Body and/or Mind – Biological versus Intellectual Identity

After her marriage, Frederica notices the relevance of the relationships between women as she moves in with Agatha to share a house. Agatha, her daughter Saskia, Frederica and her son Leo thus form a new family model, an alternative to the traditional family. Elizabeth Abel states that “[w]omen characters, more psychologically embedded in relationships, sometimes share the formative voyage with friends, sisters, or mothers, who assume equal status as protagonists” (Abel, 12) and so does Frederica whose identity develops in her connection to Agatha and also by comparing and contrasting herself with Jacqueline.

Agatha and Frederica are both single mothers, an experience which certainly connects them. Yet, the foundation of their friendship is really their common love for language and passion for words (comp. BT, 170). They do also bond because they share a similar past as rather lonely children who were caught in their own worlds of language and literature which naturally set them off and separated them from other girls their age.

Frederica as well as Agatha have thus learnt to become self-sufficient to an extent which

borders on egotism; both still are as grown-up women. Working as a Principal for the Ministry of Education, Agatha is career-wise very successful and rises indeed fast in the hierarchy of the Civil Service, a world still dominated by men. Frederica looks up to her house-mate as someone who has found her place in the world: “a woman with a solid place in the world, a secretary, a telephone, colleagues, an office” (WW, 10/11). In her eyes Agatha knows where she is positioned and is even defined by her job, something Frederica misses since she feels insecure of herself. Agatha has what Frederica wants – an “outline and architecture” (WW, 38). Agatha, however, considers it a restriction to be defined as such, as a tough business woman. Her success in her job somehow relegates her to a rather male sphere where she feels pressured to restrict her female side. But she wants more, she wants a private life and love as well, she wants a family and a father for her daughter Saskia.

Nevertheless, she keeps this desire for herself, does not share her longings with Frederica who has in fact no idea of this side of Agatha. The reader is similarly kept in the dark and it hence comes as quite a surprise that towards the end of A Whistling Woman, Agatha has eventually found her missing piece and has a relationship with Gerard Wijnnobel (WW, 417) who might well be Saskia’s biological father considering that he is a Dutchman and Saskia was named after the Dutch painter Rembrandt’s wife.

While Frederica and Agatha share the passion for language and literature, Frederica and Jacqueline resemble each other in their ambitious greed for knowledge. Both strongly feel the “desire to know the next thing, and then the next, and then the next” (WW, 24), a hunger which is really insatiable. The “inexorable force of her own curiosity” lives in Jacqueline and “like a bright dragon in a cave, it had to be fed, it must not be denied, it would destroy her if she did not feed it” (ibid.). The passions of her mind are strong and demanding and overrule those of her female body. Although she had affairs at university, these sexual encounters were mainly caused by curiosity and a feeling that they were somehow expected from her and so she gave in. Deep inside she “still ha[s] a conventional vision of herself, some day or other, meeting the ‘right man’ and being joined to him in a flurry of white veiling and organ music” (WW, 23). However, she decides to deny and neglect these dreams (probably implanted in her by her family and society) to instead “do hard science” (WW, 20) and make ground-breaking discoveries. As she prefers the desires of her mind to those of her body, she ignores Luk Lysgaard-Peacock’s approaches to her and chooses asexual Marcus Potter as her love interest. Being in love with Marcus is safe for her

since she knows that he will not take any sexual interest in her and she is thus able to keep on concentrating on her work. Being in love with Marcus makes her feel like an ordinary woman with ordinary feelings. Marcus is her alibi friend and a disguise for her ambitions:

“Marcus was not quite of this world, not quite real, and Jacqueline, as she began to understand the extent of her own ambitions, began to suspect that she had chosen him for this reason” (WW, 24).

However, after having slept with her boss Lyon Bowman, Jacqueline’s body awakens and takes over her mind. The sexual act itself was not that great as to be a revelation but it was more or less Bowman’s behaviour towards her and his belittling her as a “good girl”⁹¹ (WW, 167) that caused Jacquie to eventually open her eyes to the passions of her body and ask herself, like Frederica does, “What do women want”? And as Frederica asserts “[t]he body wants to be pregnant” (WW, 148), Jacqueline comes to a similar conclusion. For too long a time, she thinks, she has neglected her female body and only fed her mind. She is indeed not a girl anymore, but “a woman who was heading beyond the natural age for easy child-bearing” (WW, 168). Her body hence develops a life of its own and is not relegated by her mind any longer. Instead of following her intellect and some “abstract idea” (WW, 170), she wants to live and break free from the needs of her mind which she now thinks have restricted her: “Luk, I must be mad, I should have listened to you, I don’t know how I got myself so cocooned in myself, I want to be able to do the things – people do – I want to live, not just think” (WW, 169). Knowing that Luk loves her, she turns to him for help, love, sex, a relationship – although she does not share his feelings. As Frederica had tried in her marriage, Jacqueline, too, makes a desperate attempt to “only connect”. Luk turns out to be the wrong partner for her as in their relationship Jacquie’s body-mind-balance is out of sync which is symbolized by her miscarriage. Marrying Luk and having his children would just be the wrong thing for her as she has to confess: “I don’t want to get married. I can’t. I want to want to get married, but I don’t. It was all a mistake” (WW, 185).

