The Postcolonial Fl â neur: Remapping the Heart of the Empire
‘One may easily sail round England, or circumnavigate the globe. But not the most enthusiastic geographer…ever memorised a map of London. Certainly no one ever walks around it. For England is a small island, the world is infinitesimal amongst the planets. But
London is illimitable.’ Ford Madox Ford
This thesis will focus on Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark and Doris Lessing’s In Pursuit of the English and The Four-Gated City. Both writers use London as their geographical setting in these novels and it is central to their work in a variety of ways. I will argue that their position as postcolonial migrants is integral to their representation of and relationship with the city, be this through their navigation of the streets, their distinct mappings of the urban space or the complex negotiation of identity and place. This in turn creates unique visions of the city that can be recognised as distinctly postcolonial. In conjunction, using Rhys and Lessing’s novels as case studies, I will explore the possibilities of the postcolonial flâneur and how this iconic cultural figure is reinterpreted by twentieth - century, postcolonial women.
While much literary research exists on the flâneur, and postcolonialism is of course an extraordinarily vast field of study, fewer writers have focused on the value of combining the two to create the postcolonial flâneur. By focussing on early twentieth - century writers, this union brings together two fields of study once seen as uniformly distinct from one another; Modernism and postcolonialism. It is only in more recent years that critics have begun to make connections between the two and acknowledge the impact each has had on the other. This thesis will contribute to the discussion by focusing on those postcolonial migrants who subverted the traditional Modernist voyages out and instead travelled inwards to the heart of the Empire. In particular, it will consider how women engage with the city, remapping the urban space and reinterpreting the figure of the flâneur. By considering the postcolonial and Modernist aspects of these novels in conjunction, new and fascinating aspects are revealed.
Chapter One details the conceptual framework of the study, briefly outlining a number of relevant elements, including London’s importance as a colonial powerhouse and metropolitan hub, the conception and subsequent development of the flâneur as a cultural icon, the oft neglected relationship between Modernism and postcolonialism and finally, brief descriptions of Rhys and Lessing’s complex postcolonial subject positions. Chapter Two focuses on Voyage in the Dark and considers the way in which Rhys’ protagonist is commodified and disenfranchised by the city as a postcolonial migrant. It also considers whether the novel’s protagonist, Anna Morgan, is able to successfully embody the flâneur under these conditions, trapped between distant lands. Chapter Three focuses on Lessing’s novels In Pursuit of the English and The Four-Gated City. It will consider the ways in which Lessing’s protagonists
transform the urban space to better reflect their unique vision of the city. Chapter Four reflects on the novels and attempts to illuminate the unifying thread that bonds them.
Chapter One
It would be hard to overstate the significance of London as the centre of the Empire. For Britain’s colonial subjects, London, in John Clement Ball’s words, was ‘the centre of the world, the fountainhead of culture, the zero-point of global time and space’ (4). For many children of the Empire, London was a mythic land of imperial glory and an unvisited home away from home. Englishness itself was inextricably bound with its colonial identity and London’s global reputation was dependent upon the far-reaching arms of imperialism. After the Second World War, as the Empire was destabilised and Britain formally withdrew from many of its former colonies, a great many of these international citizens voyaged to London in what Ball referred to as a ‘reinvasion of the centre’ (4), travelling from places as far-reaching as the Caribbean, South Africa and the Pacific islands. These new residents of London put pressure on Britain’s national identity by redefining the parameters of ‘Britishness’ and complicating the very notion of home.
Consequently, as the makeup of London’s streets was transformed, there began a marked overlap between postcolonial and metropolitan writers in the twentieth-century. Many ex-colonial and postex-colonial expatriates, including writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame, Christina Stead, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon and Doris Lessing, used autobiographical and fictional narratives to engage with and explore their complicated relationship with Britain. With the introduction of the Aliens Act in 1905, legislation imposed restrictions upon migration to Britain and increased anti-immigration sentiment in the first half of the
twentieth-century (Thompson, 128). As a consequence, many new arrivals were faced with a growing xenophobia at odds with the welcome they had been led to believe they would receive as Commonwealth citizens. For many, it was an intimidating experience in which the postcolonial community was a buffer against the alienation and discrimination they faced.
However, while many postcolonial narratives of London in this period are explicit in their representation of the challenges the postcolonial experience presented, they also demonstrate the ways in which these new residents saw London as ‘both a site and object of resistance’ (Ball, 7). It was, in itself, subversive to occupy the streets of London as an outsider, rewriting the metropolis from within and through a postcolonial perspective. By both co-opting and satirising London’s landscape, these writers show their resistance to colonial rhetoric. As Ball
notes, it is through this process that many found transformative power: ’As ex-colonials come to dwell in London and walk its streets, they appropriate and reterritorialize it’ (8).
It was Virginia Woolf, an archetypal metropolitan writer, who, in her essay A Room of One’s Own, argued that access to space, both physical and metaphorical, is integral to women’s independence. This is particularly pertinent for postcolonial writers, hailing from places in which space is a hard lost commodity that is directly related to the obtainment of power. In their wanderings around the city, these postcolonial subjects carve out space for themselves in this imperial hub, reinterpreting London’s map according to their unique perspectives.
Walking is a common trope in postcolonial narratives of London. By physically walking around the city, these postcolonial writers explicitly engage with the discourse of space and power. Henri Lefebvre, in his most famous work The Production of Space (1991), argued that space is socially constructed, and is therefore a tool used by the hegemony to maintain power and control: ‘(Social) space is a (social) product…In addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power’ (289). Consequently, being aware of and taking control of this space is an act of resistance, particularly in a city such as London.
In writing about walking, these authors also actively engage with the figure of the flâneur. The flâneur was first brought to cultural consciousness in Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 essay The Painter of Modern Life. In it, Baudelaire equates the flâneur with the modern artist, a cosmopolitan traveller, a ‘man of the world’ and a figure evolved from the dandyism of the nineteenth-century. Over fifty years later, Walter Benjamin drew on Baudelaire’s ideas in his work The Arcade Project, where he used the flâneur as part of a study of modern city life and the experience of urban commodity capitalism. It was this focus on consumer capitalism that differentiates Benjamin’s flâneur from Baudelaire’s, though Benjamin’s flâneur retains the essential essence of the figure; an observer of the spectacle of the modern city, an idle wanderer, attentive to the city’s occurrences though not an active participant. This
representation of the flâneur became an emblem of the modern urban experience. It is Charles Baudelaire’s original description of the flâneur that most successfully evokes the almost transcendent experience of wandering amongst the multitudes of the modern urban city:
‘The crowd is his element…For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement…To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home…to be at the centre of the world and yet to remain hidden…He is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’’ (795).
For the postcolonial flâneur, this description holds a number of potential issues and discourses. Their postcolonial position impacts not only their ability to exist as mere spectator, but also their relationship to the city as ‘home’ or the ‘centre of the world’.
Similarly, an ‘appetite for the ‘non-I’’ is an affecting concept for postcolonial subjects who, in some cases, have seen their personhood come under threat from colonial forces. In fact, the very struggle for subjecthood, the desire for a concrete and determinable ‘I’, is a common trope in postcolonial narratives.
