21 because of its connotative suggestions which may mislead readers and because a feminist vision would not accurately describe what Drabble considers herself to have or what she envisions for us.Drabble's world is very social and painfully moral and in that sense she is concerned about the political issues of the times.But Margaret Drabble is not an ideologue;she is an artist.Margaret Drabble is not writing treatises,she is writing novels.Although certainly good writers do write out of particular politi- cal persuasions,Drabble simply is not one of these.She is writing novels,not to state,but to find.As the later novels cover more issues,problems and possibili- ties,Drabble's vision has become more metaphysical.She does look far beyond the surface to find the essence of existence.And she also more subtly uses story in order to do that the stories she creates as well as the liter- ature of the culture.She uses imagination to find,to create,and to articulate meaning. In that sense she is very Wordsworthian in her vision for her imagination is consistently focused on ordinary life and on the extraordinary value of nature in life. The ability to create story through imagination is also a strength that can be misused,and Drabble regularly cautions against careless or frivolous use of the imagina- tion.4 But Drabble's connection of the power of the
22 imagination to the female experience is one of the major aspects of her particular and personal vision. The power to birth,to nurture,to make whole those small pieces of life is the power of creating meaning and for her that power is centered in and best expressed through femaleness.I think as the canon develops we can see Drabble mythologizing the female experience in a positive way that is very different from the debilitating romanti- cization of women which in the past was perpetuated most often by male writers,but which we also find among some women writers of the 19th century.I use the word "mythology"here in the sense that Drabble's stories become more than life itself,rather they project life into realms that transcend time and place and become images of all times and of all places.At the same time, the novels remain firmly anchored in perceptible and recognizable social worlds.As I have tried to answer the question about Drabble's feminism,I have realized that she is not a feminist writer because her vision is primarily poetic,rather than political or social or even moral.So I choose to say she is a female writer,using the term "female"because the word does not carry political implications,which would be inaccurate in Drabble's case,but mainly because it is capable of containing the inclusiveness of Drabble's "creative
23 vision.Therefore,I do not call Drabble a female writer only because she is a woman,or only because she writes books which focus on women,although those things are part of the femaleness of her work.She is a female writer because her vision is centered in her female imagination which is holistic and life-affirming. Elaine Showalter's "Feminine.Feminist.and Female" Elaine Showalter in A LITERATURE OF THEIR OWN categorizes British women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries as Feminine,Feminist,and Female.Showalter places Drabble with the early traditional Feminine writers like Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot,writers she says imitated the male tradition and,although they wrote about the details of female lives in a social context,they also often were forced to submerge the full range of their female feelings which surfaced in interesting subconscious ways in their texts.The tension between the imitation of the male tradition and the suppressed authentic female experience creates part of the richness and the subtlety of the Feminine author's works.Yet,at least in its sur- face story,the Feminine tradition accepted the limita- tions for women.Showalter describes Feminist writers as those who openly and angrily protested the repression of women and demanded the right of expression at the same time often denying the importance of sexuality for men and
24 for women.These writers sometimes advocated matriarchal utopias which excluded men.The extreme form of Feminist is much the same as the sterotype of the modern radical feminist.Showalter defines Female writers as those contemporary artists who are attempting self-definition through self-discovery and who are also working toward a female aesthetic that reconciles the personal and the artistic life.Although she sees Drabble as a major writer among contemporary women artists,Showalter argues that at least through THE NEEDLE'S EYE,the last of Drabble's novels she examines,she is more like the early Feminine writers in several respects.One of these is the obvious influence of those writers on her work demonstrat- ed in the numerous allusions to the works of Austen,Eliot and the Brontes.Another similarity is that Drabble's protagonists aceept the limitations of being women and find compensation in having children.Showalter is one of those who sees Drabble as the "novelist of maternity" whose characters exhibit "feminine surrender"(305).She analyzes the self-sacrifice demonstrated by a character like Rose in THE NEEDLE'S EYE to be compatible with ideas of the Feminine novelists rather than reflective of the ideas of the exploratory Female novelists.And certainly Rose's kind of self-sacrifice would be antithetical to the early Feminist novelists who were attempting to espouse a
25 political position more than to create a literary vision. Rose's self-sacrifice also has met with unfavorable crit- icism from contemporary feminist critics.Since THE NEEDLE'S EYE,of course,Drabble's novels have created protagonists who do insist on centering on self as well as on self serving others.And even before THE NEEDLE'S EYE, in THE WATERFALL,Drabble creates a character who recon- ciles her maternal self with her sexual self,both of which help her to find artistic autonomy.Having the advantage of looking at Drabble's work after the ninth novel instead of after the sixth,we can see that Drabble has demonstrated that greater degree of freedom which Showalter tenatively predicted she would exhibit.Surely at this point Showalter would agree that Drabble's later works move her fully into Showalter's category of Female writers.Drabble and other women writers are exploring and discovering connections to the past tradition of female writers and at the same time articulating a more conscious vision of how the female experience is authen- tic,important and different from the experience of the dominant culture. Why "Female vitality?" For a number of reasons,however,I do not believe that calling Drabble a female writer is adequate to des- cribe the way in which she is legitimizing,even perhaps