Gender and Feminism in Fowles and McEwan's British Novels

Introduction: De Beauvoir, Gender, and the Male Novelist

"She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other." — Simone de Beauvoir.

Simone de Beauvoir's influential analysis of gender difference as somehow implying gender deference — that the mere fact of defining the male in opposition to the female somehow implies placing one in an inferior or subaltern position — becomes especially interesting when examining how fiction by male authors approaches questions of gender. This paper examines in detail two British novels of the postwar period: The Collector by John Fowles, published in 1963, and The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan, published in 1981. I hope to demonstrate that the existence of the feminist movement managed to shift the portrayal of gender in the work of male novelists. To some extent, Fowles' The Collector can be read as a pre-feminist novel, which employs a traditional set of gendered associations to approach a topic that is actually quite different, while McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers is a post-feminist novel, self-aware in its handling of gender representation.

The Collector as Pre-Feminist Fiction

Fowles' The Collector is an early work by a novelist better known for more subtle structural and metafictional construction. There is some effort at metafictionality — both central characters compose their own diaries — but the overall central scenario is so lurid that it feels nearly pornographic, and has earned substantial ire from feminist critics as a result. It is worth noting, however, that Fowles has already asked the reader to consider his or her own complicity in a sort of criminality that the novel depicts: the parallel between Clegg's sexualized voyeurism and the voyeurism entailed in reading someone else's diary is fully exploited by Fowles, and seems to invite the reader to consider the morality of the aesthetic — or indeed pornographic — experience unsparingly. If Fowles' is an anti-feminist work in some sense, it cannot be called a morally or ethically uncomplicated book, or one in which substantial thought and analysis are not taking place.

The novel is, of course, about a man who stalks, kidnaps, and sexually torments an attractive woman — but it should be possible to treat such subjects without indulging them. To a certain degree, this is the reason Fowles adopts a detached tone in narration. As Katherine Tarbox puts it, in Clegg's "camera eyes, he sees everything from a distance, voyeuristically" (Tarbox 48). This detachment may be a late ramification of the willingness of modernist writers in the 1920s and 1930s to permit film techniques to influence fictional composition: the detached, cool gaze of Clegg is meant to invoke a whole environment of mediated detachment, above and beyond the sexual objectification at the heart of the book.

We must regard The Collector as a pre-feminist novel, though not entirely so — John Fowles writes well after earlier writers who can be characterized as feminist, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Virginia Woolf to Simone de Beauvoir herself, who was active in 1963 but had emerged as a public intellectual substantially earlier. It is worth noting that the year of publication for The Collector was also the year of publication for Betty Friedan's noteworthy best-selling feminist work The Feminine Mystique. Ideas of objectification were very much in the air, but Fowles does not have the benefit of writing after Friedan. Instead, we must try to understand both writers as expressing something in the early 1960s that would be borne out by subsequent events and the emergence of a full-scale women's movement in the 1970s.

Certainly Clegg views Miranda purely in terms of beauty, but that beauty is likened to the butterflies he collects — the divide between himself and her is almost one of species. This bears out Fowles' own interpretation of the book as being intended to capture a difference in social class more than a difference in gender. Gindin emphasizes Fowles' own claim in his characterization of The Collector as a work where "Fowles attempted to probe psychologically and sociologically on a single plane of experience, to demonstrate what in a young man of one class caused him to collect, imprison, and dissect the girl from another class he thought he loved" (Gindin 331). At the same time, Gindin is forced to conclude that the motif of the unknowable alterity of the female is something of an obsession in Fowles' work overall:

The sexual focus, however, with its attendant guilts and metaphorical expansions, is characteristic, and the novels develop the rational and sometimes manipulative means the male uses to try to understand and control the amorphous and enigmatic female. The male is always limited, his formulations and understandings only partial. And, in his frustration, the necessity that he operate in a world where understanding is never complete, he acts so as to capture (The Collector), desert (The Magus), betray (The French Lieutenant's Woman), relate to through art (Mantissa), or both betray and finally recover (Daniel Martin) the female he can only partially comprehend. (Gindin 332)

Class, Gender, and the Figure of Miranda

Feminist criticism is aware of the double bind that Fowles' fiction places the reader in. It is entirely possible to read The Collector as a novel more about class than gender, as Fowles himself has contended. Indeed, one of the sharpest feminist critiques of Fowles' novel, by Lenz, acknowledges this openly: "the violence and ignorance embodied in Clegg are endemic to a society fractured by rigid stratifications, and illustrates the impossibility of communication across social, economic and cultural boundaries" (Lenz 49). But this does not lessen the discomfort that Lenz registers in her reading of The Collector, where she ultimately decides that Fowles — especially in the passages which ventriloquize Miranda's journal — "exploits rather than explores a woman's standpoint, and offers no alternative vision to the troubling pornographic objectification and fragmented disjunction of its characters' socially conditioned interactions" (Lenz 50). Still, Pamela Cooper seems to believe that the depiction of gender here is subordinated to class issues, noting that "The Collector dramatizes the clash between a socially entrenched, wealthy middle class and an underprivileged but upwardly mobile working or lower middle class, dubbed 'The New People' in the book" (Cooper 21).

The act which sets the plot into motion is depicted by Fowles with substantial class indicators:

I did the pools from the week I was twenty-one. Every week I did the same five-bob perm. Old Tom and Crutchley, who were in Rates with me, and some of the girls clubbed together and did a big one and they were always going at me to join in, but I stayed the lone wolf. I never liked old Tom or Crutchley. Old Tom is slimy, always going on about local government and buttering up to Mr. Williams, the Borough Treasurer. Crutchley's got a dirty mind and he is a sadist, he never let an opportunity go of making fun of my interest, especially if there were girls around. "Fred's looking tired — he's been having a dirty week-end with a Cabbage White," he used to say, and, "Who was that Painted Lady I saw you with last night?" Old Tom would snigger, and Jane, Crutchley's girl from Sanitation, she was always in our office, would giggle. She was all Miranda wasn't. I always hated vulgar women, especially girls. So I did my own entry, like I said. The cheque was for £73,091 and some odd shillings and pence.

