‘Queering’ the Speaking Subject in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger

Abstract

Over the past 12 years, Sarah Waters has become established as a popular and successful writer of mainstream lesbian fiction. Her work is noted for its historical engagement with working-class lesbian life and, one might argue, can be read as an attempt to validate an existence that has consistently been written out of the pages of history. Although same-sex relationships between women are documented, Alison Oram is quite right when she suggests that we generally only have access to accounts that examine and discuss the middle and upper-class affairs of lesbian existence.1 Part of this scarcity is caused by a lack of suitable primary sources. For instance, Chris White’s Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: a Sourcebook (1991) contains a vast array of primary material, some now out of print, from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Yet, on close inspection, this book gives little over 20 pages to relationships between women; far more is given over to writings that deal with men, the legalities and consequences of homosexuality at this time and so forth. With obvious reasons to put forward for an apparent lack of collatable material such as levels of education and literacy, it seems possible to suggest that one of the reasons working-class lesbian relationships have not had so much scholarly attention is because of such a dearth.KeywordsGender CategoryCultural CodeTextual SpaceLiminal SpaceCreative CapacityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.