SOURCE: “Acts of Self-Creation: Female Identity in the Novels of Margaret Drabble,” in Faith of a （Woman） Writer, edited by Alice Kessler-Harris and William McBrien, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 21-9.

[In the following essay, Hoffman explores Drabble's depiction of female experience and self-awareness in her novels and the influence of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. Commenting on The Middle Ground, Hoffman writes, “the novel itself constitutes for Drabble the opportunity to bring together the public and private, the political and the maternal.”]

At the start of Margaret Drabble's most recent novel, The Middle Ground, we see Kate, the protagonist, sifting through her morning mail, an array of marketing materials, each abusing and exploiting women in its own particular way. Kate's comic despair questions the notion of progress in the face of such flagrant instances of degradation and may well cause us to wonder if the situation of women in the late 1970s is to be the focus of the novel. As Kate herself asks, is she “a special case,” and as such “of little general relevance,” or is she “on the contrary an almost abnormally normal woman, a typical woman of our time, and as such of little particular interest.” The question is playful and perhaps more than a little misleading. For while Drabble will provide a small gallery of women making their way, the “new women,” Kate calls them, she makes no polemical or sociological efforts to categorize or typify; indeed the achievement of this most recent novel rests just in its acceptance of its characters, their actions and conflicts, small resolutions, in their most ordinary and individual sense.

Kate is a journalist, whose articles originate in her situation as divorced mother of three （we hear the resemblance between author and character）; Kate has made herself who she is through the act of writing which both expresses her kinship with women, and gives her the additional role of observer. At the time of the novel's opening, however, she is at the point of weariness with herself and her writing. As she remarks to a friend, “I'm as bloody sick of bloody women as you are, I'm sick to death of them, I wish I'd never invented them, but they won't just go away because I've got tired of them. Will they?” Kate chafes in the constraints of her subject matter and indeed her discontent may well serve Drabble as the opportunity to comment on the limitations of some women's writing, which remains mired, obsessively, in the delineation of women's problems, women's work.

Kate's comments capsule some of the dissatisfaction Drabble expressed a number of years before writing The Middle Ground and echo the author's conviction that while one may start out by writing out of one's own situation, this is something of a limitation to be outgrown. For example, after publication of The Ice Age: “I'm on better terms with my own interior life. I don't feel the need to write about it. I'm very interested in the way society works.” Has Drabble indeed shed the more private concerns of femaleness for larger public issues? In what sense is she to be considered （or does she consider herself to be） a women's writer? In The Middle Ground, Drabble explores the life of a woman whose work—writing—is fashioned out of her life, yet Kate does not offer Drabble's self-portrait. Rather, the novel itself constitutes for Drabble the opportunity to bring together the public and private, the political and the maternal.

Susan Gubar has described the closeness of the female artist to her art, the lack of distance that originates in the concept of the female body as artwork. Traditionally, the female body has functioned as the material that is fashioned into art by the male creator （for example, Pygmalion）, but one can find the subversion of the traditional notion of art as masculine activity by paying attention to the unnoticed or overlooked areas of female creativity. Indeed Gubar comments on the kind of “revisionary theology” by which late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century women writers were able to “reappropriate and valorize metaphors of uniquely female creativity and primacy.” Drabble is one of that company of writers who restore to the novel the examination of an area of experience that had been disregarded. With a kind of controlled closeness, she incorporates much of herself into her creations, sustaining a semi-ironic awareness of her own maternity as well as that of her characters.

As a writer and as a person, Kate of The Middle Ground is deeply rooted in femaleness, and so cannot dismiss it with witty comment or detached observation. Writing is directly connected to maternity for Kate. Nevertheless, having created herself out of her situation, and having fashioned for herself a role, the question of what is to be next confronts her. A recent abortion expresses her dilemma: she is not to be a mother again, not this time; indeed, Kate is blocked in her life, haunted in her dreams by the image of the child that might have been. Thus at the outset, Kate is moved to consider all the things she is not, but the question remains of what she is to do, how she is to focus her considerable energies.

