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

now irrelevant, replaced by the purely social membership in a particular gender and,
increasingly, in a very particular gender role. Later, two Irishwomen seem to refer to
Pat as “one of us,” putting Pat’s gender once again in doubt—and making a muddle
of gender and national identities.
As Section Three continues, Pat takes on a number of more specific, highly
gendered identities. These include “the high proud lesbian-queen” resisting the
advances of a Don Juan figure (149); a slave boy headed to market, a highly
sexualized identity precipitated by the same Don Juan figure referring to Pat as a boy
(151); Slim O’Rooley, a detective investigating the theft (not loss) of the missing
member (154); Sir Patrice, “the best knight in the world” (160); Burleigh O’Rooley, a
lawyer whose name is a pun on Raymond Burr, the gay actor who played Perry
Mason (161); Patricia “Bunny” (last name not given, Burleigh’s secretary;
Oruleus/Ulrix/Unruly, a fantasy hero who sets off into “the dread realm of the Great
Camp King” (177); and possibly Oc herself, the heroine of the pornographic novel
Pat has been reading. Gender roles become increasingly indistinguishable from genre
roles. Gender is treated, then, as postmodernist fiction. With the force of a controlling
narrative voice ceded to a disembodied narrator, Pat’s identity, too, is ceded to
fiction. This echoes Brophy’s description of the reader’s submission to the author, the
total immersion, in “The Novel as a Takeover Bid” (1963): “The novel doesn’t stop
short at taking you out of yourself: it puts the author in your place. It forces you to
become the author” (Don’t Never Forget 99). While Brophy celebrates the giving up
of oneself to the author as one of the supreme joys of fiction, and as a perceived threat
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