42
PARTISAN IliVIEW
The gifted English writer A. S. Byatt has most recently become
famous for her bravura historic reconstruction and intellectual detective
fiction, the prize-winning novel,
Possession,
and for a Darwinian Victorian
fantasy on the theme that human society is like that of the ant, which was
made into the recent movie,
Angels and [mecls.
But eighteen years ago she
embarked on a chronicle expressing her own generational experience as
someone like her heroine Frederica Potter - "a slightly transgressive, inde–
pendent woman." She planned a sequence of four novels , and now has
published
Babel Tower,
her third after
The
Vi~i?in
ill the Carden
(1978) and
Still Life
(1985), bringing Frederica to the era of the sixties. When the new
"Orange Prize" ($46,000) ticketed for woman writers was awarded in
Britain this past summer, Byatt protested that it "ghettoized" writers like
herself. Clearly she is interested in a great many things besides the subject
of being female. She is interested in biological and social theory, the nature
and function of human language, the future of education, the relation of
modern England to the past still present in landscapes and human behav–
ior, the division between classes, and a dozen other topics, and her new
book is very much a novel of ideas.
It
has a multitude of characters; it is a
many-stranded history which also folds another fiction, a fantasy com–
menting upon the times, into its fabric. Yet the central story it carries
forward is clearly a female
Bildungsroman,
an authorial self-questioning
about the shaping of female destiny.
Frederica's dilemma is commonplace enough. She married without
quite knowing what she was about. Her own physical urgency and the
unpersuasive appeal of the young men she met at the university had pro–
pelled her into the arms of Nigel Rivers, unintellectual, domineering, the
kind of man who boasted, "If you say, 'I love you' to a woman, it makes
her wet." Reading, paradoxically, had also betrayed her at the Cambridge
of F R. Leavis, where she had accepted the Lawrentian doctrine "that the
body is truth," that love-in-the-head is evil; she had taken her subjection
to Nigel's sexual force as proof that she was arriving at that ardor beyond
words reached by Lady Chatterley. She had been captivated, too, by Nigel's
upper-class swank; a schoolteacher's daughter from Yorkshire, she had fall–
en for his gentry glamor and Forster's
Howard's End
had instructed, "Only
connect," as though her marriage would effect the union of the classes
England needed. But, in fact, Nigel's posh country estate proved to be a
prison and her husband a boring jailor who turned Bluebeard and beat her
when she tried to escape.
Escape she does, though, to a London full of old friends and new, rep–
resentatives of a changing time. She takes her child with her but lives
independently, working as a teacher and publisher's reader. And she pre–
pares for the struggle which will climax in the court trial that first denies