By the end of the novel this question remains more or less to be answered. On the outside nothing much has changed. The novel ends as a party is about to begin; it is a party that draws together, perhaps only in a physical sense, the persons who have walked through the novel, the various strands of Kate's life, the important relationships and casual encounters of her urban existence. And so it concludes with Kate poised on the threshold, about to descend the stair: “A child calls her from downstairs. The doorbell rings. The telephone also rings. She hears her house living. She rises.” It is surely not too remote an association to invoke the presence here of another literary lady and her party: as her novel ends, Clarissa Dalloway too stands ready to descend the stair and draws into herself the fragile strands of the moment.

In a 1973 tribute to Virginia Woolf, Drabble acknowledges her initial aversion to the writer who was to become for her something of a literary progenitor. Put off by Woolf's reputation as a difficult, even an elitist writer, Drabble could not, she avers, place herself in relation to Woolf. Via the feminist stance she discovered in A Room of One's Own, however, Drabble describes a journey that for her culminated in an act of identification: “And here I sit, in my own room in Bloomsbury, feeling myself uncannily a product of her imagination.” It is with a significant leap of her own sympathetic imagination that Drabble appropriates Woolf for her literary family; in Woolf's novels, she notes, she finds no pictures of businesswomen with freezers and washing machines, nor any of “women novelists with many children, rushing from typewriter to school to butcher … but they were about to be born and she welcomed them.” We have here the recording of a kinship, perhaps more accurately the act of creating a progenitor who, from the distance of time, casts her approving gaze upon one who has come after. Here we find the establishment of the kind of continuum women writers are so often said to have lacked; in the course of acknowledging their differences, Drabble is able to feel also a necessary closeness and support for her own acts of self-creation.

Indeed, in describing what she finds to be Woolf's lasting contribution to the novel, Drabble underlines those qualities which she has grown to achieve in her own prose: “her perceptions of the slightest connections, her lack of interest in a heavy conventional narrative, her passion for the inconsequential psychological detail.” These Woolfian qualities are most to be found in Drabble's more recent work from Realms of Gold to The Middle Ground. She has grown to this point, I think, leaving behind her the propensity to melodrama that structures such novels as The Waterfall and Jerusalem the Golden. Now she offers the kind of glancing, panoramic view of the urban scene that Woolf carried out in Mrs. Dalloway. Kate, at one point in The Middle Ground, looks at the urban landscape from her friend's hospital room and achieves, for the breadth of the moment, the “aerial view of human love, where all connections are made known, where all roads connect.” Such wholeness is something the eye gives to a scene and achieves for the duration of a moment. The perception may well arise from the absorption in all the details of the everyday, so that as Drabble notes of Woolf, daily life takes on “such absorbing interest, so rich in terror and joy, that she needed no other stimulants.”

Is this perhaps a particularly feminine capacity to perceive, indeed, to create the moment? Drabble on Woolf's achievement: “To seize the moments of calm in the very midst of smoke and music and noise and flux—Mrs. Dalloway poised on her staircase to greet her guests; Mrs. Ramsay ladling out soup, endlessly concerned about her family, feeling suddenly the 'still space that lies at the heart of things,’ alone in the midst of company—this is triumph indeed.” Such moments imply not grand resolutions, but acknowledgments and acceptance of the values of kinship, of the values of community, the fragile unities that arise amid the disorder of daily life.

The Middle Ground considers the forms that women's lives take. As a novel, it may well constitute for its author the kind of opportunity that Judith Kegan Gardiner describes—to “define herself through the text while creating her female hero.” Even further, it may offer the woman reader access to an analogous process of empathic identification. In an effort to articulate the spectrum of women's roles here, we can perhaps define polar opposites: at one extreme, the offering of the body as art or ornamental object and, at the other, the function of nurturing. In her investigation of her own past, Kate comes upon the sister of an old school chum who has gone from a flair for the dramatic to become a second-rate film star in cheap movies and who now sits, reified and decaying, amid the emblems of her brief period of success.

