Otherness and Sharing: Space, Emotions, and Discourse in Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2023.15.9Keywords:
The Enchanted April, fictional tourists, heterotopia, Christian love, free indirect discourseAbstract
This paper deals with Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1922 novel The Enchanted April as an example of modernist travel narrative. The novel focuses on four different women vacationing together in Italy for a month and the present analysis aims to address how these protagonists experience otherness – of the Italian place, their own emotions, and one another. To this effect, the analysis relies on the theoretical concept of heterotopia and descriptions of Christian love. Close reading of selected excerpts, which prominently feature free indirect discourse (as a signifier of otherness in the text), reveals that otherness can be overcome through sharing and love mediated through the specific (heterotopic) spatial setting, which bears the aspects of sacredness and the potential for transformation.
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Copyright (c) 2023 Tijana Parezanović, Melina Nikolić
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