Cleaving to the Scene of Shame: Stigmatised Childhoods in The End of Alice and Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Abstract

Chapter 2 discusses two contemporary American writers, A.M. Homes and Mary Gaitskill – whose literary engagements with shame, in relation to sexuality in particular, have been notably provocative and disturbing. The chapter first discusses childhood and/as the scene of shame and considers the idea of the ‘queer child’; it then analyses the unsettling, contradictory admixture of desire, disgust and shame to be found in Homes’s The End of Alice (1996) and Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), both of which present stories of child abuse, both of which resist any straightforwardly redemptive or consolatory conclusion. In these novels, the childhood scene of shame is something that cannot be definitively vanquished – hence the double meaning of ‘cleave’ (to cling to, to separate from) in this chapter’s title. Chapter 2 also considers the movement of shame through and beyond the texts: the self-reflexive emphasis on deviant or unreliable narration; the displacement of shame upon the reader, whose disconcerting complicity is thereby invited; and the unease evident in the novels’ reception, regarding the de-feminising implications of female authors writing about apparently ‘shameful’ topics.