‘The role in which you’ve cast me’: Reassessing the Myth of Spark

Abstract

This chapter examines how the self-reflexive techniques employed in her writing work to facilitate instances of gendered social critique, while also interrogating the wider functioning of power and personal identity in the increasingly mediatised postmodern consumer culture in which they were written. The chapter focuses predominantly on three of Spark’s most formally and thematically experimental works: 1962’s seldom-discussed stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, 1968’s slight and sparsely detailed The Public Image, and the elaborately metafictional satire of celebrity and press sensationalism, Not to Disturb, published in 1971. Also discussed here is ‘A Dangerous Situation on the Stairs’ (c.1960), an unpublished short story that encountered in the author’s archive in the McFarlin Library in Tulsa. In each case, Spark’s literary innovations are read alongside her longstanding preoccupation with the tensions that exist between private selves and public performances – with bodies nearly inscribed within oppressive cultural narratives (and those deemed to be deviant for daring to exist outside of them), and with the sinister, violent negation of female subjectivity.