In defence of the domestic novel - Persephone lecture

To many readers, the domestic novel might appear to need no defence.
Earlier this year, however, two well-known young novelists, Ali Smith and Toby Litt, claimed that the submissions they received for an anthology of new writing were dull, depressed and domestic – as if, they said, “too many women writers had been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape and depressed as hell.” Predictably, a number of women novelists were contacted by newspapers to ask for their response, and all were very indignant. Some cited the names of woman writers whose chosen subjects were the opposite of domestic; others described how the domestic could be sexed-up by making it part of a genre such as the gothic or the detective story.

What is peculiar, though, is that none of them seemed to wish to defend the domestic as a subject which might be valid in its own right. I have been brooding about this ever since. There is no excuse for a novel being dull – yet few seemed to think the domestic novel, concerned as it is with marriage, children, friendship, gardening, cookery, housekeeping or home-making was a valid subject for fiction any longer. Critics in this country give praise and prizes to novels that seem to be exotic, foreign and concerned with the world of work or, if you believe the former literary editor of the New Statesman, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on our major cities. The domestic novel is the opposite of all these. It interests me very much when the media throws up, almost unconsciously, an elephant in the kitchen – that is, a huge subject which everyone busily pretends not to see. So often, these elephants seem to involve acknowledging something that women do, or perceive as having an intrinsic value. Virginia Woolf mocked this standpoint: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.”

Here is a conflict that goes to the heart of the novel. The earliest works of literature that we have all deal with war, and heroic deeds by heroic men; but the earliest English novels were not only epistolary, conjuring up a fictional world in which women’s letters were sent from one household to another, but were preoccupied with precisely these matters of love, marriage and property that made them by definition domestic. Few readers who have any grasp of English literature would despise a category that includes Richardson, Fielding, Austen, George Eliot, Trollope, Forster and Woolf herself. The joys and miseries of hearth and home are intimately bound up with the great novel. Yet in Britain, now, it is as if Odysseus had no Penelope to come home to, nothing worthwhile to yearn for and reclaim.

Women are no longer confined to living within the home, it is true. We can go to university, take jobs, travel the world, refuse to have children and earn far more than that £500 a year that Woolf envisaged as essential in A Room of One’s Own. The domestic novel may no longer seem relevant. And yet, where else do most of us live? Where do most of the dramas, traumas and triumphs of our private lives take place? The home, and the family, is where we lead a great deal of our lives, particularly if we are women, and have children.

“Happy families are all alike”, said Tolstoy, famously – and erroneously, for those with happy families know that their forms are as varied as the unhappy kind. Nor are all homes alike. You can walk down rows of seemingly identical houses in a British street, houses that seem as alike on the outside as a row of cut-out paper dolls and find quite astonishing variations within. It is this variety, as remarkable as that of those finches that Darwin spotted in the Galapagos Islands, which makes our neighbours interesting in fact or fiction. The way other people arrange the stuff of their private lives fascinates us – as proved by the millions who watch TV shows such as Wife Swap or Desperate Housewives.

Virginia Woolf imagined at the end of her great essay, A Room of One’s Own, asking an ordinary old woman what she remembered of her life, and said that apart from great national events, “she would remember nothing. “For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie” because, said Woolf, “those infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded.”

One of the best novels I’ve read this year – in a year of exceptionally strong contenders for the Booker Prize - is Dorothea Canfield Fisher’s The Home-Maker, which Persephone reprinted in 2004. It begins with a portrait of the excruciatingly unhappy Knapp family, the mother forced by conventional strictures into housework and child-care. Scrubbing furiously, bitterly oppressive to her three sensitive children, she and her husband are impoverished by his lowly status in a small-town department store. Mr. Knapp is equally wretched. A born reader he must toil away, bored and disliked until, in what seems pure tragedy, he gets sacked. The only way he can think of saving his family is by killing himself for his insurance money, but his attempt goes dreadfully wrong and ends with him being crippled and unable to walk.

This would be the end if it was, say, a play by Ibsen, and certainly the rage and desperation of the poor couple makes for a drama that resonates today. I myself, as the mother of children, have felt very like Mrs. Knapp from time to time, having “the moments in a mother’s life about which nobody ever warned you, about which everybody kept a deceitful silence”. Yet Mrs. Knapp’s release comes not just from the ability to pay another woman to do her chores for her. It comes when she is forced to go out and earn the family bread, discovering that her genius is for retailing, just as her paralysed husband finds that his gentle patience and imagination can save their children from the deathly grip of depression. It is a wonderful twist, the kind of turning-point that I think only a woman would have come up with, and despite a growing number of house-husbands, almost as radical now as then.

Persephone’s republished authors tackle all kinds of unfashionable subjects, from the loveless wedding of Julia Strachey to losing your mind through age and Alzheimers in There Were No Windows. They show what happens after the wedding bells are rung, and before adultery, divorce or bereavement. They seem to me to be taking any number of risks in holding up what they do, and in making up stories that are passionate, funny, stylish and sad. Furthermore, they shed light on an almost unnoticed tribe in the human race. For it is not only home-makers who get written out of the approved, masculine view of what are suitable subjects for literature. It is children. To me, the real tragedy of Anna Karenina’s life is not her loss of Vronsky or her suicide. It is her abandonment of her child. Dorothy Canfield Fisher was quite right to describe The Home-Maker as “a whoop not for ‘womens’ rights’ but for ‘children’s rights.” If you deny the domestic novel its place as serious literature, you deny not only the experience of women but that of children within the adult consciousness.

It is interesting to compare the British attitude to such novels with the American one. Would Carol Shields have ever actually won the Booker for her fiction? She was certainly short-listed for it, twice, but the premier prize she received was the Pulitzer, the American equivalent to the Booker. It is hard not to conclude that Americans valued her as the British failed to. In this country, the domestic tends to be acceptable only as journalism. We do not accept it unless it comes, like Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, suitably dressed up as ethnic. Unlike the Americans, for whose immigrant population the desire for home presumably has more artistic resonance, we want our novels to be novel, to bring us news from elsewhere. We don’t want to hear about what is under our noses.

Novels can be read in many different ways – as an aesthetic experience, as entertainment, as historical documents, as guides, comforters or mood-changers. We do not consistently respond to life on the Parnassian level that high art, and high literature, would have us believe: the gentler slopes may be more common, more humble, but they are in fact where much of us spend our time.

One of the novels that meant a great deal to me when I was a teenager was Monica Dickens’s Mariana, which Persephone republished in 1999. It made me understand what a number of works in the literary canon had failed to convey: that a proud, bad-tempered, unpleasant man of the kind I found attractive in literature might not make the best kind of husband for me. It is, in other words, one of those invaluable guides through the maze of ordinary life and “all the trivial, momentous, exciting, everyday things” that go to make up those of us who are not heroes or indeed heroines. Mary’s eventual discovery of happiness through marriage is, as an artist remarks on hearing about her engagement, “all too unswervingly normal,” but it is this normality which the domestic novel celebrates and shows as being, like common sense, far from ordinary. Let us hold our heads high, as women and as readers and say, Far from making us dull and depressed, it is the domestic novel which, unlike any other, frees us to be interesting, and happy.

Persephone lecture, Newnham College Cambridge, September 2005.
Copyright Amanda Craig