Did Mrs Danvers Warm Rebecca's Pearls? Significant Exchanges and the Extension of Lesbian Space and Time in Literature

Bibliographic Data

ID5127709
AuthorsNicky Hallett (corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume74
Issue1
Pages35-49
Publication date2003-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400109
OpenAlexW2086529093
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited15

This article is concerned with the ways in which literary spaces can become sexualized by the transfer of objects between women, as well as by the ways in which bodies themselves touch. It discusses how lesbian desire changes both spatial and temporal structures, via a consideration of the use of pearl imagery. In particular, it analyses the link between sexual, class and bodily construction in two texts: Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (1938) and Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'Warming Her Pearls' (1987). These texts encode contrasting ideas about the lesbian body, ideas that are discursively textured by the periods in which they were written and by the relative ideological resistance of their writers. While du Maurier's novel establishes a concept of spatial and temporal enclosure, Duffy's poem creates an unconfined and unstable lesbian body-text. Within this, the pearl can be seen as a subversive device, destructuring and stretching the parameters of lesbian desire

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Extension (predicate logic) · Feminism · Human sexuality · Ideology · Lesbian · Linguistics · Literature · Pearl · Poetry · Politics · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Computer Science · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Marriage and Sexual Relationships · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy

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