Ambiguity: A Deconstructive Reading Of The Millstone

Novelist, editor, critic, biographer, and public figure, versatile Margaret Drabbleis one that can not be missed in terms of Contemporary British literature. She is alsowell-known as an ardent humanist, who is always concerned about the well-being ofher people, especially her women contemporaries. Therefore, both her early writingsargued by some critics that Drabble has incorporated many biographical elements insuch works like A Summer Bird’s Cage (1963), The Garrick Year (1964), and TheMillstone (1965), and her later works marked by the publication of The Ice Age (1977),which expands the topic of domestic matters to a larger sphere of social issues, thereis always a moral focus easy to be found. The Millstone, Drabble’s third novel, iswell received and probably the greatest contributors to Drabble’s prestige. It has notonly been awarded the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, but also adapted to the movie ATouch of Love in America. In this novel, Drabble portrayed a young woman Englishliterature major, Rosamund Stacey, who is a new Cambridge graduate and is workingon her dissertation, struggles hard between career and child; ideal and reality;awakened women consciousness and traditional roles of women. Undoubtedly,Rosamund’s predicaments are very much of Margaret Drabble her own when shestepped out of the ivory tower of campus and into a family and a society she foundher herself at odds with. However, Rosamund’s and Drabble’s plights are not peculiarto they two only. A lot of intellectual women share their sufferings and torments.For this reason, Drabble is always trying to work out a possible way-out of theclassic predicament in her early writings. With a close reading of The Millstone, wecan find the most overt ideological project of the novel: in content, maternity is aproper way-out for the modern young intellectual women’ social and moralpredicament; in form, realistic tradition is far more advisable than postmodernexperimentation. However, the binary oppositions of moral/amoral,tradition/experimentation on which the ideological project rests are unstable and could be deconstructed by the text’s own ambivalences. Such ambivalences can betraced in Drabble’s characterization of her protagonist, Rosamund Stacey, whosemoral position in the novel are very much questioned. As a result, Rosamund can notconvincingly act as the spokesperson of her creator’s moral concern of theintellectual women. Similarly, Drabble’s frequent employment of the postmoderntechniques in this novel is not in accordance with her strong appeal of sticking to the“a dying tradition” of realism. Consequently, Margaret Drabble is quite ambiguouson life and art strategies that she is suggesting in The Millstone.This thesis is composed of three parts: the introduction, the body and theconclusion.The introduction includes a literary review of previous studies on The Millstone,and a lead-in to the main argument in the body part.The body constitutes the main argument of the thesis, which will be proved bythree supporting ideas respectively in Chapter One, Chapter Two, and Chapter Three.Chapter One endeavors to prove that Margaret Drabble is an intensive moralist,who is always concerned about the intellectual women’ well-being and spares noeffort to explore possible solutions to ease their perplexity and suffering. Thus, shesuggests that maternity is an effective way-out for them.Chapter Two is also based on a close reading of the text, which tries to conveythe novel’s the other ideological project that realism is superior to postmodernexperimentation.Chapter Three will deconstruct the meaning that Drabble tries to convey, for thetwo pairs of binary oppositions, moral and amoral, tradition and experimentation thatthe meaning is constructed upon are unstable.Therefore, both ideological projects in the novel are deconstructed by the text’sambivalences. Based on the above argument, a conclusion will be drawn.