Margaret Drabble, "The Millstone": part of the « Angry Young Men » movement?
Résumé de l'exposé
Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield (Yorkshire) in 1939. She has an upper-class and intellectual background: her father was a barrister, a county court judge and a novelist; her mother was a teacher. She had a strict education and a studious life as a young girl: she went to a Quaker boarding-school and graduated at the Cambridge. Before writing novels, she was an actress in the Royal Shakespeare Company.
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Sommaire de l'exposé
The main theme treated by the 'Angry Young Men' movement is the class confrontation and the awakening of a social consciousness
During the whole novel the reader can notice a great emancipation of Rosamund through her motherhood and her fight for independence
Individualism is another feature from the 'Angry Young Men' movement
The marginality of the main character
Extraits de l'exposé
[...] This individualism is another feature from what could be the ?Angry Young Men' movement. If Jimmy in Look Back in Anger must be the more relevant example for it, it can also be found in a lot of other works. In The Millstone, although Rosamund's character experiences a great evolution, she still stays individualist through the whole novel. This is maybe why she fears and focuses so much on sex and relationships between men and women, which were the norm during the sexual revolution, but that she cannot experience because she doesn't want to interact with other people at all. [...]
[...] Margaret Drabble, The Millstone: part of the Angry Young Men movement? Margaret Drabble is a writer who was often assimilated to what is called the ?Angry Young Men' literary movement. But, as a lot of those writers of the 1950s who were put into the same category, she never claimed being fully part of this movement all the more so since the term of movement is in this case controversial. It is then interesting to find out what similarities could be found between Drabble's novel The Millstone and the criteria which, for the critics, were representative of the ?Angry Young Men'. [...]
[...] Through a quite autobiographical novel, Margaret Drabble describes the tribulations of a young woman trying to cope with her problems. More generally, those problems she depicts, and also the self-questioning which takes place throughout this work are to a certain extent representative of the ones of the whole English youth during the 1960s. The themes she develops are especially recognizable as part of the register which is also developed by a lot of 1950s and 1960s ?Angry Young Men' authors: the class confrontation, the emancipation, the individualism, and the position of marginality towards the rest of the society of the main character. [...]
[...] More simply, in The Millstone, Rosamund might be angry - and then assimilated to the ?Angry Young Men' group of writers, in the way she decides to keep her child whereas she could try to obtain an abortion. Indeed, abortion was forbidden until the 1967 Abortion Act, unless a there was a risk of mental problems for the woman through her motherhood. But it was unofficially possible to abort by proposing doctor's a certain amount of money. Rosamund, regarding her social situation, could have afforded an abortion, but in a way wants to enter the real world with its difficulties. [...]
[...] They are depicted in a realistic way, and the language plays a great role, in that it was often non-conventional (especially in the plays). The principal character is also, because of this social confrontation, the evolution of his thoughts and his isolation, put in a position of marginality. This certain marginality is also to be found in most of the ?Angry Young Men' works: the character starts his life in a specific world: a social class, a philosophy, a way of life, and his evolution make him change. [...]
Philosophie & matières littéraires 
