Muriel Spark’s feminism is one of the most interesting aspects of her work and one that, outside of academic circles, has not been given much attention. Spark never advertised herself nor her work as feminist, yet when you look at the life she led, it was one of a liberated woman who carved her own path.
“Muriel Spark was a feminist, but not like Germaine Greer,” said Alan Taylor recently – a journalist and friend of Spark. This remark brilliantly sums up Spark’s feminism. Greer was and remains outspoken and direct, whereas Spark was somewhat less obvious. Moreover, Spark’s feminism was not the main focus of her work.
“She is a great novelist who looks like a quieter novelist. An essay on Spark must be correspondingly loud,” said the writer Adam Thirlwell. And he’s right. It’s easy to overlook the deeper meanings in Spark’s writing as the surface is so light-hearted (what Ali Smith refers to as Spark’s blitheness) whilst her novels are deceptively short. Moreover, Spark credits readers with enough intelligence to work things out for themselves.
I am an independent woman.”
Spark didn’t align herself with the feminist movement and wanted to be seen not as a female writer but as a writer. Paradoxically it’s this individualism that is the key to her feminism. Spark puts the onus on the individual to define herself, Spark’s own life being a case in point. She led an independent, unconventional life and became a successful writer in an industry dominated by men. Arguably she could have been even more successful had the patriarchal literary establishment given Spark due credit. Aside from Jean Brodie, Spark wrote another much 21 lesser-known novels.
Spark had a tough life with real economic hardship up until when she became a successful novelist in her early 40s. When she had money, she enjoyed it. She loved to buy clothes and jewellery with the proceeds of her work and interestingly, when writing The Driver’s Seat, arguably her most feminist novel, she spent most of her downtime shopping. “We have the receipts to prove it,” said Alan Taylor (evidence, should Spark ever need it; her life being one long paper-trail). Whilst she loved clothes, it’s hard not to see Spark’s shopping as an expression of her power and freedom.
For Spark, equal pay was the most important concern when it came to women’s rights. She understood that in a world dominated by patriarchal capitalism, equal pay would change the power dynamic. Equal pay remains a key feminist issue – see the recent gender pay gap data.
Give her ten shillings,” said the Baron.
“It’s a man.”
“Give him two pounds.”
– The Comforters
Spark’s novels don’t argue for women’s rights as such; rather they describe the situation of women living under patriarchy, very often in comic fashion. Her breezy humour and lightness of touch frequently belie the seriousness of her subject.
Heroines
One of Spark’s major and largely unrecognised achievements was to put women centre-stage: spirited, complicated and sometimes dangerous women like the charismatic narcissist Jean Brodie. Spark’s heroines are not necessarily nice. Spark frees women from the pressure to be likeable, rather they are off-beat women with agency.
Spark’s heroines are often working women. My favourite are the writers, notably Caroline in Spark’s first novel The Comforters (1957), who navigates the novel as a character in a novel who is writing a book about novels. Caroline listens to her own “madness” – the voice of The Typing Ghost – and plays it at it’s own game. It’s a clever exposé of the mechanics of fiction – arguably Spark’s biggest preoccupation.
The Comforters also features the marvellous Louisa Jepp, a septuagenarian diamond smuggler and keen pickler, whose charm and nonchalance provide a successful distraction from her underhand dealings. She’s like Maude in the film Harold and Maude (1971) only without the teenage lover.
Fleur Talbot, the poet and would-be novelist in Loitering with Intent (1981) is perhaps Spark’s greatest heroine. Utterly self-assured (the novel starts off with her writing poetry in a graveyard) she is never cowed by other people’s expectations or by their attempts to control her: “I was not any sort of victim; I was simply not constituted for the role.” Fleur plays manipulators at their own game in a novel that riffs on the interplay between art and life, and truth and fiction. It’s also a novel where incidences of casual sexism – from both sexes – are met with a swift retort.
The second week of the job she asked me if I was going to get married.
“No I write poetry. I want to write. Marriage would interfere.”
