Penelope Lively's "Moon Tiger": A Feminist "History of the World"

Abstract

Surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid thus far to British author Penelope Lively, a first-rate novelist of increasing importance whose work Moon Tiger won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1987.1 Until fairly recently Lively was known only as an author of children's literature, but since the late 1970s she has produced seven adult novels, all of them technically sophisticated and all concerned with contemporary philosophical and epistemological issues. Her interest in psychological time, the subjective nature of experience, and the relationship between language and reality places her squarely in the postmodernist tradition. With Moon Tiger Lively has also made a place for herself in the developing novel tradition. There has of course been much debate about what constitutes a feminist novel, and theories have changed over the last twenty years? In the early days of the women's movement-the 1960s and early 1970s-a novel was generally considered if it portrayed liberated female characters breaking free of traditional roles or if it raised readers' consciousnesses by exposing the pernicious effects of patriarchal culture. The polemical novels of Marilyn French and Doris Lessing-for example, The Women's Room and The Summer before the Dark, respectively-are good representatives of this early brand of fiction. In recent years, however, American and British feminists, influenced by the critical views of Derrida and the French feminists, have adopted a more complex theory: they argue that patriarchal values are deeply embedded in all the signs and structures of our culture, including narrative conventions and even language itself, and that to create a truly work a novelist must do more than merely alter traditional character types and plots; she must challenge and undermine patriarchal assumptions by departing from standard narrative patterns and/or syntax. French feminists urge women writers to reject conventional discourse, which is the means through which men have objectified the world and named it according to their terms, and to write from the body, that is, employ a kind of gestural, rhythmic, prereferential language that expresses the physical pleasure women felt in infancy before they were indoctrinated with male-oriented attitudes.3 Less radical North American and British women writers protest in a subtler way: while employing conventional syntax and referential language, they slyly undermine established discourse by questioning or making fun of some of the conventions. Margaret Atwood, for example, presents female protagonists who seem like innocents in the world of language; they continually wonder, in childlike fashion, about why a word means what it does. This drawing attention to the arbitrariness of the way the world has been named points out that language is not natural but is rather a man-made structure. A similar effect