Integrating the Narrative: Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You Baby and the Sub-Genre of the Kitchen Drama

Jacques Pothier (1)

1 SUDS - Suds d'Amériques, Espaces Atlantiques

This article examines Ellen Douglas's novel Can't Quit You, Baby, which can be situated in the sub-genre of the kitchen drama, focusing on the relationships between housewives and their black housekeepers in the South, at the crossroads of the issues of race, class and gender, as they come out in the privileged locus of the meeting between black and white women, the kitchen. Douglas's novel transcends the convention of the genre through an innvating narrative perspective and through her style.

Cet article porte sur le roman Can't Quit You, Baby de Ellen Douglas (1988), situé dans un sous-genre américain qu'on pourrait appeler le kitchen drama, qui s'intéresse aux relations entre maîtresses de maison et leurs domestiques noires dans le Sud, au carrefour des questions de race, classe et genre, à travers le lieu privilégié où se manifestent ces interactions. Il examine comment le roman de Douglas joue avec les conventions du genre pour les remettre en cause, en particulier à travers le style et une perspective narrative innovante.

Mots clés: Douglas Ellen; Faulkner William; Race; Class; Gender; South; Integration; Segregation; Narrative; Kitchen; Memory

Mots clés: Classe; Genre; Sud; Récit; Cuisine; Mémoire

Domaines: Littératures

Jacques Pothier. Integrating the Narrative: Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You Baby and the Sub-Genre of the Kitchen Drama. Miranda : Revue pluridisciplinaire sur le monde anglophone. Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English-speaking world , 2011, 5, pp.10. ⟨halshs-00598982⟩