Perhaps at a polar opposite is Evelyn, the social worker who moves amid urban chaos, trying to administer some order and warmth, to heal broken families. Possessed of a large measure of insight and professional competence, Evelyn wonders at the kind of necessity that has compelled her to care for the lives of strangers and thinks back, by way of pondering her role, to her early years when each girl at school had to contribute sixpence of her pocket money to something called the Self-Denial Fund. Such precedents, in one form or another, structure early female experience, help to instill the habit of self-sacrifice and may show themselves to be at the root of the vocation of so sophisticated and self-aware a character as Evelyn.

The film star suggests use of the body as emblem, or object to be adorned expensively; Evelyn's role as social worker points to the opposite side of the coin, offering of the body in an act of service. Both hark back to the notion of the female body as ground to be worked. Bouncing somewhere between the two is a young woman, in the novel, who offers a bizarre repudiation of the female body and the nurturing role. This is Irene, who lives with a man and produces a child, but rejects each of these elements of her femininity in her periodic flights to her lesbian friends and in physical abuse of her child. The novel enacts something of a mythic play around these varieties of female experience, a drama that culminates, with ironic appropriateness, in an accident in which Evelyn is seriously injured and for which Irene is responsible.

It is Irene's very repudiation of femaleness that strikes out at Evelyn's kindly nurturance and benevolent interventionism, the novel seems to suggest. Indeed this significance is not lost on Kate and Evelyn, who laugh ruefully at the entanglements into which the instincts of mothering have led them. The human capacity to recoup and even redeem the moment receives its due, however, for it is Evelyn's recovery from the accident that provides the occasion for the party with which the novel concludes. The party as human creation counters the force of the accidental and offers its own tentative assertion of meaning.

The novel traces such a spectrum of women, but concentrates its gaze more on the mothers, “the new matriarchy,” as Kate designates them, with an awareness of the difficulties of single parenting. Here, Drabble wants to say, it is going on, all around us, people making do, women raising children, struggling to make ends meet, not to mention to create themselves. That struggle, that work is what she adds to the novel; her novels are about women in the process of becoming, a process, one would think, that has brought her to where she is. Claiming a development of her own, Drabble says in an interview: “It's true that in my earlier novels I wrote about the situation of being a women—being stuck with a baby, or having an illegitimate baby, or being stuck with a marriage where you couldn't have a job. But I'm less and less interested in that now: one's life becomes wider as one grows older and books reflect one's life. Inevitably.” While her books reflect a growing breadth of concern, this expansion has been achieved within the realm of the ordinary and, in significant ways, through the ongoing concern with the realm of feminine, even maternal, experience. Drabble is, I think, no less concerned with women's situations now, but her concern has altered to produce novels that are less reflective of the obsessions of a single mind.

Drabble's early novels such as The Millstone tend to be monothematic, each with a theme that reflects the mind of the protagonist; one might term these novels of female development. There is a marked contrast between the early and the more recent novels, a contrast having to do in part with the larger sphere of activity and fulfillment that seems to open up for the female protagonists. The early protagonists chafe in a world defined in terms of masculine prerogatives, masculine action. Bright and talented, they either entrap themselves in relationships where their potential for autonomous action is limited or else they try to escape such traps in ways that isolate them from the rewards of human relationship.