Jacqueline is successful in her scientific work and tries to be content in leading a life of the mind alone. Yet, she still has a nagging feeling that a life of the mind cannot be all there is for her. As a woman, her scientific achievements are not valued as much as those of her male colleagues. In the eyes of society she is regarded suspiciously because she does not

91 Jacqueline is not being taken serious by Bowman when he tries to sooth her by calling her a “good girl” and thus belittling her. Frederica has had a similar experience with Nigel who also turned her into a “good girl” and thus made her feel “[a]s though she was a horse, or a laboring sheep” (SL, 353).

conform to gender roles and stereotypes. Giving in to the desire of her body was her attempt to eventually feel “human” (WW, 255) and feel accepted. Because her relationship with Luk failed, she feels like a failure as well when it comes to satisfying her needs as a woman. She cannot think in laminations like Frederica and hence needs to find another way to a balance of body and mind. Jacqueline and Frederica have indeed more in common than they think because both are trying to combine intellectual and biological identity. If only they could have been trusting enough to open up to each other they might have shared their fears and anger: “How hard do you find it, being an obsessed intellectual, and a woman, too, does your own biology bother you?” (WW, 253) Jacqueline’s decision to prefer mind over body has also physically changed her: she has developed from a pretty girl into an attractive woman. The unhappy relationship with Luk and her miscarriage forced her to step out of her comfort zone, to eventually shed her skin, reveal her true self and step up for it. Obviously, her experiences have hurt her and made her harder, but they have also done her good: “She had been a glossy nut-brown girl, and had become a sharp woman who looked somehow emptied out. She had become thin, her mouth was tighter, her bones more pronounced. It suited her. The removal of her comfortable persona made her real intelligence visible” (WW, 245). Her unexpected relationship with Daniel, in whom she finds a confidant, helps her to achieve and settle her personal body-mind-balance. And, as A Whistling Woman comes to an optimistic end, Jacqueline and Frederica are eventually “part of a new world of free women, women who had incomes, work they had chosen, a life of the mind, sex as they pleased”

(WW, 415).

It is in these women – in Frederica, Agatha, Jacqueline, and Stephanie – that Byatt not only explores specific female experiences and female sexuality, but also ponders the question if there is or has to be a separation between the female body and mind. In an essay for The Guardian, Byatt reflects on the body-mind-problem especially intellectual women have been confronted with throughout the centuries. She states that she has already been pondering “the modern female desire to be undissociated” since the 1950s because, in her own experiences, “the body required sex and childbearing” which was then followed “quite likely [by] the death of the mind” (Byatt 2004). A.S. Byatt hence applies the separation and interplay of body and mind to her own life as well. In my introduction to the author I have pointed out that already as a young woman and writer she tried to allocate the passions of her body and those of her mind to two distinct planes. In an interview from 2009 Byatt

admits that she still is a split persona in the sense that she separates her mind from her body and can thus function as a loving wife, mother, and grandmother and at the same time be a writer, a creator of things: “I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It’s the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes these things. [...] who I am, is the person that has the project of making a thing. Well, that’s putting it pompously – but constructing. I do see it in sort of three-dimensional structures. And because that person does that all the time, that person is able to love all these people” (Leith). Frederica is the embodiment of Byatt’s love of literature and for her, too, literature is indeed the glue which connects her biological and intellectual identity: “When Frederica had finished writing these reports she feels a kind of complicated glee. It has many components: she has enjoyed the act of writing, of watching language run black out of the end of her pen: this has in turn made her feel that she is herself again, and has made her body real to her, because her mind is alive” (BT, 155).

Byatt here clearly voices how important it is for her to use her mind just as it is necessary for Frederica to be more than only a mother and wife which she reminds her husband of during a fight:

You knew what I was when you married me – you knew I was clever and independent and – and ambitious – you seemed to like that – God knows I had nothing else someone like you might be interested in, no money, no connections. I’m not beautiful – all I was was bright and you can’t marry someone for their brains and their – resourcefulness – and then expect them to behave like – [...] Like that sort of girl you might have expected to marry – but didn’t – one who has always gone hunting and shooting and likes just being in the country. (BT, 37)

Her greed for knowledge and thinking makes it impossible for her to remain restricted and reduced in her marriage with Nigel. Marrying him, she comes to see, has been a decision made by bodily desires and as her sexual greed was fed her mind was starved. Byatt suggests that body and mind should ideally be in a balance. That this combination of body and mind has for quite a long time not been encouraged by society becomes obvious in the divorce trial Frederica has to go through. She is in fact judged for her active mind, for her intelligence and her striving for a career. The court emphasizes that Frederica has neglected her female body and duties by failing to be a devoted wife and mother and thus disregarding conventions which still tried to push her into the role of the Victorian angel-in-the-house.

