On Ice: Feminist Alienation and Brookner's "Hotel du Lac"

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKER: Ravit Reichman, Brown University

It was the year Madonna descended from a seventeen-foot wedding cake at the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards, the year Torvill and Dean won ice dancing gold at the Sarajevo Olympics with perfect marks across the board, and the year Anita Brookner’s quiet wisp of a novel, Hotel du Lac, won the Booker Prize. No one was more surprised by this 1984 victory than Brookner herself; indeed, few had anticipated that her novel would beat out celebrated works like J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and Anita Desai’s In Custody. A spare, restrained account of a woman on hiatus from her London life at a Swiss hotel, Hotel du Lac often reads like a Jamesian fever dream (think Daisy Miller), a novel of manners with an occasional foray into the novel of ideas. With scarcely any references to the nineteen-eighties, one might easily mistake it for a late nineteenth-century work. Yet this seeming throwback, I submit, won the Booker because it tapped into something deep, unsettling, and powerfully felt in 1984: an ambivalence and alienation from feminism shaped and distorted by backlash against the women’s movement. Peeling back the layers of Brookner’s most famous work, I make the case for Hotel du Lac as an intricate autopsy of the women feminism forgot, a literary experiment fusing the rise of eighties capitalism with the sundowning of second-wave feminism, and a work that anticipates the tensions between solitude and solidarity in a moment of shifting political tectonics.

About the Speakers

Ravit Reichman is Associate Professor of English at Brown University, where she works at the intersection of literature, law, and psychoanalysis. Her first book, The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination, examines law and literature in the context of the world wars. She is completing Possessive Cases: The Propertied Imagination in Modern Times, a study of property’s cultural and psychological life that traces a genealogy of property’s expansive role in our psychic life, from conventional notions of ownership to the idea of property restitution as a vehicle for justice. This talk draws on her next project, a study of the cultural and intellectual significance of the year 1984.

If you have any questions, please contact Deidre Lynch at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu or Yoon Sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu.