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

Half-fainting, Patricia staggered against the wall and dully heard that
she had knocked her briefcase thumping to the floor. (117).
This moment represents not only a shift in the protagonist’s gender (and, with the
third person in place, perhaps a shift in the protagonist), but another shift from the
epistemological to the ontological. Up until this point, Sexshuntwo has been primarily
concerned with Pat’s mental processes—memory, observation, and deduction—as
they relate to determining the character’s gender. The strangeness of the novel in this
section has not been related to external realities, but to Pat’s comical inability to
determine a seemingly basic fact, with the failing of memory being perhaps the
strangest and most obvious circumstance, as highlighted by Pat’s reactions to the
“evidence” of Betty Bouncer. It has been, up until this point, The Case of the Missing
Remember—a detective story about an epistemological problem. In this moment,
however, the section becomes The Case of the Missing Member, as Pat’s problem
transitions from an epistemological one to an ontological one. That is, Pat has been
attempting to determine his or her physical sexual characteristics based on a variety
of evidence, and has found the evidence inconclusive. Pat’s assumption has been that
sex and gender are equivalent, and that binary categorization is possible—that is, that
gender is a stable reality, a fact about the world, with two simple possibilities for
classification. However, what Pat finds is something that is incompatible with preexisting
categories—so much so that the narrator has no word with which to name it
directly. This is the tipping point between epistemology and ontology—it is not
simply that the sex is unknown, but that, as far as existing categories go, it does not
exist. One could imagine an epistemologically-dominant text that is concerned
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