Critical Survey

During the twentieth century, scientific advances, especially in the field of reproductive technologies, have fundamentally altered ideas about parenting, the family and what it means to be human. In the 1980s, the family became a significant site of political conflict in the UK when family values were defended and so-called pretended families were condemned. New information technologies make it possible for online chat between friends who have never met. Changes in legislation have defined and protected the rights of the child and spectacular campaigns have developed for fathers’ rights. Meanwhile tracing your family history has become one of the most popular hobbies.

In Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the architecture of the family is scrutinised and stretched to breaking point. Partnerships and relationships, which by implication suggest ‘nearness’, are graphically torn apart before partial reconciliations are achieved. The bonds of the family are costly, combining the beloved aspect of the term ‘dear’ with its more detrimental meanings. ‘Near and dear’ denotes a physical and emotional proximity that is revealed to be acutely and negatively exaggerated in Danielewski’s novel. The physical and emotional ‘nearness’ of family life is teased out as understanding and reunion are approached through journey, specifically through the mythic confrontation with the labyrinth. Gradually, through allusion to mythological struggle and unavoidable psychoanalytical ties, the novel implicitly confers a transformation of the family through a journey of remembrance. The spatial manipulation of family relations and the inevitable reformation of these relationships, elicited through the labyrinth, are primary considerations in this article.

Rees-Jones' Quiver and Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto' explore how different mythologies of being can emancipate women from and create a dialogue with ordinary female reproduction. Haraway and Rees-Jones use advances in reproductive and mechanical technologies to imagine new modes of being which are not simply products of the imagination, but a recycling of images and debates of concern to women and feminists. In Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood?, Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli Klein and Shelley Minden ask a pertinent question: '[e]ach time a new technological development is hailed the same question arises: is this liberation or oppression in a new guise?' Both Haraway and Rees-Jones explore the rise of new technologies in relation to gender and maternity and gauge the emancipatory or oppressive possibilities.

Since their rediscovery as minor comic masterpieces in the late 1970s, Barbara Pym's early novels, produced between 1950 and 1963, have been widely reassessed. Interestingly, the period of Pym's early success precisely spans what I will call the 'long 1950s', coming to an abrupt end in 1963 with the rejection of An Unsuitable Attachment by Pym's regular publisher, Jonathan Cape. This action, in an ironic move that Pym herself might later have appreciated, came appositely at precisely the cultural moment pinpointed by Pym's friend, Philip Larkin, as the point when 'the sixties' actually began: "between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP". However, from being perceived at that point as a quaintly old fashioned novelist incapable of articulating female desire, Pym has since emerged as a writer whose approach to sexuality is in some ways more complex than that of her more fashionable peers, whose embrace of the 'sexual revolution' now looks relatively uncritical. This essay, then, aims to emphasise the conjunction of Pym's early creative period with the 'age of marriages' in the postwar period precisely because of the cultural contradictions involved.

More than any other novel of the last fifty years, Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956) has emerged as the talismanic literary account of the consequences of postwar migration to Britain. These consequences are well known: Selvon's novel engages with the growing racism of London; the challenge of his characters – Moses, Galahad and others – to find work, accommodation and sustenance (both emotional and material); the defiant attempt to resist prejudice and establish a new, vibrant and cosmopolitan London culture. Yet perhaps the least discussed issue in the novel is Galahad's fatherhood; early in the novel, and only once, a reference is made to the fact that, eight-and-a-half-months after Galahad's arrival, a young woman can be spied pushing a pram through Ladbroke Grove that contains his son. The appearance of this enigmatic child - quickly forgotten by his father, Selvon's novel and its critics - exposes the disruptive and transformative effect on the family by the historical phenomenon of postwar migration.

The Map of Love (1999), a novel by the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif, opens in Egypt and America in the late twentieth century, but shifts in time to explore and imaginatively reclaim the terrain of the travels of a Victorian woman in Egypt, Lady Lucie Duff Gordon, English author of Letters from Egypt (1865). The novel explores the links between a contemporary American-Egyptian family and a nineteenth-century Anglo-Egyptian one. By focussing on the hybrid family and by drawing on historical figures such as Gordon and the English Orientalist painter John Frederick Lewis, Soueif seeks to explore the complex dynamics of intercultural discourse. The Map of Love destabilises the homogeneity of a patriarchal and imperial narrative (several of Soueif 's nineteenth century British characters are anti-imperial) and it is through the representation of the harem as desirable domestic space that Soueif's revisionist project advances a positive vision of nineteenth-century Arab-Muslim domesticity and culture. These representations also align her project with nineteenth-century female travellers' accounts of the harem.

From her first novel, Behind the Scenes At the Museum, to her most recent, Case Histories, Kate Atkinson's fiction can be described as attempting to rewrite and revision the family. All of her novels present us with families that have been altered or reshaped in some way, usually because of the loss of a mother or a child. Her narratives are driven by the need to account for these losses: to discover the fate of the missing family members, and in the process to uncover often unpleasant family secrets. In Atkinson's fictions, the family is revealed as a disturbing place, the site of violence, resentments and jealousies as much as love and affection. At the same time, the continued return to family plots in her novels suggests that the family, regardless of its flaws, is not an institution that either she or her protagonists can easily leave behind. Atkinson's first novel, Behind the Scenes At The Museum, like her later fiction, is both an attempt to critique and debunk received notions of family, and an exploration of familial loss and longing.

Jeanette Winterson's fictional families are unusual. Invariably the adopted or fostered child is used as a narrator. This offers the perspective that nurtured relationships are as emotionally bonding as natural ones. The traditional, biological family is, at times, used in order to be exposed as brutal and false, as in Art and Lies (1994) where Picasso is sexually abused by her brother and is the product of rape between her father and a maid. Winterson's novels appear to challenge the biological family. Furthermore, adultery is used as a repeated theme. From Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) onwards, marriage is described as an institution and is castigated, whereas the belief in true love hardly ever wavers. That Winterson continues to draw on the family, however it is constituted, reflects an ongoing concern with the bonds of love. It is this belief in love that reveals a paradoxical fidelity to a conservative stance which is elsewhere, through the critiques of family and marriage, apparently questioned.

Portraits SUE BUTLER

Yes It's True … RENNIE PARKER

Surfacing by William Park (Liverpool: Spike, 2005), ISBN 0-9518978-7-X, £5.99

The Ogling of Lady Luck by Alan Dixon (Nottingham: Shoestring, 2005), ISBN 1-904886-12-4, £6.95

Mr Dick’s Kite by Arnold Rattenbury (Nottingham: Shoestring, 2005), ISBN 1-904886-13-2, £6.95 Blue is Rare by Kevin Borman (Frizinghall: Redbeck, 2005), ISBN 1-904338-19-4, £8.00

The Cartographer Sleeps by Barbara Daniels (Nottingham: Shoestring, 2005), ISBN 1-904886-14-0, £8.95

Mixer by André Mangeot (Norwich: Egg Box, 2005), ISBN 0-9543920-4-3, £5.00

The Outsider by Christine McNeill (Nottingham: Shoestring, 2005), ISBN 1-904886-15-9, £8.95 Taking Cover by Michael Tolkien (Bradford: Redbeck, 2005), ISBN 1-904338-28-3, £8.95

Poems, 1955–2005 by Anne Stevenson (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2005), ISBN 1-852246-99-5, £9.95

Notes on contributors