Intertextual Outlawry: Robin Hood and Race in We Need to Talk About Kevin

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the presence of Robin Hood as a key figure in Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin and its film adaptation, directed by Lynne Ramsay. I argue that the film emphasizes Kevin’s ‘whiteness’ in the way that it adapts the Robin Hood material from Shriver’s novel, embellishing his role in the story and complicating his affiliation with the teenage killer by tapping into Robin Hood’s status in popular visual culture; in so doing, the film critiques America’s ‘copycat’ appropriation of a similar strategy used by earlier nationalist writers in Britain. In the scene that depicts a Robin Hood children’s book, Ramsay superimposes multiple Robin Hood texts into one, polyphonically performing the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism. Therefore, despite the fact that Kevin appropriates Robin Hood for his own evil ends, Ramsay dialogically inserts multiple voicings from the Robin Hood tradition to speak against a hegemonic backdrop of white masculinity (mis)informed by racist discourses affirming Anglo-Saxonist ideas of white heritage.