A Conscious Failure to Pass:

Dressing across Sexual and Racial Borders in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Abstract

This article seeks to illustrate how cross-dressing functions to highlight not only a crisis of gender identity, as Marjorie Garber describes in Vested Interests (1992), but operates more broadly to indicate multiple and overlapping crises of sexual and racial identity. Using examples from three postcolonial neo-Victorian novels, Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999), Elaine di Rollo’s A Proper Education for Girls (2008) and Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing (2009), the article analyses the representation of characters who consciously fail to pass as ‘other’ when dressing across lines of race and gender. Using a postfeminist framework, the article challenges the assumption that seemingly independent female characters in neo-Victorian fiction automatically contest Victorian stereotypes of accepted female behaviour. Looking at the novels’ representations of otherness, the article argues for the existence of a double Orientalism in postcolonial neo-Victorianism: a revived Victorian Orientalism within the texts as well as a renewed twenty-first-century Orientalism constructed between the present-day reader and the modern text itself.