A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women: Fictions, Histories, Myths (Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing) [1st ed. 2022] 3031086708, 9783031086700

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women Fictions, Histories, Myths Leanne Bibby

Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing Series Editors

Gina Wisker International Ctr for Higher Ed Mgmt University of Bath Cambridge, UK Denise deCaires Narain University of Sussex Brighton, UK

This monograph series aims to showcase late twentieth and twenty-first century work of contemporary women, trans and non-binary writers in literary criticism. The ‘women’ in our title advocates for work specifically on women’s writing in a world of cultural and critical production that can still too easily slide into patriarchal criteria for what constitutes ‘worthy’ literature. This vision for the series is avowedly feminist although we do not require submissions to identify as such and we actively encourage submissions that engage directly with different definitions of ‘feminism’. Our series does make the claim for a continuing imperative to promote work by women authors; it remains essential for our field to make space for this body of literary criticism. Further, our series makes a claim that serious inquiry on late twentieth and twenty-first century women’s writing contributes to a necessary, emerging and exciting research area in literary studies.

Leanne Bibby

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women Fictions, Histories, Myths

Leanne Bibby School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law Teesside University Middlesbrough, UK

ISSN 2523-8140     ISSN 2523-8159 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing ISBN 978-3-031-08670-0    ISBN 978-3-031-08671-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Steelheart / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is for my daughter, April Rose—a formidable intellectual woman in the making.

Acknowledgements

This book began as my PhD research, and I wish to thank, once again, my supervisors Professor Mary Eagleton, Professor Susan Watkins and Professor Ruth Robbins, as well as my examiners Professor Mary Joannou and Dr Sue Chaplin, for their generous support and encouragement as I developed the project into the form of a monograph. I could never adequately thank my family, friends and colleagues over the years, but I’ll say it anyway. You made it all possible. Many thanks also to my anonymous peer reviewers for your attentive and illuminating comments, and to my editor at Palgrave, Molly Beck, for your guidance.

vii

Contents

1 Cultural  Histories of the Intellectual: From Patriarchal Myth to Feminist Mythopoeia  1 2 A. S. Byatt: Creating the Intellectual Woman 43 3 Minds and Bodies 79 4 Women Intellectuals and Sexual Specificity117 5 Women Intellectuals, Private Intellectuals?151 6 Fictions and Future Histories of Intellectual Women183 7 Afterword: Ragnarok: The End of the Gods217 References225 Index237

ix

About the Author

Leanne Bibby  is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University. Her research concerns the relationships between literary writing and historical narrative.

xi

CHAPTER 1

Cultural Histories of the Intellectual: From Patriarchal Myth to Feminist Mythopoeia

1.1   Introduction In late 2011, as I completed the original study on which this book is based and, in doing so, wrestled with long-contested questions concerning relationships between imaginative writing and feminist politics, A. S. Byatt’s book Ragnarok: The End of the Gods was published. I had progressed far enough with the work to understand that myth and mythopoeia would be key to my answers to some of those questions, and this particular new book confirmed that line of thinking. This work of fiction rewrites Norse mythology while also examining the influence of myth itself on the life of a young girl, referred to only as ‘the thin child’, during the Second World War. The thin child is an avid reader and a critical and creative thinker, and makes the myths she reads into tools with which to comprehend her world. Byatt has made no secret of the basis of the girl on herself, making the book part novel, part fictionalised autobiography, part critique of the Ragnarok myth in particular, and part critical reflection on the nature of myth in general as a mode of writing. Forms of myth and mythopoeia govern many other textual forms that outwardly deny their ‘mythic’ content. Byatt’s Ragnarok was published as part of Canongate collection The Myths, which features retellings of well-known myths and legends by contemporary authors and also includes works by Jeanette Winterson,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Bibby, A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_1

1

2 

L. BIBBY

Margaret Atwood and Ali Smith. This series also helped to usher in a period of increasing popularity for books, primarily novels, by women authors that re-told stories from ancient mythology from a feminist perspective. At the time of writing, this category of fiction includes bestsellers by Madeline Miller, Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes and Jennifer Saint. Women writers’ interest in what Helen Morales describes as ‘reimagined ancient myths as acts of resistance’1 is worth thinking about, and Byatt’s take on myth is, I would argue, unique. This is because her fiction is concerned with myth’s role in structuring culture itself; myth as, to use Roland Barthes’s description in his classic Mythologies, a language characterised in part by its ‘expansive ambiguity’2 and by ‘the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature’.3 Byatt’s works remind us of mythic language as something that runs through narrative itself, camouflaging stories as realities, often for harmful ends, but importantly in ways that can be answered with reformed or entirely new myths, as my fuller analysis of Ragnarok in this study’s Afterword will demonstrate. In this book, I examine one of the modern myths central to Byatt’s fiction: that of the public intellectual. This figure is almost always gendered as masculine, to the cost of women intellectuals, who are therefore represented as secondary to their male peers.4 Today, intellectuals are objects of deep suspicion. Their cultural history, and stereotypes of dusty academics in distant ivory towers and pondering matters irrelevant to real life, casts a long shadow over contemporary attitudes towards thinkers, writers and artists whose work endeavours to ‘speak truth to power’. These stereotypes are insidious, with their assumptions about intellectuals’ functions, motivations, credibility and social class, to say nothing yet of their gender. This book suggests that such narratives, used as justification for the current vilification of intellectualism and expertise, are only a small part of a richer and still-developing cultural history in which women intellectuals, feminist intellectuals and literary art are crucial in reshaping foundational concepts of who and what an intellectual can be. This book does not attempt to contend with the problem of anti-intellectualism in cultures of ‘post-truth’5 as a whole, but rather to suggest ways in which the literary work of a key British author and critic addresses some of the flawed thinking at that prejudice’s basis. The idea of the intellectual woman is not defined and fixed, but is formed continually as part of a dynamic set of narratives, intrinsically literary and mythopoeic (myth-creating) in form. Byatt’s narratives, for instance, of women visionaries in The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and The Game (1967), the poets and academics in her

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

3

well-­known Possession: A Romance (1990), the storytellers and early university women in The Children’s Book (2009), and the variety of ‘thinking’ women in her short stories, seldom fit easily within present, familiar notions of public intellectuals, but are never simply the exceptional ‘others’ of male contemporaries. These texts are instruments of a vital mythopoeic, and historiographic, form of literary feminism. This study is timely. With the current and widespread distrust of intellectuals in a great deal of public discourse, and its inherent anti-feminism, the specific figure of the woman intellectual—the woman who thinks and writes for audiences—has re-entered that discourse, albeit often for negative reasons. In Women and Power (2017), classicist Mary Beard’s bestselling pamphlet on the traditional exclusion of women’s voices from the public sphere, written partly in response to her experience of being ‘trolled’ on social media, Beard suggests that in order to improve conditions for women in public discussion, ‘we need to go back to some first principles about the nature of spoken authority, about what constitutes it, and how we have learned to hear authority where we do,’ and that ‘we should be thinking more about the fault-lines and fractures that underlie dominant male discourse.’6 Many feminist authors have questioned this male discourse, for example, in the feminist theory through which I read Byatt’s fiction in this study. It is no accident, I think, that this kind of account of women’s marginalisation in intellectual life coincides with the renewed popularity of feminist versions of ancient myths in fiction. Helen Morales places modern mythographers including Ali Smith, Suzanne Collins, Beyoncé, Madeline Miller and Pat Barker in the same tradition of rewriting myths from other perspectives as writers from antiquity themselves such as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Plato in their retelling of stories by Homer.7 Natalie Haynes prefaces her study of ten often misunderstood women characters from classical mythology, Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths (2020) by emphasising myth’s inherent malleability and the necessity of mythopoeia: ‘Every myth contains multiple timelines within itself: the time in which it is set, the time it is first told, and every retelling afterwards.’8 I would argue, and I contend that Byatt’s feminist mythopoeia supports the view, that what Haynes says here is true beyond the myths of classical antiquity. Women intellectuals have been positioned outside the male public paradigm of the intellectual for centuries but have still existed, resolutely figuring themselves and being figured in discourse as linked to older narratives of intellectuals, but modifying those narratives at the same time. Precisely

4 

L. BIBBY

how this occurs is key to Byatt’s literary project and to this book’s argument. In their attempts to reinstate women within ‘intellectual history’, many feminist scholars have not queried extensively enough the patriarchal knowledges governing how ‘the intellectual’ is commonly conceived. As a result, feminists themselves are emblematic women intellectuals, but they have been denied the same cultural status as paradigmatic, male public intellectuals who are culture’s primary ‘thinkers’ and writers. Therefore, as a paradigm, the public intellectual is central to a powerful modern myth. This myth is far-reaching, historically speaking. In A. S. Byatt’s bestseller Possession: A Romance (1990), a pair of twentieth-­century academics research the life of a nineteenth-century woman poet whose public image and private life were both complicated by her intellectual identity. One of the researchers is her descendant Maud Bailey, a feminist critic who experiences many similar conflicts a century later. We may reasonably wonder why this should be, when intellectual and literary women are the subjects of masses of well-known historical documents. That novel queries the conditions of cultural-historical knowledge that exist to ensure women’s problems in identifying and working as intellectuals. The disjunctions in historical narrative affecting the two female protagonists in Byatt’s Possession are portrayed using a number of different literary forms side-byside, but in addition to this, the blank, silent spaces between fictionalised Victorian letters, diary entries and poems in the text seem to symbolise the silences, disjunctions and distortions in historical narrative itself, and with which reality must contend. Using these forms, the novel draws on numerous strands of the perceived cultural history of the intellectual, exploiting that history’s formal and ideological problems—especially the problem of gender—in notably productive ways. Possession is the best-known example of Byatt’s achievements in representing these issues, but the overarching issue of women’s marginalisation as intellectuals pervades her oeuvre. Her ‘Frederica’ quartet of novels, comprising The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002) centre on the character Frederica Potter. She is a Cambridge graduate, teacher, writer and restless intellectual who negotiates conflict between her mind and body’s separate needs and succeeds, to a large but ambiguous extent, in attempting to reconcile the two by imaginatively ‘laminating’ (Byatt’s term) the different aspects of her life and the various texts of the culture she inhabits. This notion of ‘lamination’ is useful to Frederica in breaking down the patriarchal myths that would tell her who and what she is. In Byatt’s The Children’s Book

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

5

(2009), several intellectual women characters face personal and social problems as a result of their intellectual interests and work, as Byatt references a familiar, dominant cultural history in which intellectuals are primarily and definitively men. The novels mentioned above are all, in different ways, historical novels. Possession’s time setting moves between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Frederica novels’ settings span the 1950s until the 1980s and The Children’s Book recounts a fin de siècle from the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, covering the years before the Great War and its immediate aftermath. I suggest here that these and Byatt’s other literary works together form an ongoing process of productive reflection on historical periods in which intellectual women encountered a range of problems. Byatt has negotiated these problems by setting up a series of textual transactions between facets of the cultural history of the intellectual outside her work (in which the figure is almost always gendered as male) and her literary work, offering narrative solutions along the way. Many of these solutions are mythopoeic in nature. Mythopoeia, or the process by which art and literature extend and alter mythology, is the driving, discursive force behind A. S. Byatt’s fictional constructions of woman intellectuals. Her fiction’s mythopoeic strategies are already the topic of criticism, including Gillian M.  E. Alban’s (2003) and Susan Sellers’s (2001) works; the fiction’s obsession with intellectual women is also considered in Mary Eagleton’s excellent study Clever Girls and the Literature of Women’s Upward Mobility (2018), but no criticism has yet considered Byatt’s treatment of a modern cultural phenomenon such as the public intellectual as a myth, or analysed this theme across her body of work. This is indeed a myth and a paradigm, one of those paradigms that, although it has inspired and supported a large number of other ‘versions’ of itself (described in the many accounts of the intellectual I refer to in this chapter), it cannot be a ‘pure’ or perfect paradigm because there are always ‘endless’ possible exceptions and contradictions to its ‘rule’.9 The result is that other, legitimate ‘versions’ of the intellectual can and do exist. This is the blind spot in patriarchal discourse that compromises the masculine public intellectual’s dominance. Laurence Coupe’s useful description of mythopoeia, here, depends on Barthes’s crucial notion of myth’s ‘very principle’: that it ‘transforms history into nature’10 while taking recognisable forms, and also Barthes’s understanding of ‘the mythical concept’ that ‘has at its disposal an unlimited mass of signifiers’.11 In other words, concepts in myth can inhere in many images, and this is something that

6 

L. BIBBY

Byatt exploits in her depictions of the paradigmatic intellectual and his others. Histories, in Byatt’s work, are never ‘naturalised’ into myths; they are oppressive narratives to be resisted wherever they suppress women’s own stories and impose other stories upon them. Byatt is not a historian but she is a writer who is concerned with the historical narratives that are valued by a culture, for whatever reason, and with the other narratives that can upset a culture’s idea of itself. She is also a stridently intellectual writer whose work has been characterised in those terms, and not always favourably. By positioning women as intellectuals, Byatt’s work addresses the terms of patriarchal mythology and reveals its linguistic, historical and philosophical points of weakness. The figure of the woman intellectual in Byatt’s fiction emerges here as a profoundly feminist critique of a patriarchy that denies women’s critical potential, and that works by exploiting the uncertainties, tensions and silences in present cultural myths. This mythopoeic project also governs this book’s methodology. For the first time, representations of women and the intellectual within all her literary work will be scrutinised and linked to her celebrated innovations within the forms of historical fiction and historiographic metafiction. The book is not an examination of her work’s dialogue with intellectual women’s real lives, as we can access those lives using historical evidence, but rather an interrogation of how their fictional representations affect discourses of femininity and intellectualism more broadly, particularly when those representations take mythopoeic forms. The ‘real’ is of course important, and I acknowledge accordingly Byatt’s gestures towards the reality in which women’s lives are partly shaped and constrained by patriarchal ideologies that tell them their minds and bodies are incompatible with any legitimate definition of intellectualism. This book also attests to Byatt’s status as a vitally important contemporary British author whose career spans crucial decades in the innovation of the novel form, from the 1960s onwards, to embrace what Mariadele Boccardi describes as the ‘literary trends’ that culminated in Byatt’s Booker Prize-winner Possession, including ‘the ludic proliferation of texts whose status as real or invented was insistently questioned’.12 Boccardi also remarks that Byatt’s critical essays on literature and culture have proven her ‘status as the closest thing to a public intellectual of an Arnoldian, Eliotesque or Leavisite kind in contemporary British literature’.13 This is apt and also an ironic set of comparisons in light of the admiring and also critical conversations with the works of Matthew Arnold, T.  S. Eliot,

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

7

F. R. Leavis and many other literary minds occurring in Byatt’s work. In an introduction to a new collection of Byatt’s short stories published in 2021, novelist David Mitchell frames her fiction’s intellectual concerns for a general readership as those of a ‘literary traveller’14 and her achievement in her short story about a woman academic who meets a genie, ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, as ‘Byatt at her magpie-minded, ideas-studded, plot-driven best’.15 I contend here that her fiction’s formidably well-­ informed, playful and critical relationships with ideas and the individuals who have them is its defining feature and a large part of what makes her one of the defining authors of both late twentieth-century and contemporary British fiction. This is, in addition, what justifies a reappraisal of her work and its unique use of mythopoeia, especially in the present context of fiction’s fascination with myth more broadly.

1.2   Structure of This Book The section following this one situates this book in its historical and cultural context and introduces some key ideas from theory, firstly by considering the myth of the public intellectual as it is constructed within selected theories of the intellectual, dating from the nineteenth century to recent years. I examine the severe gender-blindness of most examples of such theories, and the unwillingness of those that do mention intellectual women to treat them as anything other than anomalous, separate and inferior examples to their male peers. The rest of this chapter then reads a selection of the feminist rejoinders to these theories as efforts to modify them that often do not entirely succeed because they do not address the precise tropes and discourses underpinning patriarchal ideas. Women intellectuals certainly are intellectuals, especially where they advance feminist politics in an exercise of what Edward W.  Said called the ‘critical sense’16 fundamental to intellectuals, but still women, unjustly, do not achieve full cultural legitimacy alongside men. Therefore, I contend with the fact that many women intellectuals are also women authors as an indicator of fiction’s place in the re-imagining of cultural histories that recount a single and narrow story, indeed a myth, that has ceased to be useful. Chapter 2 then commences my reading of A. S. Byatt’s fiction in terms of its ‘conversation’ with patriarchal myths of the intellectual, negotiating the gendered standard by way of art, and thus testing the boundaries of discourse itself. The texts analysed in this chapter are Byatt’s first novel The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and three collections of her short stories: Sugar

8 

L. BIBBY

and Other Stories (1987), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), and Elementals (1998). Chapter 3 examines what Byatt has called ‘the major biological/intellectual problem of women’,17 or the conflict between intellectual and physical imperatives in women’s lives that so often prevents them from undertaking intellectual work on the same terms as men. This is a preoccupation at the heart of Byatt’s quartet of novels in which the main characters are Frederica Potter and her family and friends. This chapter is a detailed critique of these novels in terms of their major subject: intellectual women’s struggle to reconcile their intellectual identities with the consequences of sexual relationships, marriage, motherhood and femininity generally. The texts’ status as historiographic metafiction, or self-­ aware fiction that comments on historiographic processes (as theorised by Linda Hutcheon, 1988), emphasises their project of rewriting historical narratives of gender and intellectualism. The novels adapt the forms of nineteenth-century realist fiction, using an omniscient, knowledgeable narrator and sections of ostensibly non-literary narrative, to assert that written discourse’s relationship to ‘the real’ is constantly subject to modification, particularly in fiction which enacts a complex relationship with ‘what really happened’. This aspect of Byatt’s strategy reveals the conceptual foundations of her later, celebrated historiographic metafictions. I demonstrate that the Frederica novels support my argument that ‘cultural histories’ and ‘traditions’ are constructs whose unity and linearity is always in question. If harmful traditions are in doubt, then positive change is possible. The evidence provided within the quartet of novels suggests that Frederica and her intellectual peers, regardless of their gender, must continually assemble individual discourses of intellectualism that adapt and depart from traditional thought (in Frederica’s case, by way of the ‘lamination’ of the separate aspects of her life that allows her to avoid choosing the demands of either her mind or her body—instead, the separate aspects can be reconciled). Following on from this discussion of the mind/body problem and Byatt’s narrative answers to it, I consider in Chap. 4 how the woman intellectual in the late twentieth century and beyond has been textually ‘created’ partly by ideas from poststructuralist feminist theory in Byatt’s novels The Game (1967) and The Biographer’s Tale (2000), and in the short story collection The Little Black Book of Stories (2003). Byatt thus re-presents both feminist women and other, less politically defined but still specific intellectual women as real, distinct, and legitimate cultural actors.

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

9

Although Byatt distrusts theory and politicised criticism as tools for reading (as she has stated in her books of essays and satirised in the novel Possession), her knowledge of cultural theory is formidable and her writing, both literary and non-literary, suggests that fiction and theory are part of the same body of critical discourse. The forms of her novels and short stories exploit the manner in which separate discourses can function in dialogue with each other and not as part of traditions, which can then be viewed as illusory and patriarchal in their inclusion (or not) of women. We see these dialogues between discursive forms in the adaptation of the work of Jacques Derrida (1967) by Luce Irigaray (1974) and Julia Kristeva (1979). Byatt is certainly familiar with Irigaray’s work, referring to it directly in her essay collection On Histories and Stories (2000). Irigaray’s theories of women’s sexual specificity are crucial in locating the woman intellectual in discourse as a specific figure in her own right and not as the inferior other of a masculine paradigm. Byatt’s stories adapt the forms and language of myths and fairy tales in order to confront what Irigaray and Michèle Le Dœuff (1980) have described as the ‘masculine imaginary’. Defying this imaginary’s discursive pressure requires textual excesses and certain dangers (such as rejection by the patriarchal discursive world and mental illness or hysteria, as I observe in the case of The Game), but there is always knowledge to be gained by taking these risks. I consider one of the most important consequences of this in Chap. 5, which analyses the situation of the private, rather than public, woman intellectual as a very different but still valid counterpoint to the masculine public intellectual in Byatt’s well-known novel Possession: A Romance (1990) and her collection The Matisse Stories (1993). By representing this figure, whose existence is denied (explicitly or implicitly) by most theories of the intellectual, particularly Edward W. Said’s (1994), the fiction interrogates ideas of gender and the so-called public and private spheres. The notion of these spheres is already interrogated in the work of Jürgen Habermas (1962) and Nancy Fraser (1999) and their limits made apparent, a set of ideas in which Byatt’s work intervenes. I therefore demonstrate that it is possible to argue further for a multiplicity of ‘types’ of intellectual, in terms of gender and other factors, beside the male public intellectual who has dominated theories so far. It is also possible to re-present this multiplicity as non-­ hierarchical and non-traditional—a discourse that adapts and ‘laminates’ other discourses rather than following them submissively. This chapter contributes to the book’s argument that there are no true, linear traditions

10 

L. BIBBY

of intellectualism, only developments, differences and the dominance over these of certain discourses that are seen to complement ‘reality’ the most. Chapter 6 examines Byatt’s literary treatment of some major historical narratives of intellectuals (including, e.g. Victorian writers and polymaths) in Possession (1990), Angels and Insects (1992) and The Children’s Book (2009). The ‘linguistic turn’ in historical and literary studies (contemporary to much of Byatt’s literary career) has been resisted by some historians from the publication of Hayden White’s influential study of histories and narrative in Metahistory (1973) to the present time, but the movement’s importance in the project of reconsidering certain histories as dominant discourses remains. Dominant representations of the intellectual have changed, although not very much, illustrating that the intellectual’s ‘cultural history’ (drawing his lineage from the Romantic era to the present) still governs popular and scholarly perceptions because it is almost always tacitly defended. The rise of neo-Victorian fiction has corresponded with Byatt’s most prolific time as a literary author, and represents a key aspect of how her fictions envisage the past. Byatt’s three texts re-present the conduits of ‘reality’, including memories, personal documents and material environments and objects, in order to reassert the woman intellectual’s cultural presence. The texts assert that history has found ample evidence of her significance. Gender is an unavoidable marker of difference, but with difference comes specificity and it is possible to accept specificity without constructing a hierarchy; indeed, Possession resists hierarchies between intellectuals continually, for instance with its celebrated satires of academic life. In Byatt’s neo-Victorian duo of novellas, Angels and Insects, narrative is an indissoluble mixture of various texts with a symbiotic and also inventive relationship to history. In The Children’s Book, this functionality of narrative is asserted again: time and subjectivities are overtly organised using self-conscious narration. Critical sensitivity to this process, as White and Irigaray make clear, is one of the keys to critiquing traditional cultural histories and legitimising women as intellectuals. Ragnarok’s ‘thin child’ is the latest of Byatt’s fictional intellectual woman who is able to freely use literary and mythic narratives to resist the patriarchal discourses that would organise her entire world and de-­ legitimise her as a thinking woman in her later life. With her youth and strident intellectual courage, she is perhaps also the ‘freest’ of Byatt’s intellectuals, but the cultural questions posed by her story are no less urgent. Ragnarok is the story of a girl reading a book and using its content to critique every aspect of her past, present and future and thus is Byatt’s

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

11

clearest statement yet that for women in particular, literature can be a formidable political tool, and one that assists readers in taking a political stance. A political stance, moreover, equals a refusal to accept dominant ideas at face value and to maintain an intellectual’s defining ‘critical sense’.18 In women’s case, exerting a critical sense equals exerting a feminist sense. Byatt’s fictional studies of women intellectuals demonstrate that this feminist sense is an integral part of culture and is not limited to certain historical periods, specialised theories, organised political movements or academic work. Byatt herself, finally, is a quintessential intellectual, involved in questioning limitations of all kinds.

1.3  Framing the Issue Cultural narratives of intellectual women, including historical and literary accounts, answer traditional, patriarchal myths of intellectuals mythopoeically—that is, by extending those myths. In A. S. Byatt’s 2000 novel The Biographer’s Tale, postgraduate student Phineas G.  Nanson makes the decision to leave his studies and instead write a biography of a fictional nineteenth-century biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes. The narrative is a humorously ironic take on academic life and literary history, one whose irony depends on familiar historical narratives, and a sense of the inventive relationships between narratives and reality. After the seminar in which Nanson makes his decision, he confides to Professor Ormerod Goode that he desires ‘a life full of things’—these things being ‘facts’ rather than theories and literary narrative. Professor Goode then parodies this attitude with reference to ‘the shining solidity of a world full of facts. Every established fact—taking its place in a constellation of glittering facts like planets in an empty heaven.’19 In the conversation between the two men, hierarchies of text and reality, literature and history, ideas and facts shift out of order in an exhilarating kind of narrative crisis in which Goode’s pronouncement that Destry-Scholes’s biography of Sir Elmer Bole is ‘the greatest work of scholarship in [his] time’ of course carries no ‘real’ weight. This is because all of these men are fictional elements within a satire built around images of the mainstays of Western intellectual life: the prestigious institution and instructors, the professor in all his—less often her— gravitas, and the insecure postgraduate student. They are also paradigms within its mythology. Everything about this scene depends on literary narratives in which statements about value, authority, and ‘greatness’ are fragile to the point of absurdity, as is, importantly, the scene’s treatment of

12 

L. BIBBY

gender. In the professor’s office, Nanson’s contempt for the feminine form of biography lands hollowly: I remarked, perhaps brashly, that I had always considered biography a bastard form, a dilettante pursuit. Tales told by those incapable of true invention, simple stories for those incapable of true critical insight. Distractions constructed by amateurs for lady readers who would never grapple with The Waves or The Years but liked to feel they had an intimate acquaintance with the Woolfs and with Bloomsbury, from daring talk of semen on skirts to sordid sexual interference with nervous girls.20

This satire is purposely offensive in its priggish dismissal of ‘lady readers’ and boorish disgust at feminine, bodily realities. Something else, biting but a little subtler, seems to drive Nanson’s outburst: his ability to insult anything not perceived in this prestigious institutional environment as serious, academically rigorous, difficult, disembodied and masculine, owing to paradigms of intellectualism put sharply into doubt by the scene’s irony. Nanson’s prejudices are clear: Woolf’s works have his respect, but sexual, physical or feminine things do not, even as part of the form of biography. Laurence Coupe describes the kind of mythic narratives underpinning these scenes with reference to theorists Kenneth Burke and Paul Ricoeur. Byatt’s satire contends with the gendered limitations of academic prestige, including the marginalisation of women’s writing: her literary work is indeed ‘a means of extending’ a stalled mythology.21 The cultural history of intellectuals hinges, in this scene, on the familiar, patriarchal imagery of intellectuals as highly educated, middle-class gatekeepers of authoritative ideas and knowledge, probably affiliated with an academic institution, and part of a lineage including the nineteenth century’s ‘men of letters’ and polymaths for which Scholes Destry-Scholes is a stand-in— and all, still, male, with Virginia Woolf as an esteemed exception. These men are indeed figures of modern myths and not mere stereotypes: Goode is a languid but formidable expert whom Nanson admires, and Destry-Scholes is an archetypal Victorian polymath. They are the Burkean paradigms Laurence Coupe identified as implying a drive towards perfection or totality but which are actually indications of mythopoeic possibility: the horizons within seeming hierarchies.22 The Biographer’s Tale does not simply try to redress imbalances of gender within intellectual history—its work is mythopoeic as it unsettles the history’s core, patriarchal narratives and characterises them instead as a selection of such

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

13

narratives among many other exploratory possibilities. Byatt’s novel indicates a discursive problem that persists with disheartening frequency. In a great deal of available writing on the intellectual, women are not mentioned at all, and where they are, they are almost always figured in comparison with the paradigmatic figure of the male public intellectual. This masculine figure incorporates within itself the impression that it is the product of an unbroken and authoritative cultural history referring to reality. This chapter suggests that writing on the intellectual assembles this partial, often misleading cultural history by creating an appearance of what Mary Eagleton calls ‘the close, unquestioned alliance between intellectualism and masculinity’.23 A large body of writing is responsible for the status of the male public intellectual, but I suggest here that its authority is constantly in question owing to the critical, ironic and ultimately literary and mythopoeic strategies of historical accounts. I will show that while theories of the intellectual claim the status of paradigm, narratives of ‘thinking’ women are inherently mythopoeic challenges to the paradigm’s dominance, in ways not hitherto acknowledged in detail. By the end of the twentieth century, a wealth of feminist literary criticism and theory ensured that the relationships between women’s writing, intellectualism and myth were well-acknowledged, although not in terms of mythopoeia. What Coupe calls the ‘systematic violence’ of familiar myths’ implied ‘totality’—that is, the implication that all true intellectuals are male or, occasionally, female—is well in evidence in this history of ideas, despite the impact of important feminist studies such as Dale Spender’s Women of Ideas—and What Men Have Done to Them (1982). Spender seems to acknowledge, but does not name, the role of patriarchal paradigms in preventing women intellectuals from actually being represented as such: knowledge is not part of women’s ‘traditions’, or ‘visible’ in their ‘culture’.24 As Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale appeared at the turn of the millennium, feminist critic Elaine Showalter described feminist intellectuals as ‘camouflaged’ by their gender,25 and noted also the importance of the Cassandra myth of the cursed prophetess whose words were disbelieved, a myth necessary for feminist intellectuals’ ‘inspiration and even self-definition’.26 Even as Showalter recognised the need for narratives of legitimate women intellectuals outside the traditional hierarchy, however, she relied on a perceived need for ‘exemplary heroines’ to challenge a gendered set of norms.27 This, I would argue, highlights the unfortunate need for ‘exceptional’ women (exceptional because the masculine norm is left in place), and oversimplifies a process that actually unsettles those

14 

L. BIBBY

norms, and which Byatt has been demonstrating since her first novel The Shadow of the Sun (1964). Certain myths of the feminist intellectual, such as the ‘Dark Lady’ which Showalter acknowledges as representing ‘the token woman or exceptional intellectual in a community of men’,28 reinforce the rule to which such women are the exceptions even while they indicate positive possibilities. The cultural history of intellectuals is circular in nature, always returning to the hierarchy of sole, male legitimacy, whether explicitly or implicitly. The Cassandra myth, referenced in the name of a main character in Byatt’s second novel The Game, evokes the thinking of two major intellectual women of Byatt’s generation—thinking that underscores this study’s approach. In her essay ‘Myth and Faerie: Rewritings and Recoveries’, Marina Warner echoes Roland Barthes’s tracing of myths’ power in their language when she refers to their ‘founding and constitutive moments of language and memory’ as something authors may rewrite and also, importantly, ‘the power of thinking and reflection, of generating mental pictures’ and how myths thus ‘draw on the imaginary’.29 In Byatt’s fiction, women’s insight is always tied to their imaginative and visionary capacities and, as such, like Cassandra’s prophecies, may not be understood by others but are powerful forces nonetheless. Warner emphasises the power of the irrational in storytelling, moreover, ‘both as an expression of the mind in its most mysterious mode, and as a terrifying force in history’.30 In this way, she calls to mind the feminist poststructuralist theories of Hélène Cixous who, in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, (1976) theorised ‘writing that inscribes femininity’ itself in clearly mythopoeic terms: ‘Woman must write her self’31 beyond patriarchal narratives and expectations, and furthermore, ‘Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.’32 Mythopoeic writing like Byatt’s proceeds from a distinctively late twentieth-century understanding that it is not enough to write women intellectuals back into history, but that it is necessary to undermine the type of narrative that de-­ legitimised them in the first place, and answer this with stories that have entirely new logics. The kind of women’s writing Cixous seemed to envisage in 1976, as Byatt’s literary career took shape, was ‘a new insurgent writing’ (emphasis in original) which will enable ‘indispensable ruptures and transformations’ in women’s history33—a proliferation of new ways of thinking about the body, politics and culture themselves. The phrase ‘public intellectual’, as it refers to the modern paradigm of thinkers and writers, conjures both an idea of the intellectual with

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

15

definable characteristics—a theory—and a more ‘open’ variable, recognisably flexible notion that bears a clearer relationship to numerous ‘real’ intellectuals. My interest here is in how the cultural history constructs its most influential paradigms. The phrase ‘public intellectual’ is specific enough to be readily understood to have meaning, while also being tied rather loosely to a range of cultural histories of education, social class, cultural production and institutions; narratives partly comprehensible because of the cultural and linguistic ‘turns’ in literary and historical studies that developed from the 1970s onwards. These movements in critical theory are contemporary to Byatt’s writing career, which began in the mid-1960s. When Byatt celebrates the ‘riddling links between autobiography, biography, fact and fiction (and lies)’ in an essay in her collection On Histories and Stories,34 she echoes late twentieth-century cultural theories that deliberately disturb the hierarchies conventionally separating ‘factual’ and invented discourse. My focus here is on how this disturbance functions in a selection of the many texts available from the disciplines of cultural theory, sociology, history and philosophy, that have attempted to define the intellectual in a gendered way, through explicit or implicit reference to conditions and institutions that privilege men and render female ‘exceptions’ to the ‘rule’ exactly that—exceptions who reinforce a norm and help to construct a modern myth. ‘Cultural history’ is here defined as the discourse of history informed by written and material artefacts, including the history of meanings. This is broadly in line with Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s Foucauldian summary of cultural history as having emerged originally to ‘propose culture as an autonomous realm in which the principal stakes were not the pursuit of individual or class interests but the creation of domains of meaning’.35 These ‘domains of meaning’ are created in the service of those ‘individual or class interests’ (in Byatt’s case, the interests of intellectual women alongside those of intellectuals, generally) but studying them on their own terms is revealing. Discourse theory asserts that ‘any given society is constituted through a multiplicity of dynamic, fluid, and ever-changing systems of meaning.’36 When these systems are scrutinised in literature, they provide imaginative space for writers to consider the textual nature of meaning itself. Early in On Histories and Stories (2000), Byatt refers to historian Hayden White in relation to history’s constructedness. In his classic work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), White stresses the ‘ineluctably poetic nature of the historical work’37 and also studies, specifically, the nineteenth century’s ‘recognised masters’ of the discipline of

16 

L. BIBBY

history.38 White thus contributes to the cultural construction of the nineteenth-­century ‘man of letters’, while providing a framework to analyse that construction, by way of the five ‘levels of conceptualisation in the historical work’: chronicle, story, ‘mode of emplotment’, ‘mode of argument’ and ‘mode of ideological implication’.39 Byatt’s long-standing interest, evident in her literary and critical writing, in the nineteenth century as an era of historical and literary exploration links neatly with White’s designation of the period as ‘history’s golden age’.40 The facts sought-after by historians are, for novelists like Byatt, sites of exploration of and transactions with historiography which extend, rather than replace, historical narratives in ways echoing Coupe’s descriptions of mythopoeia as a ‘means of extending mythology’.41 All of the theories and histories of the intellectual I will discuss here rely on what White called, in Metahistory, ‘explanation by emplotment’, conveying meaning by revealing themselves linguistically to be a ‘type’ of narrative with certain textual characteristics.42 White’s work posits the possibility that the sphere of historical writing may belong as much to literary authors as to historians, most strikingly through his theorisation of the linguistic trope of irony, or figurative language that potentially represents the breakdown of any straightforward link between White’s notion of the ‘historical field’ and its textual representations. This is the method of what may be called historiographic mythopoeia, and a strategy for reading fiction’s relationship to historical narrative as mythopoeia. Interestingly, while the ‘Ironic mode’ can give an appearance of realism and sophistication with its seeming ‘self-consciousness’,43 a text intended to represent the past realistically presumably could not do so ironically. This may, as this book contends, explain Byatt’s penchant for satires and parodies of intellectualism, evident in Possession: A Romance (1990), The Biographer’s Tale and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994). However, part of the ‘game’ Byatt seems to play with this theory concerns the attitudes and ideas that cultural-historical narratives convey, rather than material realities, when those narratives are ‘cast in the Ironic mode’. Their content is only one aspect of the phenomena they depict. Byatt’s works seem to suggest that the authority of knowledge about history can be called into question productively with attention to strategies of representation.

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

17

1.4  Definitions of the Intellectual Historians of the intellectual are already aware of the blind spot concerning gender that results from accepting its patriarchal terms. Hilda L. Smith, in her short study of the woman intellectual’s ‘paradigmatic separation’, warns against taking ‘falsely universal and broadly inclusive terms at face value’.44 Smith, however, does not acknowledge directly how exactly these terms have been embedded in narrative structures so that when women intellectuals are mentioned, they are always separate from male peers and their legitimacy is in question. The most obvious reason for this separation is that the overarching cultural history of the intellectual is that of the public intellectual, who enters into public discourse by means of writing and speaking to audiences. Opportunities to become a public intellectual have always been dependent on social and economic conditions that have not affected the sexes equally. A number of biographies and critical studies now exist, and continue to be published, focusing on intellectuals that draw on this virtually pre-set narrative, documenting the lives and works of public intellectuals who are mainly male, highly educated, and culturally visible (Small, 2002; Collini, 2006; Horowitz, 2012; Heynders, 2016). Helen Small writes that the phrase ‘public intellectual’ only entered ‘common usage’ in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1990s.45 The term covers, however, a modern mythology and a narrative that has built up over a much longer period, although not continuously and not creating a single ‘type’ of intellectual. Philosopher and novelist Julien Benda’s polemic The Treason of the Intellectuals (1928, published in France in 1927) participates in this twentieth-­century period of myth-making by describing intellectuals such as ‘philosophers, men of religion, artists, men of learning’ who abandoned their traditional function of ‘metaphysical speculation’ to become involved in the day’s ‘political passions’.46 The book responds to what Benda viewed as the destruction of the ideal intellectual function: that of moral guidance to the public. This represents a recognisable notion of the intellectual, linked to literature and critical capacity, but also, vitally, to the kind of cultural authority to which men have had primary access. The narrative of the intellectual here both draws on and entrenches the necessity of education and a prestige drawn from separateness from the rest of society and ‘political passions’, paradigms established by repetition. There are areas of Benda’s account in which other historical narratives begin to emerge. For example, the book’s original, French title, La Trahison des Clercs indicates

18 

L. BIBBY

that in the English title, ‘intellectual’ is approximated with the French ‘clercs’ or ‘clerics’ and with their attendant medieval, religious meanings, and also their etymological associations with literacy. The ‘clerk’, central to European ideas of the intellectual, is occupied with reading and writing, and possesses some power over discourse. The masculine, historical lineage of the intellectual is underlined. Still, in the seventeenth-century period to which this French word refers, European religious life was characterised by learned women, nuns, as much as by religious men, clerics. Although Benda’s account suggests space for women counterparts, the actual narrative does not include them and nor did public life. Nonetheless, that ‘space’ remains—the paradigm is not ‘pure’ or perfect, despite its repetition. Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim’s definition of the intellectual, like Benda’s, recognises the necessary social conditions of the production of knowledge as part of his pioneering ‘sociology of knowledge’, but also, it seems, the effect of change on those conditions. He associates systems of knowledge, or ‘unified world views’,47 with different social classes who were, before the twentieth century, separated by a lack of ‘vertical mobility’ on the part of the lower classes. Society’s structure remained stable because of this, and also, the lower classes’ knowledge systems could not challenge or be challenged by those of society’s middle or ‘upper strata’. Intellectuals, Mannheim explains, came into existence by transcending those divisions, using ‘vertical mobility’ to become ‘uncertain and sceptical of their traditional view of the world’48 as they produce new ideas. This narrative of intellectual disturbance of a previously stable social order is mythopoeic in its manner of extending the modern myth of the intellectual. This narrative is also charged with progressive possibility: Mannheim writes that the ‘upper strata’, ‘stabilised on the basis of authority’ and their command of dominant knowledges, are at no risk of having their power challenged until ‘the stage of democratisation has been reached’.49 Then, members of the lower strata gain for the first time the political force to confront authority with their alternative knowledges, which have now gained ‘representational validity.”50 Social and cultural discourses change subtly, here, because different people may now function as intellectuals. Mannheim has no need, still, to specify that these intellectuals are likely to be men, with access to the resources that would allow for ‘representational validity’, but once again there are points allowing for potential ‘other’ intellectuals in his account. He describes one distinct group, the ‘professional intelligentsia’, as ‘social groups whose special task it is to provide an

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

19

interpretation of the world for that society’.51 This professional intelligentsia, evoking the stereotypical ‘ivory tower’ (Byatt’s professor Goode, perhaps), are supposedly detached from the everyday problems of life, and also from critical attitudes towards non-academic problems outside their profession. Crucially, then, the detachment of this group of professional intellectuals creates space for the emergence of a ‘free intelligentsia’. Mannheim suggests that these arise from various socio-economic backgrounds to exercise their critical faculties and compete with one another for ‘the favour of the public’,52 in a manner evoking modern public intellectual discourse. As in Benda’s influential account, the masculine paradigm is compromised from within, but social conditions (the confinement of learned women to convents, for instance, and later the greater likelihood that men would be educated and have time to read, write and speak) mean that the overarching discourse of intellectualism remains masculine. Whereas Mannheim stresses that ‘a common educational heritage progressively tends to suppress differences of birth, status, profession, and wealth,’53 historically this was not common to many women, particularly women from lower social ‘strata’. Professor Goode may thrive as one of the professional intelligentsia, and the writer Alexander Wedderburn in The Virgin in the Garden (1978) may do well as a part of a type of middle-­ class, twentieth-century free intelligentsia, but in the almost cloistered life of the nineteenth-century poet Christabel LaMotte in Possession, Byatt acknowledges several barriers to women’s places in these narratives. Nonetheless, education takes many forms, and the notion of a free intelligentsia remains one in which ‘pure’ paradigms can be questioned. The issue of women’s education has been central to the work of the most famous intellectual women, including Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir and naturally key to the success of various women’s movements. Mannheim’s narrative of the intellectual has been, furthermore, one of the dominant European theories of professional and ‘free’ intellectuals during A.  S. Byatt’s lifetime: she was born in 1936, the year of Ideology and Utopia’s original publication. For intellectual women in particular, as I will show later in this chapter, their relationships to or separation from institutions, educational or professional, play a role in defining them as ‘exceptional’ rather than straightforwardly legitimate intellectuals. This condition is discursive as well as structural. Mannheim’s ideas owe much to English, Romantic ideas of the exceptional ‘genius’, separated from the mainstream of his society by a combination of his intellect, education and social status. Like Benda’s, Mannheim’s writing is emplotted (to use

20 

L. BIBBY

White’s term) along Romantic lines, figuring intellectuals as heroic, individual men rising against social and cultural adversaries. In these versions of the myth of the intellectual, women can only ever be exceptions to the rule. Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s essay ‘The Intellectuals’ contributes to this contradictory but still patriarchal paradigm, although acknowledging more space for the potential existence of legitimate intellectuals not so rigidly defined. Gramsci’s notion of ‘organic intellectuals’ corresponds roughly with Mannheim’s ‘free intelligentsia’, in that they emerge from social groups and give that group ‘homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields’.54 Intellectuals are thus defined by their intellectual work and especially their capacity to ‘raise awareness’ from within a group, politically. The organic intellectual’s role is automatically public and for an audience, as is that of Gramsci’s ‘traditional intellectuals’ who are associated with ‘an historical continuity’ of older, ecclesiastical and monarchical forms of power,55 and so can equate with Mannheim’s ‘professional intelligentsia’ in their ties to institutions. At the root of Gramsci’s theory is that every person might, and usually does, behave as an intellectual during their lives regardless of their background or circumstances, but that this does not mean they fulfil the intellectual’s ‘function’ in society.56 This leaves discursive space to consider, then, the many possible personae of intellectuals outside the conventional, vaunted, public intellectual ‘function’. Substitute ‘women’ for ‘men’ in Gramsci’s essay and the underlying discourse seems to shift in favour of multiple other narratives of intellectuals, including women. The problem of the intellectual’s ‘function’ remains, however, and is implicitly masculine, calling to mind Byatt’s narratives of intellectual women like Christabel and Frederica Potter, who meet a number of cultural and physical barriers to their desired and actual roles as intellectuals. Gramsci’s is therefore a definition of intellectualism with the capacity to change and broaden narratives, although it ‘closes’ ultimately upon the linked issues of class, education and gender, as touchstones of patriarchal historical narratives that have not yet accommodated other intellectuals except as others to a norm. The organic intellectual Gramsci describes is a prototype of today’s public intellectuals, likely to be either male or exceptional and so to propagate the paradigm defining the myth. Importantly, also, the organic intellectual can function as a powerful metaphor for the feminist intellectual, emplotting discourses of the intellectual that are open, critical of

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

21

themselves and forward thinking, with similarly open criteria for legitimacy. Gramsci’s essay almost anticipates this changing discourse: it is constructed as a meditation on the intellectual across several cultural-historical contexts, in which the figure of the intellectual resonates with familiar masculine examples, while still implying a multiplicity of possible ‘types’. Nevertheless, the strength of possibly different intellectuals within narratives contributing to the paradigm usually does not, by itself, challenge the paradigm. A later extension of this apparently genderless narrative of the intellectual, but one which upholds the definitive nature of the male intellectual’s cultural history, is found in American sociologist Edward Shils’s essay ‘The Intellectuals and the Powers’ (1972). More than the theorists discussed previously, Shils details intellectual function, and in doing so suggests an individual with power to shape discourse—even, we can suppose, discourses of their own status and characteristics, as producers as well as subjects of (implicitly) mythopoeia, or creation of new narratives to explain the world. In each society, he argues, intellectuals are those ‘persons with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred, an uncommon reflectiveness about the nature of the universe and the rules which govern their society’. This ‘minority of persons’ are marked by their capacity for careful thought and communication on topics of worldly but also spiritual interest—Shils’s wording suggests Benda’s ‘clerics’ and their ecclesiastical history. For him, this spiritual insight is a key criterion of status as an intellectual, an ‘interior need to penetrate beyond the screen of immediate concrete experience’.57 This intellectual, then, is visionary in his abilities, but is once more tied somehow to social institutions and structures. These provide the demand for ‘persons who of necessity, by virtue of the actions they perform, are intellectuals’, whose task is to produce the cultural vehicles and symbols of self-conscious thought—books, songs, histories and so on—which help to provide a sense of order and coherence in culture and society.58 These seem to be rather broad terms in which to describe late twentieth-century culture and society, and are again focused implicitly on middle-class, educated men, but this is because Shils’s notion of intellectualism relies so much on English Romanticism. Shils’s above definition of intellectuals seems to reference directly William Wordsworth’s 1802 ‘Preface’ to his Lyrical Ballads, and his description of ‘the Poet’: He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of

22 

L. BIBBY

human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.59

Romantic literature, especially poetry, is a literary mode that A. S. Byatt’s work often references and adapts, for instance in the novels The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and Still Life (1985), and in her monograph Unruly Times (1970). Although the patriarchal paradigm dominates literary history, Byatt emphasises that within it, women writer-intellectuals are more than exceptions. Through Romanticism, her fiction makes significant transactions with patriarchal narratives of genius, and in response to which intellectual women construct their own, multiplicitous histories. The teenager Anna Severell, for example, is a foil to her ‘genius’, novelist father in her different visions. Shils’s essay is nostalgic for Romantic geniuses, poets as gifted individuals and as ‘guardians’ of language60 as well as for Benda’s clerical intellectuals; both are exceptional and set-apart for their concern with metaphysical and moral matters. They are also, importantly, stages in a changing narrative of intellectuals. However, Shils also stresses that intellectuals are ‘formed’ in response to the social demand mentioned above, more often than they are born as transcendent geniuses or exist ‘by disposition’.61 Byatt’s fiction, instead of being nostalgic for these paradigms, actively broadens them and compromises their sole authority. These cultural histories of separation from the mainstream of society, vision and transcendence recall, also, another Romantic concept of the intellectual in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’: a ‘permanent learned class of men’.62 This resonance removes decisively any false genderlessness implied by Shils’s use of the term ‘persons’. The accounts by Benda, Mannheim, Shils, and Gramsci construct narratives of male intellectuals that also obscure female others in this way, but in doing so, draw vital attention to those others as a kind of negative image that, although it reinforces the dominant type, still persists as a troubling discursive presence. Edward Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC, published in 1994 as Representations of the Intellectual, recognise a paradigm in need of analysis, whose characteristics, status and functions have and do change, although certain features, such as the ‘production and distribution of knowledge’,63 apparently stay the same. He begins his survey of modern intellectuals by asking whether ‘the intellectuals’ are ‘a very large or an extremely small and highly selective group of people’, a point on which he says Julien Benda and Antonio Gramsci are ‘fundamentally opposed’.64 The single trait Said identifies as being intrinsic to who and what

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

23

intellectuals are is an interesting component of the persistent, patriarchal myth, as it is both specific and broad. Said states that the intellectual is: someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unable to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-­ so-­ accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwilling, but actively willing to say so in public.65

In this account of the intellectual’s defining critical voice, there are more echoes of Romanticism and its combination of political critique with resistance and artistic expression as part of intellectual work. This characteristic is appealingly recognisable in many contexts, but is again underpinned by falsely universal terms. The major limitation of Said’s definition, and others, is the difficulty associated with accepting the public intellectual as a definitive type. However, here this is a productive difficulty in terms of representation. Said’s is one of the major studies of the intellectual that includes female examples and uses both gender pronouns, and mentions a few specific women. At the same time, though, Said’s ideas are firmly part of the mythology I have described that gains its influence from representing the intellectual as public, and probably, although not always, male. The intellectual cannot be passively engaged with ideas but must state his or her ‘views’ in public. Said stresses also that an intellectual’s role is a ‘specific public role that cannot be reduced to simply being a faceless professional, a competent member of a class going about her/his business’.66 Although the paradigmatic narrative of the intellectual remains in place, then, it reveals itself to be partial, unstable and reliant on implicit assumptions regarding class, educational background and other forms of privilege. Said does not state that an intellectual’s background, the conditions and form of ‘her/his’ work can be other than the paradigm suggests, but still his phrasing suggests that otherness and difference may not, after all, preclude legitimacy. The presence of women in the relevant histories seems to enact its own mythopoeia. Said tells many stories of intellectuals, and they are indeed stories, although those of women are incompatible with the conventions used to tell those of men: women are represented as different, separate, singular, and basically outside the paradigm. He rightly calls Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ ‘a crucial text for the modern feminist intellectual’,67 recognising its work in unpicking patriarchal culture,

24 

L. BIBBY

but in doing so separates ‘feminist intellectuals’ as a category by themselves and with a different level of legitimacy. There is no space in his discourse to consider how difference and specificity may not have to indicate hierarchy (as the absent-presence of women intellectuals suggests), and so Said’s writing ultimately, implicitly confirms the paradigm’s authority. It thus perpetuates further the imaginatively powerful cultural history of the nineteenth-century ‘literary man’ or ‘man of letters’ which, as Mary Poovey has shown, was constructed and romanticised as an ‘autonomous individual’, dedicated to culture, in order to conceal tensions between actual perceptions of the man of letters as alternately ‘the “genius” and the cog of the capitalist machine’ churning out writing to be sold.68 Said, then, does not critique the public intellectual’s discursive construction in Representations of the Intellectual, with negative consequences for women thinkers and writers who are rendered ‘other’, lesser intellectuals. Startlingly, he characterises Woolf’s argument in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ as that of ‘an intellectual representing the forgotten “weaker sex”, in a language perfectly suited for the job’—that is, a language sensitive to the patriarchal values ‘already set when a woman takes up her pen to write’69— without pursuing what this means for intellectual women. Said therefore notes but does not see the politics of representation within women’s critical discourse as having the power to extend the very narrative he is concerned with, apart from brief, imprecise gestures towards literary writing with the mention of Woolf and, elsewhere, two other novelists: Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. Said does, however, demonstrate an inherently mythopoeic cultural history when he revises two of his core assertions in Representations in his 2002 essay ‘The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals’. Whereas his earlier book prioritised the Benda-esque myth of disinterest thinkers unattached to a politics, in the later essay Said allows that the ‘difficulty of the tension for the individual writer and intellectual has been paradoxically that the realm of the political and public has expanded so much as to be virtually without borders.’70 A political stance is inevitable for the woman intellectual and certainly for the feminist intellectual, because she must contend with her own social and discursive position. She must also claim a voice within or in relation to (as this book’s chapter on Byatt’s ‘private’ intellectual considers) the public sphere and public exchange of ideas, which entails professional intellectual work to some extent. This supposed conflict between public and private spheres, and between different kinds of intellectual work, pervades the tradition of women’s writings on the

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

25

subject. Where male-focused theories of the intellectual are silent on the subject of gender, however, or where women appear occasionally as exceptions to a rule, the masculine paradigm is shown as having limitations and consequences. This chapter’s next section traces some components of the cultural history of the woman intellectual which further demonstrate intellectual history’s mythopoeia in important ways for women, not only resisting but dismantling the paradigmatic, gendered public intellectual’s conceptual precedence in ways that foreground Byatt’s literary project.

1.5  Describing and Creating the Woman Intellectual Because intellectual women, deploying their ‘critical sense’ in some kind of discursive output, stand against the patriarchal standard that denies them legitimacy (whether or not their work is overtly feminist in its agenda), their mere existence modifies the terms of that standard. Scholars have ‘recovered’ the narratives of the women writers, scholars, artists and teachers with particular intensity from the latter half of the twentieth century onwards, building up discourses of their absent-presence in otherwise masculine histories as, for example, early modern nuns or eighteenth-­ century bluestockings—the latter in, such as, Norma Clarke’s excellent The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (2004). I have suggested that the theories of the male public intellectual already considered suggested a more open discourse than their overarching narrative at first implies. As a result of this contradictory myth-building, patriarchal theories do not actually describe the intellectual as a singular cultural figure, but instead as a multiplicity of figures with several similarities. Although the figure is always gendered as either male or exceptional, these theories’ suggestions of limitations and multiplicity have already tested those limitations, allowing the most authoritative, patriarchal notions of the intellectual to differ in critical places and create space for rethinking them. And so Edward Said, for instance, used the more inclusive pronouns ‘he/she’ in his Representations (1994), pushing against the paradigm’s explicit gendering, but also stopping short of actually restructuring it. Writings on the woman intellectual in particular take the next necessary steps to achieve this, by suggesting the critical-literary strategies necessary to alter a cultural-­ historical system of representation as part of an ongoing mythopoeia.

