment into a «ruthless» she-devil, Ruth acquires enormous wealth, manipulates dozens of characters, and makes a new body for herself through years of plastic surgery-and all to torment and humble her faithless husband, a clownish figure appropriately named Bobbo. As with Carter's «conspiracy» at the center of The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, this is plotting with a vengeance, and that is the point. Authors are puppeteers; their plots are arbitrary. Carter's Wise Children, too, emphasizes the arbitrary nature of plotting through repeated introduction of wild conjunctions. Carter's heroine is appropriately named Dora Chance; with her twin sister Nora she shares a stage identity as one-half of 'The Lucky Chances.' All sexual coupling has its comically coincidental aspects (as Fielding and Sterne were among the first novelists to point out). Yet it is more than usually by lucky chance that Dora and Nora enter the world. For they have been told that they are the consequence of a particularly improbable conjunction-the casual rape of a shy chambermaid in a seedy Brixton boarding house by a great Shakespearian actor. (An early sketch for this plot centered on fortuitous insemination is provided by Carter's story 'The Kitchen Child,' first published in 1979 and later in Black Venus, 1985).

Plot among these writers, then, may be overdetermined; it also may simply be withheld: too much happens, or nothing. The autobiography of Fay Dodworth Langdon, the first-person narrator in Brookner's Brief Lives (1990), is one example of the latter. Fay lives emotionally in her own distant past, when she was a radio singer ('Arcady, Arcady was my song'); she even cherishes warm memories of the deadeningly quiet Sundays of her childhood, spent in a drab quarter of London: 'we would be reading, the simple honest stories Mother brought home from the Boots Lending Library and which for us were a source of endless pleasure, an integral part of Sunday, with nothing -952- harsh or disturbing to tell us, and always a happy ending.' Fay is a character trapped in a nearly eventless plot that never reveals itself to her, though readers soon see a pattern: everyone Fay «loves» dies and deserts her. Yet with the exception of her adored father, who died late in her childhood, Fay seems incapable of acknowledging her emotional ties to other people-including her mother and her husband-until long after they have died and left her alone. So love itself has been manifest to Fay only in its most painful form: grief, acute and chronic. This novel is a case study, a portrait of the sorrow that is Fay's only powerful characteristic. Attempting to read Fay as a heroine can lead only to the conclusion of an angry reader of Brief Lives who wrote the Sunday Times objecting to its favorable review of the novel: 'Am I the only reader for whom the heroines of Ms Anita Brookner's novels are not pathetic waifs but cold-blooded, egocentric, manipulative bitches?'

In any event, the loneliness Fay complains of in her old age-which she attributes to the fading of her beauty- is shown to be the result of an unacknowledged contradiction in her nature. She thinks she yearns for conventional relationships, and yet to her fastidious taste, every relationship she does enter is flawed and insufficient. Following the sudden death of a man with whom she has for some time been conducting a clandestine affair, Fay assesses her mood with her usual horrifying calm: 'It was not Charlie that I missed, but rather the person for whom Charlie had been a substitute, whoever that was.' She can take no pleasure even in the everyday chores of the «ordinary» life she says she aspires to:

I dread the weekends. I dread the pretense that drives me to the shops on a Saturday morning, and the shame of buying a solitary chop… I dread the calm of Saturday afternoons, punctuated only by the distant roar from the football terraces. Something stops me from going out, as if I might be in danger of missing a visitor, though no one ever comes. I sit by the window, my hands in my lap, looking out and waiting… I watch the light fade with a sort of anguish, an anguish which is not entirely temporal. I perceive the symbolism of the end of the day.

Fay's story (unlike the unsophisticated fiction of her childhood) has not been simple or honest, and there is no hope of a happy ending. In Brief Lives, the sparseness of events focuses attention entirely on the transient moods of a self-deluding narrator. -953-

For these writers, technique often lies-as with Brookner's use of Fay to center Brief Lives-in a form-fitting of the plot to a central individual consciousness. If that character (the subject of the portrait) should finally die (as Claudia Hampton does in the conclusion of Lively's Moon Tiger), a strong sense of closure may be provided. More often, however, these novels end oddly, awkwardly-as though there is something forced or painful about the novelists' separation from their characters. Conclusions may feature an explosion of gaudy improbabilities and last-minute revelations-as in Carter's Wise Children-or simply fade to black: three friends watch a sunset in Drabble's Radiant Way.

