Moon Tiger as Historical Bildungsroman

As has been suggested in the last chapter, Moon Tiger is frequently concerned with the interrogation of gender issues such as women and marriage, motherhood, the possibilities of a successful career for women as well as with the female participation in political and historical events. These topics feature prominently in the female Bildungsroman which

traditionally concentrates upon a heroine who is on a journey towards self-discovery.

Considering these main concerns of the female Bildungsroman it becomes obvious that identity, especially a female one, “is shaped by an amalgam of contexts that range from the personal through to the social, historical, and ideological” (Wojcik-Andrews, 9).

Ian Wojcik-Andrews even stresses that the female Bildungsroman differs from its male equivalent by a foregrounding of community rather than individuality, implying that friendships and relationships are more important to women than to men. What Wojcik-Andrews calls a “sense of connectedness” (Wojcik-Wojcik-Andrews, 14) is described by Marion Gymnich as a “sense of self-in-relationship”³² (Gymnich 2005, 278) which separates female from male identity. Gymnich explains this “sense of self-in-relationship“ by stating that “[b]ei Frauenfiguren in feministischer Literatur wird oft die zentrale Bedeutung von Beziehungen (zu Partnern, Kindern, Freunden oder Eltern) für weibliche Identitätsentwicklung dargestellt”

(Gymnich 2005, 278). Claudia Hampton also observes and acknowledges this importance of relationships concerning the formation of a personal identity. She knows that her story is forever connected with the histories of those others (her mother, her brother, her lovers, and her child) that have influenced her life. However, Claudia is also aware that in order to achieve her individual identity she has, at least partly, to overcome this sense of in-relationship which might not only enrich her identity but might also restrict her self-discovery and independence. She furthermore tries to avoid being defined by the stereotypical assumptions and standards regarding women of her time and society because she senses how restricting they can be when it comes to the definition of her self. It is not enough for Claudia to be just a mother or a historian or a writer or a lover. Instead she strives to be a “myriad Claudias” (MT, 2), a multitude of Claudias. Just as she has certain pictures of herself in her mind, other people do as well: Lisa’s Claudia is not Laszlo’s, nor is Jasper’s view on Claudia the same as Tom’s. There is no definite Claudia, but her identity is fractured. Furthermore, her many identities help her to escape those fixed identities a patriarchal society has created to entrap women.

Indeed, the question Claudia has to ask herself while on her quest for identity is whether there can ever be a whole person, a unified identity, in a world thus fragmented. At the end of her life she can finally answer this question. She is a whole person simply because her identity is so fragmented: “All I can think, when I hear your voice, is that the past is true,

32 Nancy Chodorow has introduced and explained this term in her The Reproduction of Mothering:

Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978).

which both appals and uplifts me. I need it; I need you, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, all of them. And I can only explain this need by extravagance: my history and the world’s. Because unless I am part of everything I am nothing” (MT, 207).

This decentring of an identity is emphasized by the way Claudia retells history – a history that consists of many voices, views and opinions. Neither history nor a woman’s journey to self-definition (her personal history) can be told in a linear or chronological way.

Therefore, old Claudia Hampton, who is now forced to a hospital bed by a fatal cancerous disease, vividly recalls the events of her life in a “series of memories and flashbacks” (Moran 1993, 112) and thus gives the reader of Moon Tiger a recollection of her personal development and her quest for identity in unruly times. Memory thus proves to be of central importance to human identity: personal memories only allow the construction of an individual identity.

Claudia’s history of the world starts at the end of her life when her journey is presumably over. Thus, the convention of the male Bildungsroman which usually begins with the childhood of the hero, continuing with a description of the youth’s journey to adulthood, is contradicted. The typical male Bildungsroman includes the journey of the young hero who goes out into the world to eventually find a place of his own and to discover himself as he discovers the world. Claudia’s Bildung has included in fact many a journey, which has not always been easy for a woman at the time she grew up when society did not expect her to spread her wings and see the world. Claudia has nevertheless had her will. Ironically, she now has to tell the story of her education and development restricted to a hospital bed; her journeys are only happening in her mind, in her head. Comparable to women of the centuries before her, Claudia is bound to one place and it is only her mind that is free to go out into the world. In a way, she is thus once again restricted to the female and private sphere of life. Moon Tiger thus seems to play with the conventions of the male as well as the female Bildungsroman.

It is said that people close to death once more re-live their past, their history, and so does Claudia. As special memories come to her mind she begins to connect these flashbacks of her private history with her memories of public history. One word is often enough to trigger a chain of memories and emotions since “all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at the flick of a key” (MT, 2), and suddenly the old lady finds herself taken back in time, experiencing what had happened back then. When Sylvia visits her sister-in-law in the

hospital she brings with her a bright poinsettia as a gift for Claudia. Looking at the flower Claudia travels back in time and reminisces her time in Egypt where “trails of brilliant blue morning glory and a lace-work of scarlett poinsettia flowers” cover ruined houses “with swarming growth” (MT, 100). Those flashbacks create “an impression of the immediacy and vividness of the events recalled” (Moran 1993, 119) and perfectly convey a certain sense of the ever-persisting presence of the past and that “nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved” (MT, 68). Consequently, Claudia Hampton resolves that her history of the world cannot be told in a chronological manner since her memories do not come to her in an ordered or linear way. Instead, she has to jump from one period in her life to another thus leaving gaps in time she later on comes back to fill with information.

