p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000}span.s1 {font-kerning: none}James Purdy’s novel Eustace Chisholm and the... Show morep.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000}span.s1 {font-kerning: none}James Purdy’s novel Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967) challenges the notion that sexuality is part of an identity that is interior to one’s self. Central to this argument is a brief scene from the novel in which the sexual identity of one of the characters, Amos Ratcliffe, is narrated as an Oedipal fantasy of patricide and incest. Read through the lens of melodrama this article suggests that the novel, and this scene in particular, exposes sexual identity as an exteriority that is projected onto a person by his or her environment. This constitution of sexual identity is enforced through the confession, which is central to both the psychoanalytic Oedipal scenario and melodrama. Melodrama, however, problematizes the psychoanalytic confession to an interior truth that is subsequently assumed as sexual identity, for it foregrounds the exteriority onto which the truth-claim of the confession is based. As such, reading Eustace Chisholm through the lens of melodrama opens up a way to think about sexuality without taking recourse to identity. Show less
