Feminist ethical reading strategies in Michéle Roberts's In the red kitchen

hysterical reading and making theory hysterical

Susan Rowland

pp. 169-183

in: Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, Tim Woods (eds), The ethics in literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

This essay will examine the ethical encounter with the Other in a contemporary feminist novel: In the Red Kitchen by Michèle Roberts.¹ I will argue that the novel is designed not only to display an ethical field structured around gender paradigms in the social realist content of the novel but also that it is crucially concerned with ethics in its narrative form. Such a narrative form problematises realism while exposing and challenging theories of psyche implicit in historical categories of gender. In short, the text demands that the reader formulate ethical reading strategies which stage an encounter with the Other under the auspices of feminism. In the Red Kitchen makes direct ethical claims upon the reader and these ethical claims are feminist in two modes: first at the level of social realism by depicting life for female narrators in Ancient Egypt, Victorian and modern London, and secondly at a theoretical level. The theoretical stratum of the novel challenges male generated theories about the feminine, that of hysteria by Sigmund Freud,² and of femininity by C. G. Jung,³ in ways that inhabit and organise the novel's narrative structure. As a result the reader is offered two models of absorbing the text: that of reading as murder of the Other (where that Other is aligned with the feminine in the novel's narrative form), and of reading hysterically. Reading hysterically means shifting subject position to respect difference in a move that simultaneously makes male theories, at the genesis of psychoanalysis, hysterical.

Cited authors

Freud Sigmund

Roberts Michéle