Figes, Eva - Peter Ackroyd
PETER ACKROYD
Nelly's Version, is, luckily, not feminine fiction. It may not even be female fiction. In fact, it's hardly fiction at all; its major purpose is to erase all of the properties of the male-dominated and bourgeois novel in an effort to be 'liberated' and modern. (p. 22)
[Nelly] evades all of the responsibilities of the male world—she is simply a recording device which details everything that happens to her, without any specific male or female identity. The heroine does not know who she is, where she is, or why she is. Neither do we. For the heroine this is some sort of advantage: to be a woman without female identity, it seems, is to know neither grief nor pain. For the reader there is a great deal of both.
Of course the narrative could be seen as an elaborate and partially successful analogy for the new liberated woman: Nelly has abandoned all of the social codes which had been foisted upon her but hasn't yet found a permanent...
[The entire page is 695 words long]
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