The Land of Spices, the Enigmatic Signifier, and the Stylistic Invention of Lesbian (In)Visibility

Abstract

The context in which Kate O'Brien came of age created both the necessity and the opportunity for her to fashion her self-image out of indefinite, radically interpretable cues of taboo sexual identity, a process reflected in her coming of age, autobiographical fiction, The Land of Spices. In following the path of her literary hero, James Joyce, whose iconic Bildungsroman her own Land of Spices closely tracks, O'Brien would have recognized how the increased self-reflexivity of the modernist novel was geared to the narrative deployment of indefinite or enigmatic signifiers. O'Brien thus drew upon and developed the modernist style that Joyce pioneered, which constituted the text as a space about as well as of interpretation, a hermeneutical field that interrogates its own limits and possibilities. In Irish society, with its legacy of Jansenist Catholicism, a structure of vigorously buttressed ignorance, undergirded by a strict knowledge of what and where to overlook, has persisted through much of the twentieth century, making it easy to mis-or underinterpret the more subtle literary strategies of cryptic sexual representation. As regards lesbian visibility, the critical reception of The Land of Spices affords a clear case in point