As Nancy Miller notes (her context is the fiction of George Eliot and Mme de Lafayette): 'To build a narrative around a character whose behavior is deliberately idiopathic… is not merely to create a puzzling fiction but to fly in the face of a certain ideology (of the text and its context)… If we were to uncover a feminine 'tradition'-diachronic recurrences-of such ungrammaticalities, would we have the basis for a poetics of women's fiction?' Contemporary British novels by women, with their common emphasis on «idiopathic» narrative viewpoint and their eccentric ironies and indeterminacies (Miller's 'ungrammaticalities') do bear out Miller's point that 'the peculiar shape of a heroine's destiny in novels by women, the implausible twists of plot in these novels, is a form of insistence about the relation of women to writing: a comment on the stakes of difference.'

None of these writers engages wholeheartedly in the dramatic simulation Updike expected of Drabble in 1976. The simulated subjects within their frames quite often, as in Fay's softly enunciated despair throughout Brief Lives, suggest a dissimulating author whose intelligence is not at one but rather at war with the self-deluding goals of her own characters. Anita Brookner is the force keeping Fay Langdon (the surname is almost a anagram for England, a homophone for London) from the simpler story Fay herself would have preferred to enact. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, Carter's most insistently metafictional novel, also finally stands as a critique of traditional closure. For Carter's novel simply runs down (in an appropriately mechanical way), and her narrator-like Brookner's Fay-turns a disappointed face outward to the readers he presumes are likewise disappointed: 'If you feel a certain sense of anticlimax, how do you think I felt?' — 954-

'Gender and the Autonomous Text': The Solitary Woman

Many of these dissimulating portraits are of women, and many raise questions traditional in British fiction centered on female experience and education. What can a woman become? What should she become? Such questions have been central to novelists (predominantly though not exclusively female) from Frances Burney and Jane Austen through the Brontës, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf; their implied answers are embodied in the characters (almost always young women) they designate as central, and in the plots that frustrate or fulfill their human potential. Can a woman be heroic entirely within the domestic sphere and the traditional roles of daughter, sister, lover, wife, mother? (Austen's Emma Woodhouse answers yes; Flaubert's Emma Bovary answers no.) Can a bright, sensitive woman deprived of an education make up for the deficiency by marrying a mentor? (For Burney's Evelina Anville, a comic yes; for Eliot's Dorothea Brooke, a tragic no.) Are the traits conducive to social popularity- beauty, cleverness, a respected profession, good bloodlines, wealth by inheritance or marriage-necessary to a credible heroine? (Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway offers a qualified assent; Eliot's Mary Garth a scornful negative.) On these issues, there is no break between these contemporary women writers and British fictional tradition-no need for a break, perhaps, because the tradition itself is not oppressively unitary or monolithic: it has already supported numerous conflicting and powerful voices.

In the answer to one traditional question about women, however, there is some oppressive uniformity in earlier British fiction by and about women, and some resistance from contemporary women novelists. Can self- sufficiency, singleness, be seen as heroic (or at least fictionally interesting) in a person; more particularly, in a woman? 'Women must marry,' Mrs. Ramsay repeatedly says in part 1 of To the Lighthouse. Her certainty is framed by Woolf and received by Lily Briscoe with considerable irony, but although Lily is a great improvement on earlier renditions of the English spinster, it is Mrs. Ramsay herself, the Madonna dry Lily has so much difficulty capturing on canvas, who centers Woolf's novel as she finally centers Lily's painting. To be a heroine-i.e., to stand as a good example of a life-a woman character must, in British fictional tradition, aspire toward an extended life, changing and being changed by other people. Even Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, who is small, plain, poor, and passionate-an embodied -955- rejection of the more facile conventions for novel-heroines-hates her orphaned singleness, yearning for her lost family as she yearns for her absent soul mate. For all her intensity as a narrator, Jane as a heroine is actually (as is characteristic of the English tradition) a compromise figure situated between the