Baudelaire’s assertion that the flâneur feels ‘oneself everywhere at home’ draws to mind Woolf’s 1938 statement in Three Guineas: ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world’ (109). Woolf’s pronouncement is generally considered to convey feminist opposition to traditionally masculine concepts of nationalism and patriotism, based as they are on years of war and violence. For the postcolonial subject, however, this statement is again blind to those who are forcibly stripped of a homeland, or whose notion of home and country is complicated by imperialist movement. It is only from a position of privilege such as Woolf’s that one is able to denounce such a loaded concept. Baudelaire’s words, therefore, can also be considered in this light, as similarly restrictive and privileged. The flâneur has indeed long been the sole property of the upper classes; an affluent dandy-artist who can wander the streets at will.
In addition, the flâneur is equivalently exclusionary for women. In the nineteenth century, the city streets were a much more regulated space for women, and thus, those who did enter the urban space were, as Parsons points out, often ‘denigrated as immoral, superficial, or vagrant’ (5). Their position as observers was undermined by the common view that it was the women themselves that served as spectacle. In fact, the female spectacle was an important aspect of Baudelaire’s flâneur, where objectification and disregard for the female perspective is par for the course. This restriction denied women the opportunity to wander uninhibited and
consequently they were locked out of Baudelaire’s conception of the flâneur . The assumption was that women had nothing to offer in terms of urban expression.
Therefore, Baudelaire’s vision of the flâneur is exclusionary in a number of ways. How, then, can the postcolonial woman occupy this figure from her unconventional position? In fact, it is this very position that allows them to access modes of seeing and being in the city that are inaccessible to others. In many cases, their reinterpretations of the city space are subversive responses to masculine and imperial mappings. By demonstrating their unique urban
expressions, these writers put pressure on the defining parameters of the flâneur, broadening the scope to encompass a wider variety of city dwellers. In this way, the colonial flâneuse could act, as Anna Snaith explains, as a disruptive presence in the urban space: ‘In a period of anxiety about national efficiency, and the health of the nation, single, colonial women
unsettled the imperial order’ (19). Adding to this anxiety was the inherent hybridity of the colonial subjects that were increasingly occupying London’s streets: ‘The colonial flâneuse occupies a hybrid position, part tourist, resident, citizen of the Empire, and exotic subject. She is both of the metropolis and not, included and made alien through her colonial position’ (Snaith, 22). From these simultaneous and contradictory subject positions, the colonial flâneuse makes her unique mark on the cityscape.
Baudelaire was explicit in his association of the flâneur with all the trappings of modern life, frequently referring to the flâneur as a ‘modern man’. Modernism and the metropolitan are intimately related, and thus the flâneur must also be considered within this Modernist context. The study of Modernism had, for a long time, excluded the work of those outside of the Western canon. The assumption was that Modernism was a purely Western phenomenon, divorced from the politics of postcolonialism. It wasn’t until the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that detailed studies of the relationship between Modernism and
postcolonialism began to be published, including Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back, Rigby and Booth’s Modernism and Empire and more recently, Snaith’s
Modernist Voyages. These texts consider the ways in which Modernism and postcolonialism are related-historically and stylistically.
However, as Booth notes, the relationship between the two is a complicated and sensitive one, as for many postcolonial critics, Modernism ‘is seen as deeply complicit with, or at the very
least parasitic upon, the power of Empire’ (16). For others, such as Stephen Selmon, Modernism can retrospectively be read as a symptom of changing European attitudes to colonialism: ‘the modernist era is coming to be re-read not simply as the manifestation of a period or style but also as the representative marker of a crisis within European colonialism’ (17, Qtd. Modernism and Empire). It is also not difficult to see Modernism, and the
experimentation inherent to the form, as the result of colonial introductions to alternative cultures and modes of expression. With the expansion of Empire, British literature was opened up to cultural styles that suggested alternatives to the constraints of nineteenth - century realism and this could have had an impact on the proliferation of Modernism as a literary form. While an increasing number of new cultural influences could have broadened the Modernist movement to geographies further afield, this was in fact not the case. As Kalliney notes, the opposite was true: ‘The wealth and increasing availability of non-metropolitan cultural objects in European capitals…helped cement the close connection between “metropolitan perceptions” and the universalist pretensions of modernist art’ (753, Reading Maps, Writing Maps). Colonialism had brought the outside in and refocused Modernist and artistic attentions upon capitals such as London. Therefore, discussions regarding Modernism remain doggedly rooted in the metropolitan.1 However, considering
postcolonialism and Modernism in conjunction is to oppose traditional representations of Modernism as a solely Western movement.
Both of the authors studied in this thesis have complex relationships with colonialism. Jean Rhys, a white, colonial expatriate hailing from Dominica, made the voyage to England in 1907, when she was just sixteen. Her father was a Welsh doctor, and her mother a third-generation Dominican Creole. Thus, Rhys occupies a culturally unstable position. As a white Creole, she is a foreigner in her native country, and yet in London, she is also excluded as alien and stigmatised according to racist assumptions despite the privileges afforded to her in Dominica. This hybridity, along with her explicit animosity towards the Empire and London itself, singles Rhys out as displaced, rootless. It also, however, draws attention to the
instability and fragility of racial categorisation as an identity marker. This in itself is
threatening to an Empire that depends upon these kinds of delineations. Furthermore, Rhys’ outsider status grants her a unique, though cynical, perspective that is evident in her writing.
1 The attitude that art with true value is only to be found in European capitals such as London and Paris is parodied in texts such as J.M Coetzee’s Youth, in which the protagonist leaves South Africa and travels to Europe in order to be amongst those ‘writing books, painting paintings, composing music’ (41).
Her protagonists teeter between respectability and disrepute and, through their powerful evocations of distant homelands, view the metropole from the unmarked space between the two.
Doris Lessing began her writing career some twenty years after Rhys’ first novel. She is also a white colonial expatriate, hailing from what was then Southern Rhodesia and is now
Zimbabwe. Arriving in London in 1949, Lessing discovered a city much changed since Rhys’ arrival forty - two years earlier. Continually increasing migration to the United Kingdom in the first half of the twentieth - century, mostly driven by the dissolution of the British Empire but also the new opportunities for mobility offered by air travel, meant Lessing’s status as a foreigner was less unusual. A strong, artistic, expatriate community had sprung up in Bloomsbury, ‘heart of ‘colonial” London and a place where single women could rent rooms or bedsits’ (Snaith, 20). This creative and supportive network eased the transition to London for many migrants. London’s landscape had also been greatly impacted by the Second World War and Lessing would have arrived to a post - war city of rationing and bombed - out buildings. She does not seem to share Rhys’ complete despair of and hostility to London, although they certainly share a resentment towards London’s designation as the ‘heart of the Empire’. Lessing’s postcolonial approach, in much of her work, is distinctly more satirical and playful than Rhys’, though to write Rhys’ work off as entirely serious would be
disingenuous. Lessing’s wry observations of English customs and manners expose her own impressions of and relationship with England as a former imperial powerhouse. Rhys and Lessing’s differing perspectives and historical positions make for an interesting comparative study.
