Studies in the Novel

Abstract:

This article argues that an ethos of resistance permeates Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness and develops a feminist-historical lens to read the novel as a social critique of wartime myths around collaboration and resistance. Resistance operates at the level of plot and thematically; it also marks the novel’s form; and it describes the book’s status within scholarship, as it straddles traditional timeframes and schools of criticism. The article excavates the novel’s major preoccupations with ruins as sites of resistance to consensus, and collaboration as a problematic but plausible means of wartime survival under occupation. Macaulay’s novel ‘makes history’ in all senses of the phrase: it looks back on the recent past to capture a liminal moment in British history before it solidifies into myth; it reflects in fictional form real tensions in postwar society; and it provides today’s readers with a complex understanding of a period still easily reduced to clichés.