The notion that someone of Clegg's social standing could win such a substantial sum on the football pools is taken by Fowles from life, from the notorious case of Viv Nicholson, who won a large sum of money in the football pools and announced that she planned to "spend, spend, spend," only to wind up living in public housing and penniless in less than a decade. Nicholson's case was the subject of horrified fascination in the class-conscious Britain of the early 1960s, and it manages — along with the low slang entailed in the nicknames and joshing — to place Clegg's financial windfall in a context of panic about the ability of the lower orders to cope morally with increased money. To that extent, Clegg's windfall, permitting him to do as he likes, seems more like a lurid metaphor for the notion that the postwar British welfare state was handing people large sums of cash to enable a hyperactive and depraved sexuality.

We may ask ourselves whether Fowles similarly portrays Miranda in class-based terms, and to a certain extent he does. Miranda is, after all, an art school student — which implies a faith on Fowles' part that women are capable of creativity outside childbirth and is certainly not intended as a slight. But it is also a class marker. The introduction of women into the fine arts was to a large degree accomplished by the Bloomsbury Group, whose women — including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Margery Fry — were able to lead lives of "bohemian" artistic liberation largely because they came from a higher social class than Miranda's own. Miranda instead seems more like the later cliché of the art student as an out-of-touch bourgeois whose art entails something disconnected from proletarian reality. Her aesthetic awareness is nonetheless borne out by the arc of her accommodation to confinement, which takes on the quality of an almost religious response to deprivation. By the end, Miranda sounds not so much like a rape victim as she does like Simone Weil undergoing a dark night of the soul:

He uses my heart. Then turns and tramples on it. He hates me, he wants to defile me and break me and destroy me. He wants me to hate myself so much that I destroy myself. The final meanness. He's not bringing me any supper. I'm to fast, on top of everything else. Perhaps he's going to leave me to starve. He's capable of it. I've got over the shock. He won't beat me. I won't give in. I won't be broken by him. I've got a temperature, I feel sick. Everything's against me, but I won't give in. I've been lying on the bed with G.P.'s picture beside me. Holding the frame in one hand. Like a crucifix. I will survive. I will escape. I will not give in. I will not give in. I hate God. I hate whatever made this world, I hate whatever made the human race, made men like Caliban possible and situations like this possible. If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness. He cannot be good. This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing. All in vain. All wasted. The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker. More and more suffering for more and more.

Miranda's willingness to rise to such heights of speculation and public empathy — connecting her own psychological state to a concern with "the bomb," Algeria, and the Congo — suggests that we are witnessing the birth of a real artist, or the passage from artist into saint. In any case, gender no longer seems to be the point here. Even if one perceives a certain similarity in the power dynamic of the Book of Job and The Story of O, Miranda's arc in The Collector more closely resembles the former.

McEwan's Post-Feminist Awareness in The Comfort of Strangers

In contrast to Fowles writing from a pre-feminist perspective, Ian McEwan writes with deliberate awareness of the feminist movement. Before his novel even begins, he signposts this awareness with the epigraph:

How we dwelt in two worlds.
The daughters and the mothers
In the kingdom of the sons
— Adrienne Rich

It is a specific sort of political act on McEwan's part to select an epigraph from Adrienne Rich. Rich was famous in literary circles as a polite formalist poet and a young married woman of the 1950s, selected by W. H. Auden for a prestigious literary prize on the basis of her metrical poems such as "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers," which seemed even then to express some vague feminist awareness. Rich would later come out as a lesbian — offering a famous definition of the "lesbian continuum" that contextualizes all women's relationships within a homosocial milieu — and begin composing more openly political, Whitmanically free verse, such as "Diving into the Wreck" in 1973. In other words, McEwan is offering an epigraph from a major American feminist icon, in which the gender divide is figured as "two worlds." Whatever commentary on gender The Comfort of Strangers advances, it certainly cannot be characterized — as Fowles can — as simply unaware.

If the epigraph raises certain expectations, the novel certainly does not disappoint them. Early in the story, Colin and Mary are confronted with direct evidence of feminism in the form of "announcements and pronouncements from feminists and the far Left" fly-posted along the sides of buildings in the unnamed city — presumably Venice — in which they are taking their holiday. This is a world in which feminism is a vital revolutionary force, demanding justice in the streets, and so it is worth examining in close detail the passage in question. It begins as Mary moves in for a closer look at the political broadsides:

Conclusion: Desire, Otherness, and the Limits of Male Feminism

Feminist critics remain divided about how to regard McEwan's post-feminist Gothic. Angela Roger argues that the novel is basically no different from Fowles in its approach to gender, functioning as a textbook illustration of otherness. She claims that "The Comfort of Strangers has a fairly neutral narrator but it helps to propound a dangerous myth of sexuality which serves women ill. McEwan's women characters are given objective existence in a man's world and their characterization is a male construct of their womanhood. Interest in them is essentially in their 'otherness' from men, but this 'otherness' is seen from a man's point of view" (11). Dwelle believes that in The Comfort of Strangers, McEwan's "exploration of male chauvinism presents the reader with a new aspect to this troubling writer, but his obsession with the loss of innocence continues," reading the novel overall as part of a larger trend in McEwan's fiction, a "trend which began with The Comfort of Strangers...where the characters still experience a loss of innocence, but the novel concentrates, not on the loss itself, but rather on the attempts of the characters to recover from that loss" (682).