Furthermore, childhood memories displayed in the female Bildungsroman “rest deep within the novel, covered by layers of adolescent and adult experiences that must be uncovered before the strange power of those childhood memories can be released” (Wojcik-Andrews, 127). Since this uncovering demands the decline of the use of a fairly straight line to tell the story, the female Bildungsroman, in this case Moon Tiger, cannot follow the typical narrative structure of its male counterpart. Instead, it tends to start in media res, which is, as Wojcik-Andrews notes, “one of the many ways in which contemporary women’s fiction revises classical epics” (Wojcik-Andrews, 27). The narrative structure thus proves to be a feminist attack on patriarchal assumptions. Penelope Lively herself must have considered the problems and questionability of telling history chronologically when writing Oleander, Jacaranda, her first autobiography. Recalling, collecting, and analysing her childhood memories she considers that “[o]ne of the problems with this assemblage of slides in the head is that they cannot be sorted chronologically. All habits are geared towards the linear, the sequential, but memory refuses such orderliness” (OJ, 36/37).

Female development generally seems to deny a linear orderliness so that Marianne Hirsch even describes it as “fragmented and discontinuous” (Hirsch, 44). This discontinuity and fragmentation is also clearly mirrored in Claudia’s chosen narrative pattern. A female Bildungsroman can hardly be told in a chronological way and Claudia resolves that she has to write her history in a non-chronological, a kaleidoscopic way because “[c]hronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. [...] The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once” (MT, 2). She stresses that history, “that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head,

everything happens at once” (MT, 68). Presenting her history of the world in that non-linear manner also mirrors the course of history which is never smooth as well. Indeed, it emphazises that history is “disorder [...], death and muddle and waste” (MT, 152) and not as tidy and linear as presented in conventional history books that reduce it to names and dates.

“History conventionally has been a linear story, has manifested a drive for closure and control – it has meant getting the story and the facts straight” (Raschke, 124). But Claudia Hampton has overthrown these, in her opinion, outdated and restricting conventions. She, on the contrary, underlines that history, just like memory, has no fixed form and no logic.

Thus, Claudia adds to history writing her very own “concept of time” which is “personal and semantic” (MT, 3) and allows her to tell how it really was.

The historical novel serves as a medium to preserve cultural memory as well as collective identity, but Moon Tiger as a postmodern historical novel has shifted the emphasis from the collective to the individual, thus decentring the common public history into private fragments. In Moon Tiger, her autobiography, Claudia’s private history collides with public history, and one has to be aware that public history is indeed subordinated to the personal one. Claudia Hampton’s approach towards history has therefore to be regarded as being to a certain degree narcissistic. She regards herself not only as a part but even as a vital component of world history. By linking her identity with history she struggles to avoid meaninglessness.

Claudia even assumes that the world history is indeed hidden in every human being since we carry not only our own history with us but also that of the universe, the world, our nation and of our ancestors. This collision of public and private history is in her opinion recorded in the human body which serves as an important record of evolution and progress:

My body records certain events; an autopsy would show that I have had a child, broken some ribs, lost my appendix. [...] My body records also a more impersonal history; it remembers Java Man and Australopithecus and the first mammals and strange creatures that flapped and crawled and swam. Its ancestries account, perhaps, for my passion for climbing trees when I was ten and my predilection for floating in warm seas. It has memories I share but cannot apprehend. (MT, 166/167)

With every new birth a new history is added to the whole and the history of the world

“[f]rom the mud to the stars” (MT, 3) is re-born again. We all share a collective past and are therefore “conditioned by and embodying all that has come before” (Moran 1993, 121) us.

Nobody can or should detach him- or herself from the past or even deny it since the history of our forefathers is also our own:

Claudia shrugs. ‘You can’t dismiss ancestry.’

‘I am what I make myself,’ says Jasper [...].

‘Plus,’ she says, ‘what you have been endowed with. Sasha has endowed you with a rather dramatic past. [...]’

‘It has nothing to do with me,’ says Jasper. ‘And you’re being portentous.’

‘I do not see,’ says Claudia, [...] ‘how you can be so majestically egotistical as to place yourself in total detachment from your antecedents just because you find your father inadequate’. (MT, 63/64)

In Claudia’s daughter Lisa, for instance, public Russian history lives on as well – although she is totally indifferent to that or might not even know about it: “Somewhere within and behind this quintessentially middle-class middle-England figure in her Jaeger suit and floppy-bowed silk shirt and her neat polished shoes lies the most tormented people in the history of the world” (MT, 61).