Loitering with Intent is perhaps the most autobiographical of Spark’s novels in that it focuses on the joys of being a writer and reveals the tricks of Spark’s trade. “A valentine to the writing life” is how her former publisher Joseph Kanon describes it, “Nothing was more important to Spark than her work.” A lesson in the importance of self-belief and following your own nature, Loitering with Intent exudes confidence and has a lyrical, celebratory feel.
How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.”
The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
The Girls of Slender Means (1963) features a group of young women in a London boarding house with little ambition. Both charming and flawed, they live in happy ignorance of much of the outside world. They preoccupy themselves with striving to be thin enough to wear the Schiaparelli dress they all share and to be able to fit through a tiny window – the gateway to sex and sunshine, and in the case of a fire, survival itself. It’s a wonderful metaphor for the impossibility of patriarchal beauty standards. Significantly, the blocking-up of the trapdoor to the roof is the result of patriarchal ideas about premarital sex – an action that leads to tragedy.
Bread-and-butter pudding is suicidal.”
If the fire wasn’t enough to highlight female entrapment, male aggression seems unavoidable: “He raped her. She was amazed.” At the end of The Girls of Slender Means, Jane is sexually assaulted – “nothing whatsoever could be done about it” – then a woman is stabbed in the middle of a crowd that pays no heed. The violence comes out of nowhere and is over in a flash.
Murder
He looked as if he would murder me, and he did.”
-The Portobello Road
Women seem to “get it” quite a lot in Spark’s novels. In Memento Mori (1959) an old lady is randomly bludgeoned to death during a burglary. In The Bachelors (1960) a man plots the murder of his pregnant girlfriend after she refuses to get rid of the baby. In The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) a young woman is murdered with a corkscrew. In Not to Disturb (1972), a Baron kills his wife and their mutual lover, whilst Aiding and Abetting (2000) was inspired by Lord Lucan’s murder of the nanny in the place of his wife.
Violence as a way of control is something that Spark would have understood well, having herself experienced an abusive relationship in her young marriage to the mentally unstable and violent Sidney Oswald Spark (S.O.S.). Abusive relationships leave a mark and I would hazard a guess that Spark’s concern with how people manipulate and control one another, as well as the nature of truth and lies, is rooted in this painful experience. It’s a subject Spark further explored when writing black propaganda for MI6 during the Second World War.
The Driver’s Seat (1970)
As soon as I saw you I knew that you were the one. You’re my type.”
The Driver’s Seat – the story of a woman who seeks her own killer – Spark takes the typical figure of the passive female victim and makes her the author of her own destiny. In essence a joke, the novel riffs on the idea that women are “asking for it” whilst exploring the nature of control.
Fabulously funny, The Driver’s Seat plays against convention at every turn. It upends the traditional murder mystery and pokes fun at the holiday romance, all whilst satirising patriarchal attitudes (see my previous post.)
From mansplaining to attempted rape, the heroine Lise experiences almost constant aggression from men keen to subjugate her to their desires. To a certain extent Lise courts the attention of these men, only it’s all part of the game: she is the hunter posing as prey.
Madness
What a crazy bitch you have created.” – Alfred A Knopf
Whilst Lise could be seen to expose the spiritual void at the centre of patriarchal capitalism, what is perhaps more interesting is the way she embodies the idea of the stereotypical hysterical woman. Lise’s madness is a red herring.
The Driver’s Seat shows how oppression drives people to madness and self-sabotage. Second, it shows victim-blaming as a crazy notion because only a mad woman would instigate her own murder. And third, it highlights female hysteria as a patriarchal concept, where calling women mad is a useful way of controlling them.
When Spark was writing The Driver’s Seat, a drunk Gore Vidal took the opportunity to criticise Spark’s previous novel, The Public Image (1968), saying it was implausible, reminding her that “all women writers go mad.” Spark may not have cared what Vidal thought, however The Driver’s Seat would have been a satisfying response to the widespread notion of women writers being thought of as inherently mad. Not only, The Driver’s Seat works as a send-up of all the crazy women in literature.
Am I noticeably neurotic, do you think?”
