Edith Hope’s Gender Performativity In Hotel Du Lac

Anita Brookner(1928 — 2016)was a contemporary British fiction writer and art historian.She won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac in 1984,and she quickly gained the attention of the literary world.Most of Brookner’s heroines are financially independent and highly educated.Many studies have focused on the female characters in Brookner’s novels from different perspectives,while this thesis applies Judith Butler’s gender performativity to analyze Edith Hope in Hotel du Lac from the perspective of feminism.Following a series of misdeeds,the romance writer Edith Hope is labeled an“unqualified woman” and sent to the Hotel du Lac,a symbol of “a training camp for good women”,for introspection.To achieve a stable gender identity and fit into society,she starts to engage herself in the gender performativity.She desires to become a lover,a wife,and “a hare” — the images in her romantic fantasy.She observes the women who perform well in gender performance in the Hotel du Lac,and imitates their“femininity”,but no matter how hard she tries,she fails to become the “perfect woman”in terms of the social norm.She starts to examine her performative acts and recognizes that the “good” performers at the hotel are actually living phony and unsatisfying lives.Gradually,she understands the difference between romance and reality and acknowledges that gender performance is the citation of social norms,namely an imitation of gender characteristics set by patriarchal culture.Moreover,“becoming a woman” appears to be a process of subject construction,but in fact,it is a process of forcibly abandoning the true self under the discipline of patriarchal culture,which runs counter to Edith’s quest for self-awareness and independent personality.In addition,she finds performativity of gender is a constant repetition of acts.In other words,it is always a process and the performer can never achieve the goal designed by absurd society’s norms.As a result,Edith decides to subvert social norms and eventually chooses to suspend the acts of performing,which indicates a return to her real self,that is,a lifestyle of “no stable gender”.