ELIZABETH FOX-GENOVESE
239
ery from other pasts. The interchangeability of pasts seems to reflect
Drabble's preoccupation with human life as behavior and custom-the
changing manifestations of nature, of the human struggle against the
various constructions of what Frances once refers to as the "human
environment."
In
proposing the phrase, Frances attempts to include
the specificity of place (those formative influences such as lakes, so well
understood by the Romantics) in the confusing mixture of heredity and
environment that shapes the individual personality. But her identifica–
tion of social texture and landscape inexcusably flattens the difficulties
of the human and social environment. And although one has links,
even with relatives of whom one remains totally unaware-in Frances's
case, her Ollerenshaw cousins-these subterranean human connections
serve to emphasize genetic recurrence at the expense of historically
enacted struggle.
Drabble's predilection for such words as "fate" and "nature,"
abstractions from the living of lives, runs like a thread through all her
novels. "I am made the way I am made" affirms Emma Evans in
The
Garrick Year.
Behaving according to one's nature covers the actions of
many a Drabble heroine. "One cannot escape one's destiny," says
Frances, thus echoing Jane Gray who, in
The Waterfall,
reflects that
often "in jumping to avoid our fate, we meet it." And indeed, Jane's
natural masochism, victimhood, and suffering led her
to
an affair with
her cousin's husband. One can hardly miss the reasonance of Oedipus
in these pronouncements, but Drabble explicitly rejects the Freudian
reading of that tale and takes a firm stand on phenomenological
terrain. Like her ambivalence about history, her ambivalence about
psychoanalytic explanation betrays a deep ambivalence about motiva–
tion and meaning-about explanation or interpretation of human
behavior.
The social world has figured in Drabble's novels from the begin–
ning. The London available to bright, modern young women just
down from Oxford or Cambridge glitters, draws, but extracts its price.
Sarah, the heroine-narrator of
A Summer Bird Cage,
might easily have
stayed on in the university world had she not found the people so dull.
Her sister Louise, around whom the novel centers, marries-tritely, for
money, as it turns out-a neurotic, sadistic, cold-fish novelist, Stephen.
Sarah, discussing the marriage with an acquaintance, explains the
action: "She didn't know what else
to
do so she got married.... She
was far too intelligent to do nothing and yet too beautiful and sexy to
do all the first-class things like politics or law or social sciences-and
she was naturally afraid of subsiding into nothingness, I suppose."
Discussing their cousin Daphne, a "herbivore," Louise and Sarah
