The Middle Ground by Margaret Drabble

First published: 1980

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The late 1970’s

Locale: England

Principal Characters:

• Kate Armstrong, a mother, divorcee, and successful journalist nearing her fortieth birthday
• Evelyn Stennett, her friend, a social worker
• Ted Stennett, Evelyn’s husband and Kate’s former lover
• Hugo Mainwaring, Evelyn’s cousin, a writer on international affairs

The Novel

The Middle Ground examines the experience of characters who are entering middle age; the vantage point is that of the postwar generation which came to maturity in the 1960’s—the bright, privileged beneficiaries of the sexual revolution who must struggle to find their place in a world of changing values and expectations. Kate Armstrong, Ted and Evelyn Stennett, and Hugo Mainwaring are all involved in careers that have lost their initial luster, and they face difficult family situations as well. Kate speaks to Hugo ironically of her “midlife crisis,” both embarrassed and amused to find herself living out a cliche. By the end of the novel, however, all four characters have come to terms with themselves and are ready to take up the reins of their lives again.

The book has no plot to speak of. Margaret Drabble dips into her characters’ minds, describes episodes from their past, and even has one (Hugo) write an analysis of another (Kate). She expects her readers to keep track of a huge cast of characters and move at dizzying speed from past to present and back again. At times, the novel seems to be a kaleidoscope of contemporary British life. What holds all the disparate elements together is the personality of Kate and her movement from alienation to recommitment.

Near the end of the book, Kate describes her distress: “For months I had this strange sensation, as if the world had in fact slipped, and I’d fallen off it.... This picture kept coming into my head, of a great dark globe rolling through the darkness at a strange angle.” Up to this point in her life, Kate has been relentlessly cheerful, strong, and dependable—one of fortune’s favorites. A combination of humor, talent, and luck that she had enabled her to escape from her stultifying lower middle-class background in East London. She married a ne’er-do-well artist and began a successful career as a writer of short pieces on women’s lives and problems. Although her husband left her after the birth of their three children, she kept her life on a steady course. She even managed to carry on a long-term affair with Ted and simultaneously to preserve her close friendship with his wife Evelyn. This unorthodox arrangement filled the needs of all three, and they seemed to have reached a point of equilibrium.

Then, in a manner familiar to readers of Drabble’s other work, fate intervened to shatter Kate’s complacency. She became pregnant by Ted at a point when their relationship was clearly over. She considered and rejected abortion, then learned through prenatal tests that her baby was suffering from spina bifida. On the advice of her doctors and of her eighteen-year-old son Mark, she terminated the pregnancy. Her action haunts her. “Maternity had been her passion, her primary passion in life, and she had been forced to deny it. Fate had forced her to undo her own nature.”

As the action of the novel begins, she is trying to reestablish a direction in her life. Her first movement toward wholeness comes with the arrival of a young Iraqi student, Mujib. He turns up at her door on the recommendation of his Lebanese fiancee’s mother, an old friend of Kate. Mujib baffles and exasperates Kate, but dealing with him seems to fill her need to be responsible for someone else—to replace the dead child, perhaps. She also takes comfort from helping Hugo, who has lost part of an arm while covering a battle in Eritrea.

More critical to her restoration is a new assignment: to make a television film on the women who were her classmates in the East Romley secondary modern school. The task provides her with the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to her childhood neighborhood. Her journey into her past has comic elements; the seriousness of Drabble’s topic never prevents her from seeing the ludicrous qualities in many human experiences. Kate makes contact with her roots by hiking in wobbly high-heeled boots up a sewer embankment. Sniffing the odors that come up through a grate takes her back to her early days when her father lectured her about the importance of his job as a sewer inspector.

Her meetings with her former schoolmates help her to deal with her frustration with her work. Though women’s issues have provided her with a career and a much-needed income, she has come to feel that they are limited. She no longer has anything fresh to write about. Reviewing the videotapes of her interviews, she begins to free herself from the sense that she must fit women into patterns. “She’d get nowhere if she spent the rest of her life forcing things into articles and programmes when they didn’t want to be forced. Shapeless diversity, what was wrong with that?”

