Finding A Voice: Identity Construction In Margaret Drabble’s Major Novels

Women’s writing, as “the product of a subculture”, struggles in the British literarytradition and finally moves into the ultimate room of one’s own. Women writers havedeveloped both personal and artistic strategies to echo the genuine transcendence of femaleidentity in finding their own voice in literary circle. Identity marks our way in the world andprovides a way of understanding the interplay between our subjective experience of the worldand the construction of our subjectivity. Identity defining for women, particular for thosewell-educated, has always been in crisis of a dilemma between domestic responsibilities andsocial roles. Therefore, identity construction for women has always been one of the recurringmotifs in women’s writing. Like the novelists of the female aesthetic, Margaret Drabbledevotes herself in her novelistic creation to the unifying of the fragments of female experiencethrough artistic vision to answer, implicitly or explicitly, the question of female identity. Hernovels at different phases, if taken in its totality, are a deliberate and evolving discourse tofind a voice that best establishes her characters’ identity as well as hers.As Luce Irigaray says, to find a voice (voix) is to find a way (voie). Voice becomes animportant conceptual tool both in feminist criticism and classical narratology. Susan S. Lansersuggests that voice is the trope par excellence of identity and power. Drabble’s novels can be afine example to display the identity construction of intellectual women which conforms to thedemand of the changing personal, political, social and historical context. Due to the closerelations between narrative voice and identity construction in Drabble’s literary practice, thisdissertation explores how the trajectory of the identity construction of her characters runsparallel with her projecting narrative voice in her four major novels—The Millstone, The IceAge, The Seven Sisters and The Red Queen. Drawing mainly on Susan S. Lanser’s narrative voice theory in feminist narratology and identity construction in feminist criticism, culturalstudies and social constructionism, the author of this dissertation sketches a possiblediscursive blueprint of her characters’ subjectivity in identification: an alienated identity in aself-enclosed narrative, the imprisoned identities in a hero’s text, the exclusive sisterhood in afemale myth, and the universal “personhood” in a multilayered discourse.This dissertation consists of four chapters besides Introduction and Conclusion.The introduction provides firstly a brief sketch of the biographical and critic context ofDrabble’s literary creation. The biographical context presents Drabble’s literary endeavours tounfold faithfully a scroll of pictures to display the frustrations, the disillusions, the strugglesof academic women against “identity crisis” from1960s up to the new millennium. The criticcontext reveals a widening vision in evaluating Drabble’s works and literary position. Inaddition, this part introduces the basic theoretical basement of the dissertation: voice infeminist narratology and identity construction in feminist and cultural studies and putsforward the guiding principles and hypotheses for this dissertation. Finally, the generalstructure of the dissertation is presented.Chapter One is a detailed study of the novel The Millstone in which motherhood is seenas milestone rather than millstone for women in identification at their golden young age.Being a “social realist”,“moral realist” and a child-bound wife at the time, Drabble endowsRosamund Stacey with a personal narrative voice to picture the heroine’s development ofmoral maturity and affirmation of female identity against the social realities. Pregnancy andmaternity drag Rosamund out of the isolated “ivory tower” she hides in and force her to jointhe social contact. The personal voice “I” details minutely everyday life to reflect the“reverent openness before life” and benefits the narration of an alienated identity. The identityof a social being does not give Rosamund a safe sense of self-affirmation. She intensifies heralienated identity through the discursive authority and exclusive focalization. This subjectivity in the authority of an exclusive personal voice however diminishes the reliability of areasonable solution to female quest of identity.Chapter Two provides a close reading of The Ice Age in which for the last and only timeDrabble presents a narrative discourse with a hero. The male protagonist Anthony is at hismiddle age and at a choice of either a compeer or a compromiser to female identity as the truemothering figure in the novel. Drabble’s only discourse of a hero signifies the widening of herconcern from dilemma of the female to that of the two sexes, from the particular to theuniversal and from the domesticity to the nation. During the discourse of the two sexes,Drabble views an identity in humanist perspective as a sexless person of independence,endurance and resilience. With a heterodiegetic voice of indeterminate male narrator as anexplicit eyewitness or “author-surrogate”, Drabble thus finds a double voice in her narrativetext to rest her authority—the voice of a woman writer and the voice in the name of men. Theextrafictional author, overt authoriality, disjunctive narrative and exposed fictionality in thenarrative which leaps from microcosm to macrocosm help perform the self-authorizingauthority “who does not require verification” and who “verifies all other statements” to voiceher moral judgments on the chaotic world, on the imprisoned identities, on the fatal injustice.Chapter Three discusses The Seven Sisters which unfolds the story of Candida and hersix other sisters along the symbolic pilgrimage to Italy to find the significance of being anddiscover the meaning of selfhood when approaching to their old age. In the narrative text,with a great number of mythological and literary allusions, Drabble performs her writingauthority to enrich the novel with intertexuality to present a poetic writing of femaleexperience. The imaginative picture of an identity in universal sisterhood is unfolded byweaving the Greek Mythology—the origin of western culture—into a grand deep structure ofwomen issue.“Her Diary” of The Seven Sisters shows Drabble’s dominant agenda toauthorize a female narrative voice as original and self-sufficient both of Margaret Drabble and Candida Wilton. Exclusive of any voice of men, the novel intends to create her “Nature” offemale “Truth” where women rule. The shifts and leaps in the narrative time and spacereinforce the degenerated process of the heroine’s psychological space. The alternative voicein the latter parts of the novel suggests the unspoken yet subversive and authoritativeidentity-constructing efforts. The authority resides not only in “men’s language”, but also inthe direction of an exclusive “feminine” form.Chapter Four examines the2004novel The Red Queen—A Transcultural Tragicomedyand finds that the novelist blurs the division of history, race, and culture and produces ahybrid narrative of universality. In order to explore consciousness and confront chaos in apostmodern world, Drabble manifests her existential faith to confront, explore and constructhuman identity in her discourse with time, space, history and culture. A transcultural voice,apparent overt authoriality, nonfictional autobiographical voice and metafictional ghost voicework together to diversify, blur the narrative of historical facts and fictional construction andultimately rest on a subversive deconstruction of the old myth and reconstruction of anauthoritative identity by promoting sisterhood and a feeling of togetherness at a global level.Margaret Drabble, together with the Crown Princess, explores issues of selfhood, questionsthe “doubts about universalism and existentialism” in this “postmodern age of culturalrelativism” and raises questions “about the nature of survival and about the possibility of theexistence of universal transcultural human characteristics”(Singh,187).Finally the conclusion summarizes what has been discussed in the previous four chaptersand further points out the significances of the study here and the enlightenment for the futurestudy. In ultimate analysis, the dissertation concludes that Margaret Drabble’s evolution ofnarrative voices runs parallel and interplays with her consistent efforts to picture thepilgrimage of identity construction for contemporary intellectual women, if not for all, whichis inevitably characterized by the changing social, historical, cultural, political and aesthetic context. She creates a woman in her novels who utters a voice of her own to locate a sense ofbelonging in experience, history and culture. She is a finder, a seeker, a subject rather than anobject. Achieving this, she is capable and authoritative of self-claiming in power relations. Inthe process, Drabble’s novels go beyond the category of femininity text by a grandself-projection under humanist concern. Through facts and fictions in her novels, instorytelling and story-sharing, her novels achieve a power beyond merely “mirroring” of life,a power to enable us to find a way to join in the negotiations of identity construction in thepostmodern age.