It is important to draw attention to the autobiographical elements of the novels in this study. The narratives of all three novels draw on the experiences of their authors, though this is made explicit in some more than others. Their interesting blend of autobiography and fiction could classify these works as auto - fiction, a term that encompasses the two seemingly
contradictory literary genres. Autobiography and postcolonialism have a long history, and autobiography remains a popular genre for postcolonial writers. This is a circumstance that makes sense when considering that the central trope of autobiography is often the quest for identity. As Bart Moore-Gilbert points out, the increasing popularity of autobiography as a literary genre for postcolonial writers seems to run parallel with the destabilisation of the
British Empire after the Second World War: ‘…by the end of the Second World War, a considerable number of auto/biographies had been written by colonised subjects across many other regions of European empires’ (XI). As an increasing number of colonial subjects experienced displacement from their homelands, far more narratives emerged that attempted to relate the experience of this displacement. In these cases, the negotiation of identity is closely interrelated with geographical place. As Edward Said states: ‘If there is anything that politically distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperialism, it is the primacy of the
geographical in it. Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control’ (297). The politics of space, therefore, are integral to the postcolonial autobiography. While the traditional Western, masculine autobiography begins with name, age and geographical location, the assurance of place is stripped from the displaced postcolonial subject. This is the central crisis for many postcolonial texts, in which the homeland and its vital associations, including a familiar language, value system and the whole epistemological network of place, are suddenly removed.
Not only is the autobiography a popular genre for postcolonial writers, but their adaption of the form decentres and destabilises Western perceptions of the self. Their alternative visions of historical temporality, fragmented subjectivity and dependent rather than autonomous selves questions the very foundation upon which the genre rests. As Moore-Gilbert concisely explains: ‘If feminism challenges the conflation of male subjectivity with ‘the human’,
postcolonialists question the equally common, if often only implicit, historical equation of the (theoretically ungendered) western Self with ‘the human’’ (XVII). Another way in which autobiography as a genre is transmuted by the postcolonial writer is by playing with the boundaries and rules that differentiate the genre from fiction. In their blending of the two, the postcolonial writer demonstrates a hostility towards objective, Western perceptions of reality. In many ways, by complicating the notion of a singular version of truth, these writers better portray the subjective and varied experience of reality. Benaouda Lebdai recognises the value postcolonial autobiographies have contributed to the canon as a whole, stating that
‘postcolonial writings participate in the very rehabilitation of the autobiographical texts as literary’ (1). As an art form that had long been denigrated as unworthy of academic study, postcolonial interpretations of the autobiography have contributed to their promotion to literary status.
For the writers in this study, the autobiographical element in their work is worth considering in relation to not only self - representation, but self - representation within the geographical context of London. In this way, their writing mediates on the very performance of self within the larger context of Empire. Their complicated relationship with England and the Empire contributes to the difficulty and constant renegotiation of this representation.
Clearly, the experiences of people of colour in London in the early twentieth-century would have been very different to that of Rhys and Lessing. By focussing on white writers, the attention is taken from issues of racial visibility and prejudice, instead looking at the experiences of those in London who exist in the interstitial space between privilege and disadvantage. Lessing and Rhys’ relationship to race is complicated in their novels and Anna Snaith draws attention to this problematic tension in the work of all white colonial writers, stressing: ‘…not only the very different experiences of black and white colonial women on London’s streets, but also the fetishisation or co-option of racial difference by writers such as Jean Rhys or Katherine Mansfield…’ (8-9). Despite the many years Lessing spent in South Africa, she notes that she had always considered herself English. Rhys’ position, however, is more complicated. In Voyage In the Dark, the protagonist frequently expresses her desire to be black, often fetishising blackness according to simplistic stereotypes. Her racial history is ambiguous, as allusions are made to her mixed heritage. Consequently, she feels alienated from both the white and black communities. This narrative appears to mimic many of Rhys’ own feelings towards racial identity, as her own history is indeterminate.
However, while these writers should be read as separate from the indigenous communities of their homelands, they share a desire to produce in their writings a distinct subjectivity that, in their case, is different from that of their European ancestors. As Elleke Boehmer notes, white colonial communities were also hindered by the Empire’s self-fashioned centrality: ‘Yet even as it marginalized, white colonial society was itself marginalized. It remained subordinated to London and rankled beneath this burden’ (112). These writers, then, are sincere in their animosity towards London and it must be noted that they too suffered under an Empire that disregarded their individual realities.
Therefore, due to their complex relationship with colonial history, this thesis will refer to them throughout as ‘post/colonial’ writers. This hopefully encompasses their ambivalent relationship to the British Empire without appropriating the histories of those that
experienced, or whose ancestors experienced, the violence and trauma of the British invasion of their homelands.
Chapter Two
West Indian migration to London steadily increased from the early twentieth-century to its height in the 1950’s and 60’s. After the Second World War, as Britain encouraged mass immigration from Commonwealth nations and former colonies of the British Empire, many West Indian migrants travelled to London in hope of a successful and permanent settlement in Britain. A number of West Indian writers rose to prominence during this period, including Sam Selvon, V.S Naipaul and George Lamming. It was also during this period that Francis Wyndham rediscovered Jean Rhys’ work and she was subsequently embraced by literary circles in London. With the help of Caribbean Voices, a weekly BBC radio segment, West Indian novelists in the city were ‘among the most celebrated in metropolitan highbrow circles throughout the decade’ (90, Kalliney, Metropolitan Modernism).
Jean Rhys’ novel Voyage in the Dark (VITD), published in 1934, was based on the
autobiographical notes written after her arrival in the UK from Dominica in 1906, including her affair with Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith and her time spent as a chorus girl. Set in London in the early twentieth - century, Anna Morgan, the novel’s protagonist, navigates the city as it consistently attempts to marginalise and disempower her. Economically underprivileged and companionless, Anna must rely upon men for financial support. Ending with a near fatal abortion, Anna’s only option is to begin the cycle of hardship all over again.
The novel’s most defining feature is Anna’s animosity towards London and the imperial power it represents. The novel’s opening establishes the simplistic framework of binaries that Anna adheres to throughout the novel. Dominica and England are frequently compared to one another according to ‘heat, cold; light, darkness’ (7), and later, these simplifications are extended to race: ‘being Black is warm and gay, being White is cold and sad’ (27). Colour is an important motif, with a landscape of greys and browns juxtaposed against the happy brightness of Dominica. The street names of London are dizzyingly recounted, all
claustrophobically mundane and puritanical: ‘Corporation Street or High Street or Duke Street or Lord Street’ (8). Remarkably, this detailed mapping has the paradoxical effect of making London appear even more difficult to navigate, with the abundance of street names creating an indecipherable maze of similar sounding streets. For Anna Morgan, the cold, dingy bedsits she flits between are the space in which she is most claustrophobic. Mostly, though, the
novel’s landscape is defined by sameness. Anna’s references to towns and streets ‘always…so exactly alike’ (8) permeate the novel, creating an atmosphere of mundane uniformity that, as this thesis will discuss in more detail, characterises Anna’s experience of the city.
Kevin Lynch coined the term ‘imageability’ to describe the way in which a city is made comprehensible to its inhabitants, emphasising the importance of a legible mental mapping of the cityscape for a person’s emotional stability:
‘In the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalised mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action. The need to recognise and pattern our surroundings is so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual’ (4).
