Candidate: Jennifer A. Smith

Degree of: Doctor of Philosophy

Department: English

Title: A Highly Ambiguous Condition: The Transgender Subject, Experimental Narrative and Trans-Reading Identity in the Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, and Jeanette Winterson

Committee: Dr. Gwen Raaberg, Chair
Dr. Christopher Nagle
Dr. Jil Larson
Dr. Paula Brush

Date: Friday, May 19, 2006, 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
2302 Friedmann Hall

Abstract: This dissertation examines how the constantly evolving gender identity of a text’s transgender subject relates to the text’s narrative structure and shapes the orientation of the reader to the text. Accordingly, this project examines how these transgender narratives deploy experimental stylistic techniques that enhance the reader’s experience of ceaseless transitioning by revealing gender as a constant process that never solidifies onto a body and by highlighting the text’s own status as process rather than finalized product. Further, this project examines how a transgender subject and his/her relationship to the body, culture, and narrative is involved in the re-vision of three conventional discourses: biography, myth, and romance.

Ultimately, this research presents a trans-reading identity as an interpretive framework that reads gender ambiguity and fluid sexuality into as well as out of texts. This reading position provides the reader with interpretive tools that will allow for a multiplicity of gendered reading positions beyond the male/female binary and opens up texts to complex interpretations that highlight the relationship between their narrative experimentation and their critique of stable gender positions. The focal novels are Orlando by Virginia Woolf, The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter, and Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson because they are “truly independent productions within which gender ambiguity is not a trap or a device but part of the production of new forms of heroism, vulnerability, visibility, and embodiment” (Halberstam 96). This study argues that such transgender narratives allow readers access to not only a trans-reading position but to a new way of viewing the world beyond the confines placed upon them by a monolithic heterosexism.

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