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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 249

This narrative statement of position is achieved out of textual contradictions and
conflicts. The representation of this is both thematic (the pull against an
independent life for women which romance represents) and formal (the text, at
significant moments of stress, is transformed into something other than that
which it appears to be). These slippages often reference things outside the text.
For example, the competing themes of romance and feminism provide the main
narrative tension, which is ultimately resolved by recourse to a humanity larger
than, and ultimately encompassing, both. In the presentation of romance and the
novel’s romance interest the reference to traditions of romantic literature is one of
qualification—‘She became vulnerable, afraid, disarmed before a hostile world….
I won’t think of him, Sarah was vowing to herself. My work needs all of me….
I’ll look to the future— to the world outside’ —and of ironization:
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Sarah saw the harsh face above her illumined by the smile which had won
his wife, chained Mrs. Beddows and given Carne of Maythorpe a
reputation for popularity. It was, she decided afterwards, only a physical
accident, a trick of bone and muscle, a flash of white teeth, a widening of
long lashed eyes: but it had its effects. 64
In this way romance—the granting of time and importance to personal and
sexual relationships—is never treated romantically. Its overall presentation
confirms the novel as characteristically middlebrow in keeping with the guide-
lines indicated earlier in the text: ‘She has observed and she can describe….
You’ve got imagination Lydia, of course, but you’ve got sense too.’ 65
The commitment to a feminist politics in which human equality is the ultimate
referent is also affirmed by the text: ‘We all pay, she thought; we all take; we are
members of one another. We cannot escape this partnership. This is what it
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means— to belong to a community; this is what it means, to be a people.’ The
romance/ feminism conflict, while focused on Sarah Burton, is not represented as
an individual psychological one. It extends to other characters in the novel and is
itself always understood in terms other than its own: ‘Beyond her personal
troubles lay the deep fatigue of one whose impersonal hopes do not mark time
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with history.’ Nor is it the central narrative conflict. Romance/feminism are
cast in terms of the private/ public opposition which underlies the whole
narrative structure: ‘[what fascinated me was] the complex tangle of motives
prompting public decisions, the unforeseen consequences of their enactment on
private lives’. 68
The conflicts and competing concerns of the text, public and private, are held
together by the idea of community, with responsible citizenship as its basis, and
the fictive resolution is dependent upon the ideological repertoire of citizenship
which we have discussed earlier. Just as citizenship in political discourse has
ambiguous and sometimes contradictory connotations, so in the novel the
community of citizens, which at its end connects Kingsport with the nation, is a
resolution able to hold in harmony the unstable and contradictory elements in the