MORAL DEVELOPMENT AND FICTIONAL TECHNIQUE IN THE NOVELS OF MARGARET DRABBLE

Margaret Drabble structures her novels around feminine problems both autobiographical and typical: the confinements of childhood and cultural conditioning, the difficulties of intimacy and single parenthood, and efforts at professional survival. Unlike the writers with whom she is often compared, Drabble's treatment of these stories is not strictly feminist. She takes the political origin of injustice for granted and focuses, instead, on individual development. To the protagonists she gives both the power and the responsibility of change.; In describing the maturation required to survive the limitations of sex and of society, Drabble uses the conventions and assumptions of both the traditional and the feminist Bildungsroman. Drabble focuses on three crucial areas of the protagonists' inner experience: the problem of loving, the complexities of ethical choice, and perceptions of reality.; Drabble's treatment of these subjects depends in important ways on narrative technique. In some novels, moral change occurs through the narrators' telling of their own stories. In other novels, dual and third-person narration become devices for ambiguity. Drabble manipulates narration in order to establish the necessary sympathy for and detachment from the protagonists. Drabble's novelistic purposes depend on these attitudes.; Description of moral growth is expressed, symbolically, through the language of nature. The protagonists who achieve personal integration do so, in part, through Wordsworthian apprehension. These characters come from Puritanical backgrounds and, for them, growth occurs as they abandon reliance on will and as they accept their inevitable loss of innocence. Drabble's novels analyze the pathology endemic to the protagonists' world and establish the terms for their transcendence of that world. From this analysis comes significant thematic content.