'SO HARD TO WRITE': WOMEN ARTISTS IN WOMEN'S NOVELS FROM WOOLF TO LESSING AND DRABBLE

Women writers and artists are rare in modern British novels, particularly as protagonists. Furthermore, in contrast with her male counterparts, a woman writer or painter in the novels of Richardson, Sinclair, Woolf, Lessing, or Drabble is more typically an amateur than a professional. If she is successful, like Anna Wulf and Jane Gray, she is apt to disparage her success. Although what Maurice Beebe has called the "artist of the ivory tower" dominates men's novels, women vehemently reject isolated aestheticism. Neither do they embrace Beebe's "artist of the sacred fount." The central debate in women's novels is whether one should be an artist at all.;From Sinclair's Mary Olivier (1919) to Drabble's The Waterfall (1969), women are concerned that art, because it is playful and therefore amoral, stands opposed to a woman's normally serious and practical responsibilities. Kenneth Burke has suggested that an author's style is a strategic response to a situation. By examining the rhetorical figures which recur in these self-reflexive narratives, one sees the women's artist's repeated, ambivalent attempts to allow herself to play with language and to compete against both reality and the visions of other artists. Especially in Woolf's Between the Acts (1941), Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962) and Drabble's The Waterfall, women artists continually question whether the artist has the right to suspend herself from reality, even temporarily. This dilemma has been avoided rather than resolved in Lessing's and Drabble's most recent novels. While any Kunstlerroman must prove its hero worthy of the special status of being an artist, it is the particular burden of the artist-heroine's story to prove not only that she is worthy of such status but that the status is worth having.