History and Her/Story in Moon Tiger

Mary H. Moran rightly points out that “the feminist subtext in this novel is far more subtle and complex than the mere portrayal of a feminist role model. Rather, it consists of an extensive subversive attack on established assumptions about reality, assumptions that radical feminists argue are male devised” (Moran 1993, 125).

Claudia Hampton, of course, is nevertheless a feminist role model. She is a strong, independent and brave woman who always fights to find and eventually go her own way at a time when women are traditionally restricted to the home and suffer the “mother-madonna-angel-in-the-house syndrome” (Raschke, 119), as Debrah Raschke nicely names it.

But Claudia soon begins to cast off those conventions and restrictions imposed on her by society and thought fitting for the female sex. She dismisses the traditional female role and the values and beliefs of patriarchal culture concerning femininity as well. She dares to be sexually liberated and enjoys various affairs without ever getting married:

Claudia, like her writing, is unorthodox. Adventurous, witty, and a bit arrogant, Claudia has innumerable affairs in various ports, a cryptic incestuous liaison with her brother, Gordon, a daughter whom she frequently ignores for her career, and a casual sexual relationship with the father of her child, whom she never marries. She lives unconventionally but fully, playfully disregarding the confines that usually mark women’s roles. (Raschke, 115)

As Rascke points out in this quotation, Claudia frequently ignores her daughter Lisa which shows that she rejects the stereotypical belief of society in the natural or biological purpose of women as mothers. Indeed, she seems even to deny the fact that she is a mother at all. As a child Lisa is consequently often shoved off to stay with her grandmother whenever Claudia wants to pursue her career. Although Claudia has decided to have a child on her own,

turning down Jasper’s marriage proposals, she nevertheless neglects her duties towards her daughter when the girl turns out to be utterly different from her mother’s idea of an ideal child. Claudia, it seems, has given birth to Lisa out of pure egotism, wanting to find her alter ego, a re-born Claudia, in the girl: “She was a disappointment to me. And I, presumably, to her. I looked for my alter ego, the querying rebellious maverick child I had been myself; Lisa looked for a reassuring clothes-shopping sherry-drinking figure like the mothers of her school friends. [...] She began to bore me. And I sensed her disapproval” (MT, 51/52).

To put it in a nutshell, Claudia rejects (stereo-)typical gender roles which could possibly restrict her. She therefore distances herself from roles defining or even reducing her as a mother or wife solely. Claudia rejects a prototypical or stereotypical female identity which patriarchal society considers not only suitable but desirable for women. Instead, she finds personal fulfilment in her job as a historian which helps her to define and reach an identity of her own, so that she can eventually gain control of the self.

Already as a child Claudia is remarkably intelligent, a quality that is not encouraged or promoted in a girl at the time she grows up because it is considered to be a rather masculine feature and not appropriate or necessary for women. As she has to find out, her intelligence surely enriches her life but makes it more complicated and uncomfortable as well. She dares to ask questions and to voice her opinion and thus causes resistance and rejection, even condemnation. Claudia rejects the idea of getting married and decides to leave home for college instead. Since she prefers career over family she studies history at Oxford and begins to publish articles which are in the years to come to be followed by several popular and rather successful historical works, including biographies. She thus manages to make her way into this formerly male dominated area of history and historiography and stands her ground there. In contrast to her mother and her sister-in-law, Sylvia, Claudia Hampton does not want to stay away or retire from history but rather be in the midst of it. By choosing a job as a war correspondent in Egypt she actively seeks involvement in history, wants to be a “front-liner” (MT, 21). As a war correspondent Claudia is one of only a few women in that predominantly male domain and thus once more rejects the typical, traditional female and passive role society requires from her. As a historian she knows what she wants to avoid:

being “lost in the forgetfulness that deprives women of their history” (Anderson, 129). She is aware that “the official story – the version that passes into history – is the one written by male writers” (Anderson, vii), but with Moon Tiger, which is indeed her history of the world,

