Diary as Queer Malady:

Deflecting the Gaze in Sarah Waters’s Affinity

Abstract

Affinity adapts and exploits tensions between a panoptic principle of uncertainty and a level of confidence promoted by diary form to effectively undermine both. The panoptic gaze is juxtaposed with diary privacy and associated suggestions of sincerity to raise questions about textual manipulation and power relations within writer/reader relations. A mystifying atmosphere of spiritualism and suspicion, manufactured myth and generic ambiguity, clouds epistolary events and disguises vital letters that are paradoxically contained within, but physically absent from the text. Unseen letters escape the panoptic principle to drive both the plot and the actual love affair that plays in the shadows and sub-text of the novel. This article examines how narrative visibility and class invisibility are effectively coordinated by specious epistolary confidence.