桃尾 美佳

The aim of the present paper is to examine the literary function of the Big House in Elizabeth Bowen's works by close reading of her short story "Her Table Spread" (1930). The Big House novel is now considered to be a substantial genre to grasp the entire picture of the Anglo-Irish literature. In this context, even though Bowen is rather famous for her "English" novels, some of her "Irish" works, especially the short stories with a tint of Gothic taste, can be read as an important example of the genre. "Her Table Spread" features the Anglo-Irish ascendancy whose lives are fully dependent on the declining Big House, paradoxically named "the Castle". While they desperately need a groom, or a male-child, to keep their Big House, the heiress is unmarried, still being "detained in childhood" in spite of her age ; she is twenty-five, and has a reputation of being "abnormal". While being careless of the economic situation of the Castle, she longs to have a powerful husband ; her excessive sexual desire almost drives her to transgress the border of the traditional gender notion. I would like to focus on the transgender craving in the story, in order to clarify the subversive potentiality of the Big House as fictional space.