“A Cake for which the Flour had been Forgotten”: The Escape from Queer Nonentity in Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September

Abstract

Building upon the popular notion that Lois’s growth in The Last September remains stunted, this paper posits that the young protagonist, who even wallows in a state of queer nonentity, does, in fact, grow up. Employing Virginia Woolf’s concept of the artist’s self-effacing androgynous mind, the paper traces how Lois’s androgynous qualities seem to keep her in a state of limbo, in which her identity is void or frozen, not unlike that of her Protestant Ascendancy class in 1920. However, both Lois’s political and sexual maturation, which culminates in the ruined mill scene at the end of the novel’s second section, is set in motion by the guidance of Marda Norton, who, also possessing androgynous characteristics, serves as Lois’s mirror figure but, embodying a more experienced and established identity, disapproves of Lois’s kind of void-inducing queerness. Although the end of the novel points to the notion that both Marda and the now-mature Lois still face the constant threat of being, again, stunted, their existence attests to the survival of the Ascendancy, albeit in a less complacent state, as Danielstown, the symbol of the Anglo-Irish Big House culture, is being burned down at the end.