1 REVENGE BODY: A NOVEL AND A DEFENCE OF THE ENGLISH LITERATURE CANON IN AN ERA OF HYPERTEXTUAL ABUNDANCE. A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Lucy Jane Boucher Department of English, Brunel University 2 Chapter One In a small room, in a small flat, two figures faced one another. It was cold outside, but far colder on the top floor of the mid-terrace house they shared. It was late September and there was an unseasonable chill in the air, but the couple refused to turn the heating on until the dying days of December. It was a discomfort that each blamed on the other. She was cheap. He was tight. The house was freezing. Their living room was an arena for a gladiatorial contest of wills to see who could remain silent the longest. Eleri and Marcus were born and raised in a town that was known only for its above average suicide statistics. They resisted the adolescent impulse to slash their wrists or chase down paracetamol with vodka and swing from the ceiling fans. They survived the turbulent teenage years, the roar of their twenties and were creeping through the boredom of their early thirties towards a dark middle age. Birdwater was a town in South Wales on the outskirts of the capital city’s attention. It was a place to be passed through on the way to somewhere else. The town centre had been emptied by the outsourcing of fashion stores and coffee chains to the discount retail park off the M4. Charity shops and e-cigarette emporiums had taken the place of repossessed restaurants and out-of-business bakeries. The people of Birdwater no longer visited the local butcher or did the weekly shop at the greengrocers. They decided against walking five minutes down the road for disappointment when a five-minute drive delivered them a panoply of consumer delights. Though Eleri had lived in Birdwater all her life, she knew little of its outlying areas. She held vague recollections of childhood car-rides to the seaside with sand buckets and picnic hampers, but she would have been amazed to learn that the endless journey had only been fifteen minutes. She remembered being buckled into her booster seat, watching the concrete of the town transform into acres of farmyards and orchards which gave way to the limestone cliffs and drifting sand of the curved shore. 3 Her father would sit beside her his hands loose on the steering wheel as he hummed an offkey ‘Hallelujah’ with Leonard Cohen. Her mother pointed to fields of grazing sheep and horses as though they were new inventions. Eleri paid so little attention to them that they may as well have been. She saw them each time anew and forgot them as soon as she reached home. “What sound does a cow make?” her mother would demand to know, hellbent on educating her idiot daughter. Eleri would shrug. She did not care. She was eight years old and her parents were beginning to worry. Scenery did not interest her. She did not need fresh air and sunlight. She preferred to be inspired by the majesty of nature from the comfort of the indoors, watching Blue Planet on a 4K plasma television screen with an easily accessible bathroom and a lapful of snacks. The outside world unsettled her. She held tight to the centre of the town for fear it would not hold. She did not own a car and she did not like to walk. Her flat was equidistant from the Chinese takeaway and Tesco’s. Domino’s delivered to her doorstep. Nothing more was necessary. As a teenager she had been restless, dreaming of a life outside the limits of her hometown. Family holidays gave her a glimpse of big cities and bright lights. Books and movies filled her head with daydreams of cigarettes along the Seine, literary salons with intellectual Manhattanites, and sunsets watched from the balcony of her big city apartment. Time had stripped her of these pretensions. She no longer pretended to read Proust. She struggled through Gordon Ramsey’s autobiography on Audible. French desserts were all that connected the two men through the centuries, but Eleri was a sucker for butter. Time diminished her ambitions. Birdwater was enough for her. She experienced the town through her sense of smell. She could shut her eyes on any street corner and know exactly where she was with one whiff. Market Square was scented with the scallops-on-the-turn of the fishmonger’s stall. His cries of “fresh off the boat” did nothing to convince her that the green-tinted fish buried beneath melting ice had not been lying in repose for the last week. If she wound her way through streets that rose like staircases – an issue for the substantive elderly population who petitioned the council to install stairlifts on the most vertiginous ascents – she would pass Coach Road. Outside the pubs that lined the 4 cobblestoned street, toothless old men offered her sniffs of cigarette smoke and cheap ale like perfume samples at a department store. She could catch her breath at the top of Primrose Hill, the scent of snap dragons and sweet peas reminding her that she was entering the affluent part of town. Here, the monotonous rows of Victorian terraces that looked more like army barracks than family homes gave way to detached houses with neat gardens and white fences. Doorways were ornamented with hoods and pilasters, pediments and fanlights. Flowerboxes coloured the windowsills. Each house was unique in its owners’ interpretation of middle-class taste, but this was an individuality she could not afford. The flat that she shared with her partner, Marcus, was as tired and grey as its surroundings. The building’s pebbledash render flaked onto the driveway, leaving bricks and mortar exposed in a sexless striptease. The landlord refused to renovate. Eleri and Marcus were incapable of practicalities. The structure was subsiding further into the earth with each rent cheque. The real estate agent did not mention this when she walked the hopeful young couple around the property seven years ago. The area was “up and coming,” she purred as she bent down to retrieve the pen she’d carelessly dropped on the stairway. The alcove Marcus hit his head on as his eyes lingered on the outline of her underwear beneath a tight leather pencil skirt was “cosy”. It was a “fixer-upper,” she assured them as she straightened up, brushing the creases from her blouse. Marcus nodded as her hands found fault with the material covering her breasts, smoothing the silk with thorough circular motions. They could “really do something with the place,” she said in the cramped kitchen, arching her back against the doorway to allow Marcus to brush past. He agreed. They could. They never did. At the time it was all they could afford. Now the rent was three months in arrears, and they could not afford to leave. “What do you think?” Eleri asked at last. She could not gauge Marcus’ reaction, bundled up as they were in their winter wardrobes. She narrowed her eyes, watching for the twitch of a grey gloved hand or the shrug of his shoulders in their Soviet officer’s woollen greatcoat. “What do you think?” Marcus countered. 5 “I think you should tell me what you think.” They spoke in smoke, their breath pluming in the air between them. “You don’t want to know what I think.” Eleri tried to remember that she had loved him, once. They had met ten years ago at the Welsh Anarchist Book Fair. She entered the village hall to escape the rain and instead met the man who would define the next decade of her life. Her fingers brushed the back of his hand as they reached for the same copy of Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia. She had mistaken the book for a poignant coming-of-age-novel about a young woman’s disappointing holiday. “I see you know your Chomsky from your Cheryni,” he said. “I like books,” she replied, though she neglected to mention that she no longer liked to read them. She found practical purposes for literature – the hardback edition of Infinite Jest that stopped her bedroom door, the paperback copy of Ulysses with an unbroken spine that propped up her iPad. “And you like the Russians.” It was not a question and Eleri did not correct him. If he over-estimated her intellect she was not to blame. She knew boys always believed what they wanted to about strange girls. She was a blank canvas in ugly glasses upon which he projected his fantasies. Eleri was not beautiful. When faced with the magnifying mirror, she lamented the grotesque forms her genetics had knitted. Though she marvelled at the circus freakery of her face, the only extraordinary thing about Eleri Hayward was how average she looked. She was pretty enough to escape criticism and not enough to threaten other women into picking apart her flaws. She did not attract unwanted male attention in the streets or the supermarket. This, she felt, was the great injustice of her life. Her heart shaped face was the canvas for features which appeared plain when not made up. Her green eyes did not sparkle like emeralds. Her white skin was not unblemished like porcelain. Her lips were not full unless filled in with lipstick. Her 6 badly dyed black hair was coarse and, despite the singe of the hot iron and the promises of John Frieda, never frizz-free.