Something Unsatisfactory: Queer Desires in Barbara Pym

Abstract

Criticism and scholarly discussion of the works of Barbara Pym has been dominated by the supposed correspondences between her own life and that of her heroines, to an extent that can obscure much of what is most interesting and unusual in her novels. This paper suggests that reading Pym queerly allows us to see how she plays with normativity, romance, and desire as she constructs the gendered and temporal identities and development of her characters. The two novels in which Pym shows her lead women characters embarking on quasi-romantic relationships with men who have sex with men are read here in terms of this search for a definable queer (textual) phenomenology. In The Sweet Dove Died we see Pym subversively representing the (by turns selfish and unsure) motives and identifications of Leonora and James in order to show how a woman's desire for a man can be as queerly constructed as that of homosexually identified characters. By contrast, A Glass of Blessings plays with the domestic and interpersonal relationships of its characters to explore the ways in which normativity, queerness and ‘orientation’ play against one another in all human interactions.