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Articles

Volume 20, Number 1 (1995)

Femme(s) Focale(s): Gail Scott's Main Brides and the Post-Identity Narrative

  • Jennifer Henderson
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1995-01-01

Abstract

Main Brides can be read as a text that displaces the narrative quest(ion) for/of identity. Rather than dis-covering Lydia's identity, peeling away surfaces for some hidden truth, Gail Scott uses her "narrator" as a fantasizing focalizer in whom a layering or sampling of identities replaces the concept of fixed identity. Lydia becomes an intertextual construct that produces other texts; Lydia's focalization creates a narrative in which identities are not dis-covered as truths but acted out.