It is interesting to consider Anna’s London using Lynch’s framework. Anna has no familial roots that link her to the city and is thus historically and emotionally disconnected. The dizzy, claustrophobic monotony of the streets impede Anna’s ability to grasp any patterns in her surroundings and, as Lynch suggests, this impacts on her both practically and emotionally.
Lynch takes his theory further, suggesting that successful imageability is achieved through five key elements: ‘paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks’ (46). When organised effectively, these elements come together to create a shared group image in which an individual can ‘operate successfully within his environment’ (46). Anna’s London is eerily devoid of these elements, with the detailed street names disconnected from their relationship to the rest of the city and paradoxically contributing to the labyrinthine feel of London. Despite spending much of her time walking the streets, the paths Anna follows are elusive and the famous landmarks that are often used to signify London are absent. Though Anna
dutifully recounts the names of the streets and restaurants she passes through, her ignorance of the city’s districts and nodes drains her surroundings of any significance. Emotionally
detached, Anna is unable to form any impression of London as a larger totality. Thus, there is nothing distinctive in Anna’s physical experience of the city that enables her to orientate
herself. There is no nodal point from which Anna can navigate herself, giving the reader the impression of a never ending network of streets leading to nowhere and devoid of any
organising principle. Her frequent change of abode emphasises this sense of displacement and disconnectedness, as she is never in one place long enough to gain a historical and emotional connection and thus build a comprehensive mental image of her surroundings. Having endured the initial displacement from her homeland, Anna is unable to recapture a sense of belonging and this is reflected in her nomadic experience of London.
Early on in the novel, Anna recalls a detailed description of England, complete with coordinates, from something she had read long before she arrived:
‘Lying between 15 10’ and 15 40’ N. and 61 14’ and 61 30’ W. ‘A goodly island and something highland, but all overgrown with woods,’ that book said. And all crumpled into hills and mountains as you would crumple a piece of paper in your hand’ (15).
The description is minimalist, factual and notably devoid of any of the living elements that define one’s homeland. Written from an outsider’s perspective, the description is no more illuminating when recalled from within England’s capital, as Anna does. Its totalising, bird’s eye view vantage point affords the reader an accurate mapping of the island while
simultaneously denying them the subjectivity necessary for memorable imageability.
Ultimately, this description of England means nothing to Anna, it is as one-dimensional as the paper crumpled in the hand.
Interestingly, while Anna is unable to create a successful mental map of London, this frustrating lack of imageability is inversely replicated in other Londoners’ conception of Dominica. Anna’s attempts to describe her homeland are unsuccessful, met only with
Walter’s barely concealed disinterest. Unable to translate the vivid images of her homeland to those around her, Anna notes the inherent weakness of language in depicting lived
experience: ‘I suppose it was the whiskey, but I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to make him see what it was like. And it all went through my head, but too quickly. Besides, you can never tell about things’ (46). 2
2 J.M Coetzee makes reference to this difficulty in Youth by explicitly reframing the issue from an author’s perspective. The protagonist despairs at publishing his story, set in South Africa, to English audiences: ‘The English will not understand it. For the beach in the story they will summon up an English idea of a beach, a few pebbles lapped by wavelets. They will not see a dazzling space of sand at the foot of rocky cliffs…’ (62). The
The inherent weakness of language is a common trope in the novel. As a white woman, language and speech are the only signifiers that expose Anna’s migrant status and the novel is rife with misapprehensions and confusion. As a post/colonial, Anna has access to the
language but is not privy to the coded subtleties of discourse in London. An outsider to the conventions of life in the city, many of the exchanges in the novel demonstrate her inability to follow the implicit rules hidden from her. Those around her mock her naivety and delight in exposing her alien status:
‘‘You were in a show when you first met Walter, weren’t you?’ Vincent said. ‘Yes,’ I said.
They looked at me as if they were expecting me to say something else. ‘It was at Southsea,’ I said.
‘Oh, it was at Southsea, was it?’ Vincent said.
They began to laugh. They were still laughing when Walter came in’ (73).
There are many of these instances in the novel, drawing attention to the way in which, removed from Dominica and the cultural knowledge she had grown accustomed to, Anna’s ability to make sense of her surroundings is jeopardised. Having left behind the familiar semiotics of the West Indies, Anna must relearn the hermeneutics of place.
While she is unable to create a successful mental map of London, Anna frequently reflects on her homeland with affectionate clarity. Her memories of her former life in the Caribbean impose upon the dull stillness of her life in London in a sensory overload of colour, song and heat. Rhys moves backwards and forwards between the two lands, melding song and snippets of childhood memories to create an image of her homeland that is far more vivid than her depiction of London. By interposing the Dominican landscape on the grey stillness of the metropole, Anna not only emphasises their incongruity, but also accentuates the lack of sensory stimuli in her experience of London. As the novel continues and Anna begins to lose her grip on London, her memories of Dominica become more frequent and intense, as the cognitive mapping of one place overwhelms the successful mapping of the other. The difference between the two geographies is stark, as in the richly sensual description below:
contrasting geographies of England and South Africa are used as an example of the disparate and incompatible epistemological frameworks of the two nations.
‘All the way back in the taxi I was thinking about home…And the smell of the store down on the Bay. (I’ll take four yards of the pink, please, Miss Jessie.’) And the smell of Francine-acrid-sweet. And that hibiscus once-it was so red, so proud and it’s long gold tongue hung out. It was so red that even the sky was just a background for it… And the sounds of rain on the galvanized-iron roof.’ (49).
Compare this passage to Anna’s frequent though minimal descriptions of her experience of London:
‘The stew tasted of nothing at all’ (50).
Clearly here, Anna’s appreciation for and memory of place is strongly influenced by the sensory stimuli available to her. In the absence of a sensory knowledge of London, Anna is unable to make an emotional connection and instead magnifies her past while simultaneously diminishing her present.
As a post/colonial, Anna exists in the borderlands between not only lands but also histories. Rhys’ unique narrative form melds the past with the present; memory with reality. Her sudden narrative shifts between London and Dominica can be read as a modernist rebellion against traditional depictions of the self as a unified whole. As a white, creole, West Indian, Anna must balance multiple selves and this results in a fragmented narrative form that encompasses both Anna’s former and present lives. Rhys herself suggested that the inclusion of Anna’s memories of Dominica was not only a technique used to express Anna’s intense nostalgia for her homeland, but also a way of demonstrating alternative perceptions of temporality: ‘… something to do with time being an illusion…the past exists-side by side with the present, not behind it…I tried to do it by making the past [the West Indies] very vivid’ (Qtd in Carr, 84). Unlike the traditional bildungsroman that relies upon a narrative of linear self-development, VITD moves fluidly between temporal and physical worlds.
By representing post/colonial identity as inherently fragmented, and attempting to make visible the West Indies in the centre of London, Rhys locates postcoloniality within the heart of metropolitan Modernism while simultaneously extending the Modernist project beyond
Eurocentric boundaries. As Urmila Seshagiri suggests, VITD demonstrates that the key components of Modernism are also integral to postcoloniality: ‘Rhys deploys Anna Morgan’s creole identity to remake the modernist fascination with fragment and fracture into the key problematic of postcoloniality’ (Qtd in Snaith, 134).
