ELIZABETH FOX-GENOVESE
words she wrote, and the woman she appeared
to
be, lay the sum and
the being of her.
247
Hard
to
believe that Drabble, writing those lines cannot have known
on some level that she wrote about herself.
The female adventure, traditionally, has been a psychological
adventure: the discovery and acceptance of or rebellion against what it
is
to
be a woman. Drabble has a genuine feel for the details of female
life. Her treatment of the reactions of young mothers
to
their children,
in particular, displays impressive sensitivity.
The Millstone
stands out
against all her other novels for the condensed passion of Rosamund's
growing love for Octabia. There alone Drabble brings together the
story and its telling, language and emotion. Between mother and
infant no angers or jealousies intervene. That their exclusive love rests
upon the denial of the male raises questions about Drabble's view of
women and points beyond the relations between the sexes to the
relations between women themselves.
For all the evocation of domestic detail, confidentiality between
women, and the familial realities of female experience, Drabble's
women remain deeply ambivalent about men and defiantly live at the
expense of other women. Drabble has yet
to
come openly
to
terms with
her heroines' denial of other women, but the most cursory reading of
her texts reveals a gallery of mothers ranging from the alchoholic
(Emma's), through the merely repressive, unattractive, and uncompre–
hending, to the openly malicious and competitive (Frances's and
Clara's). Sisters and sister figures fare scarcely better. Since Louise's
relatively gentle fate, Drabble has given us a collection of female
doubles for her heroines, including Clelia, whose brother Clara stole,
notwithstanding their apparently ideal friendship-we shall pass over
the incestuous complications of
Jerusalem the Golden;
Lucy whose
husband Jane stole; poor old Janet Bird, merely consigned
to
oblivion;
and Frances's real sister, Alice, whose suicide ·merits occasional passing
references as Frances wings her way toward her golden future.
Drabble's technique frees her
to
give an account of modern female
life that superficially acknowledges difficulty and struggle but that, by
displacing them and draining them of their content, refuses the reality
of female, and indeed human, life. Frances's apparent candor and
transparency cannot mask her selfish and narcissistic opacity. Frances
has left behind her the realms of domesticity (meaningless labor),
which have left distressingly little trace on her advertised conscious–
ness. But then Frances, with her sexually ambiguous name (which
juxtaposed against Karel, the name of her lover, makes one wonder
whether Drabble is groping for a model of androgyny-sexual resolu-
