Lorrie Moore Collection“Escape from the Invasion of the Love-Killers”: Lorrie Moore's Metafictional Feminism

Abstract

Lorrie Moore's work offers up a comic exploration of the pain of womanhood and feminism, and a powerful metafictional critique of prevailing narratives. She melds a postmodern experimentation with a gendered sense of identity, focussing on the fragmented self not just as a reaction against the constraints of a realist narrative, but as an opportunity to explore multiplicity and artistic agency. The principal focus of this essay is onAnagrams, a collection of linked short stories that has also been marketed as a novel.Anagramsoffers a metafictional recycling of the alternative “stories” of the central character's life. This may be Moore's most overt play on masquerade and (re)invention, but, as will be explored, heroeuvreis suffused with women characters who attempt a variety of escapes from their presumed narrative closures and who also struggle with feminism and its consequent impact on their narrated lives. Moore admirably captures the angst attached to narrative disappointment; the desire for replication, reinvention and a shifting of responsibility; and the problematic landscape of feminism for her mature and maturing women characters. This essay explores Moore's fictional(ized) feminism and postfeminism and her characters' resort to masquerade as a legitimate response to contemporary angst and narrative tension.