Artists as Mothers: A Response to June Sturrock*

Published in 2009, A. S. Byatt' s The Children's Book traces the relationships between the children and parents of various interconnected artistic families at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In their study A. S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling (2010), Alexa Alf er and Amy J. Edwards de Campos note that The Children's Book "is centrally concerned with the potential as well as the actual abuses visited upon the young by their elders' overactive and often predatory imaginations" (128). This assessment makes much of the historical location of the novel, understanding the breakdown of the relationships between parents and children as a metaphor for the wider cultural failure of the older generation to protect the younger generation from the horrors of the First World War. Indeed, Alfer and de Campos suggest that the "Great War" dominates the novel as "the inevitable conclusion [...], which none of the characters can predict but which every reader will be aware of" (120). 1 Similarly, Sam Leith writes that "[t]he first world war comes down on the end of The Children's Book like a guillotine" (13). Byatt herself, however, resists this prioritization of the war in the novel; in an interview with Leith, she says "I keep trying to get people to take the word 'looming' out of the publicity material" (13). In her article, "Artists as Parents in A. S. Byatt 's The Children's Book and Iris Murdoch's The Good Apprentice," June Sturrock illuminates Byatt 's novel in a way that enables it to come out from under the shadow of the Great War. While she recognises that the generational and collective experience is clearly an important part of The Children's Book, Sturrock focuses on the complex family relationships presented in the narrative and, in particular, the impact of the position of the parent as artist on the parent-child relationship.Sturrock 's article opens with a consideration of the connections between Byatt's novel and that of her mentor, arguing that The Children's Book is "in part a response to Murdoch's writing and more specifically to her late novel, The Good Apprentice" (108). She identifies three areas for her comparison: the representation of the artist as parent, the combination of realist and non-realist narrative modes, and the adoption of multiple narratives in an attempt to create a centreless novel. These three threads become interconnected as Sturrock claims that both novels open out from a consideration of the "intense connection between art and parental failure" (113) to explore issues about the moral responsibility of the artist. The attempts to create a "multiplecentred novel" reflect the difficulties and limitations of storytelling in its focus on the individual. Despite the interrelation of these threads, Sturrock' s analysis centres on the representation of the artist as parent or, more specifically, the failure of the artist as parent. In contrasting the artist figures of Benedict Fludd and Olive Wellwood, Sturrock draws out the differences in the nature of their failure as parents, which she sees as ultimately tied to the nature of the art they produce. In this response, I would like to expand Sturrock' s analysis to consider another factor which impacts on their respective failures as parents: gender.Sturrock 's analysis identifies the intertextual connections between Byatt's potter Benedict Fludd and Murdoch's painter Jesse Baltram, and between both of these fictional characters and the historical figure of Eric Gill. She claims that all three figures reveal the negative impact artist-parents have on their families, yet she suggests that Byatt's novel "is concerned both to intensify and to darken" Murdoch's narrative (108). Whereas Murdoch's novel focuses on the artist-parent of Jesse Baltram, Byatt's more expansive novel incorporates a vast array of artist-parents, including the children's novelist Olive Wellwood. As with Benedict Fludd, Sturrock identifies interesting parallels between Byatt's fictional artist-parent and a historical figure, the children's novelist Edith Nesbit. …