Feminine Endings. And Beginnings: Margaret Drabble's "The Waterfall"

Abstract

Margaret Drabble has called her fifth novel, The Waterfall (1969), most female of all my books.' In it, she tacitly refutes Simone de Beauvoir's contention that there is no such thing as feminine. This is particularly interesting in light of Drabble's early attraction to de Beauvoir's feminism, which she first encountered as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the sixties where she read The Second Sex and was profoundly affected by it.2 Indeed, Drabble's first three novels A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), The Garrick Year (1964), and The Millstone (1965)may be read as a translation into fictional form of Part II of The Second Sex, which charts the typical development of a woman in a patriarchal society. In those novels, says Drabble, I wrote about the situation of being a womanbeing stuck with a baby, or having an illegitimate baby, or being stuck with a marriage where you couldn't have a job.3 De Beauvoir's classic analysis of the situation of women denies the ontological validity of the concept of femininity. Instead, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has pointed out, The Second Sex insists that