Rachel Cusk’s New Realism: Gender, Power, Voice, and Genre in the Outline Trilogy

Abstract

Abstract Rachel Cusk creates a new narrative form in the Outline trilogy—distanced, displaced first-person point of view—to create a safe position from which to speak truths about marriage and motherhood that she has been criticized for expressing in her nonfiction work. Eschewing linear plot and dominating perspective in favor of overheard stories, the novels also represent a new form of social realism that illustrates how listening and collaborative storytelling can communicate social critique. By incorporating elements of her life and nonfiction in the trilogy, Cusk creates a nexus of autobiography, fiction, essay, and memoir in which the suffering of women and the cruelty of misogyny register as visible and undeniably real, changing the fabric of social reality by rewriting the forms that represent it.