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Kate Morton, "Barbara Vine's A Dark-Adapted Eye: A Gothic Renegotiation of the Borders of Self and Society" While conventional "whodunnits" present a world divided into two exclusive groups--innocent social body and deviant individuals--in certain more recent mystery novels this clear bourgeois distinction, central to a socialised notion of justice, is not sustained. Such works as Barbara Vine's A Dark-Adapted Eye, represent a more liberal structure, condemning the oppression arising from conflicting structures of identities within coercive hierarchies of power, sexuality and gender. Society is implicated in criminal behaviour rather than opposed to it, as seemingly "ordinary" characters are shown to commit extraordinary criminal acts. In A Dark-Adapted Eye, Vera Hillyard, a conservative middle-class English woman is driven to commit sororicide when the strict social constraints of 1940s England conflict with her individual desires. The novel opens with Vera's death by hanging and a brief account of her crime, so the question of who, or what, is never in doubt. Rather, the traditional narrative focus of detection is replaced by an exploration of such mutable issues as desire, obsession and identity, as Vera's niece, Faith, provides a retrospective narration of events leading up to the crime. The novel resists the idea of a stable, knowable self in modern society, highlighting instead the constant development and reconsideration of individual identity. This renegotiation of the borders of self and society suggests the novel's proximity to certain conventions of Gothic literature: boundaries and taboos, the imprisoning house, family secrets, past and present, the embedded text, and the border of knowledge. Biography: Kate Morton is a PhD student at the University of Queensland whose current project focuses on issues of metawriting, historiography, identity and epistemology in contemporary fictional memoirs by Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, A.S. Byatt and Barbara Vine. Her MPhil dealt with the Victorian tragic novels of Thomas Hardy while her Honours work explored approaches to Shakespearean film criticism. Kate has also studied drama in Australia and London and is a Licentiate of Trinity College, London. |
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