Frederica Potter, doubt, certainty, love
Character study of a remarkable, terribly relatable fictional young woman
‘I know. You only want everything. You’re a formidable girl, Frederica.’
Still Life, page 289
I read AS Byatt’s Still Life during April, towards the end of my first year at university. Behind me lay a turbulent seven months, a period where I had never questioned my own identity so much. In school, I had a very firm understanding of who I was — nice, prudent girl who read books for fun, dabbled in acting, enthused by French. That was about it. Coming to university, that was all in the air. Things I’d held to for my entire adolescent existence — the maintenance of ‘dignity’, a burning desire to study books all the time, the knowledge that I was, by nature, a solitary person — were undone. First semester, I had never been so wrapped up in absolute trivialities, so deeply uncertain of just about everything. It was a gradual undoing of mostly everything I knew and believed about myself.
Going home around Christmas helped immensely, of course, and I returned in January feeling much more myself, much more normal, less like a social experiment of a girl. February brought despair and a plethora of challenges, as Februarys always do. But afterwards, I felt like myself again, and at times when I didn’t, I’d go to my friends and vent.
‘Well, are you reading?’ One of them said.
‘No,’
‘Then that’s it, that’s why you’re feeling lost.’ I saw at once how right she was. So I went to a second hand bookshop and found myself a copy of a book I knew we had at home, an older edition of Still Life. I knew that A.S Byatt had passed away at the start of the year, which my mother and brother found deeply saddening, both of them big fans. I knew that both of them would be angered by my buying a copy of a book we already owned. It was weathered and bendy, which I liked, and I remember very vividly reading the summary on the back — Frederica Potter, ‘doomed to be intelligent’, plunges into Cambridge University life, greedy for knowledge, sex, and love. I’d read that before, it always gave me a little thrill for how exciting it sounded.
I’d given Still Life a go when I was 14 or 15, putting it away after reading some five pages and deciding (wisely) that it was a bit too hard, a bit too beyond my grasp. But there I was in the second hand bookshop that I so loved, and I felt I should give it a go again. I thought that I, too, was in a Frederica Potter position; all of the stuff about being greedy for knowledge, sex, and love applied wholeheartedly to me. I was more or less right. I found in Frederica a character that was both relatable and aspirational.
‘She herself was vulgar and clever and arrogant and frightened, uncertain of tone and well-meaning.’
Byatt sketches both the intricacies of and around her character. We see how the world that surrounds Frederica seems to admire her, sees her as something formidable and striking. What I love, though, is that we see Frederica as she does, too — the vulnerability, the painful awkwardness and occasional glimpses of despair. She is alternating between fears of inadequacy and a total certainty of being someone, being determined. That’s what it is to be a girl of 18 or so, isn’t it — vulgar and clever and arrogant and frightened. There’s a duality to her that I feel I know quite well — having this idea of what you should or could be hovering above you all the time. And then having the glum reality of who you worry about being pervade it all.
We follow Frederica through a plethora of brief love affairs with Cambridge men (all infatuated with her while she remains sufficiently aloof), we learn with her — in both an academic and emotional sense. We join her the summer before she starts university, and she is, as I also was, very much excited for the world to open up before her.
Her mind was full of the future which presented itself as a bright empty space crossed by tracks of her own shining, clear-cut flights, her passage swift and sunlit. ’ 49
Frederica goes through the world with ‘her chin jutted out in determination'.’ She wants to know and be known. We are confronted at all times by everything she already is, and everything she keeps aching for and desiring.
What most tore into me, though, were the descriptions of her falling in love. I will try to go into this without spoiling much. I found it all very heartrending to read, because it is quite special I thought, to read a character who is so impressive, written by such a tremendous writer as AS Byatt, and see, and understand the painstaking vulnerability that underlies the character, the story, the writer. Frederica has had no problem, up to this point, in remaining aloof, in a romantic sense, towards Cambridge’s young and dashing men, while being secretly enamoured with the idea of them.
The man she falls in love with is one Raphael Faber, a particularly brilliant academic. Do a lot of eccentric/pretentious young girls dream of love with people they think to be better than them, I wonder? Seems to be a trend. Byatt writes that ‘she fell in love, for all her sexual experiments, for all her canny prevarification, quite childishly, with a face and a concept.’ A face being beauty, attraction, admiration. A concept being the part of attraction where we desire their life and the idea of them.
‘it had elements of, those early conversations between lovers where a life story is exchanged for another life story. (He was never again to be so easily, so deliberately open with her about himself.) And Frederica felt her language heavy in her mouth. He had no native tongue: she had never questioned the efficacy of her own, until he taught her, only her own skill with it. But her words meant nothing to him and he despised her kind of story on principle.’
So she and Raphael meet and she is taken aback. He deconstructs all of her — crucially, her favourite books (‘Books full of people she knew and loved, inside and out.’), her cultural heritage and country.
The following bit of prose is so beautiful and true that I don’t quite know what to say about it, in all honesty, so I will just leave it down here.
‘She wandered back through clear grey Cambridge. He had made her head ache. He had lent her books — that was a beginning, lending of books was a universal sign of the beginning of something. To borrow implied to return. As soon as he was not there, love flooded her again like an easing of pain. She named what she loved: sadness, exact thought, remembered fear, a furious inner life. She remembered meeting his eyes when she explained that she was not Jewish. They were strangers. She loved a stranger. The world was larger than it had been.’
That’s how it feels, doesn’t it, when you meet someone quite remarkable? The world was larger than it had been. I don’t know if, when AS Byatt was writing Frederica, she intended for her to be so resonant, so understandable. Maybe she isn’t, and maybe it’s just me who has also plunged into university life greedy for knowledge, sex, and love. But there really is something beautiful in seeing a modern young woman depicted so truthfully on the page. Frederica has the capacity to repel and to enchant; she is at once desperate for love and aloof, standoffish; she wants admiration, she wants to be formidable. And yet, without really knowing it, she is.
Youth, girlhood, young-woman-hood, whatever you call it, is difficult and unwieldy. To me, it is characterised by this: between doubt and certainty there is a distance. We spend ages dwelling there.