ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

person narrator transforms into the third-person O’Rooley. Confidently entering the
men’s lavatory, O’Rooley takes advantage of the privacy and searches for physical
proof of gender, but finds that “Something – flesh briefly veiled by underclothes –
was there, but not in the expected form” (117). To this point, the narrator has
attempted to resolve gender confusion based on the performance of gender roles in
public: how the narrator is dressed, how others react to the narrator, the narrator’s
memories of behavior and encounters with others in the past. The narrator has
assumed a fundamental coherence between gender and sex; when one has been
determined, the other will be as well. The narrator is therefore left with an
epistemological problem, attempting to gather knowledge of gender from the
comically unavailable or ambiguous evidence. Sexshuntoo has been the Tale of the
Missing Remember: a modernist mystery concerning the difficulty of determining
reality using the unreliable medium of subjective memory. Once the narrator is able
to confront the body in private, however, the chapter is transformed into the Tale of
the Missing Member. Rather than using gender performance to epistemologically
determine sex, the novel from this point uses sex to ontologically determine gender.
The disappearance of the first-person narrator at this point abets this shift: gender is
now something that is determined extradiegetically, a fact of the story-narrated from
outside, rather than a diegetic hypothesis.
At the end of Sexshuntwo, the now-female protagonist Patricia “crept through
the gap and stood upright,” exiting not only the transit lounge, but the building itself
(124). The language suggests both birth and development. That is, Patricia is born or
grows into the novel’s second half, which will be dominated by gender roles that are
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