The Quest for Identity in The Red Queen

As has been noted, The Red Queen is a novel which cross-breeds various narrative modes, forms, genres, and techniques thus being an example of the contemporary novel which cannot be easily classified anymore (comp. Gasiorek, 19). As much as Margaret Drabble plays with metafictionality, intertextuality, and different literary forms, she always seems to come back to the same topics so frequently found in her writings, one of them being motherhood. In most of Drabble’s novels motherhood is an influential aspect of female identity, or as Olga Kenyon stresses: “For her [Drabble] the great discovery of self comes through the complex reactions of being a mother” (Kenyon 1988, 88). It therefore does not come as a surprise that Barbara Halliwell’s life seems to crumble into pieces with the death of her son. Furthermore, she is deprived of her husband by a mental illness that requires institutionalization. She was once a mother and a wife, but both roles have been taken away from her. What remains is her scholarly life and her career, which seem to fulfill her and allot her a place in the world. Barbara is both an independent and capable woman in her forties.

65 In an interview Drabble describes how she accidentally came across the memoirs of the real Red Queen and how this woman’s life story haunted her: “I was invited to speak at a literary conference in Seoul, South Korea, in 2000, and so before I went I visited the British Museum to look at the Korean antiquities and to talk to one of the experts there. She happened to tell me about the memoirs, and I bought a copy through Amazon and was completely gripped by this extraordinary story. […] this recommendation had a very great impact on me and obsessed me for years of my life. I read everything I could find about the crown princess and her period, including other versions of her memoirs, and I found I could not get story out of my head”

(http://www.harcourtbooks.com/authorinterviews/bookinterview_Drabble.asp).

It is only when the Red Queen, or her ghost, enters Babs’ life that she begins to question who she is, where she stands and what she wants in life. With the ghost, that takes hold of her, comes confusion in Barbara’s life and she is put to test. Gerda Leeming further explains that Babs now has to pursue “meaning amid a confused mass of accidents” (Leeming, 112) and coincidences which are in fact part of the comic side of The Red Queen, subtitled A Transcultural Tragicomedy by its author.

The life-story of the Red Queen herself is the rather tragic counterpart. Restricted by her time and culture, she never had the chance to find an identity of her own. Instead it was somehow allocated to her. Being married as a child and removed from her family, she had to struggle to find her place in the royal palace where affairs and intrigue made life dangerous.

Her first son died as a baby, her husband, feeling suppressed and tortured by his father, became mentally ill and was eventually sentenced to death by his own father. The way he died, locked up in a rice-chest and damned to starvation, was gruesome. The Crown Princess, without allies, but also somewhat independent and brave, afterwards tried to find refuge and fulfillment in motherhood and later on in the role of grandmother.

It is again a journey which marks the first stage of Dr Barbara Halliwell’s quest for identity.

For Babs it is a journey into the unknown, whereas for the ghost of the Red Queen it is a journey home. Being possessed by the Crown Princess’s ghost, Babs follows her steps into the past and discovers its direct influence on the present. Her fascination with the past also brings back love and sex into her life and Babs Halliwell once again feels like a woman, a role she hasn’t assumed in a while hiding in her scholarly life and under a veil of grief. While in Korea Babs meets Jan van Jost, shares with him her attraction to the Red Queen and her life, and begins a passionate love affair with Jan, which ends with his unexpected death. Yet, this strange encounter is a revelation to Babs since Jan has told her about his and his wife’s wish to adopt a Chinese baby. He confides in Barbara that he has already, unbeknownst to his wife, spent some money to make the adoption possible. After his sudden death, Babs is the only one who knows about this baby and back in England she not only changes everything about her former life but eventually contacts Viveca van Jost to tell her about her late husband’s plans. Between these two different women a functional comradeship develops and together they are able to finally adopt the little Chinese girl, which eventually seems to balance the loss of Barbara’s and the Crown Princess’s infants. Above all of this lingers the

ghost of the Red Queen who not only finds a new envoy in the toddler but is in a sense reborn for she knows that this girl will carry her history on: “She is imperial in her demeanor, and queenly in her expectations. The Crown Princess observes her new heir with satisfaction. Her interests will be safe with her” (RQ, 343). Thus, through a mixture of coincidence, fate and luck, Babs once again finds fulfillment in motherhood. Her life seems to be complete and is hers alone once again. The Red Queen is appeased, too, for she knows that the female line will continue and her story will live on. The ark of memory will continue its journey.

Drabble’s novels clearly emphasize the influence of the past on the present.

Discovering history and accepting one’s roots is an essential step on the road towards the development of identity.

In the following chapter I will take a closer look at selected novels by A.S. Byatt. Since she is Margaret Drabble’s sister and a main representative of contemporary British literature, her work and her literary views have already made an entrance in this chapter on The Peppered Moth and The Red Queen. Byatt, too, holds the opinion “that we cannot understand the present if we do not understand the past that preceded and produced it” (HS, 11), thus pointing to an important aspect of her own novels. Memory and history, historiography and biography are also topics she frequently deals with. In 2001, A.S. Byatt even published a collection of essays in which she further examines these subjects and their relationship in literature. The gathering of these selected essays is aptly named On Histories and Stories, already pointing at the combination of fact and fiction in historical writing.