Review by Linda Aloysius

In Morvern Callar, Alan Warner effectively updates the critique of femininity’s relation to commerce that Gustave Flaubert provided in Madame Bovary. This is a far from obvious update, but undeniable once seen.

Both heroines have potentially doomed, but differing, relationships with consumerism. Emma Bovary eventually dies through suicide induced by the psychological effects of consumption beyond her means. Morvern Callar, conversely, finds liberation from her living death as a supermarket assistant. Both heroines are from working class backgrounds, both live in localised communities estranged from the mainland. Both women rarely speak. Emma siphons off her husband’s material possessions whilst Morvern appropriates her boyfriend’s intellectual property. Each woman suffers, deeply, in longing for a sensual life not afforded by their financial circumstances and for what this confers to the expression of their repressed femininity.

But, whereas Flaubert chose to sadistically create a life of tortured longing for Emma Bovary, finally punishing her desires and her femininity with gruesome death by suicide, Warner demands something positive – indeed, every positive thing – for women: sensual experience; intellectual stimulation; freedom to create and to procreate; freedom from conventional judgment and from oppression generally (particularly male oppression) and freedom to live as one chooses.

Moreover, Warner, in having Morvern eventually become a writer, reverses a long established trend that relied on actual or near death of a female character in order that a man could succeed as an author: Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant; the films Betty Blue; The Shining; Moulin Rouge – each of these works involve the death of a female, whether social death by enforced invisibility or physical death itself, to secure male authorship. Warner, in his capacity as a writer, gives to Morvern Callar the ability to write whilst killing off her would-be-author boyfriend, so returning to his heroine the creative freedom that she inspires in him. Warner’s is a small, largely unrecognised, but deeply heroic act. It deserves our reading.

Morvern Callar by Alan Warner (Vintage, £7.99) is out now.

Linda Aloysius is an artist living in London. She is currently researching her PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College.