Seeing Double in Susan Swan’s The Wives of Bath: Cross-Dressing and Revisions of Identity
The Wives of Bath is a tale of cross-dressing and mismatched desire in the context of a Canadian girls’ boarding-school in the 1950s. Paulie’s quest for existence in a man’s world has drastic consequences. Categories of gender are questioned and murder is committed in the interests of crossing those...
Enregistré dans:
| Dans: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
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| Auteur principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Anglais |
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Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2024
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | The Wives of Bath is a tale of cross-dressing and mismatched desire in the context of a Canadian girls’ boarding-school in the 1950s. Paulie’s quest for existence in a man’s world has drastic consequences. Categories of gender are questioned and murder is committed in the interests of crossing those boundaries which separate male and female. This essay examines the mixture of detective, gothic and autobiographical genres which contribute to the destabilizing of codes in the narrative. What is finally at stake is the very undermining of the concept of category itself. |
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