Margaret Drabble

Since the debut of her first novel in 1963, Margaret Drabble has long been considered a feminist writer, concerned almost exclusively with the inner lives of female characters and what some critics have referred to as the 'female quest.' Indeed, most of her early novels are told from the point of view of a female protagonist, and depict issues that are decidedly female-centric: the struggle of young women to establish a sense of self-identity, relationships between sisters, and the perils and pitfalls of marriage, as well as the emotions associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. As a woman herself, Drabble certainly understands the emotional impact of such events in the felale life, so it only makes sense that her characters would reflect a certain kind of experience and view of the world.

However, Drabble is not only interested in examining the events commonly associated with the female experience. Indeed, Drabble's novel reflect a desire to get to the heart of the psychological experience of what it means to be a woman, both as part of a family and as part of a larger world. Central to many of her narratives is the notion that the lives of female protagonists are in large part shaped by the inevitable influence of family and environment, as Drabble seems to assert that much of our lives are predestined by factors beyond our control. It is the female protagonists in her works that demonstrate this determinism most clearly, and thus

Related Essays

Modernism Defined .... Finally, Margaret Drabble argues, as does Merriam Webster, that modernism reflected the impact upon literature of the psychology of Sigmund Freud and the .... (3682 15 )

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH .... Lyrical Ballads. London: Methuen, 1968. Drabble, Margaret. Wordsworth. New York: Arco, 1969. Ellis, Amanda. Rebels & Conservatives. .... (1879 8 )

Literary Movements of Modernism & Imagism .... Faces of Modernity. Durham: Duke UP, 1987. Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Eysteinsson, Astradur. .... (1726 7 )

Modernist Style of Writing & Imagism .... Faces of Modernity. Durham: Duke UP, 1987. Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Eysteinsson, Astradur. .... (1726 7 )

Poetry in the Romantic Period .... 267. Cuddon, JA Literary Terms. New York: Penguin, 1979. Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. .... (1994 8 )

ustice in life. She is acutely aware of the fact that she has been given quite a bit in life in terms of intelligence and physical beauty, while others, like her "ghastly" cousin Daphne, receive so little. Clearly, Sarah contends, there is nothing fair about this, when one does have to do anything to earn such gifts. She muses, "How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever" (Bird-Cage 35). It is clear to Sarah that this unjust distribution of physical charm will determine the course of Daphne's life, who, as "a plain bespectacled girl, now a schoolmistress," Sarah imagines will "bring despair to the hearts of young girls as they view the narrow grey horizons of maturity through such lenses" (Bird-Cage 19). Indeed, Daphne's future seems so bleak to Sarah that she asks, "� why do you think God made people like Daphne?" (Bird-Cage 180). Sarah is desperate to understand "God's purpose in creating such incomplete creatures" (Bird-Cage 182) because such obvious inequalities among women seem to serve no purpose that to make some lives more difficult than others. Sarah tries to rationalize the inequality between she and Daphne by repeating a li

Category: Literature - M