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Guilt and Glory. Studies in Margaret Drabble's Novels 1963-80,

and: Iris Murdoch's Comic Vision, and: The Divided Heroine: A

Recurrent Pattern in Six English Novels (review)

Jean Pickering

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 31, Number 2, Summer 1985,

pp. 375-377 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.0170

For additional information about this article

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Susanna Roxman. Guilt and Glory. Studies in Margaret Drabble's Novels 1963-80.Stockholm: Almqvist, 1984. 227 pp. No price given.

Angela Hague. Iris Murdoch's Comic Vision. Cranbury: Susquehanna UP, 1984.164 pp. $19.50.

H. M. Daleski. The Divided Heroine: A Recurrent Pattern in Six English Novels. NewYork: Holmes, 1984. 175 pp. $29.50.

Conventional wisdom holds that dissertations rarely succeed as books. Havingso many obligationsto demonstrate industry, to review the literature, to keepthe peace amongst factious professorial committeesthey often end up with theparts malproportioned and the intentions obscure. Roxman's is no exception.

The book is divided into three main sections, which are, however, not

discrete; "it has not always been possible," Roxman says, "to avoid overlaps."This apology articulates the source of all her problems, the preference forinclusiveness rather than focus. Any of the sections could have been developed

into a full length work. The first, "Margaret Drabble and the Literary Back-ground," discusses the literary influences on the first six novels, ending withThe Realms of Gold. The section also seems to fulfill some kind of requirementto review the literature, for it includes references to most of the Drabble criticismto date. It describes the literary sources of plots, images, and allusions, withoutever addressing the larger questions: why, for instance, did Drabble take the

plot of The Waterfall from The Mill on the Floss? What does this insight add toour understnding of the writer? of the novel?

The second section, "Moral and Other Philosophical Problems in MargaretDrabble's Fiction," is subdivided into two parts, the first, "Fate, Chance,

Retribution, and the Problem of Privilege," including all Drabble's novels. Thesecond subsection, "Deontological morality vs. utilitarianism in The Needle's Eye,"comes at the named novel from another angle. Roxman comes to no conclusionsabout the precise nature of any of these concepts and their relations with eachother. "Privilege" in particular seems to be exceptionally inclusive, finally com-ing to mean all those differences either social or genetic that confer a survivaladvantage.

The third section, "Imagery in Three Novels by Margaret Drabble," dis-cusses 7"Ae Waterfall, The Middle Ground, and The Realms of Gold. In many waysthe most original, it is also the most disjointed, consisting of short, numbered

discussions of individual passages. Apart from a disconcerting tendency to labelimages in the terminology of classical rhetoric, Roxman does a good job here.Her discussions of the sewer and pollution images in The Middle Ground areespecially noteworthy, although they would have been more useful if they hadincluded some general statement justifying the selection of these particular pas-sages.

Roxman's ability to analyze individual passages is far greater than herability to unify her perceptions into an overall reading of Drabble's work.Nonetheless, if the reader can struggle through the redundancy and lack of focusto the genuine insights, Guilt and Glory might still be an asset to those with a

scholarly interest in Drabble.A similar problem with focus undermines Angela Hague's book. In contrast

to theoreticians of tragedy, which is more clearly defined, theoreticians of comedyhave always had some difficulty in coming to grips with their topic. Hague fails

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to negotiate the traditional dilemma; unable to decide whether the essence ofcomedy is an attitude or a structure, she discusses both alternatives withouttrying to establish the relationship between them. Although acknowledging the

problem of defining the comic, she then evades it by summarizing the ideas ofthe most influential comic theorists from Freud to Frye. This lengthy Introduction

adds nothing to the literature of comic theory and has little bearing on theensuing discussion of Murdoch's work.

The second section, "Iris Murdoch's Comic Vision: Theory and Practice,"deals in a similar way with critical commentary on Murdoch as a comic writerand with Murdoch's own "opinions about comedy." Although Hague's methodis inclusive and descriptive, this discussion presents an essentially accurate es-timate of Murdoch's thought: "deeply committed to comedy as the most ap-propriate and realistic form for the novel, she has increasingly allowed the comicmode to dominate the work of the past decade."

