ELIZABETH FOX-GENOVESE
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ters. Drabble creates a network of signs that intersects with the social,
psychological-human, in a word-fabric of her story at given points,
but remains essentially alien to it.
It
is hard to avoid the suspicion that
she is speaking in two languages at once-that of female being on the
one hand, that of double-first Cambridge essays on the other. Her
literary language reads as if derived from an interpretive essay. The
volcano, for example, into which David peers in
The Realms of Gold,
points explicitly towards the volcano of human nature. And who can
resist Jane Grey (a self-proclaimed victim), or Emma Evans (Emma
Woodhouse, Emma Bovary, Mary Ann Evans)?
By her idiosyncratic and intransigent use of labels, Drabble
forestalls much obvious exegesis: her labels tease rather than name.
For, in the same conversational tones in which she speaks of baby's
food, wardrobes, vegetables, television, or plane crashes, she gives us
fate, victim, nature, suffering, freak, madness. Meaning is denied in
favor of observation of the multifarious variety of human life. Drabble
does not neglect the intrusion of violence into normal life. But since
her brief, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to deal with its most
positive aspect, the inherent violence of the sexual confrontation of
men and women, the mutual recognition and acceptance of otherness,
she has refused its living manifestations. Violence pervades the subse–
quent novels, but always as reported event. Frances complacently
survives the violent plate-throwing and emotional distress of Karel's
wife, Joy, and looks forward to tolerating more. By all accounts, the
physical violence of Rose's married life with Christopher was unbear–
able; the reader never witnesses it directly. Distance anaesthetizes
psychological as well as physical violence. Exhibitionism, which
Frances recognizes in herself, characterizes all the heroines to greater or
lesser degree. But intimations of confidentiality notwithstanding, the
self-revelation remains as genuinely communicative as
Cosmopolitan
advice on how to hold a man. The somewhat schizophrenic deadlock
between intelligence and emotion, and the tension between surface and
meaning, gives the novels a neutralized quality. The material of life
abounds, but deep resistances frequently impede its vitality. With due
respect to Drabble's suspicion of the Freudian perspective, the apparent
transparency of her novels bears a marked resemblance to the classic
defense of verbalization.
...
...
...
The occasional authorial interventions in
The Realms of Gold
suggest that Drabble might be attempting to distance herself from her
