Images of women in contemporary British fiction by women

(This article is based on a talk given by the author at the Perm Seminar on Contemporary English Literature in September 2019)

I’ve been pondering women in fiction. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about female characters in fiction currently being written by women in the UK. My question is, are we depicting women who are fundamentally different from the heroines of nineteenth century novels? Since George Eliot created Dorothea Brooke, and Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, we have gained effective contraception and many rights; the vote; equal education, work and pay; the right to own property and our own bodies. The lack of all these rights ensured that the majority of heroines in Victorian fiction were, in one way or another, victims. So I’m curious about how differently we are now portraying ourselves.

The victim role is a difficult one to shed, not least because, despite the law, we’re not exactly equal yet. I think of recent novels I’ve admired – Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (in which the protagonist is a victim of sexual abuse) or The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, which is set in ancient Greece, and where the whole point of the novel is to shout out that these female chattels/slaves are human beings too. The only way Briseis, Barker’s heroine, can gain the tiniest portion of control over her life is by making herself indispensable to the mighty Achilles.

Having written a desperate victim of a woman myself, in my seventh novel, I tried in the subsequent two to write heroic ones. Jessie in The Testament of Jessie Lamb is an idealistic teenager ready to lay down her life to ensure the future of humanity. She has a young person’s clear vision of right and wrong, unmuddied by the evasions and compromises of her parents. But there are still readers who consider her a victim; gullible, victim of her own youthful ignorance, be-

ing used by a devious old (male) scientist for his own glory. I find myself wondering how much victimhood is in the eye of the beholder.

And in Conrad and Eleanor I set out to write about a long marriage in which the wife, Eleanor, has a more successful career, higher pay, and less patience with children than her husband. She is nobody’s victim, but she has been labelled ‘cold’ and ‘hard’ and even ‘dislikeable’, whereas, if the roles were reversed, I suspect Conrad would simply be read as a rather conventional male.

Hilary Mantel’s 1995 novel An Experiment in Love plus three recent prize-winning novels have set me thinking about this conundrum again; Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, Milkman by Anna Burns, and Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellmann.

Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment in Love tells the story of Carmel’s first year at university in London. There are frequent flashbacks to earlier periods in her life, her childhood and teenage years. The story is told from a vantage point much later in Carmel’s life, which raises interesting questions about what might have happened to her in the intervening years.

The relationship between Carmel and her mother is at the heart of the novel, and it is not a good relationship. Carmel approvingly quotes Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that she

Had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of 15 and goes on to qualify that by saying, the world moves so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.

‘ And don’t let me come up and catch you gawping out of the window, neither.’ Carmel must be top of the class, and she must pass the scholarship exam – her mother tells her,

‘You’re as good as anyone else.’

Although she’s a terrible cook she insists that Carmel is useless in the kitchen; as Carmel sardonically tells us, only her mother was allowed to burn the carrots for their tea. Carmel internalises the academic ambition, knowing it is her ticket to escape. Apart from wanting to get away from her mother’s temper, Carmel is also revolted by her mother’s adult female body. Here she describes her mother in the school uniform shop changing room:

She took off her coat and hung it on one of the hooks supplied, and at once her woman smell gushed out and filled the air: chemical tang of primitive deodorant, scent and grease of Tan Fantastic, flowery scent of face powder, emanation of armpit and cervix, milk duct and scalp.

Carmel herself is pale as paper, my body without scent or flavour of its own. And she hopes she can stay like this for as long as possible. She sees her mother as a victim of her own body: at menopause my mother seemed to enter on a 20 year temper tantrum.

This revulsion at both the physical and mental life of women like her mother is skewered by a pun halfway through the novel. Carmel’s mother buys a women’s magazine called Women’s Realm, that is to say, the kingdom – or rather queendom – ruled by women. It was a real and popular magazine, full of recipes, knitting patterns, household hints on cleaning, and beauty tips. When her comics are stopped, Carmel herself begins to read Women’s Realm. Soon after, she has her first period. She’s shocked and horrified by the blood and the pain, and deeply distressed to hear that this will continue to happen to her regularly for many years. Her mother’s advice is: ‘Exercise is good for period pain. Scrubbing floors, that helps it.’So here it is – Carmel tells the reader- The women’s realm. Physical suffering and domestic drudgery, along with enslavement to the body. No wonder she wants to escape.

