Inverse Intimacy: Reconfiguring ‘Personal Relations’ in Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel

Abstract

Ever since its publication in 1927, Elizabeth Bowen's first novel, The Hotel, has prompted critical responses that have tried to gauge the ways in which the narrative represents intimacy between women. Although one of its earliest reviewers sensed that the ‘dark, forlorn spirit of inversion is all through it’, modern critics have acknowledged that The Hotel is not engaged with the sexological models of inversion that inform Radclyffe Hall's contemporaneous novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928). At the same time, commentators have recognized that The Hotel forms part of a group of 1920s fictions that address female homosexuality with increasing openness. For the most part, readers have focused close attention on the intimate friendship that develops between the young Sydney Warren and the middle-aged widow Mrs. Kerr. This bond, even if it is fraught with tension, remains a source of prurient fascination among the other English residents enjoying a wintertime dolce far niente on the Italian Riviera. Still, the sustained critical focus on the attachment that develops between these two characters has tended to ignore the significance of the partnership between the two single women, Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald, that places the whole span of the novel in parentheses. Although recent studies by Elizabeth Cullingford and Maud Ellmann have drawn attention to Bowen's interest in what it means to be a ‘singleton’ or part of stadial series of personal relationships (single, couple, and triad), little has been said about the two spinsters, each of whom is ‘half of a duality’. The present essay concentrates attention on the ways in which the enumerative turn in Bowen studies broadens in scope when we look at how Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald appear as both two in one and one in two: a narrative formula that reminds us not of sexual inversion but the inverse number in mathematics. It is this type of inverse intimacy between woman and woman that triumphs at the end of The Hotel.