This Modernist vision of Anna’s consciousness is deftly contrasted against an imperial fondness for rigidity and dogma. Hester, Anna’s stepmother and aspiring English lady, most clearly demonstrates this traditionalism. Her puritanical and patronising attitude towards Anna is characteristic of a city that demands respectability whilst simultaneously disadvantaging her. Walter, too, is routinely depicted as conservative and arrogant, a dull English gentleman: ‘ ‘This wine is corked,’ Mr Jeffries said. ‘Corked, sir?’ the waiter said in a soft, incredulous and horror-stricken voice…The waiter sniffed. Then Mr Jeffries sniffed. Their noses were exactly alike, their faces very solemn’ (17-18). Though Anna spends much time with Walter, he is strangely featureless, indistinct. He is characterised by his lack of imagination, which he weakly denies: ‘‘No imagination? That’s all rot.’’ (67). This rigidity and tedium is reflected in the landscape of England itself, as Anna’s immediate first impression through the train window is one of delineations and boundaries: ‘This is England Hester said and I watched it through the train-window divided into squares like pocket-handkerchiefs; a small tidy look it had everywhere fenced off from everywhere else’ (15).
While there is no shortage of travel in the novel, denoted by the abundance of street names, the novel is notably devoid of any real physical movement through the streets of London. There are no descriptions of Anna traversing the city, only her arrival from one place to the next, without the necessary movement in between. Ironically for a travelling chorus girl, Anna’s time in London reads as surprisingly stagnant. In the novel’s opening chapter, Anna states of her time in London: ‘You were perpetually moving to another place which was perpetually the same’ (8). However, this movement is not evident in the text. Instead, her descriptions of the city streets are depicted as though looking upon a one-dimensional image of a landscape: ‘When I got up I went out for a walk. It’s funny how parts of London are as empty as if they were dead. There was no sun, but there was a glare on everything’ (36). By minimising any descriptions of Anna’s actual movement in the city, Rhys emphasises the essential sameness of the streets and bedsits. At times, it is as if Anna may as well have never moved at all, so similar are her surroundings.
Linguistically, this lack of movement is mimicked by Anna’s speech. Her responses are frequently short and stilted, often silencing her voice in favour of the rush of her interior monologue. She frequently allows Maudie to speak for her, the humorously garrulous antithesis to Anna’s quiet restraint. Her reluctance to speak up for herself is born of an awareness of the power relations marked by speech, with her own voice marking her as an outsider. When discussing her homeland, however, Anna’s sentences run on in a flurry of words, mimicking the energetic pace of Dominica.
Movement, it seems, is reserved for Anna’s beloved homeland, where her detailed childhood memories conjure vivid images of the West Indies: ‘And then there is New Town, and just beyond New Town the big mango tree…And then-wait a minute. Then do you turn to the right or to the left? To the left, of course. You turn to the left and the sea is at your back, and the road goes zigzag upwards’ (129). The path is illuminated in Anna’s mind’s eye, depicting a short journey more distinctive than the whole of London’s boroughs. Her description has Lynch’s landmarks, paths and nodes, but these come in the form of mango trees and winding ocean paths. Notably, Anna’s descriptions of her homeland are devoid of the street and restaurant names that typify her descriptions of London. Rather, her knowledge of Dominica is based on years of affectionate familiarity, not any official cartographic representation. Therefore, it is Anna’s roots in Dominica and her sensitive lived experience of the surroundings that conjure such a successful mental map.
Despite this stagnant representation of London, Anna Morgan can still be described as a streetwalker and flâneur in a number of ways. Firstly, it is her time spent roaming London’s streets and moving between grotty bedsits that make up the vast majority of the narrative. Very little reference is made to her working life, instead the focus is on the transient experience of life in the city. Secondly, her disreputable and unreliable working life as a chorus girl aids in her eventual slide into amateur prostitution and leads to her position as another kind of streetwalker.
The prostitute is a common motif in depictions of the modern urban experience. If the urban experience of the flâneur is typified by the freedom to observe, the position of the prostitute is the inverse. They are themselves objects of the gaze, pure spectacle and consumerist vice of
the typically white, male onlooker. However, this interpretation has been challenged by those who suggest that this ignores the deviant possibilities for the streetwalker themselves,
possibilities that embrace the immorality of the position for the opportunity to occupy the urban space with relative freedom and in doing so challenge the strictly male persona of the urban walker. As Deborah Parsons notes: ‘The correlation of flâneur and artist has resulted in the tendency to overlook the visual perspective of the public woman’ (40). Relegating the streetwalker to pure object ignores the reciprocal nature of the gaze. The act of looking and desiring is a resistant one in a city in which women’s bodies are commodified and controlled.
Parsons goes on to point out the connection between consumer culture and prostitution, a correlation that was frequently made at the end of the nineteenth - century, as many feared the freedom of desire that consumerism encouraged: ‘Punch cartoons of proletarian protests in London in the 1880s and 1890s depicted a raging mob of grotesque women…on the streets were shoppers and prostitutes, indistinguishable both in terms of their adherence to fashion and their uncontrollable desires’ (29). This element of consumer culture is rife in Rhys’ London, with Anna’s love of the city’s shops and elegant mannequins offering her the
opportunity to create an alternative identity for herself: ‘‘If I could buy this, then of course I’d be quite different’’ (111). Fashion, for Anna, allows her to escape the margins of society that she is relegated to as a post/colonial woman. Instead, under the guise of a fur coat and the latest fashions, she is briefly able to participate in the echelons of high society and access the privileges therein.
This freedom, however, is short-lived, as Anna herself is implicated in the commodification of the city. The commodifying gaze is reversed upon her, as the illuminated shop fronts look outward and increase her sense of inadequacy: ‘Everything makes you want pretty clothes like hell…And the shop-windows sneering and smiling in your face. And then you look at the skirt of your costume, all crumpled at the back. And your hideous underclothes’ (22).
Consequently, the metropole causes her to externalise the self, as she begins to view her own body with the commodifying gaze of the city: ‘I watched myself in the glass over the
mantelpiece, laughing’ (12). ‘I walked up to the looking-glass and put the lights on over it and stared at myself. It was as if I were looking at somebody else’ (21). This externalisation of the self is the result of not only a city that views her as a commodity, but also Anna’s increasing inability to maintain a unified identity. Her sense of self is split between the simultaneous and
conflicting demands of those around her and meaning is passively transcribed upon her body. Her companions frequently discuss Anna as if she were absent, disregarding her own
subjectivity: ‘Germaine was staring at me. ‘She looks awfully young, this kid,’ she said’ (73). In this way, Anna realises that as a post/colonial woman in London, meaning will be
transcribed upon her according to racist and sexist assumptions. At various points in the novel, Anna attempts to restore her agency from those that have taken it from her. She tries to achieve this through the purchasing of clothing, small acts of rebellion such as her vocal dislike of London, and refusing to allow Walter to reduce her self - worth to her body, as demonstrated in their discussion on virginity: ‘‘Oh yes it matters. It’s the only thing that matters.’ ‘It’s not the only thing that matters,’ I said. ‘All that’s made up.’’(32). Here, Anna rebels against a patriarchal system that values women according to their sexual worth, refusing to allow Walter to control the signification of her body.