And she does indeed seem to escape, at university. She works hard at her studies, day and night, and obtains excellent marks. And she denies her body by starving it. Her perfectly valid excuse is that she can’t afford to spend much on food. But there are enough references to her skipping meals and not being able to remember when she last ate, and indeed to her room mates’ comments on how she is vanishing before their eyes, to alert the reader to the fact that she has become anorexic. She is amazed by the behaviour of some of the other women students, who iron their boyfriends’ shirts:

How can it be, that after all these years of education, all you want is the wash-tub? Leave this, and go and run the country.

But then, from her older vantage point as narrator, she reveals that her ideas have changed. Now, she believes that these ironing girls were in fact in rebellion against their education. They were being educated like boys;

women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it. She asserts that their education reduced girls to middle-sexes, neuters, without the powers of men or the duties of women. Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature.

And what the adult Carmel means by this is that women want to be the kind of creature that her mother was:

We’d had sex; sex bred the desire for its consequences. The little women inside were looking out through our eyes and waving at the world. // We wanted homes. Houses of our own. Babies, even; the milky drool of saliva to replace the smooth flow of ink.

The friend who falls pregnant, Sue, is not pregnant by accident; she has made a choice. Carmel asks her,

‘ Were you on the pill?’ / ‘At first.’ / ‘And then?’ / ‘I wanted to know if I could have one . .. Why should anybody blame me? I just wanted to know, you see, to be sure. It’s natural.’

Sue has made a natural choice – although all around her agree it is a poor choice, and she is eventually pressurised into having an abortion. And Carmel herself is eventually betrayed by her own body, collapsing through lack of nourishment. Her friends tend her and feed her milky drinks like a little child, and she comes to realise that her body cannot be denied.

So, at one level, Carmel is a victim. She wants to escape the stereotype of femaleness presented by her mother, and its gross physicality, and she finds that neither she nor her university friends are able to do that.

On the other hand, there are many indications in the book that she is absolutely NOT a victim. Firstly, she has shockingly violent impulses. The one which is key to her difficult relationship with her friend Karina happens when they are very young, in their first year of infant school; she watches Karina playing with a baby doll in the back of a toy lorry, and hates it.

I saw my foot swing. I saw it catch the lorry’s underside and hurtle it into the air. I saw the rubber trajectory of the pink pseudo-flesh, and the baby face smashed down on to the hard floor.

As she admits to the other girls at university, Karina hates me because I kicked her baby. She has similarly violent impulses towards the boys at the bus station.

It wasn’t so much the men themselves who scared me, but the impulses of rage that leapt inside me at their jeers and leers and off-hand remarks, at the knowledge that they owned the streets. I would have liked to strike them dead with a stare; I wanted to beckon them, let them approach, and then stick them with a hidden knife.

She has an equally savage response to the shoe-repairer who kindly punches an extra hole into her belt for free;

‘There you are my darling,’ the man said. ‘If it weren’t for the wife I’d take you home and fatten you up myself.’

I blushed. I wasn’t used to Londoners then. I’m still not. They talk so much. I always want to smash their jaws shut; I realise the reaction may be excessive.

She is savage and angry and determined, and when she glances at herself in the mirror she sees 'a terrible creature with iron teeth, grinding up everything that came in her path ’. She is in rebellion against the roles both nature and her education have ordained for her, and I think the reader comes away from this book with a sense of a fighter rather than a victim. She is a woman who will make her own choices, even if that costs her very dear.

Home Fire (winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2018) is based on the Greek drama Antigone . Kamila Shamsie’s contemporary version deals with three British Pakistani siblings: Isma, heading to the United States to study for her Masters degree; Aneeka, at university in London; and her twin Parvaiz who, to his sisters’ horror, has joined ISIS and gone to Syria.

Parvaiz soon realises he’s made a mistake, and he is murdered. The Home Secretary forbids the repatriation of his body. Aneeka flies to Karachi and persuades the undertakers to deliver the corpse to a park next to the British embassy. There, beneath a Banyan tree, she scatters rose petals and keeps a grief-stricken vigil over her brother’s body, watched by the TV cameras of all the world. A wave of public sympathy builds; the girl risks, and loses, her life, but the Home Secretary’s losses are even greater.

Shamsie’s reworking of Sophocles’ drama lays bare the power play not just between men and women – between a man in power and a woman with the courage to defy him – but also between state and religion, in the heavy-handed government assumption that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and in the resulting Muslim sense of injustice and rage. I think everyone would agree that Aneeka is heroic.

