The Figure of the Spy in British Cold War Fiction and Drama from Elizabeth Bowen to Tom Stoppard
Open AccessThis dissertation examines a selection of texts produced in Britain from 1948 to 1988. The aim of this study is to consider how spy stories, in novels and in plays, reflect significant changes in postwar Britain. Drawing on a diverse collection of texts and writers, the following chapters will explore these authors’ wide-ranging responses to the events and ideologies of the Cold War as it affected Britain. I argue that British plays and novels of the late twentieth century use the figure of the spy and the spy’s professional life to offer salient commentary on Britain’s role in the Cold War and its diminished geopolitical position after World War Two. All the texts featured in this study are character studies of failure, subterfuge, and deception. The first chapter focuses on three spy plays by Alan Bennett which reveal Bennett’s critique of the British class system and the repercussions of treason in relation to class and nationality during the postwar era. In the second chapter I analyze Elizabeth Bowen’s World War Two novel, THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1948), published during the Cold War, and Graham Greene’s THE HUMAN FACTOR (1978) to examine how the figure of the traitor depicted in each novel symbolizes national decline. Chapter Three focuses on the representation of gender in espionage in late twentieth-century British plays. I look at David Hare’s PLENTY (1978) and Tom Stoppard’s HAPGOOD (1988) to examine how those plays portray women in espionage in conjunction with Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power and the changing cultural attitudes towards women in the workforce in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter Four is an analysis of the Cold War spy novels of John Le Carré and their depiction of intelligence bureaucracy. This dissertation attempts to bridge the gaps in historiographies of twentieth-century espionage, Cold War literary studies, British cultural studies, and popular culture. Its narratives are fictions of history, a history, as it turns out, that is itself a continuing, shaping process.
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