Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire

6. Writing Women,Reading Men

6 Writing Women, Reading Men A. S. Byatt, Barbara Pym, and the Post-Gentlemen The dissolution of the code of English gentlemanliness and the simultaneous adaptation of specific traits of that code in the literature of postwar, post-imperial England signifies both the decline of the English gentleman and the paradoxical persistence of the ideals that define Englishness and Englishmen. The focus in earlier chapters has been on middle- to lower-class male protagonists who struggle against the weight of an inherited upper-class gentlemanliness that emerged during the halcyon expansiveness of the empire. The struggle occurs in tandem with their attempt to reshape codes of gentlemanliness to suit the possibilities of the welfare state, with its paradoxical associations of renewed national confidence and containment. This final chapter shifts that focus and considers the marginalized stories of middle-class female protagonists against and through which the post-gentlemen defined themselves. At the same time, these narratives by women also challenge the narratives of the post-gentlemen as they are focalized through the female protagonist. The two intertwined tracks in the story of the postwar, middle-class Englishwoman best emerge in the very different works of A. S. Byatt and Barbara Pym, a yoking that might appear violent and counterintuitive, but they both depict the newly opened possibilities and constraints for the middle-class female protagonist effected by the tumultuous socioeconomic restructuring of Britain. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment (1962, 1982) address the changes in the middle-class woman as she negotiates the changes of postwar Britain. This chapter explores not just a reversal where the gentleman and the “new man” are now subject to the middle-class female gaze, but it also 166 Scarecrows of Chivalry addresses how this perspective reevaluates those narratives where women are marginalized and/or represented as tokens of exchange. This final chapter constitutes a feminist critical response (in a slightly different mode than the earlier chapters) to Englishmen writing about themselves and the women that they either dismiss or attempt to possess on their journey of self-discovery. These particular novels by women about middle-class men and women are crucial to an understanding of post-imperial masculinities and the politics of gender. “Writing Women” is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of the postwar woman: I do not offer a similar genealogical paradigm for the alterations of femininity as I have done with gentlemanliness. It works more inductively than the previous chapters, which read the post-gentleman within an imperial gendered genealogy. My close textual analysis reveals that women novelists frequently invoke characters or tropes from the works of their male counterparts in order to deconstruct them. The two texts examined here speak back to works considered so far, making it clear that the negotiations of the “new man” with his inherited gender scripts intertwines with struggles of the Englishwoman who endeavors to do the same. In other words, Charles Lumley in Hurry on Down and Anna Severell in The Shadow of the Sun work within the concentric and overlapping circles of inherited gender conventions and ideals of Englishness while they attempt to construct a postimperial gendered subjectivity in what seems to be a modernized, insular England. The double-helix of foreclosed horizons and newly awakened possibility that informs the masculine narratives of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, John Wain’s Hurry on Down, and even Philip Larkin’s poetics of melancholy optimism runs through The Shadow of the Sun and An Unsuitable Attachment. The key difference is that the difficulty of the female protagonist ’s struggle is compounded by the aggressive, masculinist presence of the Angry Young Man. Like the works by the male writers, Byatt and Pym’s novels illustrate the raggedness that comes with possibility: the working within and against gendered expectations in a new phase of Englishness, but for the women involved, the horizons are foreshortened by the narratives of domesticity, where female subjectivity is always in danger of being subsumed by the male presence. Anna and Antonia: Vision Quest A. S. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, though published in 1964, was written between 1954 and 1957 while she was a doctoral student at Cambridge.1 It is Writing Women, Reading Men 167 the story of the teenage Anna Severell, the daughter of a famous novelist, Henry Severell, who attempts...