ABSTRACT
To write about the way in which the canonical writers of the 1930s represent women is to apply a ‘slantways’ focus to their work. Neither Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell nor Rex Warner showed much interest in female subjectivity; and of these, only Isherwood, who in his old age became a public spokesman for Gay Liberation, ever showed any interest in dismantling sexual stereotypes-and then only for his own sex. The left-wing writings which these men produced during the thirties are, as I argued in Chapter 2, both strongly autobiographical and much influenced by the writers’ acute awareness of their own overdetermined position as historical subjects responding to events that they did not shape. This autobiographical slant, obvious in the poems of Spender and the prose writings of Isherwood and Orwell, is also present in the poems, novels and verse plays which reshaped these writers’ private mythologies of their own lives into public
parables. In the verse-play Paid on Both Sides (1930), Auden represented his own Oedipal dilemma as the predicament of a generation; and The Ascent of F6 (1937), which he wrote with Isherwood, does something similar. The verseplays of MacNeice and Spender similarly transform the personal into the political, as do Day Lewis’ longer poems, such as From Feathers to Iron (1931), which commemorates the gestation and birth of his first son, and the sequence The Magnetic Mountain (1933), about his own journey to Communism. None of these plays or poems deals directly with women, although female symbolism plays an important part in them all.
