| Chapter 1: | Caging or Community? The “Working Class” Novels |
Jeffery K. Olick, discussing Maurice Halbwachs, highlights this permeability between individual and collective memory, the kind of large-canvas perspective that Liza feels so deeply, especially regarding a community of women that manages to transcend the constraints of the present: “the most primally individual memories are socially framed and…thus, at the limit, the very distinction between individual and social memory is problematic…memory is no mere byproduct of group existence but is its very lifeblood” (6). Olick continues, invoking Robert Bellah, regarding the role of memory in constructing identity within the community:
As the repository of eighty-four years of memory, as the century's daughter, Liza's death is a severe blow to the history and the narrative that, if only by a thread, gives these people a sense of community; like the wrecking-ball tearing down the houses, which excites the young “by the machine's power to destroy,” many of the women, old enough to remember the neighborhood and understanding the importance of memory, especially collective memory and its role in forming a sense of history and identity, “walked past on their way to the shops, looked at the machine once and then quickly away” (Barker, “Liza's England” 282).
While the relations between women and men are certainly bad, especially the “disenfranchised” men (unemployed, alcoholic, lacking a sense of self-worth and indeed lacking a certain piece of the puzzle to their masculine identities), women in need of mutual support do not always find it forthcoming, either from family or from friends. Three weeks after Kelly is raped, for example, her mother is understandably in need of someone