A Bathroom of One's Own: Intimacies of Austerity and Austerities of Intimacy in Barbara Pym's Fiction

Abstract

‘I have to share a bathroom’, I had so often murmured, almost with shame, as if I personally had been found unworthy of a bathroom of my own. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (1952) For a single woman of a certain age, living alone in postwar London, austerity was more than a set of political and economic imperatives. It was at once a deeply personal and intimate condition, and a form of conditioning that—compounded by the implicit inequalities of the postwar settlement and the popular perception of singleness as a state of deprivation in itself—had lasting implications, shaping the trajectories of both life and narrative. This article draws on Lauren Berlant's work on intimacy, aspiration and the good‐life fantasy to offer a queer reading of Barbara Pym's single heroines that explores the ways in which they negotiate the processes of life‐building and self‐definition in a society that privileges the couple form. It argues that their stories—the spaces they inhabit, the intimacies they forge and the fantasies they indulge, in spite or as a result of postwar austerity—represent a conscious effort by Pym to expose the ‘practices of self‐interruption’ that Berlant suggests mark people's struggles to change the terms of value in which their lives are cast. Everyday dramas of attrition and adjustment, the novels offer strategies for surviving the assaults of normativity, and building alternative intimate lives.