Beginning with a discussion of the murder in 2021 of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, Wayne Couzens, this chapter explores the relationship between gender, power and domestic spaces during the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain, which saw an increase in domestic violence. Through a discussion of Robert Minhinnick’s prose poem ‘Gorwelion’ (‘Horizons,’ 2022) about a fictional video game named after a seventeenth-century convent on the shore of the Bristol Channel whose nuns were subject to a violent raid, it argues that exploring the relationship between different kinds of space has been key to the representation of gender in British Covid fictions. Such representation includes an examination of the relationship between outside and inside, public and private, civic and domestic; but also includes further abstract spatial categories such as real/ virtual spaces, spaces of memory and spaces in time. The chapter then goes on to examine Rachel Cusk’s novel Second Place (2021), where it explores the relationship between spaces of creativity such as artists’ studios and spaces of care such as hospitals and how such spaces are variously constructed and/ or contested as women’s spaces. Finally, the chapter shows how many of the dichotomies already discussed—between inside/ outside, private/ public—come together in Sarah Hall’s pandemic novel Burntcoat (2021), a novel narrated from a stand-point years or even decades after the viral outbreak at its centre, thereby switching into a futuristic mode where the anticipation of posterity begins gesturing towards a post-Covid-19 world.

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Gender, Power and Domestic Spaces in Covid Fiction

  • Hywel Dix

摘要

Beginning with a discussion of the murder in 2021 of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, Wayne Couzens, this chapter explores the relationship between gender, power and domestic spaces during the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain, which saw an increase in domestic violence. Through a discussion of Robert Minhinnick’s prose poem ‘Gorwelion’ (‘Horizons,’ 2022) about a fictional video game named after a seventeenth-century convent on the shore of the Bristol Channel whose nuns were subject to a violent raid, it argues that exploring the relationship between different kinds of space has been key to the representation of gender in British Covid fictions. Such representation includes an examination of the relationship between outside and inside, public and private, civic and domestic; but also includes further abstract spatial categories such as real/ virtual spaces, spaces of memory and spaces in time. The chapter then goes on to examine Rachel Cusk’s novel Second Place (2021), where it explores the relationship between spaces of creativity such as artists’ studios and spaces of care such as hospitals and how such spaces are variously constructed and/ or contested as women’s spaces. Finally, the chapter shows how many of the dichotomies already discussed—between inside/ outside, private/ public—come together in Sarah Hall’s pandemic novel Burntcoat (2021), a novel narrated from a stand-point years or even decades after the viral outbreak at its centre, thereby switching into a futuristic mode where the anticipation of posterity begins gesturing towards a post-Covid-19 world.