Feminine Competence in Society

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how, in contrast to feminist protagonists that preceded her in literature, the heroine of Margaret Drabble's "The Millstone" comes to embody an intellectual and physical form of feminine competence in society. It looks at how, ultimately, Rosamund's pregnancy does not prove a hindrance to her work and how she discredits female stereotypes related to pregnancy through her simultaneous embodiment of maternity and intellectual development. It shows how Drabble incarnates Rosamund as a completely emancipated woman, a paradigm of the new generation, and embodies her own ideal conception of the modern woman, a woman complete in mind and body.

From the Paper:

"Drabble perhaps deliberately begins with her protagonist in a world where illegitimate birth is a stigma, even to those who do not flout the conventions of normal female intellectual development, such as Rosamund. Rosamund's attitude towards her own physicality is similar to Sue Brideshead or the Early Modern idea of femininity as being an either or proposition for women "as a kind of modification of the angel of the hearth" Victorian ideal, women were constructed in such an idea as being either of the flesh, or of aspiring in an asexual fashion to a male consciousness."

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