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

lamentable incident which I am now going, in a manner as
straightforward and circumstantial as I can muster, to narrate) but a
piece of information which, though less individual to me than my
identity, was in certain immediate respects even more vital. (In Transit
63)
The even more vital piece of information referred to by the narrator is the knowledge
of the narrator’s own anatomical sex and gender.
The narrator seems to reject the view of identity as a pure social construct, the
view associated with the more extreme interpretations of Butler’s performativity that
Butler eventually rejected. Nevertheless, identity is first invoked in the social realm—
a loss of identity being somehow a loss of a sense of kinship with others. Identity here
is not the same thing as consciousness, and particularly not the linguistic aspect of
consciousness that is reproducible through language. Modernist stream-ofconsciousness
narrative gives us partial access to consciousness, but this
consciousness is itself already a social mediation of identity itself. Consciousness
may be socially permeable, even partly readable, but identity is not. Sheryl Stevenson
argues that In Transit throughout (but especially following Pat’s gender confusion) is
an extension of the Bakhtinian mix of discourses into a world of unstable language
and gender norms:
A hodgepodge of voices, the first-person narrative conveys a psyche so
permeated by social discourses that it seems, as Bakhtin says, a
‘borderline’ phenomenon, merging self and society and so having
‘extraterritorial status.’ In both Bakthin and Brophy this metaphor of
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