ELIZABETH FOX-GENOVESE
235
complexity, conflict, and struggle with respect to female being and
potential achievement as does her blandly optimistic picture of British
society. For Drabble has solved the dilemmas of womanhood by a
retreat to masculinity or androgyny even as she has solved the tragedies
of late capitalist society by a retreat to God, philosophy, and muddling
through.
The publication of
The Ice Age
coincided with the republication,
in the United States, of all her earlier novels in accessible paperback
editions, thus confirming-as the complete Penguin edition of her
work in England had already confirmed-a certain status. Drabble
currently figures as one of the most successful novelists of middle-class
womanhood. Ironically, the structural relationship of
The Ice Age
to
the earlier, female-centered novels accentuates the limits of the inten–
tionally individualistic bourgeois feminism-the ambiguities of
middle-class female identity-that pervades, if in displaced and sub–
merged fashion, the earlier novels themselves. What began as a quasi–
autobiographical mode uniting first person female narrator and author
has gradually given way
to
authorial intervention and growing identi–
fication with male characters, but male characters only as vehicle for
recognizable middle-class female ambitions and identifications.
From her early novels about the lives of young women leaving
University, marrying, bearing children, coping with frigidity and
nappies, to her current preoccupation with personal release from the
prisons of family and society, Drabble has constructed, if not an
autobiography, something in the way of a chronicle of a specific female
generation. A fictionalized, English
Passages.
If
Anthony'S turn to God
at the end of
The Ice Age
evokes the
nouveaux philosophes
and a rising
personalist and antipolitical religious sensibility, the subject matter of
her earlier novels constituted an open invitation to female identifica–
tion, reinforced by an eye for interiors, clothing, and trends, that linked
them with women's magazines such as
Nova
or the upgraded afternoon
television soap-operas that have flourished in the United States since
the women graduates of the early nineteen-sixties found themselves at
home with small children. As the embryonic women's movement,
particularly in its more liberal, consciousness-raising manifestations,
testified, many of the middle-class women of that generation shared a
deep concern with the discovery of a self and the elaboration of a
language in which to express it. Drabble's career as a novelist belongs
to that phenomenon as surely as do those of Anne Roiphe, Lois Gould,
and a host of others. Sarah, of
A Summer Bird Cage,
has just come
down from University and is making up her mind about getting
married while holding a job and observing the marriages of her sister
