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.

Keywords:

• Queer
• Heteroqueer
• Housing
• Spinster
• Temporal
• Phenomenology

Notes

1 Burkhart provides a near exhaustive catalogue of Pym's same-sex-oriented characters, but his tone is often less than critically detached (Burkhart 1988).

2 Furbank provides an analysis of class difference that is singularly useful for Pym scholars (see also Furbank 1985/1986). See also Cooper (1999) and, for a historical view, Cannadine (1998/2000: esp. 106–60).

3 Anyone interested in textual criticism of Pym's works would find a very interesting comparison in where this passage is placed in the drafts in MS Pym 25 and 29 compared to the final version.

4 For an exploration of the Bakhtinian character of Pym's narratives, see Little (1996: esp. 77–87).

5 See MS Pym 17: 1, which also locates Sybil's house as being in ‘one of the grander parts’ of Bayswater.

6 Butler discusses the role of the category of heterosexuality in the founding of institutions such as the family and the nation (Butler 2004: 102–30).

7 Cook's full-length study came too late for consideration here, but explores many of these themes at greater length (Cook 2014).

8 For a well-documented but pre-queer theory view, see Hilliard (1982).