ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider the work of five post-1945 British and North American women writers whose work has generally been received in terms of an orthodox 'liberal' critical reading. Certainly the work of Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner, Sylvia Plath, and Ann Tyler has been read as formally unadventurous, eschewing the narrative experiment of postmodernist fiction and espousing a broadly realist aesthetic. (The work of Grace Paley has been either ignored or assimilated to a 'liberal' reading.) In my view, this reading has ignored their significant, though often unobtrusive, formal innovations (no fabulatory fireworks here), and their contribution to a political and psychoanalytic understanding of gender and subjectivity. They are, by no means, all declared feminists. Brookner has explicitly distanced herself from feminist politics and declared that her aesthetic ideal is one of Enlightenment rationalism, yet her work is similar to Woolf's in its perception of the relational basis of identity and its portrayal of her women characters' obsessive need for and fear of connection. Woolf observed that 'women have seemed all the centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its normal size' (A Room of One's Own, p. 35). Brookner's women function very much as looking-glasses, while longing, at the same time, to cry out, passionately and unrestrainedly: 'Look at me!' Their moral strengths function as weakness in the patriarchal, consumerist, and acquisitive world of the post19608, and they themselves internalize this disparaging view of their qualities, resulting in a perpetually low self-esteem. As Jean Baker Miller argues: 'Dominants are usually convinced that the
way things are is right and good, not only for them but especially for the subordinates. All morality confirms this view, and all social structure sustains it' (J.B. Miller 1983, p. 9). Like Mrs Ramsay and Clarissa Dalloway, Brookner's characters are compelled to resolve their ego boundary confusion through repressive or self-destructive patterns of behaviour. Similarly also, their actions often imitate the aesthetic options open to their author, as art and literature are explored as possible routes to imaginary wholeness. Unlike Woolf, however, Brookner seems to imply that their fate, like their identity, is sealed and fixed, and only resignation or neurosis are offered as ways of dealing with this 'truth'.