One might be reminded here of Patricia Meyer Spacks' discussion in The Female Imagination of power and passivity in nineteenth-century novels by women. Spacks notes that female dependency on a man is a basic fact in these novels, regardless of the attitude that writer or character takes to it. It has been noted, incidentally, that Drabble is flattered by comparisons of her work to George Eliot's, less so by references to Charlotte Bronté; it is perhaps Bronté's preoccupation with obsession, emotion thwarted and intense, that Drabble rejects in herself, has tried to move beyond in her fiction. The pleasure Drabble takes in relationship to Eliot reflects an identification with Eliot's more comprehensive, social portrayal of English life; it is no accident that Middlemarch is subtitled A Study of Provincial Life. In The Ice Age, Drabble attempts a more encompassing sweep; the novel is her state of England book, the national health explored via the rises and falls, the financial ups and downs, the passing political concerns of its characters.

Drabble's early novels have something to say about the problem of passion—problem because the protagonists, women, chafe within the bonds of attachment to one man, living through a man; they reject too the rejection of passion. Passion can create a claustrophobic setting, in which the characters are compressed by the intensity of their feelings. In The Waterfall, for example, we find a tale of obsession, here presented with some significant experimentation with narrative form: the protagonist presents herself in both first and third person. In the third person, Jane takes extraordinary pleasure in endless descriptions of her obsession with James who seems to exist to give form and outlet to her sexuality. Jane and James, her sometimes twin, live out an obsessive fairly tale in which she is the imprisoned maiden; indeed, the narrative locates itself within the constrained world of the fairytale, acknowledging only occasionally the existence of the larger social world. Although an automobile accident falls, like grace, to release Jane from the confinement of her affair with James, it is only with the possibility of this emergence that the novel ends.

While in The Waterfall we are on the inside, only rarely looking out, The Middle Ground, as its title suggests, moves outward to a larger perspective without losing the preoccupation with inner experience. The protagonists of both novels are writers, but Jane suggests the writer at an early stage, hesitant about the place of her work beyond private experience. Kate's writing is of a different order—articles, rather than poems—a more public form, quite in keeping with her outwardly directed nature.

Towards the end of her novel, Kate visits a museum where her attention is caught by a painting titled “Psyche Locked Out of the Palace of Cupid,” which pictures Psyche sitting, large-limbed and abandoned, in “an attitude of despondency.” Why does she not look around her, Kate wonders. “She should look up, and move, and go. The castle of love was a prison, a fortress, a tomb, how could she not appreciate her luck in being locked out, in being safe here in the open air? Let her rise and go.” Kate sees in the picture an emblem of a situation she has left behind. Psyche remains trapped, in Kate's eyes, by her failure of vision; she remains trapped in masculine definition of her universe, so that she can only sit on the beach and mourn, unaware of the life around her. It is as if Kate had looked back into the world of the early novels and seen Jane trapped in her erotic relationship with James, Rosamund of The Millstone trapped in her strenuous evasions of her own erotic nature, Emma of The Garrick Year trapped both in relationship to men and to children. The painting serves emblematically too to suggest the kind of novel Drabble has left behind her—the novel of a female in a male-structured universe, alive only in her passion for the male and in the energy of her repression. “Psyche Locked Out of the Palace of Cupid” describes the problematic of passion without the possibility of release.

It is, of course, in Realms of Gold that Drabble brings together work and questions of personal relationship through her protagonist, Frances Wingate. The novel moves with Frances, from conference on archaeology to London kitchen, encompassing the variety of women's work and allowing in Frances for both scholarly breadth and maternal concern. The novel has been criticized by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese for its failure to explore female identity. Fox-Genovese sees in Drabble's female protagonists generally a repudiation of feminine being, one which culminates perhaps in Frances Wingate and the man she loves, Karel, whose sexually ambiguous names suggest that Drabble is groping for a model of androgyny. One might see here rather a probing from the opposite end of the spectrum of the need for relationship in a woman who has established herself eminently in her profession.

A particular strength of Drabble's in these most recent novels is to raise the issue of relationship （particularly of parent and child） for consideration. We move closer to Frances through her responses to her own mother's professional eminence and cool disregard of her offspring, her brother's alcoholism, her nephew's pain and inability to sustain the defenses necessary for survival in the world, her cousin Janet's narrow and restricted existence. It is the fact of relationship that comes before our consideration, an abstraction that exists only through the various instances that give rise to it, an abstraction that can never be detached from those varieties of human connection.

