Essay Title: One of the leading themes of the post war period is the difficulties involved in personal choice and action. By what techniques and literary strategies do the writers studied make these difficulties real for the reader?
The difficulties involved in personal choice and action were reflected to a great extent in the novels of the post war period. Greater freedom gifted both authors and readers with greater responsibility and this was also explored, especially in the area of authorial control. In the two novels to be discussed in detail here, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark and The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, both control within the novel and by the author are used effectively to examine its importance. Other major themes and techniques, such as temporal manipulation and the concept of exclusion, as well as the question of the omniscient author will also be considered in order to explore how each novel treats the concept of personal choice and the methods used for doing so.
Muriel Spark’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, was first published in 1962 and was an immediate critical and popular success. The novel concerns the dominance of a Scottish teacher, Jean Brodie, in a private girls’ school, Marcia Blaine, in the Edinburgh of the 1930s. Jean Brodie is a charismatic character who selects girls to be members of ‘the Brodie set’, whom she claims are the ‘crème de la crème’ and whom ‘everyone thinks had more fun than anybody else’. Brodie’s Calvinist notions of a predestined ‘Elect’ which she selects (later, Sandy notes that Miss Brodie thinks of herself as the ‘God of Calvin’) are clearly dangerous, especially since her Fascist political sympathies are taught to the ‘impressionable girls’ on whom they have varying degrees and types of effect.
In order that the reader should be aware of both cause and effect simultaneously, Spark makes frequent and effective use of prolepsis, moving the reader’s consciousness forward to see how the girls developed as a result of Brodie’s influence. These ‘flash-forwards’ facilitate succinctly the complete lives of all those involved in the narrative, allowing the reader to evaluate more lucidly the complex control patterns Spark is exploring and contribute to ‘the consummate artistic finish of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’. That is, the way that Miss Brodie not only takes away the girls’ independence and free will in youth but plants seeds that will only be completely realised with the passing of the years.
Temporal manipulation is also employed to a great extent in John Fowles’ novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Set in Lyme, the novel was written in 1969 but begins in 1869, perpetually shifting between past and present. Fowles was influenced by Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and, like Hardy, appears ‘in love’ with the titular heroine, Sarah Woodruff, ‘the French lieutenant’s woman’. Fowles draws the reader into collaboration with the characters as well as the mystery surrounding Sarah, even providing alternate endings, encouraging the idea that personal choice involves not just the characters and the author but the reader, too. Fowles is an interventionist author and an omniscient one but he disperses control beyond the author and even allows that characters do not always behave exactly as he might have wished, having, instead, a life and will of their own. Choices are not clearly defined, not even fully decided upon, and the animated, inclusive ambivalence drives the novel throughout. The narrative form facilitates this, since Fowles engages the reader in the writing process by having his narrator, distinct from Fowles himself, stepping out of the narrative and addressing the reader directly, using time-shifts, and ultimately denying a conclusive ending. In many ways, the novel is a modern rendering of a Victorian novel, in that it uses characters and situations that might have been used then but employs techniques and addresses subject matter that would have been impossible then:
Fowles fiction is like a huge protean amusement park, a literary Disney World enisled in a sea of potential interpretation. But the park is sinister, not gay; dark, not ferris wheel-lighted and lantern-strung. And the people who come to the park are always alone. They pass through the main gate where Dostoevsky, a microphoned Cerberus, barks, ‘Step right inside, everything is permitted!’ Sartre sells tickets to the maze and Camus operates the lightless ferris wheel which never stops yet never progresses. Richardson shills people into the inner darkness where the girlie show bumps and groans in the night, and Conrad mans the turnstile to Jungle Land. Dickens and Hardy, uniformed men to be respected, patrol the midway and enforce the rules. Unlike most amusement parks, however, in the Fowles world illusion becomes reality rather than vice versa.
Fowles’ fiction is, indeed, informed by resonances of the Victorian era but he has taken it beyond that, as Palmer suggests, making it conform, if that is the word, to a completely different ‘reality’, evidenced in his narrative structure. Hence, though the central narrative could even be consigned to the realms of cliché, Fowles’ handling of it makes the difference. We are never quite sure exactly to whom ‘the eye in the telescope’ belongs and the choice of the angle of vision is perpetually distorted.
Similarly, Spark’s desire to unravel and, like Sandy, expose the corrupting formative effect on the choices of the young by the influence of their elders, especially their heroes and heroines, is different from a straightforward narrative because of its stylistic features, principally the use of prolepses. As indicated earlier, this enables the reader to see the seed and the fruit simultaneously:
Muriel Spark has consistently manifested in her novels the playful and significant eccentricity of a writer conscious of style and form.
However, in order to see precisely how Spark’s technique aids the author’s revelation of the reality of the difficulty of choice and action, it is necessary to look closely at an example from her text. Sandy is clearly the obvious choice for this type of analysis, not only because of the connection with Spark herself, but because she is both the principal confidante of Brodie, and selected to be so, and the arbiter of her downfall. She is also the girl on whose life Miss Brodie has the most influence, almost by inversion. Sandy rebels most against Miss Brodie by exercising her free will to destroy her but she cannot escape the control Brodie has had on her life because it has actually moulded what she has become:
‘What was your biggest influence, then, Sister Helena? Was it political, personal? Was it Calvinism?’
‘Oh no,’ said Sandy. ‘But there was a Miss Brodie in her prime.’
