Sexuality and Intertextuality: Margaret Drabble's "The Radiant Way"

Abstract

In her influential commentary on and writing, Laugh of the Medusa, H6lne Cixous argues that must woman (877), that is, must write of their own experience as sexual beings without being drawn into the negative images created by male texts and interpretations. She observes that have been riveted by male texts two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss (885). Yet in fact, women aren't castrated . . . they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning[.] You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's (885). While the narratives of Margaret Drabble may not suggest themselves as examples of Cixous's challenge to reconceptualize language through the differentness of female experience, in The Radiant Way, her most recent novel, Drabble indeed woman: by revising several figures of classical tradition, including both figures named by Cixous Medusa and a version of the abyss, the labyrinth she writes new meanings for her female characters and for her readers. Through these reconceived images, Drabble explores the sexual as well as the social experiences of three female characters who are deeply immersed in the issues of their time and place. Although Cixous's visionary, laughing Medusa may not be an intentional intertextual connection, Drabble both wittily and seriously establishes the intertextuality of her fiction as she explores the ebb and flow of relationships in the context of contemporary British life. In several of her recent novels, she affirms her relation to two narrative traditions, the classical one and the British novel tradition. In the latter context, Kate Armstrong, the protagonist of The Middle Ground,