One is Never Quite Totally in the World: Jane Bowles’ Allegorical Realism

Abstract

The work of the mid-twentieth-century American writer Jane Bowles has always had a loyal and appreciative (even a cultish and adoring) readership among writers and artists, but until recently her work has suffered from critical incomprehension and neglect. Contemporary reviewers of the work as it was originally published in the 1940s, and then collected and republished in the 1960s, tended to divide into highly partisan camps, one side arguing that the work was nonsensical, hysterical and discardable, and the other contending that it was writing of the first order and the rare product of genius (Skerl 6–12). Subsequent commentary was similarly skewed, but “tended toward a more consistent affirmation of [Bowies’] literary achievement” (Skerl 13). More recently, trends in gay and lesbian studies, as well as in poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial criticisms, have opened the way for a more sustained and probing thematic critical appreciation of Bowles’ work.