Margaret Drabble, "The Millstone": part of the « Angry Young Men » movement?

Résumé du document

Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield (Yorkshire) in 1939. She has an upper-class and intellectual background: her father was a barrister, a county court judge and a novelist; her mother was a teacher. She had a strict education and a studious life as a young girl: she went to a Quaker boarding-school and graduated at the Cambridge. Before writing novels, she was an actress in the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Extraits

[...] This individualism is another feature from what could be the ‘Angry Young Men' movement. If Jimmy in Look Back in Anger must be the more relevant example for it, it can also be found in a lot of other works. In The Millstone, although Rosamund's character experiences a great evolution, she still stays individualist through the whole novel. This is maybe why she fears and focuses so much on sex and relationships between men and women, which were the norm during the sexual revolution, but that she cannot experience because she doesn't want to interact with other people at all. [...]

[...] Margaret Drabble, The Millstone: part of the Angry Young Men movement? Margaret Drabble is a writer who was often assimilated to what is called the ‘Angry Young Men' literary movement. But, as a lot of those writers of the 1950s who were put into the same category, she never claimed being fully part of this movement all the more so since the term of movement is in this case controversial. It is then interesting to find out what similarities could be found between Drabble's novel The Millstone and the criteria which, for the critics, were representative of the ‘Angry Young Men'. [...]

[...] In Room at the Top (John Braine, 1957), Joe tries to integrate a higher social group than the one he comes from, and apparently succeeds, but basically not, because of the contradictions this shift creates in himself. This class confrontation is also to be found in Arnold Wesker's Roots (1959), where Beatie discovers a new world after meeting a middle-class man whom she is in love with. He teaches her different thoughts and ideals which, by confronting them with her family's way of thinking and acting, create a class confrontation and a Beatie's rebellion. At the beginning of The Millstone, Rosamund is described as very young, and having little experience of life and social relationships. [...]

[...] But it is true that a lot of subtle similarities appear between The Millstone and the works of authors who were put by the critics in the category of the ‘Angry Young Men', which similarities Drabble also admitted. Bibliography Margaret Drabble, The Millstone John Osborne, Look back in anger Arnold Wesker, Roots Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey John Braine, Room at the Top, 1957. [...]

[...] The Millstone was published in 1965. It is one of her first published novels; it won the John Llewelly Rhys Prize, which is a prize awarding young authors. It also was a success on screen in 1969 as A Touch of Love. The story takes place in London during the sexual revolution; Rosamund Stacey, a young and inexperienced woman, whose main occupation is writing a thesis about the sixteenth-century love poetry, finds herself pregnant after her first sexual relation. After a ridiculous attempt (because of a great lack of information) of abortion, she decides to keep her child without telling the father, who she doesn't meet with anymore during her pregnancy. [...]