26 

L. BIBBY

To describe intellectual women is, in an important sense, to create them discursively, and to contend with the terms of their definition as other and inferior in ways that produce numerous possible accounts of them. As Byatt acknowledges in On Histories and Stories (2001), the late twentieth-­ century context of poststructuralist cultural theory is vital here, both as explanation of and as strategy for fiction. Alongside Hayden White’s recognition of the ‘fictionality’ of ‘fact’, much literary theory Byatt references directly, such as by Michel Foucault, can be summarised as describing the tensions between texts and reality, histories and knowledges. These tensions are the drivers of her fiction’s mythopoeia. Histories are not material ‘pasts’, of course, but cultural products in several senses, constructs created in contexts, to be comprehensible to audiences, to be bought and sold, and above all narratives that are never ‘closed’ or completely authoritative. In this sense, the narratives they put forward are mythopoeic in their inventive relationship to ‘real’ history. Patricia Waugh approaches a key question, in her discussion of whether literary texts create knowledge or ‘objects’ in what Hayden White calls the ‘historical field’, by considering the role of context in determining the ‘ontological status of fictional objects’: All literary fiction has to construct a ‘context’ at the same time as it constructs a ‘text’, through entirely verbal processes. Descriptions of objects in fiction are simultaneously creations of that object. (Descriptions of objects in the context of the material world are determined by the existence of the object outside the description.)71

Here, Waugh does not imply that historical realities are created entirely through texts. Instead, she suggests that the fiction writer’s cultural work is comparable to that of the historian: both produce what Hayden White would term ‘Formist’ modes of historical ‘emplotment’ or narration by describing objects within the historical field and at the same time creating ‘reconstructions’ of them.72 Waugh does not explicitly reference White, but she describes a comparable process to emplotment in the ‘creation/ description’ paradox, arguing that this paradox characterises all fiction, and not only the postmodernist, self-aware metafictions to which her book’s title refers. The ‘creation/description’ phenomenon, she contends, ‘demonstrates the existence of multiple realities’;73 we may substitute ‘narratives’ for ‘realities’, here, especially as Waugh then adds that ‘the construction of contexts is also the construction of different universes of

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

27

discourse.’74 The creation/description paradox is a doubly powerful framework for reading the gendering of intellectual history, as it helps to explain how patriarchal theories of the intellectual acquire the status of cultural myth, strong enough to masquerade as ‘the way things are’. However, at the same time, the paradox goes some way towards explaining how women intellectuals can and do answer that myth with myths of their own. Citing sociologist Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974), Waugh writes that both the ‘historical world’ and works of art are perceived through ‘frames’, which in traditional and realist novels take the form of chapter boundaries and other textual markers of their status as fiction. Historical writings normally use the same textual markers, underlining their own dependence on narrative and its links to (or disjunctions from) reality. Frames within a given ‘reality’ are defined as the structures with which experience is organised: the divisions, beginnings and endings subjects live through, which are of course only recalled through discourse. As feminist historian Joan W. Scott writes, experience is made visible within historical narrative as a ‘chronology’ and ‘invents institutions to accommodate itself’.75 Waugh contends that ‘lived’ and textual frames correspond imaginatively, so that by distorting the chaptered and other structures familiar in realist novels, modernist texts and later metafictions describe and discursively ‘create’ a sense that reality is mediated, carefully organised and also changeable.76 Pastiche, parody and other reactions to the realist novel, then, while breaking powerfully with narrative convention, also accommodate breaks with other inadequate discourses and the realities they represent. Metafictions (a term that describes many of A. S. Byatt’s works) emerge in Waugh’s analysis not as a clear-cut category of fiction but as a set of characteristics that features across many textual forms. Because humanist notions of reality, truth and knowledge are intertwined, metafictions critique them all by setting up continuous transactions between literary and non-literary, including historical, discourses. Linked to this, Linda Hutcheon emphasises a ‘return to history’ in writing, or ‘a new desire to think historically’, as a paradoxical but key element of late twentieth-century postmodernist literary theory. The postmodern ‘concentration’ of knowledge facilitates textual sites at which knowledge can be ‘made new’.77 Hutcheon thus makes the crucial point that postmodernist art and literature are not mere reminders of knowledge’s transience, but rather play a part in stressing ‘the meaning-making function of human constructs’.78 The late twentieth-century ‘new desire to think

28 

L. BIBBY

historical’ brought with it an intense fascination with feminist history and nineteenth-century history, among others, which again figure repeatedly in Byatt’s fiction, suggesting a contemporary need to rewrite and so re-­ create certain histories, restoring what Karl Mannheim called ‘representational validity’79 to subjects and forms. In these interlinked historical narratives, intellectual women are most often figured, or figure themselves, as writer-intellectuals; writing, including fiction, gives them often their sole point of access to male-focused history, and also the chance to shape its discourses. The woman writer-intellectual appears in many guises in A. S. Byatt’s work and points strongly to the ideas and images discussed so far, as well as being the ‘type’ most often figured in historical narratives such as those of learned nuns, eighteenth-century bluestockings, and nineteenth-century ‘women of letters’. Ideas of the male public intellectual remain the default type so strongly that language surrounding women intellectuals still tends to be the language of questioning, and exceptionalism, albeit as a way of entering a more complex debate. As recently as 2009, for instance, feminist academic Mary Evans asked the question ‘Can Women Be Intellectuals?’ in her essay of that title. Evans states that although its answer is ‘an emphatic “Yes!”’,80 this is a disheartening reminder of the absence of a clear, unproblematic concept of critical participation in public spheres that can include women. It is also provocative in its suggestion of a broader impatience with false universalism and the notion of the male as ‘the definitive human actor’.81 Evans’s argument is that although women were accorded a place in intellectual history by what she calls the Enlightenment ‘settlement’ concerning gender, their contributions were excluded from dominant intellectual traditions ‘in both the sense of exclusion as particular human beings’ and exclusion as ‘the female/feminine’ outside ‘the universalism of the “male”’.82 Evans finds that although women feature prominently in the literature of the Enlightenment through to that of the nineteenth century in spite of hegemonic patriarchy, they serve as images and symbols of culture and progress. The backhanded variety of female ‘emancipation’ within patriarchal intellectual history that Evans critiques, holding women such as Mary Wollstonecraft up as culture’s exceptional treasures, is certainly ‘located within a paradigm which assumes the male gate-keeping of access to the public social world’.83 Women’s actual figuring here, however, includes a potentially mythopoeic modification of a key condition of intellectualism. Evans links intellectuals with sociological understandings of the public sphere, drawn specifically from the work of Jürgen Habermas,

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

29

and so also with the cultural activity including writing with which women are so strongly associated. Habermas defined the ‘public sphere’ as composed of ‘private people’, particularly and crucially the ‘bourgeois intellectuals’ whose work shapes public discourse.84 Nancy Fraser clarifies this for feminist purposes, stating that the public sphere in Habermas’s sense is ‘not an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theatre for debating and deliberating rather than buying or selling’.85 For women authors and public intellectuals, then, writing and publishing do not simply help to establish them as authors and intellectuals: they establish them within the same discourse as men, and give them some control over their figuring and status there. Indeed, having outlined the distinction between the public and private spheres as theorised by Habermas, Evans points out some of the crucial overlaps between public and private space made possible by literary writing: Part of the investment which we have made in the private sphere since the Enlightenment has been in the literary public sphere, for it has been through literature, especially the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century psychological novel, that we have deepened that interiority that is at the basis of bourgeois versions of the private and privacy.86

Historically, literary writing offered women authors a ‘private’ means to enter public life and discourse, the history of thought, and one great ‘tradition’ that was not closed to them: the English novel (Evans specifies the English context, although this is not exclusive).87 Clearly, however, although women authors influenced nineteenth-century canons, there are both possibilities and problems in the idea that their writing indicates its own purpose as ‘either a defence by women of a female ethic and a female world, or a claim by women to alteration in the world of men’.88 Evans thus suggests that women’s writing serves a discursive purpose capable of challenging their subordination in culture, either by defending feminine specificity in cultural production or by ‘alteration’ in patriarchal society: the other vital implication here is that this writing is inherently intellectual in its critical stance towards power, and inherently feminist because the power in question is patriarchal. The fragility of the nevertheless masculine cultural history I outlined earlier, that has sidelined women despite their productive and troubling presence in intellectual history, is addressed in feminist histories with reference to what Norma Clarke celebrated as the

30 

L. BIBBY

‘woman of letters’ in her study of that figure’s curious ‘disappearance’ from cultural history (2004). The idea of disappearance is not accurate, of course, but indicates the dominance of the myth of the ‘man of letters’. Using this framework as a prelude to my study of Byatt, it is possible to reconsider selected texts either written by intellectual women or concerned with them as figures within intellectual history which contribute notably to mythopoeia within that history—the process not of ‘recovering’ their history, but of interpreting mythographically the system of representation that denied women were there legitimately in the first place. My selections are not exhaustive or representative, but are intended to illustrate several of the ways in which women’s intellectual experiences have been narrated and so discursively ‘created’, and to speculate at the possible ‘meaning-making’ function of such writings in relation to the myth of the male public intellectual’s exclusive legitimacy. One early twentieth-­century example of a piece dedicated to women intellectuals, psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s essay ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (1929), is of interest because of its dependence on the gendered, masculine paradigm of the intellectual. Riviere narrates the ‘disorders’ to which professional intellectual women in the interwar period were thought to be prone, grounding her argument in the male-dominated discourse of psychoanalysis. The text refers to the familiar discourse of the intellectual that is male, by default, but also to patriarchal discourses of normative sexual development. Riviere’s women intellectual workers submit to these discourses at the cost of their full legitimacy, as though resistance would be ludicrous. The ‘particular type of intellectual woman’ she focuses on is different from the ‘overtly’ masculine type of [professional, intellectual] woman, who ‘in pronounced cases made no secret of her wish or claim to be a man.’89 Examples of this other, ‘particular’ type of woman experience subtler inner conflicts. They ‘seem to fulfil every criterion of complete feminine development’ as excellent wives and mothers, as well as attending to appropriate work outside the home. However, in the specific cases Riviere discusses, the women attempt to hide their intellectual and professional success with a ‘masquerade’ of exaggeratedly feminine behaviour.90 This masquerade is deemed ‘disordered’ because it undermines received discourses of authentic gender identity. The women examined had apparently worked hard to be able to exercise their intellectual, professional capacities because their society allowed them to as exceptions to a middle-class rule. Riviere implies that their anxiety resulted from a sense that knowledge and thought were not really for their gender. Men, in this time and place, have clear roles in

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

31

the family and professions, while the only unquestioned roles for women seem to be those that denote ‘complete feminine development’, sexually and domestically oriented. Other roles certainly were available to middle-­ class women, but they accepted opportunities, and defied cultural narratives of ‘public’ men and ‘private’ women, at their peril. Riviere’s glimpse into women’s role in twentieth-century intellectual life ultimately leaves the long-standing, patriarchal myth intact and indeed affirms it discursively by repeating it in narrative form. A different, explicitly literary and mythopoeic set of perspectives occurs in Virginia Woolf’s essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, some of the most valuable twentieth-century, cultural-historical narratives of intellectual women because they continually undermine and play with concepts of exclusion, marginalisation, the real and the possible. They are also, as I will argue, echoed in Byatt’s work including The Children’s Book. Woolf combines the subject of women’s status with a playful literary style that paradoxically defies narrative ‘emplotment’ and celebrates ‘Irony’ as defined by Hayden White, strategically distancing the text from the ‘world’ while still reconstructing that world textually. A Room of One’s Own is based on two papers Woolf read at two Cambridge women’s colleges in 1928, and it mimics a meandering lecture on the topic of ‘women and fiction’, its working title. The essay models a critical stance against a clear cultural context: the narrator asks to be called ‘Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please’,91 dismissing any clear individuality while pondering the material and economic conditions women require in order to write fiction. Meanwhile, she explores her fictionalised ‘Oxbridge’ surroundings in which women students subsist on meagre meals and are barred from the library unless ‘accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction’.92 The environment is rendered oddly fragile: not completely imaginary, but framed in imaginative terms in order to provide the specific narrative in which a woman intellectual may think clearly, unconcerned, for now, with gender hierarchy. This means that Woolf’s dissection of the context of women’s material and cultural exclusion from intellectual and artistic life (the two bound together in important ways for women intellectuals, as we have seen) takes the form of a series of stories, some accepted as ‘true’ (Jane Austen hiding her manuscripts from the sight of visitors and servants) and other ‘imagined’ (Shakespeare’s gifted, tragic, forgotten sister). The essay, then, enacts the role of fiction in piecing together or breaking apart the narrative forms of cultural histories, and underlining the power of narrative to make and

32 

L. BIBBY

unmake past—and future—realities. Even more notably, in Woolf’s 1938 essay Three Guineas, she produces another narrative enactment of a woman’s critical stance in relation to that most masculine and ‘worldly’ issue, war. This essay purports to be a woman’s written reply to a man’s letter which asked for her opinion on how best to prevent war. Because very few details are given as to the man’s original letter, the female voice is privileged, and is also informed, critical, discontented and aware of the differences between her life and that of her correspondent. He has been educated at public school and university and is normally to be found busy ‘writing letters, attending meetings, presiding over this and that, asking questions’;93 in this way, he is contrasted with the woman letter writer who is of the same social class as him and earns her own living despite having little formal education. She exploits this difference by exploring it in literary language as ‘a precipice, a gulf so deeply cut between us that for three years or more I have been sitting on my side of it wondering if it is any use to try to speak across it’.94 Her male correspondent may ask questions bolstered by education and prestige, but she asks questions from a position of awareness of this precise situation and hierarchy, asking, for example, ‘what patriotism means to an educated man and what duties it imposes upon him’ compared to ‘the educated man’s sister’.95 This awareness, of course, makes education, work and independence risky for women when those things are supplied by patriarchal institutions, and liable also to stifle their critical discourse. In Three Guineas, university education is associated not with women’s impending freedoms (a view problematised also in A Room of One’s Own), but instead with the view that ‘war is a profession, a source of happiness and excitement’ and ‘an outlet for manly qualities’.96 The female narrator worries that ‘if we help an educated man’s daughter go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war?’97 Woolf’s narrator suggests that an intellectual woman should maintain her integrity and critical stance towards patriarchal values by, like her, earning her own income (in an early, historiographically significant defence of women’s professionalism within a patriarchal economy) and by thinking and writing for an audience. The haunting problem with this, however, indicated by the essay’s gloomy ending, is the other limitations on women’s intellectualism. For all the letter-writer’s strident constructions of intellectual women, modelled by her awareness of the need to think outside patriarchal values, she closes with a timid apology to her correspondent ‘first for the length of this letter, second for the smallness of the contribution, and thirdly for writing at

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

33

all’.98 With heavy irony, Woolf’s narrator bows to her discursive inferiority to her correspondent—an inferiority only mitigated by education and financial independence to a certain point. She silences herself only after being present in this discourse, and after embodying a critical stance that renders her male peer almost a caricature of himself. Byatt’s claim that she thinks ‘in metaphors, not in propaganda’ is evocative of Woolf’s project in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, in which literary strategies including her fictionalised speaking persona are used as discursive tactics, and also of Woolf’s known reluctance to be seen as a political woman writer who would be derided as ‘a feminist’.99 In these two essays, that ‘horror’ is not of propaganda itself, however, but of limitations on Woolf’s representational validity as an intellectual100 as a result of associating herself only and explicitly with ‘women’s’ concerns. Woolf dramatises individual speaking personae grappling with the woman intellectual’s ‘double bind’: gaining the opportunity to speak out, but then having little ‘worldly’ weight attached to their opinion. By doing this, however, the essays highlight the irony of that position—a derided, but nonetheless powerfully critical, stance—and thus interrogate the conditions that make it so. Their explicitly literary structure serves a double purpose, making clear the status of this gendered narrative as a narrative. More than a double bind, feminist philosopher Michèle Le Dœuff refers to this as the ‘double loss’ of being both a woman and a philosopher and yet fully accepted as neither.101 Nevertheless, in feminist narrative forms, this ‘loss’ can be known, scrutinised and resisted. Julia Kristeva’s 1977 essay ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’ deserves closer attention in the twenty-first century, with its specific reference to artists as spokespeople and ‘talking heads’ to speak to power, for two reasons: its denial of the woman intellectual’s absence from culture and its denial of the need of a set ‘genealogy’ of intellectuals to support their legitimacy in modern times. Kristeva carries out mythopoeia in relation to dominant narratives of intellectualism, creating much-needed scope for women. Importantly, she answers male theorists’ ideas of proper intellectual function by associating the intellectual chiefly with literature, and through literature particularly, with marginal status within changing societies. She notes ‘these peculiar kinds of speeches and jouissance directed against the equalising Word’ and the ‘machinery of politics […] that excludes the specific histories of speech, dreams and jouissance’:

34 

L. BIBBY

It is the task of the intellectual, who has inherited those ‘unproductive’ elements of our modern technocratic society which used to be called the ‘humanities’, not just to produce this right to speak and behave in an individual way in our culture, but to assert its political value.102

Here is space for, and terms for describing, feminist ‘breakdowns’ of the myth of the man of letters as the dominant type. Kristeva challenges and even overturns Julien Benda’s definition of the intellectual by asserting that political engagement is integral to modern intellectual function, especially following twentieth-century conflicts and in already changing social contexts. The work of Mannheim, Gramsci and Shils is also undermined by Kristeva’s focus on the intellectual’s function rather than its origins; she deems social groupings, formal education and other institutions that historically have excluded all but a few exceptional women, to be less important than individual intellectuals’ relationship to the language of political dissidence. When it comes to their individual origins, Kristeva describes the effect of comfortable association with ‘restrictive and bankrupt social “formations”’103 in diluting and diminishing intellectual function. The public institutions many intellectuals rely on, then, in becoming educated, published and broadcast, come with obvious risk. Kristeva’s narrative of the intellectual distinguishes three ‘types’: ‘the rebel who attacks political power’, the ‘psychoanalyst’ and, most importantly for women, the writer who experiments with the limits of identity, producing texts where the law does not exist outside language. A playful language therefore gives rise to a law that is overturned, violated and pluralised, a law upheld only to allow a polyvalent, polylogical sense of play that sets the being of law ablaze in a peaceful, relaxing void.104

Association with restrictive institutions aside, literary cultural production is here figured as not only desirable but integral to the role of the ‘new’ intellectual discussed (whose newness is questionable, given the literary traditions associated with the woman of letters). Kristeva’s overtly literary style makes a conceptual ‘break’ with the kind of patriarchal theory that declares its own authority, to demonstrate her point regarding experimental writing as a stance against power: there will be a continual, questioning discourse, rather than a rigidly repetitive narrative of masculine authority. This allows authors like Kristeva to pose rhetorically powerful questions whose historical objects and references are not immediately clear,

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

35

regarding women’s capacity for dissidence, for example: ‘And sexual difference, women: isn’t that another form of dissidence?’ The answer is implicitly yes, but the context not obvious because traditional historical narratives supply no clear context of distinct female dissidence, in the literary sense that Patricia Waugh ascribed to the term ‘context’. That is to say, the context of a straightforward, ‘commonsense’ world that a history text would invoke105—here, that of paradigmatic male, dissident intellectuals— is absent, and its absence indicated as a space for new discourses of female intellectualism that is always already dissident. A woman, Kristeva specifies, is dissident in her gender in that she is associated less with an outward stance against ‘the consensual law of politics and society’, as a man would be, but with ‘the laws of reproduction’.106 A woman has capacity for dissidence therefore because she is ‘trapped within the frontiers of her body and even of her species, and consequently feels exiled both by the general clichés that make up a common consensus and by the very powers of generalisation intrinsic to language’.107 The ‘generalisation intrinsic to language’ here refers specifically to French grammar, which allows for no gender neutrality, but the pressure of gendered language and thus discourse remains, in English. Her definition of the intellectual most closely resembles Said’s individual utilising a ‘critical sense’, but instead of sidelining the woman author as he does, Kristeva attributes a specific and acute critical awareness because of the automatically different and dissident sexual meanings attached to their bodies. These meanings, questioned as they are here and in innumerable theoretical and literary writings, are already strong suggestions that women’s intellectual history stands beside, and not inferior to, men’s. At once echoing and querying Said, Kristeva states that ‘true dissidence today is perhaps simply what it has always been: thought’, thought being ‘an analytic position in the face of conceptual, subjective, sexual and linguistic identity’, characterising dissidence more openly than ever before as ‘becoming a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity’.108 A problem remains in the continuing association between Western intellectuals and institutionalised, professional work, alongside and even more so than their political dissidence, but I intend to argue that this is a contradictory model with which Byatt’s fiction contends as she depicts women intellectuals’ need for economic survival as well as intellectual legitimacy, in several contexts. The feminist intellectual, then, is a culturally troubling figure for a number of reasons, often fulfilling many of the patriarchal conditions of representational validity in terms of class, education and

36 

L. BIBBY

public profile, but also whose discourse interrogates her limited acceptance into her own cultural history. Furthermore, feminist women intellectuals’ tendency towards literary as well as non-literary writing allows for multiple modes for writing against that cultural history. Le Dœuff recognises this in her 1998 book The Sex of Knowing, suggesting that being a feminist ‘is also a way of integrating the fact of being a philosopher’, and describes a Saidian critical sense neatly as ‘a desire to judge by and for oneself, which may manifest itself in relation to different questions’.109 Le Dœuff narrates the encouraging ‘radical disorientation’ in culture which feminist critiques and activism have wrought.110 She addresses the politics of knowledge production in a manner familiar from feminist literary criticism, commenting on the ‘recovery’ of women’s writing such as by the seventeenth-century religious writer Gabrielle Suchon.111 This method is echoed again in Hilda L. Smith’s shorter study (2007). Smith, however, calls The Sex of Knowing ‘an angry book, often sounding more like 1960 than the 1990s’.112 Smith’s comments evoke further the paradigmatic separation, to use her phrase, of women’s intellectual history, in a dominant narrative in which feminists are more clearly associated with strident activism than with literary production and its discursive implications. The debate’s circularity, then, is dishearteningly difficult to break because of the precise ‘paradigmatic separation’ Smith referred to, seen as a facet of myth, mythopoeia and most importantly, literature.

1.6  Conclusion I have commented here firstly on several twentieth-century works of history and philosophy that feature what Hayden White would describe as a conservative mode of ideological implication, or one of the processes with which historical accounts assert a sense of their unity and authority, and which often obscure their own literary qualities.113 The feminist accounts of intellectuals, then considered, suggest the limitations of that process of ideological implication. Writers of those feminist accounts often accomplish radical ideological implication through literary means, exploiting non-literary texts’ literary structures to suggest the discursive overlap between forms, and to make explicit the idea that although all historical narratives are written and provisional, they can still claim some, if not total, authority. Because of these discursive processes, the modern paradigms of the intellectual are inherently unstable, and subject to literary and mythopoeic restructuring and extension. Feminist cultural history

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

37

testifies to women’s capacity, beginning with their critique of patriarchy, to alter their cultural and material circumstances. The dual projects of cultural-­historical and fictional discourse, the domains of many intellectuals, indeed accomplish both description and creation: of events, contexts, subjectivities and above all possibilities beside inadequate realities, beyond ‘“commonsense” contextual constructions’ of the world.114 The discrepancy between ‘commonsense’ contexts and the new ones instated by written discourse is also the space in which the creation, or re-creation, of a cultural figure framed so far only by patriarchy is possible. The feminist intellectual facilitates her own re-creation and supplies the discursive ‘material’ for this process to continue. Literary writing, then, is not only a facet of cultural history: it is the material of which cultural histories are made. The following chapters will explore the ways in which A. S. Byatt’s fiction exemplifies the idea that literary writing is also one of the keys to a mythography that elucidates women’s place in Western intellectual history.

Notes 1. Helen Morales, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths (London: Wildfire, 2020), location 229. 2. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Jonathan Cape (London: Routledge, 1997), 148. 3. Barthes, Mythologies, 154. 4. For a further detailed analysis of Ragnarok, see my chapter ‘Wartime Housewives and Vintage Women: A. S. Byatt’s Ragnarok: The End of the Gods and Reframing Popular Nostalgia’ in Claire O’Callaghan and Helen Davies (eds.) (2017) Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture: Femininity, Masculinity and Recession in Film, TV and Literature. London: I. B. Tauris. 5. The term ‘post-truth’ is most often used to describe political climates in which there is widespread suspicion of intellectuals and intellectualism as disloyal to a country and government, and a converse sympathy for palatable half-truths and untruths about authorities and institutions. Notoriously in 2017, Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to President Donald Trump, spoke of inaccurate figures of attendees at his inauguration as ‘alternative facts’ (Blake 2017). Michael A. Peters contextualises contemporary ‘post-truth’ attitudes using late twentieth-century political crises and movements in the United States: ‘Anti-intellectual fundamentalism held hands with McCathyism to pare back the forces of progressivism in

38 

L. BIBBY

American politics’, in response to which Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’ worked within progressive social and political movements (2018, 1). 6. Mary Beard, Women and Power: A Manifesto (London: Profile Books, 2017), location 278. 7. Morales, Antigone Rising, location 144. 8. Natalie Haynes, Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths (London: Picador, 2020), 4. 9. Laurence Coupe, Myth, 2nd edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 5–6. 10. Barthes, Mythologies, 154. 11. Barthes, Mythologies, 143. 12. Mariadele Boccardi, A.  S. Byatt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 13. 13. Boccardi, A. S. Byatt, 15. 14. David Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Medusa’s Ankles, by A.  S. Byatt. London: Chatto and Windus, 2021, x. 15. Mitchell, “Introduction,” xi. 16. Edward W.  Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage, 1994), 17. 17. Tredell, Conversations with Critics, 61. 18. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 17. 19. A. S. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2001), p. 4. 20. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale, 5. 21. Coupe, Myth, 4. 22. Coupe, Myth, 8. 23. Mary Eagleton, “Nice Work? Representations of the Intellectual Woman Worker,” Women’s History Review 14, no. 2 (2005): 204. 24. Dale Spender, Women of Ideas  – and What Men Have Done to Them (London: HarperCollins, 1982), 9. 25. Elaine Showater, “Laughing Medusa: Feminist Intellectuals at the Millennium,” Women: A Cultural Review 11, no. 1–2 (2000): 132. 26. Showalter, “Laughing Medusa,” 134. 27. Showalter, “Laughing Medusa,” 134. 28. Showalter, “Laughing Medusa,” 136. 29. Marina Warner, Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003), 454. 30. Warner, Signs and Wonders, 3. 31. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875. 32. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 876. 33. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 880. 34. A. S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2001), 10.

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

39

35. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 8. 36. Spiegel, Practicing History, 11. 37. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe (Reprint, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), x. 38. White, Metahistory, 2. 39. White, Metahistory, 2. 40. White, Metahistory, xii. 41. Coupe, Myth, 4. 42. White, Metahistory, 7. 43. White, Metahistory, 7. 44. Hilda L.  Smith, “Women Intellectuals and Intellectual History: Their Paradigmatic Separation,” Women’s History Review 16, no. 3 (2007): 354. 45. Helen Small, ed., The Public Intellectual (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 2. 46. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, translated from the French by Richard Aldington (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1928. Reprint, New York: Norton, 1969), 44. 47. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, translated from the German by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, 1936 (Reprint, London: Routledge, 1966), 10. 48. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 6. 49. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 7. 50. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 8. 51. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 9. 52. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 10–11. 53. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 138. 54. Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Nowell Smith and Quentin Hoare, 1971 (Reprint, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2007), 5. 55. Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” 7. 56. Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” 9. 57. Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972), 3. 58. Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers, 4. 59. William Wordsworth, “Preface,” in Lyrical Ballads, edited by Michael Mason (London and New York: Longman), 71. 60. Linda C. Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 28. 61. Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers, 5.

40 

L. BIBBY

62. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On the Constitution of the Church and State,” in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: On the Constitution of the Church and State, edited by John Colmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 193. 63. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 7. 64. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 3. 65. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 17. 66. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 3. 67. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 3. 68. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid- Victorian England (Reprint, London: Virago, 1989), 106. 69. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 25–26. 70. Edward W. Said, “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” in The Public Intellectual, edited by Helen Small (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 20. 71. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-­Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen and Co, 1984. Reprint, London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 90. 72. White, Metahistory, 13–15. 73. Waugh, Metafiction, 88–89. 74. Waugh, Metafiction, 90. 75. Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn, edited by Gabrielle M. Spiegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 202. 76. Waugh, Metafiction, 28–29. 77. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (Reprint, 1996. London: Routledge, 1988), 88. 78. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 89. 79. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 8. 80. Mary Evans, “Can Women be Intellectuals?” in Intellectuals and their Publics: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, edited by Christian Fleck, Andreas Hess and E. Stina Lyon (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 33. 81. Evans, “Can Women be Intellectuals?”, 29. 82. Evans, “Can Women be Intellectuals?”, 30–31. 83. Evans, “Can Women be Intellectuals?”, 32. 84. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated from the German by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989 (Reprint, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 30. 85. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 111. 86. Evans, “Can Women be Intellectuals?’, 32.

1  CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE INTELLECTUAL: FROM PATRIARCHAL… 

41

87. Evans, “Can Women be Intellectuals?’, 30. 88. Evans, “Can Women be Intellectuals?’, 32–33. 89. Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” in Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), 35. 90. Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” 36. 91. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Reprint, London: Vintage, 2001), 2. 92. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 5. 93. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 102. 94. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 102. 95. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 107. 96. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 106. 97. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 129. 98. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 242. 99. Hermione Lee, “Introduction: A Room of One’s Own,” in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 2001), viii. 100. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 8. 101. Michèle Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, translated from the French by Colin Gordon, 1989 (Reprint, London: Continuum, 2002), 27. 102. Julia Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident,” in The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, translated from the French by Seán Hand, 1986 (Reprint, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 294. 103. Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual,” 294. 104. Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual,” 295. 105. Waugh, Metafiction, 100. 106. Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual,” 296. 107. Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual,” 296. 108. Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual,” 298–299. 109. Michèle Le Dœff, The Sex of Knowing, translated from the French by Taylor and Francis Books, 1998 (Reprint, London: Routledge, 2003), 29. 110. Le Dœuff, The Sex of Knowing, 213. 111. Le Dœuff, The Sex of Knowing, 13. 112. Hilda L.  Smith, “Women Intellectuals and Intellectual History: Their Paradigmatic Separation,” Women’s History Review 16, no. 3 (2007): 358. 113. White, Metahistory, 29. 114. Waugh, Metafiction, 90.

CHAPTER 2

A. S. Byatt: Creating the Intellectual Woman

2.1   Introduction The public intellectual is certainly a powerful modern myth, and in written discourse, is subject to continuous mythopoeia. This figure denotes a set of narratives that claim to be explanatory, as Laurence Coupe describes this effect (building on Roland Barthes’s ideas about modern mythologies), and definitive. By examining some of these narratives in Chap. 1, I argued that intellectuals are viewed almost exclusively as public, masculine and authoritative precisely because of these qualities. I suggested that in relation to this masculine myth, women intellectuals are constructed as mere exceptions to a norm. However, the woman intellectual is key to a powerful mythopoeia, or the potential to point to new myths and a multiplicity of types of intellectuals. The theories of the intellectual discussed in the previous chapter function as descriptions of the intellectual in each given context, and each forms part of a multiplicity of perspectives rather than a closed-off, explanatory and linear set of ideas. The apparent tradition of ideas of who intellectuals are and what they do, evident in the influential analyses of Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said and others, exemplifies the authority claimed by written cultural histories but which they cannot support upon close scrutiny. Such scrutiny often takes place in the form of fiction narratives.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Bibby, A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_2

43

44 

L. BIBBY

The feminist qualities of relevant fictions, exemplified here by A. S. Byatt’s oeuvre, reframe the intellectual’s cultural histories. These are written and rewritten using a wider variety of discursive strategies than is evident in the most familiar histories of intellectual lives and work. The woman intellectual is the key to these other strategies; as a figure, she answers and embodies myth’s exploratory potential, and blurs the divisions between critical and creative work in ways that broaden notions of intellectual work itself. Laurence Coupe describes that exploratory potential using philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s work as follows: myth ‘carries with it a promise of another mode of experience entirely’, and represents a ‘horizon’ beyond any limiting ‘hierarchy’ of understanding.1 This is not a new idea in the broad cultural history of intellectuals, made up of numerous myths and narratives, but within this cultural history there is a persistent problem for women intellectuals: a discursive hierarchy which deems them so different from their male counterparts—in significance, status, legacy— that they barely deserve the definition, as suggested by their representation in various books. This gendering of the figure of the intellectual in most written narratives, then, appears to be inevitable. Until, that is, we look again at what ‘other’, mythopoeic narratives of intellectuals actually achieve at a discursive level. In order to claim authority, dominant descriptions of intellectuals call to mind similar descriptions and repress the complexities of their own cultural histories. The following study of A. S. Byatt’s fictions demonstrates that feminist literary strategies open up these complexities once more, mythopoeically expanding existing narratives of intellectuals and disturbing the hierarchies on which the dominant descriptions still depend. This chapter takes the Romantic genius as its first example of this process, and one in which Byatt’s fiction takes a telling and illuminating interest. The protagonists of her first novel The Shadow of the Sun (1964) are a novelist, a public man and a genius with roots in Romantic ideas of ‘genius’ and his teenage daughter, whose intellectual and artistic potential is ‘stopped off’ by her status in comparison to him—inevitably, indeed, but not completely. Both the girl and her father are reminders of the mythopoeic ways in which discourses of the intellectual actually work, for both men and women: specifically, the mythopoeic ways in which the notion of Romantic genius has always worked, at the borderline of critical and imaginative thinking, and always susceptible to feminist rethinking and reinvention. I contend here that A. S. Byatt uses her fiction to demonstrate that within historical narratives of Romantic, literary genius, redolent with exceptionalism,

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

45

artistry unhampered by feminine life, literary fame and legacy, gendered hierarchies of ‘genius’ are powerful, but fragile. To analyse why Byatt’s literary interventions here are so important, I return to Michel Foucault’s understanding of discourse, Coupe’s of mythopoeia, and Hayden White’s of historical knowledge. Byatt’s depictions of masculine ‘genius’ exert discursive dominance (and cultural prominence and status) in limited ways, particularly alongside feminine, imaginative intellectual activity. In addition to Coupe’s description of myth’s claim to be ‘explanatory’, Hayden White reminds us that historical discourse is inevitably figurative and dependent on language to construct ‘explanations’ of what can later be perceived as factual, complete histories. White’s essay ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’ contextualises the literary qualities of histories of the intellectual which use the seemingly ‘plain’ language of history and the social sciences: ‘ordinary language has its own forms of terminological determinism, represented by the figures of speech without which discourse itself is impossible.’2 Within White’s model of historical knowledge, which is not only constructed linguistically but determined linguistically, the location of authority in knowledge becomes doubtful, as does the intellectual’s determinedly patriarchal and public cultural ‘lineage’, with its notions that women thinkers are lesser exceptions and that feminist work is second-rate intellectual work. This chapter will observe this process in Byatt’s mythopoeic appropriations of ‘genius’ and their presuppositions (e.g. of public work and status, and masculine life) in The Shadow of the Sun (1964), her first collection of short stories Sugar and Other Stories (1987) and two later collections The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994) and Elementals (1998).

2.2  The British Intellectual and the Romantic Genius The Romantic ‘genius’ is a key point of reference for Byatt in her various, inventive depictions of intellectuals. This stands to reason, as she produced her first critical study Unruly Times (1970), on William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, while also writing The Shadow of the Sun. The Romantic genius has attained the status of myth or explanatory narrative, both in terms of its claim to authority and the limitations of that authority, as Christine Battersby’s work on the gendering of this myth shows (1989)—whatever it appears to be, the male, Romantic genius is one

46 

L. BIBBY

narrative among many. In Byatt’s writing as in that of Julien Benda (1928) and Edward Shils (1972), Romantic images and ideas proliferate and are reconsidered continually, so that myths become disguised as definitive traditions. The nature and significance of Byatt’s particular feminist and mythopoeic reiterations of the intellectual can be examined by way of her discursive querying of a particular tradition of the European, but most often British, intellectual. Women’s typical exclusion from the widely understood and widely referenced trope of the public intellectual, save for when they are figured as exceptions to the masculine norm, indicates that the trope is an unstable discourse as well as a myth. Michel Foucault (himself an example of an iconic European intellectual inseparable from the idea of his work) states in The Archaeology of Knowledge that, within any discourse made of statements, a reader should ‘accept as valid none of the unities that would normally present themselves’ and instead consider each ‘discontinuity, break, threshold, or limit’.3 For Foucault, as for Hayden White, ‘discourse’ denotes systems of language linked to concepts and institutions. Foucault’s methodology confirms this: he poses lists of questions on the status of various discourses. Certain ‘statements’ are associated with discourses because of those discourses’ perceived unities, but Foucault asks, ‘what are these unities?’4 Knowledges come into existence because of the grouping of statements, driven by discursive forces that are ‘permitted’ to act socially. Or, in Foucault’s words, ‘statements different in form, and dispersed in time, form a group if they refer to one and the same object.’5 However, the discursive unity of such ‘objects’ is always doubtful, because although a group of statements might constitute a claim to the ‘silent, self-enclosed truth’ of an object, they themselves ‘create’ this idea of truth. In an illuminating passage, Foucault gives his well-known example of madness as a discursive object, denoted by a group of statements when, in terms of the formation of madness as a discourse, mental illness was constituted by all that was said in the statements that named it, divided it up, described it, explained it, traced its developments, indicated its various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave it speech by articulating, in its name, discourses that were to be taken as its own.6

Objects only become the objects of discourses when the statements surrounding them allow it; in turn, then, discourses are delineated and enclosed. Still using the example of madness, Foucault names the medical

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

47

profession as the ‘major authority in society that delimited, designated, named and established madness as an object’ but which ‘was not alone in this: legal, religious and other cultural institutions, including those of art and literature, perpetuated the discourses surrounding the singular, unified object of madness.7 By ‘limiting’ discourses, authorities such as professions control them, but these authorities are nonetheless a messier multitude of forces than their monolithic appearances suggest. When Foucault refers here to his chosen ‘object’, madness and the institutions that are madness’ ‘delimiting authorities’, he draws on historical narratives that are themselves linguistic formations dependent on creative discourses; in doing so, however, he supplies theoretical tools for resisting such objects’ totalising power. A.  S. Byatt’s fiction treats the intellectual as just such a discursive ‘object’, to upset the intellectual’s conventional cultural histories of male thinkers as definitive and female as exceptional at their discursive bases and resist their terms, so as to offer important narrative solutions to the fictions’ intellectual women. Her writing supports Hayden White’s suggestion that although historians are concerned with ‘real’ events that ‘can be assigned to specific time-space locations, events which are (or were), in principle observable or perceivable’, ‘imaginative writers—poets, novelists, playwrights—are concerned with both these kinds of events and imagined, hypothetical, or invented ones.’8 Literary writers arguably have more decisive control than historians over the discourses shaping knowledge of the ‘real’ world, a situation both confirmed and problematised by the work of myth in shaping culture. In literature, myths and stories are not separate from knowledge, but part of its construction. Laurence Coupe notes that although the ancient greeks separated the idea of mythos, meaning fantasy, from logos, meaning rational argument (despite the original meaning of ‘myth’ being ‘speech’ or ‘word’), myth remained embedded in their culture.9 Notable attempts at demythologisation of culture occurred in Europe during the Enlightenment, with its celebration of reason, and also in the late twentieth century, such as when the poet Philip Larkin argued against art favouring culture’s ‘myth-kitty’ over ‘experience’ despite, again, the mythic imagery in his own work.10 A. S. Byatt’s fiction recognises and resists the ‘myth of mythlessness’ Coupe identifies,11 because this is what allows the gendered figure of the public intellectual to retain its discursive dominance. The public intellectual is an example of the point at which ‘myth might offer, for the duration of the narrative, not just a provisional paradigm but an approximation to totality’, as Coupe points out with

48 

L. BIBBY

reference to literary critic Kenneth Burke.12 Byatt’s work is engaged in a project of the intellectual’s remythologisation, emphasising the role of myth not only in representing old realities but in imagining new ones beyond the horizons of culture as we know it.

2.3   The Shadow of the Sun: The British Intellectual and the Romantic Genius Byatt’s debut novel The Shadow of the Sun indicates the figure of the intellectual that is the Foucauldian object of several related cultural histories. In these histories, the primacy of the male gender acts as I have already described, while indicating the discourse’s fragility. A key version of the intellectual-as-object is the image evoked in Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals: the European ideal of disinterested thinkers concerned with universal and spiritual matters apart from ‘the realism of the multitudes’ who, after the nineteenth century, debased their high callings by engaging in the game of political passions.13 Benda’s polemic relies on the terms of a certain historical narrative, of High Romanticism, which united ‘poets’ with ‘thinkers’ decisively in the figure of the writer-intellectual, and which privileged the Romantic intellectual dedicated to ‘eternal things’ and ‘the study of beauty’ as an ideal.14 Benda’s analysis is an ethics of the intellectual, in its condemnation of nationalism and its recognition of the conflicts to which nationalism had already led and would lead to in the twentieth century. However, in drawing a lineage between Romantic artists and thinkers and modern intellectuals, the account closes and limits itself as a historical narrative. Benda’s arguments are jarring to read because they depend on the discourse of the Romantic genius, that is hugely influential but the topic of vigorous debate, being based on a canon of artists and authors that is also a delimiting mechanism beyond which ‘other’ intellectuals proliferate. Jerome J. McGann argued in 1999 that ‘the phenomena associated with Romanticism and Romantic Poetry are volatile even to this day’ and ascribed different versions of Romanticism to different representatives of the accepted ‘canon’.15 McGann describes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry in particular as at times ‘unstable or manifestly beyond the conceptual controls he himself explicitly pursued in his poetic work’ (my emphasis),16 figuring Coleridge as both an object and a manipulator of discourses that are, in Foucault’s terms, ‘unstable’ by their nature. This is an example of the masculine writer-intellectual emerging as in

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

49

discourse as ‘different from but the same as’ past, influential definitions of himself. Coleridge’s idea of a ‘National Clerisy’, or body of learned men associated with the nation state (1830), links intellectuals with institutions such as the church makes them akin to Julien Benda’s ‘clerks’ (1928), and Antonio Gramsci’s ‘traditional intellectuals’: figures who bear little resemblance to modern public intellectuals apart from in terms of their gender. Coleridge’s contemporary and fellow subject of Byatt’s Unruly Times, William Wordsworth, theorised his own practice in Lyrical Ballads as an attempt to narrate ‘incidents and situations from common life’ ‘in a selection of language really used by men’ whilst treating events and language with ‘a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way’.17 In doing so, he figured himself as an artist exerting careful control over his written versions of the world, even though those versions were designed to represent ‘truths’. Crucially, also, by identifying ‘the Poet’ as a gifted man with ‘a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind’,18 he provided what was evidently a primary model for Edward Shils’s sociological study of the intellectual in his essay ‘The Intellectuals and the Powers: Some Perspectives for Comparative Analysis’ (1972). In this essay, Shils describes a model of the late twentieth-century intellectual who is almost identical to Wordsworth’s ‘Poet’, as I stated in Chap. 1. Shils’s conventional version of the Romantic genius is associated with numerous areas of knowledge including religion and art, and also with an ‘attachment to ultimate values’, ‘an unusual sensitivity to the sacred’ and, directly echoing Wordsworth, other unspecified ‘passions’ and ‘a need to externalise this quest in oral and written discourses, in poetic or plastic expression, in historical reminiscence or writing, in ritual performance and in acts of worship’.19 Shils’s words here demonstrate the extent of this Romantic figure’s overlap with concepts of the intellectual in the United Kingdom at the time when Byatt produced both fiction and non-fiction, The Shadow of the Sun and Unruly Times respectively, to which Romantic geniuses were so central. The Romantic poets’ historical and literary discourses were sources for Byatt’s writing but not fixed, unchanging ones by any means, even in terms of gender when there is no immediately clear place for women within them. In exploring constructions of the Romantic genius, the intellectual and gender, Byatt breaks important ground but she has not been alone in doing so. Elizabeth A. Fay indicates that many women writers working in the Romantic period (Fay distinguishes this idea of a period

50 

L. BIBBY

from those of ‘Romanticism’ as a tradition and ‘romanticism’ as a more generally used noun) were critical of High Romanticism represented by canonical male writers, who were thought to be inspired by female muses.20 This gendering of inspiration is theorised at length in Christine Battersby’s work, as I explain below. In Shils’s essay ‘British Intellectuals in the Mid-Twentieth Century’ (1972), he suggests that although intellectuals could be easily characterised in ways similar to Romantic writers, for instance in their singularity and maleness, they had broken with that tradition in vital ways. For example, Shils notes that after the Second World War the poet W. H. Auden quit Britain in favour of America in political protest.21 As objects of a sociological discourse, Shils’s intellectuals are still highly educated, creative and singular individuals, but they are also heirs to Julien Benda’s ‘Treason’ owing to their political ‘passions’. Shils’s essays do not claim to present an unbroken line of cultural ‘descent’ from the ‘clerks’ figured in Benda’s treatise to the public writer-intellectuals of modern times, but they nonetheless appeal to a set of discourses that is determinedly gendered. These discourses are certainly indicative of ‘real’ historical events and individuals—real in the sense, as Hayden White specified, that they can be traced and evidenced—but they are not closed and do not represent complete accounts of ‘what happened’, governing what can reasonably be expected to happen in the future. Christine Battersby writes of the ‘delimiting’ effects of these discourses and their illusions of closure in her book Gender and Genius (1989), firstly by describing her premature admiration, as a young student, of the Romantic valuation of artists for what was seen as their authenticity and originality—that is, the ‘sincerity’ of their artwork in its reflection of the individual mind that created it. She then documents her eventual awareness that the genius must always be a man: a hero, inhabiting a world of male action.22 Her response to this aesthetic and political problem as a young person is telling in view of the integral role of imaginative art in intellectual endeavour: she recounts that she ‘blanked out’ the troubling question of gender while reading novels that featured women characters recognisable to her. At the same time, she found many male characters ‘quite compelling’.23 Battersby’s account suggests ways in which the ‘Virility School of Creativity’, dating back to antiquity and characterised by its association of artistic and intellectual creation with active male sexuality, is a powerful influence on the works and self-images of artists and intellectuals up to modern times. Battersby draws particular attention to its prevalence in the mid-twentieth century,24

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

51

also the time of Edward Shils’s discussions of prestigious, British male writer-intellectuals. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar famously approach the ‘Virility School’ in the opening line of The Madwoman in the Attic, ‘Is the pen a metaphorical penis?’, framing their study in terms of the masculine metaphors (the components of the myth) that exclude women from constructing themselves as writers except as exceptions to the masculine ‘school’.25 However, Battersby goes on to stress the conflict between masculine and feminine forms of creation within aesthetic theories that the ‘Virility School’ could not conceal or close off. The Romantic idealisation of nature and natural creation led to the figuring of creativity as a sort of birth, involving labour and pain as well as beauty and triumph. Officially, however, this feminine image only applied to male artists, a situation persisting into the nineteenth century and coexisting, as Battersby points out, with the Romantic concept of the artistic mind as ‘androgynous’. The birth myth becomes a feminine metaphor once more in Ellen Moers’s Literary Women, in which Moers refers frequently to the ‘birth’ of women authors and literary traditions such as ‘Female Gothic’.26 She undertakes a useful discussion of the birth myth/metaphor and gender which positions Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as ‘a birth myth’ that departs (it seems, mythopoeically) from the images of birth that have been most ‘deeply rooted’ in culture: ‘the ecstasy, the sense of fulfilment, and the rush of nourishing love which sweep over the new mother’.27 These images are evidently closer to the masculine, Romantic birth myth than is Shelley’s literary imagery drawn from ‘revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread and flight surrounding birth and its consequence’, which, Moers argues, renders Shelley’s text ‘feminine’ in its closeness to birth’s painful realities.28 The patriarchal, idealised and sanitised version of the birth myth appears in William Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ in his Intimations of Immortality as a quintessentially Romantic set of images, culminating in ‘trailing clouds of glory’.29 This painless fantasy clashes with Stephanie Potter’s experiences in Byatt’s novel Still Life (1985), analysed in the following chapter, and is also countered by other versions of the myth produced by women artists of the Romantic period, including Mary Shelley. Importantly for both women and men, however, Steven Bruhm relates Romantic literary myths of the body, among which the capacity for birth should be counted, to the hopes and fears of revolution during that historical period, pointing out that for its great male artists, ‘the body holds a political strength that,

52 

L. BIBBY

rightly used, can destroy the old order’.30 However much women artists and intellectuals made use of the Romantic aesthetic historically, Christine Battersby reminds us that wherever women have exhibited the ‘passions’ and the active as well as the emotional creative capacities associated with the male genius, they have often been dismissed or downgraded in importance as ‘hysterical’ or ‘confessional’ (confessional implying too much of the ‘self’ within the art and less of the ideal, natural sublime).31 Women’s link with the physical capacity for birth meant that, where they chose artistic and intellectual work, they were conceptualised as masculine and often as ‘partly bisexual and partly homosexual women’.32 Of course, these categorisations were made possible and made negative by the discursive power of what Foucault described as ‘delimiting authorities’. The process can also be seen in Joan Riviere’s ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (1929), mentioned in the previous chapter, which employs psychoanalytic and sexological terms to diagnose intellectual women as sexually disordered. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun confronts the Romantic standard of genius and its assumptions about creative and intellectual work, and physical and artistic creation. Its three main characters—Henry Severell, Anna Severell and Oliver Canning—represent the internal disunities of this discourse of the intellectual in twentieth-century form. The symbolism of their names is apparent: ‘Severell’ evokes the plurality of identities and Henry and Anna vacillate between, whereas ‘Canning’ implies a more contained outlook on the part of Oliver, a much steadier character, bound up in his life’s work. Henry Severell is a famous novelist who overshadows the relationship between Anna, his daughter, and Oliver, an academic and critic of Henry’s work. Henry is constructed as a twentieth-century Romantic genius in his emotional and creative responses to the world around him (particularly the natural world, as when he embarks on long and dangerous walks for inspiration), the attraction he holds for other people as a ‘great’ man and artist and even in his appearance: sardonically, Byatt gives him ‘patriarchal good looks’ (94) while Henry’s wife Caroline comments on his beard’s resemblance to that of ‘God the Father’ (173), aligning him with classical and Romantic conceptions of the artist as an inflexibly male ‘creator’. It is also likely that he was written to resemble the nineteenth-century poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, one of the bases for Byatt’s fictitious Randolph Henry Ash in Possession (1990). However, Henry’s embodiment of the ‘genius’ myth causes him and his family constant problems. The novel documents the effects of his status on his daughter as she tries to escape the shadow of the title, Henry’s

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

53

shadow, and embark on a singular, and not exceptional, intellectual and artistic life of her own. Her aimless efforts to think clearly and bring about an unspecified, significant ‘event’ in her life bring her disastrously under the influence of Oliver Canning, a moralistic and diligent academic whose relationship to Henry is antagonistic, apparently because Henry is a literary writer whose intellectual activity is somehow ‘free’, whilst Oliver’s is bound by institutional work and based on a Leavisite ethic of literature’s ‘moral seriousness’. Already, revolutionary Romantic ideals are contained and their subversive functions closed down—but it will be Anna, not her father or her lover, that challenges this in the text. In Byatt’s new preface to the 1991 reissue of The Shadow of the Sun, she reminisces that the Leavisite literary ethic was key to her Cambridge English studies, an experience Anna Severell shares briefly, wherein literature was placed ‘at the centre of university studies and also of social morality’ (2). The book’s characters seem to value the doctrine of ‘moral seriousness’ in literature but not in life, but their rebellions do not make them free: family structures break down as Oliver neglects his wife Margaret to have an affair with young Anna, while Margaret turns to the ‘great man’ Henry for help and is disappointed. Henry and Anna represent the difficulties for both men and women, but women especially, in negotiating the Bloomian metaphor of literary paternity. I use the phrase as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar use it to describe that mythology of creativity ‘poured seminally from pen to page’ and which presents the author as ‘a solitary Father God’ and ‘the only creator of all things’.33 This mythic figure resembles Henry Severell, in the way his wife characterises him to herself. Henry is uncomfortable with the terms of this myth. As well as being physically large and awkward, where his wife sees him as magnificent in spite of his dirty shirt collar and social unreliability (9), he struggles with fulfilling his formidable image when faced with his staid and ‘intelligent reader’, Oliver. His interior monologue is anxious under Oliver’s pursuit: ‘He did not like to be researched into in the flesh. He wished he had not said so much about what he was doing’ (33). Anna’s situation as a young woman, however, is more perilous than her father’s. The literary paternity myth, unlike the birth myth, seems intractably masculine and impossible for women artists to appropriate for themselves. This is the barrier Anna encounters and it affects her to the point at which she cannot write at all and can barely participate in the life playing out around her, as though, without a clear discourse of her own, she is incapacitated. When Oliver warns her ‘you’ll not be anything

54 

L. BIBBY

if you just sit about and wait and breathe your father’s rarefied air. A ghost, a shadow; I’m not exaggerating’ (83), he may well not be exaggerating, in the context of Byatt’s reworked mythology. She needs a different myth. The Shadow of the Sun is a fictionalised feminist discourse on the mythology of genius and tradition underpinning Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Bloom’s critical prose on the problems, for ‘strong poets, major figures’, of originality and influence, is literary and evocative in itself, as when the critic sets out to consider poets ‘with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death’.34 Originality is not figured as a problem for Anna Severell in The Shadow of the Sun, but influence and tradition are. Before intellectual and artistic women can find a credible place for themselves within a tradition and among the ‘strong’ male peers considered, among others, by Harold Bloom, those women have to accept the legitimacy of ‘tradition’ and the discourses underpinning it. This is seldom a useful thing to do, as Anna seems to acknowledge when she rejects her public school education, feminine clothes and her father’s well-meant but clumsy overtures of friendship when she is a student at Cambridge. On the other hand, ‘influence’ is sometimes useful to her; as such, she allows Oliver Canning to tutor her and draw close to her, even though their relationship is emotionally damaging to themselves and others. In this text, answering a masculine tradition with a feminine one is not enough; Anna instead finds herself at the perilous ‘edge’ of traditions of all kinds, witnessing their myths fall apart. The discourse of the genius shows its fragility at the novel’s outset. Caroline Severell, Henry’s ‘sacrificially devoted wife’, worries about Henry’s neglect both of his work—the business of producing books for publication as opposed to aimless thinking and writing notes—and of social and family obligations. The ‘moods’, as Caroline describes them, which prompt him to wander out in nature rather than collect visiting friends from the train station (7), are brought down to the level of prosaic annoyance and away from the image and ideal of the artist seeking the sublime. The genius’ status as a Foucauldian object, around which discourse gathers, becomes doubtful. Appropriately but ironically, Henry has been writing a critical work, Analysis of the English Romantic Movement, for several years without making sufficient progress (8);35 the figure of the Romantic genius is so defunct, here, that he cannot even write about it in its conventional form. Caroline, too, is incapacitated by the myth’s uselessness. Her self-conscious wifeliness, her respect for Henry’s work and her willingness to take responsibility for most practical aspects of their

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

55

home life is linked to her dearly held sense of reverence for this image of him as a great artist with no worldly burdens, but an image is what it is. She understands this: his ‘patriarchal beard’ has the effect now of a deliberate flamboyance, of a pose, aesthetically entirely satisfactory, it has to be admitted, as the successful literary giant—if the idea of posing had not entailed the idea of fraud, which few people would have accused him of. He was successful, and he was generally considered to be one of the few living giants. (9)

This is another example of the way in which Henry as a ‘literary giant’, a living myth, is constructed less by himself than by those around him and their acceptance of those myths. Oliver and Margaret Canning both view him in this way, but for different reasons: whereas Margaret idolises Henry’s mind and hopes it will be a positive influence on her dour husband during their visit to the Severells (25), Oliver himself argues with Henry about ‘real’ and ‘urgent’ social problems. He is precisely the sort of ‘intelligent reader’ Henry fears: one who consumes art actively and questioningly (32–33). Oliver rails against the fascination his wife feels towards the personality of the artist and what she perceives to be his brilliance. For him, that brilliance leaves Henry divorced from the problems of the real world, an implicitly more ‘worthy’ focus for intellectual and literary work in line with Oliver’s ethic. Oliver is a ‘post-war graduate’ who views reading for entertainment rather than learning to be ‘positively morally wrong’ (22–24); he stands doggedly for the post-war English studies including Leavis’s arguments for certain ‘great’ authors in his The Great Tradition (1948). Margaret’s fascination with Henry, meanwhile, echoes the early nineteenth-century narrative of popular fascination with ‘literary lives’ as companions to Romantic literary works, aspects of English print culture described by Marilyn Butler.36 Butler’s account of the sense of alienation plaguing the Romantic poet within industrialised society applies to Henry in illuminating ways. She suggests that the pressure upon writers to write for publication and to entertain a large, literate audience led to some authors’ severe unease with ‘the public posture of confident integrity’ and ‘a syndrome of private neuroses’ affecting writers for two centuries afterwards.37 Henry is certainly humble and socially insecure, and feeds his work by seeking experiences of the sublime, in nature, but Byatt does more with the genius myth than simply query it; at times, the myth becomes Henry’s reality, underlining

56 

L. BIBBY

the text’s intention to expand this myth. In the first of the novel’s extended narratives of his walks, Henry dwells on the ‘attacks’ of ‘vision’ or ‘sight’ he has experienced since childhood, once painful and now a source of physical and artistic power. Instead of poetry, however, he writes novels, refusing to treat his visions as ‘raw material’ for poetry (58–60); poetry’s supposedly higher status therefore appeals to the myth of visionaries as detached individuals speaking a language sometimes inaccessible to the masses. Henry might thus be a real visionary but he is not at his gift’s complete mercy; he makes a considered choice of which form of discourse to produce. Byatt continually complicates the gendering of the discourses surrounding Henry’s artistry and intellect. He is constantly referred to as physically large and powerful, especially during his visions, and this apparently validates the conventional notion of male energy at the root of creativity. But again, Henry’s body is awkward, and he is uncomfortable with his image and his ‘great’ energy. He resembles the virile, godlike artist-­ creator valorised in Romantic and modernist art, as referred to by Battersby, but Battersby’s account outlines a way to unsettle this image, very similar to the way in which Byatt unsettles it in her novel. Henry is both a character within modern fiction and a producer of it, with considerable ability and capacity for ‘originality’ because of his visions, but he is nonetheless a working writer and family man (albeit a detached one) rather than the ‘god’ of the Romantic myth. As Battersby puts it, ‘as long as we retain Romantic notions of artistic creativity, we retain the author as a pseudo-­ god.’38 This reverence affects The Shadow of the Sun’s disappointed wives, Caroline and Margaret, and in Margaret’s extreme case her idolatry of Henry leads her to dependence on him following a nervous breakdown. Anna Severell is an intelligent but frustrated teenager who vaguely but disruptively desires to write something and to ‘think’ in a significant way. Partly and importantly owing to her compulsion towards creativity, she cannot be a dutiful student of English studies either to Oliver or at university, although she suffers from her inability to view herself as fully separate from her father’s fame and her rebellious compulsion, as a result, towards a dangerous passivity, as though she is unwilling to give culture, literary or otherwise, a chance to exclude her in the first place. She is expected to go to university despite having been expelled from boarding school for running away and she is thereby aligned, literally inescapably, with the same culture of institutionalised British intellectuals as her Cambridge graduate father. But neither father nor daughter is at ease within that culture. Henry later reflects on his time as ‘an insignificant undergraduate, large, timid,

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

57

not apparently bright’ who longed to be fashionable and witty as was expected (93); whilst at Cambridge, Anna writes perfunctory essays and shuns her teacher’s idealisation of ‘originality’ (seldom a woman’s concern) and ‘emotional instability and intellectual exhibitionism’ (143). Anna thus takes up an anti-Romantic stance while seeking an alternative path for herself. Her search is aimless, as is the novel’s plot, but this is appropriately another rejection of tradition, influence and the familiar literary forms of ‘great’ works. Both she and her father are seemingly unhappy with what Edward Shils identified as a resurgence of ‘the culture associated with the aristocracy and the gentry’ during the post-war period, accompanied by intellectual rebellion against bourgeois culture. Shils relates that young people (we can infer that these were predominantly young men) who could attend university preferred the ‘Oxbridge-Cambridge-London’ triangle39—the precise university culture to which Anna is directed by her mother’s feminine and frustrated social ambitions and Oliver Canning’s tuition. Her progression instead into an affair with Oliver is at first confusing to the reader and unfortunate in view of his spitefulness and neglect of his wife, but the decision is part of Anna’s rejection of what is, to her, a closed, elitist and patriarchal route to intellectual distinction represented by the ancient universities. Cambridge corresponds at least partially with an unproductive lifestyle and not with unfettered and satisfying intellectual, and more importantly creative, work with which Anna might resolve the problem of ‘influence’ by ‘great men’. The universities are potentially the world of, in words echoing Virginia Woolf’s descriptions in A Room of One’s Own (1929) in which she wrote women into their history, ‘sunlit polished tables on which stood old silver milk jugs’ where ‘few appeared to do any hard work and all lived graciously and spaciously’.40 Anna suffers, then, not from a lack of access to intellectual work but from a lack of artistic expression. Thoughtful and occasionally very industrious, she makes numerous attempts to experience moments of vision and insight akin to her father’s but which are uniquely hers, as when she awaits an approaching storm and admires light refracting through a glass of water, longing to ‘know’ its significance. These locations and objects are nothing to do with the natural ‘sublime’ as Henry pursues it, but are instead subtle and elusive, hardly visionary at all but still experiences accessible to Anna regardless of the limitations she feels. Like her father, however, she experiences creative impulses as critical insight and also associates her moments of insight with power, with the ‘warning and exhilarating

58 

L. BIBBY

hint that she could do anything, anything at all, and that here, to be caught if she could catch it, was the clue as to how to begin’ (237). This and her other interior monologues refer again to the unnamed ‘event’; because Anna’s life has no clear trajectory towards either work or relationships, she avoids definition in terms of any identity other than that of potential artist. But while her mind remains ‘free’, concerned with all new experiences, her bodily, creative experiences compromise that freedom. On that night of the storm, she does not learn the beautiful, refracting light’s ‘significance’—instead she is ‘passionately embraced’ by Oliver (133–138). She eventually sleeps with him in an effort to gain understanding, simply ‘to know’ (162), and by the time she feels she is on the verge of knowing how to pursue her ‘event’, she is pregnant. The myth of birth equalling creativity is thus exposed as a terribly limited and limiting myth; the prospect of birth becomes very real for Anna, as it does for Stephanie Potter in Byatt’s ‘Frederica’ novels.41 The potential woman artist, far from being liberated and made more powerful by sexuality and creativity like the virile male artist, is indeed here ‘trapped by her biology’, as Jane Campbell has written in an analysis that attributes Anna’s vacillation about her future to her gender.42 Nevertheless, the narrative does not leave Anna ‘trapped’ at all; she escapes a panicked engagement to a son of the gentry, Peter Hughes-Winterton, and the novel ends with her deciding alone how she will deal with the pregnancy and her future, and happy enough to do so, while in the temporary crossroads of York’s station hotel. Although Oliver is with her, her future with him is not set in stone by any contrivance of a ‘happily ever after’ or any narrative closure at all. Anna’s equilibrium is a measure of resolution, even though the twinned situations of her pregnancy and uncertain future continue. The prose here, with its adaptation of Romantic resonances, resembles the inner monologue of Ursula at the end of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), in which her engagement is broken off and her future is uncertain: she has ‘thought only of preparing her garments and of living quietly, peacefully, till the time when she should join him again and her history would be concluded for ever’.43 Nonetheless, she pushes away the thought of her married former lover and envisages, with explicit mythopoeia, ‘the earth’s new architecture’—a future that is only imagined and unclear but will still come to pass.44 This is the hopeful ‘horizon’ beyond available mythology, achieved through a woman’s intellectual and creative negotiation of her circumstances.