Ultimately, however, her dissent is not powerful enough to retain her sense of agency. As the novel continues, the increase in Anna’s mental time travel and her descent into her interior monologue, particularly in the novel’s final pages, reflect her increasing inability to locate herself physically and emotionally. Time, space and ultimately, meaning, begin to break down: ‘I am hopeless, resigned, utterly happy. Is that me? I am bad, not good any longer, bad. That has no meaning, absolutely none. Just words’ (49). Anna’s interior monologue takes over in the final pages of the novel as she descends into madness. The slide into Anna’s mind matches the movement from the city into the claustrophobic lodgings she resides in.
Eventually, she removes herself entirely from the city, locking herself away after she falls seriously ill from a botched abortion. This removal demonstrates the way the city silences those who do not conform. Stripped of her system of meaning, Anna fails to articulate herself.
Unable to reclaim her body from the greedy hands of the city, or to maintain a concrete subject position, Anna’s subjectivity is stolen from her. Thus, the narrative falls apart, moving haphazardly between perspectives, time periods, memory and reality. As Héléne Cixous writes, writing the self is essential for reclaiming the female body: ‘By writing the self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display’ (165). Anna is unable to write a coherent narrative for herself and is therefore only able to view herself externally. She becomes
increasingly detached from her own body and its movements around the city. With Anna, Rhys demonstrates the way in which the post/colonial subject is essentially locked out of London society. She meets no other migrants in the narrative, as they are similarly relegated to the margins. However, their presence is implied through a fear of the contagion of ‘dirty foreigners’ (95), as Ethel refers to them. And yet, Anna never comes into contact with another post/colonial migrant, emphasising her loneliness, the isolation of the capital and the cage-like atmosphere of the city.
Anna is unable to succeed in the city as a flâneur. She is certainly an observer and often wanders London without purpose, allowing the city to passively impose its impressions upon her. If, however, Anna is considered in relation to Baudelaire’s definition of the flâneur, an ‘observer who is at the centre of his world and yet remains inconspicuous’, the connection falls apart. Not only is Anna locked out of the social, metropolitan culture that is essential to the flâneur, but, as a post/colonial subject, she is scrutinised and commodified by the city. Anna is unable to remain inconspicuous and does not have the privilege of viewing the city as an entirely detached observer. Similarly, her own history is so implicated in Britain’s colonial past that Anna is unable to maintain the impartiality necessary for detached observation and her post/colonial perspective irrevocably corrupts her vision of London. Dominica is
diametrically opposed to London throughout the novel, and this impedes Anna’s ability to make sense of her surroundings. In a city that is claustrophobic and alien, Anna lacks the confident composure of the flâneur.
Ultimately, Anna Morgan feels a powerlessness in her relationship with London.
Economically underprivileged, her options are limited, and her inadvertent slide into amateur prostitution is a response to the commodifying gaze of a hostile and impervious city. Anna’s position feels, at times, like a helpless one. Opportunities for dissent are few and far between, so reliant is she on her oppressors for financial support and so limited are her alternatives. Instead, Anna must make do with more modest acts of rebellion; her utter disdain for London, her refusal to acquiesce to the supposed superiority of the imperial ‘centre’, her pride for her homeland in the face of ignorant and racist assumptions, and, occasionally, less noble acts of defiance:
‘What’s the joke?’ I said. They went on laughing.
I was smoking, and I put the end of my cigarette down on Walter’s hand. I jammed it down hard and held it there, and he snatched his hand away and said ‘Christ!’
But they had stopped laughing.’ (74)
Chapter Three
Doris Lessing’s memoir In Pursuit of the English (IPOTE), published in 1960, is based on her experience of arriving in post Second World War London from Rhodesia in 1949. This was a
period in which many South African migrants travelled to Britain, along with the subjects of many other colonised nations. This was largely influenced by the British Nationality Act of 1948, which allows British subjects from the colonies visa free travel to Britain. So large was the ensuing migration that the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was introduced in 1962 in an attempt to curb the number of arrivals. Lessing arrived in the period soon after the
introduction of the first act and was greeted by a city still recovering from the devastation of the war. As she wanders the streets in search of suitable accommodation, she begins to form an impression of London that is far removed from her previous imaginings back in South Africa. She eventually moves into a boarding house and, with the help with fellow boarder Rose, is given an education in what it means to be English. Though much less hostile to the city than Rhys’ novel, Lessing’s autobiographical account also uses London as the
geographical centre with which to negotiate her own post/colonial identity. Lessing’s interest in and complicated relationship with the English is the basis for the novel, although she admits at the outset her supposed failure to achieve the novel’s objective: ‘…unfortunately I have not…succeeded in getting to know an Englishman’ (6).
In The Four-Gated City (TFGC), book five of Lessing’s Children of Violence series and published in 1969, almost ten years after her memoir, Lessing’s protagonist is Martha Quest. Martha has recently moved from Southern Rhodesia to post-war London, a journey that clearly also draws on Lessing’s own experiences. TFGC, however, has a dystopian, science-fiction slant, moving through time to a future that ends with Martha’s death on an island after the onset of World War Three. The beginning of the novel most directly deals with Martha’s experience of walking the streets in London, presenting an alternative view of the city that, I will argue, rebels against colonial and masculine hegemonies.
IPOTE is a blend of autobiography and fiction. Its’ tagline, A Documentary, indicates the ways in which Lessing has taken her autobiographical experiences and moulded them into a traditionally linear narrative form. It also implies an outsider perspective. The English, Lessing suggests, are curious, strange and worthy of study. This in itself displaces the English perspective as the definitive mode of seeing and being, relegating the English to the interstitial space in which many postcolonial migrants found themselves in London.
Lessing’s pursuit of someone who can be considered truly English is the pretext for an exploration of ‘Englishness’ as an identity marker in itself. As she reveals throughout the novel, Englishness is an unstable and slippery concept and in fact its’ rarity reveals the ways in which Englishness, as perpetuated in the colonies, became an almost mythic creation the Empire used in order to create a unified narrative of identity. As Lessing discovers, the reality is more complex, with Englishness represented by a variety of colonial and regional
communities. Lessing humorously acknowledges the difficulty of defining her own identity as a colonial expatriate:
‘I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to come to England. This was because, to use the word in an entirely different sense, I was English. In the colonies or
Dominions, people are English when they are sorry they ever emigrated in the first place; when they are glad they emigrated but consider their roots are in England; when they are thoroughly assimilated into the local scene and would hate ever to set foot in England again; and even when they are born colonial but have an English grandparent’ (12).
