Females As Intellectuals: A Study Of A.S. Byatt's Quartet

A. S. Byatt, is one of the most renowned female novelists in Britain in our time, who was awarded DBE in 1999. As she once said that her non-fiction On Histories and Stories that her works mainly deal with women artists, her voluminous quartet, which narrates some female intellectuals' confusion of their self-identification in the tumultuous 1950s and 1960s, serves as the studied subject in this thesis. The quartet, composed of The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002), features in Stephanie and Frederica, two intellectual sisters' negotiation between their quest for asserting their intellectual self and the conventional social roles women have to undertake with their maturation.The two sisters are typical female intellectuals since they are among the few female students in Cambridge in the late 1950s and at that time male students are six times as many as female ones. The female intellectuals in the novel resemble the crunodes in tug of wars, with the two opposing sides competing for winning. The female intellectuals are restricted by tenacious traditions, but contrary to that, the desire to prove their intellects to the world also urges them to walk out of the family confines. In the novels, the two sisters' father nurtures them as if they were boys, as a result of which, they have their mind refreshed to the utmost, but at the same time they can hardly make any female friends. When the two graduate from Cambridge, they choose distinct ways of life. Stephanie marries a curate although she is not a Christian at all, and buries her intellects in the family chores. Frederica marries quickly after graduation; however, overwhelmed by the failure to assert her intellects, she escapes from her husband. Female intellectuals, although may be brave enough to divorce, do not intend to let loose their offspring. Frederica, although lack of financial income shortly after her escape from her marriage, intends not even once to leave her son. The tenacious effort to retain their mothers' rights may account for female intellectuals' attempt to retain their femaleness. When female intellectuals successfully have a career, the mostly talked about jobs are teachers, TV hostesses, proof-readers, which are not so satisfactory as to really prove their intellects.Besides tortured by the outer traditional requirements and their attempts to escape from those requirements, female intellectuals are also confused in their inner mind. On the one hand, they always intend to retain some inner room purely of their own, something like a Utopia, where they can think independently. On the other hand, desire for the other sex and motherhood invades their imagined Utopia. Female intellectuals make their best effort to defend the Utopia by means of divorce and writing. It's only that to prove themselves by the benchmark made in a patriarchal system furthers their self-contradiction more.It takes Byatt altogether twenty-four years to complete her quartet, during which, she must detachedly reflect the once loud women's movement. Honestly speaking, as far as the ultimate cause of the women's movement is concerned, the movement is a failure, because it fails to achieve "final equality between men and women". Perhaps, this very ultimate cause is at fault itself, because the different social positions induced from physical differences are unlikely and unnecessary to change. Byatt has this thinking as a cultural background for her quartet, so as to interpret in a way what female intellectuals "should do and should not". At the same time, the quartet also has its own limitation. When actively trying to position female intellectuals, Byatt concerns herself much more with the relationship between males and females than the inter-female relationships.In conclusion, although the stories are set in Britain in the mid-20^th century, they do present a universal picture of female intellectuals' painful positioning of themselves and the picture is still echoed by many today. On the one hand, female intellectuals wish to substantialise their intellects; on the other, they are tortured by a constant fear that their ambitions may deny their female identity. They are still eager to love and to bear children, but the burdens behind the roles as wife and mother daunt them because they do not intend to lose their selves.