Spark’s own period of madness in the mid-1950s – hallucinations as a result of taking the slimming pill Dexedrine – followed by her conversion to Catholicism, provided the inspiration for The Comforters, the book that kick-started her career as a novelist. Arguably, Spark’s hallucinations opened her mind to a much greater sense of creative possibility. Madness, a prominent theme in Spark’s work, isn’t necessarily something to be shunned.
“Is the world a lunatic asylum then? Are we all courteous maniacs discreetly making allowances for everyone else’s derangement?”
-The Comforters
Victims and Oppressors
By making the Lise in The Driver’s Seat the author of her own death, Spark inverts the traditional notion of the victim as a passive object. The beautiful young woman brutally murdered is a trope that persists in fiction and on screen. Spark turns this trope on its head; giving the victim agency and putting her centre-stage. So often with crimes, it is the victim who is forgotten.
Not only, Spark questions the whole notion of victimhood. “I think there is a kind of truth in the story,” she wrote to her agent in October 1969. “In some of the murders one reads about one senses a sort of collusion and sometimes one begins to wonder which party is the ‘victim.’”
All oppression creates a state of war.” – Simone de Beauvoir
Whilst Spark comes dangerously close to feeding the victim-blaming narrative that is so pervasive when it comes to violence against women, what she is saying is far more nuanced. The Driver’s Seat explores the interplay of victim and aggressor and how that can be a vicious cycle that serves to perpetuate oppression. An oppressive society, Spark seems to suggest, makes victims of us all (albeit victims of varying degrees). Moreover, Spark shows how easily victims can become perpetrators.
Spark’s intention seems to be, by exposing the mechanisms at work in an oppressive society, to empower individuals to see past the gaslighting and to recognise to what extent they are colluding in the system and where they might in fact have some control.
The Art of Ridicule
Spark’s 1970 speech entitled “The Desegregation of Art” offers valuable insight into the thinking behind The Driver’s Seat. In her speech Spark talks about the victim-oppressor complex and how it is portrayed in literature and art. She suggests that, whilst art can temporarily evoke sympathy, it tends to reinforce people’s roles as over- or underdogs.
Spark proposes to replace the art of “sentiment and emotion” with the art of ridicule – her weapon of choice for tackling violence and oppression. “Violence in any form,” she says, should be “ruthlessly mocked.” It’s a speech that would strike a chord today.
The only effective art of our particular time is the satirical, the harsh and witty, the ironic and derisive. Because we have come to a moment in history when we are surrounded on all sides and oppressed by the absurd.”
Death of the Authoress
It could be that The Driver’s Seat is a response to the sexism of the literary world at the time. In 1967 Roland Barthes published his theory on The Death of the Author managing to completely leave out women writers. Could The Driver’s Seat be Spark’s mocking response – The Death of the Authoress – whereby Lise performs her own twisted version of Anna Pavlova’s The Dying Swan? (In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Brodie takes her charges to see Pavlova perform that very dance.)
Second Wave Feminism
The Driver’s Seat was published in 1970, the same year as feminist classics The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer and Sexual Politics by Kate Millett. The Female Eunuch rebelled against the idea of women as sex objects, whilst Sexual Politics identified the patriarchy as “the most pervasive ideology of our culture.” Lise, it could be said, rebels against being a sex object, not just with her garish clothes and the picking up and dropping of men, but in doing away with her body entirely. It seems that, intentionally or not, Spark was tapping into the zeitgeist.
Take Back Control
It’s not just Lise in The Driver’s Seat who self-sabotages in the attempt to take back control. Sandy similarly self-sabotages in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie when she betrays her domineering teacher, leading to her penance as a nun – one who greets visitors from behind bars.
Spark’s observations on the cycle of victimhood in The Driver’s Seat extend far beyond the novel’s feminist subject matter; they apply to any situation where the oppressed are tricked into self-sabotaging.
Spark’s playful, subversive fictions are a wonderful antidote to the chaos of the so-called post-truth age. They serve to liberate rather than contain: in deconstructing myths Spark opens up a world of possibility, and in doing so, puts the power in the hands of the reader.
…and I went on my way rejoicing.”
-Loitering with Intent
Jeanie in the Metro 