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

59

Christien Franken’s study of The Shadow of the Sun addresses Anna’s ‘failed’ visions and failure to create anything at least during the narrative’s course, and argues that Anna feels that she cannot be an artist like Henry.45 I would add to this that the novel’s incomplete conclusion of Anna’s artistic and intellectual fate depicts her as having evaded the misleading ‘shadow’ of visionary genius, the academic work in which she is uninterested and finally unexpected and unwanted maternity. She plans to give the child away and do something, perhaps write, which she accepts she has never really tried to do (297). The text’s open ending avoids one of the novel form’s in-built ‘limits’ with the line, ‘At that time, she was surprisingly content’ (298). Anna is therefore not ‘contained’ by any clear fate. Even within the historical context Byatt depicts in the novel for her women characters, which she has called in the 1991 edition’s preface ‘the English version of the world of Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique’ (viii), we can be confident that she avoided becoming a ‘sacrificially devoted wife’ in awe of her husband and of godlike artists. Her indifference to her unborn child is perhaps unsettling, but it is necessary during this moment of half-made decisions in her life because it allows her to exist, at least temporarily, outside any pre-set discourses that would govern her thoughts or her movements. The 1991 preface is partly a piece of autobiography and partly Byatt’s feminist critique of her own work. In the preface, Henry and the novel’s other male characters are implicated in the world of the feminine mystique, or Friedan’s ‘problem with no name’ affecting middle-class women as a consequence of their restricted domestic lives and stifled ambitions (1963). As Christine Battersby reminisces about her identification with the male heroes in the books she read while young, so Byatt recalls that as she produced her first novel, she considered Henry Severell her ‘secret self’, or the visionary she longed to be (x). Byatt suspected, as patriarchal intellectual history would have her believe and as Battersby has helped to establish, that ‘Female visionaries are poor mad exploited sibyls and pythonesses. Male ones are prophets and poets. Or so I thought. There was a feminine mystique but no tradition of female mysticism that wasn’t hopelessly self-abnegating’ (x). While liberal feminists such as Betty Friedan described the feminine mystique—the ‘problem that has no name’ as a new mythology encompassing many problems—as a focus for feminist resistance, the mythological fabric of Western society including this harmful female mysticism remained in place and supported the sexist assumptions underpinning patriarchy. Byatt gives no further details on this absent

60 

L. BIBBY

‘tradition’ of female mysticism, but The Shadow of the Sun gives us an impression of the real issues to which she sought narrative solutions. Gendered discourses of artistry and intellectualism impose limitations on both men and women, and so within the text, Byatt unsettles many of these limitations. Henry Severell’s physical and artistic powers are inhibited by his retiring and ineffectual personality, Peter Hughes-Winterton is caught in a mystique of his own when he imagines an idyllic marriage between himself and Anna (which she then releases him from) and finally Anna rejects patriarchal modes of success either in a socially advantageous marriage or university education to forge a path of her own. The choices offered by patriarchy constitute the harmful ‘sun’ of Byatt’s title which, as she has written, in fact has no shadow: ‘You have to be the sun or nothing’ (xiv). The ending of Anna’s personal story is an unusual ending to what is often a frustrating story to read. It has little in the way of a narrative arc and instead follows its main characters from one disappointment to the next and finally to irresolution that we hope will prove positive for Anna, although we will never know. The omniscient narration is rambling rather than controlling as it follows Anna’s thoughts closely, and thus its internal unity is deliberately compromised. She is at times excluded from dialogues that might supply a greater structure to the story surrounding her, and this affects her profoundly as a subject of that story. Byatt makes her aware of this exclusion within long streams of thought, as here when she reflects on her rushed engagement to Peter: Anna agreed [with Peter’s mother]. But she sensed that she herself was not liked; she could not respond openly, that was too demure, too quiet, agreed too much. She could never find an opening in the conversation where it would be possible to disagree, with that rush of frankness, earnestness, even laughter, which she sensed would be acceptable, and could not, to save herself, produce. (286)

Long, jagged sentences like this one suggest that the context of liberal feminism suggested by Byatt’s mention of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in her preface is only one aspect of Byatt’s feminist project. When Anna loses the very language and perspective she needs to assess and resist her situation, the narrative around her starts to lose its way. This confusion is necessary. Anna is unable to make clear ‘statements’ in the sense in which Foucault defines them—in basic terms, the statement is ‘the elementary unit of discourse’.46 She cannot claim the statement’s authority, but this is

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

61

a sort of newly ‘powerful passivity’ for her that soon allows her to avoid a mistaken marriage and motherhood that she does not desire. It also allows her to avoid confrontation with Lady Hughes-Winterton in the scene quoted above, and instead she quietly leaves the Hughes-Winterton home. The novel ends inconclusively in order to undermine conclusiveness, a form of authority, itself.

2.4   Sugar and Other Stories The narrative forms of the short stories in Byatt’s first collection Sugar and Other Stories vary significantly, as do Byatt’s experiments with the discursive structures underpinning the patriarchal, delimiting authorities acting on women’s intellectualism and artistry and defining these as either feminine and subdued, or as public, masculine and exceptional. Again, liberal feminist ideas in twentieth-century settings are the main contextual framework of these stories about women’s vision, their choices and the choices denied to them, but below this deceptively simple thematic level, they address the contingency of these and other European cultural-­ historical factors. Jane Campbell references the collection’s liberal-feminist themes in her feminist study of Byatt’s work, describing the ‘steady, compassionate gaze [the author] directs on the minutiae of women’s lives, in the depiction of the female imagination, and in the qualities of endurance, courage and hopefulness that her characters display in painful, often desperate situations’.47 These women characters are the constructed ‘objects’, as Foucault defined them, of real discourses that define them to their disadvantage, until those discourses reveal their potential for feminist mythopoeia. Campbell’s study of Sugar and Other Stories analyses the strong ‘feminist statements’ made within the stories48 with their depiction of the limitation of women’s creative potential, their discouragement within educational environments, their generational and personal histories, and the relation of art to reality or the ‘unreal’ to the ‘real’. One of these women characters’ major modes of resistance to ‘delimiting’ forms of authority is narration of their lives and those of others. The use of narration itself as a theme governs the various forms used in the volume, including the short ‘tales’ mimicking traditional myth and folk tales. The latter forms are also integral to Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and Elementals. These texts are integrally mythopoeic or, as Laurence Coupe defines the term, ‘tending to create or recreate certain narratives which human beings take to be crucial to their understanding of the world.49

62 

L. BIBBY

Byatt references directly the familiar forms and selected language of folktales and myth to demonstrate that their stories were never ‘closed’—on the contrary, they are modes of showing that other discourses are ‘open’ and always in question. In Sugar and Other Stories, when characters inhabit stories with both realistic and supernatural content, they also inhabit specific historical narratives imbued with patriarchal pressures determining how their lives should proceed and which they resist with differing degrees of success. My analysis covers the first story ‘Racine and the Tablecloth’ in detail, as well as ‘Rose-Coloured Teacups’ more briefly, because these two texts unsettle the patriarchal foundations of storytelling and knowledge-­ creation in ways that affect the lives of many ‘thinking’ women in important ways. ‘Racine and the Tablecloth’ depicts Emily Bray’s tormented post-war schooldays (the historical setting can be deduced easily although it is not specified) under the power of an autocratic teacher, Miss Crichton-Walker. The story relies on the highly intelligent Emily’s capacity for careful thought. She recalls the stories told by Miss Crichton-Walker to her pupils, juxtaposing these with the discourses of feminine docility with which the woman, a supposedly ‘grown-up, intelligent schoolmistress’, once organised life at the school (4). But whereas Miss Crichton-Walker exercises a cruelly restrictive power over Emily in school, based on her belief in educating women domestically rather than academically, Emily is capable of thriving within the institutionally intellectual environment of essays, examinations and, crucially, beyond this environment. We are told she is a ‘simply intellectual creature’ (4) and therein is her mode of survival when Miss Crichton-Walker’s cruelty and condemnation of Emily as ‘depraved’ (9) (for which we may read, disordered) drives Emily to a nervous breakdown. Byatt’s narrator is an ‘I’ who is not, however, a symbol of authority and control but instead a George Eliot-esque, conversational, sympathetic and omniscient observer who, with reference to a disastrous school social occasion, states that ‘I am not going to describe the dance’ (15). Other forms of authority in the story are not immutable, although they are damaging. The narrator recounts Emily’s process of looking back through what Foucault referred to evocatively as ‘a thick layer of events’ imposed on the past through the narratives commonly imposed on history.50 The difference here is that Emily’s ‘thick layer of events’ does not constitute a patriarchal version of the past but one that imaginatively constructs one repressed girl’s efforts to succeed intellectually in spite of others’ negative judgements.

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

63

The following striking sentence shows the narrator underlining one form of this repression: ‘As I write, I can feel you judging her adversely, thinking, what a to-do, or even, smug little bitch’ (20). Miss Crichton-­ Walker represents pressure on intellectual women towards self-effacing femininity in the post-war British education system even within educational institutions where girls’ intellectual work is otherwise facilitated. The teacher is all the more dangerous because she is also a woman and her malign influence is all the more damaging because it is driven and sanctioned by a patriarchal institution that purports to support girls. Emily inhabits the ‘British version of the world of the feminine mystique’ that Byatt identified as a context of The Shadow of the Sun in her 1991 preface to that novel (viii). Miss Crichton-Walker is a school-level, British version of the ‘sex-directed educators’ described in Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a teacher who, to retain women in education even when they are not encouraged to pursue careers in the same numbers as men, ‘moved in to teach [women] adjustment within the world of home and children’.51 Emily is immune to this pressure towards domesticity—suggesting a momentary powerlessness in the male genius myth limiting her opportunities—and, later in the story, she is strong enough to succeed academically in spite of terrible emotional illness and physical exhaustion. This pressure towards decorative, domestic femininity resonates more deeply than education curricula, as we see in Christine Battersby’s reading of Kant’s philosophy of the relationship of ‘the female sex’ to male ‘genius’: ‘A man has his own goals and purposes; but a woman has only nature’s purposes. Kant’s female sex is an aesthetically pleasing sex, but not a fully human sex.’52 Women seem to be irredeemably excluded from Romantic philosophies of genius and, through them, mid-twentieth-century ideas of who should have access to scholarship. Nonetheless, Emily resists these cruelties because she views them critically and decides that her teacher represents a different, inferior authority to her family, including her ‘briefly ambitious’, Cambridge-graduate mother (11). What Battersby calls the eighteenth-century ideal of women’s ‘mental beauty’, cultivated by proper, feminine education, is a sham. Emily Bray detects her school’s ‘traditional pattern’ in which her teacher ‘had her traditional place’, and re-inscribes this pattern for herself by enjoying the mocking tales told by her fellow schoolgirls about Miss Crichton-Walker’s rumoured, secret night-time activities (12–13). Narration thus cuts through a patriarchal reality that proves to be unstable. To use Foucault’s words, Miss Crichton-Walker loses her ‘special quality’ and ‘prestige’ as the enforcer of a discourse of

64 

L. BIBBY

femininity when her girl pupils withdraw their docile acceptance of her authority.53 Emily looks to literature not for a replacement authority but for the satisfaction of her intellectual interests. Her love for the works of Racine is vividly imagined and spurs her on to academic achievement regardless of prevailing views of girls’ education and its purposes: ‘Girls went to university but were not excessively, not even much praised for this’ (20). Emily is dedicated despite being hated by her schoolmates and her teacher, and she takes the risks of being a barely defined, intellectually successful type of woman (she has no role-models except for her thwarted mother), preparing for A-level examinations ‘with a desperate chastity of effort, as a nun might prepare for her vows’ but with a nonetheless ‘pugnacious tilt to her chin’ (20). The exact reasons for other women’s hatred of her are not specified but it is possible the feelings are related to the hatred Battersby reads in essayist William Duff’s anger towards Mary Wollstonecraft who, as a woman of the marked ‘mental energy’ only prized in men, was a ‘freak of nature; a kind of mental hermaphrodite’.54 Clear conceptual limits have stood in the way of women’s intellectual and creative efforts but are inevitably illusory. Byatt’s knowledge of this sexist philosophical ‘tradition’ is evident in ‘Racine and the Tablecloth’. For example, Battersby quotes another eighteenth-century essayist, Joseph Addison, as he recommends needlework as the proper mode in which women can express their ‘fine Genius’;55 in Byatt’s story, Miss Crichton-Walker argues that there is ‘as much lasting value, as much pleasure for others, in a well-made tablecloth as in a well-written book’ to discourage girls from thinking that there is any ‘exceptional merit’ in academic achievement (21). Emily’s breakdown during her examinations renders her ‘double’, with her ‘feeling part’ defeated whilst her indomitable ‘thinking part’ survives and allows her to complete the necessary work successfully. The ‘feeling part’ would certainly have been prized by the Enlightenment writers cited by Battersby, whereas the ‘thinking part’ would have been seen as masculine and a distortion of a ‘beautiful’ female mind. Miss Crichton-Walker attributes Emily’s illness to her ‘overambitious’ efforts (25–26). However, it is far more likely that Byatt has Emily survive and thrive because her intellectual and creative work (in her engagement with literature) allows her to transcend the school’s patriarchal, institutional trap. Like Gillian Perholt in The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Emily is a powerfully intellectual woman able to work within an institutional culture and avoid its pitfalls while also showing the discursive limits it imposes on women—in

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

65

this case, the patriarchal ‘law’ laid down by Miss Crichton-Walker—to be cruel and oppressive, and surmountable, but unfortunately only to a certain extent, as yet. There is nothing intrinsically inferior or flawed about Emily’s mind but many things wrong with the culture she and the girls inhabit. Discourses of femininity can be challenged but they are slow to actually change. She leaves school, gains a university education and eventually clashes with the schoolteachers of one of her ‘two clever daughters’, who wish to educate Sarah ‘for life, for forming personal relations, for running a home, finding her place in society, understanding her responsibilities’ rather than for the ‘simply intellectual’ success of which she is capable’ (30–31). Institutional limits remain but, fortunately, Sarah is capable of extending her vision beyond them into the ‘light’, or mythic, encouraging horizon, of her own, as yet unfinished, story (32). The protagonist of ‘Rose-Coloured Teacups’, Veronica, is likely to be of Emily Bray’s generation and, like her, is the daughter of a university-­ educated mother and herself a mother to a ‘clever’ girl. The story sees Veronica imagining a college tea party held by her mother when she was a young student during the 1920s. She ‘sees’ this scene ‘very clearly’ (30), reminding us of the form of Romantic ‘vision’ or ‘sight’ Byatt imbues in all her ‘thinking’ women—that is, keen imagination combined with intellectual ability. The rose-coloured teacups of the story’s title were a gift from Veronica’s mother which she rejected, and now she is infuriated by her own daughter’s lack of respect for an old sewing machine which is also an heirloom, representing generations of female, creative life (although the sewing machine signals the persistent problem of expected, feminine forms of creative behaviour, with its needlework function). Veronica’s imagined memories become a way of responding to troubling histories, specifically her guilt towards her mother, sparked by seeing her daughter ‘assert her place in it, her here and now’ (37). She answers her lack of a sense of a positive and continuous history made up of three generations of intellectual women by supplying narratives to fill the gap, whether they correspond with a hurtful ‘truth’ or not. This story stresses the fragile and constructed nature of traditions. Assertions of counterpoint ‘female’ traditions do much to reassert women’s place within historical narrative but are sometimes as inadequate and unwelcome as the rose-coloured teacups in their attempts to link several generations of different women using the same ‘images’ of the past. Traditions are always, perhaps, patriarchal in the continuity they presume. However, there is also a feminist, mythopoeic aspect of domesticity wherever art is linked to domestic objects, as Mary

66 

L. BIBBY

Eagleton asserts with reference to Byatt’s short story ‘Art Work’ in The Matisse Stories (1993), to be discussed in more detail in Chap. 5 of this book. In ‘Art Work’, Sheba Brown works as a cleaner in the home of a middle-class family of writers and artists, and in her spare time creates sculptures out of domestic items. Her claim to being ‘an artist’, however, is made problematic by pre-set, patriarchal aesthetic standards; the domestic objects themselves thus become not problems, but assets.56

2.5   The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye For Byatt’s intellectual women, reading and writing leads mythopoeically towards radically changed, even unprecedented futures. Myths and short tales, and their links to gender and intellectual work, are the formal and conceptual thread uniting the ‘Five Fairy Stories’ in Byatt’s explicitly mythopoeic text The Djinn and the Nightingale’s Eye. Four short tales that are ‘fairy stories’ in a very traditional sense, set in ‘other’ times and places and featuring fantastical events, precede the book’s main narrative featuring Dr Gillian Perholt, a professional narratologist. My analysis focuses mainly on Gillian’s story ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, reflecting its centrality in the entire text and its negotiation of the issues of form and narrative shaping the other stories; indeed, the reader must largely interpret those others using the content of Gillian’s tale. Happy to have been abandoned by her husband and freed from her dismally ‘feminine’ life as his ignored wife, Gillian comes to inhabit her own wonder tale when she releases a genie from a bottle and discovers the power of creating as well as interpreting narratives. What she requires from art, not only as a woman but as an intellectual, is made clear: while attending an international conference in Ankara on ‘Stories of Women’s Lives’, she also departs from a culture that disadvantages women of her age and situation, and gains the opportunity to answer the discourses beneath these attitudes with the narratives she studies and creates. In the narrator’s words, ‘although she was now redundant as a woman, being neither wife, mother nor mistress, she was by no means redundant as a narratologist but on the contrary, in demand everywhere’ (103). In Gillian’s story, the language of European fairy tales is appropriate and appealing because it positions her as a heroine when she is considered ‘redundant’ by many in her society, even though, as the narrator of her ‘tale’ declares, she exists in a momentous ‘time’ presented as mythical even as we know it bears a powerful resemblance to contemporary time:

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

67

For this was a time when women were privileged, when female narratologists had skills greatly revered, when there were pythonesses, abbesses and sibyls in the world of narratology, who revealed mysteries and kept watch at the boundaries of correctness. (103)

There is a victory for Byatt in this paragraph over the problems of women’s representation in relation to genius, discussed in her 1991 preface to The Shadow of the Sun: where once she despaired that, in myth, ‘Female visionaries are poor mad exploited sibyls and pythonesses’ (x), in ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ she is able to overturn that exact imagery and make it hopeful, mischievous and true in the sense that intellectual women certainly often are highly successful academics (even though they are only a fraction of the ‘thinking’ women in existence). Gillian’s story is the last in this volume but central to its project of experimentation with myth and fairy story structures. Thelma J. Shinn describes myths both ancient and new as forms used to gain understanding over ‘what happens’ by allowing it to ‘happen again from the beginning’ in narrative terms,57 and accordingly, in the first four stories in The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Byatt creates new myths in order to assert the workings of myth itself before making an inventive link between realist and fantastical fiction in Gillian’s story. This is a major example of Byatt’s use of what Andrzej Ga ̨siorek noted as the ‘interanimation of forms, styles and techniques’ and recognition of ‘language’s constitutive role’—fiction not only adapting previous mythic representations of reality, but creating new ones.58 In ‘The Glass Coffin’ and ‘Gode’s Story’, the narrator tells the reader repeatedly that certain objects and eventualities are ‘always so’; for instance in ‘The Glass Coffin’ when the tailor sets out to release the sleeping woman, believing that her awakening will be a ‘true adventure’ and her hand in marriage will be his reward (14). It seems that the tale will be organised around these archetypes, but alternative possibilities are always available. The tailor’s awareness of the plot conventions he experiences leads to his empowerment as well as that of the woman. Firstly he doubts his place in the story, despite loving and desiring the lady who likewise desires him to be her rescuer. He offers her the opportunity to remove herself from the ‘happily ever after’ narrative, telling her ‘when, and if, you are restored to your rightful place, and your home lands and people are again your own, I trust you will feel free to reconsider the matter, and remain, if you will, alone and unwed’ (20–21). The tailor’s task is to remove the enchantment from the lady’s castle and, having done this, he

68 

L. BIBBY

and the lady choose freely to marry each other. Thelma J. Shinn describes the act of rewriting mythic narratives in order to present alternatives to their conventional events as a movement towards transforming culture outside literature. Citing Rosemary Jackson, Shinn suggests that authors attempt to, as Jackson has claimed, remove boundaries between the imaginary and the symbolic in order to enact real change. This is possible because in the sort of ‘fantastic literature’ written by a woman we are now reading, ‘the imaginary is the symbolic’ and although imagined alternatives to reality ‘depend upon the extension and expansion of already accepted possibilities’, they contemplate vital new forms of knowledge.59 A young woman’s need to make choices, and the power of choices to reshape discourses, are the themes directing ‘The Story of the Eldest Princess’. The Princess of the title, sent on a ‘Quest’, is given an active role in her own story but one still characteristic of fairy tales—Byatt’s innovation lies in the ‘extension and expansion’ of possibilities she allows the Princess. The Princess is critically aware, as was the tailor earlier, of the discourses underpinning her situation, because she is ‘by nature a reading, not a travelling princess’ (47). Because she understands the perils she faces, she is partly representative of intellectual women who have understood the workings of patriarchal culture intricately and have therefore been able to thoughtfully negotiate that culture. Guided by her knowledge, the Princess avoids the horror of marriage to a Bluebeard-like, singing woodcutter (60) and meets a wise old woman who confirms to her that she is a ‘born storyteller’ as well as a thinking woman, and able to direct her own fate. Moreover, the old woman, having no story of her own, knows herself to be ‘free, as old women are free, who don’t have to worry about princes or kingdoms’ (p. 66). Having no story is not always preferable to making one’s own story, however, as the old woman’s telling of ‘The brief story of the third Princess’ confirms: the eldest Princess’ youngest sister, having no quest and no story of her own, suffers from the sense of ‘the empty space around her’ (69). The space is empty because life itself depends on narrative. Stories have positive functions as life-affirming forms of history, as in the next tale ‘Dragons’ Breath’ wherein a family of three children survive the destruction of their village by a dragon by telling tales based on their memories and drawn from the ‘riddling hints of the true relations between peace and beauty and terror’ (92). Susan Sellers compares the Princesses and their personal stories, or lack of them, with Dr Gillian Perholt’s predicament as ‘a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy’ (95). Having no story is as

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

69

unsatisfactory to these women as being contained by patriarchal narratives of femininity that hinder them as human subjects.60 Gillian enjoys a sense of freedom, expressed in John Milton’s phrase ‘floating redundant’ (100) when her husband leaves her in favour of a younger woman and she is thereby withdrawn from one story of her life as a wife and left to choose another. She is not the passive and endangered heroine of a conventional folktale but rather ‘a narratologist, a being of secondary order, whose days were spent hunched in great libraries scrying, interpreting, decoding the fairy tales of childhood’ (96) and at the same time ‘an unprecedented being, a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision, her own store of money, her own life and field of power’ (105). Here, mythic language (‘scrying’) is placed within a list of real and recognisable markers of a privileged life in order to amplify the extraordinary nature of a modern intellectual and professional woman’s life. By placing Dr Gillian Perholt within a fantastical narrative, Byatt suggests the potential of narratives to engender new ‘truths’. Gillian’s intellectual work means that she is not an artistic creator in the sense of identifying herself as an artist primarily, but as I explained in the previous chapter, intellectual women tend to be ‘creators’ of narratives partly to reclaim the ‘birth’ myth that Romanticism appropriated for men. The ‘secondary order’ of academic study Gillian inhabits makes her powerful enough to alter her destiny by re-creating stories. At the very apt ‘Stories of Women’s Lives’ conference, she retells the story of ‘Patient Griselda’ as told by Chaucer. She questions thoroughly its patriarchal terms and concludes that ‘the stories of women’s lives in fiction are the stories of stopped energies’ (121). When she releases the djinn or genie, she describes herself cautiously as ‘an independent woman, a scholar’, apparently wary of adopting a lesser role in her own tale. The djinn helps her to dismiss old, new and archetypal stories that do not offer what she requires to retain her powerful persona, giving her what she needs from art as a ‘thinking’ woman: a greater capacity for re-telling inadequate stories instead of solely analysing them. ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ ends with her selecting a glass paperweight in a New York shop and regarding the glass as ‘a solid metaphor’ and ‘a medium for seeing and a thing seen at once. It is what art is’ (274–275). The glass is transparent rather than a reflective mirror, the mirror being central to notions of creativity originating in the middle ages which saw art as ‘reflecting’ other, more revered art, described by Battersby in her chapter titled ‘The Clouded Mirror’.61 This mirror metaphor is reminiscent of that of ‘the queen’s looking glass’ in Gilbert and Gubar’s

70 

L. BIBBY

The Madwoman in the Attic, the harmfully inverted, feminine version of the patriarchal ‘mirror up to the world’ as a metaphor for nineteenth-­ century realist literature. This image becomes the ‘speculum’ in Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), to be discussed later in this book. Byatt recognises that this metaphor would restrict women of ‘genius’ to reflecting the brilliance of male predecessors and also limit their vision. With glass, even as prosaic as Anna Severell’s prismatic water glass in The Shadow of the Sun, there is unlimited vision, and potentially no reflection. Glass returns as a medium for artistic vision and a metaphor for women’s uninhibited critical and creative thought in ‘Cold’, the central story in Byatt’s collection Elementals, which also rejects demarcations between literary forms to create new feminist myths.

2.6   Elementals In Elementals and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Byatt’s tales conduct a dialogue with conventional images from folk or fairy tales that demonstrates the provisional nature of their patriarchal features, and the mythopoeic nature of feminist art in general. When intertwined with forms of realist discourse that also paradoxically resist realism, her short tales, in their adaptation of mythic narratives, emphasise the imaginative and thus discursively productive elements of all narratives. In Elementals, Byatt explores the historical and cultural forces that have ‘stopped off’ women’s intellectual and artistic energies, as mythic horizons to be overcome. Both the intellectual men and women in these stories seek environments in which both their bodies and minds will thrive, as Jane Campbell observes,62 and the environments they seek must allow them to inhabit narratives and relate to images that will not harm or limit them as conventional patriarchal ones would. Their efforts to be happy and successful as ‘thinking’ people do not always pay off immediately, as in the first story ‘Crocodile Tears’ in which Patricia Nimmo attempts to disappear after her husband’s sudden death in an art gallery. This event releases her (like Gillian Perholt’s abandonment by her husband does for her) from the narrative of marriage, family life and her successful but dull business career into untold possibilities. However, this cataclysmic personal tragedy and sudden ‘empty space’ in her life is as disorienting for Patricia as it was for the third Princess in Djinn, and she literally flees into a myth that has always fascinated her—total disappearance—but one that is unfeasible in real life. Her life/narrative with her

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

71

husband Tony is harmonious before his death: they look at art together and rarely disagree on their interpretations (5), but the story’s claim to realism is compromised, productively, from the beginning. The narrator discusses the ways ‘Patches of time’ are organised in memory and (un) consciousness: ‘Patches of time is a mild metaphor, mixing time and space, mildly appropriate in art galleries, where time is difficult to deal with’ (3). Time might seem ‘unreal’ to Patricia in the art gallery but Tony’s fatal heart attack cannot be adequately placed within the ‘new’ time and new narrative Patricia creates when she flees the country, leaving his body in the gallery. She attempts to reassure herself about her actions en route to Nîmes in France by trying to make her fantasy of escape match her reality, recalling ‘early versions of the imagined escape’, including conventional images of the ‘young bride’ and the ‘successful woman’—however, this leaves her lost: ‘She did not know where she was going’ (12). Her keen intellect appears suppressed within her new narrative as a result of her fantasies being so oppressive and so inadequate. For much of this story, very little sense is given of Patricia’s inner life; the narrator remains detached as the fantasy takes over and Patricia tells herself she is ‘a girl, a girl on her first solitary trip abroad’ when we know, as she does, that she is not. To test the limits of the ‘unreal’ is dangerous because the real is always present. Her outward engagement with various stories and histories through books and historical artefacts is the only indication of the intellectual power and vision that will redeem her by drawing her towards the ‘real’ story of her life in which she will reconnect with her abandoned family. Her life in exile is boring, frightening and repetitive and brings her to attempt suicide, death seeming like the simplest available escape from her derailed life. She is surrounded by art and history, drinking in the Bar Hemingway surrounded by photos of the novelist and Picasso whilst reading the newspaper and finding no ‘foreign news’ and therefore nothing to connect her own life with (25). She then meets a fellow lone traveller who has also tried to install himself within a dangerously false narrative of lies about his life. He confesses to Patricia and returns to England with her, thus ending her harmful story. The protagonist of ‘A Lamia in the Cévannes’, Bernard Lycett-Kean, is an artist who, like Patricia, seeks to escape from an unsatisfactory story of his life in ‘unreal’ Britain (82). Unlike her, however, he chooses artwork and the careful consideration of potentially dangerous myths concerning beauty and sexuality in his new existence in France. Unlike Patricia Nimmo, his escape is successful and

72 

L. BIBBY

his newly chosen ‘story’ for himself stays on course. While searching for the perfect shade of blue for his paintings, he discovers a lamia, or enchanted, female snake, in his swimming pool.63 The lamia begs him to kiss her and so change her into a beautiful woman who will marry him, bringing him ‘power, and riches, and knowledge’ beyond his dreams—but Bernard, the committed, intellectually sensitive and autonomous artist who has chosen the context of his life and work for good reasons, is not fooled by the new plot the lamia represents, or its terms. He is interested only in the blue colour of her scales but he knows the risks of associating with her because he also knows the narratives she represents, and he rejects them; although he is ‘almost prepared for a Faustian damnation’ in return for the blue, he does not succumb to it. He shows awareness that he has chosen the right narrative for himself and that he is on the right ‘quest’ in his commitment to painting, and because of this ‘He was happy, in one of the ways human beings have found to be happy’ (88) and remains so until the story’s conclusion. His autonomy and his art allow him to remove himself from the mass of historical narratives Patricia Nimmo found so alienating, so that he is a ‘human being’ subject to the strictures of no particular time periods, having fled ‘Thatcher’s Britain’, described in borrowed storybook terms as ‘a land of dog-eat-dog, lung-­ corroding ozone and floating money, of which there was at once far too much and far too little’ (81). Eventually the lamia is kissed and becomes engaged to Bernard’s houseguest, Bernard having looked up the Keats’s poem that first described the creature and been repelled by its ‘excess’ (101) as he is repelled by the beautiful woman the lamia in his pool has become, ‘Melanie’. By refusing Melanie’s false charms and dubious promises, and remaining committed to art, Bernard is de-sexualised and disassociated from the concept of the Romantic, virile male artist and thinker. He is partly a masculine fulfilment of the patriarchally imposed, feminine intellectual ideal of total, nun-like devotion to work, the pressure to conform to which A. S. Byatt felt during her days as a PhD researcher. Through Patricia Nimmo in ‘Crocodile Tears’, Byatt reminds us of the power of narrative, but through Bernard Lycett-Kean, Byatt erodes the authority and legitimacy of these two myths of the intellectual, the male genius and the female hermit, showing them to be at best limited examples of what the intellectual has been and can be that are harmful to both men and women. Fiammarosa, the Princess in the next story, ‘Cold’, contrasts with Bernard by choosing the conventional narrative of marriage and indeed

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

73

finding a way, with her husband’s help, to allow her intellectual and physical lives to coexist. In terms of language, content and style, ‘Cold’ announces itself as a tale much more than the other texts in this volume. Fiammarosa is a mythical being, an ‘icewoman’, and only completely happy and healthy in extreme cold but in spite of this she chooses the ruler of a desert, Prince Sasan, to marry. In addition, she is an intellectual woman who, typical of Byatt’s fiction, is aware of the power of narrative and art in shaping her thought and her life; she is a careful reader of ‘both histories and wonder tales’ (135). She knows that her husband’s home will be physically dangerous to her, the heat causing her to literally melt and disintegrate. However, he is an artist who wins her love by sending her glass sculptures; here, glass returns as a metaphor for all that can be ‘seen through’ and an antidote to the image of the mirror that has hindered women artists. As in The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, glass is both a thing seen and a mode of seing, analogous with art itself in Byatt’s work. Sasan constructs a home in which the couple can both be happy, constructed of glass, which as a work of art and a ‘real’ thing simultaneously, rescues Fiammarosa as both a body and a mind. Within it she ‘could live, and could breath, and could be herself’ (178). The potential dangers and freedoms inherent in either inhabiting myths (in the sense of archetypal narratives that are told and re-told), or engaging with those myths as intellectuals to create new narratives, are contrasted in the volume’s final three, very short stories. In ‘Baglady’, a businessman’s lonely wife is wrenched out of her existence during a shopping trip in the Far East with other ‘wives’. She finds herself in a supernatural nightmare when she is left behind, forgotten, unable to exit the shopping centre. With no way back to where she came from, she loses her identity. At the end of this tale, which is not really an ending at all, she ‘cannot imagine anyone coming’ to retrieve her (194) and so cannot escape the story of terror she has stumbled into. The following story, ‘Jael’, is told in the first person. The narrator Jess, like the first-person narrator of ‘Sugar’, exploits the qualities of memory within narrative (as the story itself does) to recount a childhood act of jealous cruelty. She then defends this memory to herself by emphasising its aesthetic and mythic qualities. The event echoes the biblical narrative of Jael, in which a woman convinces a soldier to trust her before killing him, but the narrative’s mythic status is the precise reason why it is dangerous, when used to ‘cover’ wrongdoing. The final story, ‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’, is an imagining of the creation of the Velázquez painting of the

74 

L. BIBBY

same name.64 In this story, Byatt experiments with historical events in fiction in the same manner as in ‘Precipice-Encurled’. Because the painter is never named, this extremely short text can centralise instead the two female cooks he incorporated into his painting, whose personal narratives history is likely to have omitted. Both Concepción and Dolores are critically sensitive and proud women whose creative talents are likely to extend beyond food preparation, and indeed, Concepción reflects early in the story that Dolores ‘could become a true artist, if she chose, she could go far’ (219). The young artist, whilst painting the two women and creating images of them to become historical traces, encourages them to think of themselves as skilled and powerful creators. As a result, Dolores imagines herself within other narratives than her station and historical situation as a servant afford her, and imagines how the painter will represent her, perhaps as ‘a kind of goddess wielding spit and carving knife instead of shield and sword’ (228). When Dolores laughs at the painter’s intense gaze upon her, the sound ends ‘the momentary coincidence between image and woman’ (230). Art, like glass, is both a thing seen and a mode of seeing and Dolores recognises its value as a method of entering a different history. The ‘coincidence between image and woman’ is just that, however: the painting, a static image, represents a past that can be re-examined but not truly changed. This is the end of the story and the point at which history and culture are silent once more.

2.7  Conclusion Art is integral to Byatt’s reconsideration of the woman intellectual because art is the material of myth-making and so often also of women’s autonomous critical thought, and just as art is continually made and remade, so is myth. Her fictions assert the manner in which new myths can and do transform our view of historical narrative and women’s status within it, and because this process is literary, it provides a language with which to re-present the systems of representation that have maintained gendered hierarchies among intellectuals. Furthermore, that language allows writers including Byatt to address the sexist cultural assumptions at the root of ‘the way things are’, or seem to be. This is a crucial, still overly specialised and still under-used (at least outside poststructuralist feminist ideas, to be discussed in Chap. 4) part of feminist work to this day. Chapter 3 begins my consideration of the conceptual consequences of Byatt’s mythopoeic project by examining her representations of the conflict between women’s

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

75

‘thinking’ minds and their bodies, as a source of their problems as intellectuals.

Notes 1. Coupe, Myth, 9. 2. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Reprint, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 135. 3. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated from the French by A.  M. Sheridan Smith, 1972 (London: Tavistock. Reprint, London: Routledge, 1995), 31. 4. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 31. 5. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 32. 6. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 32. 7. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 42. 8. White, Tropics of Discourse, 121. 9. Coupe, Myth, 9–10. 10. Coupe, Myth, 10–11. 11. Coupe, Myth, 9. 12. Coupe, Myth, 7. 13. Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, 44–45. 14. Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, 47. 15. Jerome J. McGann, “Poetry,” in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, edited by Iain McCalman (Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 270. 16. McGann, “Poetry,” 278. 17. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 59. 18. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 71. 19. Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers, 3. 20. Elizabeth A. Fay, A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 11. 21. Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers, 134. 22. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, 2nd edition (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), 18–19. 23. Battersby, Gender and Genius, 9. 24. Battersby, Gender and Genius, 57. 25. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 3. 26. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: W.  H. Allen and Co. Reprint, London: The Women’s Press, 1980), 91. 27. Moers, Literary Women, 93.

76 

L. BIBBY

28. Moers, Literary Women, 92–93. 29. William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality (London: Phoenix, 1996), 49. 30. Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 146. 31. Battersby, Gender and Genius, 149. 32. Battersby, Gender and Genius, 149. 33. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 7. 34. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 5. 35. In this way, Henry is reminiscent of the Rev. Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874), another scholar whose work is never done, to the cost of those around him. 36. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1981), 2. 37. Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, 71. 38. Battersby, Gender and Genius, 61. 39. Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers, 143. 40. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 146. 41. And also for the characters of other late twentieth-century novels by women authors, for example Rosamund Stacey in The Millstone (1965) by Byatt’s sister, Margaret Drabble. 42. Jane Campbell, A.  S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination (Waterloo, ON, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004), 25. 43. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Reprint, London: Heron, 1968), 485. 44. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, 495. 45. Christien Franken, A. S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 50. 46. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 80. 47. Campbell, A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination, 82. 48. Campbell, A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination, 81. 49. Coupe, Myth, 4. 50. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 3. 51. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Reprint, New  York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 157. 52. Battersby, Gender and Genius, 113. 53. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 50. 54. Battersby, Gender and Genius, 115. 55. Battersby, Gender and Genius, 123. 56. Mary Eagleton, Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 38.

2  A. S. BYATT: CREATING THE INTELLECTUAL WOMAN 

77

57. Thelma J. Shinn, Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 65. 58. Andrzej Ga ̨siorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), 19. 59. Shinn, Worlds Within Women, 151. 60. Susan Sellers, Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 37–38. 61. Battersby, Gender and Genius, 35. 62. Campbell, A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination, 201. 63. The ‘snake woman’ recalls not only John Keats’s poem ‘Lamia’ but also the myth of Melusine as used in Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990; 1991) and the snake goddess in her clearest experiment with mythopoeia Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011). 64. Campbell, A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination, 310.

CHAPTER 3

Minds and Bodies

3.1   Introduction In her 1994 interview with Nicolas Tredell, Byatt suggested ‘that the feminist movement, whatever its virtues, has not produced any satisfactory answer to what I see as the major biological/intellectual problem of women.’1 This was characteristic of her stated ambivalence towards organised feminist movements. Her fiction, meanwhile, as this study asserts, was already richly feminist in its literary forms and in ways that addressed this precise biological/intellectual impasse. Those forms often recall Linda Hutcheon’s summary of feminist-postmodernist writing and its interdependence with historical fiction: working with feminism’s ‘politicisation of the personal’, this writing sits on the borderline between fiction and personal history […] The representation of the self (and the other) in history in this form is also done with intense self-consciousness, thus revealing the problematic relation of the private person writing to the public as well as personal events once lived (by the narrator or someone else).2

Such writing concerns itself with what women have done, and can do, in reality, in spite of ‘borderlines’, and in Byatt’s quartet of historical novels known informally as the Frederica Quartet after their protagonist,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Bibby, A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_3

79

80 

L. BIBBY

‘lamination’ of texts and ideas is one critical strategy for resisting conflict between the demands of intellect and biology. As Frederica muses in The Virgin in the Garden (1978): One could let all these facts and things lie alongside each other like laminations, not like growing cells. This laminated knowledge produced a powerful sense of freedom, truthfulness and even selflessness, since the earlier organic and sexual linking by analogy was undoubtedly selfish. (274)

A. S. Byatt’s ‘Frederica’ quartet of novels, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002), are primarily the stories of women striving to reconcile their womanhood with their intellectual lives, and this ‘striving’ is inherently mythopoeic, extending as it does tired historical narratives of female existence within patriarchal restraints on their bodies and minds. Their mythopoeia adapts literary realism by way of what Byatt has called the ‘curiously symbiotic relationship between old realism and new experiment’.3 The novels isolate one of the key reasons why women intellectuals are only ever problematically represented within the twentieth-century cultural epoch in which these novels are set. Byatt’s comments on the issue in interviews and in her non-fiction writing conflate the theme of the mind/body problem as it is experienced in ‘real’ life and as it is represented in literature, linking to Linda Hutcheon’s statements above on ‘the problematic relation of the private person writing to the public’ and the feminist features of fiction that depict actually ‘experienced’ issues. Thus my reading considers Byatt’s achievement in figuring the woman intellectual as distinct from the patriarchal cultural history of the intellectual in terms of the author’s adaptation of experimental realism, as a mode of mythopoeia that tests the purposes of cultural history itself for feminist ends.

3.2   Historical Discourse and the ‘Real’ When A. S. Byatt discussed the ‘major biological/intellectual problem of women’ in her interview with Tredell, she alluded to a number of linked preoccupations in her non-fiction as well as her fiction: feminism as a politics and as a dimension of literature authored by women; the relationship between literature and ‘reality’ (Byatt’s multifaceted, self-conscious realism); and theories of the nature of language and discourse. I argue here that this quartet of novels constitutes an examination of historical

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

81

narratives of gender and the intellectual that undermines the masculine paradigm as a mere representation of reality, while supporting other, mythopoeic and discursive modes of literary representation of the real, for example experimental realism. Prompted by Tredell to discuss her representations of women’s lives, the pressures upon women within the first two Frederica novels and the idea that the sisters Frederica and Stephanie Potter lack ‘some kind of discourse of feminism to articulate and possibly to alter their situation’, Byatt replied that certain of those representations were based solely on her observations and personal experiences: ‘I think in metaphors, not propaganda.’4 Metaphor is Byatt’s most frequently and effectively used strategy for representing a productive ‘bridge’ between the real and imagined, as well to avoid confronting her work’s political implications so directly that it becomes statements of ideological commitment. However, for now I focus on her approximation of the real with the mythic; that is, the idea that the ‘real’ past the texts refer to is also linguistically composed and that this composition produces myths about that past. Byatt’s historical representations adapt classic realism with an awareness of these myths and the potential for their extension and modification. By ‘classic realism’, I mean the literary writing, associated predominantly with the nineteenth century, that adhered to certain principles identified concisely by Steven Earnshaw. These include an effort to ‘reflect’ reality through detailed description, a sense of plausibility and authenticity,5 chronological organisation based on cause-and-effect, and a temporal focus on the ‘here and now’.6 However, literary ‘realism’ is an unstable category. In Erich Auerbach’s foundational study of literary realism, Mimesis (1946), to which Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) was partly an admiring response, Auerbach argues for what would become a common view of the nineteenth century as the definitive period for classic realism, although later in the book he acknowledges the experimental examples that signalled changes in the mode during that same century.7 Andrzej Ga ̨siorek argues persuasively, using the example of George Eliot’s novels, that experimentation with and beyond classic principles has been an integral aspect of realist writing from the nineteenth century onwards.8 Indeed, he stresses correctly that realism is a ‘critical’ form and that the exact meanings of ‘realism’ and ‘experiment’ are far from established (p. 181).9 These observations assist in reading Byatt’s versions of realism, as for her, as we have already seen, categories are discursive limitations which exist to be tested. The ‘real’ is an object for critical examination in

82 

L. BIBBY

Byatt’s work. In the closing pages of Auerbach’s Mimesis, written during the Second World War, he situates his project within a larger, urgent one of preserving a sense of ‘Western history’.10 His professed ‘elastic’ methodology, loosely structured and guided by the texts that he perceived as important, is not unlike Byatt’s critical style in her essays such as those collected in On Histories and Stories (1991) which often seems to ignore rigid, scholarly protocol in favour of an approach guided by her personal responses to texts and her impressions of extra-textual problems. Byatt had clearly made an ethical investment in literary realism and reality itself when she discussed women’s problems as artists and thinkers and wrote about her own fraught journey towards literary and intellectual distinction in the 1991 re-introduction to The Shadow of the Sun (1964). In addition, Byatt expresses a responsibility towards the interior subjective dimensions of reality, prioritising them above the exterior objective dimensions. The major ‘reality’ represented within the Frederica novels is that interior reality of women trying to reconcile their gendered bodies and their social and political meanings with their intellects and ambitions, or sacrifice their intellectual and even social autonomy. The realist form allows Byatt to create a multifaceted version of their twentieth-century world with an impact on how related, exterior ‘factual’ discourses are perceived. Fiction can transact with histories in a way that serves women, but where histories have traditionally marginalised or harmed them, Byatt makes use of fiction’s sense of decreased responsibility towards official narratives of the past. Thus, in terms of generic narrative and formal organisation, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman incorporate dialogues between classic realism and the metafiction and historiographic metafiction for which Byatt has become well known. They describe a recognisable world, Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, and follow the mixed fortunes of the Potter family from the mid-1950s until an indeterminate point in the future. The novels reject chronology, and refer to points in time outside the narrative’s ‘present’, in prologues or points of narration referring to events in characters’ distant futures. Byatt modifies nineteenth-century realism’s emphasis on the contemporary or the ‘here and now’11 to demonstrate anew that realist representations of the contemporary are as constructed as those of the past: construction itself is a motif within fiction and not simply an organising principle, and explores the idea foregrounded in poststructuralist theory that all knowledge must be ‘rendered’ textually.12,13 This contradictory, unreal-realist

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

83

form also facilitates the novels’ manipulation of historical narrative: the past, the future and memory as concepts and as literary strategies for ‘ordering material’ from reality,14 with real, ethical implications for women’s histories. A prolific critic as well as a literary author, Byatt locates her own work within descriptions of the realist novel’s history in response to the freedoms and restrictions the mode imposes upon her as a writer. However, she does not do this in the political spirit of ‘rejection’ of forms by proponents of experimental fiction, or with the ‘irritable territorial definitions’ of what contemporary fiction should be.15 She avoids avowed political and formal commitments, most probably because these represent limitations to the fiction’s mythopoeic capacity by presenting other ‘closed’ accounts of the world. Instead, she defends fiction in broad, inclusive terms—as storytelling—embracing, again, the ‘curiously symbiotic relationship between old realism and new experiment’16 and thereby affirming that novels can incorporate both realist and experimental elements without one cancelling out the other. Again, Byatt prioritises fiction’s representational capacities above its polemical ones, and is also wary of the potential of theoretical interpretations to obscure other readings. She has stated numerous times that although she is interested in the literary theories that have gained currency since her time as a student of F. R. Leavis’s school of literature’s ‘moral responsibility’ and methods of ‘close reading’ that allegedly reject critical theory,17 she adheres to no particular school of thought.18 The tendency of her fiction and critical writing to move referentially between theories and perspectives has been termed its ‘polyvocality’ by Christien Franken (2001), and points to the writing’s tendency to move between concepts; Byatt’s interests remain Foucauldian in their polyvocality, as she mobilises ‘concepts of discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series and transformation’19 across these four substantial narratives. This subsection’s title, ‘Historical Discourse and the Real’, refers to the conceptual juncture at which Byatt positions the quartet. Whilst no critical study has attempted to read the novels as straightforwardly autobiographical, some, such as Julian Gitzen’s,20 have read parallels between Byatt’s life and the Potter sisters’ experiences. Her representation of ‘real’ historical experiences, or at least their mediation through written ‘memories’, provides a site to consider how historical knowledge translates into and is even partly produced by realist fiction, historical fiction, historiographic metafiction and the overlaps in between these categories. Byatt has written of her impulse to write The Virgin in the Garden during the 1960s, feeling

84 

L. BIBBY

that her life so far had encompassed what is called ‘history’, and of how her research for the extremely detailed novel led her to ‘the edge between lived and imagined history’.21 It is this Foucauldian threshold or ‘edge’ which the Frederica quartet’s ‘self-conscious realism’ confronts and explores. Byatt has defined her notion of self-conscious realist texts as novels comprising: an awareness of the difficulty of ‘realism’ combined with a strong moral attachment to its values, a formal need to comment on their fictiveness combined with a strong sense of the value of a habitable imagined world, a sense that models, literature and ‘the tradition’ [an allusion to Leavis’s Great Tradition] are ambiguous and problematic goods combined with a profound nostalgia for, rather than rejection of, the great works of the past.22

Within this definition, old forms and new experiment are both respected as they are combined to create a different object for literary-historical scrutiny, which certainly exists on Ga ̨siorek’s spectrum of experimental realism. Byatt’s stated interest in contradictions, the both/and made possible by experimental realisms, develops Linda Hutcheon’s evaluation of historiographic metafiction (or literary writing representing historical events as well as the process of writing itself) as a category of postmodern art. Hutcheon shows that postmodernism is characteristically paradoxical, allowing for literary texts’ invocation of historical contexts as ‘significant and even determining’, at the same time as presenting all historical knowledge as linguistically constructed.23 Therefore, whilst The Virgin in the Garden can build the world of 1950s Yorkshire in realist-fictional terms and support its realism using many ‘real’ historical referents, at most the novel asserts itself as an act of interpretation based on mimicked historiographic processes. Our sense of the text’s authentic ‘historicity’ is undercut by the presence of imagined characters and events but is nonetheless still there. Classic realism must be adapted to make The Virgin in the Garden’s narrative possible, because a classically realist form would probably have depended upon patriarchal discourses of a unified history of the intellectual as male. The novel’s narrator shows knowledge of this danger and imitates authorial narrative control. The narrator commences the novel’s present-day plot, following a prologue set in 1968, with an image of historical discourse as it impacts on one character’s private, intellectual world. ‘In 1952’, we are told, ‘history took a grip on the world of Alexander Wedderburn’s imagination’ (17). The fictional

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

85

playwright Alexander is composing a play about the first Queen Elizabeth to commemorate the second’s coronation, and as a result, fiction is framed with the real past, but more importantly, imagined literature is located within the novel we are reading, as in the quartet’s subsequent three novels. This layering of documented histories—of this historical novel, the year 1952, and the two Elizabeths—foregrounds time as a written construct, and one necessarily supported by the discourse of fiction. In Metahistory, Hayden White argues that ‘the whole discussion on the nature of “realism” in literature flounders in the failure to assess critically what a genuinely “historical” conception of “reality” consists of.’24 Byatt’s text suggests, in the ways described above, that fiction supplies ways to reconsider what a ‘historical’ conception of reality could be—perhaps, finally, one that constantly tests the discursive horizons of history itself, as Alexander Wedderburn seems to find as he explores the second Elizabeth’s story using that of the first. This first ‘Frederica’ novel’s narrative is frequently broken by sections combing historical representations with markedly much more literary writing, not only as separate sections of traditional narrative but within them, for instance when characters watch the new queen’s coronation on television and the narration incorporates details from a fictitious news article. The article asks: What is it in this news that must stir the deep pride of the nation? It is the sense that all is possible: it is the elation of the knowledge that the age of Elizabeth II is opening dramatically and magnificently. Let them scoff who will, but there is a quality about this news that lifts it higher than the headlines it makes. (317)

That quality is the commemorative function of language, and the resulting production of knowledge and national, mythological memory. The coronation is what Foucault called one of the ‘monuments of the past’ that historical discourse seeks to ‘memorise’ by making them into documents.25 This metafictional mention of the commemorative quality feeds back into the narrative’s private dimension when we enter Frederica Potter’s thoughts, although not in 1953 but in 1973, when she ‘saw’, we are told, Alexander’s lecture on television about public communication. The novel’s breaks in timeline and form, as postmodern departures from realism, exemplify the paradox of postmodernist fiction described by Linda Hutcheon because they allow it to claim historical contexts and

86 

L. BIBBY

knowledge within what is self-consciously fiction. Hutcheon elaborates that this form of intertextuality is ‘a formal manifestation of both a desire to close the gap between the past and the present of the reader and a desire to rewrite the past in a new context’.26 This contradiction is exploited productively throughout the Frederica quartet and especially for the sake of intellectual women such as Frederica Potter; the text represents her problems with sharp realism while examining the roots of those problems and their potential solutions. Byatt’s metaphors are the major mode by which her chosen realities are mediated by literary language; they are the inventive ‘bridge’ between literature and life and they are transformative tools against patriarchy within women’s writing, as Ellen Moers recognises in Literary Women.27 Still Life, the second in Byatt’s quartet, began as an experiment in writing a novel without metaphor, in order to close the space between words and ‘things’, when Byatt was suspicious of the poststructuralist theory that denies this is possible: she explains that she had hoped to write about temporal events and problems, ‘birth and death, plainly and exactly’, and thereby represent, in the most basic sense, something of the real within narrative. Her essay ‘Still Life/Nature Morte’ is an account of why this was indeed not possible, as literary language is never ‘plain’ or ‘free of cultural resonances’.28 She recounts her instinctive knowledge of the process described by cultural theorists at the time she wrote, of disassociation between language and ‘things’, and of the ‘vague sense that [her] novel must move from an undisassociated paradise to our modern disassociated world’.29 This ‘undisassociated paradise’ is the early modern cultural world of Europe depicted by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things in which language was viewed as describing reality, and representation ‘posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature’.30 Byatt’s exploration of disassociation theories, in which language becomes a collection of signs arbitrarily linked to reality, supported the writing of Still Life and became the basis of its many depictions of visual art and painting— paint being a medium, like language, that only ever refers to the real although it is itself ‘real’.31 She has commented on the text’s use of the relationship of words to things as simultaneously ‘inventive, imprecise, denotative, practical, imagined’.32 The meanings produced by representations may be diffuse, multifarious and inherently mythopoeic, although Byatt does not use that term. However, with Still Life itself, Byatt seems to defend the validity of some sense of reality nonetheless. Within experimental novels, such a defence is possible; literary texts can constitute a

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

87

‘postmodern complicitous critique’33 of themselves. In this context, mythopoeia is especially powerful, as it may extend and reconstruct the cultural fabric of patriarchal history itself. Alexander Wedderburn is again central to Still Life’s prologue, which in 1980 finds him an ageing and still ‘time-obsessed man’ (3) within a time-obsessed text. His memory of a play he has written about Van Gogh, The Yellow Chair, and a narrative of Alexander’s meeting with Frederica and her brother-in-law Daniel Orton, are divided by reproduced sections of Van Gogh’s letters. This pairs a fictitious narrative with a historical one, both of which posit a paradoxical, ‘whole’ reality. The title The Yellow Chair denotes Alexander’s struggle to represent simple, precise things without metaphor, analogous to Byatt’s in her account of her vision for this novel, breaking further barriers between the author’s idea of reality and this imagined one. Alexander’s interior monologue paraphrases Byatt’s essay, quoted above, directly: he had ‘thought that he could write a plain, exact verse with no figurative language, in which a yellow chair was the thing itself, a yellow chair’ (2). With the reader’s hindsight, his suggestion relates to Foucault’s mythic pre-­ disassociation Europe, but the comment was nevertheless a writer’s sincere ambition. Alexander, the male intellectual and artist, is at an impasse which Frederica will find ways to overcome despite her mind/body conflicts, owing to the quartet of texts’ feminist mythopoeic strategies. In the same essay mentioned above, Byatt details how her self-­conscious realist style was altered, in Still Life, by her exploration of language and things: ‘I found myself writing into my text “taxonomies”—from one girl’s study of all young men in Cambridge, to a formicary and an essay in field grasses, from children’s pictures representing alphabets to a long discursus on a child’s pre-speech.’34 As a consequence of these extra-realist writings, part of the reality Still Life purports to represent is the imprecise process itself of naming and classifying. A representation of memory governs another of the ‘taxonomies’ mentioned above, found in the novel when Frederica Potter first attends Cambridge. The narrator looks backward from an unspecified point in time to describe the features and atmosphere of the ancient university ‘in those days’, and supplies details of the moral and intellectual climate in which Frederica will pursue both intellectual and physical experiences. The ‘agitation against all things Victorian’, against the disassociated sensibilities of Tennyson and Browning as ‘sanctified by Dr Leavis’ and T.  S. Eliot, constitutes another confrontation between literary and non-literary discourses and, in its focus on literary culture, underlines literature’s authority within this version of cultural

88 

L. BIBBY

history (133). Novels, indeed, are ‘sources’ to the intellectual Frederica as she negotiates Cambridge life (135). Later on, her final year at Cambridge is also situated within a non-literary, temporal history—we learn in a chapter tellingly titled ‘History’ that the year began ‘with the Suez crisis, and contained other incursions from, excursions into, the world out there’ (339). These ‘incursions’ and ‘excursions’ indicate the text’s movements and substitutions of narratives, temporal and imagined, as much as the development of characters. Frederica’s story so far has depended on ‘the world out there’ as Byatt has researched and represented it, but in addition, her fictional narrative has been altered by literary narratives, from Shakespeare, T.  S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre: observing the news, ‘Frederica had correlated these terrible images with unlived knowledge from literature to form a belief that human nature was dangerous and unstable’ (339–340, my emphasis). The novel teases with the possibility that literary and historical discourses have the potential to change each other. The narrative itself alludes to this, as Frederica’s immediate future may certainly be mediated by literature—there are ‘two hypothetical future Fredericas’, one a Cambridge PhD candidate and the other a London journalist. In the event, however, she becomes neither, responding to the historical pressures on women against which Byatt has written and spoken numerous times by marrying a secretive and sexually compelling landowner, Nigel Reiver. This marriage does not require literary representation to ‘happen’, as though Byatt refuses to dignify it in that way; it occurs not as part of the ‘ending’ of Still Life, but somewhere in the unwritten narrative between this novel and the next, Babel Tower. This third novel is perhaps the one which, of the quartet, is most concerned with literary discourses above all others. It contains a fictitious novel-within-a-novel, the fantastical and very violent Babbletower, which becomes the focus of an obscenity trial explicitly paralleled with the 1960 case against D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In turn, Frederica’s divorce from Nigel Reiver and her battle for custody of her young son are court cases paralleled with the fictitious obscenity trial. All of these cases are then overshadowed by the trial of the Moors Murderers. The invented trials are narrated in transcript form, the major point in the quartet when the omniscient, authorial narrator is removed completely and also the point at which fiction transacts most intensely with historical and legal realities, making their interdependence sharply apparent. Then, despite a gap of some years in the quartet’s timescale, the narrative of Babel Tower is continued in A Whistling Woman with another book-within-the-book,

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

89

a children’s story titled Flight North by the character Agatha Mond. The finale of the quartet is supported paratextually by fewer ‘real’ texts, but instead its narrative refers to the May 1968 student riots in France, with Byatt’s invention of a student revolt at the fictitious University of North Yorkshire, which appears to be based on the University of York. Later, the character Brenda Pincher, while inhabiting a religious cult in order to study it, sends letters and recordings to a correspondent outside the cult to report on its doings. The novel ‘documents’ the letters in full, interspersed within the narrative, having made it clear that they were not read by their intended recipient. This sort of epistolary narrative is a long-standing feature of the novel as a form, and in metafiction such as A Whistling Woman, it signifies the processes by which many other non-literary narratives are assembled—or can be, if letters are received and read. A researcher with her own agenda, Brenda Pincher could be an archetypal unreliable narrator, but in the historical narrative-context of religious cults and separatist communities depicted in the novel, we are likely to believe her conclusions in order to make the rest of this realist narrative coherent. Our expectations of realist narratives are exploited so that we willingly follow the community’s downfall as it is presented to us, and Byatt does not subvert those expectations or undermine any information in Brenda’s letters. This is rather a missed opportunity on Byatt’s part, as we are given no reason to question the letters’ content. The rebelling NYU students, on the other hand, who believe in ‘the logic of history’ (a Marxist philosophy, textually available to them) and in the inevitability of revolution (365), eventually only perpetrate destruction during an isolated moment in the novel’s chronology. Their own philosophies are not sophisticated or effective enough even to challenge the history portrayed within this fictional narrative, to say nothing of the temporal history outside it.