Milkman (winner of the ManBooker prize 2018) is set in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s, although Burns never names the place. England is ‘the country over the water’ and Ireland, ‘the country over the border.’ The IRA become ‘Renouncers of the state’, and individual characters are identified by their relationship to the narrator, or by their actions. So Burns’ novel is about behaviours which arise in any war of occupation; violence and rabid partisanship are not particular to Belfast in the 1970’s.

The story is narrated in the first person by a young woman of 18. From page 1 she is established as a victim of inappropriate sexual attention from men. Milkman in particular is a dangerous predator, twenty-three years older than her, married, and high up in the ranks of the Renouncers. He turns up at random, offering her lifts or running beside her in the park. He tells her how to behave and insinuates that if she doesn’t stop seeing her boyfriend, the boy will be killed by a car-bomb. To make matters worse, the girl’s family and community are all convinced she is having an affair with this man, for which they constantly criticise her. She tries not to respond, but this results in her face becoming numb and expressionless.

So far, you could say this novel portrays a classic female victim, reduced to helpless passivity by wicked men. But a closer reading reveals a rather different picture. She seeks independence through education, attending French classes dangerously far from her home, and reading as she walks around the city, burying herself in nineteenth century literature in order to block out the Troubles. Her third brotherin-law begs her to pay attention to the dangers on the streets, instead of, ‘reading-while-walking– your head down, the tiniest of readingtorches shining on your pages.’

The narrator tells us she’s choosing to ignore the world around her, because ‘Knowledge didn’t guarantee power, safety or relief. ’ And she seems to feel it’s irrelevant that two of her own brothers have been shot as Renouncers, and that one of her sisters has had to flee the country because she married a Protestant. Her refusal to be wary of the dangers surrounding her amounts to a crazy kind of courage.

She, along with all the other characters, both male and female, is a victim of war and the effects of war upon a small beleaguered community. But as a woman, she tells her own and the community’s story with irony, humour, rebellion and outright refusal to play the victim.

Ducks, Newburyport (shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker Prize, and winner of the Goldsmith’s prize for experimental fiction) is over a thousand pages long, and the bulk of that thousand pages is the stream of consciousness of a middle-aged woman. Like the protagonist in Milkman , aspects of her experience fit her for the role of victim: as a child with a heart defect she spent months in hospital; her mother died when she was young, leaving her, in her own word, ‘broken’; her first husband abused her; she has been bullied at work; she’s suffered from life-threatening cancer (incurring vast medical bills); she is cripplingly shy; she is being stalked by a gun-toting creep called Ronny. She feels furious but powerless in the face of Trump’s sexism, US gun laws and school shootings, global pollution, and the massacre of First Nations peoples.

She has four children. And this is the hinge that opens the door onto her heroism. She works day and night making pies to help pay her children’s future college fees. When they are in danger, she res- cues them. Her story is punctuated with episodes in the life of a lioness who is separated from, and then re-united with, her cubs; leaving the reader in no doubt that this is a novel about the love and courage of mothers. When the lioness finally finds her cubs, she knows she will ‘love them and save them and feed them and teach them and never let them go.’

The narrator and her children together outwit and overwhelm the gunman. As a team, the family she has created – and especially her disaffected oldest daughter, Stacy – are strong enough to defend themselves against an armed man. By way of celebration, Stacy suggests a family trip to the zoo see the lioness and her cubs. The narrator wonders whether Stacy identifies with the lioness; ‘the fact that whether this is because she feels fierce and free, or caged and cowed, doesn’t bear thinking about.’ The narrator, we know, feels both; she’s a lioness of a mother, self-deprecating but ferocious in defence of her young.

These four heroines still lack the absolute power of the men who attempt to control their lives. But they are women who are demanding the power to define their own identities. They are standing up for those they love, and for their rights; women resolutely refusing to play the victim. Maybe they are heralds of a brave new dawn of heroic women in our fiction.

( Jane’s novels range from historical (Mr Wroe’s Virgins) through contemporary (Island) to science fiction (The Testament of Jessie Lamb). Her latest novel, Body Tourists, is a dystopia set in 2045. Her story collection , Hitting Trees with Sticks, is in the project on Contemporary English Literature in Russian Universities).