Abstract
After the Party is a novel about a young, working-class woman who is raped by three teenagers at a house party. It explores the interconnectedness of gender and class and shows how a victim of sexual violence can be demonised and blamed with profound repercussions. The story is told from the perspectives of the victim, Georgia, and the perpetrators’ mothers, Colette, Lydia and Helena. As the case unfolds the preparators’ mothers find their comfortable, upper-middle class lives torn apart and prove themselves to be capable of just about anything to protect their sons’ reputations. After the rape and the court case, Georgia is back at university when she sees one of her attackers, Hugh. She sets out to ingratiate herself into his circle of friends, believing that he does not recognise her, in the hope of exacting revenge.The creative work is in the sub-genre of the domestic noir which tends to focus on the middle-class female experience, so in positioning my victim, Georgia, as working-class, I have the opportunity to examine both the mother’s attitudes towards her and also Georgia’s perceptions of them and their privileged lives. In centralising the victim’s trauma there is an opportunity to counter or subvert representations of gendered violence and explore the notion of female victimhood in new, imaginative ways.
Contemporary Northern Irish fiction, and also scholarship of it, has been slower than Southern Irish writing to directly address matters of the female body, so this project is a timely and necessary study of the representations of the female body, particularly as it relates to working-class female characters. I argue that in reading Northern Irish crime fiction (and Milkman) through the lens of the female body we can illuminate the intersection between gender and class, to better understand the power dynamics that subjugate women. I conclude that in examining gender and class through representations of the female body we can move towards an understanding of the complications of the power dynamics at play, while recognising that these complications can never be fully resolved when society and fictional worlds are rooted in hegemonic masculinity.
Thesis is embargoed until 31 December 2028.
| Date of Award | Dec 2023 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Sponsors | Northern Ireland Department for the Economy |
| Supervisor | Andrew Pepper (Supervisor) & Dominique Jeannerod (Supervisor) |
Keywords
- Crime fiction
- gender
- class
- body