3.3   Intellectuals and Literature The Frederica novels’ relationship with the intellectual’s dominant, patriarchal cultural history is both implicit and explicit, in each text’s combination of experimental realist narrative, simulacra of non-literary forms and extracts from other, existing texts. An ordered, linear narrative/critique will not do; the novels instead query the conceptual foundations of ‘cultural history’ itself with their expansive, multifarious and mythopoeic forms. Previously, I have examined definitions of the intellectual, in

90 

L. BIBBY

particular women intellectuals, and fiction as a mode key to their representation because of the need to broaden and extend the myth of the exclusively masculine intellectual. My discussion of intellectuals and art, referring to the work of Christine Battersby on the Romantic genius in particular, considered the critique implicit in some of Byatt’s early and short fictions of the Romantic link between masculine gender, creativity and intellect and that link’s instability when cultural history is revealed to be no more than discourse dependent on many factors. Studies of women intellectuals and women artists frequently treat art and intellectual work as closely related, if not interchangeable, modes by which authors have resisted concepts that have assumed an irreconcilable division between the female body and the intellect. Realism and its mythopoeic potential to examine and broaden are sense of the real is, again, key to this process. Byatt’s collection of critical essays Passions of the Mind, first published in 1991 in the wake of the success of Possession: A Romance (in which the relationship of writing and the body is a pivotal theme), is introduced with a discussion of fiction-writing in which Byatt defends self-conscious realism ‘not because I believe that it has any privileged relationship to truth, social or psychological, but because it leaves space for thinking minds as well as feeling bodies’.35 This same, barely defined (because to define it would be to ‘close’ it) ‘space’ is a preoccupation of literary historians who, without claiming that women’s fiction represents their temporal and material experiences ‘truthfully’, nonetheless defend the idea that literary writing supplies important representations of women intellectuals that have a place in thinking about their real lives. When Mary Evans noted that although the human, and not only the intellectual, has remained implicitly gendered as male in European cultural life since the Enlightenment,36 she commented on a literary-historical myth that is difficult, though by no means impossible, to challenge. As I explained in Chap. 1, writing novels may have allowed certain women to participate in public discourse, but only at the cost of upholding a hierarchical gender binary opposition in which woman was the lesser term alongside man. Byatt’s fiction writing demonstrates that this itself constitutes a myth of hierarchy that totalises feminist and literary history, without questioning what, within writing, can and has resisted woman’s predicament. The most influential literary-historical narratives of the last two hundred years have represented the novel as a feminine form, owing to the woman author’s association with the private sphere. A significant, negative consequence of this has been widespread views of the novel as an inferior,

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

91

frivolous form of discourse, a view attacked by George Eliot in her essay ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, in which she parodied the gendering of the ‘women’s novel’.37 In the eighteenth century, as Norma Clarke contends, ‘women of letters’ were public figures, respected poets, novelists, historians, critics, translators, philosophers and generally ‘bookish’ contributors to ‘the improving cultural stock of the nation’.38 The binary oppositions of masculine/serious and feminine/frivolous in views of writing are here again unfortunately evident. Clarke aligns the decline of monarchical power and the growth of commercial production by the end of the eighteenth century with the ‘fall’ of the distinctive, public woman of letters, and the corresponding proliferation of ‘women writers’ of less respected fiction and thus, by implication, with the conceptual link between femaleness and lack of literary and intellectual prestige. This simplifies a gradual process but as Clarke stresses, for a woman to be a ‘scribbler’ of novels rather than poems, histories and polemics would remain ‘problematic’. The novel form was relatively new, and unlike poetry it had no clear roots in any classical form.39 Nevertheless, novel-writing, by which novelists could garner grudging respectability, was one of the few available routes into public discourse and intellectual life for women, another being the salons of European upper class ‘bluestockings’, wherein the genders mixed to participate in learned conversation. Clarke adds that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the ‘bluestocking ideal’, like the novel, was giving way to social and commercial change and the term ‘bluestocking’ was already pejorative.40 This author’s account frames the woman intellectual effectively as a figure, character and discursive object obscured and displaced in history, and the question of literary authorship as one of the modes of both her removal from and restitution to that history. This is because by accessing and producing literature, at least in the time when rank and patronage ensured authors’ ‘greatness’, eighteenth-century women authors and bluestockings could link themselves with certain literature’s high cultural status. As Clarke puts it, women writers ‘took on honorary masculinity’,41 gaining reverence for their intellects, obscuring their feminine gender and helping to construct themselves as legitimate exceptions to a masculine rule. Since the decline of the eighteenth century’s semi-religious reverence for certain ‘great’ authors, the lessening of the woman writer-intellectual’s status is still felt, although the modern woman’s novel is variously regarded as a low, middlebrow or literary form depending on its content and the market for which it is intended. The development of the literary novel,

92 

L. BIBBY

now encompassing Byatt’s self-conscious realist novels and her historiographic metafictions, highlights the novel’s place (and thus literary extensions of past myths, stories and histories) in discourses of the modern public intellectual. But while the literary novel has been established as an important form in this process of representation, the woman intellectual’s cultural position is as problematic as ever—and consequently, it seems, she is at least one of the subjects of many, many novels by women. The place of high and low literary forms in relation to gender and the intellectual is satirised subtly by Byatt early in The Virgin in the Garden when Frederica, a precocious teenager, complains that her father, schoolmaster Bill Potter, not only disapproved of some of her childhood reading but burned it. Here, the idea of literature mixes shockingly with what were recent, in 1953, and violent recent memories of Fascist regimes (the image of book-­ burning returns to haunt Frederica again in Babel Tower). As one of Byatt’s ‘thinking and feeling’ bodies, Frederica also rages that she does not want her ‘biology contaminating’ with religious moralising from the sex education texts available at her school. In addition, she reveals that among the books Bill allegedly burned were Georgette Heyer’s historical romances (40–41). Heyer is the author of a 1965 novel, Frederica, which of course Frederica Potter could not have read in 1952 but for whom Byatt may well have named her. Heyer’s hugely popular romances, emblematic of the bestselling historical romance form and also included in Diana Wallace’s survey of historical novels as an important predecessor of women’s literary writing including Byatt’s,42 are the subject of Byatt’s essay ‘An Honourable Escape’, reprinted in Passions of the Mind. By alluding to them with Frederica’s name, Byatt again brings to mind the place of ‘women’s novels’ in narratives of literary history and their significance in relation to intellectual women’s experiences of dissonance between their culturally pre-inscribed minds and bodies. Byatt’s young, female intellectual protagonist in The Virgin in the Garden protests that reading romances gives her ‘something to talk to other girls about’, at which Bill begins to discourse on ‘literary truth’ (41), sweeping her preferences aside in favour of the ‘right’ sort of book that can clearly stifle dialogues among and about women. Bill aligns literature with lived realities by writing to his daughters’ teachers ‘about sex and freedom and literature and all that’, but his strident, politicised and, above all, patriarchal intellectualism blinds him to the specific, gendered problems his attitudes create for Frederica and Stephanie. Although he is in favour of educating and instilling ambition in

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

93

his daughters (whose names are feminine versions of Frederick and Stephen or Stephan, as though he simply wishes them to fit themselves into masculine lives), the cultural discourses to which Bill is committed are incompatible with their feminine experiences. This problem arises repeatedly, as when Cambridge graduate Stephanie chooses to marry the local curate, Daniel Orton, and have children, to her father’s disappointment. At seventeen, Frederica shares some of her father’s misdirected but passionate commitment to pursuing a different sort of life. She asserts, referring to the sex education text, ‘If I thought I’d really got to live the sort of life that book holds up for my admiration I’d drown myself in the Bilge Pond now’ (40). With these words, her gendered body is made inextricable from her intellect, from the sense of biology constructed in sex education to the mortal body that might be drowned sacrificially if certain books are allowed to dictate life. Here, the realist mode depicts a stifled, unappreciated, complicated and impassioned young woman intellectual whose development will thread through the quartet, and update and exploit what Mary Evans termed the nineteenth-century novel’s ‘interiority’.43 The Virgin in the Garden achieves a new kind of interiority by combining aspects of public and private intellectual life, to become one of the ‘historiographic metafictions in which the fictively personal’—the source of Frederica’s frustration with romantic novels and sex education textbooks— ‘becomes the historically—and thus politically—public’.44 Although she is a specific and not always sympathetic character, in this respect Frederica references any number of intellectual women of her time. Although Mary Evans does not define interiority clearly, the complex dialogue and long interior monologues of the Frederica novels, featuring telling extra-textual references to public history, agree with the concept of representing ‘interior’ thinking. The concept of thought, relating to the intellectual, is both a motif found throughout the quartet and a process for the text to describe and imitate. On the day of Stephanie Potter’s wedding to Daniel, the text supplies her meandering doubts, overheard horror stories and imaginings of married life that again underline the linking of body, intellect and text by this reworked realist form: the ‘brute reality’ of wedding nights and contraceptives conflicts with the religious mythology and seemingly anachronistic ‘Cranmer’s prose’ of the ceremony (334). Stephanie is almost stifled by negative, patriarchal mythology, but not quite. In her bare childhood room, before the ceremony, she thinks of Daniel with discomfort, and then of Wordsworth, feeling ‘a momentary relief’ (336). In Still Life, after the birth of her aptly named son William, she spends some

94 

L. BIBBY

time away from him in the local library in an attempt ‘just to read, clearly’ but finds that, more so than at university, her thoughts wander even now when they are so much filled with the baby: ‘One had to peel one’s mind from its run of preoccupations’ (183). The use of meandering thoughts and sentences here recalls Byatt’s observation in ‘True Stories and Facts in Fiction’ that one ‘quintessentially modern’ feature of contemporary fiction is its representation of ‘scholarly habits of mind, the search for impossible precision’45 in thought and communication. In the same essay, Byatt comments on Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and its subject, that is, ‘the breakdown of language and of fictive forms adequate to describe the sexual and political reality of the immediate present’.46 The language of The Virgin in the Garden seems interested in this same type of breakdown and produces a version of thought—specifically, in the above example, Stephanie’s thought as she contemplates the physical ceremonies, religious and sexual, of marriage. The body is mediated by thought which is in turn imitated by Byatt’s experimental realism, and this can constitute a consoling and productive ‘distance’ between real things and the text. Sometime after rebelling verbally against the potential life mapped out for her in the school’s conservative sex education literature, and during an unsuccessful attempt to lose her virginity to Alexander Wedderburn, Frederica’s dialogue suggests she has found a sort of harmony between language, her female physicality and the gendered precedents she finds within literature. She says to Alexander: I’ve been lurking. In the tomatoes. Luckily I had a book. And it’s quite sunny out here. So I dozed in the tomatoes and read little bits of this book. Tomatoes have a terrible smell, they smell like powdered hot metal and something else, maybe sulphur, is it, it’s a smell that comes at you and attacks your metabolism, or that’s what I think, this morning, having had no sleep and feeling kind of scraped and over-sensitive to everything. (459)

In Frederica’s rambling speech, perception is processed as a bodily experience, but unconsciously it has become clear to her that physical perception is secondary to the life-enhancing experiences of reading and thinking about Lawrence’s Women in Love, fearing that she ‘might be Gudrun’ and thus might embody a character from actual fiction, or that character’s supposed failings. To resist this, Frederica engages critically with Lawrence’s novel and also with the idea of the male author, loving ‘him’ and hating ‘him’ equally and simultaneously (460). Within Frederica’s sections of the

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

95

narrative, constructed largely through this mimicry of thought, culture equals public life, the public world of authorship and the possibility of becoming a public figure—an actress, author or scholar, even though that public life is dominated by men like Alexander. Her greed for all of those options as well as for sexual love is importantly portrayed as greed and also as admirable, indiscriminate desire for embodiment of her female biology and feminine gender, at the same time as fulfilment of her intellectual potential. She wants all of it, not choices, or at the very least her own, many choices rather than the limited ones culture offers. Her thoughts and desires, therefore, a large part of the text’s interiority, are inherently mythopoeic in nature. All four Frederica novels are strongly woman-centred texts in the sense that Clare Hanson has appropriated the phrase, with reference to the work of Maroula Joannou, as an alternative to the term ‘women’s novels’. Hanson explains that both ‘women’s novels’ and ‘woman-centred texts’ denote novels written by women authors which, although they may or may not be feminist novels in the sense of including a ‘coherent feminist agenda’, should be of interest to feminist critics for their treatment of ‘the complex and contradictory elements which go to form “feminine” identities’.47 Byatt’s Frederica novels are concerned with both women’s and men’s experiences, but because these experiences are variously intellectual and physical, the texts’ driving theme and central crisis is women’s particular problem with rendering the mind and body compatible as discourses and as realities. In The Virgin in the Garden, this is articulated primarily in Frederica’s verbal and physical rebellions against the imperatives of literature and of her developing body, and in Stephanie’s (often physically) painful balancing of her academic interests and her wish to marry Daniel Orton. The speech and interior monologues of both young women are homages to the process of critical thought: the stance necessary to resist and take action against the dictates of power in all its forms, culminating in mythopoeic narratives in which the touchstones of the patriarchal myth of the intellectual are reduced in power. As part of her examination of woman-centred texts and their consumption, Hanson suggests that ‘the adoption of a position of critical distance is for many an essential element in the pleasure of reading.’48 Byatt uses this ‘stance’ on more than one level: Frederica and Stephanie are self-defined intellectual readers of literature and of broader signifiers of power, even as they are themselves figured in novels that offer themselves simultaneously as objects and instruments of critical discourse. In this way, they develop one of the central tenets of

96 

L. BIBBY

intellectualism described by a dominant theorist of the same, Edward Said (1993)—the ‘critical sense’ that allows him and occasionally her to speak truth to power. Clare Hanson traces the roots of the mind/body problem to the devaluation of the female body and the feminine gender within male-authored classical philosophy, as it is countered in the work of Luce Irigaray in which Irigaray exposes the dilemma confronted by the educated woman: ‘She is offered access to a philosophical and cultural tradition that defines her as an anomaly, even a monstrosity, in that she identifies with transcendent male reason yet is confined within the immanence of the fleshy female body.’49 Hanson’s study of contemporary women’s novels (including a reading of Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden) is driven by the Neoplatonic myth of female embodiment as incompatible with ‘transcendent male reason’ and the possibility that the ‘women’s novel’, as a discursive tool, helps to break down this organising principle of patriarchal thought. She terms Byatt ‘an intellectual writer using a reader-friendly form’ with origins in ‘domestic realism’, despite Byatt’s stated ambivalence about that form in her 1991 Preface to The Shadow of the Sun (xii). By drawing on myth, folktales and theory, Hanson argues rightly, Byatt bridges the gap between literary and popular fiction and alters the form and purpose of the ‘women’s novel’ as it has come to be understood, once more with, I argue, inherently mythopoeic discursive tools. In Still Life, Frederica’s train journey to Nîmes in the summer before she first attends Cambridge stands out as an almost-pastiche of a female bildungsroman, or even a potential romantic adventure.50 Life is, as always for Frederica, filtered through fiction and altered in real terms by the slipperiness of language and names—she knows that ‘Nîmes is a provincial city and would have preferred it not to be, seeing “provincial” in terms of the English nineteenth-century novel, not of the Roman Provincia, Provence’ (61). Byatt’s authorial (in that it controls what we do and do not know) narration intervenes continually to supply understandings not possessed by characters, drawn from factual texts of history, and so closes the gap further between fictional and non-fictional discourse. Meanwhile, Frederica experiences no conflict yet between intellect and embodiment, and importantly no conflict either between bodily and sexual discourses, or between literary and popular women’s fiction: having ‘admired her long legs’, she blithely refuses a sexual overture from another traveller, and reads Flaubert’s seminal realist novel about a woman’s struggle with reconciling fictions and real life, Madame Bovary, along with Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and a novel by the prolific author of popular literature,

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

97

Margery Sharp (62). The text’s self-consciousness equals consciousness of its own adaptation of realism and therefore of its characters’ closeness to or alienation from ‘real’ problems. Its narration often includes a critical commentary on other texts of similar form and genre, as when Alexander goes to live with the Poole family in London and we are told that he ‘had come to London as successful writers did, or successful characters, at the end of those exploratory novels which analysed and celebrated working-­ class values and virtues in the North, whose authors and heroes hurried down as fast as they could to the busy capital’ (194). This might be Alexander’s point of view, the narrator’s or a generalised historical or narrative consciousness referring to the ‘angry young man’ literature of the 1950s; in any case, this discourse is unmoored from any one basis and nonetheless defines Alexander as a writer and a ‘thinking’ person in patriarchy’s limited mould. The equation of Alexander with a literary archetype positions him in relation to literary history and describes him not only in fictional terms but in relation to various cultural histories—of authors, class, travel, the city and regional identity. All of these histories are compromised in their authority and the ideal of the ‘successful writer’ is proved to be just that, as we see when Alexander compromises severely the purpose of his journey, to write, by giving in to bodily temptations and fathering a child with his married hostess, Elinor Poole. Other discursive ‘voices’ continually break through the novel’s omniscient narration, as does a version of Byatt’s explicitly authorial voice when she reveals, after a passage describing a ‘theory current now’ and related to the narrative, ‘the germ of this novel’: a woman, with a child, looking at a tray of growing seedlings and also at the seed packet with its picture of the flower (286–287). In the novel, the woman in that image becomes Stephanie and the ‘growing’ things become a metaphor for living bodies, only ever represented in discursive form. Much earlier, while pregnant with William, Stephanie takes refuge from what Tess Cosslett points out is a ‘depersonalised hospital regime’51 by reading Wordsworth’s poetry in the antenatal clinic, and cannot reconcile his metaphors of women with their real bodies as she sees them around her: ‘She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years.’ Seemed. She looked at the women. Hats, headscarves, bulky coats, varicose veins, bags, baskets, bottles. (16)

98 

L. BIBBY

In the case of Stephanie’s ‘growing things’, then, metaphor provides a link between discourse, the linguistic fabric of culture and the real. However sometimes, as in the antenatal clinic, metaphor can suggest a frightening gulf between language and reality which there are no clear narratives to bridge. Still Life is partly a meditation on these possible variations in meaning, again overlapping explicitly with Byatt’s non-fiction when the narrator explains the fraught ideas of ‘naming and accuracy’ behind the novel (364). At that point, the text should appear entirely artificial, but it is brought harrowingly close again to ideas of real dangers with a graphic description of Stephanie’s accidental death by electrocution—a true ‘waste’ of her life and elimination of her intellectual self where she had feared losing that life, self and intellect symbolically to domesticity. Any realistic sense of human life in which horrifying accidents do happen then gives way once more to critical reflection on how ‘the decorum of the novel’ should treat the subject (and shattering mental and physical experience) of grief; the narrator decides that, where other texts have ignored the emotion, this one will attempt to describe it (415). Daniel’s grief, tellingly, includes thoughts of the literature with which his wife tried to imbue her life with extra meaning and happiness: ‘he was to spend long periods thinking of how she had been made dumb, by marrying him, about Wordsworth and Shakespeare, of how he had failed to come home an hour earlier’ (415).52 The ‘made dumb’ here encompasses bluntly Stephanie’s mind and voice, both quietened by her marriage and its privileging of her female body, now also lost to Daniel. Throughout, Still Life explores art works as vehicles for metaphor, and metaphor, in turn, as the element of art that declares its relationship to the real. This meta-literary discourse finds another particular focus in Alexander Wedderburn’s playwriting and meditation on Van Gogh, specifically in his interior monologues: Language might relate the plum to the night sky, or to certain ways of seeing a burning coal, or to a soft case enwrapping a hard nugget of treasure. Or it might introduce an abstraction, a reflection, of mind, not mirror. […] But the difference, the distance, fascinated Alexander. Paint itself declares itself as a force of analogy and connection, a kind of metaphor-making between the flat surface of purple pigment and yellow pigment and the statement ‘This is a plum.’ (200)

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

99

A ‘reflection, of mind, not mirror’ rejects the nineteenth-century ideal of literary realism as a ‘mirror’ of the world in favour of inventive possibilities of artistic representation, and also rejects the mirror’s feminine symbolism as the ‘looking glass’ that limits women’s art (to use Gilbert and Gubar’s metaphor). The image of the mirror also teases with the idea of art being a mirror held up either to reality or even a metaphor for the artist’s mind itself, a metaphor that conceals the complex debates around realist art while also suggesting those complexities in the mirror’s very mysteriousness, especially, perhaps, in the case of the woman artist who does not merely step into the man’s traditional role, but modifies that role from within. This is the impression given by M. H. Abrams when he comments on the mirror as a Romantic image, and the artist’s mind as ‘a radiant projector’ (Abrams, 1953, p. ii),53 full of potential. In Still Life, Byatt’s narrator celebrates language in particular as a mode of ‘making’ culture by offering many different ‘reflections’ of the world, without apparent limitations: ‘Language runs up and down, through and round things known and things imitated in a way paint doesn’t’, and ‘words are our common currency, we all have words’ (201). At the metaphorical site of distance between language and things, intellectual life is representable regardless of the gender of body that goes with the mind. Metaphor and conflicting discourses, used alongside and in place of realist literary narration, are fundamental to the structure of Babel Tower, the most metafictional novel of the Frederica quartet in terms of form and content. The theme of language’s detachment from reality is reinforced early in the text by a series of letters to Frederica from her friends, late in her unhappy marriage to Nigel Reiver. In one of these, the poet Hugh Pink pays his respects to her as an intellectual who ‘knew why reading and writing mattered in the world’ and defends his decision to abjure life as a Cambridge scholar on the grounds that he would not be ‘quite real’, closed within a College (73).54 This brief detail conflates the ‘real’ with the idea of the body, separate from the intellect, in a way that vitally sidesteps gender; Hugh does not shy away from identifying himself with Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, an image usually connected to Byatt’s female characters.55 For both men and women, intellectual and bodily experiences are inextricable and literature becomes a way of working through consequent problems, in many ways: Frederica, for example, works as publishing assistant, adult education teacher and a broadcaster on a cultural television programme, before publishing her own novel. Although she must work primarily to support herself and her son, her

100 

L. BIBBY

work challenges and satisfies her, going some way towards resolving her sense of a mind/body conflict—the experience of reading a set of manuscripts makes her ‘feel that she is herself again’ and her body also feel, in mystical terms, ‘real to her, because her mind is alive’ (155). Literature and bodily feminine life mutually support and complicate one another throughout Babel Tower, on several levels of the narrative. A Whistling Woman opens with a representation of what could be seen initially as ‘pure’ literary language, without any declared metafictional agenda as appears at the disjointed start of Babel Tower (featuring several possible ‘beginnings’). The children’s story Flight North, however, proves to be a crucial mythopoeic narrative, both separate and linked to the novel proper’s content, when it introduces the ‘Whistlers’, a society of female half-bird, half-human creatures who have sacrificed full humanity and verbal language for their freedom (6–7). The central role of mythopoeia in describing and theorising women intellectuals is apparent again when Frederica resigns from her job as an extra-mural teacher of literature on the basis of her need ‘to learn something, to think’ (37)—‘thinking’ itself is the discursive object around which her life as a novelist, importantly, and thinker is shaped. Bill Potter’s reaction to a production of Shakespeare’s fantastical tragi-comedy The Winter’s Tale invokes the residue of traditional views of literature as necessary in the context of ‘human’ reality: he asserts that the play is ‘about art, it’s about the necessity of art’ (395). Bill finds that the play serves a need for alternative ‘lives’ within fiction, and furthermore for new histories and new futures, new discourses, at this moment of nascent revolutions in civil rights.

3.4   Mind and Body In this quartet, the novel form combines and hybridises literary and non-­ literary discourses in its commentary on the mind/body problem. Foucault questions ‘the distinction between the major types of discourse, or that between such forms or genres as science, literature, philosophy, history, fiction etc.’56 In doing so, he creates a list of categories while inviting us to query them—the categories possess ‘complex relations with each other, but they are not intrinsic, autochthonous, and universally recognisable characteristics’.57 The Frederica novels represent many conflicting discourses as though they have never been incompatible, in recognition of the possibilities Foucault points out. Indeed, they rely upon the interconnectedness of art, science, literature and history despite their ‘complex

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

101

relationships with each other’, because without that interconnectedness, such an experimental set of novels would not be successful. This very interconnectedness, or at least, this laying of discourses side-by-side so that they complement rather than contradict each other, is an overarching manifestation of the concept of ‘lamination’ as the novels theorise it. As Byatt told Nicolas Tredell, referring to a future in which Frederica Potter will be happy: I think the seventies and the eighties do laminate. And I suppose I think of lamination in two ways really. I remember thinking of it as a strategy for survival when I was Frederica’s age, in the sense that I thought you could possibly manage to be both at once, a passionate woman and a passionate intellectual, and efficient, if you could just switch gear and switch gear from one to the other, but if you let them all run together organically, something messy would occur and you would get overwhelmed.58

Lamination allows for both/and and not either/or relationships between discourses, periods of historical time and Frederica’s mind and body. Indeed, the novels containing her story require many discursive and structural laminations. Mary Eagleton comments on this, with reference to Byatt’s style, as follows: it is ‘partly synaesthetic but also conveys [Byatt’s] sense of architecture as she patterns her work with connected images, metaphors or significant colours’.59 Far from problematising the novels’ internal coherence, lamination makes their coherence possible, overturning the need for the very discursive unities Foucault named and questioned. Language, here, is a means not only of representation of mind/body problems but also of critique of conceptual barriers, and so is the source of the ‘productive’ tensions between concepts to which I have referred. When Foucault listed categories of discourse, he showed, as does Byatt in The Virgin in the Garden, that ‘Lists are a form of power’ (90) and a site at which language can exploit its distance from objects as a form of resistance. When Frederica Potter spends time ‘studying the forms of the exercise of power’ in this first novel of the quartet, scrutinising critically the reality she inhabits as always, she registers no distinction or conflict between the concepts of intellects and bodies. This is an important detail, since at the Blesford Girls’ Grammar school, young female pupils’ lives are organised in such a way that their minds and bodies are ascribed separate meanings and purposes, as reflected in the ‘Lists’ Frederica notes within her interior monologue:

102 

L. BIBBY

Control of pace of feet, of numbers of girls abreast, of socks, knickers, stockings, size and colour of gingham checks. Inclusion, exclusion, prominence, failure, were regulated and embodied in public lists. Lists of Posture Prizes, Conduct Marks, Tennis Teams, Debating Team, School Cert credits, Form Orders, in subjects and overall. (90)

Although such lists provoke in Frederica hatred and ‘wild energies’, she nevertheless thinks in lists, parodied here within the text, and desires to be ‘first’ on all of them. The inherent patriarchy of conventional hierarchies governs her ambition, but will lead her to problems. For instance, her desire to be ‘first’ will bring her, in Still Life, to Cambridge and a hierarchy in which she is sexually prized by male peers but seen as intellectually second rate, owing to her gender. A form of discursive power is therefore appropriated by the text itself and its protagonist, who draws physical energy from it: when looking to cast a schoolgirl to play the young Elizabeth I in Alexander Wedderburn’s play Astraea, it is ‘impossible for a teacher to distribute parts without becoming aware of Frederica’s desperate concentration, fingers, toes, eyes, mouth, strained with eagerness’ (90). Her mind and body are subjects of a reality dominated by certain discourses of femininity such as that of decorous female education. In this context, that nurtures conventional femininity as well as high-quality education, her physical and intellectual confidence appear incongruous and awkward to others. She embodies her required femaleness and feminine acting roles with ‘throbbing brio, embarrassing other girls, who felt that classroom conditions required muted tones, as a matter of good manners’ (90). Her preference for female roles, where her readings of male ones are ‘paradoxically less alarming to her involuntary audiences’ (90–91), indicates her disregard for a cultural code that denigrates her body and her gender or even defines the genders as two clearly demarcated fields of behaviour. Although Frederica is painfully self-conscious, she is still also unselfconscious in her ignorance of proper feminine behaviour and this overcomes boundaries of experience in her life: she eventually wins the part of young Elizabeth I through sheer determination. Her attitude is unconsciously politicised, as many of her actions constitute forceful rejections of a mind/body separation. Her outlook is unlike Stephanie’s, in this respect. While teaching poetry to female pupils at the local school, the elder Potter sister experiences Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn as a physical sensation analogous to the way both Potter women experience sex; sexual feelings, Clare Hanson asserts, lead them to ‘an

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

103

engulfment in physical experience, a movement into an unseen and potentially dangerous interior world which nonetheless has its own vivid shapes and contours’.60 Stephanie experiences the poem on an intellectual and physical level simultaneously, elaborating mentally on ‘a sense of the movement of the rhythm of the language which was biological, not verbal or visual’: Visual images, neither seen, in the mind’s eye, nor unseen. White forms of arrested movement under dark formal boughs. Trouble with how to ‘see’ the trodden weed. John Keats on his death-bed, requesting the removal of books, even of Shakespeare. Herself at Cambridge, looking out through glass library walls into green boughs, committing to memory, what? Asking what, why? (99)

Her physical feelings are instinctual, questioning, de-politicised and inseparable from her mental efforts in these interior paragraphs. She keeps her body ‘unnaturally still’ (98) as she thinks and, crucially, imagines the end of John Keats’s life, a historical narrative from which the present moment is made inseparable by the poem. This is a new myth of mind/body almost-reconciliation: physical or ‘interior’ thought. This interiority serves the same critical purpose as the interiority of the nineteenth-century novel observed by Mary Evans because it does not dichotomise the genders in terms of intellect. In the above passage, the often intrusive, scholarly and authorial narrator retreats into the successive foci of Stephanie’s mind in rambling sentences. The passage represents Stephanie’s still body, her temporal presence, as something that can be negotiated in relation to her intellect. This negotiation of body and mind is an easier process for her than for Frederica. On Stephanie’s wedding night, we are shown as well as told of the images that represent a remarkable balance between her physical and mental experiences. With Daniel, she had the thought, in words, that this was truly the only time in her life when her attention had all been gathered in one place—body, mind, and whatever dreams or makes images. Then the images took over. She had always a very vague imagining of the inner spaces of her body, dark interior flesh, black-­ red, red-black, flexible and shifting, larger than she imagined herself from outside, with no kind of graspable perspective, no apparent limits. (372)

The physical and mental ‘engulfment’ of sex is an unthreatening experience because Stephanie’s critical capabilities are unaffected and her body,

104 

L. BIBBY

to her at this point, is not a site of political conflict or the crux of her autonomy. Again, then, when she becomes pregnant, because the experience is welcome, she is ‘possessed by amazed delight at having done something instinctive and right. She had thought with her body, must have, and was being rewarded with pure pleasure’ (392). The change in her body has not obliterated her capacity to ‘think’ (although it slows her mind later); instead it expands that capacity to include new forms of knowledge that link organically to her female body rather than encountering the body as a limitation, although this brings with it risks and sacrifices of certain freedoms. By contrast, when Frederica embarks on a day trip that will lead her to a sexual encounter with a travelling salesman, she hopes tellingly for ‘the sense of disembodiment a good journey can confer’ (263). This word choice indicates the gulf between an enquiring mind and an awkward, in many ways, female body. For her, at age seventeen, sex equals knowledge and the chance ‘to pinpoint the sources of her discontent’, but in a clinical, causal description of the experience, she is shocked by her body’s ‘automatic greed’ and a sense disassociation from her mental state (269–270). Actual ‘disembodiment’ is not possible because of her demand for sexual experience, which cannot be separated from her body or from the social meanings of feminine sexuality that exclude the intellectual experience Frederica also wishes to gain on her ‘journey’. Still, after Stephanie’s intellectual and physical euphoria at her first pregnancy’s outset, driven by her imagination of her own interiority and its broadening of possible intellectual experiences, the pregnancy brings painful dislocations of her mind and body’s former fragile unity. Early in Still Life, her reading of Wordsworth’s poems during antenatal appointments is disturbed by material realities: heavy books, uncomfortable physical examinations and ‘a pregnant incapacity to finish sentences’ (15). Crucially, her later emotional and mental experiences as a mother are supported by the books to which the text alludes. When leaving the baby with her family as she goes to the library to read Wordsworth again, she finds herself ‘amongst the shelves of fiction, politics, household, gardening, mother-care, philosophy books’ (183)—literary and non-literary texts listed and underlying dominant discourses of womanhood, domesticity and marriage, although side-by-side and potentially laminated. Domestic discourses do not completely demarcate her life. Her interior life is preoccupied by the endlessly varied worlds of literature and its interpretations, closely related to the ‘permanent possibilities’ of myth,61 and so the

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

105

‘closed’ exterior discourses represented by the Blesford public library’s contents leave her unmoved. Instead of them, she dwells on Wordsworth’s fantastical ‘Ode’. Meanwhile, her sister at Cambridge fears the ‘confinement’ Stephanie represents, viewing that confinement as total and horrifying in a way Stephanie does not (156). Towards the end of Frederica’s marriage as depicted in Babel Tower, her interior monologues are characterised by statements, blunt reactions to the same discourses in which she does not fit, with her political (although the political vocabulary of feminism is not used) awareness that her intellectualism and gender sit uneasily together. She watches Nigel Reiver, a mere, objectified ‘naked man’, before he comes to bed, following an argument: She thinks, I am a woman, and thinks what a silly pretentious thought that is. She thinks, I thought that, because the kind of woman I am is not quite sure she is a woman, she likes to be reassured about that. I am a thin woman, a sharp woman, a wordy woman, not the sort of animal men think of at all, when they think of a woman. Cambridge obscured this, temporarily, there were so few women, we were all treated as though we were real ones, like nurses in prisons, like secretaries in barracks. (119)

Frederica suffers from a sense of separation from definitions of ‘woman’ itself—the ‘animal’ defined and therefore created by patriarchy, figured here simply as ‘men’. In the scene quoted above, she is able to ‘other’ herself because she is an intellectual woman no longer part of an institution, Cambridge, that grudgingly allowed her to ‘laminate’ (as she will later learn to do elsewhere) her gendered body and her powerful mind. She cannot submit to sex with Nigel because that would equal submitting to a damaging myth—instead, she tells him she will leave the next day. He responds with violence, reducing her body to something to be physically controlled; her mind and indeed her feelings do not figure in his concept of her. This episode of domestic brutality, related to but not reducible to Frederica’s inability to fit herself into ideas of femininity and wifely submission, is sparely and clinically described as an event and not a myth— Frederica’s personal ‘remythologisation’—a counter to Coupe’s description of ‘demythologisation’ within culture62—of herself as a mind and a female body will come later. The repetition of ‘woman’ and overlong panicked sentences are followed by the removal of Frederica’s subjectivity as we are told that ‘the man’ ‘approaches the motionless woman’—she is absent from her own bodily life because her mind is occupied ‘with total

106 

L. BIBBY

clarity’ with the pornography she has discovered among Nigel’s private papers, an unwelcome, violently patriarchal form of sexual knowledge. This description’s disturbing impersonality can be contextualised by what Linda Hutcheon views as the denaturalisation of the ‘traditional historiographic separation’ of the public and private as well as the personal and the political.63 Frederica does not need to be informed of second-wave feminism’s language to be linked to its principles, because of the novel’s dramatisation of her politicised position as a thinking wife and mother, a thinking body. Moreover, her sense of dislocation from herself mirrors other postmodern dislocations, including of the body and desire as social and historical constructions that refigure notions of individual subjectivity and Romantic ‘self-expression’.64 This traumatic moment is also the point at which separation from restrictive discourses of an isolated married life and sexual obligation becomes possible—Frederica’s story is larger, and she can then tell Nigel clearly, and unexpectedly even for herself, that their marriage is over (119). The Potter sisters’ parallel narratives continue to assert an existing, if not straightforward, link between words and things, including language and the body. Stephanie experiences reading, like sex, as an intellectual and physical experience: in the antenatal clinic, she is ‘pleased’ by the phrase ‘I am sunk in biology’ and reconciles Wordsworth’s lines with the physical and emotional sensations, good and bad, of pregnancy (16). When in A Whistling Woman Frederica becomes the presenter of a television programme, Through the Looking Glass, concerned with concepts, images, material objects and the riddling links between them, the novel is able to further examine possible reconciliations between signifiers of meaning and physical ‘things’ with empowering implications for Frederica herself. The accuracy, or otherwise, of language and especially names is evident as the narrator summarises the content of one programme as another of the lists seen often in these texts: ‘DDT and astrology, memory and revolution, the death of the past and schizophrenia, nurture and nature, teaching grammar, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Mrs Beeton and D. H. Lawrence (who went with sex and padlocks)’ (35). A programme with the theme of ‘Free Women’65 turns on literary images and metaphors of restricted feminine life, intellectual and physical, which could have been drawn from the novels of guest Julia Corbett, also a character in Byatt’s second novel The Game and described here as ‘somewhere between a lady novelist and a woman novelist’ (140), a bitter reminder of the feminine gendering of reduced prestige and a distinction that recalls George Eliot’s

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

107

sardonic essay title ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. By the time in Frederica’s life, represented by this final novel, the problem of reconciling embodiment with intellect may not be solved conclusively, but crucially, she possesses ‘many more metaphors and stories to think with, her world was richer’ (158); language and art may still bridge the gaps, hence the specific power of the woman writer-intellectual. Metaphor is indeed the literary material with which the separation between words and things and between body and mind is overcome, because metaphor allows knowledge to be represented in indefinite, evocative and exploratory ways that do not preclude authority derived from their links, intrinsically professed, to reality. The idea of metaphor permits readings of ‘a perpetual sense of horizon’ in Byatt’s fictions as examples of the intellectual’s ongoing mythography.66 In the Frederica novels, Byatt’s major metaphoric solution to the mind/body problem, her vital and still critically under-recognised ‘horizon’, is the ‘lamination’ of aspects of separate identity.

3.5  Division, Dissolution or Lamination? In The Virgin in the Garden, Frederica’s resistance to the need to either separate or reconcile intellectual imperatives and female embodiment takes the form of a sense of intellectual mastery over the slogan on her school blazer: ‘Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed’. Alexander informs her that the quotation is from Tennyson’s poem ‘Princess’, and is probably a spiteful joke at the expense of the feminist academy, ‘the bluestockings and all’, ‘the virginal idealists who claimed access to the springs of knowledge’ by writing using erotic imagery and exploiting the notion of the body. Frederica replies that she is glad her school blazer is ‘secretly obscene’ (32–33). The fountain metaphor’s sexual overtones are useful to Frederica’s fierce sense of ambition and simultaneous wish for sexual experience, and so she rejects Alexander’s account of its misogynistic history and also its image of embodiment regarded as ‘obscene’ by poets and scholars, linking it instead to her impatience with the straitlaced girls’ grammar school education that Alexander mocks. Such metaphors are hers to remould for her use, indicating once more the vital roles of literary writing and mythopoeia in her specifically feminine intellectualism. ‘Lamination’ is the major metaphor which, across the quartet, describes the process by which Frederica Potter succeeds in thriving, not only at the ‘end’ of the last novel but at many points throughout the series, despite her frequent dread of the division or dissolution of her mind and body as

108 

L. BIBBY

an intellectual woman. When Byatt asserted that she thinks ‘in metaphors’, she valorised metaphor as a more powerful theoretical tool even than theory (literary or feminist) itself,67 even though metaphor is central to theory, as this book’s following chapter argues. Frederica first considers this possibility after her disturbing sexual encounter with the doll salesman, as a way of letting ‘all these facts and things lie alongside each other like laminations, not like growing cells’ (274) (the ‘growing cells’ remind the reader of all four novels of Stephanie’s fascination, in Still Life, with ‘growing things’). Frederica’s use of the metaphor climaxes in Babel Tower when her first novel is published, titled Laminations, which literally lays various snippets of text side-by-side to create an experimental ‘whole’. Byatt has said that this striving for ‘laminated knowledge’, as well as being a ‘model of conduct and an aesthetic’ (274), is nothing less than a ‘strategy for survival’ in order to be ‘both at once, a passionate woman and a passionate intellectual’.68 The alternatives are either the impossible division of intellect and body or the devastating dissolution of intellectual capabilities, the fear articulated when frustrated young housewife Jennifer Parry warns Frederica in The Virgin in the Garden: ‘Don’t give it up, don’t stop, don’t turn into a cow and a mopper-­ upper, don’t suppose that the death of the mind can be avoided by a little rushed reading between two lots of nappies and dishes, because it can’t. Adultery you may find time for, but life, no, and thought, no’ (507, my emphasis). Life and death themselves become metaphors, respectively, for the cultivation, or not, of a woman’s intellect. At the age of seventeen, Frederica uses her sense of laminated knowledge successfully to avoid ‘a surrender of her autonomy’ along with the surrender of her virginity to the prodigy Edmund Wilkie, but this is only the first occasion when she will require the strategy. Her sense of distance from the men she subsequently meets at Cambridge, described in lists and spare details, reinforces the notion of lamination as a gathering of information for her critical scrutiny, rather than a crisis. However, her successful use of lamination is soon interrupted by her obsessive attraction to Cambridge don, Raphael Faber, whose appearance and reputation correspond with Frederica’s mental image of an ideal man—not only a lover but an intellectual mentor. Here, she risks but avoids enacting a scenario of ‘erotico-theoretical transference’ (referred to by Le Dœuff 69) by critical and creative means. Raphael is an archetypal object of this sort of female devotion to male intellectual mentors which maintains gendered hierarchies of intellectuals. However, Frederica

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

109

perceives Raphael more as a constructed image or metaphor for himself than an individual, so that Still Life’s narrator struggles ‘not to describe this face in clichés for it was in clichés that Frederica had discovered, invented, fantasised, constructed, read and written him, so: ascetic, saturnine, a little harsh, melancholy, black-browed under fine black hair over black eyes. Also a real, unknown man’ (243). The text and Frederica alike face problems in keeping Raphael ‘laminated’ from other images and knowledges because of his sexual significance to her and because there seems to be no neat metaphor to represent him or her romantic love for him. Her unfulfilled, immature love for Raphael presents fewer problems for Frederica as an intellectual than her marriage to Nigel Reiver does. Early in Babel Tower, her desire to escape the inertia of her married life is impeded by Nigel’s verbal construction of her as no more than a ‘girl’ who has wilfully become a wife and mother, a suspicious and irresponsible ‘great one for reading’ who only wishes to work outside the home so that she can see other men (37). To him, in other words, she is an unstable, hyper-sexualised female body whose intellect (unlike her sexuality itself) is useless to him and thus a nuisance.70 Nigel uses certain unspecified, affectionate words, we are told, to keep Frederica confined to a certain discourse and maintain his power; his language ‘is for keeping things safe in their places’ and safely defined (38–39). Frederica becomes a victim of this other form of lamination, both here and when she is in a gathering of unhappy wives and mothers at a party and accused of being a ‘bad woman’ by one of them, on account of her separation from Nigel and wish to earn her own living (253). Even before she writes her emblematic novel, writing is the mode of resistance she eventually chooses to consolidate her strategy of lamination. Required to write a statement about her marriage to support her divorce case, she finds she cannot. Beginning instead to prepare a lecture on Howards End and Women in Love, she considers their presentations of romantic love, ‘Oneness’ and separation (308–312). Her relationship with John Ottakar allows her, temporarily at least, to successfully laminate fulfilling oneness and autonomy in which to ‘think’. Crucially, it also leads to her idea for the book Laminations—a reaction to ‘the Romantic desire for everything to be One’ (360) which as Byatt’s texts have suggested, leads to painful subjective division and dissolution for women who have historically had to negate intellect and creativity in order to participate in sexual love, epitomised by marriage and the family. Drafts for Laminations, inserted into the narrative without annotation, include many unrelated literary and non-literary documents, side-by-side,

110 

L. BIBBY

complementary, but nonetheless unmixed. We learn in A Whistling Woman that the book is published after Frederica has kept its writing a secret, and indeed, there are no previous references to it in this final instalment of the quartet; it is kept ‘written out’ of or laminated from the rest of her existence and kept purely for herself until its publication. Laminations, like the allegedly obscene Babbletower and other fictitious novels-within-novels in Byatt’s series, must negotiate the shadow of Leavisite literary history symbolised by Frederica’s father and his demands that his daughters shun feminine things (265). By standing alone and largely unannounced, these books represent another form of knowledge and discourse—a new, amorphous ‘canon’ of literary forms—laminated from a problematic and also patriarchal canon. Byatt’s new literary mythology permits and supports itself in this way. Her novels’ concept of lamination may not be a definitive answer to the mind/body problem—it does not address the problem of female embodiment within patriarchy itself (what the body itself is and means), or of surmounting every practical problem that results from this—but lamination does overcome the need to create utopian, new unities that would themselves be patriarchal in their claim to authority. Social and conceptual limitations remain attached to gender identities, affecting every intellectual regardless of gender, and the four novels’ sprawling forms and content suggest that exploration of possible laminations is the most useful answering strategy, as opposed to solution or dismissal of mind/body problems. In any case, certain bodily experiences cannot be theorised away or considered as ‘myth’ in and of themselves. For Frederica as for her sister Stephanie, her biology, her corporeal, ‘real’ female self, asserts itself most fully in pregnancy, which is both the quartet’s final crisis and one of its suggested resolutions or opportunities for lamination. Although a solely female experience, pregnancy is the closest thing to complete unity between mind and body and between the real and the imagined that is possible for the Potter women.

3.6  Conclusion The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman interact with the mind/body problem by looking backward into the textual past in order to look forward into a disjointed and uncertain future. Any possible solution to the woman intellectual’s major crisis is always contingent on temporal, physical and largely inescapable realities demonstrated by history, chiefly sexuality, birth and death. These tropes of reality

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

111

are confronted by the open ending of A Whistling Woman. Lena Steveker has accused the entire Frederica quartet of failing to deconstruct the entrenched, Neoplatonic dichotomy of body and mind which it criticises,71 for instance in Still Life’s representation of Stephanie’s intellectual frustration during her marriage and in its descriptions of childbirth. In Steveker’s view, these scenes represent the female body as a threat to the female mind, reinforcing patriarchal cultural imagery.72 In addition, this critic points out that Frederica finds it impossible to reconcile sexual satisfaction in her relationships with intellectual freedom, and like her sister she suffers from mental sluggishness during pregnancy.73 However, this reading draws crucial attention to the point at the apparent end of the final novel when it seems that Frederica, pregnant (emblematically) for a second time, will be happy in a relationship with a scientist, Luk Lysgaard-­ Peacock, the only man she has been involved with who respects her intellect as well as enjoying her sexuality along with her.74 Although Steveker rightly regards this relationship as a form of resolution to Frederica’s personal mind/body problem, affording her intellectual as well as physical happiness, her reading ignores the four novels’ positioning in relation to historical narratives and the necessary limitations of the solutions they offer to the woman intellectual’s crisis. The past is defined as the past, partly in that it is different from the present75 and cannot access the future. In the historical epoch encompassed by the quartet, Byatt’s intellectual women cannot fully reconcile their minds and bodies because in the recognisable version of reality the texts represent, this was mostly impossible, but resistance to whatever prevents them doing so is not. The Neoplatonic gender dichotomy of body and mind cannot be deconstructed without deconstructing gender itself. This is not something Byatt’s ‘fictively historical’ novels seek to do, concerned as they are with memory (often Byatt’s own memories, as discussed in the Tredell interview) and texts which refer to the ‘real’ as it is understood and commonly figured in fiction. The novels do, however, succeed in ‘laminating’ many conflicting realities, even if only temporarily, and of answering patriarchal myths mythopoeically with less familiar, more encouraging myths of ‘lamination’ itself. The end of A Whistling Woman suggests that smaller, personal reconciliations of mind and body are possible, even despite the frequent primacy of female biology during pregnancy. The penultimate chapter ends with highly suggestive metaphors: Frederica is perturbed ‘in body and mind’ by her feelings for Luk following a one night stand—her ‘laminations’ are

112 

L. BIBBY

‘slipping’ and she is literally ‘full of life’ [411]). The language here suggests reconciliation and unity as much as disturbance, because ambivalence always gestures towards possibilities. Laminations, again, may not be permanent solutions, but perhaps strategies for use during ongoing and always different experiences. When she learns that she is pregnant, we are firmly located historically in ‘January 1970’ (412) by that dated heading. Her life, far from being uprooted, is ‘taking on a new, fluent, elegantly provisional shape’ (412) and she fights the mental confusion caused by her physical condition with some success (415)—like Stephanie in Still Life, she goes some way towards balancing her changing body with her intellectual power. After a panicked time spent alone, conveyed in lists of short, sharp statements, she and Luk are reunited and, importantly, they are presented as free to choose their next course of action. Unconfined to any fixed discourse of family life or gender roles, or any conventionally romantic happy ending, we are told ‘They could go anywhere’ (421). Historical narratives convince us that Frederica will encounter internal and external conflict because of her gender, as she has before, but accessible history is composed of texts, appearances, metaphors and myths which, as an intellectual, she is equipped to answer and resist. Byatt is less concerned with the ‘facts’ that may be compromised as we question and fictionalise received histories, than with the proliferations of new knowledge possible when myths are recognised, remade, perpetuated and laminated wherever they exist in textual culture. Her inventive depiction of these possibilities across the four Frederica novels constitutes her major innovation in representing and contending with the ‘mind/body problem’.

Notes 1. Tredell, Conversations with Critics, 61. 2. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd edition, 2002 (New York: Routledge, 1989), 157. 3. A. S. Byatt, Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings (London: Chatto and Windus, 1991. Reprint, London: Vintage, 1993), 170. 4. Tredell, Conversations with Critics, 61. 5. Steven Earnshaw, Beginning Realism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 14. 6. Earnshaw, Beginning Realism, 29.

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

113

7. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated from the German by W.  R. Trask, 1953 (Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 557. 8. Ga ̨siorek, Post-War British Fiction, 10. 9. Ga ̨siorek, Post-War British Fiction, 181. 10. Auerbach, Mimesis, 557. 11. Earnshaw, Beginning Realism, 29. 12. Earnshaw, Beginning Realism, 192–193. 13. Byatt uses this idea implicitly to link her work to George Eliot’s who, whilst considered a major representative of nineteenth-century realism, only ever published novels set in the past. I thank Professor Ruth Robbins for first pointing this out to me. 14. Earnshaw, Beginning Realism, 17. 15. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 166. 16. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 170. 17. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980. Reprint: London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 11. 18. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 2. 19. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 21. 20. Julian Gitzen, “A.  S. Byatt’s Self-Mirroring Art,” Critique 36, no. 2 (1995): 83–95. 21. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 12. 22. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 181. 23. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 89. 24. White, Metahistory, 3. 25. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 7. 26. Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 118. 27. Moers, Literary Women, 244. 28. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 9. 29. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 11. 30. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1966. Translated from the French by Tavistock/Routledge, 1970. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2002), 17. 31. This idea is elaborated by Still Life’s narrator on p. 200, as I discuss later in this chapter. 32. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 20. 33. Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 155. 34. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 17. 35. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 4. 36. Evans, “Can Women Be Intellectuals?” 30. 37. George Eliot, The Essays of George Eliot, Project Gutenberg ebook, 1883, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28289.

114 

L. BIBBY

38. Norma Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London, Pimlico, 2004), 3. 39. Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, 4–5. 40. Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, 8–9. 41. Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, 306. 42. Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 36. 43. Evans, “Can Women Be Intellectuals?” 32. 44. Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 156. 45. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 96. 46. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 97. 47. Clare Hanson, Hysterical Fictions: The ‘Woman’s Novel’ in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 2. 48. Hanson, Hysterical Fictions, 12. 49. Hanson, Hysterical Fictions, 13. 50. Nîmes is also the setting of Byatt’s story ‘Crocodile Tears’, in the volume Elementals. The story features another subversion of a woman-centred, romantic fantasy of escape. 51. Tess Cosslett, “Childbirth from the Woman’s Point of View in British Women’s Fiction: Enid Bagnold’s The Squire and A. S. Byatt’s Still Life,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 8, no. 2 (1989): 264. 52. Stephanie’s accidental death also recalls the death of Leonard as a result of a falling bookcase in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), which Frederica teaches in an extra-mural literature class in Babel Tower. 53. M.  H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), ii. 54. This fear of becoming ‘unreal’ by embracing scholarly life is experienced in a more intense form by Griselda Wellwood in The Children’s Book (2009), when she becomes a pioneering woman student at Cambridge in the early twentieth century. For her, intellectual life necessitates complete detachment from ‘real’, feminine life and there are not yet any socially sanctioned alternatives for middle-class women. 55. Tredell, Conversations with Critics, 66. 56. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 22. 57. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 22. 58. Tredell, Conversations with Critics, 69. 59. Mary Eagleton, Clever Girls and the Literature of Women’s Upward Mobility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 69. 60. Hanson, Hysterical Fictions, 133. 61. Coupe, Myth, 100. 62. Coupe, Myth, 10. 63. Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 139–139.

3  MINDS AND BODIES 

115

64. Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 139–139. 65. This is also a chapter heading used in Doris Lessing’s experimental novel The Golden Notebook (1962), the protagonist of which is a woman writer-intellectual. 66. Coupe, Myth, 100–101. 67. Tredell, Conversations with Critics, 61. 68. Tredell, Conversations with Critics, 69. 69. Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary. 70. Their relationship, with its power struggle meditated in language, is thus reminiscent of that between Nora and Torvald in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). 71. Lena Steveker, Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 66. 72. Steveker, Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt, 68. 73. Steveker, Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt, 68. 74. Steveker, Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt, 72. 75. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 113.

CHAPTER 4

Women Intellectuals and Sexual Specificity

4.1   Introduction This book has established the argument that mythopoeia, or the process by which literature extends and alters mythology, is the major discursive force behind A. S. Byatt’s fictional constructions of woman intellectuals. Her fiction’s mythopoeic strategies are already the subject of works of criticism by Susan Sellers (2001) and Gillian M.  E. Alban (2003), and Mary Eagleton has approached some of Byatt’s intellectual women (2004, 2018), but no work has yet considered Byatt’s treatment of the public intellectual specifically as a myth. Byatt’s fiction remythologises the intellectual by showing the limitations of the conventional myths underpinning it; one of the most important of these is the mind/body problem discussed in Chap. 3, or Byatt’s term for the problem of reconciling intellect (gendered traditionally as masculine) with a female body. The fiction can accomplish this and also gesture towards the possible multiplicities of new mythologies that could take its place, because that project has already been underway for many years, carried out by feminist researchers and writers. However, these have been rendered specific and separate in relation to the mainstream, ‘universal’ discourses of history, philosophy, sociology and even literature that ultimately seem to determine who and what intellectuals are. Feminist theory carries with it internal tensions,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Bibby, A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_4

117

118 

L. BIBBY

therefore, because the other theories they must not only answer but draw on are largely written and disseminated by men. Bloom’s notion of authorial ‘anxiety of influence’ (1973) haunts feminist thought by providing no clear place for specific, women intellectuals, but can only continue to do so if we accept the patriarchal mythology governing Bloom’s theory itself that suggests that ideas and art are created as per the Romantic male ‘birth’ myth and only properly passed down the male line, in a largely unbroken lineage. This chapter argues that in The Game (1967), The Biographer’s Tale (2000) and The Little Black Book of Stories (2003), A. S. Byatt constructs and positions intellectual women as mythopoeic forces at odds with the theoretical assumptions limiting women’s unproblematic recognition as intellectuals. I suggest that Byatt’s fiction maintains a particular dialogue with (as opposed to merely ‘inheriting’ and re-using) feminist theory’s late twentieth-century adaptation of Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist ideas, to critique uses of language and representation that maintain the woman intellectual’s subordination as the other of the male. Where that myth is denied, others are made possible, and their discursive authority is given a place, a voice and functions. Byatt’s work shows us that both mythology and theory are tools rather than objects for dogged political commitment—commitment that sets itself up to fail in some way by limiting its own possible uses. The chapter reads Luce Irigaray’s contentious idea of sexual specificity, which presents an alternative to women’s sexual otherness and place within hierarchies of gender, as of pivotal importance to how the woman intellectual is figured in cultural history as the inferior other of the male. Byatt’s three texts explore and ultimately support a view that the woman intellectual is sexually specific in ways related to language, representation and the production of critical discourse because to deny any and all sexual difference is to create a false unity among the genders, a misleading construct. Women intellectuals must make the new, critical/ artistic discourse that resists their conventional, specific marginalisation. The chapter’s remaining three sections use these chosen texts by Byatt and selections from the works of Derrida, Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Michèle Le Dœuff to identify productive points of dialogue, disagreement and tension between them, and to stress the significance of mythopoeic images of the intellectual and gender to be found within theory and extended in Byatt’s fiction.