she intends to overthrow these stereotypes and comes up with something revolutionary – a personalized version of public history as seen by a woman. Claudia has chosen the highly personal form of autobiography to replace the conventional, objective forms of history. And moreover, she has dared to title her very own autobiography “a history of the world”. Thus she opposes the traditionally male picture of history by becoming herself the main character of history, at a time when women’s place was usually “outside history” (Raschke, 117). This attempt of a woman to write herself into history can indeed be regarded as a “subversive attack on established assumptions” (Moran 1993, 125) of patriarchal society.

Female history used to be connected to the personal and the trivial area of life, thus standing “in a direct contrast to the more significant public history” (Raschke, 118). This public history has so far been dominated by men, as Seyla Benhabib rightly points out:

“Wenn das Subjekt der westlichen intellektuellen Tradition für gewöhnlich der weiße, wohlhabende, christliche, männliche Hausvorstand war, dann war die Geschichte der Menschheit, so wie sie bisher festgehalten und erzählt wurde, die Geschichte dieses Mannes: history in der Tat als his story“ (Benhabib, 233). By telling the individual history of a woman and by showing how tightly it can in fact be connected to public history, Claudia Hampton is courageous enough to escape this stereotype and help female history to finally occupy the place it deserves – as a part of public history. Hence she emphasises that women are indeed not an unimportant historical fringe group.

Claudia’s connection of public and private history which stresses the non-objectivity of history and historiography can also be regarded as a feminist attack on the male assumption that history should be objective. Her history of the world is instead composed of

“fact and fiction, myth and evidence” (MT, 1) and thus points to a potential fictionality in historiography her male fellow historians deny. Her integration of myth into history certainly disturbs many a historian since myth is strangely connected with the female gender and thus, of course, seen as something that does not belong to historiography. Myths, indeed, seem to belong to the realm of fantasy and hence to a space where women and their stories have often been relegated to as well.

It has already been stated that “Lively employs the memoir as her narrative device to represent the facts and emotions and horrors of war” (Dukes, 85/86). A memoir is often regarded a non-scientific piece of historiography in which truth and fiction undeniably mix, but despite this fact, this narrative form allows Lively to stress the characters’ direct

connection to history and allows to give an immediate and intimate insight into the impact a historical event can have on the individual. Historical events are therefore told by an experiencing first person narrator, a device which emphasises the subjectivity and the personal bias underlying seemingly objective historical occurrences.

The way Claudia tells her history can be regarded as a feminist challenge of male, patriarchal assumptions of narrative patterns. With her kaleidoscopic way of narrating history she rejects conventional discourse and thus creates a female counterpart to male historiography. Claudia does not use a chronological or linear way of telling history since she regards this mode as distinctively male. For her a linear notion of time (time’s arrow) has associations with the male and patriarchal and is as such inappropriate to the female experience. Thus Moon Tiger, a fictional autobiography, stands in line with the women’s tradition in autobiography. Already early autobiographies by women show that their creators have begun to deny the conventional narrative forms practiced by men, the linear and progressive, and instead have legitimized not only subjective but also “disjunctive or discontinuous narratives, often interrupting the chronological order with flashbacks, anecdotes, and character sketches” (Jelinek, 88). Claudia Hampton’s device to include many voices to tell the story has to be considered feminist as well because it points to the specifically female fragmentation of identity and the sense of self-in-relationship women experience when it comes to the formation of their identity. As I shall discuss in the following chapter on Moon Tiger, Claudia Hampton is aware of the rather typical attitude of women to define themselves through their relationships with others. In her essay on Lively’s Moon Tiger Debrah Raschke summarizes the novel’s feminist implications: “Moon Tiger thus not only provides a space for a woman in a discourse from which she has been previously excluded, but also confronts through its use of language and narrative frame the ideological structures that have made such an exclusion possible” (Raschke, 117).