Female Intellectuals' Visions

As one of the first female novelists who take her themes from the growing feminist movement of the mid-twentieth century, Margaret Drabble (1939- ) is considered among the most accomplished British authors of the postwar period. Since 1962 Drabble began her novel-writing career. Up to 2004, she had already published sixteen novels with her focus expanded from the concerns of middle-class educated women to a variety of political and moral dilemmas in British society. Since Drabble is a prolific writer with a variety of concerns, it is hard to cover all of her novels in a single limited study like this. Therefore, the focus of this study is mainly laid on the analysis of three novels chosen from Drabble's early works before 1980, The Millstone, The Waterfall and The Realms of Gold, whose protagonists are all intellectual women pursuing their identity at different life stages.What accounts for the study of the three novels is that they can be considered as a trilogy. In the first place, they are novels dealing with women issues and the protagonists are all intellectual women and mothers. In the second place, the major female characters are represented respectively for their own efforts in different manners to pursue their identity, though they have to struggle in their own predicament. In the third place, the three novels form a coherent relationship that the heroines at different life stages are pursuing what they want to be, for the first two novels explore two striking and significant fulfillments desired by female intellectuals at their time: balance between self-reliance and maternity, and self-reliance and eroticism, and the third novel, as a step forward, goes beyond independence and fulfillment of sexuality making its heroine contemplate and deal with more universal problems as an individual human being. Thus, the three novels form a trilogy though it is not a trilogy intended by Margaret Drabble herself.As few critics of Drabble have ever noticed that The Millstone, The Waterfall and The Realms of Gold can be considered as an organic whole—a trilogy, we try to justify our argument in the light of Showalter's and Beauvoir's feminist theories, and Abraham Harold Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The Millstone, the first novel of the trilogy, describes how the protagonist Rosamund Stacey, a young doctoral student and an unwed mother, tries to retain her independence at the expense of her denial of love for man, and explores her achievement of balance between self-reliance and maternity. With the constructiveness of maternity, Rosamund satisfies her need for maternal love and self respect. But Rosamund's understanding of independence and the choice in her refusal of sexual love remain questionable. If Rosamund Stacey in The Millstone cherishes her own independence at the expense of her own passion, which results in her deliberate denial of love for man and the abstinence in sexuality, Jane Gray, the protagonist of The Waterfall, who is a poet, a married woman and mother of two children, not only admits her love for her lover George, but also embraces sexuality boldly. The former isolated and dry Jane gradually meets her need for love and to be loved as well as her need for respect in her romance with George. Jane's experience of her love affair with a married man enables her to break up her former physical and mental isolation and helps her realize her need for self-reliance. Frances Wingate, heroine of The Realms of Gold, is both a successful mother and well-established archaeologist. In her mid-thirties she enjoys what a real emancipated woman does—independence and freedom. The problems she encounters go beyond what has trapped Rosamund Stacey and Jane Gray as female. As an individual being not merely a woman, Frances is pondering and trying to deal with universal problems such as illness, life and death, past and future which every human being has to face. By doing so Frances Wingate is satisfying her needs of self-actualization and achieving transcendence at this stage of her life. Thus, this trilogy represents intellectual women's pursuit of identity at different stages of life.