The “De-Realed” World:Intertextuality Between Margaret Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby And Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”

Margaret Drabble(1939-)maintains her humanistic concern in her writings,even though her change of style since the 1980 s is regarded by some critics as a turn to postmodernism.Her millennium work The Pure Gold Baby(2013)deals with war,disease,and death among other themes of ethics.The novel borrows its title from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus”(1962).With Hannah Arendt’s theory of public realm,this study analyzes The Pure Gold Baby’s intertextuality with “Lady Lazarus”in three aspects,ranging from the private realm’s essentialization of individuals,obstacles to private/public translation,to the key role of speech for the public realm,so as to reveal Drabble’s contemplation on the existential impasse of denied reality.Her trans-century intertextualization implies that the public realm where each individual is received as real and respectful is far from being rebuilt;and her rendering of style in service to the message conveyed reaffirms Drabble’s inheritance of F.R.Leavis’ “Great Tradition”,undisturbed by literary fashions or styles.Chapter One discusses how homogenizing violence in private realm denies man’s existence.Cases of individual’s real status shielded by observing eyes or mediatized images in The Pure Gold Baby and “Lady Lazarus” reveal that de-realing mediatization feeds on viewers’ homogenizing violence to the viewed.The essentializing tendency of the private realm is a hotbed for such violence and thus is the origin of de-realing.To resist de-realing forces like mediatization,one ought to translate1 from the private to the public.Chapter Two analyzes three obstacles to such translation.That the Jew in “Lady Lazarus” fails to defend herself for want of a legal persona and the immigrants in The Pure Gold Baby are evicted on groundless base infers that,the contemporary judicial system is no less essentializing than that in WWII,for it dismisses the so called world citizens back to the private realm as unrecognized beings.Though private realm retains a sense of reality from repetitive labor and enduring artifacts,both works emphasize the sense of reality’s precarious and illusive nature by picturing the loss of it that results in a status more de-realed2 than translating failures.Underneath the national system,the self-isolating“unthinking man” is an unimposing accomplice who evades self-reflection and dialogues so as to composedly crush others’ lives.Whereas “Lady Lazarus” rehearses the unthinking evil of Nazi executioners,The Pure Gold Baby exposes the unthinking tendency in Britain’s social caring staff nowadays,as an anxious echo to both Plath and the revival of thoughtlessness.Chapter Three discusses the key role of speech in rebuilding public realm and relieving existential impasse.In his speech,man passes his self to his interlocutor,whose reception of the speech attests to the speaker’s self,and whose retelling of the speech to others elongates the speaker’s existence.In“Lady Lazarus”,a self-defending speech of dialogue is dismayed by its homogenized listeners.The Pure Gold Baby then adopts the speech of storytelling to restore a historical figure’s real self,since storytelling is unlimited by time and space and the ever-retold stories keep drawing more listeners to resist homogenization.By comparing storytelling to motherhood that signals rebirth and inter-subjective bondage,Drabble makes speech a renewing activity that aligns itself with Arendt’s natality(rebirth)indispensable for rebuilding the public realm.The Drabblean speech thus provides “Lady Lazarus” a way out and merges with the storytelling tradition of pilgrimage as the novel ends with the vision of a public realm in place of the de-realed world.By untangling the intertextuality between the new millennial The Pure Gold Baby and “Lady Lazarus” half a century ago,this study contends that,history lingers,the challenge to humanity never subsides,the impasse of de-realed existence awaits rescue,and the mission to rebuild the public realm ought to be shouldered well.By then,staying discreet to what media present,maintaining inter-subjective bonds,and making plural storytelling out of difficult history would be the remedy.