Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1965) was one of two books that I read when I was seventeen that I loved so much I re-read them obsessively (the other was The Bell Jar but perhaps it’s best not to go there just at the moment). The novel tells the first-person story of Rosamund Stacey, an aspiring academic whose friends think she is the last word in promiscuity. She is quite the opposite, in fact, and finds herself pregnant after her first diffident sexual encounter with an acquaintance she had assumed was gay. She fails not to have the baby, and the rest of the book details her pregnancy, birth experience, interactions with the nascent National Health Service, and a final meeting with the baby’s father. Rosamund’s narrative is almost out-of-body she sounds so detached - although I have discovered, after seven years of living in the UK, that this is also called ‘being English’. She comments on this herself in the novel’s first line that ‘my career has always been marked by a strange mixture of confidence and cowardice: almost, one might say, made by it.’
But this is not a blog for adolescent reminiscences. The reason I am writing a post about it, is that I happened upon a podcast of Margaret Drabble being interviewed this year on the subject of The Millstone when my own baby was four months’ old. I thought it would be interesting to return to this novel nearly - cough - twenty years later, and read it from the point of view of having given birth myself. It was an interesting experience, perhaps as close to speaking to your younger self as it is likely to get.
When I first read it, I remember being beguiled by Rosamund’s mix of confidence and cowardice, which seemed to me like worldliness, and her self-assurance about her intellectual abilities. I had admired how she was, in some ways, able to live the Superwoman ideal: she could work in her chosen profession, while single-handedly raising her baby. And, for good measure, her body blithely ‘bounced back’ quickly after giving birth. If I thought much at all at seventeen about having children, which I didn’t, I’m sure I would’ve thought Rosamund offered some kind of positive role model.
All of which goes to show how little we know about anything when we’re seventeen. This time around, I was a little irked by Rosamund’s confidence-bordering-on-arrogance - not every solo mum gets to live rent-free in their parents’ Marylebone flat - and frustrated at her cowardice, especially in regard to her failure to re-connect with George (the baby’s father). I could interpret the class codes in the novel that passed me by as a teenager. I was intrigued to note the different mores regarding acceptable behaviour while pregnant i.e. drinking and smoking. I was somewhat shocked that she thought it perfectly all right to leave her baby at home asleep, while she popped out to the chemist. And I felt like I wanted to slap her when she met George again in the novel’s final chapter.
Of course, this is a novel, not a how-to manual on perfect pregnancy and parenthood, for which I think we can all be grateful. But once I had gone through in fact what Rosamund had gone through in fiction, I could no longer read and identify with the character in the way I had when I was seventeen. Then, I found it a feminist narrative of liberation: Rosamund is able to defy social convention and succeed on her own terms. Now, I was more acutely aware of the advantages that accrued to her because of her class and academic privilege. I was more aware of the embodied experience of being a mother, and acutely aware of how fortunate I was to have a supportive partner.
So is it a feminist novel? In some ways it is: Rosamund does defy social expectation and succeeds in her career, while caring for a sick child. In some ways it isn’t: is Rosamund as Superwoman really a relatable character? Does she set unrealistic expectations for women, particularly those who do not share her privileges? Does her failure to connect with other people, due to her ‘flawed character’, mean that she is martyring herself?
More importantly, did I enjoy the novel? It’s hard to say, as it was labouring - no pun intended - under the weight of my high expectations. It still has narrative urgency, and Rosamund’s voice is as direct as ever. The reader is like a confidant listening to a young mother make several rods for her own back. Indeed, as Rosamund observes early in the novel, ‘I did not know that a pattern forms before we are aware of it, and what we think we make becomes a rigid prison making us.’ I had previously found Rosamund’s refusal to re-connect with George at the end of novel, choosing to go it alone with her baby, a refusal to submit to patriarchy, and, hence a satisfactory ending. Now, I found it intransigent, and difficult to fathom. It left me wondering whether or not a feminist narrative can only be about women going it alone. Isn’t there room to connect with others - male or female - and re-define supportive relationships so that they do not re-inscribe traditional gender roles and uphold patriarchal values? In short, does it have to be all or nothing?
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