Paradoxically, her renewal of hope comes to full fruition through another random blow of fate. This time, the victim is Evelyn, who is almost blinded when a bottle of cleaning fluid is thrown in her face. Kate, always at her best when others need her, immediately steps in to help Ted and the Stennett children. A few days later, as she stands at the window of Evelyn’s hospital room, looking at the view of London below, she realizes that her world has come back into balance:

  London, how could one ever be tired of it? How could one stumble dully through its streets, or waste time sitting in a heap staring at a wall? When there it lay, its old intensity restored, shining with invitation.... The aerial view.... The aerial view of human love, where all connections are made known, where all roads connect?

Drabble’s novel ends on a positive note as Kate decides to celebrate her restoration to equilibrium with a party. The social occasion becomes a metaphor for the author’s belief in the redemptive power of human connections and the value of daily existence, even in a world filled with unexpected, unmerited violence and pain. Drabble’s affirmation is symbolized by Kate’s purchase of an enormous potted bay tree, a hardy plant that will grow in her backyard. She can once again look to the future: “It waits, unseen, and she will meet it, it will meet her. There is no way of knowing what it will be. It does not know itself. But it will come into being.”

The Characters

Drabble has peopled The Middle Ground with a diverse and extensive cast of characters. Among the most memorable are Kate’s obese, agoraphobic mother; Hunt, the down-at-the-heels, drunken bohemian who introduced Kate to her husband and helped her escape from her East Romley world; Mujib, the serious, inquisitive young Iraqi; Marylou Scott (nee Shirley), who went from Romley Fourways secondary modern school to the silver screen and a sterile, expensively decorated apartment; and little Rubia Subhan, the eight-year-old Pakistani girl who has the presence of mind to summon help for Evelyn after her injury. Drabble’s obvious affection for young people can be seen in her brief but lively sketches of the Armstrong, Stennett, and Mainwaring children, with their punk hairdos, their outrageous sweatshirts, and their touching and surprising moments of support and insight.

These characters and many others provide the background against which Drabble presents the four central figures. Kate is, of course, the most fully developed, a lively, vibrant, contradictory figure. She wears expensive boots with rummage sale shirts, lives in a remodeled fish-and-chips shop in cozy but invariably cluttered surroundings, and rather envies Evelyn’s ability to provide regular sit-down, orderly meals for her family. Her friends depend upon her for motherly solicitude and perennial cheerfulness; she, as Hugo observes, depends on them as an audience—“many things that Kate did were little performances, requiring applause, enquiry or comment.” Kate is, above all, a very human character, recognizable and sympathetic.

Kate’s warmth, her cheerful disorder, and her dependence on others, are in sharp contrast to Evelyn’s intrinsic seriousness, her well-kept home, and her duty-driven commitment to London’s poor and displaced. Yet Evelyn, like Kate, finds herself questioning her purpose and her vocation. The growing bureaucracy frustrates her, and she sees more failure than success from her work. She has horrifying visions of herself, “the mildest of women,” physically attacking the old and frail. She seems far more isolated than Kate, even though she is constantly working with people. Her marriage offers her little sustenance. She almost welcomes Kate’s liaison with Ted, which protects her from some of his needs. She even finds dealing with her own children difficult, though she is good with adolescent delinquents. She, like Kate, is able to work through her self-doubt, but her solution is more stoical, less joyful. Lying in her hospital bed, she realizes that she can, if she must, live without faith, subsisting on human contacts and the small daily pleasures of life, such as the mushroom salad Ted brings from a delicatessen.

