Anita Brookner: The Principle of Hope

Abstract

Brookner’s novels are primarily concerned with romantic love, and while her fiction offers a partial critique of the assumptions which underlie popular romance, it also endorses ‘romantic hopefulness’ as an essential condition of life. Her protagonists are often academic women with attachments both to the intellectual life and to an old-fashioned model of femininity in which a woman waits to be discovered, looking her best, ‘by a man who has battled across continents, abandoning whatever he may have had in his in-tray, to reclaim [her]’.¹ Her work thus explores a particular aspect of the mind—body problem, the conflict between an investment in intellectual life and an investment in an ideal of femininity in which woman functions as the passive object of male desire. In exploring this conflict, Brookner is doing more than disclosing a pathetic disparity between the intellectual sophistication and emotional naivety of her heroines. They are not so much naive as innocent and hopeful, and this is the most interesting aspect of Brookner’s treatment of romance. Most feminist analysis of romance has explored it from a psychoanalytic point of view. Janice Radway’s classic study Reading the Romance, for example, draws on the work of Nancy Chodorow in order to argue that the function of popular romance is to offer vicarious nurturance to women who, typically, spend their lives in nurturing others.² Such a perspective, while illuminating, fails to acknowledge the wider social implications and possibilities of the romance structure.