This awareness and knowledge of history enlarges Claudia and helps her to find her own place in the whole of history. It seems very important for her to make clear that the past is indeed never really over but rather continues to be alive in us. Tom’s diary is another example how the past can be kept alive: even though Tom is long gone he will survive, brought back to life whenever his words are read. The past is always present if only somebody remembers it. Then it can broaden our mind and enrich our personal history which seems to be the reason for Claudia Hampton to write her biographical works on historical characters and her numerous articles on historical events. They help to increase her awareness of the liveliness of history and to notice its presence in herself and her life:

“And what, you may ask, does that moment in history have to do with me, Claudia, except that I wrote a book about it? [...] Like everything else: it enlarges me, it frees me from the prison of my experience; it also resounds within that experience” (MT, 158/159).

Personal history intertwines with public history in that every single individual is endowed with a similar past, not only with that of one’s forefathers or one’s nation but also with something everybody shares: the history of the human race, the collective past. Private history is not at all only passively but also actively affected by the public one as Claudia states: “I’ve grown old with the century; there’s not much left of either of us. The century of war. All history, of course, is the history of wars, but this hundred years has excelled itself.

How many million shot, maimed, burned, frozen, starved, drowned?” (MT, 66) Her own first

personal contact with history was the death of her father in World War I. History

“summoned Father and took him away for ever” (MT, 66), “history killed Father” (MT, 6), a fact that clearly influences her for the rest of her life. Growing up with a father might have led to a different development concerning her education, her relationship with her brother, her behaviour towards men in general, and towards her daughter Lisa. Therefore, the death of her father is the first example in her life of how powerful history can be and how easily it can influence and change one’s life.

In fact, it seems as if almost all people important to Claudia and influential in her life are introduced to her by history. She meets her one true love, Tom, in Egypt while World War II shakes the world. And, only a few years later, she gets to know Jasper, the father of her daughter Lisa, while working on her book on Tito. Ten years later, Claudia’s life becomes again “entangled with historical events” (Moran 1993, 113): in 1956 she publishes an article on the revolt in Hungary which is read by a Hungarian whose son currently stays in England

“and, inferring rightly that Claudia is a sympathetic liberal, telephones from Budapest begging her to look up his son and warn him against returning home” (Moran 1993, 115).

Meeting Laszlo, the young Hungarian, again changes Claudia’s life and shows once more how public and private history interfere since it is most of all his life that is undeniably influenced and changed by public history: “You poor little sod, she thinks. You poor little wretch, you’re one of those for whom history really pulls out the stops. You are indeed someone who cannot call his life his own. Free will, right now, must have a hollow sound” (MT, 174).

Yet, Claudia’s own life is probably most shaken by history while witnessing World War II from first row in Egypt. Pushed not only by her interest in history but also by her will to always outdo her brother Gordon she applies for the job as a war correspondent in Egypt.

And there, “at the cutting edge of history” (Moran 1993, 113), she experiences not only one of the most intense events of public history but also “the most intensive period of her own personal history” (Moran 1993, 113). It is in the North African desert that she happens to meet Tom Southern, a young British tank commander stationed there, and for the first and last time in her life she falls in love. Their love affair represents the “core”, the “centre” (MT, 70) of her life and of her private history. The love affair also features prominently in the centre of the novel Moon Tiger, thus emphasizing at once its significance as well as its commonness: there was a life before Tom and there will be a life after Tom is gone.

However, it is again public history that not only unites but also separates the two lovers.

Tom, just like Claudia’s father, is “picked off by history” (MT, 7) and throughout the rest of her life she cannot forget this one true love. Tom’s loss has left a deep scar which represents Claudia’s “war wound” (MT, 71). The war she endured was certainly different than that experienced by men, but it nevertheless left its traces.

Although the Tom-Claudia episode forms the core of her life, the romance plot is not the most important element in the narrative. Lively departs from the traditional romance pattern that includes either a happy marriage or the tragic death of the heroine as a result of the loss of love and emphasizes instead Claudia’s will to survive. In the years after Tom’s death Claudia is able to lead a fulfilled life, to enjoy her interests and her career. This dismissal of the traditional romance pattern can indeed be regarded as another attack on patriarchal assumptions and conventions and thus as a feminist device. However, it is important to Penelope Lively to stress that she is not the kind of feminist writer who is concerned with feminist or women’s issues only. She does not want her writing to be judged by her gender and “[i]n fact, she takes issue with the view upheld by some feminists that gender is the ultimate divide” (Moran 1993, 6). Yet, with its fascinating and strong main character being a woman struggling with the powers of history, the novel invites a feminist reading.

Moon Tiger is what Ansgar Nünning calls a feminist instance of historiographic metafiction.

This implies that it deals with historiographic issues from a feminist point of view. In Moon Tiger the postmodern historical novel uniquely combines with the female Bildungsroman and autobiographical conventions. Despite its toying with ideas and assumptions concerning the writing of history and the curious mixture of fact and fiction, the novel also includes a central quest motif concerned with the search for a specific female identity. Claudia

This implies that it deals with historiographic issues from a feminist point of view. In Moon Tiger the postmodern historical novel uniquely combines with the female Bildungsroman and autobiographical conventions. Despite its toying with ideas and assumptions concerning the writing of history and the curious mixture of fact and fiction, the novel also includes a central quest motif concerned with the search for a specific female identity. Claudia