Rosie Garland: Challenging the Neo-Victorian Status Quo in The Night Brother (2017)
Neo-Victorian literature is often associated with mirrors and dual imagery; simultaneously depicting Victorian settings and events for twenty-first century readers, whilst reflecting our own issues and anxieties. While Neo-Victorianism frequently celebrates marginalised identities and tells hidden histories, many works reinforce Western-centric, cis-normative ideologies through their narrative voice. This paper draws on my PhD research into cross-dressing and ‘criminality’ and shows how Rosie Garland’s work disturbs this trend. As a novelist, poet and performer, Garland defies categorisation, and this is also reflected in her neo-Victorian works. In The Night Brother (2017), Garland actively centres marginalised identities through her use of first-person perspective; this allows the protagonists to tell their own stories in their own voices, rather than being spoken for by third-person narrators. Moreover, by setting the novel in Manchester, Garland rejects the London-centric focus that the literary genre tends to pursue, giving a voice to northern communities. Finally, I contend that Garland’s fiction is one example of a neo-Victorian novel which highlights and challenges the continued imbalance of representation between London and the affluent south, and other regional communities.
Emma Catan is a second year (part time) PhD candidate at Northumbria University; her thesis is titled ‘Cross-Dressing and ‘Criminality’ in the neo-Victorian city’. Her research interests focus on gender and space; how city-spaces are constructed and policed, and how social codes can be transgressed through gender performance (specifically, cross-dressing).
