WOMEN NOVELISTS IN LATER DECADES
Doris Lessing
The broadening of opportunities for women paved way for some of the radical social changes in the later decades of the twentieth century. A “New Morality” emerged to challenge the established values and perceptions of gender, sexuality, marriage, etc. “New patterns of women employment, especially in the professional sector, made a rapid stride after the War was over in 1945. One of the most inspiring books in the feminist movement came from Germaine Creer (b. 1939), namely The Female Eunuch (1970), which is, in her own words, a part of the second wave in which “ungenteel middle-class women are calling for revolution.” One of the male characters in Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook (1962) echoes the phrase Creer has used here: “The Russian revolution, the Chinese Revolution - they’re nothing at all. The real revolution is women against men.” For both of these women writers that revolution was to be perceived in the female sensitivity to the unfair or highly limited roles of women, to their restricted representation in society and its literature.
Lessing’s career as writer had begun in East Africa with the novels she had written about the growth of political awareness among black people and the white settlers. She had experienced the colonial situation in that part of Africa. Her monumental work in five volumes, Children of Violence (1952-69), focuses on the growing political involvement, and the subsequent disillusion, of Martha Quest. This English woman in East Africa is shown growing from childhood to youth to age, experiencing the acute and complex problems of race and class. It is an epic sequence covering, in a sense, the entire history of the twentieth-century world. Lessing calls her fiction, and its type, “inner space fiction,” by which she means a fiction that has methodically moved in a different direction from conventional realism. The Four-Gated City (1969), the last of the sequence, is an illustration of the type. The significance of her central work, The Golden Notebook, lies in relating her concept of mental fragmentation to the disintegration of fictional form. Here woman’s creativity is to act as instrument of freedom for the fair sex. As the novel’s heroine, Anna Wulf, reflects, “women’s emotions are all still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists.”
Angela Carter
Another notable woman novelist of the period was Angela Carter (1940-1992), whose unconventional essay on pornography, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), pleads that even pornographic fantasy could be legitimized in literature if it could be pressed into the service of women and if women could cease to be considered as mere commodities. She is best known by her novel The Passion of New Eve (1977) and the two volumes of Gothic tales, Fireworks (1974) and The Bloody Chamber (1979). Her novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), as the title itself suggests, has a male protagonist. Her later work includes two major theatrical novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991).
Margaret Drabble
Perhaps the most representative of the later twentieth century novelists in England is Margaret Drabble (b. 1939), whose very first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) registered a new presence. It deals with two sisters of the “new” consciousness, who are gossipy, sexually emancipated, university educated, fond of parties. Still better than her first novel is Jerusalem the Golden (1967), which, too, focuses on the same themes, but comes out more assured and less jerky. Her most artful novel of the 1970’s is, however, The Ice Age (1977), which brings out a sharper picture of contemporary English society. Her favourite themes include corruption, IRA bombs, broken marriages, alienations of upward social mobility, etc. The feminist crusade of these women writers is in tune with the theory of Postmodernism.
OTHER NOVELISTS IN LATER DECADES
John Fowles
Perhaps the last of the well-known novelists of the twentieth century is John Fowles (1917-1993), who made a mark with his first novel, The Collector (1963), which is a sort of post-Freudian fantasy. The narrator, protagonist is a rather repressed, butterfly collecting clerk, an anti-hero. His kidnapping an art-student expresses his repression, making the release of sexual energy as a form of liberation. A similar theme of psychic and sexual liberation is also dealt with in his next novel, Mantissa (1982).
The Magus (1966, revised in 1977) is also on the same theme. His most popular novel, and most admired, has been The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), where again juxtaposition of repression and release is set up. The pair of central characters defy all taboos and conventions of social morality. We can see reflected in his work the influence of Lacanian psychology, which is post-Freudian.
Fraser And Farrell
There are some novelists whose work is of special interest to the Indian readers, because it relates the Indian situation during the British Raj. George Macdonald Fraser (b. 1925) and James Gordon Farrell (1935-1979) are among these writers. The Victorian India has been of great interest to many of these English novelists who had the opportunity to experience life on the Indian sub-continent. Fraser has to his credit ten volumes of the so-called “Flashman Paper,” dealing with the imagined career of the ex-villain of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. These volumes appeared between 1969 and 1994. The various themes in these volumes concern the Afgan war of 1842, the British acquisition of Punjab, and the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Less provocative than Fraser’s work is Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), which deals with the Indian Mutiny or Sepoy Rebellion, as the British named it from their side. On our side, the event is called the first War of Independence. The perspective brought upon the events is, of course, that of the colonial outfit. If does, however raise questions about the British imperial mission in the colonies. Fraser and Farrell do not compare, in terms of art, with E.M. Forster, whose novel on India is not impaired by any narrow outlook. Here, there is lack of depth of understanding of characters as well as the situation. FarreU’s unfinished novel about Shimla, The Hill Station (1981), is the poorest of his work.