Ted and Hugo are somewhat less well-developed, believable characters, but their presence serves to universalize Drabble’s point and to free her of the accusation of being exclusively a “woman’s writer.” The two are very different from each other. Ted, a successful medical researcher, is aggressive, self-confident, and not particularly sensitive to the needs of others. His midlife crisis comes in the form of “immense lassitude,” especially in his relations with women. Evelyn’s accident has a therapeutic effect on him as well as Kate, and the reader sees him last with his eye on a neighbor, Rosamund Stacey, the heroine of Drabble’s early novel The Millstone (1965).

Hugo is far more sensitive to others than is Ted; he is Kate’s confidant and appears to be at least a little in love with her, though she refuses to take him seriously. As a boy, he prepared himself for hardship and heroism, and he has made a career as a writer on international affairs. His injury has brought him to his point of crisis. He refuses to wear an artificial limb, being secretly relieved that he has been freed of the obligation to be a hero. He will stay in England, he has decided, to write a book on the Middle East. The last pages, however, see him being fitted, with Kate’s help, for a new arm and making plans to return to Bagdad. The reason for his change of heart is not altogether clear, but it seems essential for the novel that he, like Kate, be ready for a new beginning.

Critical Context

The Middle Ground appears to have brought to a close at least one period of Margaret Drabble’s career. After publishing a novel every two or three years from 1962 to 1980, she has turned her attention to other tasks, including the editing of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985). It is tempting to read this novel as the culmination of her exploration of contemporary English society. Having affirmed the value of life in the face of violence and irrationality, she has, perhaps, reached a natural stopping point.

Like The Realms of Gold (1975) and The Ice Age, Drabble’s two preceding novels, The Middle Ground focuses on men as well as women and the world of public as well as domestic affairs. It is, for these reasons, among others, a richer work than her earlier novels. Few would argue, however, that it is in every way her best or most lasting work. Even her greatest admirers may find some of her narrative techniques excessively mannered—for example, her conversations with the reader about how to handle her narrative; her long list of what-happens-next questions in the last section; her catalog of each character’s activities during the month of November; and the introduction of characters from her earlier works in minor roles. Her reliance on the minutiae of everyday life to give texture to her work may also limit its long-term appeal.

Even with its flaws, however, this novel remains an important part of Drabble’s literary achievement. It displays her comic perspective and her powers of observation as well as her sensitivity to the predicament of the middle-aged caught in the conflicts of contemporary society. More than that, it states clearly her lasting conviction that, through human connections, order and meaning can be brought out of chaos.

Bibliography

Greene, Gayle. “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (Winter, 1991): 290-321. A comparison of five writers (Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Laurence, Doris Lessing, and Toni Morrison) who deal with the questions of how memory differs from nostalgia and how it promotes or hinders liberation. Includes The Middle Ground.

Moran, Mary Hurley. Margaret Drabble: Existing Within Structures. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Analyzes Drabble’s views of human freedom, choice, and constraints, using all of her novels published up to 1983, including The Middle Ground. Moran argues that Drabble sees human lives as being determined by a variety of forces, including fate, nature, and the family. Hence, she rejects the existentialist idea that one is free to become what one will.

Myer, Valerie Grosvenor. Margaret Drabble: A Reader’s Guide. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. After a brief introduction, each novel, from A Summer Birdcage (1963) to A Natural Curiosity (1989), is discussed. A useful introduction to Drabble’s fiction.

Packer, Joan Garrett. Margaret Drabble: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1988. A comprehensive annotated bibliography of all Drabble’s writings, major and minor, and of English-language secondary works about Drabble published before May of 1986.

Rose, Ellen Cronan, ed. Critical Essays on Margaret Drabble. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. Eleven essays tracing the evolution of Drabble’s themes, including the lack of choice for women and the effect of equality on women. Five of the essays were written especially for this volume, and none of the six reprinted essays is older than 1977. One is devoted to The Middle Ground.

Sadler, Lynn Veach. Margaret Drabble. Boston: Twayne, 1986. An examination of the fact that Drabble’s vision is primarily autobiographical, focusing on the themes of young women, independent women, marriage, and coping with middle age. Includes the novels up to The Ice Age and The Middle Ground.