Naturalism and Feminism in Rose Tremain's The Swimming Pool Season

What is it about?

With such characters as Gervaise or the Maréchal exclaiming over ‘la comédie humaine’, Tremain pays homage in The Swimming Pool Season to the tradition of the great realistic novel. Her portrayal of the mid-life crisis of middle and lower class characters impacted by their ‘milieu’ – the social, economic, national components of their identity – within a causal plot matches the conventions of the realistic novel, more particularly of the naturalistic school. Her character study, however, also incorporates modernist issues of the exile of the self and the disjunction between one’s perception and the world’s judgement with a gallery of migrant and local characters gathered together in the made-up French village of Pomerac. Although postmodernist thinkers were highly critical of realism, The Swimming Pool Season may be an example of the ‘the synthesis or transcension’ of the modes of writing of traditional bourgeois realism and modernism that John Barth foresaw for postmodernist fiction. Tremain’s brand of realism adopts feminist and psychoanalytical concerns with the instability of gender signifiers depicted in this polyphonic novel through marital crisis and a variety of love triangles. Larry and Miriam are a British couple in crisis while Gervaise, her husband Mallélou and her lover Klaus are involved in a ‘ménage à trois’. Hervé, the village’s bachelor misogamist doctor, is wooed by Polish Nadia whose husband resides in an Adjustment Home. Xavier, Gervaise’s son, falls in love with the doctor’s niece who is engaged to well-off Luc. It is also modified by postcolonialism and post war issues with the fabrication of a cosmopolitan village against the historical background of the French collaborationist past. The novel opposes the patriarchal figure of the Maréchal and the obscene figure of Pétainist Mallélou. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the vitality of the realistic genre and attempt to answer the charges against it of conservatism, especially when written by a woman. Keywords: realism, naturalism, postmodern realism, polyphony, gender relations

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