The Waterfall’s existential questions presuppose a privileged woman’s material ease

Evidence

These are not bad answers; necessity if all else fails, or perhaps random contingency; an attempt not to trivialize women; blood bonds between mothers and daughters; love free of social security. The problem for a reader like me is that the entire question is carried on in what I can only see as a privileged atmosphere. I am not saying, of course, that Jane is Drabble (although that, too, is true in a complicated way). I am saying that Drabble considers the story of so privileged a woman the most worth telling. Not the well-bred lady of pulp fiction, but an impossible princess who mentions in one passing sentence toward the beginning of the book that her poems are read on the BBC. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 519

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s inquiry about whether irony about class/identity can be sustained by individual subjects detached from material constraint — Spivak here flags that privilege underwrites Drabble’s microstructural focus.