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PARTISAN REVIEW
dereli ct or di e. Does Mrs. Lessing understand thi s? We canno t be sure.
T he onl y evidence we have is in her titl e,
Summer Before the Dark–
darkness, this would appear to be telling us, will foll ow Ka te's long
summer of di scontent. Mrs. Lessing does no t address the outcome of
her heroine's choice with the courage we had come to expect o f her.
And who in our current fi ction of female libera ti on does? The
female ques t is before all else the quest for freedom and in our universe
o f absolutes surely no thing is so absolutely absolute as the idea of
freedom-who dares to speak of it as the mos t rela tive o f rela ti ves? As
we know from Quentin Anderson 's important study in Ameri can
thought,
Th e Imperial Self,
ever since Emerson and T horeau and
Whitman it has been on behalf of our free life as indi vidua ls tha t thi s
country has done its most ruthl ess colonizing, commandin g for the self
all things in the world , all obj ects and subj ects, all territo ri es and
governments of feeling, and all the crea ti ons of na ture.
It
h as been by
our refu sal of the conditions imposed upon the individual by society
that we have defin ed the self in wha t we take
to
be its proper sta te o f
innocen ce and power. Once turned outwa rd to such specifi call y social
issues as suffrage and p roperty rights under law, the women 's move–
ment now turns inward
to
make women, too, into imperi alists o f the
self instead o f the social legisla tors they once were.
It
is a ch ange, from
outward to inward reference, well suited to a period in whi ch external
reality h as small claim to grandeur, and we cannot be su rprised tha t
even Britain-the Britain o f fail ed empire-begins to an wer to the
same appeal.
Yet of course so long as we phys icall y inhabit society even if we
do no t admit its condition s, conditions exi st. I am talking about what
James ca ll ed " the things we cannot possibl y
n ot
know sooner or la ter. "
With or without their authors' consent, our novels o f libera ti on tell us
a good deal about the culture they refl ect and help to create. We sh are
this culture, so p erhaps some of the circumstances reported in our
liberated fi ction a re worth noting.
We remember tha t a t the end of James's
Portrait of a L ady
Isabel
Archer decides to stay with her husband and rear hi s illegitima te
daughter. James give us no ground for supposin g that this pos tpone–
ment
to
a n ext genera tion of hi s heroine's fulfillment has hi s encour–
agement; he is simpl y accepting the famili ar " solution " of the time–
things will be better for one's daughters.
In
our current novels of
female self-realization the future promises nothing. We can no longer
with confidence leave the reconstitution of life in any aspect to the
unborn or newl y born-if life is
to
be saved , it must be saved now.