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

119

4.2   Feminist Theory and Women’s Writing A.  S. Byatt’s distrust of cultural theory and politicised criticism is well documented, as I have pointed out previously. Her essays, reviews and interviews are shaped by her background as an academic still involved in literary criticism by way of her author status, but one who paradoxically possesses and continually negotiates a difficult relationship to the ‘schools of thought’ to which she claims to be a ‘non-believer and a non-­belonger’.1 Such schools of thought have nonetheless dominated literary studies since the second half of the twentieth century, after the time Byatt was a student at Cambridge. Her non-fiction work, with its embedded, fragmented autobiography of herself as a student, writer, literary critic and public voice on subjects with which she has been professionally and personally concerned, is a model of a woman intellectual’s output. Despite her hesitation when discussing feminism and women’s studies, her non-fiction and undeniably feminist fictions must be seen as part of the same enterprise. Her works are best described as the sort of ‘feminist critical fictions’ which, owing a debt to Foucault’s anti-essentialism in the areas of history, identity and the formation of ‘knowledge regimes’, rethink patriarchy as a symptom or effect of certain discourses rather than as a monolithic cause of women’s oppression.2 So far, this study has scrutinised the role of Byatt’s fiction in ‘re-presenting’ the woman intellectual, with reference to the status of many past and present women intellectuals as women novelists. Although overtly gendered as masculine in many sources, the designation of ‘writer-intellectual’ can alternatively be seen as gendered in favour of the feminine. The mutability of this myth appears possible when we reflect on, for example, historical narratives of England in the nineteenth century and France in the twentieth century, when many women intellectuals came to prominence as much for their literary output as their non-literary work. This historically gendered literary productivity is a feature of the woman intellectual’s sexual specificity which I here explore as an extension of her mythology, achieved by feminist theory and figured continually, then, in fiction. The Western literary canon is still male-­ dominated, but nonetheless a huge body of literary criticism, not all explicitly feminist, attests to the ‘greatness’ and exceptionality of a proportion of women within that canon. Because of Byatt’s interest in this canon, and despite her stated ambivalence towards feminist politics, her writing is steeped in a gendered mythology of intellectuals and writing which her representations of women address and counter.

120 

L. BIBBY

In Byatt’s retrospective comments on her university education under F. R. Leavis and her subsequent training as a teacher and academic, she recalls learning Leavis’s ‘word-by-word, questioning method of close reading’ and maintaining the method as ‘protection’ against the ‘distorting interpretative fervour’ encouraged by French structuralism and the related critical theory that developed during the 1960s.3 Her respect for Leavis’s outlook functions here as a truly protective ‘mantle’ of patriarchal ideas, keeping the seemingly destructive power of theory at bay in a way that is both frustrating and instructive—instructive because it indicates the subtlety of Byatt’s feminist project. Her overt suspicion of the uses and abuses of theory can distract us as readers of her fiction from the extent to which she has worked as a literary author within, alongside and against theory. Her literary practice goes beyond pitting the dogma of ‘close reading’ against the potential ‘destruction’ of theory as a binary opposition and viewing one or the other as suspicious; for her, they both have their uses, apparently as indicators of the ‘horizons’ and ‘possibilities’ represented by myth. This relates closely to the conceptual basis of Christien Franken’s monograph on Byatt, which recognises her fiction’s movement around and beyond theoretical and political ideas without limitation to one or another (2001). This is a feminist strategy, when feminist politics is viewed as a route through and outside totalising, patriarchal ideology rather than simply another, opposing ideology claiming to have the answers. This subsection’s title refers to ‘feminist theory’ and ‘women’s fiction’ in order to suggest another kind of misleading opposition that does not, in truth, hold. The relationship of feminist theory to fiction authored by women is in fact extremely close, inventive and full of productive differences and tensions. Catherine Belsey’s assertion that ‘there is no practice without theory’4 holds true, as Byatt’s feminist critical fictions and feminist theory fulfil many of the same functions as each other. Whereas Byatt’s non-fiction critical readings incorporate the kind of ‘suppressed, unformulated’ theoretical assumptions Belsey comments on in her introduction to Critical Practice,5 her fiction demonstrates theoretical awareness in a way that makes its ‘incoherencies, its contradictions and its silences’6 as important as its points of unity. Belsey’s use of the language of poststructuralist theory is particularly apt. I will now read The Game, The Biographer’s Tale and The Little Black Book of Stories alongside European poststructuralist and feminist theory because these theoretical texts are more closely related to the features and functions of Byatt’s literary texts than much of the Anglo-American

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

121

theoretical feminist theory to which I have so far referred. The fictions maintain creative and intertextual engagements with poststructuralist, French feminisms which is often deceptively negative, on its surface. Her review of Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, for example, is dismissive of the aim of ‘Mlle Wittig’ to create a ‘rupture of the patterns of written language’; this is, Byatt contends, ‘a more pressing problem for the French, with French’s ubiquitous indications of gender, than for the English’.7 The review subsequently shows Byatt’s extensive expertise in and appreciation of gender issues within French language and theory. Such a contradictory ‘appreciative critique’ makes comments like those in her interview with Nicolas Tredell, where she describes her moving portrayal in the novel Still Life of Stephanie’s mistreatment while giving birth as ‘nothing to do with feminist theory’8 seem mischievous, because Byatt’s literary enactment of birth certainly does intervene in feminist dialogues (as I suggested in Chap. 3), even though she has claimed to find theoretical movements themselves ‘baffling and reductive’.9 Immediately in the same interview, she makes the assertion I referred to earlier, ‘I think in metaphors, not in propaganda,’ apparently dismissing feminist theory, but simultaneously suggesting that metaphor—key to both fiction and feminist theory—constitutes a much more politically useful discourse than does outright propaganda although they may be part of one project. Elizabeth Grosz’s Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (1989), an overview and contextualisation of the work of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Michèle Le Dœuff, offers some possible reasons for why a woman author might hesitate to cite feminist theory directly, at least in her non-­ fiction. Conceptions of women’s sexual specificity—their difference from, rather than their inferiority to or opposition to, men—are central to the work of Kristeva, Irigaray and Le Dœuff, and are obviously contentious in relation to the liberal feminism with which Byatt associated herself more readily when she described ‘the future’ her fiction looks forward to, in which women would gain (unspecified) freedoms previously denied.10 Sexual specificity and related concepts also upset any notion of an authoritative and genderless subject position of the kind Byatt has necessarily tried to adopt in her critical work, and which must have felt hard-won after her time as a woman student of overtly patriarchal English studies in the 1950s. The idea of that subject position’s genderlessness is another unavoidable myth but Byatt has nonetheless made that ‘genderless’ subject a persistent part of her fictional strategy, as is evidenced by her formidably knowledgeable, omniscient narrators. These represent enactments

122 

L. BIBBY

of a subjectivity that still seems impossible in ‘real’ life and culture, and are striking feminist achievements. Byatt’s distancing of her critical position from those of often purposely obscure poststructuralist feminists is understandable in this light. That distancing is akin to what Susan Wiseman describes as Susan Sontag’s reluctance to allow herself ‘to be drawn to address the relationship between her female body, her writing and her status as an intellectual’,11 and the manner in which Sontag instead attempted to write under an ‘de-gendered’ ‘I’ that is impossible to achieve, leaving femininity ‘suppressed’ in her work.12 Wiseman shows that a reading of Sontag’s work through that of Hélène Cixous permits the critic to ‘investigate, question, explore the possibilities of the feminine’.13 Cixous’s ideas are thus interrogative tools rather than the destructive new orthodoxy Byatt appears to reject when she rejects critical theory. This distinction is recognised in her fiction, however, where metaphor is common to both her overtly literary narratives and her pastiches and mimicries of the other textual forms. Metafictional and experimental realist forms allow boundaries to move constantly. Her fictions appropriate and mobilise some of the same linguistic liberties taken by theorists like Luce Irigaray, described by Grosz as involving ‘new forms of discourse, new ways of speaking, a “poetry” which is necessarily innovative and evocative of new conceptions of women and femininity’14—and the material of a proliferation of new mythologies. Irigaray’s highly innovative ‘styles’ have resulted in her work’s centrality in the readings that follow, as their reliance on metaphor, I argue, work much like Byatt’s fiction in their mythopoeic project. Grosz’s commentary on the prominent place of Derridean deconstruction in the context of feminist theory supplies the terms with which to scrutinise such theory and Byatt’s fiction together. Grosz indicates that on a linguistic level, binary oppositions ‘provide a methodological validation for knowledges in the West’, with one superior term possessing its privilege as a result of ‘disavowing its intimate dependence on its negative double’.15 The idea of fully deconstructing naturalised binaries such as good/bad, mind/body and man/woman is still a provocative and difficult one, but has been central to Derridean deconstruction, or the process of destabilising logocentric discourses, from its earliest inception. Importantly, Grosz stresses the view of deconstruction not as a pre-existing method, but instead a series of ‘close reading’ exercises (echoing Byatt’s description of the reading method she took from F. R. Leavis, but referring to a very different strategy) seeking out ‘points of unrecognised

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

123

vulnerability’—paradox, excess, undecidability and points where the text ‘spills over its conceptual boundaries’16 in a process described in comparable terms, of ‘discontinuity, rupture, threshold’, by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge.17 This is the context—the absorption of deconstruction into feminist theory and its later interpretations as approaches, rather than oppressive new orthodoxies—in which my readings of Byatt’s fiction apply these terms. The role of the literary text in deconstruction, as an object, a catalyst and a site for experimentation, signals its importance when thinking of the woman intellectual as part of a binary opposition, recurring in historical representations, in which the mythic, paradigmatic male is still privileged. The very lack of authoritative or conclusive instructions in Derrida’s theories makes it impossible to select from his theoretical output specific statements of this ‘method’ or strategies. However, his description of différance assists in understanding the foundation of deconstruction as used by feminists including Irigaray, as it describes features inherent in culture, needing only to be analysed. Having explained the notion of the ‘sign’ as it exists in place of the ‘signified’ or ideal meaning or referent, the ‘present in its absence’, Derrida continues: The first consequence to be drawn from this is that the signified concept is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself. Essentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of a systematic play of differences.18

Logocentrism is a powerful metaphor of the authority of knowledge as dependent on the perceived unity between word or ‘sign’, and ‘real’ thing or ‘signified’. The intellectual and the woman intellectual, privileged and ‘other’ term, respectively, are perceived as having a different relationship to knowledge as intellectuals as well as distinct places within that relationship owing to their respective genders. Moreover, this applies to any ‘version’ of the woman intellectual, in any given cultural context. The distinctiveness of the woman intellectual can be described in terms of ‘sexual difference rather than sexual differentiation’, to cite Grosz in her assessment of Irigaray’s work.19 ‘Sexual’ difference, referring to the difference of the female body from the male as each is biologically and culturally constructed, is usefully separate from any idea of ‘intellectual’ difference as a concept or image (I will return to the idea of ‘images’).

124 

L. BIBBY

Defining the figure of the intellectual woman on her own terms, although it departs from liberal feminist calls for women’s intellectual ‘equality’ (very difficult and perhaps limiting, as my discussion of the mind/body problem attempted to show), is an appealing prospect, as is Irigaray’s project of deconstructing binary oppositions to remove one term’s privilege. This is because, for many reasons, the woman intellectual cannot gain the same representational legitimacy as the male without adopting the masculine subject position by, for instance, succumbing to the myth of the ‘anxiety of influence’ or even accepting a clear ‘genealogy’ of women writers, as did Virginia Woolf (1929 and 1938) and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979). Irigaray works with this exact problem by speculating on the potential benefits of releasing intellectuals of either gender from limiting binaries. Like Derrida, Irigaray does not present an authoritative method, thus sidestepping the problems of authority and its gender. Instead, she engages in exercises in deconstruction and intertextuality which exemplify the exploratory effect of grouping texts together, particularly when drawn from separate discourses, and bringing them into dialogue. Among the ‘liberties’ mentioned earlier are Irigaray’s tactic in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) of creating an actual dialogue with Freud’s theories of femininity to expose the ‘Old Dream of Symmetry’, and the image of woman as an inadequate man, underpinning them. Addressing the absent-present author of the patriarchal theory directly as ‘you’, Irigaray poses a sequence of questions, exploiting the strategy of ‘dialogue’ as it is used in the humanities and applying the discourse of psychoanalysis back to one of its ‘fathers’—both his work and representations of the man himself. This critical, female, intellectual voice is decisive as Irigaray practices what Grosz refers to as her ‘celebrations of female specificity in discursive form’.20 This style leads onto a series of subsections under the title of ‘Speculum’, referring to the volume’s main metaphor. This speculum is an image of a curved mirror designed to look specifically at women, envisaged to offset Western culture’s entrenched patriarchal tendency to define women only in terms of their level of ‘sameness’ to men (beside its gynaecological meaning). As Irigaray explains using psychoanalytic terms and imagery early in the volume: The “differentiation” into two sexes derives from the a priori assumption of the same, since the little man that the little girl is, must become a man minus certain attributes whose paradigm is morphological—attributes capable of

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

125

determining, of assuring, the reproduction-specularisation of the same. A man minus the possibility of (re)presenting oneself as a man = a normal woman.21

The process of ‘specularisation’ encompasses cultural representation, the point at which Irigaray envisages a possible difference, or opportunity for women to be represented as distinct beyond the ‘reproduction-­ specularisation of the same’. Irigaray’s readings thus seek out this process as it is represented in various texts, while maintaining awareness of the phallocentrism, closely related to logocentrism, in all language and all terms. ‘Where will the other spring up again?’ Irigaray asks, predicting that the dominant male subject, assured in his position by woman’s lack in relation to him, ‘will be multiple, plural, sometimes di-formed [sic], but it will still postulate itself as the cause of all the mirages that can be enumerated endlessly and therefore put back together again as one. A fantastic, phantasmic fragmentation.’22 These statements imply an open-ended project or set of possibilities in which subject positions could be questioned and new representations instated endlessly. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984), Irigaray’s ideas in Speculum crystallise into ‘the work of sexual difference’23—not an authoritative, ultimately restricting and patriarchal method, but a set of principles and a hugely important project that still has yet to be widely implemented over three decades after the book’s first publication in France in 1984. The notion of ‘work’, used in this context, brings to mind Mary Poovey’s later explanation of ‘the ideological work of gender’ in the nineteenth century as those constructions of gender identity that, while claiming authority, were always in formation and thus ‘open to revision, dispute, and the emergence of oppositional formulations’.24 The ‘work of sexual difference’ is the work of constant revision and dispute in answer to culture’s dominant, patriarchal, ideological acts. As a postulate of feminist theory, sexual difference emphasises feminist theory’s status as a separate branch of knowledge within theory and philosophy more broadly. In ‘Women’s Time’ (1979), Julia Kristeva reads the history of successive ‘generations’ of feminism as phases in a process of representation. When Byatt criticises feminist theory as inhibiting the value of her own observations and impressions as a young woman, she implicitly identifies with what Kristeva calls the ‘first’ generation of the women’s movement; those who ‘aspired to gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history’ in campaigns for women’s equality and restoration into history itself by way of cultural movements, including

126 

L. BIBBY

existentialism. Kristeva posits that these feminists supported a generalised concept of ‘Universal Woman’ in line with ‘the socio-political life of nations’.25 Byatt’s feminism, professed with hesitation in her non-fiction as a long-standing belief in progress towards times of greater and greater equality between the genders, rests on a universalised and mythologised set of problems and solutions, for instance when her autobiographical reminiscences connect with broader historical narratives of women’s lives but she does not examine the ideologies at the root of specific problems. Her fiction addresses this precise lack. Her literary practice shares more with the feminists of Kristeva’s ‘second phase’ who ‘refused’ notions of linear time and the problems of universality (linked to problems of structural inequality) in order to ‘seek to give a language to the intra-subjective and corporeal experiences left mute by culture in the past’26—that culture being governed by patriarchal mythologies. Importantly, the ‘artists or writers’ of Kristeva’s account practice the open-ended, ‘exploded, plural, fluid’ feminist criticism of which Irigaray is exemplary. They are the recognisable feminist writer-­ intellectuals with whom Byatt must be identified if her fiction is to be fully implicated in woman intellectuals’ cultural refiguration, by means of the same remythologisation Kristeva practices here. Besides Irigaray and Kristeva, as in Elizabeth Grosz’s book mentioned earlier, this chapter treats Michèle Le Dœuff’s theory of the philosophical imaginary27 as another aspect of a group of ideas central to any project exploring sexual difference as opposed to the overt feminist propaganda which Byatt avoids. Le Dœuff’s work, in common with Irigaray’s, examines intertextually the condition of texts that have made a ‘blind spot’ of women generally and intellectual women in particular within the histories of philosophy and ideas. More than Kristeva or Irigaray, she is careful initially to emphasise the avowed separateness of discourses: philosophy ‘is not a story, not a pictorial description, not a work of pure literature’, and is ‘inscribed and declares its status as philosophy through a break with myth, fable, the poetic, the domain of the image’.28 This ‘break’, however, is certainly deceptive when we consider that myth and narrative are often inseparable—there are indeed limits to ‘empiricism’ in the language on which humanity depends both to express ideas and create art.29 Philosophy does, nevertheless, undercut its own ‘allegedly complete rationality’30 by incorporating images that are not only literary but also sites of linguistic instability and playfulness.

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

127

On its surface, philosophy retains a ‘metadiscourse’ or commentary about itself to protect its status, an endeavour that always fails as a result of the ‘philosophical imaginary’—the ‘other’ side it denies. Le Dœuff suggests that the discipline then responds by ‘projecting the shameful side of philosophy onto an Other’ which might be myth, children’s stories, folklore or other ‘lower’ discourses.31 Le Dœuff’s model of the internal instability of phallocentric disciplines supports the idea of the closeness of separate discourses which Byatt’s fiction constantly exploits—the ‘Frederica’ quartet is a case in point, as Chap. 3 argued. In addition, these instabilities and the constant presence of more or less familiar myths allow Byatt to put to work the feminist ideas and politics that she simultaneously rejects. Fiction and non-fiction have an irreducibly different relationship to ontology; Derrida famously states that ‘There is no outside-text’ because writing always represents the ‘disappearance’ or absence of reality or the ‘natural presence’ or site of meaning.32 Poststructuralist theory therefore reasserts the text’s central role in ensuring that representational practices do not stagnate, politically or otherwise.

4.3   The Game In A.  S. Byatt’s second novel The Game (1967), images cross not only between different discourses but between text’s and meaning’s supposed ‘natural presence’ in reality, as Derrida defined it. Literature has the power to change reality, sometimes fatally, in Byatt’s chilling imagining and exploration of the notion (although it is not referred to directly) that no Derridean ‘outside-text’ exists. A rivalry between two sisters centring on a man they both love culminates in novelist Julia writing a book whose protagonist is based on her sister Cassandra, an Oxford don. Byatt’s text is unsettling and difficult to classify in terms of genre, for many reasons related to its representational practices. In broad narrative terms, the sisters’ trajectories are determined by their closeness to or distance from discourses of family, religion, and the cultural and technological mediation of ideas. Julia is the highly insecure wife of a social worker, while Cassandra is isolated by her reclusive personality and devotion to her occupation. Cassandra becomes increasingly unstable as she tries to disentangle what is ‘real’ from ideas, fantasies, fears and Julia’s literary work. They are both in love with Simon Moffitt, a naturalist whose work is the subject of a television programme. The sisters are enclosed in a text whose experimental-­ realist narrative is disturbed intrinsically by its awareness of the same

128 

L. BIBBY

problems of logic, reality (ontology) and representation that are at the root of Derridean deconstruction, and which can be read productively alongside Irigaray and Le Dœuff’s explorations of feminine subjectivity. Julia and Cassandra enjoy no certainties in their lives and so become ‘images’ of female victimisation by phallocentrism and by their lack of clear ideas of their own bodies and minds, while those are mediated by language. They suffer initially from a Derridean disturbance of linearity as an organising principle of time; in Derrida’s definition, linearity is that which has classified cultural ‘scripts’ and described their history, most emblematically in the ‘book’ itself.33 In his account, ‘the enigmatic model of the line is thus the very thing that philosophy could not see when it had its eyes open on the interior of its own history.’34 Philosophy might have been historically unaware of its internal inconsistencies, but Byatt’s novel recognises and exploits them in a dialectical, feminist ‘answer’. Julia Corbett suffers telling anxiety over dinner parties and the cultural status of her occupation as a popular novelist—she longs to escape the image of ‘the woman writer’ and become an apparently more gender-­ neutral ‘expert on the art of the novel’ (10), in command of higher language. In other words, she wishes to mythologise herself as an author in command of the authorial ‘I’, as Susan Sontag tried and was unable to do.35 This attitude changes to a deeper disturbance when she first views Simon Moffitt’s nature programme. The narrator’s commentary (not Simon’s own voice, as is later jarringly revealed) on the chaos of the Amazon basin is the reader’s only access to that chaos, and by implication Julia’s, too. Its imagery is chaotic, and the commentary itself makes no distinction between physical and mental worlds, or between discourses, referring to literary authors as readily as famous explorers; language creates the world of the programme as Julia receives it. She hears that, in this world, ‘Nothing is fixed: maps are approximations’ (10) and suffers as a result of having no clear guide to the irregularity of language or images. She struggles to ‘see’ confusing television images mediated by language: Julia’s eye was bewildered by a series of changes in focus—close-ups of knots of creepers or areas of powdery bark, vistas into the depths of externally extended, haphazardly cluttered cathedrals, between whose pillars the sun occasionally burst in long, white, hissing stars which rested on the leaves—a phenomenon the camera can hold, as the eye can not. It was alien and enveloping, in no way pretty. (11)

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

129

Derrida’s ‘natural presence’ of reality is never quite present here, as names of ‘things’ are outnumbered by verbs, adjectives and metaphors, movements and impressions. What Julia sees is always just out of reach, even to herself, as language becomes what the narrator of Still Life called ‘abstraction, a reflection, of mind, not mirror’ (200), dismissing the image of the ‘mirror’ that has been limiting to women and attributing discursive value to literary representations of the ‘mind’ itself. While Julia views, but cannot clearly ‘see’, Simon’s programme, elsewhere Cassandra experiences splits between the discourses she inhabits as an academic, a member of her College community, and a teacher. Sections of her essay on Malory, a letter, and a report on a student appear as part of the narrative in order to demonstrate the tenuousness of the links between language and the ‘reality’ from which Cassandra will become (ultimately, fatally) disconnected. She is preoccupied with the linear time which anchors her, at first, to the historical rather than subjective time described by Kristeva:36 ‘here, she thought, looking again at her watch, I am. Here I am. Imagination and all, God knows’ (16–17). In her isolated college room, moreover, she clings to objects; she surrounds herself with images which to her are ‘solid things’, intended to distract her from the thought of her own subjectivity: ‘She saw herself, for a moment, coldly from outside—a feeling she disliked, and had invented little rituals to avoid’ (16–17). Her fears are both limiting, because they maintain her physical isolation, and intellectually liberating, as her interior monologues suggest. In the following complex paragraph we are shown that she inhabits her mind and its grasp of unusual imagery freely: She had elaborated, and believed, a network of symbols which made the outer world into a dazzling but comprehensible constellation of physical facts whose spiritual interrelations could be grasped and woven by the untiring intellect; suns, moons, stars, roses, cups, lances, lions and serpents, all had their place and also their meaning. (18)

Like Julia, Cassandra longingly imagines her feminine subjectivity absent and herself in command of a higher language. However, this language cannot be genderless and ‘femininity’ is only ever suppressed within it, if not made explicitly subordinate. Her choice of symbols, reminiscent of the symbols of the Tarot, parallels Irigaray’s imagery when describing the automatic masculinity of the subject; in the masculine ‘imaginary’, the source of power is always masculine, so that ‘woman’ can find no stability

130 

L. BIBBY

or clear identity for herself in relation to it: ‘Whence, no doubt, the fact that she is said to be restless and unstable.’37 Cassandra struggles with this instability and with her sense of her own difference as a woman in relation to male knowledges, or the Irigarayan ‘sun’ to which she was drawn as a young woman coming to Oxford (18). This ‘sun’ is also Byatt’s metaphor for artistry and power, figured in her first novel The Shadow of the Sun and represented in Jane Campbell’s notion of Byatt’s ‘heliotropic imagination’. Cassandra’s predisposition towards ritual and Christianity can also be read in Irigarayan terms. Irigaray points out that ‘the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and every discourse, is always masculine and paternal in the West,’38 and that the idea of God, by claiming some of the subject’s ‘passion’, even subverts some of the potential of the sexual encounter in which sexually different beings are made most fully aware of their difference.39 Sexual relationships do not feature at all in Cassandra’s cloistered existence and she experiences ‘chastity’ in an ‘occupational and accidental way’, unwilling to dwell on its implications for her sense of herself (15). In Byatt’s text, Cassandra is strongly affected by, and appears to embody, the threat of the specific feminine subject breaching paternal, authoritative and separate discourses, in the sense of these being clearly demarcated and upheld as ‘higher’. She writes to her Anglo-Catholic priest Father Rowell of her fear of becoming ‘overwhelmed’ (16), and Julia remembers an outburst from Cassandra in the Quaker Meeting-house when Cassandra insisted that ‘We need God because we are desperate and wicked and we can find Him only through Himself. The Inner Light doesn’t necessarily shine, and doesn’t illuminate much. You will find no meaning by simply examining your consciences, maybe, ever. What I am saying is, we have got to find a way of living in a world that eats and destroys and pays nothing back.’ (38)

The religious terms here are symbols of a source of patriarchal authority which Cassandra’s professional, intellectual life will undermine and at times break through, despite her fiercely avowed religious beliefs. Julia, for her part, finds the Meeting-house, symbol of her family’s religion, to be a place of disorder and ‘embarrassing speech’ which she avoids despite her husband’s status and authority as an ‘active Friend’ (37). Unlike Cassandra, Julia mostly settles for security within patriarchal philosophical and linguistic structures, hence her choice to be a novelist, whereas her sister, as

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

131

an isolated academic at Oxford, keeps herself further disassociated from conventional femininity. The sisters’ individual experiences of attraction to Simon Moffitt are damaged by their individual preoccupations and insecurities, and align strikingly with Irigaray’s reading of Descartes’s The Passions of the Soul in her analysis of the sexual encounter of sexually distinct beings. In Irigaray’s narrative ‘[t]his other, male or female, should surprise us again and again, appear to us as new, very different from what we knew or what we thought he or she should be.’40 Encounters characterised by Descartes’s concept of ‘wonder’ are marked by a tension or conflict that reinforces the wondering subject’s sense of difference from the other: ‘We would in some way have reduced the other to ourselves if he or she suited us completely. An excess resists: the other’s existence and becoming as a place that permits union and/through resistance to assimilation or reduction to sameness.’41 This excess is imagined in Byatt’s novel partly in Cassandra’s journal, in which she has recorded, ‘in accurate detail, every event of her day’ as a safeguard against the sense that her life is ‘weightless and meaningless’ (23) and that things are only real if she writes about them. Her existence, textually mediated by the journal (and in turn by the novel) is not obviously unified by the discourses of profession and family, keeping her sexual subjectivity distanced from them. This is both potentially freeing for her, particularly compared to her married sister, and dangerous as she loses her grip on ‘life’ as it is known and ‘knowable’. Her ‘occupational and accidental’ chastity makes her responses to Simon Moffitt, the only sexual ‘other’ she ever considers, more significant. She describes in her journal her attachment to Simon as a sexually different other, ‘elaborating the physical differences between Simon Moffitt as she saw him now and Simon as she had known him. This was painful, but not without excitement’ (24). Her further responses are coolly intellectualised, with reference to her knowledge of his work, her opinions of it, and relevant literary quotations, so that her sexual difference from him is linked to her status as a professional intellectual and, importantly, made inextricable from her ‘different’ gender. Her future dealings with him never lead to physical consummation of any kind, but are documented in her journal so that she ‘knows’ the process rather than succumbing to it physically. The more passive and conformist Julia imagines Cassandra as patriarchal culture does, shut away in a ‘draughty college’, ‘out of Eden’, as part of a pitying myth with a transgressive Eve at its heart. Cassandra, however, is able to keep a critical distance from the masculine social world that would have defined her as inferior, and simultaneously remains linked

132 

L. BIBBY

to intellectual life through language. Narratives and imagery become her safeguard against ‘sameness’ as she explores her ‘difference’, but will not protect her from mental illness; the horizon of present myths of intellectualism is a dangerous and distressing place. She is referred to hatefully as one of the college’s ‘Hysterical women dons’ by a female undergraduate who, like Julia, apparently cannot think outside patriarchal language (151), signalling Cassandra’s limited and limiting position within an institutional culture that admits women even as it defines them to their disadvantage (Frederica Potter faces a similar problem at Cambridge). Cassandra is not personally distressed by this as much as by her general feeling of dislocation from the ‘real’ world, but, apparently because she cannot fully conceptualise her own specific subjectivity within that world, she does not escape a real form of hysteria. When she is unable to separate her material existence and Julia’s ‘creation’ of her within her novel (women’s narratives of themselves, again, are crucial to their survival), Cassandra’s panicked anger at Julia becomes a series of metaphors in her journal, including one that seems to reach for Irigaray’s speculum without quite finding it: she compares herself to ‘a mirror on the wall to be asked what she, what either of us, means?’ (230). By comparing herself to the mirror, she exhibits courage in refusing to be a mere ‘subject’ to its reflections, but her position is ultimately too uncertain. Her final, despairing questions are a refusal of either a traditional masculine/ superior or feminine/inferior subject position in relation to her world, and can be read alongside Irigaray’s narrative of women’s ‘madnesses’ in ‘La Mystérique’, the central section in Speculum of the Other Woman.42 These ‘madnesses’, although dangerous, are powerful because they threaten the masculine subject’s primacy and allow his feminine other to free herself from their binary opposition, but at a potentially terrible price, as no alternative position has yet been conceptualised for the feminine. These ideas correspond with the potential for both freedom and destruction which Cassandra faces, and the threatening excesses that lie beyond representation as she has known it. Irigaray describes these contradictory, liberating dangers as follows: The walls of her prison are broken, the distinction between inside/outside transgressed. In such ex-stasies, she risks losing herself or at least seeing the assurance of her self-identity-as-same fade away. Moreover, she doesn’t know where she is going, and will have to wander randomly and in darkness. And her eye has become accustomed to obvious

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

133

“truths” that actually hide what she is seeking. It is the very shadow of her gaze that must be explored.43

Cassandra’s suicide after the publication of Julia’s new novel prevents her from ever exploring the very shadow of her gaze. Julia contrasts with her sister because of her own relative acceptance of the ‘obvious “truths”’ through which her existence is mediated. As a popular novelist who, by appearing on television, gains a platform via technology and media to construct herself and her professional life, she never cultivates the critical distance from such forms of power that Cassandra does. In addition, her failing marriage and her affair with a colleague, Ivan, root her in clearly pre-defined and superficially comprehensible sexual relations with men that do not even make her happy. When she writes to Ivan ahead of her reunion with Simon Moffitt, she reduces Simon to trite literary images that, moreover, reduce literary figures to superficial romantic heroes— Simon is her ‘first love’, a ‘sort of cross between Heathcliff and Sebastian Flyte’ with ‘a romantic Bridesheady sort of charm’ (78). Unlike Cassandra, she experiences no distress when meeting Simon again, beyond commonplace social awkwardness and romantic feelings that do not shock or confuse her. As an adult, she can reflect ironically on her rivalry with Cassandra for Simon’s love as being ‘a bit like a cheap novelette’, or an example of the feminised notion of fiction within which she fears she now works (although she would rather not). Nonetheless, her attraction to Simon later awakens in Julia an awareness of a disturbing, other imaginary different from what she has desired so far, that is, the life ‘concerned with real things’ partly embodied by her stolid social-worker husband (99). She becomes aware of the mythic imagery present in the fiction she writes, about ‘people’—we can infer, mostly women—‘confined in a domestic pressure-chamber’ (99). This imagery aligns clearly with a sense of inferior, feminine subjectivity as theorised by Irigaray. To confirm this, at a party at Cassandra’s college Julia meets Sylvia Redman, a reader of her novels and former student of Cassandra. Julia identifies herself to Sylvia as ‘really Mrs Eskelund’ (115), not Julia Corbett the author, prompting Sylvia to remark that Julia’s books deal with ‘a real problem, one nobody thinks anything ought to be done about. That is—women, intelligent women, who are suddenly plunged into being at home all day’ (115)— one of the instances in which Byatt paraphrases Betty Friedan’s liberal feminist classic The Feminine Mystique to describe the feminine mind/ body problem considered in the previous chapter. In Julia’s view, the

134 

L. BIBBY

‘indignity and waste of being a woman’ can be explored legitimately in novels (115), although she seems unaware that representing the problem in simplistic narrative terms does not change inadequate forms of representation. Indeed, her damaging fictional representation of Cassandra leads to Cassandra’s despair and death because it objectifies her within a new ‘myth’ akin to the ‘common myth’ of a chillingly adversarial board game the sisters ‘created’ together as children, which supposedly ‘contained and resolved’ their difficulties (230). Characteristically, Cassandra reacts imaginatively, asking her journal ‘So have I become a doll to stick pins in?’ (230) Still, her hysteria should be read not only as vulnerability and illness but also in terms of Irigaray’s reverie in ‘La Mystérique’, in which the feminine subject finds herself outside ‘the logic that has framed her’, protecting her ‘self-identity-as-same’, and must instead confront and explore ‘the very shadow of her gaze.’44 Cassandra is arguably unstable because she is well acquainted with the ‘shadow’ of her own gaze, a position of power but also, again, of danger. Cassandra’s flight from the ‘logic’ of Julia’s novel proves dangerous, too, partly because examples of such patriarchal ‘logic’ are everywhere and therefore she can no longer feel safe, anywhere. Julia is safer than Cassandra because she never seems to glimpse the ‘shadow’ of any gaze. She experiences no significant encounter with Simon as a sexually different other because she never imagines herself as similarly different. Her dealings with him are hindered by her lack of any new language, and so she considers physical affection instead to ‘make everything real’ (169). However, nothing material seems to be ‘created’ without language, and no damaging subjectivities or images can be altered without new, different language. This language needs to somehow represent the excess beyond what is currently known and the horizon of inadequate myths to which only Cassandra has access, although fatally, as a result of there being no known ‘reality’ beyond that horizon. As Julia tells her sister, ‘extremity was always your business’ (193), and it is certainly extremity that costs Cassandra her grasp on life. The Corbett women, neither of them ‘heroines’ of any conventional story or myth, but both aware to different degrees of the discourses containing them, are caught between two damaging positions: acceptance of feminine subjectivity within phallocentrism, and refusal of it where there is no clear alternative. The frustration to be found in reading The Game’s tragic conclusion is that neither character is given time to properly imagine what that alternative might be.

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

135

4.4   The Biographer’s Tale The Biographer’s Tale (2000) is Byatt’s only novel written in the first person and also her only narrative to take up a male character’s point of view. Although her fiction often approaches masculine subjectivity through third-person narration, this short metafictional novel more than any other in Byatt’s oeuvre explores the relationship between the individual subject and the logocentricism of knowledge systems using the male subject himself. Within his academic life, postgraduate student Phineas Nanson experiences no overt conflict between his subjectivity and the knowledge he is asked to process, covering literature, philosophy and even the poststructuralist and postmodernist theories that have put knowledge itself into question. We learn that in seminars, he has ‘been doing quite a lot of not-­ too-­long texts written by women. And also quite a lot of Freud—we’d deconstructed the Wolf Man, and Dora’ (1). Textual problems are kept in their ‘proper’ place by academic structures, as classroom tasks with no apparent significance outside the seminar room. These patriarchal boundaries, moreover, keep those ‘texts by women’ in their familiar, ring-fenced place. The turning point in Phineas’s life comes when he attributes his boredom to the sameness and repetition of the study of literature and instead seeks ‘a life full of things’ (4). He decides to instead pursue ‘real’ life by writing a biography of a famous biographer, Scholes Destry Scholes. In other words, he means to pursue material reality within language. The ‘facts’ he must consequently seek are motifs not only of logocentrism (ironically, a postulate of the poststructuralist literary theory Phineas abandons) but also of phallocentrism. His mention of the ‘not-too-long texts by women’ he reluctantly studied before are an almost satirical emblem of his former life’s feminine ‘unconscious’ that will repeatedly resurface. This satire is possible because of the text’s thematic concern with poststructuralist theory itself. When talking about things, he reflects that he ‘had avoided the trap of talking about “reality” and “unreality” for I knew very well that postmodernist literary theory could be described as a reality. People lived in it’ (4). Further linguistic and conceptual traps await him, however. The form of traditional biography reassures and ultimately deceives him with its reliance on ‘personal life exactly as far as it can be known, and no further’, despite the contradiction of this in the idea of tantalising metaphors, suggesting concealed meanings (16). His attitude is a dramatisation of the repression of ‘others’, including women and

136 

L. BIBBY

femininity embodied in the figure of mother, within patriarchal discourse as Irigaray portrays the process. The (masculine, universal) subject must challenge her [the mother] for power, for productivity. He must resurface the earth with this floor of the ideal. Identify with the law-giving father, with his proper names, his desires for making capital, in every sense of the word, desires that prefer the possession of territory, which includes language, to the exercise of his pleasures, with the exception of his pleasure in trading women—fetishized objects, merchandise of whose value he stands surety—with his peers.45

Here, maternity is the femininity at the source of all material existence which culture denies or suppresses. This ‘suppressed’ femininity resurfaces for Phineas within the new, supposedly simplified and more valuable, knowledge for which he is hungry as its set of internal contradictions, in its ‘[o]verdetermination, deferred action, dreams, fantasies, puns.’46 The novel’s use of a first person, male narrator allows its dramatisation of the masculine subject’s insecurity, and by extension the insecurity of knowledge itself, at the prospect of materiality, femininity and a distinct feminine subjectivity. The novel’s references to the theory Phineas rejects is made explicit, but when it comes to the ‘real’ biographical evidence he then embraces, his transcriptions are embedded into the text itself so that the experience of reading the ‘odd pieces of writing’ (96) is the reader’s as well as his. The fragility of academic inquiry that seeks to ‘master’ texts in the way he believes he mastered them as a student is sharply apparent. After reading texts written by Scholes Destry Scholes, moreover, Phineas is no closer to Scholes’s ‘life’ or a sense of his subjectivity: ‘In a sense I knew a lot more about him than I had. And in another sense, I knew nothing at all’ (97). Phineas seizes on the ‘odd moments where the professional biographer revealed his own preoccupations’, proposing to ‘track him through his unconscious (or conscious) assumptions’, fruitlessly: ‘A semiotic analysis is not an instrument designed to discover a singular individual’ (97). The text’s theoretical awareness undermines the possibility of discovering ‘things’ or individuals, problematising the final, closed knowledge Phineas craves and paving the way for the return of the feminine to the textual worlds he explores. Released from gendered hierarchies, the feminine is now the mythopoeic ‘horizon’ beyond what is known and thought, rather than a point of weakness within discourse.

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

137

Phineas meets Swedish ecologist Fulla Biefeld when his research departs from literary problems to the study of the physical world, references to which abound in Scholes’s work. In attempting to equate Fulla’s striking appearance with a cultural form of womanhood he recognises—‘a Picasso ceramic’—he fails: her hair has ‘a life of its own, appearing so abundant and energetic that it was almost a separate life-form’ (110). Female materiality thereby evokes Medusa-like imagery but also an impression of excessive and uncontrolled femininity emblematised in her name. This reference to visual art as a set of metaphors intensifies the real for Phineas, whereas for the small-minded Julia Corbett, art obscured the real. At the same time as this meeting, Phineas encounters a drawing which equates the mythic woman Andromeda with a species of flower, and which includes an eroticised written description of their similarities; this is a male author’s depiction of female sexuality in woman and in plant which Phineas quickly dismisses (112–114). The narrative moves on, with him occupied with topics other than sex, until a power cut leaves him unwittingly in a ‘submissive’ posture in front of Fulla (117–118). Appropriately, she possesses expertise which is of use to his project, and is soon assisting him with his research, although he remains fixated on her physical singularity. Fulla is a woman who, like Cassandra Corbett, has been forced by her profession and its institutions to seek the masculine subject position in relation to knowledge rather than accept an inadequate existence as the feminine other, outside knowledge. Like Cassandra, also, she is critical of this positioning, showing no regard for Phineas’s pride in his intellectual autonomy as she ‘forcefully’ and ‘wrathfully’ deals with his haphazard attitude to his research (119). More important than evidence of her sense of her own sexual specificity, however, is his response to her. The novel offers a type of inversion of ‘erotico-theoretical transference’, detailed in Le Dœuff’s The Philosophical Imaginary. She reads within the history of philosophy that ‘those few women who did (but how, and to what extent?) approach philosophy’—she is careful here to leave the observation open to modification as opposed to being a closed, phallocentric fact—did so as ‘favourable disciples’ and ‘intelligent readers’ of great men.47 This is of course a set of historical realities organised into myth narrative but contains a scenario that has found many parallels elsewhere. Erotico-theoretical transference upholds the binary opposition of the superior masculine subject and feminine other sexually, with its male masters as love objects of female acolytes. In The Biographer’s Tale, Phineas Nanson discovers its perils despite his gender: at the novel’s start, he is

138 

L. BIBBY

arrogant in his expectation to command language, although he then finds himself on the outside of disciplines and discourses and cannot proceed without gaining knowledge of them. His knowledge of literary theory shows him that his biographical project is doomed, so that in desperation, he traces references to biological material and therefore perilous concerns which require him to confront Fulla’s unruly womanhood in order to learn from her. She passes on fragments of her formidable ecological knowledge as their relationship develops beyond his professed desires, or lack of them; having been repelled at first by her appearance, he attributes his subsequent sexual fascination, in a pseudo-scientific manner, to ‘pheromones’ (117). The materiality and indeterminate subjectivity of a different, distinct woman leaves him as the disciple in a type of erotico-theoretical transference in which ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ subject positions are not as clear-cut and securely placed as they once were. When they begin a correspondence, Phineas is led by Fulla’s opinions and ‘tempted’ into responding (156). In this latter section of the novel, he strives to assert his identity or subjectivity in plain narrative in between the other documents, such as index cards, which then fail to define ‘him’ clearly enough as master of his discourse: ‘I (Phineas G. Nanson, that is, the ur-I of this document) feel I should intermit here the transcription of the Hybrids and Cluster—my hybrids and cluster’ (156). The novel’s playful mimicry of a forceful ‘piece of writing’ (214) by its protagonist demonstrates that the writing is going awry because of the incursion of feminine sexual and intellectual power into his life. While conducting research at the home of Scholes’s niece Vera (another emblematic name—truthfulness attributed to the feminine), Phineas commences an affair with her, and a later meeting with Fulla Biefield at which she continues to instruct him on the nature of insect life ends with the sexual consummation of their ‘transference’. At this same point, he loses some of his ability to recount his experiences in ‘writing’, as though his mastery of the ‘I’ is slipping. The symbolic bedroom door is closed upon him and Fulla with the word ‘And...’, after which the narrative pauses while he recalls, in desperation, his initial decision to abandon literary theory, his ‘revulsion’ at the philosophical concept of bodily fragmentation and his desire to locate ‘a whole individual, a multifaceted single man, one life from birth to death’ (214, my emphasis). Instead, he has found that fragmentation, at least of subjectivity, is inevitable and bewildering unless he finds a language to harness the reality he has confronted. The novel’s climax occurs when he suffers a

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

139

severe emotional outburst or minor breakdown. Byatt’s linguistic representation of this emphasises the linguistic nature of his difficulties: I remember hearing my own voice screaming incoherently about dogsbodies, schadenfreude, Pym or Pim, semiotics, disgust, limits after all, everything doesn’t go; I remember screaming and growling and howling—yes, and weeping—in complete sentences. (203)

Having momentarily lost his grip on language, Phineas regains it in a way that approaches the conceptual excesses necessary to describe and accept feminine sexual specificity as a possibility. In bed with Scholes’s niece, Vera, he compares her with Fulla using sumptuous imagery that embraces the women’s physicality even to the point of imagining her as seminal ‘dandelion clocks’ (although Vera is the ‘truth’ he cannot really ‘touch’ with language only). Phineas asks himself: How did I get to these synaesthetic metaphors? Vera (my love, my darling) is a darting silver fish, a sailing moon in an indigo sky, quicksilver melting into a thousand droplets and recombining. Fulla is gold calyx strenuously spread in gold sunlight, Fulla is golden pollen clinging to bee-fur, Fulla is the sailing fleets of dandelion clocks. (219)

As ever, metaphor, and thus literature, constitutes the only available bridge between the world and the text—and also, to extend my discussion in Chap. 3 of the Potter sisters, between the mind and the body—albeit an inventive bridge. Thankfully, as Phineas discovers, ‘A farewell to Literature doesn’t, all at one blow, get rid of a new-found addiction to writing’ (255). The capital ‘L’ indicates his likely recognition of the domineering tendencies of the academy he has left behind, and his musings at the novel’s abrupt end suggest his further recognition of the possibilities of ‘writing’ even though the signified must always exceed the sign: ‘the too-much-loved earth will always exceed our power to describe, or imagine, or understand it’ (259). The ‘real’ is excessive beyond language and theory, and contains endless possibilities. Incorporated into this imagining of this earth is Fulla, who in turn is compared to ‘a minor Norse goddess’ (260) as Phineas revels in the feminine discourses he formerly dismissed. Nonetheless, the clichéd nature of these comparisons and their location within mythic discourses that have supported patriarchal culture signal that the text’s feminist work by no means finished. At the ‘open’ end of

140 

L. BIBBY

the novel, it must be enough that the question of feminine subjectivity is open also. By closing her novel in this spare yet hugely suggestive and ambiguous manner, Byatt hints that the notion of linguistic-excess-as-­ feminine, which as Alice Jardine indicates is a feature of male-authored theory including Derrida’s, need not be the point at which the feminine is made culturally invisible but rather where a new politics of representation may be formulated.48

4.5   The Little Black Book of Stories In Byatt’s most recent collection of short stories The Little Black Book of Stories (2003), certain characters appear, like Cassandra Corbett in The Game, aware of the possibility of a feminine sexual specificity that would remove women from the damaging subject/other binary opposition in which they are seen traditionally as the inferior term, defined according to their ‘sameness’ as men, or else that sameness’ limitation. As in Cassandra’s case, confronting the masculine imaginary that upholds that binary opposition can be dangerous, because no alternative subjectivity has ever been fully theorised before. Nevertheless, this confrontation is attempted repeatedly in Byatt’s collection. The ‘excess’ beyond the masculine imaginary of Western culture ‘erupts’ successively as a monster in a forest, an eating disorder, a condition in which a woman’s body turns to stone, the murder of a talented but unassuming creative writing student, and the ghost of a still-living wife. ‘The Thing in the Forest’ appropriates a recognisable form and also a recognisable imaginary or set of images—that of the fairy tale—to surround two protagonists with a solid, real but still indistinct form of a supernatural danger: the ironically formless monster known only as the ‘thing’. Penny and Primrose are children who befriend each other when they are both evacuated from their homes during the Second World War, and then separate after an apparent sighting of a monstrous worm in the forest. They reflect on the event as adults when they are reunited, having found a description of the creature in a book. Their evacuation as children is their first source of terror, as it leaves them without knowledge of their environment or a sense of their identity and can only be remedied with the use of their intellects. Unaware of where they are going, why or for how long, Penny fills these knowledge gaps with scenarios from Victorian literature, whereas Primrose needs no such images, viewing herself and Penny as ‘orphans’ and transplanting that classic Victorian trope into their

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

141

reality (8). In this story, the nature of sexual specificity itself is less important than the excesses that result when existing subjectivities are disturbed or re-imagined, as they are in this text which begins and ends with the same sentence: ‘There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in the forest’ (3, 51). This indicates the paradoxical limitations and possibilities encompassed within narratives made from language, when the signified does exceed the sign—the things we ‘know’ must be seen as limited (in this case, the story is hopelessly circular in form) and we must confront the possibility of things we do not know. The girls’ encounter with the monster necessitates an archetypal scene from a fairy story—a mythic quest in a forest—but without clear identities or purposes ascribed to either child. Their detachment from discourses of family and society leaves them feeling ‘too insignificant’ to find a place in linear history (26). There, the constitution of reality comes into question, frighteningly: ‘Did they hear it first or smell it first?’ The monster is an unimagined horror, an image that cannot be classified either before or after it is seen; it is a thorough enactment of Julia Kristeva’s abjection, in that it is ‘neither object nor subject’ and ‘radically excluded’ from the symbolic order, bringing with it the collapse of meaning.49 It announces itself chaotically with ‘a crackling, a crushing, a heavy thumping, combined with threshing and thrashing, and added to that a gulping, heaving, boiling, bursting, steaming sound’ (15). Like its sound, its appearance is barely describable, although numerous attempts are made in the text. The monster represents an untapped imaginary (the ‘imaginary’ here is more obviously the one defined by Le Dœuff, as the unacknowledged ‘other side’ of thought) that obsesses the two girls into adulthood alongside the war, the centrepiece of world history that led to their evacuation. Unlike the war, the monster is indeed ‘a story that’s never been told before’ (51). On meeting each other again, Penny and Primrose are shown to have become encircled by feminine social classifications, shaped by ‘dead fathers, unmarried status, child-caring professions, recently dead mothers’ (26), circumstances that also echo other fairy-tale archetypes. However their sighting of the monster is the unlikely catalyst of their resistance of a masculine imaginary that would term them ‘mad’. Even after seeing the monster’s picture in a book, the ‘book’ being a Derridean image of logocentrism, Penny, an educated child psychologist, insists ‘I don’t know what it was, but I’ve always been quite sure we saw it’ (27). Having transgressed the familiar imaginary, they have faced its excess and resisted ‘madness’ at the same time. Although Primrose in particular struggles with

142 

L. BIBBY

doubts over her perceptions, she is able to conceptualise what she has seen as one of the ‘things that are real—more real than we are—but mostly we don’t cross their paths, or they don’t cross ours’ (28). The monster is ‘more real’ because it so far surpasses the supposed limits of ontology, albeit in a negative way, unlike the unruly femininity—both sexual and intellectual—represented by Fulla Biefeld in The Biographer’s Tale. Penny and Primrose’s feelings of insignificance in the context of world history recall Irigaray’s image of the woman who barely exists—yet: ‘So woman has not yet taken (a) place. The “not yet” probably corresponds to a system of hysterical fantasy but/and it acknowledges a historical condition.’50 Penny and Primrose’s shared isolation leads them to fear they are part of an imagined story, so that they bridge both ‘historical condition’ and ‘hysterical fantasy’. Their forest experience, purposeless, dangerous and leading them to a barely representable ‘thing’, dramatises a form of Irigaray’s enquiry of how women might seek their own subjectivity where none has been allowed before: ‘how does one tackle these things, even if one felt passionately about them, if there is no sense of vocation? No directing goal is in sight, no cause can be taken for a point of reference.’51 Unlike Cassandra Corbett in The Game, Penny and Primrose encounter excess, the as yet unrepresented, ‘the final dispossession of the last imaginary retreat into pure objectivity’,52 and survive even though they unfortunately do not escape their own ‘stories’ as the last line’s repetition suggests. Part of the text’s success as a macabre and unsettling tale is in its uncertainty over whether they ever can escape. Irigaray’s intertwined notions of excess and the possibly positive meanings of female ‘madness’ or hysteria illuminate a reading of the volume’s second story, ‘Body Art’, in which Dr Damien Becket’s involvement with a troubled female artist leads to the birth of a daughter. Damian’s role in the Gynaecology Ward of St Pantaleon’s hospital is a position of overt mastery over a place where women face illness and give birth, the two facets of feminine materiality which Irigaray has examined in detail. Damian is exhausted firstly by ‘a sleepless night of blood and danger’ before Daisy Whimple literally comes crashing into his already disordered existence by falling from a ladder (56–58). If Damian represents phallocentrism unsettled by the materiality of the female body, Daisy is an example of the excesses of a feminine subjectivity seeking specificity. As if to confirm this, when Damian first meets her he judges that she suffers from what Elizabeth Grosz describes in her reading of Irigaray as ‘that modern expression of hysteria, anorexia nervosa’.53 In drawing close to Daisy, Damian becomes the man who, in

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

143

Irigaray’s work, confronts excesses in order to understand the breakdown of subjectivity in hysteria and illness: ‘That he has accepted the need to take the detour through metaphors that can scarcely be called figures. That he has given up his knowledge in order to attend to women’s madnesses.’54 Art student Daisy is imaginative, antisocial, apparently homeless and at the mercy of her physical condition. Significantly, she is thought to be infertile after ‘abortion complications’ (76), and so distanced from the capacity for maternity that will nonetheless return as a positive form of excess in itself. At the same time, she is concerned with the female body in art and aligned with many of the text’s vivid descriptions of visual art. Her own artwork, including a controversial installation made of stolen medical objects (103–104), is an unsurprisingly raw and confrontational selection of metaphors. She is at odds with the patriarchal principles of knowledge and organisation governing Dr Becket’s life, with which he is often uncomfortable himself. A lapsed Catholic (69), he combats old religious anxieties, mostly to do with women and sex, by collecting art so that he can worship ‘the absence of God in the material staining of paint and ink’ (75), the ‘staining’ contradicting images of the ‘unstained’ Virgin Mary. (Daisy’s surname, ‘Whimple’, may be a play on ‘Wimple’, or nun’s headdress, and therefore a confrontation of another place for femininity within Catholicism.) Damian’s tendency towards art as a replacement for religion, epitomised when he recalls seeing a carved crucifix as a carving and nothing else (72–73), is a personal victory over one form of patriarchal ‘knowledge’ that might have hindered his understanding of Daisy. For him, confrontation with Daisy’s supposed ‘hysteria’, her illnesses and enraged response to her pregnancy is positive and productive. They both ultimately discover their daughter’s unimagined uniqueness, or her specificity (124). Ines, the protagonist of ‘A Stone Woman’, is faced by the ultimate physical conclusion of maternity when her mother dies. She then thinks chillingly of herself as an image, or archetype, unbearably limited in her own significance—she ‘who had been the younger woman, became an old woman’, in an instant’ (129). Without preamble, the text’s opening presents her perilous mental condition after this event and also suggests the bizarre physical condition that will follow: ‘At first, she did not think of stones. Grief made her insubstantial to herself; she felt herself flitting lightly from room to room, in the twilit apartment, like a moth’ (129). In common with several other characters in this volume, Ines is an

144 

L. BIBBY

intellectual worker, a researcher for ‘a major etymological dictionary’ (134), who becomes pivotally aware of the exploratory power of metaphor and the imaginary within ‘real’ life. Her ‘reality’ does not correspond with the dominant imaginary. For example, her relationship with her lost mother is that of ‘two intelligent women who understood each other easily’ (130), so that she is not merely the ‘dutiful daughter’ she seems to be to others (in a direct reference, it seems, to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of that name). Later, when her illness overtakes her and she begins literally turning to stone, she refuses to see a doctor for fear that she will be subject to a brutal, logocentric medical profession out to claim fresh knowledge by any means: ‘she saw clearly that she would be an object of horror and fascination, to be shut away and experimented on’ (140). Whereas Penny, Primrose and Daisy confronted hysteria as a threat to their subjectivities, Ines has cause to dread physical violence perpetrated by masculine culture on her changing body. She becomes a physical metaphor, having figuratively broken the bounds of an as yet unformulated discourse of a middle ground between organic life and death. A woman writer is the ‘subject’ of ‘Raw Material’. Cicely Fox is a student in the creative writing class run by the story’s protagonist, Jack Smollett, a semi-successful novelist who, like Dr Damien Becket, is a male victim of a masculine imaginary that has never defined women in their own right. The text lists conventional background material about him, albeit with strong indications of his dismissive attitude towards women and resulting social isolation: ‘Women liked him, as they liked enthusiastic Labrador dogs’ (188). In the past he has seen himself as ‘a Writer’ without ever becoming a real ‘master’ of his craft, and now runs classes filled mainly with women who write gruesome stories of murder and, more tellingly, ones about female nervous breakdowns (193). This implied, unproblematic link between women and hysteria as a cultural trope and construction is undermined by Cicely Fox, an elderly member of Jack’s class whose brilliant writing places her outside his imagination of women as alternately poor students, poor writers and lovers. The quality of her nostalgic writings about the procedure for black-leading stoves and wash-day captivates Jack by disturbing his most basic assumptions about women and writing. Exceptionally good writing becomes the ‘excess’ to which Cicely alone has access. When this woman, with her mastery of words, is found murdered in the flat she shared with a mute friend, Jack’s difficulty in comprehending the scene is made plain: ‘It was not nice. Cicely Fox was quite dead’ (228). The image is beyond anything he can write about afterwards

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

145

because her seemingly ‘appalling life’ is outside the logic he had tried to apply to her, when trying patronisingly ‘to get to talk to her, as though she had been a pretty girl’ (212), when what he really desired was her now-­ silenced language. Meanwhile, his class is more than willing to write about her death, aligning it with the conventional violence they favour: ‘Miss Fox belonged after all in the normal world of their writings, the world of domestic violence, torture and shock-horror’ (229). In ‘The Pink Ribbon’, James Ennis’s meetings with a woman who might be the ‘ghost’ of his mentally disabled wife are constructed as an encounter with a transgressive feminine subject. While caring for Madeleine, or Mado as he thinks of her (as though to emphasise an idea of madness), James is grief-stricken by her apparently lost personality; to him, her ‘poor brain is a mass of thick plaques and tangles of meaningless stuff. Like moth-eaten knitting. There’s no one there’ (236)—a combination of medical diagnoses, distressing feminine metaphors and no traces of the companion he knew. But as the eerie appearance of ‘Dido’ later makes clear, the living woman’s illness allows her to solidify in her husband’s memory and in his life as a confusing, unknowable entity. Through his memories and Dido’s speech, we learn of Madeleine’s secrecy, her lack of family and her unusual life, even as a married woman in wartime. These circumstances led her to work for the ‘Ministry of Information, where her colleagues were elegant poets, shadowy foreigners, and expert linguists’ (247). Having resisted the terms of phallocentric culture, Madeleine still defies her husband’s comprehension and so ‘haunts’ him before she is dead, but when she is no longer able to narrate her own life in comprehensible language. As a literary construct, she often evokes and simultaneously defies Le Dœuff’s description of ‘the imaginary portrait of “woman”’ which keeps women barred from masculine philosophical discourse: ‘a power of disorder, a being of night, a twilight beauty, a dark continent, a sphinx of dissolution, an abyss of the unintelligible, a voice of underworld gods, an inner enemy who alters and perverts without visible sign of combat, a place where all forms dissolve.’55 This description is purposely hyperbolic, although useful to our contextualisation of the position of women in this story and others as either sources or foci of disturbance and dread. Without a formulation and acceptance of their sexual specificity, women are confined to the lesser half of a gendered binary opposition which they often understandably resist, resulting in the fascinatingly abject, ghostly and exotic disturbance we see linked to Madeleine, among others. This disturbance contains a dimension of sadness, however, in the form of the

146 

L. BIBBY

women like Madeleine and Cassandra Corbett, who do not succeed in traversing the bounds between conventional and ‘other’ subjectivities with their health or even their lives intact. This disturbance makes memory, the imaginative recovery of the past, possible. James only recalls the happiness of his time with his wife, when they were young, after he has met Dido, her apparent ghost. Dido is sexually attractive in a shocking, transgressive way, dressed in an allegedly ‘tarty’ fashion (251), and therefore an amplification of James’s remembered attraction to Madeleine in spite (or perhaps because) of her secrecy and exciting career separate from her life with him. From Dido, he learns of the illusory nature of that career, even to Madeleine herself, and realises that she was more complex than the threatening image he ascribed to her. Indeed, she felt trapped by the horror of history, deprived of motherhood and her contented early sexual union with James: ‘Hitler had destroyed the days of her youth, and the quiet days of her marriage, and the child she might have had’ (269). Dido seems to be Madeleine’s unified, sexually specific self, unconfined by any cultural limitations, but somehow clearer to James than his ‘real’ wife. In reality, however, there exists no concept with which to identify her and so James ultimately doubts that he has really seen her at all (257). This differs tellingly from Penny’s certainty that she saw ‘the thing in the forest’. As an unconceptualised version of a woman, in excess of James’s reality, Dido cannot exist either in the past or in the present.