The book concludes with three essays on individual novels and here Hague

comes into her own. Her analyses of An Accidental Man, The Black Prince, andThe Sea, The Sea justify the book. In each case, her discussion relies heavily on

Northrop Frye's theory of modes and thus deals with comedy more as a matterof structure than of attitude. This proves to be an appropriate way of focusingon these difficult, ironic, intellectual novels, validating Hagues's contention thatMurdoch's "fictive universe has increasingly mirrored her conviction that thecomic mode is the most appropriate vehicle for the novel."

H. M. Daleski's study deals with a tragic subdivision of the main traditionof the English novel, which generally involves a conflict over love, perhaps a

love triangle. Typically comic, it moves toward a resolution of the conflict,usually a marriage, which symbolizes some kind of selfhood. The conflict de-scribed in this book, however, permits of no such resolution because the twosuitors represent the heroine's irreconcilable desires. Either she longs for onewhile bound to the other or, caught between the two, is unable to choose either.She disintegrates either into madness or death, the latter often with suicidalovertones. Daleski differentiates from the pattern under discussion novels suchas Mansfield Park, where Fanny is safe from disintegration because the oppositionbetween her suitors does not reflect an inner conflict in Fanny. He also excludesnovels such as Jane Eyre, where, although Rochester and St. John Rivers do

reflect her own conflict, Jane manages to make a decisive choice between them.Daleski observes that this duality is endemic to Western civilization. Itappears in Plato's Phaedrus as the charioteer pulled in different directions by thedark horse and the white horse. St. Paul, he goes on to say, "stamped a

particular mode of dual being on the Christian consciousness," which refusedto admit the possibility of reconciling the flesh and the spirit. The hundredyears between Wuthering Heights and The End of the Affair were a period when,in spite of the waning influence of Pauline Christianity, the opposition betweenthe flesh and the spirit remained a serious conflict. The novels in Daleski's studydo not all posit the conflict in exactly these terms, but all are powered by it

on some level, especially in the assumption that the conflicting forces can neverbe reconciled.

In Wuthering Heights, the conflict is between storm and calm. Cathy, drawnto both Heathcliff and Edgar, swings from one to the other and back again.

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When open violence breaks out between the two men, Cathy has to face theirreconcilability of her desires. She falls into a delirium, ultimately dying inchildbirth. The conflict continues after her death, ending only with the marriageof her daughter and Hareton. In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie's conflict is

between the intellect and animal vitality, embodied by Philip and Stephen

respectively. Resolving to be without either, she is overwhelmed by a suicidaldespair, and when she dies in the flood, she is still a victim of "irreparable

self-division." In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the conflict assumes the traditionalPauline terms of the flesh, typified by Alec, and the spirit, typified by Angel.Daleski points out that the men, rather than being static embodiments of theseforces, each has his own conflict of flesh and spirit. Tess "negates the spiritin relation to Alec and then the flesh in relation to Angel," her tragedy thuslying not in her destruction by the two men but in her inability to reconcilethe opposing claims within herself.

This conflict is similar to that posited by Lawrence in The White Peacock,

although Lawrence uses the terms "mental consciousness" and "blood con-sciousness" for the spiritual and the sensual. In Mrs. Dalloway, the opposingforces are isolation and communication. Of all the heroines studied by Daleski,only Clarissa Dalloway manages her conflict effectively, the breakdown andsuicide "implicit in her condition having been worked through at second hand,as it were, in the presentation of Septimus." In The End of the Affair, the Paulinedichotomy between body and spirit is closely allied to a conflict between skep-ticism and belief. Here are two love triangles, the one composed of Sarah, herlover, and her husband, giving way to that of Sarah, her lover, and God. SeeingBendrix prostrate after an air raid, Sarah vows to give him up and to believein God if He will bring him back to life; however, she cannot rid herself of theidea that Bendrix might have been only knocked unconscious by the bomb. Unableto resolve her conflict, she dies of an untended cold.

Daleski's argument is well worked out and his analysis of the chosen novelsilluminating. His book is a valuable addition to the theory of the English novel.

JEAN PICKERINGCalifornia State University, Fresno

rtr

Hugh Kenner. A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers. New York: Penguin, 1984.367 pp. pb. $8.95.

James F. Kilroy, ed. 7'Ae Irish Short Story: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne,1984. 251 pp. $17.95.

"A Colder Eye" is an expression of Yeatsian origin, and it does not signifywhat the casual reader might think. As Kenner notes, the connotation of theEnglish word "cold" in the sense of disinterested, or the antonym of passionate,is not what Yeats forced it to mean in his language. There it means concentrated,

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