Paul Scott
Of all the British novelists who wrote about India, Paul Scott’s “Raj Quartet” offers the most comprehensive treatment of the subject. Paul Scott (1920-1978) wrote his quartet (a sequence of four novels) between 1966 and 1975. Collectively called the Raj Quartet, the sequence consists of The Jewel in the Crown (1966), A Day of the Scorpion(1968), The Towers of Silence (1971), and A Division of the Spoils (1975). The period the quartet covers relates to World War II years and the subsequent phase leading to India’s Independence. Scott’s last novel, Staying On (1977), also deals with India, covering the post-Independence period. It shows how those who chose to stay on found themselves misfits in the changed scenario. Scott may not be as great as Forster, but he is decidedly superior to Fraser and Farrell. As a consequence of the Postcolonial critical theory, the work of these novelists, along with the work of similar writers, such as Forster and Kipling, has now been interpreted from the Postmodernist perspective.
POST-WAR POETRY
Surrealism
Between the Auden group of poets of the 1930’s and the Movement poets of the 1950’s, there are some poets of the forties who do not constitute any group or movement. One thing common between them is that they do not continue with the experimental poetry of the 1920’s, nor the Poetry of Commitment of the 1930’s, the decade of Depression. In the later years of 1930’s there emerged the movement of Surrealism in Europe,—including England. Primarily related to painting, Surrealism influenced the art of poetry also. One way of defining Surrealism is to see it in relation to Romanticism. One can say that Romanticism intensified becomes Surrealism. Another way to define it is to relate it to Realism. In that case Surrealism is seen as Super-Realism. For, after all, dreams, nightmares, daydreams, emotionalism, irrationalism are also a part of “real” life that we live, and it is these very aspects of life that constitute the stuff of Surrealism. In England, it was introduced in poetry by David Gascoyne (b. 1916), who also wrote A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935).
Dylan Thomas
A prominent poet associated with Surrealism was the Anglo-Welsh Dylan Thoman (1914-1953), although some decline to do that. Andrew Sanders is one such critic. His contention is: “As his ambitious and uneven first volume, Poems (1934), suggests, Thoma had begun to mould an extravagant and pulsatingly rhetorical style before he became aware of the imported innovations of international Surrealist writing. He was, however, decidedly a poet who thought in images. If there is a kinship evident in Thomas’s verse it is with the ‘difficulty,’ the emotionalism, the lyric intensity, and the metaphysical speculation (though not the intellectual vigour) of the school of Donne.” One of the popularly known poems of Thomas is “The Force that through the Green Fuse drives the Flower,” considered an example of his pantheism and mysticism; also an example of Blakean symbolism, such as the following:
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
Another well-known poem of his is “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines,” which is typical of his “obscurity” because his symbolism tends to be personal and private, such as the following:
Light breakes on secret lots,
On time of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.
Thomas and other poets of the forties are called neo-romantics, having greater affinity with Blake, Yeats, Lawrence, etc., than with Eliot or Auden. Some other poems of Thomas to remember are “The Hunchback in the Park,” “After the Funeral,” “Over Sir John’s Hill,” “Fern Hill,” and “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
As Karl Shapiro has said, “Thomas is in somewhat the same relation to modern poetry that Hopkins was to Tennyson and the Victorians; this is a relation of anti-magnetism. Thomas resisted the literary traditionalism of the Eliot school; he wanted no part of it. Poetry to him was not a civilizing manoeuvre, a replanting of the gardens; it was a holocaust, a sowing of the wind.” Thomas is also known for his catchy, parodic, title Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), his book of autobiographical short stories. Unfortunately, he had died of drinking, just as Marlowe died in a drunken brawl. His best known volume of poems remains Deaths and Entrances (1946). In its Surrealistic revolt against all restraints on free creativity, including logical reason, standard morality, social norms, Thomas’s work reflects one facet of Postmodernism which finds more mature expression later in the literature of the 1960’s.
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There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.
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