Love, Honour, Obey, Destroy
Unmaking the Family Home in Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath (2012) and Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living (2018)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7152986 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dearbhaile Sophie Houston (0000-0003-0916-0783, independent scholar, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 106 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 1017-1032 |
| Publication date | 2025-10-03 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0013838x.2025.2520756 |
| OpenAlex | W4412202878 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
This article explores the representation of the family home in the wake of divorce through a comparative reading of Rachel Cusk’s memoir Aftermath (2012) and Deborah Levy’s autobiography The Cost of Living (2018). Examining what is at stake in the “unmaking” of one iteration of home in these examples of contemporary life writing, this article contends that Cusk and Levy’s texts illustrate wider cultural anxieties regarding the status and function of the family home. In doing so, feminist critiques of the home space and the family unit are invoked explicitly and implicitly in both texts to discuss the failure of the family home as a space of belonging and its ideological impact on women, specifically wives and mothers. This article brings close readings of the homes in Cusk and Levy’s texts into contact with second wave feminist critiques of domesticity and feminist theories of family abolition
Honour · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Medicine · Philosophy · Religious studies · Gerontology
| Highly cited | No |
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