An Unofficial Rose
Iris Murdoch
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‘…Although Murdoch illustrates love between men much more frequently in her fiction than love between women, she depicts male homosexuality or lesbianism to some extent in nearly all of her twenty-six novels, and it could be argued that many of these representations of same-sex desire share similarities with social constructionist theory. For example, one could argue that the controlling Emma Sands in An Unofficial Rose (1962), the aggressive Mitzi Richardo in An Accidental Man (1971), and the cigar-smoking, gender-bending Patricia Raven in Henry and Cato (1976) are represented as ‘masculine’ or ‘butch’ lesbians, consistent with the then-prevalent societal expectation that female homosexuals were marked by their mannish appearance or demeanor. In addition, Humphrey Finch in An Unofficial Rose, whose homosexuality is an open secret to those in his community, lives in a sexless heterosexual marriage ostensibly to conform to social norms, while Theodore Gray in The Nice and the Good (1968) and Edgar Demarnay in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) are male homosexual characters who remain ‘in the closet’ even to those closest to them, which again illustrates the social pressures confronting homosexuals ’ ~ Tammy Grimshaw, Studies in the Novel, Vol. 36, No. 4 (winter 2004), pp. 552-570
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Details
| ISBN | 9780140021547 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publication Date | 06-Jan-71 |
| Publisher | Penguin Books Ltd |
| Format | Paperback |
| No. of Pages | 288 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | Good |
| Subject | Fiction / General; Fiction / Humorous; Fiction / Literary |
| BookID | 13932 |
