Page 266 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 255

‘That is…what I…felt,’ Romara said, ‘but I never…thought, I never…
dreamt, that you would…feel…the…same.’
‘You seemed in so many ways to be like my mother,’ Lord Ravenscar
said. 89

But the process of reduction and simplification can perhaps be seen most clearly
in the texts’ handling of a central motif, found across a wide range of women’s
writing—the ‘other woman’. This unstable combination can be resolved in a
number of ways (which certainly need to be analysed historically as well as
formally): by the death of the heroine (The Mill on the Floss) or of the man
(Daniel Deronda) or, perhaps most typically, of the other woman herself (Jane
Eyre). The other woman may be dead but still potent in memory, so that a
second, symbolic death is necessary (Rebecca). It may be resolved in a comic
peripeteia which reveals that there never really was another woman (Emma); or
it may be fractured altogether by the presence of powerful new elements, as in
South Riding, where traditional formulaic resolutions (mad wife, death of the
man) are rendered virtually redundant by the determination of the feminist
heroine not to marry in any case. In all these instances the working out of the
motif generates some degree of narrative complication and a residual disturbance
or ambiguity. Cartland’s texts are notable for the ease with which the triangle is
resolved and the potential narrative discomfort neutralized. In both Blue Heather
and Lord Ravenscar’s Revenge the other woman is painlessly married off to a
conveniently unattached minor male, thus forming a simple sentence of her own.
And in one interesting example, The Black Panther, which can be fruitfully
compared with both Rebecca and Deronda, she is literally incorporated into the
heroine by the unexpected but useful device of reincarnation.
The silencing subjection of the woman and the accompanying closure of
narrative codes; the exclusion of irony in the rigorous simplification of the
narrative ‘grammar’; the prominence of a sententious vein of common sense: all
serve as a reminder that these texts are far from ideologically inert—mere
‘entertainment’. Every element of the textual common sense articulated and
enlivened by the play of the narrative speaks directly to the ideology of the
subordinate classes and (in Cartland’s case, at least) of the lower middle classes
in particular: pride and anxiety of ownership, fear of history, professional
insecurity, female domesticity. The nature of this ideological work can be
understood in terms of reproduction.
The reproduction of the social relations of production requires, in class
societies, the continual production of specifically classed and gendered individuals
within an ideological field that naturalizes existing classes and genders. In the
broadest sense, the work of ideologies is to represent historical contradictions as
natural: as immu table differences (between men and women, blacks and whites,
‘them’ and ‘us’, the ‘successful’ and the ‘idle’); as rich or amusing variety (‘it
takes all sorts’, ‘vive la différence’); as mutual dependency (‘different but equal’,
social contract, a share of the profits); or as mere appearances subsumed in a