The Feminist Aspect of The Peppered Moth

An important feminist aspect of this novel is obviously Drabble’s interest in private female history which she brings to light. “Bessie was determined to occupy the centre of the story”

(PM, 19) so that the main protagonists of The Peppered Moth are women. Men are therefore indeed reduced to bystanders. By denying men a voice in this story, the author ironically attacks and subverts traditional, patriarchal biographical and historical writing as the narrator aptly summarizes: “Christine Flora Barron is of more interest to us and to geneticist Dr Hawthorne than her brother Robert, for she is in the direct matrilineal line of descent.

Robert is consigned (or will consign himself) to a minor role: almost to a non-speaking part”

(PM, 131). Furthermore, it is explained that “[h]er son Robert was not much use to her, socially: he had turned into a reclusive academic, a historian rather than a lawyer […].

Mothers are expected to favour their sons, but Robert had not allowed her to favour him”

(PM, 256). Instead, leaving out fathers and sons and happy, fulfilling love stories (except for Faro falling in love and starting a relationship towards the end of the novel), Margaret Drabble here deals mainly with mother-daughter-relationships and thus takes up an essential theme in feminist writing. The author hence turns away from the centrality of the paternal and towards the maternal instead. The figures of father, husband, or son diminish and are replaced by matrilineal family figures. Often a distinct grandmother-mother-daughter-triad is formed which allows to tell the stories and histories of several generations.

Yi-Lin Yu therefore proposes that Drabble’s The Peppered Moth is an example of this “new feminist family romance” which “builds a female-dominated world founded on women’s mothering activities and experiences” (Yu, 66).

But Drabble also points to a rejection of traditional gender roles and attacks male assumptions, for instance by creating an ill-natured mother figure (Bessie) that shows no deep love for either her husband or her children or her life as a housewife. When it comes to form or literary classification, The Peppered Moth is indeed a piece of unorthodox writing and I would therefore agree with Ina Schabert who emphasizes: “Frauen erkämpfen sich durch Umformungen der männlichen Literatur, die ihnen eigentlich Objektfunktionen zuweist, eigene Sprechpostitionen. Sie erzählen ihre andere Geschichte, indem sie die von männlichen Autoren entwickelten Erzählmuster durch Verstöße gegen die vorgegebene narrative Grammatik überfremden“ (Schabert 1997, 13). Drabble uses (fictional) biography to point to and rediscover female experiences by placing women at the centre of history.

Michael Holroyd explains that this focus on female experiences became part of biographical writing with Samuel Johnson who turned away from Ecclesiasticus’ doctrine to dedicate biography to “famous men” and instead advised biographers to “lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and to display the minute details of daily life – more […] in the feminine than the masculine tradition” (Holroyd, 22). The same is true for historiography and historical fiction which in due course turned its attention from an interest in great men to a more private and as such female side of history. Exploring Bessie’s childhood, adolescence and adult life, and diving into Chrissie Barron’s and Faro Gaulden’s biographies, Drabble not

only narrates a personal, a family story but roots it in the context to contemporary history and zeitgeist. Following the lives and stories of these women is therefore female history and also shows the development of feminism from the beginnings with Bessie to its culmination in Faro.

From an early age on Bessie Bawtry has striven to enter the male world of education and knowledge, thus breaking free from the roles her sex imposed on her. Already as a little girl she made it clear that she was not one for knitting or sewing – considered to be activities appropriate and necessary for girls and women – but that she wanted instead to broaden her horizon: “[…] Bessie had been a failure as a knitter of socks and a turner of seams, but had mastered the names of the Books of the Bible and the Rivers of Europe, and was good at reciting by role” (PM, 20). She was keen on using her intelligence and feed her hunger for knowledge:

She had, by the age of ten, exhausted the limited supply of reading matter in the Morley Girls Library, and had read over and over again the small collection of books in Slotton Road [...]. Bessie, at the age of eleven, felt herself ready for stronger fare. And at Breaseborough Secondary School, before she fell ill of the influenza, she was beginning to find it. She had been introduced to English Language and Literature, Reading and Recitation, History, Geography, French, Arithmetic, Algebra, Science, Scripture, Art, Needlework and Nature Study.

Riches of learning spread themselves before her. […] Bessie was entranced by this brave new world of adult study. (PM, 20ff.)

Drabble emphasizes the power and importance of knowledge and education for identity formation and female selfhood. At the time when Bessie grew up, this notion was revolutionary when one keeps in mind that the general (male) opinion was still that “the health of the female is not suited to higher education” (PM, 77). Therefore it does not come as a surprise that for some women “it was often safer to seem stupid” (PM, 82) and hide their intelligence. Bessie nevertheless does not care but aims to adopt her teacher’s, Miss Heald’s, credo who urged her pupils to believe in themselves and their ability to reach higher goals: “They must move on, they must gain a better world, they must never slip through the cracks into the slough, the pit, the trenches. They must march into glory” (PM, 35). Miss Heald, born in the late 19^th century, seems to be Drabble’s well chosen counterpart to her mother. In an alternative (his)story, this is how Bessie Bawtry would ideally have turned out to be. Since history took away her love – “The Great War and the Spanish influenza had murdered the lovers of Miss Heald and her generation”(PM, 34) – the teacher is now intent

on changing and opening the world (of education) for young girls. She is the perfect and contented example for independence and success who has created a rather solely female world in which men are left outside:

