The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble

First published: 1969

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: London and Yorkshire

Principal Characters:

• Jane Gray, a poet and mother of two
• James Otford, Jane’s Norwegian cousin by marriage and her lover
• Malcolm Gray, Jane’s husband, a musician
• Lucy Goldsmith Otford, Jane’s cousin and James’s wife
• Laurie Gray, Jane and Malcolm’s son
• Bianca Gray, Jane and Malcolm’s daughter

The Novel

Narrating the most intimate details of the feminine experience surrounding the birth of her second child, Jane Gray surrenders herself to the fate that is her physical nature and sees herself as drowning in a “willing sea.” Her confessional narrative glides effortlessly in and out of two distinct voices, one debating, as it were, with the other. Speaking in the third-person, Jane narrates the events of her past and her present. When she shifts to the first person, she comments on her feelings about the events, as though to find interconnections and some center for those events and persons that constitute her life. For example, in speaking of her new baby, she regrets having omitted feelings for the child: “I did not want to include one man’s child in the story of my passion for another man. I felt compromised, I felt condemned.” Unable to verbalize her feelings with another person, she debates within herself, equally unable to bring those debates to a resolution until the end of the narrative, when once more she resumes her writing. Her poetry eventually provides the unity, saving her from the drowning.

Married to a musician (Margaret Drabble herself had been married to an actor), Jane confesses that it was she who had sent him away, preferring to have their baby by herself, with the help of a visiting midwife. The novel begins with the breakup of the marriage and the appearance of Jane’s cousin and closest friend, Lucy Otford, to offer what help Jane will accept. In strong contrast to Jane, Lucy enjoys an active life with her own children and with her profession, both of which she has been able to connect, as Jane has been unable to do. Efficient and well ordered, Lucy does what Jane allows her to do, then leaves, and in her place Lucy’s husband arrives to sit with Jane. His visits become regular, so that when the doctor approves of the resumption of her sexual activity, James wordlessly and easily slips into bed with her as though by mutual consent.

Jane had already cut off ties with her provincial, conventional origins, except for the occasional arrival of her mother to take Laurie, the older child, away for a visit. She finds it easy to make excuses for Malcolm’s absence during the birth; he is away on a concert tour. Lucy remains her one loose tie to the past, but even this one is not intimate. A comfortable living pattern soon develops as Jane, her children, and James form a second family unit. As he is in the car business, James frequently takes Jane, Laurie, and Bianca on business trips, their only major excursions into the outside world.

One peculiarity of James, driving recklessly, seems to Jane the only irregularity in the security of their routines. Fears of death haunt her. Ironically, on a day when he drives with care—they are on their way to Norway to visit James’s uncle—road construction causes an accident, and James is hospitalized, necessitating contacts with Lucy and James’s mother. The lovers’ privacy is violated, although Lucy is not too surprised. For some time, she and James have acknowledged their separateness, maintaining the semblance of a family despite their lack of a close family unity. In fact, Jane and Lucy develop a closer understanding as both stay at a local hotel during James’s recovery.

Jane and James resume their relationship after his recovery, although on a less obsessive and more routine level. Malcolm, now an acclaimed concert guitarist, reappears in an attempt at reconciliation but is sent away again. Not telling even James that she has resumed her writing, Jane seems more the efficient, in-charge person as she sets her formerly dirty and chaotic old Victorian house to rights and even attends to a green plant, replacing the dried plant that was there at the novel’s beginning. She is saved from her inertia, her “drowning,” by her love affair with James, an affair catalyzed by the accident into a sense of the interconnectedness of things that had temporarily been lost, or even, indeed, heretofore not experienced.

In a final episode narrated by Jane in the first person, she and James drive to Goredale Scar, near Bradford, so that she can feel the sublimity of the gorge and waterfall once passionately described at a party by a guest. The long ascent and descent tire them both, but she feels stirrings and intimations at the beautiful scenery of which the Scar is a part. Unlike James and herself, she says, the Scar is real and it exists. When they return to the hotel room, she accidentally spills talcum powder into the glass, making the whiskey taste foul, “a fitting conclusion to the sublimities of nature.” Jane has realized an interconnectedness, a unity, and some control. She has survived the gorge and has not been drowned by the waterfall.

