Jumping off of the discussion we had about how Lolly Willowes fits into a feminist framework, during the first section of the book, I thought that the novel seemed to have a bit of a feminist theme running through it. The most salient piece of evidence that I can point to in support of that idea is the total ambivalence that Lolly shows toward the idea of marriage. She is not eager to marry, though her family may be eager to see her married, and she continually rebuffs any potential husband candidates that her family sends her way. Still, she was largely passive, letting herself be shuttled around from family member to family member, and when she made the decision to move to Great Mop, I thought that the development of the novel was going to show Lolly moving from passivity to activity, from allowing things to happen to her to making things happen (which fit in with my idea of a contemporary feminist theme). However, that is not what happened at the novel’s end. Instead, Lolly is finally free from her familial obligations, but she has been freed by a man (Satan).
At first, when I read the ending, I was a little frustrated. I had wanted Lolly to take on a more active role, instead of passively letting things happen to her. I wanted, in short, a story with a contemporary feministic bent. But when I thought about it more, I realized that I had pushed my own, contemporary reading on a book written over 80 years ago, and that probably wasn’t totally fair. In 2009, our ideas are very different from the prevailing ideas of the 1920s, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that. In fact, looking back at some of the things that Lolly says at the end of the book, it does seem somewhat progressive for the time period. When Lolly is talking to Satan, she says that she (and others) want to be witches not because they want to do trivial things like black magic or fly on brooms, but because they want to have a life to themselves, separate from everything else. She says that they want to be able to have their own thoughts, and do whatever they feel like doing day in and day out. Essentially, they want to have their own identity, not an identity that ties them to someone else (so-and-so’s aunt, so-and-so’s mother, so-and-so’s wife). I’m not too well-versed on the state of women’s rights in the 1920s, but to my understanding, women during that time were largely defined by their relationship to others, so in that respect, Lolly Willowes could be seen as possessing some feminist ideals (at least, for the time). Of course, the idea that women had to sell their soul to Satan to get this separate identity doesn’t lend as much support to a feministic reading of the novel.
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Lauren, you're right about 1920s women's roles. In many ways they still were defined by their relationship to their fathers or their husbands (sometimes still being considered property, though that distinction was losing ground in the early twentieth century.) It is, I find this too, sometimes very difficult to forget our own expectations of what or how we think characters should act, especially in so-called feminist novels, because we know what we want and are used to that.
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