The Desegregation of Spark

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides a comprehensive account of Spark’s critical reception, spanning the 1960s to the present day. Established critical views, it argues, have collectively developed a ‘myth’ of Spark as an author who delights in playing the role of malevolent master-puppeteer, flaunting her powers of omniscience before the reader. This tendency to liken Spark’s authorial power to that wielded punitively by the Old Testament God does a disservice to the complexity and diversity of her writing, and blunts its political anger and subversive edge. Instead, this rigid, prescriptive theologically-informed reading of Spark has postponed or even precluded more rigorous analysis of the significance of the social and historical contexts and concerns of her fiction, explorations of the relevance of her writing to diverse strands of literary and psychoanalytic theory, as well as considerations of how her literary innovations have facilitated instances of gendered social critique. Spark’s narrative perspectives – which are multifarious rather than uniform, altering drastically from one text to the next – are instead concerned intensely with reflecting and subverting the dynamics of power, knowledge and control operating within the worlds in which they are set, rather than conveying godlike omniscience.