Lansbury, Socialism and Feminism

BOOK REVIEWS male (spermy); and (3) the powerful female is rendered harmless by a return to her pre-sexual state. The six-fold Ololon is transformed into a twelve-year-old-virgin, neither sexual nor maternal. Kate Leslie is converted into a child by her dance with a stranger during her first sojourn in Sayula; the transformation is repeated late in the novel when she sits with Cipriano beneath the idol of Huitzilopochtli and becomes fourteen. But one must remember that ultimately Kate refuses to commit herself totally and irrevocably to Cipriano and Mexico. Hence, in Lawrence, as in Blake, the moments of female subjection to the male are always in danger of being eroded. The final chapter, a brief one, sees in both Blake and Lawrence the ability to create a more balanced image of masculinity and to consider women as less disruptive to that image in their last works: Blake's woodcuts for Virgil and his copper etchings for Illustrations to the Book of Job, and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. One might ask the author if this balance is made possible by masculine triumph in the earlier works, but she makes no such claim and such question is a cavil, for we know that balance is more likely to be achieved and sustained in art than in life. This is a fine book. It fills a gap that is surprising when one considers how frequently Blake and Lawrence are cited as concentrating their vision on ideal conditions for the individual, how asocial they both are. Storch not only reads keenly in the lights of Kleinian theory, she uses just enough psychoanalytic terminology to provide a matrix for textual examination, avoiding the reductiveness that is an attractive nuisance in psychological/ biographical studies of creativity. The knowledge and pleasure which even a veteran Lawrentian derives from reading this book is the finest proof of Storch's own summary statement, "Artistic creation does not remove the causes of personal difficulties, nor does the artist's coming to terms with aspects of the self through producing a work of art destroy the sources of inspiration." To this I would add: nor does the mystery and power of creativity decline for the reader as knowledge of creativity advances. „ ., . „ „ ° J Rose Marie Burwell Northern Illinois University Lansbury, Socialism and Feminism Jonathan Schneer. George Lansbury. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. 230 pp. £29.95 MANCHESTER University Press's Lives of the Left series has produced, 263 ELT : VOLUME 35:2 1992 among others, such fine studies as Joel Wiener's William Lovett, Fred Leventhal's Arthur Henderson, Will Knox's James Maxton, and Dick Geary's Karl Kautsky. Jonathan Schneer's study of George Lansbury (1859-1940) is a worthy addition to the project, even though it is not, in some respects, equal in keen interpretation and style to some of its predecessors in the series. But, as Schneer states, "This is not a biography in the conventional sense" and certainly not "a complete biography." Thus, he does not deal with Lansbury's family life, nor with "his important role as editor of the Daily Herald during 1912-22," his parliamentary campaigns, and his role in Ramsay MacDonald's ill-fated Labour Government (1929-31). For these aspects of Lansbury's career, Schneer defers to Raymond Postgate's biography of Lansbury published in 1951. Instead, Schneer covers Lansbury's life by concentrating on the three great causes of his career (and, Schneer asserts, "three of the British left's most important preoccupations" between the 1880s and 1930s): socialism, feminism, and pacifism, which (says Schneer) Postgate "did not examine in detail." Each of the three topical sections overlap and are treated in a somewhat loose chronological order—Lansbury's socialism during the 1880s and 1890s; Lansbury's advocacy of the suffragette cause during 1900-14; and Lansbury's pacifism from 1914 through the 1930s. Lansbury was basically a good man and an incurable idealist who steadfastly adhered to a roseate view of humankind. He was not an original thinker and theorist and his ideology was simply that "socialism represented a higher stage of human existence than capitalism because it would be based on cooperation...