De-siring desire: Emancipatory visions of female sexuality in Barbara Gowdy's fiction

This thesis analyzes the development of increasingly emancipatory forms of female sexuality in Barbara Gowdy's Falling Angels, We So Seldom Look on Love, and Mister Sandman. Each section of this discussion argues that Gowdy's texts "queer" mainstream cultural constructs such as the patriarchal family romance and its accompanying compulsory heterosexuality. The first chapter discusses Gowdy's yoking of maternity to eroticism in Falling Angels and Mister Sandman. Gowdy "queers" the family romance in these texts by caricaturing Western culture's popular maternal iconography and undermining radical feminist precepts. Chapter Two explores Falling Angels and Mister Sandman in terms of the sexual identities Gowdy develops for her young female protagonists in adolescence and young womanhood. Both the first and second chapters argue that the forms of female sexuality in these texts are decidedly more emancipatory in Mister Sandman than in Falling Angels. The third chapter discusses the title story of We So Seldom Look on Love in order to argue that, in this text, Gowdy "queers" heterosexuality. Gowdy's rendering of the desire her necrophilic female protagonist experiences in "We So Seldom Look on Love" ultimately undermines the patriarchal sexual system that defeats her female characters in Falling Angels and thus prefigures the renegotiation of restrictive sexual roles perpetuated by her female characters in Mister Sandman. The conclusion comments briefly on The White Bone, but discusses this text and its enthusiastic critical reception primarily in order to highlight and then to query the critical silence which surrounds Gowdy's work to date.