'Coldly kind': Calculated care in post-war British women's writing

The post-war works of Elizabeth Bowen, Daphne du Maurier, Muriel Spark, and Elizabeth Taylor are replete with representations of the strategic manipulation of domestic care and kindness. Elizabeth Bowen's novels of the 1950s and 1960s feature a range of suspect guardians and dubious acts of charity. Midge, in du Maurier's 'The Apple Tree' (1952), looks after her husband so punctiliously that her attention takes the form of a 'long-term reproach' for an earlier indiscretion on his part. Mrs. Pettigrew, in Spark's Momento Mori (1959), uses her position as carer to exercise absolute domination over her charges to the point of blackmail. In Elizabeth Taylor's The Soul of Kindness (1964), the benevolent interventions of Flora into the lives of those around her are shown to disguise an inherent narcissism. In all cases, care is used, whether consciously or not, to manage and control interpersonal relationships. This chapter will suggest that such domesticated representations also offer a response to a more widespread process of institutionalizing and commodifying care, both as discourse and practice, in the years immediately following the Second World War. 'After the fifties are over', notes the chairman of a management committee for a care home in Spark's novel, 'everything will be easier'. Ridge argues that these women writers variously and subtly document, in their post-war works, a transition period that sees the establishment of what Nikolas Rose has described as a 'new rationale of government', one directed towards the subjectivity and 'soul' of the citizen. Their works articulate a problematics of care in ways that complicate later feminist approaches, such as Carol Gilligan's pioneering work on relationality in the 1980s, raising questions not only about the efficacy of care as a moral framework but equally its capacity as a strategic mechanism of governance.