Abstract:
Muriel Spark is a writer whose work causes us problems. Frank Kermode described her as “an unremittingly Catholic novelist committed to immutable truths”; twenty years later, Ruth Whittaker declared that “Muriel Spark’s fiction is primarily concerned with the relationship between God and man”. She has frequently been accused of dogmatism, sensationalism and, perhaps most damning of all, Catholic orthodoxy. More recently, Martin McQuillan is one of a number of writers on a mission to save Muriel Spark by reading her through “postmodern forms of knowledge” in a “theoretical mode”. Once seen as a writer paring her fingernails as she plays puppet-master, it seems she has now become a political subversive and a postmodern sage. Spark has only recently been read as a satirist of a particular historical moment. This thesis follows some recent criticism in examining her situatedness as a restless writer of the 1960s, searching for forms of expression under the unthinkable shadow of the Holocaust and the Bomb, at the same time as deploring her era’s headlong dive into rampant consumerism and militant individualism. I argue that, in her novels between The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Abbess of Crewe (1974), she explores a crisis of identity and a crumbling of meaning in the post-war world, creating elliptical, deceptive forms to represent a decade defined by its uncertainty. After surveying the moral and theoretical frameworks critics of Muriel Spark have adopted over the past half century, I examine in Chapter Two the emerging crisis of identity in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means (1963), connecting the false romanticism surrounding closed communities with the ‘impossible’ climate of the Cold War. The next chapter, ‘Public Images’, moves forward to the short novels of the turn of the decade, The Public Image (1968), The Driver’s Seat (1970) and Not to Disturb (1971), examining their satire of a media-refracted world through the lenses of popular social and political theorists of the era. Chapter Four, ‘The End of the World’, discusses The Hothouse by the East River (1973) and The Abbess of Crewe, novels about communities in which identities have turned so far inwards that they have ceased to exist. Throughout, I treat Muriel Spark’s novels of the periods as the exploratory work of a satirist at her peak, determined to find fictional means to explore an era defined by its own uncertainty: an impossible task for unthinkable times.