Friendship, hope and communication during second-wave and postfeminism: Gillian E. Hanscombe's Between Friends and Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends.

Abstract

Hanscombe's 1982 epistolary novel Between Friends offers insight into the main ideas, conflicts and blind spots of Anglo-American second-wave (radical) feminism. Highly contested by its successors, the second wave of feminism in the Anglo-American context fiercely debated issues, such as sex and class, female separatism and political lesbianism. These are the matters Between Friends addresses via a heated discussion between four women on matters such as misogyny, autohomophobia, motherhood and queer love. The answers they advocate for, such as forming a utopian lesbian enclave, abandoning all male children, and aborting male feti, show the tendency of second-wave feminists to seek grand, albeit reductive, solutions to the issues posed by the patriarchal capitalist system. The protagonists of Sally Rooney's 2017 novel Conversations with Friends seem to be just as painfully aware of their own class and gender hindrances as their second-wave sisters, but the tone of their conversations is skeptical of 20 ^th-century metanarratives and refrains from offering any sort of solution to their social positioning. The discontinuity and inconsistency of (digital) communication between the characters in the novel reflects the uncertainty and aimlessness characterising their pursuit of love, social success and economic stability. This research aims to compare these two approaches to friendship and feminism by interpreting both the ideas the characters represent and their modes of communication as a consequence of the shifts in feminist theories caused by late capitalism and its effects.