4.6  Conclusion The dominance of the masculine imaginary, described in the theories of Irigaray and Le Dœuff in particular, brings into focus an immense difficulty in changing discourses of the intellectual so that women’s experience can be framed adequately within language: alternative ‘imaginaries’ threaten entire discursive systems, and so their possibility is represented as a danger, leading to hysteria and chaos. One of Byatt’s major achievements is to represent the possibility of other conceptualisations of the woman intellectual anyway. A hugely significant result of this is that after consideration of Byatt’s fictional representations of intellectuals, it seems difficult and unreasonable to think of the masculine public intellectual as the sole legitimate ‘type’, despite its still-paradigmatic status. Difference and specificity are certainly facets of our actual culture and not mere suggestions. Again, we see that gender’s continuing ‘ideological work’ (in the

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

147

sense that Poovey uses this term reaches further than is implied by limited patriarchal representations of feminist work, to include a rethinking of the linguistic structures of culture, within literature. Chapter 5 moves forward by emphasising a particular, different and specific intellectual—the private intellectual—as an ‘other’, but still legitimate counterpart to the public intellectual that modifies that patriarchal myth.

Notes 1. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 2. 2. Ga ̨siorek, Post-War British Fiction, 123-124. 3. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 2. 4. Belsey, Critical Practice, 4. 5. Belsey, Critical Practice, 4. 6. Belsey, Critical Practice, 3. 7. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 217. 8. Tredell, Conversations with Critics, 61. 9. Tredell, Conversations with Critics, 61. 10. Jonathan Noakes, “Interview with A. S. Byatt,” in A. S. Byatt: The Essential Guide to Contemporary Literature, edited by Jonathan Noakes and Margaret Reynolds (London: Vintage, 2004), 29. 11. Susan Wiseman, “Femininity and the Intellectual in Sontag and Cixous,” in The Body and the Text, edited by Helen Wilcox (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 100. 12. Wiseman, “Femininity and the Intellectual,” 105. 13. Wiseman, “Femininity and the Intellectual,” 109. 14. Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 101. 15. Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 27. 16. Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 28. 17. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 21. 18. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated from the French by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1976, 2nd edition (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 63. 19. Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 101. 20. Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 101–102. 21. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, translated from the French by Gillian C.  Gill, 1985 (Ithaca and New  York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 27. 22. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 135.

148 

L. BIBBY

23. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated from the French by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C.  Gill, 1993 (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), 6. 24. Poovey, Uneven Developments, 3. 25. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” in The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, translated from the French by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, 1986 (Reprint, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 193–194. 26. Kristeva, “Woman’s Time,” 194. 27. Le Dœuff’s use of the term ‘imaginary’ has clear linguistic and conceptual roots in Jacques Lacan’s theory of l’imaginaire, or the ‘Imaginary order’. Lacan defines this as ‘phantasies in the technique of the psychoanalytic experience and in the constitution of the object at the various stages of psychic development’ (1968, 1981, p. 3). Le Dœuff retains his concept of unconscious spaces for discourse, although her usage of the term ‘imaginary’ is at once loose, adaptable and specific to her argument for philosophy’s ‘other’, not necessarily patriarchal side. 28. Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, 1. 29. Coupe, Myth, 12–13. 30. Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, 2. 31. Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, 6. 32. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158–159. 33. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 86. 34. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 86. 35. Wiseman, “Femininity and the Intellectual.” 36. Kristeva, “Woman’s Time,” 195. 37. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 134. 38. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated from the French by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C.  Gill, 1993 (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), 6–7. 39. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 13. 40. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 74. 41. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 74. 42. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 191. 43. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 192–193. 44. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 193. 45. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 140. 46. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 140. 47. Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, 104. 48. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Reprint, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 186.

4  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS AND SEXUAL SPECIFICITY 

149

49. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated from the French by Roudiez, Leon S., 1982. Reprint, New  York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2. 50. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 227. 51. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 194. 52. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 195. 53. Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 136. 54. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 191–192. 55. Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, 113.

CHAPTER 5

Women Intellectuals, Private Intellectuals?

5.1   Introduction In the following lines from A. S. Byatt’s best-known novel Possession: A Romance (1990), the fictitious, minor woman poet Christabel LaMotte mythologises herself not only as a poet but as a female and thus marginal participant in intellectual life, within a culture that prizes a certain type of intellectual to the point of that type having definitive status: the man of letters: I sent some of my smaller poems—a little sheaf—selected with trembling—to a great Poet—who shall be nameless, I cannot write his name—asking—Are These Poems? Have I—a Voice? (180)

LaMotte writes to the fictitious, great poet Randolph Henry Ash, a man so representative of this facet of Victorian patriarchy that in her letters she expresses doubts that her poems are poems at all. The mythology of which Ash is a symbol almost, but not definitively, erases her from discourse and culture itself, as that culture rests on the myth of a hierarchy of thinkers in which women are always inferior to men. This chapter reads Possession: A Romance and The Matisse Stories (1993) in terms of how their representations of women writer-intellectuals test the limits of the myth of the man of letters by representing the private intellectual as a legitimate possibility © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Bibby, A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_5

151

152 

L. BIBBY

in reality as well as within fiction. I examine these texts’ treatment of the relationship between intellectuals, literary writing and concepts of the public and private spheres with reference to key thinking on these ideas in the work of Edward W. Said (1994) and Jürgen Habermas (1962), work that has contributed powerfully to the myth of public cultural and intellectual workers, while at the same time indicating that myth’s limitations. Theories of the intellectual claim almost unanimously that a private intellectual cannot exist or at least cannot claim legitimacy, but Byatt’s fiction considers seriously the possibility that since women have related very differently to the institutions of public life, many women intellectuals have figured themselves as other than ‘public’. Moreover, as previous chapters also argued, the public intellectual is one specific image of the intellectual among many that do not necessarily arrange themselves into a clear, gendered hierarchy. In this chapter’s first section, using the work of Said and Habermas, I argue that the public and private spheres (as the above theorists describe them) are not entirely separable. This is because in every textual representation reaching an audience, there is encoded an idea or image of the private individual who created it. This is of particular relevance to the women intellectuals who relate differently to public and private life than men, and often exploit their specificity. Byatt’s ‘thinking’ women defy the dominant cultural images of public, professional and occasionally amateur intellectuals (‘amateur’ to be defined shortly), and modify those same images. They therefore represent a discourse of intellectuals that is non-traditional and non-hierarchical, allowing it to accommodate valid, ‘other’ intellectuals who make vital contributions to public life. This is the narrative solution available to intellectual women facing social and cultural limitations in Byatt’s fiction; for example, in the compromised ‘silence’ of Christabel LaMotte as analysed by twentieth-century scholars in Possession, and also in the cases of a female translator’s difficulty in seeing herself as important in public life in the short story ‘Medusa’s Ankles’, a guilty writer and mother whose cleaning lady is a secret artist in ‘Art Work’, and a female academic taking up the cause of an abused female student in ‘The Chinese Lobster’. The masculine public intellectual’s exclusive legitimacy is a modern myth of ‘perfection’ and depends on a paradigm, as Laurence Coupe defines them,1 constituting an ideal rather than a consistent reality. The public intellectual as a paradigm signals the myth’s ‘drive towards completion’ or a definitive idea; that is, the ideal intellectual in comparison to which others are poor imitations. This is a case of ‘the inevitable dogmatism of any mythography which emphasises

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

153

only one paradigm’2 as theories of the intellectual do. These theories have obscured the many, many differences between intellectuals, what they do and in what context. By fictionalising intellectuals including women, Byatt has helped to assemble an endlessly variable mythology that avoids placing ‘a certain idea of perfection onto material that may have more practical functions’.3 One of these ‘practical functions’ is to legitimise different, specific ideas of the intellectual beside the paradigm of the ‘public’ intellectual by representing those ideas in discursive form when, arguably, they are already legitimate in reality.

5.2   Literature and the Private Sphere Mary Evans’s argument for the woman intellectual’s significance in her article ‘Can Women be Intellectuals?’ (2009) depends on the fact that the nineteenth-century woman writer-intellectual figured prominently in the literary public sphere. The context of Evans’s work is the study of the public intellectual, in line with the default and dominant definition of the intellectual as a public figure. However, the popular and academic image of the nineteenth-century woman writer compromises the public intellectual’s paradigmatic status significantly by indicating women’s prominence as writer-intellectuals at that time, regardless of any gendered hierarchy of such figures. Women’s specificity or difference, explored in Chap. 4, rather than their mere otherness and secondary status, is a compelling notion because it would theoretically lessen the impact of gender hierarchies. This represents a possible reconsideration of one of the ways in which gender difference is discursively constructed, a notion likely to have influenced the content and the forms of the texts by A. S. Byatt I analyse here. This frames them as important ‘feminist critical fictions’ in the same way as Andrzej Ga ̨siorek contextualises the work of Angela Carter and Sara Maitland,4 two other notably intellectual women authors. In his key study of the intellectual, Representations of the Intellectual (1994), and one which theorises this figure in detail although still relying on the masculine paradigm, Edward W. Said upholds another misleading aspect of that paradigm: the idea that a private intellectual cannot exist. His definition of the intellectual as ‘an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public’5 implies that public status itself defines an intellectual. However, Said’s next comments suggest that

154 

L. BIBBY

the public and private spheres are not completely separable. Referring to his own status as an intellectual, he describes the quite complicated mix between the private and the public worlds, my own history, values, writings and positions as they derive from my experiences, on the one hand, and on the other hand, how these enter into the social world where people debate and make decisions about war and freedom and justice.6

Here, Said figures himself as a public intellectual while delineating an idea of the ‘private world’ of which he is simultaneously a part, as an illustration of what all intellectuals do when they represent themselves in textual cultures as characters in quasi-literary narratives. Said adopts the language of literary criticism although without acknowledging that literature represents the private, publicly, in a crucial paradox. He argues against the actual existence of private intellectuals: there is ‘no such thing’, ‘since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world’.7 Nevertheless, that idea of the private remains part of the intellectual’s image: Said stresses that there is never only a public intellectual, someone who exists just as a figurehead or spokesperson or symbol of a cause, movement, or position. There is always the personal inflection and the private sensibility, and those give meaning to what is being said or written.8

I have examined Said’s contradictory gender-blind yet inclusive use of pronouns in Chap. 1 of this book. However, in the section of his work from which the above is taken, those pronouns imply that there are affinities between the public and private spheres, creating clear scope for women to be part of the intellectual’s mythology. Historically, many women have undoubtedly fulfilled one of the intellectual’s defining characteristics, which Said summarises as follows: ‘in the end it is the intellectual as a representative figure that matters—someone who visibly represents a standpoint of some kind, and someone who makes articulate representations to his or her public despite all sorts of barriers.’9 The barriers ‘she’, the woman intellectual, has faced, have been greater than and different from the male intellectual’s, but they have not been enough to keep her work totally private and separate from public discourse, as Said suggests when

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

155

he delineates ‘representing’ as ‘talking, writing, teaching, appearing on television’.10 The purpose of this chapter is to interrogate and broaden Said’s mythologisation of an exclusively public intellectual by referring to A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession: A Romance and short collection The Matisse Stories as literary texts exploring the possibility that just as public intellectuals are also private individuals, so the private sphere must be seen as part of the body of non-linear and non-hierarchical discourses that support women intellectuals’ representation in ‘public’ form. A completely private body of an intellectual’s work may be inaccessible to ‘factual’ narrative representation, but this is a boundary Byatt’s fictions address, suggesting that its privacy is only ever provisional and perhaps temporary as in the case of Byatt’s women poets and cleaning ladies-cum-artists. Women have traditionally enjoyed different levels of access to the institutions through which public intellectuals have practiced ‘representing’, for reasons of social custom, class, wealth and institutional sexism. These are obvious ‘barriers’ which feminist intellectuals have fought, but in doing so they may have stopped short of challenging representational practices, casting themselves in masculine terms as public intellectuals and joining the ‘procession of educated men’ of which Virginia Woolf was so wary.11 Overcoming logistical barriers to public life is clearly important, but literature’s interrogative function indicates the liminality, of the discourses underpinning those same barriers and making resistance seem impossible rather than merely difficult, possibly myth’s most dangerous and pervasive function. What Ga ̨siorek calls ‘feminist critical fictions’ are crucial vehicles in this process because the major feminine blind spot in the myth of the public intellectual, and the only public intellectual who, it seems, can legitimately be female, is the feminist. The feminist represents the point at which the patriarchal myth’s false universalism is overtaken by real historical events12 and proven false. The myth has always been resisted and with good reason; the feminist resembles the single white crow that proves that not all crows are black, although the white crow remains anomalous. Despite Said’s denial of private intellectuals’ existence and lack of attention paid to specific gender issues, his Representations of the Intellectual is an example of this interrogative type of text—one of a set of mythopoeic narratives about intellectuals. His 1993 Reith lectures (from which the book derives) were published in the same year as the publication of Byatt’s The Matisse Stories and only three years after that of Possession: A Romance, and so offer an illuminating co-narrative of the gendering and social

156 

L. BIBBY

positioning of writer-intellectuals in the Western world, with a crucially literary bias. Said points out that language, specifically written language, ‘is the principal medium of intellectual activity’ and thus the intellectual’s role involves challenging language’s political function—that is, to ‘preserve the status quo’13—while also working within language. The intellectuals in Possession and The Matisse Stories are keenly aware of this, not least because many of them are women and their resistance to the inequalities they face is inherently feminist. Although Said’s text rests on a specific set of definitions of the intellectual, it invites resistance and revision with the claim that ‘intellectual life is fundamentally about knowledge and freedom,’14 as is the history of feminist thought and activism. The intellectual’s critical and marginal position in relation to power must allow him or her to be something other than what certain theories declare, but this does not overcome the practical, institutional and logistical problems faced by women intellectuals in particular. Nonetheless, the ‘horizon’ and limits of these problems is certainly in sight. Said fails to break down the masculine myth as well as the public myth of the intellectual, but he shows awareness of certain key issues. Intellectual professionalisation is the major problem he attaches to intellectual work. He idealises amateurism, or ‘the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture,’15 while criticising those intellectual workers who focus on ‘proper, professional behaviour—not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits’.16 This section resonates with the work of feminist theory, pointing again to the myth’s limitations, its horizon. Academics, who often appear in Byatt’s fiction, are especially susceptible to these supposed risks of professionalism within capitalist and patriarchal educational institutions. Nonetheless Said argues that ‘being an intellectual is not at all inconsistent with being an academic’ or pursuing any other profession.17 Amateurism and professionalism have affected women in different ways to men because, once more, women relate differently to the institutions of intellectual work. The value of Said’s account is that he recognises a slim but important margin for difference in how intellectuals represent themselves and their messages—these processes change over time18 unlike the idea that an ‘intellectual life is fundamentally about knowledge and freedom’. For women, has this included ‘freedom’ in many cases from the professional aspect of public life, as part of the allowed (if only theoretical) margin for difference? Does a culture built upon literary discourse ever legitimate that discourse’s private production? Writing opens up these

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

157

questions and, although it may not conclusively answer them, the possibilities it suggests prevent their ultimate closure; this, as I’ve argued throughout this study, is the feminism inherent in intellectualism itself and which Byatt’s fiction explores consistently. First it is necessary to ask, what is meant, precisely, by ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres and ‘public life’? So far in this chapter I have relied on loose definitions of ‘public’ as everything located outside domestic space—the arenas of work, politics and culture. Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) is a vital account of the complexity of the public and private spheres and, of particular importance for women intellectuals, of ‘the emergence of the literary public sphere’.19 Habermas begins by historicising the ‘multiplicity of concurrent meanings’ connected to the terms ‘public’ and ‘public sphere’. His concept of ‘inherited language’ including the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ themselves—which are used in spite of their sometimes ‘confused’ meanings20—applies to the metafiction and historiographic metafiction with which I am concerned, since fiction writers work with language whose meaning has changed historically but which remains in use. Metafiction indeed exploits these slippages in meaning; this is a key part of Byatt’s project, as I have argued. Although Habermas concurs with Said’s denial that individuals can represent messages in private, as representation requires public ‘staging’ as it did in the case of historical monarchies, this idea defines representation itself as ‘publicity’ in a way that persists far into contemporary times.21 The meaning of the public sphere has historically depended on economic organisation, so that in Habermas’s account of early modern Europe, ‘traffic in commodities’ was accompanied by ‘traffic in news’.22 However, information was not strictly ‘public’, as it was circulated in letter form and not automatically accessible to most of the private individuals for whom the letters were not intended. Gradually, the ‘publicity of representation’ controlled by the rulers of a society was overtaken by ‘the new domain of a public sphere whose decisive mark was the published word’.23 The published word is obviously perennially powerful, but the previous ‘traffic in news’ indicates the role of unpublished writing, including letters (which I will discuss further in relation to Byatt’s Possession), within public discourse. Habermas recounts that by the mid-seventeenth century in Great Britain, the word ‘public’ had come to be used in place of ‘mankind’, whilst in Germany during the eighteenth century, the word Publikum replaced the ‘world of readers’ or Lesewelt.24 The notion of

158 

L. BIBBY

‘readers’ is crucial in view of the French etymology of ‘intellectual’, with its resonances of ‘lecteur’, meaning ‘reader’. The noun is masculine, weighted historically with images of men as guardians of knowledge, images which we now know concealed many educated, female producers of discourse. Importantly, letter writers and also certain ‘readers’ (in the sense of those who study in private) are the private individuals making up the ‘sphere’ to which and for which public figures represent themselves, as in Habermas’s statement that the ‘bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public’ (my emphasis).25 Men and women have participated in this public in different contexts and on different terms and although Habermas does not address this difference directly, women are the clear and instrumental ‘others’ in his account, maintaining a clear hierarchy of legitimacy. In historical terms, the ‘private man’ has ‘combined the role of owner of commodities with that of head of the family, that of property owner with that of “human being” per se’,26 but there is no apparent reason why any private woman could not participate in the cultural dimension of the public sphere while maintaining her status as a private individual without any public, that is institutional, affiliation. Thus, the public and private spheres support and help to define each other. Habermas details that ‘the subectivity originating in the interior sphere of the conjugal family created, so to speak, its own public’ and that Even before the control over the public sphere by public authority was contested and finally wrested away by the critical reasoning of private persons on political issues, there evolved under its cover a public sphere in apolitical form—the literary precursor of the public sphere operative in the public domain. It provided the training ground for a critical public reflection still preoccupied with itself—a process of self-clarification of private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness.27

This ‘literary precursor’ of the modern public sphere, associated, for example, with ‘the reading room and the theatre’, museums, concerts, coffee houses and salons,28 highlights the wider social power invested in private individuals’ cultural activities. There is no doubt that a large part of this critical discourse took place in what Habermas calls the ‘interior domain’ of the home or that the home adopted aspects of the public sphere when people gathered there for discussion, as in the case of literary

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

159

salons where writer-intellectuals would legitimate their ideas before seeking wider publication29—and with which European upper-class women at least are strongly, historically associated. Alongside each society’s economic structure, its class structure has governed the intellectual’s relationship to public and private spheres, and Habermas crucially places ‘bourgeois intellectuals’ within the European private realm in his ‘blueprint of the public sphere of the eighteenth century’,30 although public forums of debate such as salons and coffee houses allowed ‘intellectuals’ (assumed to be members of an educated middle class) to meet with the nobility and the grande bourgeoisie. The European intellectual of Habermas’s study emerges from this theory as a point at which the public and private spheres converge and alter each other, and the individual intellectual is a variable figure with a more complex relationship to public life than is often supposed, owing to a ‘public’ cultural investment in private activities. The assumption underlying Habermas’s historical account of representation as a purely public process, and reinforced by Edward W. Said’s assertion that private intellectuals cannot exist, is also a dubious assumption that the figure of the intellectual has remained fundamentally unchanged. According to Habermas, the ‘public that read and debated...read and debated about itself’, presumably as a body of private individuals with ‘private’ concerns. This European ‘bourgeois reading public’31 and the bourgeois family gave discursive form to a concept of the private that was intended for an audience: ‘Subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private’ was represented, for example, in the publication of ‘correspondence and novels composed of letters,’32 ideas exploited also in Byatt’s A Whistling Woman. Novel-reading is here linked to the decline of gatherings like those in coffee houses and to the growth of the press and ‘professional criticism’: ‘They formed the public sphere of a rational-critical debate in the world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself.’33 The popularity of epistolary eighteenth-­ century novels, with their mimicry of private letters, and the subsequent growth of the psychological novel show us how the figure of the private writer-intellectual began to preoccupy public literary discourse, gaining literary along with discursive form. Such texts are the forerunners of the contemporary narratives which seek to document the related figures of the private, amateur or suppressed intellectuals who have worked outside public (in the sense of published and read) discourse in such a way that textual history could not document them. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance and The

160 

L. BIBBY

Matisse Stories explore the historical and contemporary relationship of the public sphere and the ‘intimate sphere’ characterised by home, family and relationships, or the centre of the ‘private realm’,34 to reassert the intellectual as a variable figure, most crucially in gender terms. Lisa McLaughlin states that feminist critiques of Habermas’s work on the public sphere ‘have underscored the extent to which the liberal-­ bourgeois model’s abstract principle of generality acted in fact as an exclusionary mechanism, such that the discussion of “common concerns” tended to preclude debate that was disassociated from the interests of white, male, educated property-owners’ (McLaughlin 2004, p.  160).35 The idea of a ‘reading public’ in particular encompasses gender (and also class) inequalities, as Joan B. Landes makes clear, as historically many fewer women than men have been literate (Landes 1988, p. 51).36 This exclusionary discourse is undeniably present, but it highlights the features Habermas’s text shares with the myth of the public intellectual—a set of paradigms that appear to preclude women’s place in public life, but as I have argued, never have entirely. Habermas’s theory of the public sphere itself rests on a myth that conceals a plurality of probable realities. Nancy Fraser argues that the ‘bourgeois public’ he described was ‘never the public’ and that ‘virtually contemporaneous with the bourgeois public there arose a host of competing counterpublics’, including some dominated by women.37 This is borne out when looking again at studies of the literary salon, bluestockings, ‘women of letters’ and the rise of women as literary celebrities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.38 Recognition of the mythology inherent everywhere in discourse has real political consequences, as does ignorance of it. Fraser is concise on these points: indeed, ‘an adequate conception of the public sphere requires not merely the bracketing, but rather the elimination, of social inequality’, and this must include the recognition ‘of interests and issues that the bourgeois, masculinist ideology labels as private and treats as inadmissible’.39 As an author of feminist critical fiction, A.  S. Byatt exploits the representation of the private as a set not only of possibilities but of realities at the edge of a truly damaging patriarchal myth.

5.3   Possession: A Romance and The Matisse Stories In terms of content and form, Possession is most strongly concerned with the limitations of the myths that constitute narrative, history and theory, all of which constitute discourse itself through language. Plurality and

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

161

multiplicity of myth is the key to unseating the most harmful forms of knowledge represented in the text, because plurality or multiplicity compromise the ‘purity’ of all paradigms, to rearrange Laurence Coupe’s notion of seemingly ‘pure paradigms.’40 The knowledge sought by part-­ time research assistant Roland Michell depends on the obscure, multiple and provisional historical narratives provided by the textual traces of literary history, which is in turn mediated by academic professionalisation in the sense in which Said used the term, as a tendency to stay within the accepted bounds of an organisation’s culture. At this very early point in the narrative, when Roland is in the London Library reading books that belonged to the nineteenth-century poet Randolph Henry Ash, it seems that too many discourses, each with their own narratives to impose, stand between Roland and the past. While dutifully studying one particular text, Roland then discovers drafts of private correspondence between Ash and an obscure woman poet, Christabel LaMotte, literally hidden within its pages. Until that point, LaMotte has only been studied and valued by feminist scholars, and their work is portrayed as a limited, limiting and overly politicised branch of scholarship through the prism of powerful male scholars’ attitudes, in a scenario that foregrounds Byatt’s portrayal of how much larger and more radical a project feminist academic work can be, when men are the very symbols of knowledge itself. The correspondence indicates that the two were lovers, in spite of LaMotte’s famously guarded privacy and Ash’s married status. The shifting but authoritative lines between the public and private literary spheres of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are thus immediately drawn. Then Roland, although employed by an institution in which knowledge is a commodity, steals the secret letters, enjoying ‘possessing knowledge on his own’ (5) and his own ‘pursuit’ of the two poets begins. Although a PhD graduate, he is not implicated in the same sort of high-profile, public, academic life in the same way as are his employers James Blackadder and the R. H. Ash specialist Mortimer Cropper. Instead, Roland’s isolation and sense of his own limited influence on the cultural world around him is often stressed, as when he attempts to tell Blackadder what he has found: Roland said, ‘I think I’ve made a discovery.’ ‘It will probably turn out to have been discovered twenty times already. What is it?’ ‘I went to read his Vico and it’s still crammed with his manuscript notes, bursting with them, between every page. In the London Library.’

162 

L. BIBBY

‘Cropper will have been through it with a toothcomb.’ ‘I don’t think so. I truly don’t think so. All the dust is set in black rims, it reaches the edges of the paper. No one’s touched it for a long, long time. I guess not ever. I read some.’ (30)

The discovered letters represent the multiple and always partial status of historical narrative as components of mythology, as well as the private dimensions of Ash and LaMotte’s lives beyond the assumption that everything that can be known, is already known. Ash’s drafts of his first letter to LaMotte, stuffed into his volume of Giambattista Vico, are literally the private that is within and part of the public. By discovering and studying the rest of the correspondence in LaMotte’s bedroom at her family’s estate, Seal Court, Roland and feminist academic Maud Bailey bring the letters closer to public discourse, although they keep them largely private for an extended period of time. Because the letters do not become part of the avaricious Mortimer Cropper’s collection of Ash’s papers, they are kept separate from the realm of public knowledge. This, along with their status as indicators of a very personal and illicit relationship, separates them from the idea of letters representing the historical ‘traffic in news’ in which Habermas was interested.41 The critical and biographical work of Blackadder and Cropper is part of the modern commercial traffic of knowledge which Habermas would recognise, and moreover these two established academics have succumbed fully to the professionalisation against which Said warned. As if to confirm this, Cropper’s biography of Randolph Henry Ash, The Great Ventriloquist, is shown early in the novel to be a conventional, reverent and old-­fashioned work, probably intended more to bolster its author’s reputation than its subject’s. Byatt’s intellectual workers are often described in terms of their different relationships to the realm of knowledge as a commodity, further testing notions of professionalisation and intellectual autonomy in various circumstances: for example, Roland is unemployed in a time of scant job prospects, Maud has had success but is professionally defined, and therefore confined by the masculine academy, as a ‘mere’ feminist scholar. Only the young academic Fergus Wolff is both ambitious and sought-after despite, or more probably because of, his arrogant and mercenary style of scholarship. The discovery that Ash and LaMotte first met at a breakfast given by Crabb Robinson, a gentleman known for surrounding himself salon-style with the ‘distinguished men’ of his time (24), recalls Habermas’s picture of the public sphere of the eighteenth century onwards, part of

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

163

which took the form of gatherings in private houses where private individuals ‘held court’ with small audiences. The record of the two poets’ meeting is found in Robinson’s ‘monumental Diary’, feeding the mythology of past and present literary public spheres in which private documents become objects of public scrutiny and contribute to totalising views of the past. The term ‘monument’ is suggestive of Foucault’s description of the ‘great discursive monuments’ of which history and knowledge are composed—‘the discipline of beginnings and ends, the description of obscure continuities and returns, the reconstitution of developments in the linear form of history’.42 Foucault here indicates the exact discursive strategies necessary to keep a ‘legend’ like Ash’s in place, supported by the arrangement and interpretation of documents. Ironically, documents are here part of a fictional narrative masquerading as a quest for historical knowledge, both mirroring and adapting the early ‘novels written in letters’, which Habermas saw as a vehicle for notions of subjectivity oriented to audiences,43 in order to exploit the documents’ discursive power for other purposes. Byatt’s novel thus portrays, in large part, the destruction of a deceptive set of literary-historical monuments in which Ash was a ‘great’ man and poet partly because one of his female peers was not, her inferiority supporting his superiority. Another strong echo of this process is found in the section of Byatt’s narrative revealing the ‘reality’ of Ash and LaMotte’s affair, made up completely of their letters after they are found hidden at the Seal Court estate. The idea that LaMotte hid the correspondence, and the location of its discovery in her bedroom, means that we read it as traces of completely private subjectivity and private matters— part of the absolute core of the ‘intimate sphere’ experienced by the poets—even after the correspondence is made public (meaning, no longer totally unknown) by gaining its audience of two. The reference to LaMotte in Crabb Robinson’s diary is disconcerting, because we cannot read it as though she were a public figure in the same way as Ash or any other ‘great man’. The gendered hierarchy of writer-­ intellectuals permeates every recorded response to the event. For instance, Crabb Robinson writes that ‘Miss LaMotte spoke more forcefully than I would have expected’, evoking the ghostly, historical women of the salon, both absent and present from discourse, but far more of the diary entry covers Ash’s contributions to the discussion (25). He is an unquestioned professional man of letters, whereas LaMotte, although a writer herself, is seen as almost irrelevant, although we learn that her father was the author of an impressive book (titled Mythologies with heavy irony) and that she

164 

L. BIBBY

gave a ‘Monna Lisa smile’ when asked her opinion on ‘rapping spirits’ (25). These representations of the two poets test the limits of ‘public’, ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ figures defined by Edward W. Said, demonstrating already the specificity and limitations of those ideas. Ash, although a professionalised ‘great man’ of his time, is studied by James Blackadder in the twentieth century as a polymath who had been ‘interested in everything’, with a mind so inclusive that as a subject of study that he is a threat to Blackadder’s own ‘conscious thinking life’—Blackadder fears ‘all his thoughts would have been another man’s thoughts, all his work another man’s work’ (28–29). Dr Beatrice Nest is Blackadder’s contemporary, another ostensibly professionalised intellectual worker, but whose under-­ regarded and excessively ‘feminine’ work on the wives of great men leaves her confined to the ignored spaces of the archive. In a horrible image of her isolation, social and academic, she is seen as ‘almost bricked in by the boxes containing the diary and correspondence of Ellen Ash’ (27). With Beatrice, the terrible power and real modern consequences of patriarchal mythology, to say nothing of its effects on women’s lives in the nineteenth century, are made clear. The novel’s first full description of Beatrice Nest is prefaced with a verse by LaMotte including the lines: In no Rush of Action This is our doom To Drag a Long Life out In a Dark Room. (112)

Beatrice is associated not with LaMotte’s poetry, however (she apparently does not undertake the variety of feminist textual analysis done by Maud Bailey), but with the confinement figured in this verse—confinement within her archive, within a subject (biographical studies of wives of great men, which was considered suitable for a female undergraduate student in the 1940s) and within her own body. Now, she is a ‘failed’ intellectual woman who has proved easy to push out of public life and also, crucially, out of the discursive sphere of feminist intellectualism (the only, grudgingly legitimated kind) by feminists, because the only discourse she uses to study women is patriarchal. She is described as having ‘wide and abundant flesh, sedentary swelling hips, a mass of bosom’ (112) with ‘a minimal private life’ in the sense of family and relationships. Her published work, Helpmeets, ‘about the daily lives of wives of genius’ has been rendered obsolete by the advent of feminism within the academy and we learn that

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

165

she took early retirement after sensing her ‘growing irrelevance to the deliberations of her department’ (116). Thus, the patriarchal power to disadvantage and exclude is accorded even to certain so-called feminists, even if that power’s aims are not overtly patriarchal. Beatrice is punished for her unwillingness to read certain narratives, of oppression, into the life stories of those ‘wives of genius’, that phrase itself shouting irony as there is no way of knowing who among those wives might have themselves been geniuses. The marginalisation of Christabel LaMotte and Beatrice Nest in their respective centuries, however, does not fully succeed. These eras of intellectual life are marked and altered by these women, as well as by Ellen Ash, whose diaries show her to be an intelligent reader: for all her journal’s display of feminine propriety, she at one point complains of Ash’s unwittingly cruel characterisation of her intellect as ‘womanly, virtuous, pure and so on and so on’ (223). Feminist criticism emerges in both the novel’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century strands as a varied textual space in which women intellectuals have represented themselves freely, although that space is not always viewed as a sufficient commodity within the traffic of public discourse, or considered to be of comparable value to representations of male intellectuals. Feminist criticism is also a problem when academic feminism also gains ‘definitive’ status and all other works and thoughts on women and their writing are seen as inferior; as a result of this process, women like Beatrice Nest are forgotten. As a feminist scholar, Dr Maud Bailey is not excluded from contemporary academia as is Beatrice Nest, but she remains susceptible to the patriarchal terms of that knowledge economy because of her gender. Her feminist work is seen, initially, as too limited in its concerns and influence compared to the work of her male colleagues on ‘great’ men of letters. A fiercely private person, Maud seems to apply her aversion to personal curiosities to her work, concerning herself with LaMotte’s literary work and assuring Roland that ‘there’s little to go on’ for an academic looking to edit the poet’s letters (41). Maud contrasts with biographical critics by representing herself as a ‘textual scholar’, shunning ‘the modern feminist attitude to private lives’ (211). Roland Michell learns of Maud in terms of her status as one of ‘the feminists’ who knows ‘all that is known about Christabel LaMotte’ (34)—an ironic reputation as a gatekeeper, as there will be much to prove she does not know. Maud thinks of her home as ‘her bright safe box’ where she can ‘work alone’ (136–137), drawn to that secret sphere rather than the academic world in which successful academics seek to ‘know everything’

166 

L. BIBBY

about their subjects, with no regard for privacy. For her, privacy proves difficult to completely attain, as it did for LaMotte. Such academics include Fergus Wolff, with whom Maud has had a disastrous affair and who threatens to write a ‘siege-paper’ (a violent phrase positioning Maud herself, as well as her work, as under siege) appropriating Maud’s past work on LaMotte. Another is feminist critic Leonora Stern, whose terminology echoes second-wave feminist ‘recovery’ of women authors and who writes to Maud speculating about how LaMotte’s ‘inhibitions made her characteristically devious and secretive’ about her assumed lesbian sexuality (138–139). This obsessively biographical criticism, practised also by Mortimer Cropper, equals the common, unthinking desire to build discursively a ‘legend’ around a subject where the ‘reality’ or ‘natural presence’44 of that subject is always unavailable. This serves to collapse conventional ideas of the public and private in unhelpful, simplistic ways by implying that writing really can replace a life’s natural presence. Byatt instead builds a more workable mythology, in writing, around the idea that we cannot ever really access the past. For Maud Bailey, feminine gender is a barrier because of its accompanying tropes of the intimate sphere and private existence, intrusive representations of which have become part of the twentieth century’s literary-­ academic public sphere—and another inadequate myth of female intellectualism. Her colleagues, Fergus Wolff and Leonora Stern, exploit their personal knowledge of her at the same time as they impress their invasive methods of scholarship upon her. In spite of her principles, however, Maud cannot avoid considering LaMotte’s private life when her correspondence with Ash is discovered, as a result of clues found within LaMotte’s poetry (an instance of the private always finding some sort of representation within the public). In this case, something of the invasive ‘modern feminist attitude’ (211) is required and even seems to have been encouraged by the long-dead poet herself, as though she meant to appeal to modern feminists, before and beyond present-day feminist academia and its limitations. Possession suggests that feminist criticism is a much broader cultural project than is found within academia alone, so large that non-literary discourse cannot represent it fully and even literature must do so inventively. As in much of her short fiction, Byatt adapts directly the language and forms of myth and folktale to achieve this facet of its inventiveness. The novel’s sections of twentieth-century narrative are interspersed with sections of Christabel LaMotte’s poetry and fairy stories in which women’s

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

167

autonomy is presented as strength, as in the often-referenced myth of the Fairy Melusine in which the serpent woman claims time to be alone and in her true, serpentine shape (studied closely in Alban [2003]). The remythologisation of women is here very literally a remythologisation, but at the same time it indicates itself as a part of a much larger process of feminist re-imagination that patriarchal culture recognises—after all, that culture has done its best to sideline LaMotte’s poetry. However, women’s private existence is also shown as having many drawbacks, not least the fact that privacy does not always equal autonomy; patriarchal societies are usually slow to change. In her story, the Fairy Melusine is discovered in her serpent form by her husband, and so in LaMotte’s story, her material independence, left to her by a maiden aunt, allows her to write but does not allow her to really prosper or be a mother to the child she bears by Ash without his knowledge. She, in turn, ends her life as her daughter’s ‘aunt’, having retreated into a saddening ‘voluntary silence’ (36–37). A separate ‘silence’ surrounding Ash and LaMotte’s true relationship is broken by their correspondence, of which Chap. 10 of the novel is entirely composed. The letters document the lively debate between the poets in which they represent themselves as intellectuals on almost equal terms, removed from the traffic of knowledge in the public world which assigns them very different statuses. The letters are almost a temporary respite from the discourses that previously limited them to certain roles. LaMotte in particular torments Ash with limited information about her home life, telling him that she is ‘no Creature of [his] thought, nor in danger of becoming so’ (169)—perhaps not a ‘Creature’ in the sense Melusine was, confined to a myth that ends with her undoing, but instead able to recast herself in a new myth. The pair discuss the interdependent functions of poets and thinkers, with LaMotte showing a striking awareness of herself as an intellectual in the traditional sense, albeit one without any real public platform: ‘now I climb down from my preaching place, my unattainable pulpit’ (169), the ‘unattainable pulpit’ suggesting the strong Biblical injunctions to women to remain silent in public. Previously to this comment, Ash displays a common Victorian prejudice by urging her to avoid taxing her mind with matters of ‘Critical Philosophy’ because ‘women’s minds, more intuitive and purer and less beset with torsions and stresses than those of mere males—may hold on to truths securely that we men may lose by much questioning’ (163). LaMotte defies his prejudices in the numerous following pages of their letters. The result, as we find in the novel’s section of nineteenth-century narrative detailing their journey to

168 

L. BIBBY

Yorkshire together, is that Ash’s ‘love for this woman, known intimately and not at all, was voracious for information’ (277). LaMotte represents potentially paradigm-shifting information because she represents many potential breaches in Victorian ideologies of femininity, to the extent that the paternalistic Ash, who feared taxing his wife’s delicate mind with too much reading aloud, eventually tells LaMotte that he ‘can see no reason in Nature why a woman might not write such a poem [her epic The Fairy Melusine] as well as a man—if she but set her mind to it’ (165). Their brief physical relationship is presented as secondary to their intellectual connection, and their correspondence more integral to Byatt’s narrative than the details of their affair. Dominant discourses of gender and writing are put firmly into question and although we know their story’s unfortunate ‘ending’ already, real ‘history’ has already shown itself in the novel to be a mass of hidden stories and compromised cultural histories. Within the letters, a pastiche of the epistolary ‘novel written in letters’, LaMotte represents herself as Ash’s intellectual peer without significant hindrance in contrast to the hindrances she faces in ‘reality’. For example, in the narrative’s modern time setting, Ash is remembered as one of the highly visible men who drove the Victorian period’s intellectual movements, at the same moment in his life when he travelled and conversed with Christabel LaMotte (212) who, although her name is later known, is usually represented in terms of her deceptive public ‘silence’ and the manner in which she guarded her privacy and autonomy. As readers of this text, we are required to focus on the written ‘evidence’ of male and female minds interacting from the intimate spheres of their private studies, as well as the same private lives played out in the later sections of omniscient narration. In the public sphere at large, both in her own time and later, LaMotte is positioned on the sidelines of public life; she never claims the status of a public ‘woman of letters’ perhaps because if she had, her mythopoeic potential would have been less than it is, owing to her aligning herself with a masculine paradigm. Instead, by identifying herself with the ‘liminal snake woman’ Melusine and her ‘rich heritage’ of female divinity,45 she taps into a discourse of femininity which patriarchy still cannot either ‘contain’ or fully suppress. Hence, patriarchy’s place as the ‘natural’ Foucauldian order is threatened. When LaMotte’s private texts, written for no audience bar Ash (although we cannot be sure they were not placed deliberately so as to be found later), find an audience, we are able to conceive of her as a private woman intellectual whose private writings will alter a public literary world.

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

169

The short stories in the volume The Matisse Stories depict three cases of the conflicted middle grounds between public and private spheres, and private and interior spheres—‘interior’ referring to the home itself, as an aspect of the private realm46—experienced by women as they negotiate art, mythology and their statuses as intellectuals. ‘Medusa’s Ankles’ begins with translator Susannah entering a hairdresser’s because she recognises Matisse’s ‘Rosy Nude’ through the shop window (3). As the proprietor, Lucian, treats all of his clientele as ‘suburban old dears’ and is too preoccupied with his own adulterous love life to find out who his new customer is, we only discover in a brief detail that she is a professional translator who is preparing to accept an award in a televised ceremony. After experiencing a violent outburst in the salon, Susannah returns home where her ‘ostentatiously work-wearied’ husband surprises her by noticing the difference in her appearance: ‘He saw her. (Usually he did not.)’ (28). Like the Rosy Nude, which Lucian has placed in his salon but ignores, Susannah is keenly intelligent and evidently good at her work and at evaluating the world around her, but she suffers from a sense of insignificance. Middle-aged, she is ‘in a panic of fear about the television, which had come too late, when she had lost the desire to be seen or looked at’ (20). The private sphere of a hairdressing business, encompassing the interior sphere of messy love affairs, and the public sphere of the media all seem equally hostile towards her aging female body and anxious mind. In contrast, the ‘lavish and complex’ Rosy Nude itself, with its ‘voluptuously’ shaped central female figure, suggests different possibilities and attitudes, an alternative set of possibilities to the hostile culture Susannah inhabits (3). The collection’s longer central story ‘Art Work’ depicts Debbie, whose job as design editor of a magazine tellingly titled A Woman’s Place emblematises the source of the tensions in her situation. She is a writer with artistic interests and a mother of two children. Her employer at the magazine is ‘a man, who reads and slightly despises the pieces about the guilt of the working mother which his periodical periodically puts out’ (38), further encircling her work in entrenched myths of femininity. She is caught literally between the public spheres of the media, of men and business, and the interior sphere of the home where she pursues her professional life as the story opens, working at home whilst caring for her sick child. Her actual ‘place’, as a woman writer involved in creative work but still caring for a family in the intimate sphere, is uncertain. Her cleaner, Mrs Brown, ‘without whom, it must immediately be said, Debbie’s world would not hold together’ (39), is a victim of domestic violence, has nursed

170 

L. BIBBY

her employer through postnatal depression and clashes often with Debbie’s husband Robin, who fails to understand the domestic and professional ‘balancing acts’ Mrs Brown helps her to maintain (55). Debbie and Robin are intellectual contemporaries whose daily lives differ disastrously: Debbie is a diligent worker and professional, committed to providing for her family above pleasing herself, while Robin is an artist committed to artwork— a displaced Romantic genius, cut off from ordinary, daily life—whose skills are less ‘marketable’ than his wife’s (54) and who resents any intrusion on his ‘ethereal’ concerns by the domestic.47 As it is in the ‘Frederica’ novels, particularly Still Life, artworks are central to Byatt’s mythopoeic work in this story as part of her characters’ strategies for resistance as well as visual symbols of that resistance, particularly when produced by working women who must become professonalized to survive. Robin suffers from his lack of professional success and validation of his artistry, constantly avoiding ‘seeing his work, his life, as absurd’ and fearing that ‘he should have been a solicitor or an accountant, he should have worn a suit and fished for trout and played cricket’ (55). The dichotomy between amateurism and professionalism in the sense that Said employed the terms is disturbed in this story by gender differences that show the two terms’ probable hollowness: Robin associates himself with a masculine image of professionalism while remaining an amateur in his line of work, while hardworking Debbie becomes the family’s ‘breadwinner’. Here, the mythology surrounding both amateurism and professionalism falls apart. Robin’s attempt to identify with a certain image of masculinity fails because that image cannot translate to his real life and circumstances. Meanwhile, Debbie entertains thoughts of the artwork she used to do, wood-carving, ‘with a quiet grief, that didn’t diminish, but was manageable’ (54). In the end it is Mrs Brown who succeeds at uniting (or laminating) her job and her artwork, regardless of official demarcations of the two, by turning domestic items collected in the course of her work into art. Debbie herself has recently published an article on feminist art representing ‘the undignified things women “frame” that male artists have never noticed, tampons and nappies but not only those, and the painted interior cavities of women, not the soft fleshy desirable superficies explored/exploited by men’ (69), indicating how her intellectual preoccupations, among them breaking patriarchal taboos, are channelled into her work. This is a new form of the ‘ideological work of gender’ (again, using Poovey’s expression), countering many decades of such work carried out in the service of patriarchy.

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

171

When Robin loses out on the chance to have his work displayed in the Callisto Gallery, Debbie visits the gallery and finds that the artwork chosen for exhibition instead is by Mrs Brown. The ‘brilliantly coloured Aladdin’s Cave’ Mrs Brown has created bears ‘a crazy kind of resemblance to a lived­in room’ (77–78), signalling its partial origins in the interior sphere of the home that is simultaneously both Debbie’s and Mrs Brown’s workplace and also, somehow, a scene from a fantastical story or myth. In other words, the home is more than a private, domestic place for these women, and thus another patriarchal myth is suggested to be just that. However, the artwork interlaces with other discourses in order to break down the home’s parameters for the ‘private’ artist and intellectual: ‘The centrepiece is a kind of dragon and chained lady, St George and the Princess Saba. Perseus and Andromeda’ (79). The ‘dragon’ manages to be both a domestic object and a mythical creature, or possibly neither. As the onlooker within the text, Debbie does not make a choice: ‘It is a Hoover and a dragon, inert and suffocating’ (79–80). One of Debbie’s first reactions to this discovery of her cleaner’s other life is a visceral identification with a fellow artist, thinker and worker, as she ‘thinks of the feel of the wooden blocks she used to cut’ (82). In an interview with Mrs Brown, or Sheba Brown as she is finally named in the story, she is portrayed as a feminist commentator with a prodigious amateur flair for artistic expression. Her work, which in fact enacts feminist sentiments very instinctively, is said to focus ‘on the trivia of our daily life, on the boredom of the quotidian, but she has no sour reflections, no chip on her shoulder, she simply makes everything absurd and surprisingly beautiful with an excess of inventive wit’ (p. 83). She seems to act outside any conscious political motivation, as Mary Eagleton argues by situating her work outside Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘categories for the dominated aesthetic’: Mrs Brown’s work is ‘neither functional, mimetic nor, in her own mind, particularly ethical or socially relevant. It is others who see her work ethically, socially, and within a feminist politics.’48 Her feminist project is unassuming and subtle but hugely significant because, by ‘unmaking’ patriarchal myths of the home and the private so instinctively, she unwittingly indicates how instinctively this can be achieved if hollow patriarchal dicta can be ignored. Her literally private work is made public on a whim—‘I just suddenly got it into my head that it was time they were seen by someone’ (87)—but remains associated more with the insights of an intelligent amateur rather than a slavish, aspiring ‘genius’ who feels entitled to inherit the name (and with it, the

172 

L. BIBBY

patriarchal myth), such as Robin. Mrs Brown’s sudden fame gestures towards the fragility of the gendering of the public sphere for women who recognise that their involvement in public life only appears to be precluded. For her, the private, domestic nature of her daily life is the prompt for her art rather than the point of its suppression. She remarks in her interview that ‘People are funny really, you can’t be a cleaning lady for long without learning that’ (86), and this impression is supported by the responses of both Debbie and Robin. Inspired by Mrs Brown’s reconciliation of home life and art, Debbie creates wood-engravings ‘which have a certain success in the world of book illustration’, and Robin becomes fascinated by some of the same liberating impulses suggested by Mrs Brown’s work, his work gaining ‘a new kind of loosed, slightly savage energy’ (89–90). The breaching of past boundaries and women’s use of art as a strategy for critique are beneficial to everyone in this story, therefore, and not merely the women formerly contained by the intimate sphere. In this volume’s final story ‘The Chinese Lobster’, Dr Gerda Himmelblau meets a colleague, Professor Perry Diss, to discuss an accusation of sexual harassment made against him by a student. Before this is made clear, however, Dr Himmelblau is merely a lone diner visiting a favourite Chinese restaurant where ‘she has been coming…for quick lunches, usually solitary, for the last seven years or so’ (93). She is interested in the privacy facilitated by this location, as that privacy equals the autonomy necessary to think through the problem at hand and also envisage herself as a ‘solitary intellectual’ (98). She considers her own professional and personal position as an intellectual alongside that of Perry Diss, a public man whose image has a superficial gloss which Dr Himmelblau is able to see through: ‘His style is orotund and idiosyncratic. Dr Himmelblau’s younger colleagues find him rambling and embarrassing. Dr Himmelblau, personally, is not of this opinion. In her view, Perry Diss is always talking about something, not about nothing, and in her view, which she knows to be the possibly crabbed view of a solitary intellectual, this is increasingly rare’ (98). Here, Dr Himmelblau’s sense of autonomy allows her to view Perry Diss, a man of questionable reputation and who refers cruelly to the troubled student accusing him as a ‘Poor little bitch’ who should not be supported in seeking a degree (109), as someone she can converse with and whose misconduct she can evaluate. She appears aware of the drawbacks of her professionalisation: ‘She is thinking in his style. It is a professional hazard, of her own generation. She has never had much style of her own, Gerda Himmelblau—only an acerbic accuracy,

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

173

which is an easy style for a very clever woman who looks as though she ought to be dry’ (98–99). As usual there is a great deal at stake for the woman intellectual within a culture that prizes her femininity and denigrates her intellect, when the latter is actually more important to her. Representation, of herself and whatever she has to say, is thus an issue beset with probable contradictions; her dress sense is ‘not masculine, but with no floppy bows or pretty ribbons’ (99). In contrast Peggi Nollett, the ‘woman and student’ accusing Perry Diss of harassment, represents herself in her letters to Dr Himmelblau (who is Dean of Women Students) as alternately a misunderstood, victimised feminist artist and a sufferer of serious mental illness. Both positions are real and urgent problems, to which Dr Himmelblau is able to respond sympathetically because she views Peggi as an individual, indeed a ‘woman and student’, rather than simply a failed artist as Perry Diss does. To him, Peggi is nothing less than repulsive, for instance when he likens her perception of Matisse’s work to ‘one monstrous female corpse bursting with male aggression’ (113). He is offended by the form and nature of Peggi’s art project, which involves the violent defacement of posters of Matisse’s work, to the extent that he cannot see that she suffers from life-threatening anorexia and suicidal feelings. He is so secure in his masculine superiority that in fact, he barely sees Peggi as a human being, subject to dangerous illness—he states that he had tried, against his ‘instincts’, ‘to converse with her as a human being’ (116). Like Debbie and Robin in ‘Art Work’, Perry Diss and Dr Himmelblau stand in for a similar deconstruction of the opposition between amateurism and professionalism discussed in Said’s Representations of the Intellectual: Dr Himmelblau is as professional as her academic job requires, whereas Perry Diss ‘was almost an important painter, but probably not quite. At the moment his work is out of fashion. He is hardly treated seriously’ (130). His public arrogance and its remaining, if hollow, power puts him at risk of deeming Peggi Nollett’s illness to be of less importance than her work and angry feminist critiques of Matisse, which he views as her ‘failures of imagination’ (124)—to him, there is no place in art for critique, or at least not such strident critique. This appears to be because he would rather retain his position of undoubted (at least by himself) power, than confront Peggi’s specificities and feminine problems, and how they may affect his way of thinking. On the other hand Dr Himmelblau does not sever the realm of work from that of personal experience, and her influence momentarily silences Perry Diss’s stridently dismissive voice. After both consider that Peggi Nollett might take her own life and blame

174 

L. BIBBY

one or both of them, Perry Diss stops speaking: ‘He is thinking. He is quiet’ (126). The idea of the private, even where it concerns women’s secrets, compromises his sense of security and superiority. Dr Himmelblau is then preoccupied with ‘the knot of quiet terror which has grown in her private self like a cancer over the last few years’ but which she does not represent in speech or consciously apply to her professional life; that is, the suicide of her friend Kay’s young daughter and the subsequent death of Kay herself. These traumas, and these lost women, are at the core of the intimate sphere of family life and interpersonal relationships partly driving Dr Himmelblau’s professional concerns, as the Dean of Women Students, just as Peggi Nollett’s personal problems drive her intellectual standpoint with regard to her artwork. The feminist slogan of ‘the personal is political’ is firmly figured, here. Perry Diss has outwardly rejected the importance of private life, but as his reaction to Dr Himmelblau’s talk of suicide demonstrates, he cannot avoid the personal and traumatic despite his external confidence. Dr Himmelblau senses this, reflecting that her companion, who mentions none of what she imagines, ‘has had a long life. His young wife was killed in an air raid. He caused scandals, in his painting days, with his relations with models, with young respectable girls who had not previously been models. He was the co-­ respondent in a divorce case full of dirt and hatred and anguish’ (130). His private existence and his specificities are indeed the core of and driving forces behind his slick but macho and cruel public persona, which is itself misleading. Like the other stories in this short collection, ‘The Chinese Lobster’ emphasises the ‘personal inflection and the private sensibility’ which Said argues is always implicit in the intellectual’s representations, giving them meaning.49 Byatt makes these private aspects, aspects of the public sphere ‘real’ as a writer of fiction can, to explicate the no-longer-­ unified discourses of the intellectual that allow for difference and specificity.

