‘If the Old Could’: Bridging the Generation Gap

Abstract

In keeping with the mood of the times sketched out above, most of the women novelists who began writing in the 1960s and 1970s wrote about the lives of young women like themselves. Among the most notable were Margaret Drabble, Fay Weldon and Angela Carter. The five novels Drabble published in the 1960s, when she was in her twenties, pay close — and new — attention to the physical and emotional realities of women’s experiences as lovers, wives and mothers of small children. One of the Drabble heroine’s most difficult relationships, however, is often that with her mother. More satirical in intent and style, Weldon’s early novels focus on male exploitation of women, particularly of female sexuality: like Drabble’s Rosamund in The Millstone, the heroine of Down Among the Women (1971), Weldon’s second novel, is also pregnant as a result of a single act of intercourse. While brought up in a multi-generational household of women, and free from Drabble’s sense of unease as a daughter, Weldon’s focus remains on the younger generation of women. While moving beyond realism, Carter’s novels of the 1960s similarly dissect the social and cultural forces that distort women’s aims and desires in the interests of perpetuating a normative view of femininity which provides the very foundations of patriarchy. In the 1970s Emma Tennant, Sara Maitland and Zoe Fairbairns also used innovative fictional forms through which to explore the social and psychological experiences of women of their time, focusing in particular on those years of women’s lives primarily devoted to education, love, marriage and children.¹

If the young knew […]

If the old could […]

Old French Proverb