SOURCE: "Language and Gender in Transit: Feminist Extensions of Bakhtin," in Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, edited by Dale M. Bauer and Susan Janet Mckinstry, State University of New York Press, 1991, pp. 181-98.

In the following essay, Stevenson discusses parallels between Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of language and In Transit, focusing on the connections the novel makes between the mutability of language, conceptions of gender, modernist fiction, and individual identities.

Tracing an Orlando-like figure through shifting guises of femininity and masculinity, Brigid Brophy's In Transit lends support to Sandra Gilbert's idea that modernist writers envision gender identities as transiently assumed roles, "costumes of the mind." An Anglo-Irish iconoclast with decidedly modernist affiliations, Brophy operates in the tradition of Woolf and Joyce, particularly in using parody to unsettle inherited notions of gender. But her 1969 novel places a distinctive emphasis on connections between gender and language, which Brophy reinforces by exploiting...