Boundary Crossing and Exile: Queer Mobility in E. M. Forster’s “Albergo Empedocle”
This article focuses on the crossing of boundaries in E. M. Forster’s 1903 short story “Albergo Empedocle,” starting with the geographical borders that the Peaslake party—a group of English tourists who embody the spirit of the so-called “mobility era”—cross during their tour of Europe, before movin...
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| 出版年: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| 第一著者: | |
| フォーマット: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| 言語: | Anglais |
| 出版事項: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2024
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| オンライン･アクセス: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| 要約: | This article focuses on the crossing of boundaries in E. M. Forster’s 1903 short story “Albergo Empedocle,” starting with the geographical borders that the Peaslake party—a group of English tourists who embody the spirit of the so-called “mobility era”—cross during their tour of Europe, before moving on to the crossing of boundaries between self and other as well as those between historical periods. This shift destabilises the travel narrative and allows the short story to explore how the crossing of boundaries reconfigures the way the characters, and Harold in particular, relate to their own identity. In this way, the short story’s conflation of geographical, and historical mobility, which results in Harold embracing a Greek life, can be read as an exploration of queer spatio-temporal and transubjective mobility that questions normative discourses on sexuality and mirrors the kind of exile that English homosexuals of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries embraced. Exile, however, is merely a momentarily negative experience and the sense of nostalgia traditionally associated with exile is only a transitory phase. Rather, exile becomes a constitutive force which allows for the experience of greatness, liberation, happiness and communion against a repressive society. |
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