Agnes Owens: The Complete Short Stories

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As Alasdair Gray underlines, in the late 60s “Scotland was still beyond ‘the fiction zone’ as far as the rest of Britain was concerned” (Tormans 571) and the 1970s are generally considered as a particularly low point for the publication of Scottish fiction, even though the Scottish poetry of the same period had quite a high British national profile. The family continued to live as best they could with her sons following their father’s profession and Agnes finding work as a cleaner. I had read one of the chapters, Christmas in the Paxton, previously, but without the context of what happens earlier, it is much less appreciated. The black humour weaved through many of the stories also make them very droll at times, at others most poignant, at others just a refreshing factual this is life how-it-is. All her characters are considered as subalterns on the ground of their social status and victimize (.

They are misfits whose suffering is invisible in the eyes of others, including those who have the professional responsibility of looking after them. Through the indifference of Sammy’s mother’s neighbours, of the railway clerk and of those who are supposed to be the representatives of an ethics of care, Owens denounces society’s incapacity to fulfil its duty towards the vulnerable and challenges the reader to engage in a different ethical response.There then followed more than a year of itinerant living, walking from town to town seeking work and sleeping in a two-man tent or in derelict buildings. I remember thinking as the afternoon wore on, the room grew darker, and the rain fell heavier, that there was enough material for a brilliant memoir. In her previous fiction, the rare times when a book was mentioned, the characters failed to read it or understand its relevance to interpret their own lives thus suggesting the uselessness of literature. The building turned out to be merely a hit, neatly boarded up and of no earthly interest, but beyond that was the entrance to a graveyard.

OpenEdition is a web platform for electronic publishing and academic communication in the humanities and social sciences. Vulnerability is not to be confused with weakness or passivity for attempts at rebellion are in fact the underlying motif of most of Owens’s stories. It has begun with the teacher who “put a big cross” ( CSS 370) through the narrator’s partly autobiographical composition. I mean, most men can’t help being abusive to women, and they might be good husbands, they might be good fathers, but they might also feel, “I’m the boss”, you know.

Later, a strange man 7 pushes her and her younger brother into a van as if they were “dogs being taken to the dog pound” ( CSS 372). I’ve had it with journalists comparing the sunniness of my flowers with the darkness of my stories,” she said, rolling eyes that flashed with mischief. This will include preparing a chronological study of her works, incorporating the previously unseen, unpublished works. In 1994 however she published A Working Mother about marriage to an alcoholic, and followed this up in 1998 with For the Love of Willie. Rather than speculate on what may have motivated such statements, what matters is the aesthetic judgement they imply.

Agnes Owen’s “strong fighting wom[e] n” , or the insurrection of small, invisible lives In: Women and Scotland: Literature, culture, politics [online]. Lynne Stark sees this focus on alienated individuals as having originated in the works of Gray and Kelman in reaction to contemporary societal changes: “Conscious that the new environment of industrial decline, structural unemployment and social fragmentation demanded innovative narrative patterns, their writing went well beyond the confines of conventional social realism, redefining the model of ‘working class’ writing, the alienated social subject replacing the community as centre of attention. The narrowing down of women’s space can, however, go further than denying them access to the public sphere of the workplace. This project will see the creation of the Agnes Owens Archive which contains previously unpublished plays, poems and short stories.

To quote Janice Galloway, “now that Scottish writing [had] a profile it [was] a bloke’s profile” (qtd in Jones 210) although her own works, as well as those of A. The silencing of women may be based on other grounds than their gender, it may stem from social contempt for subaltern’s stories or simply from a form of social invisibility. The definition of vulnerability is predicated on a vision of the human as vulnerable and essentially dependent on others, and vice versa, a conception of interdependence that makes humanity essentially relational” (Ganteau 5). Although Owens never described herself as a feminist and even stated that “It’s hard to have a family and be a feminist” (Duncan), her exposure of women’s predicament explores many facets of patriarchal oppression and could easily be quoted to support a feminist agenda.