Limping Lucy's Queer Criptopia
Narrative Sidestepping in The Moonstone
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12411552 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christian Lewis (0000-0003-1493-8297, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 461-487 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victorian Literature and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1060-1503 • E-ISSN: 1470-1553 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1060150321000073 |
| OpenAlex | W4296204632 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
Although there has been extensive scholarship on Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone —including recent commentary on disability and queerness—there has been no extended engagement with the character of Limping Lucy, a Marxist misandrist working-class disabled lesbian. This piece serves as a corrective to that gap and a justification of why we should study her. Lucy appears in only six pages of the novel, but this essay embraces the minimal amount of text and performs a microreading. In doing so, we can learn a great deal about Lucy, her abnormal body, her radical politics, her role in the narrative, and the queer criptopia she imagines for herself and her disabled beloved, Rosanna. This reading will also demonstrate a mode of reading and ethical reading praxis I call narrative sidestepping—which explores and embraces expansive plot potentials for disabled characters. Using these theoretical tools, I will argue that Lucy, uninterested in the closure of the normative narrative (the solving of the mystery and the resolution of the marriage plot), intentionally delays it, focusing instead on her sidestepped narrative, her plan for a queer criptopic future with Rosanna
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Lesbian · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Plot (graphics · Political science · Praxis · Queer · Queer theory · Reading (process · Scholarship · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Short Stories in Global Literature
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |