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PARTISAN REVIEW
tion without sexual differences), openly claims descent from h er father
and her grandfather, not her mother. Women's ambivalence toward
their sexual identity is no new discovery. Lessing's treatment of Anna's
disgust for her own menstrual blood uncomfortably and powerfully
captures the intractability of those struggles with and for self. But
Drabble's unnuanced celebration of the escape from the shackles of
female being constitutes a denial rather than an understanding.
And Drabble's attempted move towards a less female-centered
novel has failed to resolve the problem. In many ways, Anthony
Keating functions as the structural successor to Frances Wingate. He
presents a rather androgynous figure . Not merely could his Oxbridge
background and early-television career serve as well for a woman as a
man-they have so served in other Drabble novels-but his gentleness
with children explicitly evokes a maternal dimension. His fascination
with the world of real power and money suggests a female attitude to
the real world of men, and even his relationship to his business
partners remains essentially passive and mystified. More important,
thus separating the inevitable "male" components of complex female
being frees Drabble unambiguously to forsake the womanliness with
which she no longer chooses to identify.
Taken as a group, Drabble's women offer a picture of predatory
narcissism, their occasional victimhood and suffering being, as Drab–
ble acknowledges, no more than another way of getting what they
want. Emma's forthright acceptance of being made the way she is made
constitutes a foreclosing, not an opening of shared consciousness. She
decides how she is made and offers her self-image not as some difficult
reality, but as self-determined justification and arbitrary explanation.
Such a female consciousness opens the path to condemning women to
find a human identity only by becoming men.
Ironically, Drabble's mode of expressing female consciousness, the
purposefully narrow and focused, has undercut the vitality of her work.
The Needle's Eye,
far and away her best novel to date, and a fine novel
by any standards, breaks out of the earlier mold by splitting the center
of consciousness between Simon and Rose. The different points of view
within the novel, rather than between author and novel, grant the
novel a new and promising strength.
The Realms of Gold
retreats to
the earlier schizoid discourse. So despite its apparent broadening of
scope and inclusion of new material, it repudiates the possibilities of
freedom and life in favor of control and mystification. A pity. Drabble's
talent is too considerable to waste on complacent, life-denying mirrors
for middle-brow, middle-class women, who themselves deserve some–
thing better.