In a discussion of narrative strategies in Realms of Gold, Cynthia Davis notes that “we must view the narrator as reporting and shaping the tale but not fully controlling it.” She sees the narrator “struggling to give ＼the story］ shape but also to respond to its inherent shape. The story is not just an artifact, but a part of living reality.” Similarly, The Middle Ground acknowledges the arbitrariness of narrative choices, suggesting that the narrator is not simply the ruler of the fictional universe, but rather a somewhat privileged observer, an interested neighbor, caught up in the flow of events. It is important for Drabble to remove omniscience from the catalogue of narrative characteristics: no one can know; one can record, perceive a bit of meaning here or there and call attention to it, but we are all subject to accident. Thus meaning is not, as Fox-Genovese suggests, denied “in favor of the multifarious variety of human life,” but is rather generated out of acknowledgment of that variety, variety which admits of the momentary emergence of a pattern while continuing to assert the primacy and inscrutability of experience.

This ongoing life of the fiction is suggested also in Drabble's use of tenses in The Middle Ground. Kate's crisis, her period of coming to terms with herself, is presented to us in the present tense; Drabble alternates her tenses, filling in the past and moving forward, suggesting thereby that she too is engaged in the act of observing Kate Brewster as she goes through an interlude of self-assessment. In The Middle Ground we have a narrator and, beyond, an author, in extraordinary sympathy with the protagonist.

In this concern with the totality of a woman's experience, Drabble finds important literary kin in Doris Lessing, particularly the Lessing of The Golden Notebook or the early Martha Quest novels. Kate shares with Anna Wulf of The Golden Notebook the acts of self-creation that their authors perceive as central to a woman's experience. Drabble and Lessing both use female friendship as a mode of exploration and both suggest the awareness that women are “living the kinds of lives that women have never lived before,” as Anna puts it in The Golden Notebook; Drabble picks up the phrase and uses it in a 1978 review of Lessing's collected stories, a review which becomes the occasion for her of recording an indebtedness or, put another way, of establishing a literary kinship. Lessing has been, she observes, “both mother and seer. … A difficult role, inviting—as mothers do—as much blame as praise.” Lessing has charted new territory in the novel, has reported, as Drabble puts it, on “an area of experience not yet made available to the general literate consciousness.” As with Woolf, Drabble finds her ancestors; in the act of recording an indebtedness, she defines and confirms her sense of her own territory. Of course it is in the exploration of ordinary experience that Drabble feels close to Lessing and thus she feels quite comfortable reviewing stories that fall into that mode. （When she must acknowledge the apocalyptic side of Lessing's more recent writing, Drabble is less at ease, a discomfort I sense in her explicit refusal to assume a critical stance.）

It is in this area of shared feminine experience that Drabble has worked most effectively, although this kind of concentration has caused her discomfort. Indeed, The Middle Ground achieves significant breadth of concern, but does so by bringing the larger into the smaller, that is, by working through the immediacy of its characters' lives. Issues of urban violence and even international politics are raised through the relationship of people to one another, within the dynamics of friendship and family life.

Drabble is perhaps all the more able to have Kate express her exasperation with “women, bloody women” because she herself has worked through the problem of limitation that “women's writing” poses. In interviews, she stresses the expansion of her own concerns, suggesting that she is less compelled to write of herself, to write out and so resolve herself. But while such growth is indeed apparent in her work, it has not led to impersonality of subject or of viewpoint. Keeping in mind her response to Virginia Woolf as well as to those aspects of Doris Lessing's writing with which she identifies herself, we can see that she has made her way with her literary progenitors as guides, towards a breadth and depth of concern that may begin but does not end with women, and that includes a feeling for the particulars of human relationship as well as for the larger concerns of society.