Being an avid reader and greedy for knowledge is regarded as some kind of perversion or

deformity and thus Frederica’s whole being and identity are questioned, put onto trial and eventually crushed. As the court stresses her bodily failures and disregards her mind, Frederica feels weightless at court. She is too thin and has no bodily presence in the patriarchal world of justice: “When the judge begins to speak, Frederica thinks again, ‘I am too thin’. She has not enough weight. She is nothing. The things she knows she cannot say and the things she says are not descriptions of what she thinks was and is what happened or is happening. He has not heard her. He will find against her” (BT, 517). Frederica feels like she is voiceless and once more restricted in her vocabulary as she does not speak the language of the male court. The struggle of body versus mind thus becomes a struggle of female versus male: body representing the female counterpart and mind referring to the male one. Yet, the walls dividing these two spheres crumble down as Byatt suggests in Babel Tower and carries out in A Whistling Woman.

Both novels are set in the ‘Swinging Sixties’, a time of change and upheaval, and a time when gender roles were questioned and started to develop into new directions. The introduction of the Pill promised new freedom for women who were now able to explore and live their sexuality as it diminished the fear of unwanted pregnancies. As Frederica’s divorce trial proves, society was nevertheless not quite ready for this change and the judges consequently despise her apparent promiscuity. Sexuality, especially female sexuality and homosexuality, was still something that was dubious and potentially dangerous. This is pointed out by the obscenity trial concerning Babbletower which is modelled after the real historical trials on Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Even Frederica herself cannot quite comprehend her age’s new approach towards sex as she is not sure how she feels about her one-night-stand with Desmond Bull. Although she planned the loss of her virginity in a rather un-romantic way and chose a man she was not in love with to ‘do’ it (thus putting mind over body) and slept with quite a few men in Cambridge to teach herself more about her body and its desires (again emphasizing mind over body), she is confused by the sudden sexual freedom the pill allows her. In a way, she feels, society, or men, now expect women to be willing sex partners. In her essay “Other Women” (2011) Francine Prose voices a similar opinion when describing the female attitude towards sex in the early 1970s: “And however misused, the word liberation was very much in the air, often to mean having sex with someone because it was more trouble to say no”

(Prose, 170). The views concerning sex at this time of the 20^th century were not only

ambiguous but hypocritical. A freer sexual culture seems indeed utopian. Byatt thus points out that the Pill was on the one hand an instrument of emancipation and liberated women, but, on the other hand, it also restricted them once again. Jane Campbell also comes to this conclusion when explaining that “[n]owhere is the danger of reductiveness more threatening than in the lives of women in the Swinging Sixties, when the availability of the pill and the expectation of sexual liberation for women could mean the restriction rather than the enlargement of their freedom to make choices” (Campbell 2004, 253). Byatt addresses these problematic issues in Jacqueline’s encounter with her boss who not only expects her to have sex with him but who assumes she must be on the Pill, too: “ ‘I suppose you are on the Pill. They all are, these days.’ ‘No,’ she managed to say, ‘I’m not.’” (WW, 166)

But not only is Jacqueline’s body exploited, it is also her mind her boss makes use of when appropriating her work as his own which makes Jacquie feel like a worthless thing, a

“see-through implement” (WW, 361). The topic of ‘free women’ is therefore a central concern of Byatt which arises in Babel Tower and is more pressingly discussed in A Whistling Woman. The author as well as her protagonists look at this through the looking-glass, as the title of Frederica’s TV show suggests. How can and do women express and experience their freedom? And how is this freedom limited? After her divorce Frederica is free of Nigel and his restrictions, she eventually also frees herself from the unhealthy relationship with John Ottokar, she is free to choose a new lover, free to have a baby without necessarily getting married and free to take the jobs she wants. At the end of A Whistling Woman it seems that Frederica has been able to achieve a harmony between body and mind and fulfil both their desires and passions. However, Byatt is careful to hint that not all that glistens is gold. It is above all Frederica’s TV show which proves that women are not yet free and still conform to gender roles. While Frederica is the host of the show, she feels like a child with her first guests and stages a kaffee-klatsch in her second show. Although she is aware of the parodic aspect of this, her and her guests being dressed and made-up like “girl-women” (WW, 146) denies them to be taken seriously as grown-up and free women. This impression is further strengthened by their discussion of George Eliot and the conflict of body and mind in her work. The works of Eliot generally feature strong heroines who want to be “free, and creative, and sexy” (WW, 144) but who also fail in achieving these goals as Eliot’s characters are somehow defeated by life. One can even compare Frederica with George Eliot’s Dorothea, the heroine of Middlemarch, since both strive “to break free from the social,

historical, and cultural identities” (de Groot, 37) offered and demanded from them. Women

historical, and cultural identities” (de Groot, 37) offered and demanded from them. Women