5.4   Writing the Private Woman Intellectual This ‘personal inflection’ and ‘private sensibility’ of Byatt’s fictional intellectuals govern the structure and content of Possession: A Romance and The Matisse Stories, asserting a representation of private experience within a form of public discourse. The figuring of private experience within fiction is not new or exceptional, but its implications for the conception of a specific private intellectual and women’s particular relationship with the public sphere make it integral to Byatt’s mythopoeic project, especially in

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

175

terms of her works of historiographic metafiction. As Linda Hutcheon explains, ‘To elevate “private experience to public consciousness” in postmodern historiographic metafiction is not really to expand the subjective; it is to render inextricable the public and historical and the private and biographical.’50 As my discussion of poststructuralist feminism suggested, feminine and feminist subjects have the often untapped power to expose mythical elements in patriarchal discourse, and our ideas of the public and private spheres themselves often betray their mythic qualities. In Possession, the distinction and distance between these two broad realms are collapsed by the juxtaposition of extremely private letters exchanged by secret lovers within a narrative of a future in which their biographies are public property, but their affair is not yet known. The question of time and the sequencing of revelations make a huge difference to the nature of a powerful historical narrative: either it is conventionally patriarchal, or a transformative, feminine mythology is given ‘voice’. Because those same secret lovers are also writer-intellectuals, their biographies are partly composed of the images of themselves and the messages with which they represented themselves using spoken and written discourse. Therefore, as a commodity, the new knowledge of their relationship transforms their biographies and shows the division between public and private to be at best limited. Moreover, as LaMotte’s life and legacy show, even where the ‘private’ sphere restricts an intellectual life, a private ‘life’ can return to ‘haunt’ and alter the public sphere of the future. Ethically speaking, this is the process that must take place whenever the public sphere is properly scrutinised. As a result of this same process, in The Matisse Stories an unassuming domestic employee creates highly original, feminist art that completely alters her employers’ (and probably her wider community’s) view of her and of themselves, and a male teacher’s sense of his own superiority is shown to be fragile when he must confront the highly personal sources of a student’s grudge against him and against the subject of her academic work. The interactions between public and private realms is the point within literature at which private intellectualism is representable as an alternative to the archetypal figure of the public intellectual and its historical predecessor, the ‘man of letters’, because the hierarchy maintaining their status as paradigms is shown to be deceptive. In both Byatt’s Possession and The Matisse Stories, it is notable that none of the intellectuals depicted are completely reducible to the strict definition of the modern intellectual as public, offered by Said, or to its opposite, the private intellectual which he argues does not exist. The two ideas or figures support and partly

176 

L. BIBBY

‘create’ each other, whilst ‘real’ intellectuals might be similar or different to them in any number of ways. Byatt’s literary intervention, with these two texts, in the representation of public and private and male and female intellectuals, constitutes a demonstration that intellectuals are always different and specific. This is a framework that cannot exclude or fully delegitimise any intellectual on grounds of gender, or of the place of their work on the division between critical and literary work. Possession, as historiographic metafiction, constitutes a direct commentary on intellectuals, gender and the interlinking of literary and historical records. In this text, commodified knowledge shapes the narratives of Ash and LaMotte’s individual histories, but has in turn been shaped by their representation of themselves as intellectuals, artists and individuals with tangled private lives. As Dana Shiller states,51 LaMotte keeps the secret of the daughter she conceived with Ash until the end of his life, and then there is no record that he ever learned of the child’s existence anyway, apart from the novel’s ‘Postscript’ which reveals to the reader that he did. In the spaces of the intimate sphere, where such personal entanglements take place, representation takes forms other than overtly public discourse which is the preserve of the man of letters or the modern public intellectual. The personal is all that is considered ‘inadmissible’, but is only ever really concealed, within the public sphere described by Habermas, as Nancy Fraser asserts,52 despite the manner in which the public sphere is partly constituted and defined by the private. Christabel LaMotte’s companion, artist Blanche Glover, keeps a diary titled ‘A Journal of our Home Life’, in which she records the breakfast given by Crabb Robinson at which LaMotte first meets Ash. This private record is located in the intimate sphere by its title although within it, Blanche hints at the intellectual life that takes place, unrecorded, within that sphere and helps to shape the public life. She writes that at Robinson’s breakfast she ‘endured a long disquisition on the Tractarians from a young and opinionated university liberal. He would have been much surpris’d to know my true Opinion on these matters, but I did not chuse to let him be so much familiar, I kept mum, and smiled and nodded as best I might, keeping my Thoughts to myself.’ (44) This is a familiar aspect of the myths of public men of letters, and the oppressed, female, literary voice. This novel’s mythopoeia demonstrates that neither myth will do; that, together, they constitute a discursive and historiographic stalemate. Blanche’s journal is one example of the private texts that now make up the public realm of knowledge about the Victorian era; when we think of the

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

177

evidence of the period’s ‘inner lives’, we are likely to think of letters and diaries. By emphasising her concealed ‘Opinion’ and ‘Thoughts’ whilst among a group of intellectuals, she stands for the discourses that are sincerely intended to be private and unread but often have not remained so (another private document, included in the novel, is her suicide note—the jarring trope of completely lost, and not merely silenced, women is frequent in Byatt’s fiction). Maud Bailey’s academic work on ‘Victorian women’s imagination of space’, considering ‘agoraphobia and claustrophobia and the paradoxical desire to be let out into unconfined space’ as an alternative to ‘voluntary confinement’ (54) illustrates how the existence of private women intellectuals has been studied and has shaped the academic feminism we know today and which especially shapes ideas about intellectual women.53 Roland Michell’s reverence for the private aspects of women’s lives, intellectual and material, is suggested when he reflects that ‘He was an intruder into their female fastnesses’ (58), referring to both Maud Bailey and Christabel LaMotte. Like Randolph Henry Ash, who suggests to LaMotte that she will ‘silence’ herself by destroying the letters, essays and poems they exchanged (88) (which she does not), Roland is conscious of the silence that would have resulted in literary, intellectual and cultural history if the correspondence no longer existed. Nonetheless, if LaMotte had ‘silenced’ herself, there must have been a voice to silence. At the edge of a cultural-historical narrative of women’s ‘confinement’ is a glimpse of a woman intellectual who was not entirely silent at all, but who chose to separate her legacy until the time when a feminist academy could put it to good use, although the feminist academy may fall short of the task as Possession suggests. In the novel’s present-day narrative, the history of women artists and intellectuals has already been influenced by the personal writings of Blanche Glover concerning Christabel LaMotte. LaMotte writes to Ash that she and Blanche ‘were Two—who wished to live the Life of the Mind’, that they planned to support themselves financially by giving lessons and selling stories and poems, but that ultimately they wished to make ‘a life in which drudgery was Artful’ (187) (an echo here of Sheba Brown), thus tackling ‘drudgery’ as an oppressive myth in itself, to say nothing of resisting its real implications. They wish to transform the economic imperative to earn money into one not incompatible with their autonomy, and to move beyond the historically favoured myth of the ‘“ingenious woman”, the witty woman, the woman who wrote poems or translated Hebrew and understood theological debates’ who, as Norma Clarke points out, was a

178 

L. BIBBY

feminine stereotype of a thinker ‘admired as an ornament and exception to her sex’ from the seventeenth century onwards.54 For Blanche and Christabel, compromised privacy means compromised autonomy, never more so than when Christabel has begun her affair with Randolph Henry Ash and he wonders what she might have ‘mischievously misrepresented’ to him in her letters (190). Ellen Ash, for all that she has passed into literary history as Ash’s devoted wife and a ‘nice dull woman’, is implicated retrospectively in this same process of strategic misrepresentation of realities when Beatrice Nest questions whether Ellen was ‘deliberately baffling’ future readers of her journal (220); here, the mythology of ‘drudgery’ shows its simplicity and disservice to women, when drudgery can also conceal a privacy to be literally re-read. Indeed, when Beatrice has given the journal to Maud Bailey, the section we read along with Maud shows Ellen to be interested in the intellectual ‘climate of such questioning’ (223) which characterised mid-nineteenth-century Europe. These revelations have the power to change the face of historical narrative itself with real political consequences, as Maud Bailey’s near-containment as a woman academic, or modern Lady of Shalott, in the (then) fictitious University of Lincoln’s ‘Tennyson Tower’ suggests, with bitter satire (39). American feminist academic Leonora Stern is perhaps the novel’s most straightforwardly public woman intellectual (although there is a caveat to this), and her work is focused heavily on the sexual aspects of women authors’ private experience. However, by reading women’s writing in this manner, Leonora limits both the scope of her feminist work, by becoming fixated on the myth of biographical ‘facts’, and risks her own public standing among her peers. On learning of the Ash-LaMotte correspondence, she is adamant that the letters should be housed in that great monument to knowledge, the British Library, and that any arguments against this— presumably citing privacy, respect and taste—‘are only sentimental’; Leonora is determined that ‘Christabel’ should be ‘honoured’ by her love affair becoming part of public literary history (404). Roland and Maud seem suspicious of Leonora’s methods partly because many more unanswered questions surround those writers’ private lives, than merely concerning their sexual lives. It has been suggested with good reason that as a character, Blanche Glover is ‘effaced’ and rendered largely unimportant in the narrative in a reflection of the 1980s’ retrograde, heteronormative politics,55 but Blanche can just as easily stand for those people and realities which become lost to historical record because neither historical nor modern discourses will accommodate them. In addition, it is notable that

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

179

Randolph Henry Ash, half of the nineteenth-century heterosexual couple, is barely ‘heard’ within the text at all, and appears in the narrative mainly to father the child. Lesbian feminism is certainly rendered ridiculous in the form of Leonora Stern, but she is probably another casualty of her cultural moment’s ideological limitations, its blind political commitments and what these ignore. Readers are encouraged to critique the politics of what is recorded, analysed and prized. In a moving scene, Maud is distressed to re-read Blanche’s suicide note and consider not what it reveals, but what it does not: ‘So little remained of Blanche’ (306). Eventually the truth about Christabel LaMotte’s retreat to her relatives in Brittany is revealed not by the pathetic fragments left by Blanche, but by the journal intime kept by Christabel’s isolated and literary-minded cousin, Sabine de Kercoz. The novel’s twentieth-century researchers only succeed in assembling the narrative of Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash to a certain point—again, they never learn that Ash knew about his child, although we do—and only by consulting a private, female-­ authored intellectual record, not yet claimed by the public domain of knowledge. This is confirmed in the text’s latter section of experimental historical narrative, recounting the days before Ash’s death from the perspective of those who lived through it, namely Ellen Ash and Christabel LaMotte. We as readers have no reason to believe or disbelieve this narrative, but as it appears, unexplained, out of the margins of the novel’s ‘real’ documents, we accept it. Ellen has the opportunity to correspond a final time with LaMotte, having always known about her relationship with her husband, but instead ‘She wrote down nothing’ (452). History will not possess her reaction because she does not represent it discursively, but literature can give it form as fiction with an imaginative relationship to historical ‘secrets’. This is symbolic of history itself as a plurality of largely unknowable narratives.

5.5  Conclusion Like other concepts connected to the woman intellectual, concepts of the public and private spheres are subject to close and occasionally transformative scrutiny as part of Byatt’s fictional representations. The public and private spheres are not separable for Byatt’s intellectual women because their lives do not allow for that separation: their ‘private’ writings encode an idea of the ‘public’ and sometimes become public property. Their homes and workplaces overlap and their intellectual work itself has a

180 

L. BIBBY

different relationship, in each case, to feminist ideas depending on the historical period and culture in which the work takes place. Byatt’s texts consider how these relationships change, so that feminist textual ‘work’ is shown to take place in many more ‘spheres’ than readers may realise, regardless of public or private status. My discussion of Possession and The Matisse Stories in relation to Habermas’s contested theory of the public sphere has begun to demonstrate Byatt’s texts’ critical relationship to both theory and historical narrative. Chapter 6 extends this subject with an analysis of her historiographic metafictions and their reframing of the intellectual woman not only in the past, but also in the present and in imagined futures.

Notes 1. Coupe, Myth, 6. 2. Coupe, Myth, 6. 3. Coupe, Myth, 7. 4. Ga ̨siorek, Post-War British Fiction, 124. 5. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 9. 6. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 9. 7. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 9. 8. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 9. 9. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 10. 10. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 10. 11. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 161. 12. Ga ̨siorek, Post-War British Fiction, 133. 13. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 44. 14. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 44. 15. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 57. 16. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 55. 17. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 54. 18. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 55. 19. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, xiii. 20. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1. 21. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 8. 22. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 16. 23. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 16. 24. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 26. 25. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 27. 26. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 28. 27. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 29.

5  WOMEN INTELLECTUALS, PRIVATE INTELLECTUALS? 

181

28. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 30. 29. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 34. 30. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 30. 31. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 43. 32. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 49. 33. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 51. 34. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 55. 35. Lisa McLaughlin, “Feminism and the political economy of transnational public space,” in After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere, edited by Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 160. 36. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 51. 37. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 116. 38. Claire Brock, The Feminisation of Fame, 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 39. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 136–137. 40. Coupe, Myth, 5. 41. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 16. 42. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 137. 43. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 49. 44. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 159. 45. Gillian M. E. Alban, Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt‘s Possession and in Mythology (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2003), 280. 46. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 30. 47. Eagleton, Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction, 41. 48. Eagleton, Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction, 47. 49. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 9. 50. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 94. 51. Dana Shiller, “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel,” Studies in the Novel 29, no. 4 (1997), 547. 52. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 137. 53. See, for instance, the limited mythology of the woman writer-intellectual as constructed in Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own: From Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing (1978; 1982), Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1977; 1980) and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979; 2000). 54. Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, 2–3. 55. Samantha J.  Carroll, “Lesbian disPossession: The Apparitionalization and Sensationalization of Female Homosexuality in A. S. Byatt‘s Possession: A Romance.” Critique 49, no. 4 (2008): 357–378.

CHAPTER 6

Fictions and Future Histories of Intellectual Women

6.1   Introduction In A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), Angels and Insects (1992) and The Children’s Book (2009), her historiographic and mythopoeic projects crystallise into a feminist remythologisation of historical narrative. Moreover, by adapting realist forms so freely, Byatt’s historiographic metafictions balance a dual purpose: they claim compellingly to represent something of the ‘real’ as well as undermining the harmful cultural forces that claim authority at the same time as they disown their mythic, provisional, papery status. Byatt’s fictions portray a multiplicity of intellectuals, female and male, that are components of a mythology besides that of the public intellectual. The fiction’s feminist strategies and tropes, including but not limited to hidden letters and poetry, fairy tales and interior monologues that seem to shape history itself and its ideological strategies, refer to and exploit the defining features of the figure of the intellectual that claims (hollowly) paradigmatic status, as they are set out by Edward W. Said in particular: the critical sense, the willingness to think through and past conventional ideas and the capacity to think and communicate on one’s own terms, separately from the ‘body’ of a society and culture. Byatt’s fictions succeed in altering our conceptualisations of intellectual women in the past and the present because, just as the accepted features

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Bibby, A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_6

183

184 

L. BIBBY

and events of history often ‘change’ conclusively owing to critical thought and research (as do the narratives of Ash and LaMotte’s lives in Possession), our sense of history can be productively broadened to include many possible and probable narratives.

6.2   Histories Art is of course partly shaped by our ethical responsibilities towards real events and people. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance, Angels and Insects and The Children’s Book, as examples (to varying degrees) of historiographic metafiction and neo-Victorian fiction, enact a dual transaction between literary and non-literary discourses by representing aspects of ‘the real’ which are nonetheless fictitious while simultaneously underlining the fiction’s ‘true’ elements such as references to particular institutions and events. This effect is both paradoxical, as Linda Hutcheon explains1 and also reflective of the intrinsic nature of historiography, which tries to re-­ create events already lost and irretrievable. History’s authority is thus not merely contested in writing: history’s underlying discourses are analysed and, crucially, remade continually in a similar manner to that applied by the mythographer to the myth. The mythographer’s analysis of myth, according to Laurence Coupe’s succinct summary, is complementary to the myth-maker’s work in creating it; both create meaning and extend narratives.2 As readings of historical narratives, Byatt’s works document an erosion not only of the traditional distinction between factual and imaginative texts by the linguistic turn, as expressed by Kuisma Korhonen,3 but also the distinction between mythic and ‘real’ discourses, in a way that is still hugely significant because of trenchant beliefs in ‘the way things are’, or were. These are the beliefs in myths, and indeed pasts, as decided, finished and closed that help to maintain the paradigm of the male public intellectual. Byatt’s three texts are concerned thematically with the ‘real’ as opposed to the ‘imagined’, but also, more urgently, with the relationship between the ‘real’ and the ‘written’ and the capacity of the written to assist in creating realities. In Possession, Roland Michell, Maud Bailey and almost every other character in the modern-day sections of the novel seek the truth about the lives of a group of Victorians based on the documents, reputations and legends that the group left behind. Nevertheless, only the text’s omniscient narrator and the reader are permitted to know that past realities are different even from the new ‘facts’ uncovered by modern-day

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

185

scholars. Angels and Insects is a volume of two linked novellas set during the nineteenth century, one of which features completely fictional characters and events in the context of real cultural changes, whilst the other depicts both invented characters and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and his family, as well as the subjects of his 1850 poem ‘In Memoriam’. Byatt’s most recent novel The Children’s Book develops the themes and strategies of Possession and Angels and Insects to explore the textual construction of national and personal histories, both ‘real’ and fictitious, so that all such histories are shown to be subject to the same linguistic conditions and liable to gain a similarly provisional or mythic status. Real and imagined pasts appear almost interchangeably from the beginning of all three texts. The Children’s Book’s narrative commences at the end of the nineteenth century, a period intensely documented by writers strongly concerned by their place within national and cultural history, as Louisa Hadley notes.4 As a result, the imaginary is framed by the real in a way that lends discursive weight to the imaginary: Two boys stood in the Prince Consort Gallery, and looked down on a third. The Prince had died in 1861, and had seen only the beginnings of his ambitious project for a gathering of museums in which the British craftsmen could study the best examples of design. His portrait, modest and medalled, was done in mosaic in the tympanum of a decorative arch at one end of the narrow gallery which ran above the space of the South Court. (3)

This narrator looks forward to an already-known future. The three fictitious boys’ imagined lives will be shaped by the histories of nation denoted by the name of the gallery, a real place, and of British arts and crafts at the turn of the twentieth century, although the boys will resist many of the values represented by the place during their lives. Byatt uses a similar strategy at the beginning of the first Frederica novel The Virgin in the Garden, which takes place in an art gallery during a time of relative equilibrium and freedom in Frederica Potter’s life. Thus, the reader receives imagined and ‘real’ narratives simultaneously, in a way that underscores their interdependence and raises the central question of how histories as well as stories are constructed. In Arthur Marwick’s presentation at the Open University in 1993, titled ‘Metahistory is Bunk, History is Essential’, he asserted that what he and other historians do is ‘produce knowledge about the past’, rather than ‘reconstruct’ or ‘represent’ it, with clear reference to Hayden White’s

186 

L. BIBBY

book Metahistory.5 How is it possible to ‘produce knowledge’ is not made clear, as Marwick depends on an uncritical view of the historian’s role in relaying ‘facts’. As ever, this is not to suggest that historical events did not happen or that writing cannot describe them with some accuracy, but only to assert that discourse does reconstruct and represent the past and how we can ‘know’ it. Accordingly, Hayden White’s response to Marwick’s lecture centres on assertions that ‘discourse’ is not jargon as Marwick complained, and that views of traditional history as transparent and authoritative attribute a false ‘ahistoricity’ to the discipline itself.6 But far from discrediting history, discourse theory opens indispensable questions within it. A. S. Byatt’s historiographic metafictions are fundamental among the literary texts that are contributions to this debate as well as enactments of its concerns. This, in itself, illustrates the discursive authority often claimed by fictions as co-texts to relevant non-fictions. In Byatt’s collection of critical essays On Histories and Stories, she discloses the theoretical matrix which her historiographic metafictions not only draw on, but often reference and adapt directly. She signals a major critical interest in ‘the idea that “all history is fiction”’ which ‘led to a new interest in fiction as history’ by paraphrasing Hayden White’s observation that ‘novelists like Balzac and Flaubert could believe they were writing “history” because the forms of their fictions coincided with the forms of nineteenth-­century histories’, which also took narrative forms and still claimed scientific authority.7 This historical view of the closeness between histories and stories is dramatised repeatedly in Byatt’s own versions of the ‘imaginary pasts’ she praises in the work of other authors.8 I return now to a quotation from Byatt’s On Histories and Stories, again to demonstrate her work’s dialogue with White’s theories: Possession plays serious games with the variety of possible forms of narrating the past—the detective story, the biography, the mediaeval verse Romance, the modern romantic novel, and Hawthorne’s fantastic historical Romance in between, the campus novel, the Victorian third-person narration, the epistolary novel, the forged manuscript novel, and the primitive fairy tale of the three women, filtered through Freud’s account of the theme in his paper on the Three Caskets.9

Notably, these ‘forms of narrating the past’ are almost all literary, save for biography and Freud’s essay (Freud referring often to literary texts, in any case), because Byatt evidently sees no need to separate notions of literary

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

187

and non-literary narrative. The ‘serious games’ referred to are games of narrativisation alluded to by the playful style of the above paragraph, and feature a clash of forms, time periods, terminology and meanings. Byatt’s critical writing thus borrows something of her novels’ style, and with it, some of the uncertain discursive status of experimental successors to traditional historical fiction. Forms and discourses clash because they are bound to; they are constructed using the same process of writing. The concept of narrativisation Byatt uses is defined usefully by Hayden White broadly as the ‘telling’ of events as a series of stories, or the imposition of narratives upon realities. In The Content of the Form (1987), Byatt’s source for White’s theories in On Histories and Stories, White remarks in relation to historical narrative that ‘Thus conceived, the literary aspect of the historical narrative was supposed to inhere solely in certain stylistic embellishments that rendered the account vivid and interesting to the reader rather than in the kind of poetic inventiveness presumed to be characteristic of the writer of fictional narrative.’10 This describes a certain stylistic licence permitted in traditional historical writing, and persisting in certain popular histories today. For instance, we still expect those history books to contain entertaining ‘stories’ of the lives of monarchs and other famous public figures, but these are not usually regarded as actual fiction. The textual likeness of the two discourses, however, is evident and instructive, as White stresses: Recent theories of discourse, however, dissolve the distinction between realistic and fictional discourses based on the presumption of an ontological difference between their respective referents, real and imaginary, in favour of stressing their common aspect as semiological apparatuses that produce meanings by the systematic substitution of signifieds (conceptual contents) for the extra-discursive entities that serve as their referents. In these semiological theories of discourse, narrative is revealed to be a particularly effective system of discursive meaning production by which individuals can be taught to live a distinctively “imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence,” that is to say, an unreal but meaningful relation to the social formations in which they are indentured to live out their lives and realise their destinies as social subjects.11

Here, narratives are recognised as spaces of imagined consciousness, but which uphold a connection to reality. Literary and non-literary texts are recognised for their common role in producing meaning and helping to govern how readers approach their subjectivities, even though they are no

188 

L. BIBBY

less than ‘indentured’, a strong and apt term, to culture. White’s reference to how individual subjects can entertain an ‘imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence’ is especially evocative of the tensions and contradictions between the real and the imaginary which Byatt represents in her fiction. In White’s terms, ‘true’ histories have always been vulnerable to acquiring the status of myth: Many modern historians hold that narrative discourse, far from being a natural medium for the representation of historical events and processes, is the very stuff of a mythical view of reality, a conceptual or pseudoconceptual “content” which, when used to represent real events, endows them with an illusory coherence and charges them with the kinds of meanings more characteristic of oneiric than of waking thought.12

Byatt is one of the many novelists who join White’s ‘modern historians’ in endorsing and perpetuating this conclusion. Writing is the ‘content’ of the ‘form’, and whether that content is imaginative or ‘factual’, its form gives it meaning in the same manner as any narrative; hence the novelist’s power over discourse (if not concrete or organic realities), whether that power is recognised or not. White’s writing on this topic spans much of the time in which Byatt has published fiction, and is more or less in constant agreement with her literary practice; indeed, I argue here that her literary work extends his ideas further than he does by enacting their consequences in fictional form. As I noted earlier, White’s classic work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe theorises the ‘deep structure’ of traditional historical texts which contain certain ‘poetic’ linguistic features. White’s choice to examine the ‘recognised masters of nineteenth-century European historiography’,13 these ‘recognised masters’ all being male, is itself a narrative that was already successfully challenged by feminist academics at the time White wrote, and that critics and novelists including Byatt still challenge. As White himself argued in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999) seemingly in support of revisionist readings of his own methods, ‘the very distinction between literal and figurative speech is a purely conventional(ist) distinction and it is to be understood by its relevance to the sociopolitical context in which it arises’.14 Never dogmatic, his strategies complement both feminist and mythographic readings of history.

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

189

In The Content of the Form, White adds that narrative is imbued with certain ‘enabling presuppositions’15—we can suppose that they are aspects of structure that give it coherence—and comments further on the traditional belief in stories as ‘adequate’ forms to represent realities, hugely important in the construction of ‘socially significant belief’.16 The idea of past and present cultural investments in accounts of the past as stories sheds light on Byatt’s appropriation of the category of neo-Victorian fiction, because of the Victorians’ documented commitment to narrativising themselves for posterity. Possession, Angels and Insects and The Children’s Book query and in some ways prolong the narrativisation of the nineteenth century, White’s ‘classic age of historical narrative’,17 and are therefore implicated in the general late twentieth-century interest, recognised by White, in ‘the nature of narrative, its epistemic authority, its cultural function, and its general social significance’18—interests also epitomised in the nineteenth century’s textual culture. The precise ‘epistemic authority’ claimed by these three texts connects neatly to White’s argument that narrative is a ‘metacode’ for translating ‘knowing’ into ‘telling’19; the texts ‘tell’ stories to display certain ‘knowledges’, albeit in a critical manner. Although White’s main focus is on narratives that claim to be factual, his assertions are not only applicable to the forms of Byatt’s novels and novellas, but are also key co-texts of them because of the idea that things ‘told’ must rely on things ‘known’. The ‘classic age of historical narrative’ included all of the forms named by Byatt in On Histories and Stories as modes of ‘narrating the past’, indicating her incisive understanding of imaginative writing’s place in relation to ‘factual’ historical narrative. With these issues in mind, it appears, she has questioned history’s right to exclude, obscure or de-legitimise intellectual women by taking White at his word when he wrote that ‘What we wish to call mythic narrative is under no obligation to keep the two orders of events, real and imaginary, distinct from one another. Narrative becomes a problem only when we wish to give real events the form of a story. It is because real events do not offer themselves as stories that their narrativisation is so difficult.’20 If this process is indeed difficult, then certain narrative histories are guilty of making it appear easy; Byatt dramatises this, for example, in the biographies produced by star academics in Possession and the outward appearance of the lives of Victorian families in Angels and Insects.

190 

L. BIBBY

6.3   Fictions In the context of the intellectual’s cultural history, Possession, Angels and Insects and The Children’s Book are all revisionary fictions in the sense that Peter Widdowson has used the phrase, in his examination of metafiction’s role in alerting readers to the instability of historical narratives—that is, re-visionary fiction that looks again, defamiliarises and rethinks the past.21, 22 Possession charts the explicit re-vision of received knowledge about the lives and relationships of two Victorian poets as well as the forms that revision takes: the reading of previously hidden or ignored letters and diaries and the informal ‘creation’ of new biographical knowledge of historical figures, separate from the accepted versions. The first of the two novellas in Angels and Insects, ‘Morpho Eugenia’ follows a husband’s discovery that his wife and her privileged family are not what they seem, incorporating a reading of the evolutionary theory of the time. The second novella, ‘The Conjugial Angel’ speculates on the inner lives of late-Victorian women involved in spiritualism, including Emily Tennyson Jesse, sister of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In The Children’s Book, invented characters move among more or less familiar social and cultural histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the build up to the First World War. All three texts contend with mythic aspects of history and their impact on individual subjectivities, the supposed distinctions between the public and private spheres, and the role of the intellectual life of a given time in shaping its narratives as we receive them. In all three, women’s lives are reassessed and their intellectual lives are centralised where they might have been peripheral to ‘serious’ history, or ignored altogether— the result also of the inherently mythopoeic work of feminist literary criticism and theory. An imaginative counter to the myth of the public intellectual’s exclusive legitimacy is found in the first few chapters of Possession. This section is set in 1986, when the realm of English studies appears segregated along gender lines so that male academics mediate access to the works of the great poet Randolph Henry Ash, and Roland Michell must consult ‘the feminists’ to learn more about Christabel LaMotte. The novel’s central mystery reveals that LaMotte is more integral to the narrative of Ash’s life and work than previously realised and so the authority of masculine academia is compromised. In this process, mainstream academia’s valorisation of Ash as a ‘pure’ paradigm, the man of letters, reveals its flaws. In addition, academia’s ghettoisation of ‘the feminists’ is shown as at best unfortunate

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

191

and at worst wilfully negligent when the next ‘big’ Ash discovery will prove to be a feminist one. However, even these feminist academics depend on mistaken assumptions: the ‘true’ historical narrative gleaned from the diaries of Ash’s wife Ellen by Dr Beatrice Nest is rejected even by feminist critics, who apparently wish to impose their own narrative of ‘rebellion and pain and untapped talent’ on Ellen’s written traces (31). These scenes constitute a sharp-edged, satirical warning against overlaying historic texts with naive or presumptuous readings, or ‘final’ narrativisations. Stories of ‘the events that happened’, as we are made privy to in the case of Ash and LaMotte (even though these sections, too, are narratives), are never totally revealed or closed by modern readings. Thus, within this novel, the historical narratives of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are held up as indeed just that, narratives, which support and help to create each other. Byatt’s representation of a fictitious 1980s university Women’s Studies block is recognisable because as readers and students of writing by women, we are still surrounded by many of the material and textual constructions academic feminism represents. For instance, Roland has coffee with Maud Bailey at one of their first meetings ‘under a poster for the Campus Crèche and facing posters for the Pregnancy Advisory Service—“A woman has a right to decide about her own body. We put women first”—and a Feminist Revue: Come and see the Sorcieres, the Vamps, the daughters of Kali and the Fatae Morganae’ (48). Although to many readers these images might seem exaggerated (although they are not), they nonetheless suggest a familiar form of feminist criticism and a stalled form of feminist mythopoeia, requiring a certain view of Ellen Ash and Christabel LaMotte as fiercely autonomous and repressed women. These narratives, in turn, support the often intrusive, biographical feminist mission of scholars such as Leonora Stern, who we learn visited LaMotte’s relations to demand access to her past home and was threatened with violence (71). Such feminism is portrayed as limited and limiting because it ignores the patriarchal mechanism inherent in forcing a certain discourse upon the idea of an event or a life and obscures whatever ‘reality’ we can access or imagine. Hence, assuming Maud Bailey intends to write a traditional biography of LaMotte, Sir George Bailey tells her that there would not ‘be much to put in a biography. She didn’t do anything. Just lived up there in the east wing and poured out all this stuff about fairies. It wasn’t a life’ (79) (in the sense of a marketable biography). Sir George holds a fixed, mythical idea of LaMotte as a staid Victorian lady, her writing emptied of all significance when it is actually the key to a

192 

L. BIBBY

feminist re-inscription of her history using the Melusine myth of the liminal ‘snake woman’. The only ostensibly available narrative of LaMotte’s existence is pieced together by Roland and Maud, and also by the reader, from anecdotes (often dismissive and always partial), her companion Blanche Glover’s journal of their quietly independent ‘Home Life’ (43–47) and problematic assumptions made by readers of her poetry including Maud. Portrayed by the mainstream of literary culture and in her own family’s historical narrative as a woman with limited access to the cultural life of her time, and who ‘didn’t do anything’, LaMotte’s life story is incompatible with the narratives required by traditional biography. However, Maud Bailey, appearing to understand this, actually aims to write a critical study of LaMotte’s poetry, and so is closely concerned with a large part of the poet’s literary legacy and its untapped mythopoeic work. This legacy brings Maud and Roland much closer to the probable facts (such as are available) of her existence by leading them to her passionate correspondence with Ash. This section of the novel calls to mind Hayden White’s view, cited earlier, of historical narrative’s always mythic status, and the implication of imaginative writing in defining and changing historical narrative. While pursuing LaMotte’s poetry, Maud also discovers aspects of the poet’s life. From the following poem and others like it by LaMotte, an entire, mythic set of ideas grow around her name: I like things clean about me Starched and gophered frill What is done exactly Cannot be done ill The house is ready spotless Waiting for the Guest Who will see our white linen At its very best Who will take it and fold it And lay us to rest. Thirty years later the feminists saw Christabel LaMotte as distraught and enraged. They wrote on ‘Ariachne’s Broken Woof: Art as Discarded Spinning in the Poems of LaMotte.’ Or ‘Melusina and the Daemonic Double: Good Mother, Bad Serpent.’ ‘A Docile Rage: Christabel LaMotte’s Ambivalent

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

193

Domesticity.’ ‘White Gloves: Blanche Glover: occluded Lesbian Sexuality in LaMotte.’ (37)

A sharp satire of feminist academia lingers, here, in the multiple uses of colons in paper titles, but their language is also poignantly emblematic of twentieth-century feminist expansion of historical knowledge of lost women. Maud’s planned critical study of LaMotte’s poetry underscores her, LaMotte’s, status as a woman writer-intellectual whose material existence and inner life are unsurprisingly of less interest to a biographical tradition more interested in the active deeds of men, at the expense of women who passed their lives in thinking and writing. Again, her gender and its attendant myths of femininity effectively erase her writing itself, to say nothing of its import, from the cultural record. Nevertheless, Maud’s focus on LaMotte’s writing looks set to fulfil a more subtle and significant purpose: we learn that she has already published an essay titled ‘Melusina, Builder of Cities: A Subversive Female Cosmogony’ (37), indicating that she recognises the powerful mythology that figured an oppressed woman as a goddess. It is possible that in this way, Maud will learn much more about LaMotte’s significance than she would from (in any case, imprecise) biographical criticism. Possession’s sections of twentieth-century, third-person and omniscient narration are often prefaced with examples of Ash and LaMotte’s poetry, as part of the ‘serious games’ the text plays with various literary modes of narration. With heavy irony, then, Byatt’s own original poetry, presented as authored by fictitious poets, becomes an imaginative version of the past lived through by those poets and traced by fictitious scholars, but nonetheless referencing two familiar periods in literary, social and cultural history. In other words, the literary overtakes the biographical—not in a way that disregards the ethics of history but rather in a way that avoids the assumptions attendant on biography in favour of a recognition of discourse as a ‘sign system’ that points ‘first, toward the set of events it purports to describe and, second, toward the generic story form to which it tacitly likens the set in order to disclose its formal coherence considered as either a structure or a process’.23 We are made aware of the ‘imaginary relation’ we tend to develop towards our lived experience as a result of writing and reading that experience,24 and simultaneously of our tendency to read imaginative texts for their references to ‘facts’ and a sort of access to past ‘realities’. In Possession, as Ash and LaMotte’s poetry is presented to us among the supposedly non-literary forms of diaries, letters, biographies,

194 

L. BIBBY

academic discussions and essays, we can suspend knowledge that these are all actually imaginary and literary. Byatt has commented on the productive power of these ironies and tensions in relation to the work of other historical novelists and authors of historiographic metafiction. Although, she notes, the ‘writer of fiction is at liberty to invent—as the historian and biographer are not’, this is not usually invention for its own sake but the occasion for ‘a new aesthetic energy to be gained from the borderlines of fact and the unknown’.25 This ‘new aesthetic energy’ can alter the way we view the past. Fact, it must be stressed, seems here to signify little more than the names and known occupations of historical figures. Her example of Hilary Mantel’s masterpiece of historiographic metafiction A Place of Greater Safety, set during the French Revolution, judges that Mantel’s ‘fiction is fiction—it is not history’, although its impact on historical understandings through the combination of literary and non-literary narrative remains. Mantel, Byatt observes, ‘writes old-fashioned psychological narrative which is the imaginative form she gives to the lives of real, partially known men’. Further, she states, the ‘imaginative closeness of the narration feels less like a discarded style than a new and shocking experiment’ (my emphasis).26 Byatt, although theoretically well-informed, is not a theorist, and so these observations in a volume she declares to be a collection of ‘a writer’s essays’27 are a cautious attitude towards the terminology of literary theory that functions not as mere dismissal, but a refusal to close down any questions with ideas from theory. Her lifelong unwillingness to allow any ‘particular writer or system’ to dominate her thinking28 supports her fiction’s use of a multiplicity of theoretical ideas, without restriction. When demarcations between discursive ‘systems’ are disregarded or their importance downplayed, other, usually gendered hierarchical structures can similarly be questioned, including those associated with critical theory. The focus of Possession’s plot on themes of both literary and biological inheritance, as Maud Bailey observes the passing-down of Christabel LaMotte’s poetry and her material possessions before discovering that she is the direct descendent of LaMotte and Ash, is emphasised when read alongside Byatt’s autobiographical descriptions of her unconventional, varied sense of inheritance. For instance: ‘my sense of my own identity is bound up with the past, with what I read and with the way my ancestors, genetic and literary, read, in the worlds in which they lived.’29 Crucially, Byatt here expresses no Bloomian anxiety of influence, suggesting instead a certain victory over such anxieties as they are figured in The Shadow of the

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

195

Sun. In addition, this is one of the many occasions on which Byatt has constructed herself as a writer, critic and intellectual without acknowledging patriarchal, linear structures of ‘descent’ from any particular ‘masters’—instead, she finds her ‘ancestors’ wherever she directs her admiration and gratitude to predecessors, regardless of their gender. Her attitude towards historical ‘facts’ parallels this sense of discursive liberty: her critical essays in On Histories and Stories and elsewhere contain frequent references to ‘making up’ not only fictional characters but characters who existed in the historical record. Such ‘real’ characters have usually already constructed themselves to some extent in their own texts. However, Byatt has admitted to carrying out only limited research on certain figures, as with her Angels and Insects novellas, preferring to exploit the ‘fictive window’30 this permits the writer of fiction, as I will shortly discuss. By fictionalising a pair of Victorian poets, their families and friends, a segment of the British heritage industry and even a whole university in Possession—this last also invented in A Whistling Woman—Byatt participates in proliferating a shared aspect of our imaginary relation to the past, or what Kuisma Korhonen neatly calls ‘virtual histories’,31 suggesting both discursive closeness and distance. This terminology is appropriated by Cora Kaplan in her argument that in the case of revisionary fictions including Possession, the ‘historical side of their ambition has less to do with the faithful reproduction of Victorian language, landscapes and mores [...] than with constructing a virtual relationship between past and present, one which experiments with the kaleidoscopic configurations of two key moments of modernity’.32 Indeed, such a relationship cannot exist or be articulated until it is imagined, confirming fiction’s place in the initial construction of historical narrative as an imaginative (in the sense that it must be imagined) discourse. Mythology will inevitably be produced in the space between past and present, but often that mythology is productive rather than reductive. Kaplan’s incisive discussion of neo-Victorian novels’ use of pastiche echoes Byatt’s comments on the range of literary modes available to narrate the past. Pastiche, Kaplan observes, can become ‘an over-the-top performance in several literary genres by different characters and literary figures—poetry, letters, journals, stories as well as retro-Victorian narration and dialogue’.33 Such ‘performance’ constitutes not only literary narration, divorced from ‘true’ historical discourse, but pastiche as an extremely valuable ‘symptom of a surprisingly passionate reinvestment in the language and structures of Victorian print culture, especially its fiction and poetry’.34 In Possession, this reinvestment

196 

L. BIBBY

is a form of participation in the mid-Victorian era’s narration of itself, taken to the point of completely imaginative narration bounded with historical references, to underline again the status of cultural history as an imaginative endeavour. This is made clearest in the novel’s Chapter Ten, composed entirely of Ash and LaMotte’s previously concealed correspondence. There is no need here for any narrative or commentary outside the letters because they narrate the beginning of the poets’ affair in its entirety, in their pastiche of nineteenth-century letters and such letters’ role in documenting existence. Indeed, ‘Possession performs imitation as if it were a better, and certainly higher, criticism’35 in its mimicry of an older form of narration. Again, however, this process allows for a proliferation of constructions of the nineteenth century as well as imitation and criticism of contemporary versions. The entirety of Possession is literary, invented, but it is nevertheless one of those metafictions that ‘instantiate the way in which the humanist and anti-humanist, and the realist and anti-realist impulses of theory and imaginative writing begin to develop a productive rather than an adversarial relationship’.36 Ash and LaMotte are composites of Victorian poets including Robert Browning and Emily Dickinson, but at the same time refer to no ‘known’ historical figures directly. The novel is an instance of the extent to which historiographic metafictions represent what Linda Hutcheon called a ‘world of provisionality and indeterminacy’, ‘opening up’ the past to the present repeatedly ‘to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological’.37 This is the tacit theoretical context in which Possession’s twentieth-­ century characters exist. When Roland and Maud compare Mortimer Cropper’s authoritative account of Randolph Henry Ash’s journey to Yorkshire, based on his letters which ‘read exactly like the letters of a solitary husband on holiday’, with the newly discovered fact that Christabel LaMotte accompanied him there, they discover that Ash was a careful constructor of a false history in his ‘travelogues’ sent home to Ellen (215). Byatt’s text supports Hutcheon’s defence of the closeness of literary and historical writing, intensified by the late twentieth-century growth of metafiction as a form; Hutcheon states that the ‘intertextual parody of historiographic metafiction enacts, in a way, the views of certain contemporary historiographers: it offers a sense of the presence of the past, but a past that can be known only from its texts, its traces—be they literary or historical’ (my emphasis).38 In the case of Byatt’s fiction, then, there are always three discourses that are never apart: the literary and ‘purely’ imaginative, ‘real’ historical narrative and critical theory. The most important of

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

197

the ‘contemporary historiographers’ whose method is encoded within Possession’s is Hayden White. This link is examined as part of Hutcheon’s reference, in another of her theoretical works contemporary to Byatt’s novel, to how professional historians inevitably suppress, repeat, subordinate, highlight, and order those facts [that they choose], but once again, the result is to endow the events of the past with a certain meaning. To call this act a literary act is, for [Hayden] White, in no way to detract from its significance. However, what contradictory postmodern fiction shows is that such meaning-granting can be undermined even as it is asserted.39

In White’s framework, such ‘literary acts’ are indeed not incompatible with the historian’s claim to some authority in narrating real events, but the same acts, Byatt shows, are always accompanied by tension linked to what and where ‘the real’ is within discourse even though metaphors are also a ‘bridge’ between literature and the real. When she thinks of the material reality of a love affair within the histories of Ash and LaMotte, Maud Bailey in particular wrestles with texts, meanings and what, if anything, these have to do with what really happened. As she says to Roland: Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects—all the time—and I suppose one studies—I study—literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful—as though we held a clue to the true nature of things? (253)

Both the excitement and the danger Maud perceives in historicised literary study is the possibility that all writing constructs, or eats up, reality. In any case, all texts portrayed in the novel, from the once private, confessional love letters to riddling poetry, impact upon the real experiences of its characters. In many ways, Possession’s nineteenth-century texts shape the personal and professional existences of its modern-day protagonists as much as its nineteenth-century ones, and thus determine the narratives they ‘live’ in. They certainly govern Maud Bailey’s intellectual existence. Her critical life is driven by the origins and nature of her work on women’s writing and the undeniable body of women’s critical and creative work ‘drawn out’ of the nineteenth century by academic feminism. This work and its meanings are a crucial counterpart to the mainstream image of

198 

L. BIBBY

‘Victorian literature’ as, to use Mary Poovey’s words, ‘a distinct body of culturally valued texts’ represented in large part by the professional man of letters as he emerged at that time.40 However, academic feminism’s power alone to challenge the intellectual hierarchy between women and men has proved limited, and this is a state of affairs represented within Possession. ‘Morpho Eugenia’, the first novella in Angels and Insects, was framed critically as a contribution to theory itself when Michael Lackey suggested that the story ‘creatively documents the central intellectual dilemmas that have given birth to contemporary theory’,41 supporting the notion that fiction has a role in constructing discourses of both past and future (albeit while deploying the patriarchal, masculine ‘birth’ myth). The text is closer in terms of form to traditional historical fiction than Possession or The Children’s Book, affecting the most ‘purely’ realist narration and incorporating the least present-tense authorial commentary of the three texts I discuss here. In contrast to Lackey’s argument that the story ‘creatively documents’ paratextual discourses, Byatt had earlier called both this tale and ‘The Conjugial Angel’ her ‘historical fantasies’ which allowed her to explore gaps of historical narrative found during her research. This research, she states, was purposely limited in scope to basic ‘facts’ in ‘a professional extension of a normal reading process, in history or fiction, making a fuller, more vivid, more hypothetical narrative precisely around what we are not told’.42 She creates both a ‘historical fantasy’ and a construction, or reconstruction, of historical ‘intellectual dilemmas’ in the texts’ two dramatisations of the nineteenth-century world conjured by historical fiction and ‘factual’ narratives. Crucially for her plots, themes and the overall function of the two novellas, these intellectual dilemmas affect real men and women very differently and impacted upon their intellectual lives in a way that was documented by many ‘men of letters’ but by comparatively few of their female intellectual peers. Nevertheless, Byatt’s intellectuals, whether female or male, ‘real’ or imagined, are always unconventional and unlike any of their peers; thus, their representation gestures towards the multiplicity of intellectuals actually in existence. The protagonist of ‘Morpho Eugenia’, naturalist William Adamson, is the guest of the Reverend Harald Alabaster and his family after spending ten years travelling in the Amazon. Both men are enmeshed intellectually in the Darwinian concerns of the day by virtue of their work: William’s ‘ruling passion’ is the behaviour of ‘the social insects’ (10), bees and butterflies, while Harald, a buyer of natural specimens for the evangelical purpose of ‘the promotion of useful knowledge, of human wonder’ (17),

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

199

questions the conclusions of ‘Mr Darwin’ and inclines towards the old belief that nature’s beauty and intricacy is the work of a ‘Creator’ (19). The novella’s imagined world, comprising almost all original characters, itself toys with this intellectual climate; for instance, the surname ‘Adamson’ is notably Biblical and the name of the Alabaster family seat, Bredely Hall, alludes to the sexual processes of reproduction and natural selection. The two men are positioned socially in such a way as to explore intellectual problems professionally: Harald, a wealthy collector at liberty to promote his view of the world, enlists William to catalogue his collection of specimens while he, Harald, spends days attempting to write ‘the kind of impossible book everyone is now trying to write. A book which shall demonstrate—with some kind of intellectual respectability—that it is not impossible that the world is the work of a Creator, a Designer’ (33). William has lost his own collection and thus his livelihood in a shipwreck, and so is dependent on the Alabasters. William is the displaced hero of a specific ‘folk tale’ built around deceptive images of Victorian intellectual life and femininity, and each of these themes is associated with different women: Eugenia Alabaster and Matilda ‘Matty’ Crompton. He is immediately and intensely attracted to Harald’s eldest daughter Eugenia (her name chillingly emblematic of eugenics), who lives the domesticated life of other women of her class and honours her father’s interest in the beauty of nature with needlework and by arranging his specimens. This places her on the fringes of the ‘intellectual adventure’ (16) to which her father and William enjoy access and links her solely to the aesthetic pleasures of study: for example, she works only to ensure that Harald’s specimens and manuscripts are as decorative as his daughters. Favouring outward aesthetics over deeper, intellectual involvement with the discourse of their time, however, will prove hazardous for her and William. Eugenia is mythologised as nothing more than desirable to the point of being objectified (like one of her father’s pinned butterfly specimens) when William first dances with her: Her feet were deft. He looked down from his height at her pale face and saw her large eyelids, blue-veined, almost translucent, and the thick fringes of white-gold hairs on their rims. Her slender fingers, resting in his, were gloved and only faintly warm. Her shoulders and bust rose white and flawless from the froth of tulle and tarlatan like Aphrodite from the foam. (6)

200 

L. BIBBY

Harald explains that one of Eugenia’s specimen arrangements ‘is not done upon quite scientific principles, but it has the intricacy of a rose window made of living forms, and does show forth the extraordinary brilliance and beauty of the insect creation’ (15). Again, she is linked solely to the aesthetic and surface beauties: a superficial discourse. However, she, her father and William embellish their material environment and inner lives with texts; for example, when Eugenia decorates her father’s specimen cases with Bible verses and William copies a poem by Ben Jonson into his notebook which seems to express his romantic feelings towards his host’s daughter (12). The Alabaster children’s governess explains ant behaviour to them using myth (42–43) and Matty Crompton, of whom more later, writes a fairy tale called ‘Things are Not What They Seem’ to express her interest in ant societies. These texts-within-the-text, some of which are ‘real’ outside its imagined world, join Darwinian ideas in anchoring Byatt’s story in the historical narrative of Victorian intellectual life in which narrative and discourse are key, and ‘facts’ are secondary. The story announces itself as a text when we are told that at Bredely Hall ‘William found himself at once a detached anthropologist and fairytale prince trapped by invisible gates and silken bonds in an enchanted castle’ (21–22); he feels the pressure of every kind of narrative upon his life, and importantly, his intellectual work is limited by the social demands of life at the great house, religion and custom generally. Indeed, he marries Eugenia very soon after their engagement so that she will not have to marry after her younger sister does (55). Also confined to the fringes of male intellectual and professional life by her social place, but resistant to her situation, is Matty (Matilda—her name is historically evocative, as is William’s) Crompton. The woman William initially perceives as ‘thin Miss Crompton’ is a dependent spinster he presumes to be a relative of the Alabasters who, although without formal employment, is charged with caring for the younger children (22). Matty ostensibly belongs more in a Victorian piece of fiction than a ‘real’ historical narrative, but her lively intellect keeps her grounded within a significant discourse of ‘thinking’ women. While taking the children on nature walks, accompanied by William, Matty shows herself to be knowledgeable and actively curious in both wood ants’ behaviour and poetry recitation (31). William remarks to her ‘You think a great deal, Miss Crompton’ to which she replies ‘For a woman. You were about to add, “for a woman”, and then refrained, which was courteous’ (41), pushing the limits of the myth of the exceptional intellectual woman she knowingly

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

201

inhabits, but will not be contained forever. However, William’s admiration for thoughtful Matty is superseded by his feelings for the inert but beautiful Eugenia, who after being frightened by a display of butterflies he arranges for her, manoeuvres him into proposing marriage. She convinces William that he is a suitable match for her because Harald thinks him ‘a man of great intellectual gifts which he thinks are very valuable, as valuable as land and rent and things’ (55)—naturally, we may think, knowing of William’s status as a shipwrecked ‘hero’. However, this scene has an ominous edge, as William the intellectual finds himself speaking to Eugenia ‘as one might question a child who sees an imaginary bogeyman where none is’ (55). He is carried along passively by his own myth, while passive, deceptive Eugenia is carried by the darker narrative of her secret life. For Harald Alabaster’s continued hospitality after William’s marriage to Eugenia, ‘He [William] was to pay, he saw, with his thoughts’ and ‘time in conversation’ with his father-in-law (57). This amounts to his mediating Harald’s struggles with the novella’s major metatextual context, Darwinian thought versus religious belief—the point at which this ‘historical fantasy’ meets the ideologies associated with its historical context. Meanwhile, William’s relationship with his new wife is confined to physical experience, as he finds her to be sexually enthusiastic where she is mostly intellectually apathetic and their life together is reduced to the most basic, indeed primal, narrative of all. Sexuality has the potential to overpower the intellect, for William, as it does for the Potter women in the Frederica novels, and for him as for them this potential needs to be managed with care. Interestingly, William proves less adept than they do at ‘laminating’ bodily and intellectual imperatives, possibly because he is too far removed from the ‘real’ for lamination to have any effect. After his wedding, the story’s narrator makes a rare interruption, announcing the text’s mythopoeic narrative form with the following: And so he lived happily ever after? Between the end of the fairy story with its bridal triumph, between the end of the novel, with its hard-won moral vision, and the brief glimpse of death and due succession, lies a placid and peaceful pseudo-eternity of harmony, of increasing affection and budding and crowing babes, of ripe orchards and heavy-headed cornfields, gathered in on hot nights. (69)

This questioning statement and consciously poetic interjection consider the other literary forms in which William’s exceptional marriage might

202 

L. BIBBY

have taken place—the fairy tale and the romantic novel—and sketches a deliberately illusory view of his happiness in his new state. Here, we are ironically, briefly distanced even from the invented ‘reality’ of his life with Eugenia, after which we see that his joy is only the result of their sex life. The ‘intimate new speech’ he expects to cultivate between them is absent, while (again very poetically on the narrator’s part) ‘their bodies spoke to each other in a kind of fluttering bath of molten gold’ (69). Dangerously, however, verbal discourse between them is largely absent, allowing Eugenia’s other, hidden life to flourish. She bears five children, and with each pregnancy William is banished from ‘the golden garden of the nights, the honey and the roses’ (70) and lives separately from her. Instead, he spends time with Matty Crompton, as she studies an ants’ nest and implores him to tell the dependent inhabitants of Bredely Hall more about his time spent travelling, as they ‘should not live in ignorance of the rest of the world’ (81) as most of the Alabasters are content to do. In an argument over religious belief with Harald Alabaster, William tells him perceptively that We have made our God by a specious analogy, Sir—I do not mean to give offence, but I have been thinking about this for some years—we make perfect images of ourselves, of our lives and fates, as the painters do of the Man of Sorrows, or the scene in the Stable, or as you once said, of a grave-faced winged creature speaking to a young girl. (89)

With this, the text again indicates its intrinsic palimpsest of traditional stories, myths and the stories disguised as ideas. The Victorian intellectual, spiritual and scientific world is ‘written’ within the world of Byatt’s novella and must inevitably be either propagated or changed with further discourse. William recognises that the Christian scriptures and poetic texts all around him have constructed religion as well as a version of the world’s history. This is a limiting process of mythopoeia, that pretends any ‘horizon’ of new possibilities is wicked—in this vein, William recalls his father, a man ‘very much in the image of a terrible Judge, who preached rivers of blood and destruction’ (90). William and his father-in-law contribute to this process of construction in contrasting ways: Harald Alabaster attempts to write a Christian answer to Darwin whilst, with William, Matty Crompton authors a book, a contribution to the study of the natural world. In doing so, Matty also rewrites the discourse of nineteenth-­century female life that would confine her to the life of a useful, but dependent,

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

203

spinster and thus trap her within the literary archetype of the Victorian governess. She, and not William, initially projects the book as one which ‘might prove useful—and dare I say it—profitable to you [William] in the quite near future’ (93), or an addition to the fact-based intellectual life of the time. Crucially, however, Matty also insists that the book William writes must be a natural history and not a ‘major scientific study’ (93). Here, she suggests awareness of the way in which nineteenth-century works of history would be memorialised in the future, as narratives: When [...] we move a great historical work out of the sphere of science in order to enshrine it in the sphere of literature as a classic, what we are paying tribute to, ultimately, is the historian’s command of a power that is plastic and figurative, and finally linguistic.43

The book is bought by an enthusiastic publisher and ultimately provides the means for William and Matilda, as she asserts her name (157), to leave Bredely Hall together after William discovers Eugenia’s incestuous affair with her brother Edgar. The ostensibly civilised cycle of William and Eugenia’s conjugal life, punctuated often by confinements and births, is shattered when William learns her secret. The narrator closes their shared story with two ‘pictures’, one of William leaving Eugenia, and the other in striking present tense, in which we are asked to ‘Imagine the strong little ship, Calypso, rushing through the mid-Atlantic night’ (159) and carrying William and Matilda. Their new, shared ‘story’ is at once a positive ending, an opening-up of a new narrative, and a daydream of a time separate from the imagined history of William and the Alabasters. It is the narrator’s moment of particular linguistic power and confirms Susan Poznar’s description of the frequent interrelations of Byatt’s critical and creative work. With ‘Morpho Eugenia’, ‘Byatt weaves her own critical threads of inquiry, through key metaphors, into this shifting, iridescent, intertextual cocoon to play with and play out the artistic problems of historical nostalgia and scepticism, realism and experiment that appear time and again in her scholarly prose.’44 Each of Byatt’s metaphors is using knowingly, becoming a bridge between the novella’s literary elements and its mythopoeic framework of critical inquiry. Whereas ‘Morpho Eugenia’ features imaginary characters within a certain construction of the nineteenth century, ‘The Conjugial Angel’ takes real figures from literary history to highlight the manner in which the same figures are cultural constructs, now, a century after they lived. The

204 

L. BIBBY

novella’s main theme is memorialisation, as it charts the involvement of Emily Tennyson Jesse with spiritualism and tells the story-about-a-story of her engagement to her famous brother’s great friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died young before the marriage could take place. Memorialisation, again, is one strategy with which writing creates mythic discourses of the past (another is the use of archetypes such as young dead genius and the bride who never was), and ‘The Conjugial Angel’ demonstrates literary writing’s power in this respect: to memorialise some and not others. Hallam is memorialised in this text in several ways: in the actually existing narrative of Tennyson’s poem and in Byatt’s ‘imagined pasts’ of Emily’s memories and the moment when Hallam’s horrifically corporeal ghost visits the fictitious medium, Sophy Sheekhy (249). Of the two texts in Angels and Insects, Byatt discusses ‘The Conjugial Angel’ before ‘Morpho Eugenia’ in her essay ‘True Stories and Facts in Fiction’, in which she explains the role of ‘fictive windows’ in her process of writing historical fiction. In the case of another short piece of historiographic metafiction, ‘Precipice-Encurled’, which appeared in her Sugar and Other Stories (1987), Byatt writes that having identified a ‘fictive window’ in which to invent a character and events, she ‘arranged other pieces of narrative, in other styles—the “hypothetical” style of the researcher’.45 Such a ‘hypothetical’ style reminds us of the capacity of mythic narratives to indicate real possibilities. In the same essay, ‘True Stories and Facts in Fiction’, Byatt explains that when she came to write ‘The Conjugial Angel’, she paused in her research at a certain point, aware of the particular aims and critical capacities of the literary form she aimed to produce: ‘as a writer of fiction, I felt a strong inclination to stop with the information I had, from Hallam’s letters, Fryn Tennyson Jesse, and various writings of Sir Charles Tennyson. I had the facts my imagination wanted to fantasise about, and I wanted space for the kind of female consciousness I needed, to which perhaps Emily Tennyson did not quite fit.’46 Historical fantasy is again validated here as a possible antidote to the patriarchal myths that grow around certain facts. Byatt works backwards from White’s conclusion that historical writing can become art, by looking back at art itself (Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’) and rebuilding the inadequate, patriarchal narratives that exist around it. Then, even though fantasy is just that, the author creates scope to interrogate damaging myths surrounding men of letters. Prior to constructing Emily’s ‘female consciousness’ in the story, Byatt invents Lilias Papagay, a young widow who involves herself with spiritualism as a livelihood, and also Sophy Sheekhy, a genuine medium. In Lilias

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

205

Papagay’s eyes, Byatt’s version of Emily Tennyson Jesse is ‘the heroine of a tragic story’ (173), and Mrs Papagay, enjoying stories, entertains herself with them and frames her experiences with narrative. Importantly, she is ‘an intelligent, questioning kind of woman, the kind who, in an earlier age, would have been a theologically minded nun, and in a later one would have had a university training in philosophy or psychology or medicine’ (170). This again tacitly defends fantasy as a shaper of a history we now know to have a basis in reality. Given to asking herself ‘large questions’, apparently Mrs Papagay ‘did not know much history, although she had read all the novels of Walter Scott’ (170), that paradigmatic historical novelist whose work Georg Lukács praised incorrectly as the origin of the form itself (1962). This aligns Mrs Papagay with the world of nineteenth-­ century historical narrative as it was created, partially, and certainly reproduced, by literature. These lines are also a striking construction of her as a woman intellectual across more than a single time period, calling to mind some of the intellectual subjects—learned nuns, university women and women doctors—of modern feminist history which, as fiction including Byatt’s suggests, is not without its own limitations. These women’s narratives are still open questions because they have been figured largely within discourses—of history, biography, philosophy—underpinned by patriarchal assumptions. Nevertheless, none of them fit the discourses designated as feminine on their behalf. They are intellectual, and alike but different to each other simultaneously. ‘The Conjugial Angel’ therefore becomes a fiction with all the hallmarks of historiographic metafiction, and works by approaching what exists of women’s intellectual history. The spiritualist séance at the novella’s centre is the site for Byatt’s ‘pursuit of the excluded Emily’,47 and is drawn from a Tennyson family legend, dramatised in the story, in which Emily was told by a spirit at a séance that in a future life she would be reunited with her lost love, Hallam. On hearing this, Emily told her living husband Captain Jesse that since she had shared her life with him, she intended to defy the spirit’s prophecy and share her afterlife with him too.48 For the Emily of the novella, spiritualism is an occasion for her own memories, and memorialisation, of Hallam, separate from her brother’s poem which aimed to do no less than ‘annihilate her’ in favour of the poet’s own persona (233–234). These are harsh but apt words at a time in which women could be practically eliminated from official (patriarchal) history with a few pen strokes. Spiritualism is hugely important for the women in this story because, as Alex Owen states in her book The Darkened

206 

L. BIBBY

Room, the Victorian séance provides a moment ‘during which we can briefly glimpse the interrelationship of class, gender, and the personal self we call subjectivity’.49 Furthermore, the séance is another site at which ‘factual’ and imaginative, even fantastical, history meet and sustain each other. This novella, including such a feminist re-reading of Emily Tennyson’s life, achieves legitimacy for its imaginative elements because these have long been necessary to ‘open’ such limiting realities for thinking women. We learn that Emily ‘believed there were higher things in life than crockery and Sunday roasts’ (178), a characterisation tallying with the extracts from Hallam’s letters to her, included in the text, in which he reproaches her for reading a paper Arthur wrote for the all-male ‘exclusive intelligences, the Cambridge Apostles’ (217). The imagined Emily was ‘quite a sharply noticing girl’ (223) when she met Hallam, and read his writing to please the intellectual ‘young God’, only to be rebuffed as though she were an embodiment of distinctly feminine Victorian discourse: Hallam ‘had treated her like a mixture of a goddess, a house angel, a small child and a pet lamb’ (218). These myths almost destroy the young Emily after Hallam’s death, when she retreats into eleven years of proper, feminine mourning. However, Emily’s defiance against Hallam’s sexism during his life is to join a secret poetry society, the ‘Husks’, an ironic but still poignant name, formed by the young women in her family (233). Official intellectual life is the preserve of men, as their domineering letters and poetry suggest, although later in her life as Byatt writes it, Emily’s house (like that of the Potters) is ‘full of books’ and she nurtures firm opinions, one of which drives her to sell her copy of Hallam’s ironically titled book, Remains (219). The ‘female consciousness’ created by Byatt here indicates to us female intellectual lives that were not documented as were the likes of Tennyson’s and other Cambridge men of the time, but which certainly existed. In addition to Byatt’s construction of intellectual women, ‘real’ and imagined, she narrates other aspects of Victorian women’s history; Louisa Hadley has noted that the invented character of Mrs Hearnshaw, who attends the séance at Emily’s home in hope of contacting her five dead infant daughters, references clearly the real horror of high infant mortality during the nineteenth century.50 Here, as elsewhere, women’s physical and intellectual capacities are not separable and must sit side-by-­ side in narrative as elsewhere, successfully ‘laminated’. As a historical fantasy, ‘The Conjugial Angel’ retains paradoxically close links to the stories of women’s lives with which factual, historical discourse is obsessed in

