Open AccessWhen Children Look at Us
Author(s) -
Olivia Bălănescu
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
gender studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.104
H-Index - 1
eISSN - 2286-0134
pISSN - 1583-980X
DOI - 10.2478/genst-2020-0004
Subject(s) - narrative , enlightenment , daughter , literature , sociology , psychoanalysis , history , psychology , philosophy , epistemology , art , law , political science
“Hideous Kinky” presents the story of an English mother travelling in Morocco with her two daughters. As expected, this exotic journey is about the woman’s pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. Less expected, the story is narrated by her youngest daughter who constantly denies the story to the reader. Starting from the issue of unreliable homodiegetic narration, this paper proposes to analyse the effects of missing information in the text, and the reader’s subsequent responsibility for filling the gaps and disambiguating the story. As a method, the essay establishes connections between its theoretical investigations and Esther Freud’s novel.