The Characters

The novel focuses primarily on character, and in particular on one character. Events exist primarily to express character. Characters other than Jane seem but pale shadows of real people, for they exist as fragmentary and ancillary parts of Jane’s life. Her opening confessional statement, “I couldn’t reach out a hand to save myself, so unwilling am I to set myself up against my fate,” is the overture to the orchestration of a series of variations on her fears and desires, conflicting fears and desires that “James and Malcolm [had] in their respective ways, died for me.” In reality, those fears and desires are for herself.

Stubbornly and mindlessly, she resists action, the kind of action embodied by Lucy, action as seen in her husband’s realization of musical success, action as represented by James and his car business, and, most of all, the action which her family traditions dictate. In this she resembles Mabel, the heroine of D. H. Lawrence’s “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” who gives in to instinct, feeling the need to do something only when the threat of drowning in “willingness” seems too threatening.

Surrendering to her nature takes form at the outset, when she insists on having her child alone, with the midwife coming in only to attend to perfunctory duties. She lies in the damp sheets of “birthing” for days, refusing to allow anyone to change them. Only James smooths them and eventually slips into them quietly, wordlessly, sharing her surrender to nature. She speaks in her first-person narrative of her love for James “blossoming out of God knows what rottenness,” the two of them “shut together, locked together, touching, not touching, naked, clothed, remembering, foreseeing.” Love for them is a dialogue, the only other nonspeaking parts taken by her children, a midwife, a doctor, and others.

Jane is totally defined by her gender. The rest of the world is external except as it crosses the needs of her feminine sexuality or her motherhood. For the former she has James, and for the latter, her children. On one of their outings with James, she and the children get out of the car, and other children gather around them. When she breast-feeds her baby, one of the strangers asks a question about the baby not having a bottle, and Jane explains why not. She seems to conduct a dialogue with the strangers on their own level. When James returns, his business completed, he comments on the audience she has collected, and her only response is that it is “nice” to have an audience. Had she gone with him during his business deal, she would have been bored and frightened. Talking to children is “nice” because she knows that they will not judge her.

Both James and Lucy are seen only through the narrations of Jane, particularly in her third-person accounting of events and people in her life. Lucy’s Cambridge degree is “bad”; Jane, rejected at Cambridge, takes a “mediocre” degree at Oxford. Lucy’s promiscuous sexual activity contrasts sharply with the limited satisfactions of Jane in her marriage to Malcolm. The reader knows little of James, since he is presented only through Jane’s limited narration. She had met him at social events during the early years when she and Lucy had left the university. His Norwegian background is blurred, and there is a mystery about his mother and the financial dealings of his family. Because Jane does not ask for information and does not pass judgment—nor does he do so with her—they accept each other without distracting complications and unnecessary explanations. He and Jane’s children provide her during her time of need with the limited connectedness necessary for survival.

Critical Context

The Waterfall, Drabble’s fifth novel, has been described by Lynn Veach Sadler as “quintessential Drabble and more.” Some have seen the novel as a turning point in Drabble’s treatment of women. In her subsequent novels, women increasingly assert their independence and a control of personal and professional aspects of their lives.

Book-length studies of Drabble’s novels, editions of critical essays, and a proliferation of articles have appeared. Controversy about whether she is a feminist or to what degree she is or is not feminist flourishes. Drabble herself has minimized the feminist interpretations, particularly the fashionable feminism that has been such an important part of her own time. Frequently likened to George Eliot and Thomas Hardy of the nineteenth century, she is also compared with twentieth century writers such as Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. One could add to that list of novelistic predecessors the names of Samuel Richardson (especially his Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, 1740-1741) and Laurence Sterne (especially his A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, 1768), for The Waterfall is a confessional novel and, at times, suggests the sentimentality (or, if one chooses, sentiment) of the eighteenth century novel tradition.

Perhaps no other novelist has focused so vividly on the routine, practical details of the “maternal-feminine” inextricably woven with the emotional needs of that condition, needs made even stronger by social inequities and natural impulses. Jane Gray, Drabble’s mid-career heroine, has survived drowning in the mother-mistress waterfall that constitutes the plight of modern women.

Bibliography

Moran, Mary Hurley. Margaret Drabble: Existing Within Structures, 1983.

Myer, Valerie Grosvenor. Margaret Drabble: Puritanism and Permissiveness, 1974.

Rose, Ellen Cronan. The Novels of Margaret Drabble: Equivocal Figures, 1980.

Sadler, Lynn Veach. Margaret Drabble, 1986.

Schmidt, Dorey, ed. Margaret Drabble: Golden Realms, 1982.