The Woman in the Red Dress

Book excerpt: "Graceful and impassioned, The Woman in the Red Dress offers important new approaches to narratives about father-daughter incest as well as stories that contaminate the myth of home as a safe space and map a geography of sexual violence, victimization, and survival. Gwin situates her analysis of fiction such as Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres within contemporary debates concerning survivor discourse, theories of domestic space, and issues of race and class. She also explores books - such as Hulme's The Bone People - that enter a murky and liminal queer space in which gender itself travels and the most claustrophic physical and social spaces can unexpectedly unhinge and open.".