She was happy single. She had a good job, and a position of power and influence. She had worked hard and travelled far to acquire superior qualifications, certificates and diplomas, and was in receipt of a more than adequate income. […] What would she want with a man? If she married, she would have to give up her job. […] She was independent. […] She was modern, and she favoured the masculine, because she was a feminist. […] On the whole, Miss Heald tended to shy away from the romantic and ladylike, and to go for the strong. (PM, 35-37)

First, Bessie follows that lead and ventures into her “paradise” (PM, 77), Cambridge. Drabble contrasts Bessie Bawtry’s triumphal entrance into the male dominated world of education with the destiny of her friend and future husband Joe Barron whose family does not support his plans to go to university and instead pushes him into family business and the career of a travelling salesman: “No such halfway fate is in store or indeed on offer for Bessie. Nor will she be claimed, as will many of her female classmates, by a future of ‘Home Duties’. For her, it is college or death” (PM, 73). Ironically, Bessie fails to grasp the chance given to her and fails to find the way into a bright future and her last resort is marriage, after all. Pioneering bravely into college and being a representative of her sex is Bessie’s contribution to the feminist cause whereas becoming actively engaged has not been on her list:

She thought of Women’s Suffrage, and almost attended a rally in Barnsley in favour of its extension to all women over twenty-one. (Married women and property-owning women over thirty had won the vote in 1918, when Bessie was still a child.) Bessie was to call herself a feminist for the rest of her life […].

She was to read, on publication, Shaw’s The Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism, the first of the Penguin Pelicans, and always claimed that it had affected her profoundly. (PM, 123/124)

And rather grimly, the narrator adds: “There had not been much evidence of feminism in her decision to marry Joe Barron. Perhaps she was biding her time and waiting for the right moment to express herself fully as feminist” (PM, 163).

Bessie’s daughter Chrissie rejects her mother and in fact, her biggest fear is for a long time to turn into her mother (PM, 186/187). And so she rebels, does everything to set herself apart:

There was a perverse, wicked, rebellious streak in Chrissie, which was to lead her to a kind of liberation. She was a shrewd little thing, and she had seen

what was happening. What good did it do you, to work so hard, to pass your exams, to go to university like a good girl? You ended up miserable, cooped up, trapped, just the same. With all your education, you ended up washing dishes, baking tarts, moaning on about the mangle […]. You might as well have some fun now, as you were going to pay later anyway. And there was fun to be had, in Holderfield, in the 1950s, when Chrissie was a girl. (PM, 173/174)

Chrissie grew up more like a boy, passionate, bold, and reckless (PM, 174), and not like a proper girl of the 1950s, a time when “[m]any of the contradictions of the nineteenth century were still in place” (PM, 187).⁵⁶ Getting older, Chrissie however discovers her sexuality and fully embraces and lives her femininity. Ironically though, Chrissie chooses not a college degree, education and eventually a career as her last possibility to flee her mother and escape into a life of her own but she decides to marry Nick Gaulden and have a child:

“Chrissie felt, during this wild heyday, that she had truly escaped Bessie at last. She had burned her boats. Goodbye, Mother. For how could Nick and Bessie possibly get on?” (PM, 255) But Chrissie failed in cutting the cord completely and finally, with her divorce, her mother came back into her life.

Feminism now seems to culminate in modern day Faro who grows up and lives at a time when all roads are seemingly open for women: “Faro is a feminist, as women of her class and education are these days. She is not a sentimental feminist, and does not hold the view that all women are good, all men are bad, all mothers good, all fathers bad […]” (PM, 160). The Peppered Moth also deals with heredity and “mitochondrial DNA and the recovery of genetic information” (PC, 299). This scientific dimension of the novel goes hand in hand with a feminist thought since the author addresses “the subject of mitochondrial DNA and matrilineal descent” (PM, 2), pointing to the importance of the female line in genealogy and stating that “[t]he womanly traits live on” (PC, 299). Drabble thus rather wittily combines two areas of research which are often distinctively set apart – feminism and science. This aspect is embodied by one of the novel’s characters: Faro Gaulden whose field is “the History of Science” (PM, 145) and who now works as a writer “for a scientific magazine called Prometheus, once a weekly periodical of distinction, but recently transformed, she

56 Niamh Baker compares the perception of women of the 1950s with the one of women from the Victorian era and states: “The period immediately following the Second World War, especially the decade of the 1950’s, produced an image of Woman [sic] almost as enduring […] as that powerful image of the Victorian lady palely reclining on her couch, smelling-salts held delicately to her nostrils. The postwar British woman was more robust than her Victorian grandmother, but she was still the Angel in the house” (Baker). Chrissie Barron surely consciously contradicts that neo-Victorian female ideal.

had to own, into a popular rag” (ibid.). Faro even has her own “Women’s Section called, with a marked lack of originality, Pandora’s Box” (ibd.). Thus, Faro is an example for an emancipated woman striving to find a room of her own in a field traditionally considered a male domain. This becomes evident in the topics she considers suitable for her section, such as “[w]omen and transport, women and motoring, women and lead-free patrol, women and waste” (PM, 143). And yet, as feminist and as strong Faro is, she still feels “tied to the table leg” (PM, 142) and restricted by a man who claims rights in her (PM, 141/142). But Faro wants to free herself from such constraints; after all she is, as she assures herself, “a free woman” (PM, 142).

Faro is, like her mother and grandmother have been before her, on the quest to become a free woman. She seeks self-definition and a place in history. In the following paragraph I will deal with her search for a female identity as well as with Bessie’s and Chrissie’s efforts. This personal quest is naturally another feminist aspect of The Peppered Moth. In Faro, Drabble combines two of the motifs she frequently copes with in her novels – the need to escape and the journey home.