Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen
-
Published:2016-11
Issue:3
Volume:6
Page:256-275
-
ISSN:2044-2416
-
Container-title:Victoriographies
-
language:en
-
Short-container-title:Victoriographies
Affiliation:
1. University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Abstract
All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Linguistics and Language,History,Language and Linguistics,Communication,Cultural Studies
Reference32 articles.
1. Realism
2. Bacon, Francis. ‘Of Followers and Friends’. Francis Bacon (1561–1626): Essays, Civil, and Moral. Vol. III, Part 1. The Harvard Classics. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14.
3. Men Talk
Cited by
1 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. Recent Dickens Studies: 2016;Dickens Studies Annual;2018-03-01