The image of Sandy transformed to ‘Sister Helena’ and ‘clutching the bars of the grille’ as she says these words is made painfully real by Spark as an image of the corruption of influence and consequent perversion of choice subliminally denying free will. Sandy’s following a vocation as a Roman Catholic nun was far from what Miss Brodie envisaged (Spark here emphasising the limit of Brodie’s directive, since her control over events is perverted by Sandy’s own counter-reactive) and this, of course, the novel suggests, is a large part of the motivation for Sandy’s choice; her idea of Brodie as the ‘God of Calvin’, resonated and inverted.
Though Sandy ultimately recognises this, acknowledging that Miss Brodie has defined her very being, directed her soul, the infamous, ‘give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life’, that Brodie Jesuitically and chillingly evinces, combined with her consciousness of and glorying in the fact that she is, ‘putting old heads on [their] young shoulders’ is effective in portraying the power of the controller and the controlled and the often unconscious complicity between the two. Spark uses prolepsis to show the varying degrees of influence Miss Brodie had on the girls but it is clearly most evident and, indeed, destructive, upon Sandy. From the first, there is a continuous connective between the past and present, with the future an elusive constant. Brodie thinks she can direct the future, pinpointing how she knows instinctively how each will turn out, yet she is wrong in every case. Spark thus illustrates the idea that power can only exist if allowed to and influences being ‘important’, ‘even if they provide something to react against’. Hence, those who follow ‘in the wake of Miss Brodie’ see her as a ‘mighty woman’ and perpetuate this image in her having limited ‘understanding of various kinds’.
Brodie’s instinct is shown continuously as fundamentally flawed as she does not at any point recognise Sandy’s imaginative, romantic nature, despite the fact that she features so prominently in it. Yet, she would seek to control even the artistic sensibilities of the girls stating that Giotto is superior to Da Vinci, for example, simply because he is ‘[her] favourite’ and that ‘Art is greater than science’ simply because she says so: control is everywhere sought and given and the importance f belonging, the denial of the individuality Brodie says she admires, is summed up by Sandy’s recognition of her dislike of the Girl Guides because they are a rival to her personal Fascisti.
Fowles is similarly interested in the influence of imagination on choice and the power of the possessor and the possessed, the individual ostracised from the group. He adds to this the notion of an author’s influence on decisions and actions and the reader’s part in this. Fowles is clear in his identification of the connection between author and narrator so there is a collaborative imagination at work which is sometimes overpowered by the will of his characters. His central male protagonist’s profession as a geologist is not taken very seriously, unlike Brodie’s, but it is significant because it involves observation of what is still and past, what remains and what is lost. Even in the mystery of the story, Fowles delegates narrative control:
I cannot imagine what Bosch-like picture of Ware Commons Mrs. Poulteney had built up over the years; what satanic orgies she divined behind every tree, what French abominations under every leaf. But I think we may safely say that it had become the objective correlative of all that went on in her own subconscious.
This example of the extremely complex narrative technique displays Fowles’ reluctance to dominate the choices of his characters and his ultimate avoidance of the omniscience of authorship. Like Hardy, whom he so much admired, Fowles uses natural imagery to illustrate the subconscious and surreal. He is both inviting the reader to ridicule and become involved with its object. (This is the more important in the case of Mrs Poulteney, of course, because of all the values of the British Empire which she represents and which Fowles seeks to debunk.) His ‘objective correlative’ is as erroneous as that of the character and the reader may not any more ‘safely assume’ the author’s ‘subconscious’ than he may the characters’.
Indeed, Fowles’ central area of control, between Charles and Sarah, shifts in the apportioning of dominance throughout, even denying the ultimate authorial ‘choice’ in this by the provision of three endings, one significantly displaced, from which the reader may choose: is this because the author cannot or will not? It is a moot point. However, Fowles appears throughout to champion Sarah, simply by making her an outsider since he sees the society from which she is excluded as faulty, their approbation not to be sought or valued: the crucial difference is between her apprehension by the older perceptions in the novel’s narrative and the new. Fowles’ temporal manipulation elucidates this. Charles’ choices, though ‘free as a God’ and ‘understanding all […] except Sarah’, are not definitive, hence the different endings and the weight given to freedom for Sarah in two of them. By simultaneously imitating and fragmenting the mould and mores of the Victorian novel, Fowles shows that the freedom of choice with which he gifts his characters is also the modern author’s. As Spark used Calvin to demonstrate the dangers of an elite, so Fowles uses Sartre, identifying with the supremacy of free will basic to Existentialism but qualifying it by a system which irrevocably influences individual choice.
Difficulties of personal choice and action drive the narratives of both these novels and the idea that power is both taken and given according to circumstance and temperament an important unifier in both. Spark is chiefly concerned with the desire to evidence the influence upon the weak by the strong and how, by the prolepsis of her narrative technique, all may be revealed simultaneously to the reader. Fowles’ use of temporal manipulation, though markedly different, nevertheless significantly increases the power of his narrative to make the difficulty of choice and action ‘real’ for the reader. Both novels display a post war preoccupation with the difficulties which an increasingly anarchic society presented and both, have an innate sense of what it means to be both possessor and possessed, controller and controlled. In the final analysis, power becomes realised in these novels as not so much exercised as allowed or permitted, perhaps even by silence, and in this sense, the creative era is significant, since it followed the denial of consent to such as would wield it. Spark and Fowles recognise the full weight of responsibility which authorship necessitates but both sustain the notion that control remains incomplete; in their different narrative styles, the reader perceives this and becomes an essential part of the continuing creative process. Hence, a novel is never really finished, complete or entire since each individual reader will continue to make different choices upon and about it, gifting the genre with a permanent vitality.
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