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

207

order to show how far that discourse depends on those stories to keep up its patriarchal front. Binary oppositions in which the feminine is the inferior term need the feminine to affirm the masculine’s superiority, a delicate situation then upset by women’s knowing manipulation (through imagination, speech and writing) of discourse itself. Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book is one of her most overtly feminist works to date, containing many re-imagined women’s histories, but its revisionist aspects are more subtle than those of ‘The Conjugial Angel’ which incorporates historical figures, or even ‘Morpho Eugenia’ or Possession which are both clearly historically located. Of these texts, The Children’s Book is the one most concerned with time itself and therefore with precisely pinpointed and well-documented history: national history, the personal histories of characters and the metafictional and metahistorical commentary of a highly involved narrator. Historical time itself is remythologised and the ‘content’ of its ‘forms’ is left in question; the text is a narrativisation of certain ‘versions’ of reality that shows that reality cannot ‘tell itself’—it must be narrativised.51 The novel moves chronologically from June in 1895, only a few months after the Dreyfus Affair in France52 and Oscar Wilde’s conviction and imprisonment, to May of 1919, when huge political upheavals were occurring across Europe following the war, and when British women were first enfranchised. The novel therefore traces many years in the lives of a large interconnecting group of invented characters, lives that are pivotally tied into the tumultuous historical record as we possess it, through Byatt’s narrator. The ‘main’ characters are the children of the title as they grow out of childhood and into an era that is no longer Victorian and no longer confines them to narratives of Victorian ideology, so that the young women may spurn marriage in favour of university, work and even single motherhood, but will also face the losses of their male peers during the carnage of the First World War. This narrator is omniscient and, importantly for the novel’s treatment of historical narrative, authoritative—formidably well-informed, like the best historical fiction itself. The tone of Byatt’s critical and autobiographical essays is evident when children’s author Olive Wellwood, in 1895, is pregnant with her seventh child and ‘trying to write’ with difficulty owing to her condition—a difficulty shared with Stephanie Potter in Still Life and Anna Severell in The Shadow of the Sun. Part of Olive’s personal history as a woman author is literary history itself, narrated specifically as the ‘proliferation of Christian stories at that time, about the exemplary deaths of little children’ which contrasts with the gory ‘ballad tale of True Thomas’

208 

L. BIBBY

(142). Olive dwells on this ballad’s imagery, which leads her to think of her unborn child and the dangers of childbirth, something not yet represented in literature: ‘These things were not spoken of, or written about. They were therefore more real, and more unreal, intensely simultaneously’ (142). Childbirth is irreducibly real, in the same way that the late Victorian era and the First World War both were, but all nonetheless only reach us—the ‘makers’ of historical discourse—through narration. Olive thus encounters White’s ‘enigma’ of storytelling and reality in a highly personal way. White asks, concerning the ‘two orders’ of events, ‘real’ and imaginary: What wish is enacted, what desire is gratified, by the fantasy that real events are properly represented when they can be shown to display the formal coherence of a story? In the enigma of this wish, this desire, we catch a glimpse of the cultural function of narrativising discourse in general, an intimation of the psychological impulse behind the apparently universal need not only to narrate but to give events an aspect of narrativity.53

For Olive Wellwood, storytelling is a mode of survival in every way. We learn early on that it was her lifeline during a horrific childhood, and that as an adult, although she is ‘sometimes frightened by the relentlessly busy inventiveness of her brain’, her imagination is safely ‘anchored’ into reality by its marketability: she earns her own living by writing (82). Thought and narrative, therefore, are not incompatible with her physical and emotional life as a wife (and later a lover, outside her marriage), mother, sister and friend, but there is more to her ‘feminine’ existence than this as a result of her storytelling. Her trajectory in the novel is a dramatisation of this dual investment in the real and the imaginary because for each of her children, she writes a private story intended only for them and featuring a main character representing them, in some way. These books are often ignored, resented or even hated; hated fatally, in the case of her favourite son Tom, who is brutally bullied at public school and takes his own life as a young adult. For Tom, literary narrative is powerful enough to make him wish to ‘live’ in his mother’s story and reject his ‘real’ life. The narratorial commentary running through the novel constructs its own counterpart to historical narrative, and recalls Byatt’s explanation elsewhere of why her fiction has become linguistically more like her non-fiction:

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

209

I think it is changes in the rhetoric of criticism that led me to write commentary more and more overtly in an exploratory, and ‘authorial’ first person. My instinct as a writer of fiction has been to explore and defend the unfashionable Victorian third-person narrator—who is not, as John Fowles claimed, playing at being God, but merely the writer, telling what can be told about the world of the fiction.54

‘Telling what can be told about the world of the fiction’ is the act of omniscient narration defined, and it is interesting that Byatt positions the third-­ person narrator historically as a Victorian phenomenon. The Children’s Book is the kind of twenty-first century historical novel that is intensely critical of fiction itself as well as historical issues, and whose author here frames its form as an import from the nineteenth century, laying claim to an aspect of literary history itself. In the text, historical narrative frequently overtakes fictional narrative and combines with it, as when Olive Wellwood’s husband Humphry abandons his professional occupation in the Bank of England to become a political journalist. His invented life plays out amidst the recognisable ‘story’ of his country: ‘Little England, Great Empire. In 1896 Humphry Wellwood was interested in the relations of armies and gold mines, diamond merchants and Stock exchange dealers. The dead Nihilist jostled the piratical Starr Jameson in his busy mind’ (165). Humphry’s gender means there is less at stake in narrativising his own life in this way than there is for Olive. He reinvents himself as a rather ineffectual and feckless ‘man of letters’ with a weakness for women, whereas the novel’s younger characters, male and female, often struggle with the separate demands for intellectual engagement with the world around them and the need for action, or work. This is also portrayed as a narration of literary, cultural and social history, with existing books, authors and historical events named and described specifically. When very young, all the children read stories, the boys take school entrance exams and the girls contemplate exchanging the usual female life trajectory of marriage in favour of learning a trade, attending university or, in Dorothy Wellwood’s case, undertaking medical training. As fictitious subjects of a historically ‘conscious’ and informed narrator, they are subjects of a version of history, but whether they are ‘revisions’ of history in terms of gender and the intellectual is very subtly signalled and so more difficult to determine than in the case of the characters of Possession or Angels and Insects. The historical record outside Byatt’s text includes women doctors such as Dorothy Wellwood, but the particular interest of

210 

L. BIBBY

Dorothy’s story is in its temporal positioning. She makes her ‘final’ decision’ to pursue medical training at a moment when, as the narrator announces, ‘The London School of Medicine for Women was granted a Royal Charter in 1902 and was now a college of the University of London. Dorothy’s way was now open. It was a very hard way’ (401). She is driven by her wish to ‘know things’, and not only help people in the expected feminine manner—she will think and therefore have more control over the discourses surrounding her. As a young woman at the vanguard of a new profession for women, she represents a significant force in history itself: the re-narrativisation of a discourse that would otherwise have excluded her. Her ‘inner’ life is as important as her temporal one in how she attains her pioneering place in history. Dorothy is the first character among the young women who were children in the novel’s earlier section to become part of its re-vision and remythologisation of pre-First World War women’s lives. In this re-visioning, they are far from passive emblems of femininity, waiting for change, although there is pressure on them to do so: ‘Time passing, for most young women, was to do with finding a husband, or being sought as a wife’ (ibid.). This elegant sentence echoes a section heading in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)55 but Byatt’s subjects are able to defy the passivity it suggests as a result of their intellectual capacities. Because the text conveys the breadth of history as created by literary and historical texts, readers are compelled to re-read the culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which many women were participants in an intellectual milieu along with men, as writers, consumers and critics. Dorothy becomes a doctor for the sake of knowledge, her cousin Griselda,56 a former, reluctant debutante, attends the University of Cambridge and the supposed ‘fallen woman’ Elsie Warren, having had a child out of wedlock, becomes a teacher whose husband supports her need to ‘think’ and study. Earlier, Griselda imagines university as the path to becoming ‘a new kind of human being’, eliminating former discourses of femininity by doing the things only men have done previously. Later when Dorothy visits her, she finds Newnham College to be full simply of ‘free women, pursuing the life of the mind, professionally’ (476)—indeed a new kind of women, free of any previous discourses Griselda had feared, such as ‘those colleges full of women—knitting, I imagine them, and flower-arranging, and drinking cocoa’ and ‘taking the veil’ (449). This myth of women having to embrace ‘nun-like’ devotion to learning is powerful, and powerfully discouraging if it is not faced and denied, and even then, its outcome is

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

211

uncertain for Griselda. The image of university women as secluded and nun-like appears to be drawn from that in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) and is paraphrased directly from Byatt’s reminiscences in her Preface to The Shadow of the Sun of Helen Gardner, the supervisor of her abandoned PhD, who ‘believed, and frequently said, that a woman had to be dedicated like a nun, to achieve anything as a mind’ (ix). The resonances here of nuns as historical women intellectuals represent a myth that no longer applies to modern life, in which women can and do laminate their physical and intellectual lives, although it is a myth that haunts and oppresses them still and certainly did in Byatt’s own past. Newnham College is ‘not quite real’ (476) to Griselda, suggesting a new, unfamiliar, unfolding story of woman intellectuals including the real Classics don Jane Harrison, ‘who was also a public personality, passionate, eccentric, with a reputation outside the College and outside Cambridge’ (477). Here, Harrison constitutes both a real historical personage underpinning the fiction, and a well-placed prototype of the modern figure of the public intellectual, although she is a woman. Although this ‘story’ with Harrison at its centre is unfamiliar and daunting, it still represents a horizon—women’s higher education—that must be pursued for the sake of disproving old myths. Towards the novel’s close, its historically knowing narrator draws closer to the factually ill-documented historical narrative of the woman intellectual, as when Olive Wellwood collaborates on a new play based on her story of her son Tom, and the narrator comments that ‘Writing stories, writing books, is fiercely solitary, even if done by housewives in snatched moments at the edge of the dining-table’ (518). This impels the reader to imagine the housewife-writers whose works, unlike that of Cambridge’s Jane Harrison, are either not known or not recognised within intellectual history, even though they literally rewrote history and can still be seen to rewrite it. However, the work still must take place as part of a mythopoeic project as well as the personal stories of innumerable, historically ‘silent’ women of various classes and situations. As The Children’s Book moves towards its First World War denouement, different female-authored narratives of the movement for women’s rights are emphasised—one ‘real’, the anti-feminist letters of Margot Asquith (560), and the other imagined: Hedda Wellwood’s involvement in violent protests as part of the movement for women’s suffrage. The juxtaposition of the real and the imagined equals the juxtaposition of the real and the written, although the written is shown to include historical ‘reality’ as we now possess it. This reality is narrated in order to fulfil the cultural ‘need’ White

212 

L. BIBBY

stressed,57 that is, to provide a culture with its stories of itself and with which it will produce its culture, but also reproduce it. Narrative is not always a direct solution to ‘real’ problems, but it is consistently defended by Byatt as a significant discursive force and vehicle of strategies.

6.4  Conclusion The woman intellectual, like any other figuring of the intellectual, is and has been whatever cultural and social history has constructed her to be. Textual representations of intellectual women have been both an impediment to feminist history, by propagating images of past social realities in which women’s opportunities were limited, and a major tool for change by theorising what is possible and what was possible in retrospect within the historical record. The final sections of The Children’s Book are notable as a rewriting of cultural history because they contest a very specific set of social- and cultural-historical moments in which men and women were not equally important participants in intellectual life, and as Linda Hutcheon has asserted, ‘What fades away with this kind of contesting is any sure ground on which to base representation and narration, in either historiography or fiction.’58 This ‘sure ground’ does not entirely fade away, however; I would argue instead that its patriarchal, seemingly unquestionable authority fades away instead. In her novels, Byatt embraces an ethos not of disorienting uncertainty (although her women characters do experience this, before they gain confidence and experience), but of mythopoeic possibility in place of patriarchal control over discourse. The texts arrange a feminist culmination of Hayden White’s defence of ‘our desire for the imaginary, the possible’ (my emphasis)59 that underlines the literary and the mythic aspects of all historical discourse. Even by constructing a more ‘classically’ realist narrative, like that of The Children’s Book, with fewer metafictional, structural features than Possession, it is possible and reasonable for Byatt as a literary author to suggest authoritative versions of this history because ‘that past did exist— independently of our capacity to know it. Historiographic metafiction accepts this philosophically realist view of the past and then proceeds to confront it with an anti-realist one that suggests that, however true that independence may be, nevertheless the past exists for us—now—only as traces on and in the present.’60 Byatt shows us in action what Hutcheon suggests theoretically: that the writing of the past continues, and unquestionably is writing, but that the act of knowing the past is also a process of

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

213

representation with changeable claims to epistemological authority. This need not be a source of ethical concern unless discourse is misused, as when it is claimed that proven injustices did not happen, but it has often been misused by patriarchy in a similar way to deny that women are harmed by gender inequalities. Byatt’s fiction participates in the project that feminist historians have long, rightly, worked towards, of recognising where and how politicised historical narratives influence responses to the past.61 It is no surprise that fictions can so often be termed both feminist and neo-Victorian, as both represent cultural movements of historical re-­ vision engaged in re-inscribing and extending historical narrative’s intrinsic mythologies. I have used the term ‘re-vision’ in the sense in which it is used in the title of Adrienne Rich’s essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1971). Here, Rich emphasises the vast importance of literature in understanding and re-interpreting women’s history, and in altering their futures as a result: ‘Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.’62 Rich’s defence of the place of imaginative writing in feminist, revisionist history cites an extract from one of Jane Harrison’s 1914 letters, in which she questions why women poets of the time never seemed to write about men. This letter, Rich suggests, ‘cuts deep into the myth-making tradition, the romantic tradition; deep into what women and men have been to each other; and deep into the psyche of the woman writer’.63 I have not discussed Rich’s essay before this late stage because A. S. Byatt’s fiction is able to enact Rich’s theory more inventively that she herself explains it. Byatt’s fictions support and give imaginative force to the following crucial view of what the woman intellectual is and has been before: a questioner of myths and maker of new ones, and a resisting subject of the same myths.

Notes 1. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism. 2. Coupe, Myth, 94. 3. Kuisma Korhonen, “General Introduction: The History/Literature Debate,” in Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate, edited by Kuisma Korhonen (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 10–11. 4. Louisa Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 7–8.

214 

L. BIBBY

5. Arthur Marwick, The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001), xii–xiii. 6. Hayden White, “Response to Arthur Marwick,” Journal of Contemporary History 30, no 2 (1995), 235. 7. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 38. 8. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 41. 9. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 48. 10. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), x. 11. White, The Content of the Form, x. 12. White, The Content of the Form, ix. 13. White, Metahistory, 2. 14. Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), vii. 15. White, The Content of the Form, xi. 16. White, The Content of the Form, ix. 17. White, The Content of the Form, 22. 18. White, The Content of the Form, x. 19. White, The Content of the Form, 1. 20. White, The Content of the Form, 3–4. 21. Peter Widdowson, “‘Writing Back’: Contemporary Re-Visionary Fiction,” Textual Practice 20, no. 3 (2006), 505. 22. Like me, Widdowson identifies his use of the term ‘re-visionary’ fiction with that of Adrienne Rich in her essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1971), quoted in this chapter’s Conclusion. 23. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Reprint, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 106. 24. White, The Content of the Form, ix. 25. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 54–55. 26. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 55. 27. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 1. 28. Byatt, Passions of the Mind, 2. 29. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 93. 30. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 103. 31. Korhonen, “General Introduction,” 18. 32. Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 9. 33. Kaplan, Victoriana, 87. 34. Kaplan, Victoriana, 87. 35. This remark echoes the title and concerns of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay ‘The Critic as Artist’.

6  FICTIONS AND FUTURE HISTORIES OF INTELLECTUAL WOMEN 

215

36. Kaplan, Victoriana, 92. 37. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 110. 38. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 125. 39. Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 64. 40. Poovey, Uneven Developments, 89. 41. Michael Lackey, “A.  S. Byatt‘s ‘Morpho Eugenia’: Prolegomena to Any Future Theory,” College Literature 35, no 1 (2008), 129. 42. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 102–103. 43. White, The Content of the Form, 118. 44. Susan Poznar, “Tradition and ‘Experiment’ in A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Conjugial Angel’,” Critique 45, no. 2 (2004), 175. 45. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 103. 46. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 105. 47. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 114. 48. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 103–104. 49. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989), 11. 50. Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, 101. 51. White, The Content of the Form, 3. 52. In which intellectuals and activists put pressure on the French government to reconsider the case against a Jewish artillery officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had been wrongly convicted of treason. See a study of the case and its cultural legacy in Cahm (1966). 53. White, The Content of the Form, 4. 54. Byatt, On Histories and Stories, 102. 55. Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Reprint, London: Routledge, 1994), 127. 56. Her name may be a mythopoeic reference to Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Patient Griselda’, an abused but obedient wife. Byatt’s Griselda is raised by her parents to marry well but delays her ‘feminine’ destiny, perhaps indefinitely, in order to study. Byatt also uses Patient Griselda’s story, again mythopoeically within a modern character’s ‘tale’, in The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994; 1995). 57. White, The Content of the Form, 4. 58. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 92. 59. White, The Content of the Form, 4. 60. Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 69. 61. Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, 6. 62. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 by Adrienne Rich. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979), 33. 63. Rich, “When We Dead Awaken,” 36.

CHAPTER 7

Afterword: Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

It seems fitting to conclude this study with a reading of Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011), arguably the book most overtly concerned with myth and with the value of women’s thinking and creative lives in Byatt’s oeuvre. This is, in part, because of Byatt’s forays into memoir in the latter part of this short book. By the time these allusions to her biography appeared in Ragnarok, regular readers of her work and its criticism were familiar with the key details of her life, and how they relate to her fiction. She has discussed the ‘story’ of herself as a bookish, sickly child, afraid of the frustrations represented by her housewife mother (in the 1991 Preface to The Shadow of the Sun, ix), her time as a student at Cambridge being taught by some of the ‘great men’ of English studies whilst secretly writing her first novel, and of her life as a ‘desperate faculty wife’, trying to finish that novel and see it published (xiii). The fascination she exerts for interviewers and readers is no less than a fascination with a formidable intellectual woman, whose status and legitimacy as an intellectual appear secure, although they were plainly hard-won. In her case, it seems that a process of ‘lamination’ has proved successful. Myths, in the sense of imaginative narratives with certain ties to the ‘real’, are the forces driving her fictions and they are also a significant part of the ‘material’ of her own biography. In Ragnarok, she reclaims this idea and puts it to work, turning that biography back into mythology in order to reveal the dialogues

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Bibby, A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_7

217

218 

L. BIBBY

between the two kinds of narrative and, I contend, to attach greater meaning and discursive power to the mythic, as opposed to the narrowly, supposedly ‘factual’, accounts of the lives of other intellectual women. A key message to draw from Ragnarok is that when myth and fact are ‘laminated’ skilfully enough (although Byatt does not mention lamination, here, directly), real changes to lived experience are possible. However, within Ragnarok, as in all Byatt’s work, myth serves no single, unified purpose, and not all of its effects are positive. The thin child is the recipient of a series of conciliatory narratives linked to wartime: two of the most important of these are to do with the ‘ordinary paradise of the English countryside’ where she grows up (3) (so that she views her very environment in terms of myth), and her view of her mother’s ‘paradoxical’ situation during wartime in which ‘it was legally possible for her to live in the mind, to teach bright boys, which before the war had been forbidden to married women’ (4). The state of war itself makes possible the broadening of her ‘thinking’ mother’s life, but only to a dismally limited extent: her pupils are ‘bright boys’ and her relative freedom owes only to the international emergency that has disrupted every aspect of the family’s life. The only narratives the thin child’s culture supplies her with are that of narrow, domestic family life, from which her mother is freed temporarily, and that of ‘the end of the world’ as the book’s first large section is named. In one sense, ‘the end of the world’ equals the idea that there might always be ‘a war on’ (3). The thin child needs other myths, and so narrative becomes no less than a method of self-protection. Narrative, here, includes the tales she tells herself (7) and those she reads in her precious copy of Asgard and the Gods by Wilhelm Wägner, the same book given to Byatt as a child by her mother, as Ragnarok’s dedication reveals. Indeed, narration is no less a mode of survival than it is for Byatt’s other intellectual women, as they appear throughout her work in their several historical periods, situations, professions and relationships: their narratives appear in the forms of Christabel LaMotte’s poetry, Frederica Potter’s daydreams and eventual published novel, Sheba Brown’s artworks, Gillian Perholt’s analyses of literature, Olive Wellwood’s children’s tales, and even her medically inclined daughter Dorothy’s tracing of her true ancestry. These women therefore become part of a multiplicitous network of intellectuals linked only by the characteristic of the (very feminist) ‘critical sense’, as opposed to a problematic lineage with patriarchal overtones of Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’.

7 AFTERWORD: RAGNAROK: THE END OF THE GODS 

219

The thin child finds the Christian parables that are part of her education to be inadequate because they do not allow her to imagine any other worlds or possibilities, or to think those worlds into existence; as a result, we learn, ‘her mind veered away, to where it was alive’ (12). Christian stories are unsatisfactory because they claim to harness ‘pure’ paradigms, final and authoritative, like the paradigms of the masculine intellectual or the domestically occupied, unthinking woman that would likewise alienate the thin child. For her, a woman’s intellect is nothing less than her life and within this text, mythic worlds are more real than the ‘real’ itself. This includes the thin child’s reality, which is both real and unreal, dominated as it is by her imaginings of where her pilot father is and what the future may be, or not be. The thin child looks for metaphors as bridges between the real and the imagined, and the sources of ‘the pleasure to the mind that the unreal offers when it is briefly more real than the visible world can ever be’ (31). Connection between the thin(king) child’s world and the stories is possible, even though ultimately, ‘they [stories] didn’t live in her, and she didn’t live in them’ (31). Proof of this connection comes when the thin child’s real environment is made into metaphors, not only for the reader’s benefit but for hers, as when she luxuriates in the verbal narrative forms of her outdoor walks, where ‘Rooks strode and cawed and gathered in glossy parliaments in the tree tops. Huge clouds of starlings went overhead wheeling like one black wing, coiling like smoke’ (35). Reality must expand to accommodate narrative. However, although the thin child is trained by the literature she reads to look for the ‘rules’ that commonly govern stories (30), the Norse myths she discovers teach her that not all stories obey those rules. She is excited by the myth of Odin’s unruly, unpredictable Wild Hunt, which allows her to survive, emotionally, the bombing of airfields near her family’s home, and which she observes as ‘a good story, a story with meaning, fear and danger were in it, and things out of control’ (40–41). Potential chaos carries very real danger with it, but in narrative terms it brings freedom from the boundaries exerted by the patriarchy (for patriarchy it certainly is, as the thin child’s view of her mother shows) evident in the stories the child has encountered before. The chaos and disorder of the Norse myth also bring with them the possibility, hugely appealing to the thin child, of difference: sexual and otherwise. Loki is a god who defies power structures of all kinds, even the structure and stability of the myths he himself inhabits: the thin child reads that Loki is ‘an outsider, with a need for the inordinate’ (44)—likewise, we see that the thin child herself has

220 

L. BIBBY

comparable needs. Loki can change shape and gender at will and, crucially, he is not a patriarchal figure in any sense other than that he is a father: ‘There are no altars to Loki, no standing stones, he had no cult’ (44). Moreover, Loki is an intellectual in a fundamental sense, like the thin child: ‘he was interested in things because he was interested in them, and in the way they were in the world, and worked in the world’ (113). To the thin child, he is a mythopoeic force in himself and one that the thin child clings to in her mind. She expects but fears the ending of a real story in her life, concerning her father and her belief that he will not come back from war; she focuses, therefore, on ‘stories that ended, instead of going in circles and cycles’, although ‘her readings and rereading at all times of the year gave [the story of the “beautiful god,” approximated with her father] a kind of eternal recurrence. The story ended, but she began it again’ (8). Ending, as a limitation, does not serve her emotional purpose or the trajectory of her own story, because her father will return. Endings, however, are not the thin child’s only fear, and when her terror of feminine ‘dailiness’ is revealed, the feminist function of her love of mythology becomes sharply apparent.1 This ‘dailiness’, or the daily boredom of an unwanted life confined to the home, equals a lack of the meaning and the possibilities myth provides her with: The thin child, despite the war that was raging, was more afraid of eternal boredom, of doing nothing that mattered, of day after day going nowhere, than she was of death or the end of things. (127)

‘Ragnarok’ itself, the end of the gods, is told to us as part of this text, and ‘the thin child in peacetime’ is left with the idea of it as ‘a form of knowledge’ (147). This is the knowledge that an entire textualised world can be destroyed, or destroy itself. She has learned that discourse itself is insecure: ‘This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind (147), as though real, because myth is made of discourses. Because of this, the thin child’s dissatisfaction with her post-war world is charged with the possibility of different worlds. She considers her mother, ‘who had been gallant and resourceful in wartime’ and who ‘might have been expected to find a happy ending in the return to the comfortable home from which she had been exiled’ (150–151), but who is then ‘defeated’ by feminine ‘dailiness’ (152). The thin child almost surrenders herself to the same ‘dailiness’: ‘A gate closed in her head. She must

7 AFTERWORD: RAGNAROK: THE END OF THE GODS 

221

learn to live in dailiness, she told herself, in a house, in a garden, at home’ (154). However, the book’s feminist success lies in the idea that ‘dailiness’ is another powerful but not immutable paradigm, claiming an illusory dominance and perfection. The domesticity the thin child imagines is the mythic place she heard of during wartime, ‘where there was butter again, and cream, and honey’ (154); it is a quasi-Christian myth, useful only for giving succour. Importantly, the thin child is not trapped by this because she remains imaginatively, thoughtfully critical and defiant: ‘on the other side of the closed gate was the bright black world into which she had walked at the time of her evacuation’, full of those impossible yet somehow ‘real’ gods, monsters, structures and chaotic events. The dominance of any one myth over her life is never complete; it can never be complete, as long as she thinks. This is her story’s ‘conclusion’, that is not really a closed, confining conclusion, and it is reminiscent of Frederica Potter’s hopeful, open ‘resolution’ at the end of A Whistling Woman. In Ragnarok’s final section, titled ‘Thoughts on Myth’, Byatt steps out of the fictional form on which this text loosely depends to discuss the forms and functions of myth.2 At the same time, she steps out of the thin child’s story as autobiography, or her own ‘myth’ of her early life as a reader and an intellectual. Her voice is notably still that of her knowledgeable, reflective omniscient narrator as she deploys it in all her fiction: the critical narrator whose prose consciously manipulates all discourses. When Byatt remarks here that ‘Myths are often unsatisfactory, even tormenting’ and that they ‘puzzle and haunt the mind that encounters them’ (161), she may also be describing the unsatisfactory, even harmful, patriarchal aspects of reality that are themselves upheld by modern myths like that of ‘dailiness’ as an inevitable feminine fate, or that of intellectualism as exclusively masculine. All are myths. It is crucial to observe, in Ragnarok, that the thin child feels vulnerable to the former but never considers the latter. She embraces books, thought, imagination and the figure of the ‘inordinate’ god Loki and these in turn test the limitations of her world so dramatically and positively that she never considers the possibility that she may not be entitled to an intellectual’s powers and freedoms. Because of her dependence on myth and her discovery of its discursive potential to change the nature of her reality, she achieves what many of Byatt’s other intellectuals do not, as they stop short of that ultimate discovery and then suffer uncertainty, unhappiness and even illness and death. Byatt’s novels and short stories often end with these other, dismal ‘conclusions’ but after all, they (barring

222 

L. BIBBY

death) may not be conclusions at all, as those in the Norse myths and in the thin child’s narratives are not; in fact, a mythic horizon of possibilities and other realities remains. Tragedy, however, is embodied in those intellectual women, like the thin child’s mother, who are overcome by patriarchal mythology and its ill effects. ‘Lamination’ of identities is not only possible, but almost inevitable if women would sidestep the limitations of patriarchal ideology and identify themselves as intellectuals. The term ‘intellectual’ itself is often absent from their stories, as though it is unnecessary. Readers are left with narratives in which the masculine public intellectual is only one ‘type’ among many, and multiplicity and ‘lamination’ of identities constitute the point at which myth becomes a positive force for producing new discourses. We can and do accept Byatt’s intellectual women as intellectuals because their ‘stories’ represent many more probable histories than the patriarchal forms of ‘history’, social and cultural, have revealed. We redefine ‘the intellectual’ for ourselves. Byatt achieves the connection between dynamic and profoundly feminist new mythologies, re-created in the life of Ragnarok’s ‘thin child’ as she responds imaginatively to Norse mythology, and the idea of the real lives lived by women. She does this partly by adapting the story of her own real life as she has done many times within her fiction and non-fiction. This process is related to autobiography, but crucially different from it, in that the process is overtly mythopoeic in its strategy to expand the Ragnarok myth into a young girl’s life and therefore expand her experience of that life. At the same time, her written story becomes a form of myth—that of ‘A Thin Child in Wartime’ (3)—on those mythopoeic terms. The woman intellectuals in A. S. Byatt’s fiction find ways not only to exist, but to thrive, because Byatt overcomes the cultural necessity for lines of descent and ‘family resemblances’. The forms of each woman intellectual’s discourse, literary and otherwise, demonstrate that she can apply her critical sense as legitimately as any man. Byatt’s fiction is emphatically feminist writing, and innovative feminist writing at that, in one respect because of the old-and-new mythologies at its centre and the way that these myths’ workings are revealed by the case of the intellectual woman. The novels and short stories demonstrate that myths make up what we think of as cultural histories and that they function in this way, shaping historical knowledge even when rejected or ignored. Moreover, new myths are created all the time, embodied in Byatt’s ‘thin child’ who creates ‘her own contrary myth in her head’ (166) in answer to the terrors, related to war and patriarchy, that would torment and trap her. With

7 AFTERWORD: RAGNAROK: THE END OF THE GODS 

223

Ragnarok, Byatt demonstrates the inestimable feminist value of choosing metaphors, within literature and art, over outdated forms of propaganda which inevitably limit themselves to certain mythologies. Her literary work indeed represents a step forward beyond simple propaganda and beyond torment, into a desperately needed modern mythopoeia.

Notes 1. See also Byatt’s 2004 ‘Conversation’ with Stephen Frosh, published in the journal Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, in which she described her own childhood fear of ‘dailyness’ (different spelling in original text). 2. This section of the book Ragnarok was reprinted as an article in The Guardian newspaper in August 2011.

References

Primary Sources Byatt, A. S. The Shadow of the Sun. London: Chatto and Windus, 1964. Reprint, London: Vintage, 1991. Byatt, A.  S. The Game. London: Chatto and Windus, 1967. Reprint, London: Vintage, 1992. Byatt, A. S. The Virgin in the Garden. London: Chatto and Windus, 1978. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2003. Byatt, A.  S. Still Life. London: Chatto and Windus, 1985. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2003. Byatt, A. S. Sugar and Other Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 1987. Reprint, London: Vintage, 1995. Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. London: Chatto and Windus, 1990. Reprint, London: Vintage, 1991. Byatt, A.  S. Angels and Insects. London: Chatto and Windus, 1992. Reprint, London: Vintage, 1995. Byatt, A.  S. The Matisse Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993. Reprint, London: Vintage, 1994. Byatt, A. S. The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 1994. Reprint, London: Vintage, 1995. Byatt, A. S. Babel Tower. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2003. Byatt, A. S. Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. London: Chatto and Windus, 1998. Reprint, London: Vintage, 1999. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Bibby, A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7

225

226 

REFERENCES

Byatt, A. S. The Biographer’s Tale. London: Chatto and Windus, 2000a. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2001. Byatt, A.  S. A Whistling Woman. London: Chatto and Windus, 2002. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2003. Byatt, A. S. The Little Black Book of Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 2003. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2004. Byatt, A. S. The Children’s Book. London: Chatto and Windus, 2009. Byatt, A. S. Ragnarok: The End of the Gods. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011a.

Secondary Sources Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. Alban, Gillian M. E. Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt’s Possession and in Mythology. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2003 Alfer, Alexa. “Realism and its Discontents: The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life.” In Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, edited by Alexa Alfer and Michael J. Noble, 47–59. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2001. Alfer, Alexa and Michael J. Noble, eds. Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2001. Andres, Sophia. “Gendered Incongruities in the Silenced Voice of Pre-Raphaelite Paintings: A. S. Byatt’s ‘Morpho Eugenia’.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 43, no. 1 (2010): 141–164. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated from the German by W.  R. Trask,1953. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. 2nd edition. London: The Women’s Press, 1989. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated from the French by H. M. Parshley, 1953. London: Jonathan Cape. Reprint, London: Picador Classics, 1988. Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Translated from the French by James Kirkup, 1958. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1984. Beard, Mary. Women and Power: A Manifesto. London: Profile Books, 2017. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980. Reprint: London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Benda, Julien. The Treason of the Intellectuals. Translated from the French by Richard Aldington. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1928. Reprint, New York: Norton, 1969. Bibby, Leanne. “Wartime Housewives and Vintage Women: A.  S. Byatt’s Ragnarok: The End of the Gods and Reframing Popular Nostalgia.” In Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture: Femininity, Masculinity and Recession in Film, TV and Literature, edited by Helen Davies and Claire O’Callaghan. London: I. B. Tauris, 2017.

 REFERENCES 

227

Blake, Aaron. “Kellyanne Conway says Donald Trump’s team has ‘alternative facts.’ Which pretty much says it all.” The Washington Post, January 22, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-­f ix/wp/2017/01/22/ kellyanne-­conway-­says-­donald-­trumps-­team-­has-­alternate-­facts-­which-­pretty-­ much-­says-­it-­all/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6a138454f8c9. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Boccardi, Mariadele. A. S. Byatt. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Bowler, Alexia L. and Jessica Cox. (2009/2010) “Introduction to Adapting the Nineteenth-Century: Revisiting, Revising and Rewriting the Past.” Neo-­ Victorian Studies 2, no. 2 (2009/2010): 1–17. Brock, Claire. The Feminisation of Fame, 1750–1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Bruhm, Steven. Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1981. Buxton, Jackie. “‘What’s love got to do with it?’: Postmodernism and Possession.” In Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, edited by Alexa Alfer and Michael J. Noble. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2001: 89–104. Byatt, A. S. Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time. 2nd edition, 1997. London: Vintage, 1970. Byatt, A. S. Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings. London: Chatto and Windus, 1991. Reprint, London: Vintage, 1993. Byatt, A. S. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. London: Chatto and Windus, 2000b. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2001. Byatt, A. S. “Ragnarök: the doom of the gods.” The Guardian, August 5, 2011b. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/05/as-­byatt-­ragnarok-­myth. Byatt, A. S. and Stephen Frosh. (2004) “Conversation Between A. S. Byatt and Stephen Frosh.” Psychology and Psychotheraphy: Theory, Research and Practice 77, no. 2 (2004): 145–159. Cahm, Eric. The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics. Reprint, 1994. Harlow: Longman, 1966. Campbell, Jane. “The Hunger of the Imagination in A.  S. Byatt’s The Game.” Critique 29, no. 3 (1988): 147–162. Campbell, Jane. “‘The Somehow May be Thishow’: Fact, Fiction and Intertextuality in Antonia Byatt’s ‘Precipice-Encurled’.” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 2 (1991): 115–123. Campbell, Jane. “‘Forever possibilities. And impossibilities, of course’: Women and Narrative in The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.” In Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, edited by Alexa Alfer and Michael J. Noble. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2001: 135–146.

228 

REFERENCES

Campbell, Jane. (2004) A.  S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination. Waterloo, ON, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004. Campbell, Jane L. “Confecting Sugar: Narrative Theory and Practice in A. S. Byatt’s Short Stories.” Critique 38, no. 2 (1997): 105–122. Carroll, Samantha J. “Lesbian disPossession: The Apparitionalization and Sensationalization of Female Homosexuality in A.  S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance.” Critique 49, no. 4 (2008): 357–378. Chinn, Nancy. “‘I Am My Own Riddle’—A. S. Byatt’s Christabel LaMotte: Emily Dickinson and Melusina.” Papers on Language and Literature 37, no. 2 (2001): 179–204. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Paula Cohen and Keith Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–893. Clark, Alex. (2009) “Her dark materials.” The Guardian, May 9, 2009. http:// www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/09/as-­byatt-­childrens-­book. Clarke, Norma. The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters. London, Pimlico, 2004. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “On the Constitution of the Church and State.” In The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: On the Constitution of the Church and State, edited by John Colmer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Coser, Lewis A. Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s View. New York: Free Press, 1965. Cosslett, Tess. “Childbirth from the Woman’s Point of View in British Women’s Fiction: Enid Bagnold’s The Squire and A. S. Byatt’s Still Life.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 8, no. 2 (1989): 263–286. Coupe, Laurence. Myth. 2nd edition. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. David, Dierdre. Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated from the French by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1976. 2nd edition. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Dowling, Linda C. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Drabble, Margaret. The Millstone. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1965. Dusinberre, Juliet. “Forms of Reality in A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Virgin in the Garden’.” Critique 24, no. 1 (1982): 55–62. Eagleton, Mary. “The Danger of Intellectual Masters: Lessons from Harry Potter and Antonia Byatt.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 48 (April 2004): 61–75. Eagleton, Mary. Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005a. Eagleton, Mary. “Nice Work? Representations of the Intellectual Woman Worker.” Women’s History Review 14, no. 2 (2005b): 203–221. Eagleton, Mary. Clever Girls and the Literature of Women’s Upward Mobility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

 REFERENCES 

229

Earnshaw, Steven. Beginning Realism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008. Eliot, George. The Essays of George Eliot. Project Gutenberg ebook, 1883. http:// www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28289. Evans, Mary. Can Women be Intellectuals? In Intellectuals and their Publics: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, edited by Christian Fleck, Andreas Hess and E. Stina Lyon. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009: 29–40. Fay, Elizabeth A. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Forster, E. M. Howards End, London, Penguin, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated from the French by A.  M. Sheridan Smith, 1972. London: Tavistock. Reprint, London: Routledge, 1995. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1966. Translated from the French by Tavistock/Routledge, 1970. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2002. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley, 1978). Reprint, London: Allen Lane, 1979. Franken, Christien. A.  S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Reprint, New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997. Gagnon, Alain G., ed. Intellectuals in Liberal Democracies: Political Influence and Social Involvement. New York and London: Praeger, 1987. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Gitzen, Julian. A. S. Byatt’s Self-Mirroring Art. Critique 36, no. 2 (1995): 83–95. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. Goldfarb, Jeffrey C. Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Gramsci, Antonio. “The Intellectuals.” In Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Nowell Smith and Quentin Hoare, 1971. Reprint, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2007, pp. 5–23. Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1989.

230 

REFERENCES

Ga ̨siorek, Andrzej. Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Translated from the German by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989. Reprint, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Hadley, Louisa. The Fiction of A. S. Byatt: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. Hadley, Louisa. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010. Hanson, Clare. Hysterical Fictions: The ‘Woman’s Novel’ in the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Hansson, Heidi. “Biography Matters: Carol Shields, Mary Swann, A.  S. Byatt, Possession, Deborah Crombie, Dreaming of the Bones.” Orbis Litterarum 58 (2003): 353–370. Harper, Douglas. “Intellectual.” Online Etymology Dictionary, 2010. http:// www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=intellectual&allowed_in_frame= Hayfield, Debbie. (2009) “Aesthetics of the Sublime: The Romantic Artist in A. S. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun.” Romanticism 15, vol. 1 (2009): 75–84. Haynes, Natalie. Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths. Kindle. London: Picador, 2020. Heilmann, Ann and Mark Llewellyn. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century. 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Homans, Margaret. “Bearing Demons: Frankenstein and the Circumvention of Maternity.” In Romanticism, edited by Cynthia Chase. London and New York: Longman, 1993: 162–183. Huszar, George B. de. The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Reprint, 1996. London: Routledge, 1988. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. 2nd edition, 2002. New  York: Routledge, 1989. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House. Reprint, London: Penguin, 2003. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated from the French by Gillian C. Gill, 1985. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated from the French by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, 1993. London: The Athlone Press, 1993. Janik, Del Ivan. “No End of History: Evidence from the Contemporary English Novel.” Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 2 (1995): 160–189. Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Reprint, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Jeffers, Jennifer M. “The White Bed of Desire in A. S. Byatt’s Possession.” Critique 43, no. 2 (2002): 135–147.

 REFERENCES 

231

Jennings, Jeremy and Tony Kemp-Welch, eds. Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie. London and New York: Routledge, 1997a. Johnson, Paul. Intellectuals. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988. Kamuf, Peggy, ed. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Kearney, Richard. States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Jennings, Jeremy and Tony Kemp-Welch, eds. Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie. London and New York: Routledge, 1997b. King, Jeanette. The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005. Korhonen, Kuisma. “General Introduction: The History/Literature Debate.” In Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate, edited by Kuisma Korhonen. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006: 9–20. Kristeva, Julia. “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident.” In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi. Translated from the French by Seán Hand, 1986. Reprint, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996: 292–300. Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi. Translated from the French by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, 1986. Reprint, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996:187–213. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated from the French by Roudiez, Leon S., 1982. Reprint, New  York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lacan, Jacques. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. Translated from the French by Anthony Wilden, 1968. Reprint, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Lackey, Michael. “A. S. Byatt’s ‘Morpho Eugenia’: Prolegomena to Any Future Theory.” College Literature 35, no 1 (2008): pp. 128–147. Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Lawrence, D. H. The Rainbow. Reprint, London: Heron, 1968. Le Dœuff, Michèle. The Philosophical Imaginary. Translated from the French by Colin Gordon, 1989. Reprint, London: Continuum, 2002. Le Dœuff, Michèle. Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc. Translated from the French by Trista Selous, 1991. Reprint, London: Blackwell, 1991. Le Dœff, Michèle. The Sex of Knowing. Translated from the French by Taylor and Francis Books, 1998. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2003. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto and Windus. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1967.

232 

REFERENCES

Lee, Hermione. “Introduction: A Room of One’s Own.” In A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 2001: Ix–liii. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. Reprint, London: Harper Perennial, 2007. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Translated from the German by Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell, 1962. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1969. Maack, Annegret. “Wonder-Tales Hiding a Truth: Retelling Tales in ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.’” In Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, edited by Alexa Alfer and Michael J.  Noble. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2001: 123–134. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Translated from the German by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, 1936. Reprint, London: Routledge, 1966. Marwick, Arthur. The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language. Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001. McGann, Jerome J. “Poetry.” In An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, edited by Iain McCalman. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001: 270–278. McLaughlin, Lisa. “Feminism and the political economy of transnational public space.” In After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere, edited by Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004: 156–175. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. London: W. H. Allen and Co. Reprint, London: The Women’s Press, 1980. Moi, Toril. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Morales, Helen. Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths. Kindle. London: Wildfire, 2020. Naughton, John. “Why don’t we love our intellectuals?” The Observer, May 8, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/08/ britain-­public-­intellectuals. Noakes, Jonathan. “Interview with A. S. Byatt.” In A. S. Byatt: The Essential Guide to Contemporary Literature, edited by Jonathan Noakes and Margaret Reynolds. London: Vintage, 2004: 11–32. Osborne, Peter. A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals. London: Routledge, 1996. Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. London: Virago, 1989. Oxford English Dictionary. “Intellectual.” 2011. http://www.oed.com.ezproxy. leedsmet.ac.uk/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/9738. Pearce, Margaret. “‘Morpho Eugenia’: Problems with the Male Gaze.’ Critique 40, no. 4 (1999): 399–414. Peters, Michael A. “Anti-intellectualism is a virus.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 51, no. 4 (2019): 357–363.

 REFERENCES 

233

Pinsker, Sanford. “Postmodernist Theory and the Academic Novel’s Latest Turn.” Sewanee Review 111, no 1 (2003): 183–191. Plotz, Judith. “A Modern “Seer Blest”: The Visionary Child in The Virgin in the Garden.” Essays on the Fiction of A.  S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, edited by Alexa Alfer and Michael J. Noble. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2001: 31–46. Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-­ Victorian England. Reprint, London: Virago, 1989. Poznar, Susan. “Tradition and ‘Experiment’ in A.  S. Byatt’s ‘The Conjugial Angel’.” Critique 45, no. 2 (2004): 173–189. Renk, Kathleen J. “Rewriting the Empire of the Imagination: The Post-Imperial Gothic Fiction of Peter Carey and A.  S. Byatt.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39, no. 2 (2004a): 61–71. Renk, Kathleen Williams. “A. S. Byatt, the Woman Artist, and Suttee.” Women’s Studies 33, no. 5 (2004b): 613–628. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” In On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 by Adrienne Rich. New  York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979: 33–50. Rieff, Philip. On Intellectuals: Theoretical Studies, Case Studies. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Riviere, Joan. “Womanliness as a Masquerade.” In Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan. London: Methuen, 1986. Rodríguez González, Carla. “A Dialogue with Literary Theory: A. S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale.” English Studies 89, no. 4 (2008): 447–460. Rosenberg, Rosalind. Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982. Said, Edward W. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. London: Vintage, 1994. Said, Edward W. “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” In The Public Intellectual, edited by Helen Small. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002: 19–39. Schuhmann, Kuno. “In Search of Self and Self-Fulfilment: Themes and Strategies in A. S. Byatt’s Early Novels.” Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, edited by Alexa Alfer and Michael J.  Noble. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2001: 75–88. Scott, Joan. “The Evidence of Experience.” In Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn, edited by Gabrielle M. Spiegel. New York: Routledge, 2005: 195–212. Sellers, Susan. Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Shiller, Dana. “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel.” Studies in the Novel 29, no. 4 (1997): 538–560.

234 

REFERENCES

Shils, Edward. The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972. Shinn, Thelma J. Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986. Shinn, Thelma J. “’What’s in a Word?’ Possessing A. S. Byatt’s Meronymic Novel.” Papers on Language and Literature 31, no. 2 (1995): 164–183. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of their Own: From Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing. London: Princeton University Press, 1977. Reprint, London: Virago, 1982. Showalter, Elaine. “Laughing Medusa: Feminist Intellectuals at the Millennium.” Women: A Cultural Review 11, no. 1–2 (2000): 131–138. Showalter, Elaine. Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage. London: Picador, 2001. Shuttleworth, Sally. “Writing Natural History: ‘Morpho Eugenia.’” In Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, edited by Alexa Alfer and Michael J. Noble. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2001: 147–160. Small, Helen, ed. The Public Intellectual. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Smith, Hilda L. “Women Intellectuals and Intellectual History: Their Paradigmatic Separation.” Women’s History Review 16, no. 3 (2007): 353–368. Spender, Dale. Women of Ideas—and What Men Have Done to Them: From Aphra Behn to Adrienna Rich. London: HarperCollins, 1982. Spiegel, Gabrielle L. Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. Steveker, Lena. Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A.  S. Byatt. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Tredell, Nicolas. “A.  S. Byatt.” In Conversations with Critics, edited by Nicolas Tredell. Manchester: Carcanet, 1994: 58–74. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Wallhead, Celia. “Metaphors for the Self in A. S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale.” Language and Literature 12, no. 4 (2003): 291–308. Warner, Marina. Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture. London: Chatto and Windus, 2003. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen and Co, 1984. Reprint, London and New  York: Routledge, 1996. Weinroth, Michelle. “‘Morpho Eugenia’ and the Fictions of Victorian Englishness: A.  S. Byatt’s Postcolonial Critique.” English Studies in Canada 31, no. 2–3 (2005): 187–222. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Reprint, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

 REFERENCES 

235

White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Reprint, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. White, Hayden. “Response to Arthur Marwick.” Journal of Contemporary History 30, no 2 (1995): 233–246. White, Hayden. Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Widdowson, Peter. “‘Writing Back’: Contemporary Re-Visionary Fiction.” Textual Practice 20, no. 3 (2006): 491–507. Wilde, Oscar. Intentions. Project Gutenberg ebook. 1997. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/ntntn10h.htm. Wiseman, Susan. “Femininity and the Intellectual in Sontag and Cixous.” In The Body and the Text, edited by Helen Wilcox. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990: 98–113. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Reprint, London: Routledge, 1994. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Reprint, London: Vintage, 2001. Wordsworth, William. “Preface.” In Lyrical Ballads, edited by Michael Mason. London and New York: Longman, 1992: 55–86. Wordsworth, William. Intimations of Immortality. London: Phoenix, 1996.

Index1

A Abrams, M. H., 99, 114n53 Aeschylus, 3 Alban, Gillian M. E., 5, 117, 167, 181n45 Arnold, Edward, 77n58 Arnold, Matthew, 6 Atwood, Margaret, 2 Auerbach, Erich, 81, 113n7, 113n10 Austen, Jane, 24, 31 B Barker, Pat, 2 Barthes, Roland, 2, 5, 14, 37n2, 37n3, 38n10, 38n11, 43

Battersby, Christine, 45, 50–52, 56, 59, 63, 64, 69, 75n22, 75n23, 75n24, 76n31, 76n32, 76n38, 76n52, 76n54, 76n55, 77n61, 90 Beard, Mary, 3, 38n6 Belsey, Catherine, 113n17, 120, 147n4, 147n5, 147n6 Benda, Julien, 17, 19, 21, 22, 24, 34, 39n46, 46, 48, 50, 75n13, 75n14 Bloom, Harold, 54, 76n34, 118, 218 Boccardi, Mariadele, 6, 38n12, 38n13 Brontë, Charlotte, 24 Burke, Carolyn, 148n23, 148n38 Burke, Kenneth, 12, 48 Butler, Marilyn, 55, 76n36, 76n37

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Bibby, A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women, Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7

237

238 

INDEX

Byatt, A. S., 1–16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 35, 37, 37n4, 38n12, 38n13, 38n14, 38n19, 38n20, 38n34, 44, 45, 47–49, 51–55, 58–70, 72–74, 76n41, 76n42, 76n45, 76n47, 76n48, 77n62, 77n63, 77n64, 79–87, 89, 90, 92, 94–99, 101, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 112n3, 113n13, 113n15, 113n16, 113n18, 113n20, 113n21, 113n22, 113n28, 113n29, 113n32, 113n34, 113n35, 114n45, 114n46, 114n50, 114n51, 115n71, 115n72, 115n73, 115n74, 117–120, 122, 125–127, 130, 131, 133, 135, 139, 140, 146, 147n1, 147n3, 147n7, 147n10, 151–153, 155–157, 159–162, 166, 168, 170, 174, 175, 177, 179, 181n45, 181n55, 183–186, 188, 189, 191, 193–198, 200, 202–209, 211, 212, 214n7, 214n8, 214n9, 214n25, 214n26, 214n27, 214n28, 214n29, 214n30, 215n41, 215n42, 215n44, 215n45, 215n46, 215n47, 215n48, 215n54, 215n56, 217, 218, 221, 222, 223n1 C Campbell, Jane, 58, 61, 70, 76n42, 76n47, 76n48, 77n62, 77n64, 130 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 69, 215n56 Cixous, Hélène, 14, 38n31, 38n32, 38n33, 122, 147n11 Clarke, Norma, 25, 29, 91, 114n38, 114n39, 114n40, 114n41, 177, 181n54

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 22, 40n62, 45, 48, 49 Collins, Suzanne, 3 Cosslett, Tess, 97, 114n51 Coupe, Laurence, 5, 12, 13, 16, 38n9, 38n21, 38n22, 39n41, 43–45, 47, 61, 75n1, 75n9, 75n10, 75n11, 75n12, 76n49, 105, 114n61, 114n62, 115n66, 148n29, 152, 161, 180n1, 180n2, 180n3, 181n40, 184, 213n2 D Derrida, Jacques, 9, 118, 123, 124, 127, 129, 140, 147n18, 148n32, 148n33, 148n34, 181n44 E Eagleton, Mary, 5, 13, 38n23, 66, 76n56, 101, 114n59, 117, 171, 181n47, 181n48 Earnshaw, Steven, 81, 112n5, 112n6, 113n11, 113n12, 113n14 Eliot, George, 62, 76n35, 81, 91, 106, 113n13, 113n37 Eliot, T. S., 6, 87 Evans, Mary, 28, 29, 40n80, 40n81, 40n82, 40n83, 40n86, 41n87, 41n88, 90, 93, 103, 113n36, 114n43, 153 F Fay, Elizabeth A., 49, 75n20 Foucault, Michel, 26, 45–48, 52, 60–63, 75n3, 75n4, 75n5, 75n6, 75n7, 76n46, 76n50, 76n53, 85, 86, 100, 101, 113n19, 113n25, 113n30, 114n56, 114n57, 119, 123, 147n17, 163, 181n42

 INDEX 

Franken, Christien, 59, 76n45, 83, 120 Fraser, Nancy, 9, 29, 40n85, 160, 176, 181n37, 181n39, 181n52 G Gilbert, Sandra M., 51, 53, 69, 75n25, 76n33, 99, 124, 181n53 Gitzen, Julian, 83, 113n20 Goffman, Erving, 27 Gramsci, Antonio, 20, 22, 34, 39n54, 39n55, 39n56, 43, 49 Grosz, Elizabeth, 121–124, 126, 142, 147n14, 147n15, 147n16, 147n19, 147n20, 149n53 Gubar, Susan, 51, 53, 69, 75n25, 76n33, 99, 124, 181n53 H Habermas, Jürgen, 9, 28, 29, 40n84, 40n85, 152, 157–160, 162, 176, 180, 180n19, 180n20, 180n21, 180n22, 180n23, 180n24, 180n25, 180n26, 180n27, 181n28, 181n29, 181n30, 181n31, 181n32, 181n33, 181n34, 181n35, 181n41, 181n43, 181n46 Hanson, Clare, 95, 102, 114n47, 114n48, 114n49, 114n60 Haynes, Natalie, 2, 3, 38n8 Heyer, Georgette, 92 Hutcheon, Linda, 8, 27, 40n77, 40n78, 79, 80, 84, 85, 106, 112n2, 113n23, 113n26, 113n33, 114n44, 114n63, 115n64, 115n75, 175, 181n50, 184, 196, 212, 213n1, 215n37, 215n38, 215n39, 215n58, 215n60

239

I Irigaray, Luce, 9, 10, 70, 96, 118, 121–126, 128, 129, 131–133, 136, 142, 146, 147n21, 147n22, 148n23, 148n37, 148n38, 148n39, 148n40, 148n41, 148n42, 148n43, 148n44, 148n45, 148n46, 149n50, 149n51, 149n52, 149n54 J Joannou, Maroula, 95 K Kaplan, Cora, 41n89, 195, 214n32, 214n33, 214n34, 215n36 Keats, John, 72, 77n63, 102, 103 Kristeva, Julia, 9, 33–35, 41n102, 41n103, 41n104, 41n106, 41n107, 41n108, 118, 121, 125, 126, 129, 141, 148n25, 148n26, 148n36, 149n49 L Lackey, Michael, 198, 215n41 Landes, Joan B., 160, 181n36 Lawrence, D. H., 39n54, 58, 76n43, 76n44, 88, 94, 106 Le Dœuff, Michèle, 9, 33, 36, 41n101, 41n110, 41n111, 108, 115n69, 118, 121, 126–128, 137, 141, 145, 146, 148n27, 148n28, 148n30, 148n31, 148n47, 149n55 Leavis, F. R., 7, 55, 83, 84, 87, 120, 122

240 

INDEX

M Mannheim, Karl, 18–20, 22, 28, 34, 39n47, 39n48, 39n49, 39n50, 39n51, 39n52, 39n53, 40n79, 41n100 Marwick, Arthur, 185, 214n5, 214n6 McGann, Jerome J., 48, 75n15, 75n16 McLaughlin, Lisa, 160, 181n35 Miller, Madeline, 2, 3 Mitchell, David, 7, 38n14, 38n15 Moers, Ellen, 51, 75n26, 75n27, 76n28, 86, 113n27, 181n53 O Owen, Alex, 205, 215n49 P Plato, 3 Poovey, Mary, 24, 40n68, 125, 147, 148n24, 170, 198, 215n40 R Rich, Adrienne, 213, 214n22, 215n62, 215n63 Ricoeur, Paul, 12, 44 Riviere, Joan, 30, 41n89, 41n90, 52 S Said, Edward W., 7, 9, 38n16, 40n70, 152, 153, 159, 164, 183 Saint, Jennifer, 2 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 88 Scott, Joan W., 27, 40n75 Scott, Walter, 205

Sellers, Susan, 5, 68, 77n60, 117 Shakespeare, 31, 88, 98, 100, 103, 106 Shelley, Mary, 51 Shils, Edward, 21, 22, 34, 39n47, 39n57, 39n58, 39n61, 46, 49, 50, 57, 75n19, 75n21, 76n39 Shinn, Thelma J., 67, 68, 77n57, 77n59 Showalter, Elaine, 13, 38n26, 38n27, 38n28, 181n53 Small, Helen, 17, 39n45, 40n70 Smith, Ali, 2, 3 Smith, Hilda L., 17, 36, 39n44, 41n112 Sophocles, 3 Spender, Dale, 13, 38n24 Spiegel, Gabrielle L., 15, 39n35, 39n36, 40n75 Steveker, Lena, 111, 115n71, 115n72, 115n73, 115n74 T Tennyson, Alfred, 52, 87, 99, 107, 178, 185, 190, 204–206 Tredell, Nicolas, 38n17, 79, 80, 101, 112n1, 112n4, 114n55, 114n58, 115n67, 115n68, 121, 147n8, 147n9 W Warner, Marina, 14, 38n29, 38n30 Waugh, Patricia, 26, 27, 35, 40n71, 40n73, 40n74, 40n76, 41n105, 41n114 White, Hayden, 10, 15, 26, 31, 36, 39n37, 45–47, 50, 75n2, 81, 85, 185, 187, 192, 197,

 INDEX 

212, 213n3, 214n6, 214n10, 214n14, 214n23 Winterson, Jeanette, 1 Woolf, Virginia, 12, 19, 23, 31–33, 41n91, 41n92, 41n93, 41n94, 41n95, 41n96, 41n97, 41n98,

241

41n99, 57, 76n40, 124, 155, 180n11, 210, 211, 215n55 Wordsworth, William, 21, 39n59, 45, 49, 51, 75n17, 75n18, 76n29, 93, 97, 98, 104, 106