Obnoxiousness and Elizabeth Bowen’s Queer Adolescents

This chapter addresses Bowen’s obnoxious adolescents, arguing that she brings together the operations of language and the critical function of affect in questions of meaning and being, and connects what she sees as the figure of the queer adolescent in Bowen (for example, Theodora Thirdman in Friends and Relations) with the equally queer or innovative operations of her writing, with her novels as aesthetic events. It thus posits adolescence as a particular structure of feeling that, in the assemblage of (Bowen’s) novelistic writing, at once mobilizes the stylistic operations of her prose, and that determines the singularity of her writing and its aesthetic effects.