The predominance of London as the centre of the Empire is evident in Lessing’s definition of England: ‘The horizon conquerors now set sail or take wing for England, which in this sense means London’ (13). In her introduction to the city, however, she discovers that London is a number of different cities to its inhabitants. For Flo, her landlord, and Rose, resident at the same boarding house, London is the limit of their own experiences: ’Rose’s West End was a fixed journey, on a certain bus route, to a certain Corner House and one of half a dozen cinemas…Flo’s London…was the basement she lived in; the shops she was registered at; and the cinema five minutes’ walk away’ (94). Neither of them are willing to extend their
knowledge of London beyond the areas that they have grown up surrounded by. Their impressions of London, so dependent on their own experiences, are therefore divorced from its real cartographic fixity:
‘I asked: ‘Have you always lived in London?’
There was a short pause before she answered; and I understood it was because she found it difficult to adapt herself to the idea of London as a place on the map and not as a setting for her life’ (47-8).
As a newcomer to London, Lessing struggles with the inverse. No longer simply a one - dimensional pinpoint on a map, Lessing must adapt to a far more subjective vision of the city. The difficulty inherent in these two differing visions of London, one of subjective familiarity and one of cartographic fixity, is demonstrated in Lessing’s early arrival in the city, as she asks for directions in a futile attempt at navigating the streets:
‘‘It’s just around the corner,’ and looking impatient when I said: ‘Which corner?’ This business of the next corner is confusing to aliens, who will interpret it as the next intersection of the street. But to the Londoner, with his highly subjective attitude to geography, the ‘corner’ will mean, perhaps, a famous pub, or an old street whose importance dwarfs all the intervening streets….’ (34)
Thus, intimate knowledge of the city mutates the physical geography of London. The urban space is entangled with history; the intimate histories of personal experience. In order to access the shared geographical knowledge of London’s residents, she must join the
community that she is currently excluded from as a recent post/colonial migrant. Eventually, through a combination of her growing familiarity with the city and her status as a
post/colonial migrant, Lessing gains access to a vision of the city not shared by the resident Londoners. She is able to view the city locally and nationally, deftly moving between the larger totality of the city and a more intimate experience.
As a post/colonial, her knowledge of the city cannot be severed from the global network of imperialism. As Ball explains: ‘Postcolonial migrants cannot see London as simply local or national; to do so would be to deny its historical and present-day overseas linkages, to suppress the ways its buildings and people constantly transport one elsewhere’ (31). IPOTE depicts London according to this vision. London, England and Englishness are always examined within the larger context of Empire. Indeed, her initial impressions of London are heavily impacted by its international reputation. Lessing’s preconceived romantic notions of the city are challenged by the unembellished reality of the post-war city: ‘Slowly the word slum, which had for me a literary and fanciful quality, a dramatic squalor, changed’ (68). The longer she remains in London, the more she is able to differentiate between neighbourhoods and identify invisible boundary lines, deciphering the hidden language and codes of the city.
As her knowledge of the city improves, so too does her understanding of the complex allegiances that govern identity in England. Lessing’s desire to meet an ‘Englishman’ is constantly thwarted by geographical and racial divisions, as this extract of Lessing’s conversation with Rose indicates:
‘‘…She’s English really. She was born here. But her grandmother was Italian, see? She comes from a restaurant family. So she behaves differently. And then the trouble is, Dan, isn’t a good influence….
‘Isn’t he English?’
‘Not really, he’s from Newcastle. They’re different from us, up in places like that. Oh no, he’s not English, not properly speaking.’
‘And you?’
She was confused at once. ‘Me, dear? But I’ve lived in London all my life. Oh, I see what you mean-I wouldn’t say I was English so much as a Londoner, see? It’s different.’’ (56-57)
As this humorous passage depicts, ‘English’ as an identity has been rarefied by absurdly specific criteria. Born and bred in London, Rose clings to these divisions in order to maintain the distinct boundaries of her own identity. In contrast, Lessing’s sense of self, at least in the two novels studied here, is noticeably transnational, hybridised, fluid. This episode, then, demonstrates her post/colonial aversion to these arbitrary stratifications, preferring instead to embrace the hybridity of the post/colonial position.
In both IPOTE and TFGC, Lessing attempts to demythologise London through a technique that Ball describes as ‘descriptive downsizing’ (8). When Martha Quest first glimpses Piccadilly Circus, her response is one of humorous disbelief: ‘She looked at the haphazard insignificance of it, and the babyish statue, and began to laugh…’This,’ she tried to explain, ‘is the hub of the Empire’’ (35). Similarly, Lessing’s own first vision of England as described in her memoir is one of immediate disillusionment: ’I arrived in England exhausted. The white cliffs of Dover depressed me. They were too small’ (28). This device serves not only to express their disenchantment, but also detracts from the power that is implied in London’s
position as the centre of the Empire. Martha’s mockery of iconic Piccadilly Circus is a direct challenge to those who would use such imagery as a source of nationalist pride.
Like Rhys, Lessing allows the imagery of her homeland to intrude on the cityscape. However, rather than travelling back in time between the two distinct time periods and lands, as Rhys depicts in VITD, Lessing allows the imagery of London and South Africa to intermingle in a unique blend of the metropolis with the veld. By depicting the imagery of South Africa amongst the cartography of the city, Lessing dissolves the boundaries between the two, transforming the urban space to better represent the hybridity of her experience as a
post/colonial subject: ‘Under the roof it was like sitting on top of an anthill, a tall sharp peak of baked earth…Sometimes it was as if the walls had dissolved, and I was left sitting under a tree, listening to birds talking from branch to branch’ (77). While Rhys uses the imagery of Dominica to emphasise the ways in which London disenchants, Lessing uses the imagery of South Africa to adapt herself to the environment, and vice versa. Thus, by interposing the landscape of the veld on her experience of the metropole, Lessing presents a uniquely
transnational vision of the city. The transformative power of her reimagining reinterprets this colonial site according to her post/colonial vision and acknowledges the deep-rooted
multiculturalism of the city.
Similarly, Martha Quest mourns the loss of the natural landscape of her homeland. Faced with the monotony of streets filled with interminable terraces ‘all unpainted since before the war, all brownish, yellowish, greyish, despondent’ (18), Martha must once again transform the metropolitan landscape to better incorporate her post/colonial vision:
’If one were to wade through earth in Africa, around one’s legs roots: tree roots, thick, buried branches; then sharper thinner vines from bushes, shrubs…But walking here, it would be through unaired rootless soil, where electricity and telephone and gas tubes ran and knotted and twined’ (19).
Her rendering of these roots, both natural and artificial, evokes not only the rural, but also their historical implications. In South Africa, where her familial roots are, the undergrowth is thick with history. In London, her colonial homeland, the roots are tenuous, artificial. All the wholesome connotations of the natural are conjured in Martha’s vision of Africa, while
London, the scarred landscape of her future, is far removed from these associations. Though Martha’s intention is to present the juxtaposition of these two images, her imagining
transforms London’s underground into its own tangled web of artificial roots, forcing the country into the city.
As the novel continues and London is increasingly seen to deteriorate, Martha notes the growing encroachment of nature in the physical cracks of the city: ‘In the hulk of timber was a cleft, more like a crack in rock than a split in wood. Moss grew in it’ (20). These changes to the city’s concrete form demonstrate the metropole’s growing inability to suppress the
invasion of the natural. This in itself is demonstrative of a city that is unable to maintain its polished veneer at a time when migrancy to London has unsettled the imperial order and brought the outside in.
