Babel Tower was published by Chatto & Windus in 1996. It is the most structurally complex volume of the quartet: set in the mid-1960s, it interweaves Frederica’s personal story (escaping a violent husband, fighting for custody of her son, teaching at a progressive art school) with the obscenity trial of a fictional novel called Babbletower — a Sadeian utopian text whose legal fate mirrors the decade’s larger struggle over freedom of expression.
The fictional Babbletower (excerpts from which are included in the text) describes a community that attempts to create a society without sexual or intellectual restraint — an experiment that degenerates into cruelty and madness. Its obscenity trial becomes Byatt’s vehicle for examining the 1960s’ central paradox: the decade celebrated liberation, but liberation without structure can produce new forms of oppression.
Frederica’s divorce trial runs parallel to the obscenity trial: in both cases, a woman’s autonomy (intellectual in one case, domestic in the other) is being adjudicated by patriarchal institutions. Byatt demonstrates that the “sexual revolution” was experienced very differently by men (as expanded freedom) and by women (as the removal of the few protections they possessed without the provision of genuine equality).
Collecting Babel Tower
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1996): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $10–$30