Sexuality after Life

Abstract

This article teases out intertextual threads from the visual arts and image-lore that join Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Ill Seen Ill Said. It explores how Beckett’s treatment of gender and sexual desire are deeply informed by Western art history’s specific gender dyad. It argues that Beckett harnesses and agitates this dyad to provoke new understandings of sexuality, sight and sense. By engaging key events in Dream and Ill Seen it unfolds an erotics of nonrelation: the sexual dimension of Beckett’s work that admits the dead and inorganic encrypted and insisting within the all too human.