This reinterpretation of the urban space continues in Martha Quest’s wanderings through London. Lynch’s vision of the city, one that focuses on the visual clarity of the urban space and conceives of the city as a unified totality in which ‘parts can be recognised and organised into a coherent pattern’ (2-3), is perhaps exclusionary in terms of alternative experiences of the city. For Martha, the segregation of the city into landmarks, districts and nodes is alien to her experience of the urban space: ‘It was this business of having to divide off, make
boundaries - it was such a strain. Jimmy and Iris’s cafe, the bombed streets, the river city where Stella was, this hunters’ street…one’s daytime brain was slotted, compartmented, pigeon-holed’ (48). Martha rebels against these imposed totalities, preferring to experience London through her mindless wanderings: ‘Her mind was a soft dark empty space’ (51). Rather than attempting a mental mapping of her surroundings, she wishes to deliberately lose herself in the city. For Martha, the Thames is her only point of reference in the tumult of London, and yet, she deliberately avoids the river in the hope of getting lost. As a recent migrant to the city, Martha has the privilege of inexperience, her relative newness to the city gives her the freedom to wander without the boundaries carved out by routine and familiarity.
This boundarylessness extends to identity. For Lessing, the self is a changeable entity. Not only is this a common theme in her work, but Lessing herself adopted a different persona, writing briefly under the pseudonym ‘Jane Somers’ (Sizemore, 48). Her protagonists
in all of us. Occasionally, her protagonists do away with the self altogether, preferring instead to focus on pure consciousness, as Martha briefly does: ‘But then who was she behind the banalities of the day? A young woman? No, nothing but a soft dark receptive intelligence, that was all’ (51). The city is the perfect landscape to negotiate these selves, a hubbub of
anonymity, chance, excitement. For Martha, the city is fundamentally related to identity. The extraordinary variety of inhabitants allows Martha to drift unnoticed through the multitudes, like the gentle pulling of an ocean current:
‘…she had been carried by that current of people, that tide, which always flows in and out of London…people visiting, holidaying, people wondering if they should settle, people looking for their ancestors and their roots, the students, the travellers, the drifters, the tasters, the derelicts and the nonconformists’ (16).
This diverse confluence on the streets of London makes space for alternative modes of being. Martha flits between herself and ‘Matty’, a bold and self-reliant alter-ego that relishes the excitement of the metropole. In another instance, Martha meets a stranger on the street, invents another name for herself, embodies this name for an afternoon and eventually abandons it to become Martha Quest once more. These sudden switches in identity demonstrate the fluidity of self she discovers in the city: ‘…calling strange identities into being with a switch of clothes or a change of voice-until one felt like an empty space without boundaries’ (30). This fluidity is matched by the narrative form of the novel, in which
dialogue is interspersed amongst Martha’s roaming thoughts as she travels through the streets.
This focus on consciousness and the city draws to mind Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness technique in narratives of London. Enamoured with the city, Woolf’s work frequently attempts to portray the true conscious experience of wandering through London. This is central to her writing in work such as Street Haunting: A London Adventure, in which the desire to purchase a pencil is a pretext for the literary journey through the streets of the city. Woolf’s writing is emblematic of a particular kind of writing on the female urban experience, a Modernist vision that brings the city to the foreground of the narrative, rather than using the city only as a backdrop.
Both Lessing and Woolf are Modernist writers concerned with the female urban experience and critics such as Nancy Joyner and Christine Sizemore have noted the connection. What is different, however, in Lessing’s writing, is her depictions of the urban experience are not relegated to a particular brand of the English upper classes. Quintessentially English, in the traditional sense, Woolf’s writing excludes those experiences of the city that were outside her immediate realm of experience. The result is a privileged and restrictive vision that relegates alternative visions of the city, such as the working class, the postcolonial, the migrant, to their status as alien. Lessing herself, in a 1962 interview, drew attention to this discrepancy in their work:
‘“I’ve always felt this thing about Virginia Woolf - I find her too much of a lady. There’s always a point in her books when I think, my God, she lives in such a different world from anything I’ve ever lived in, I don’t understand it. I think it’s charming in a way but I feel that her experience must have been too limited”’ (Qtd. in Joyner, 204)
Similarly, while Woolf’s focus is on the rhythmic, wave-like experience of consciousness in the city, Lessing’s focus is primarily on the historical. Though she too moves with the pull of an invisible current, her relationship to the city is much more penetrative than Woolf’s. In TFGC, Martha’s depiction of life in the city is largely based on the layers of history that are embedded in the city’s architecture. In this way, Lessing’s understanding of the city is the direct inverse of Woolf’s exclusionary vision. Martha shows an extraordinary awareness of the innumerable lives that have fused together to create London. Consequently, Martha is able to wander the streets in double - vision, witnessing the city as it is to her-a colonial
powerhouse, an unattractive metropolis, and simultaneously the setting for countless lives and loves: ‘Martha walked in double-vision, as if she were two people: herself and Iris, one eye stating, denying, warding off the total hideousness of the whole area, the other, with Iris, knowing it with love’ (21).
Christine Sizemore’s close analysis of the text identifies Martha’s relationship to the city as inherently palimpsestic, a multi-layered text created and perceived by women. Just like the damp and peeling layers of wallpaper Martha discovers in the crumbling remains of a bombed-out building, London holds countless layers of history in its concrete interior.
Sizemore goes on to suggest that Martha’s historical vision of the city is related to her fluid sense of self, a trait she argues is distinctly feminine:
‘Because women do not separate out the sense of self as rigidly as men do, they are more comfortable with seeing the city as mixed, partial, and layered, as districts overlapping with one another in space and time, rather than definite precise areas’ (31).
To expand on Sizemore’s point, this understanding of the self is not only a feminine trait, but is also characteristic of post/coloniality, in which identity is more likely to be a mosaic of selves. Thus, Martha presents an alternative map of the city that focuses on the historical layers of the everyday and in the process disregards nodal points of monumentalised imperial power, such as Piccadilly Circus and Nelson’s column. This map bypasses official imperial representations of the city, displaces the ‘centre’ and instead places value on a feminine experience of the city that is historically focussed:
‘…women’s brains, that recorded in such tiny loving anxious detail the histories of windowsills, skins of paint, replaced curtains and salvaged baulks of timber, there would be a recording instrument, a sort of six-dimensional map which included the histories and lives and loves of people, London’ (21).
As Gayatri Spivak stated ‘in post-coloniality, every metropolitan definition is dislodged. The general mode for the post-colonial is citation, re-inscription, re-routing the historical’ (Qtd in Chambers, 23). These alternative mapping re-route the historical by redirecting the focus from the history of war to the history of female experience. By imbuing the materiality of the city with these intricate histories, the city, for Martha, is reinscribed.
Martha Quest’s complex love affair with London challenges the notion that the city is an inherently masculine space. Long had the city, with its planned and ordered streets, hard lines and business centres, been designated a male domain. The feminine space, in contrast, was traditionally associated with the natural, soft lines, aestheticism and the messy disorder of emotion. Though perhaps in danger of reinforcing these patriarchal stereotypes, rather than denounce these feminine/masculine dichotomies, Martha’s vision of London corresponds to
