SOURCE: Rowland, Susan. “Feminist Ethical Reading Strategies in Michèle Roberts's In the Red Kitchen: Hysterical Reading and Making Theory Hysterical.” In The Ethics in Literature, edited by Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, and Tim Woods, pp. 169-83. New York: St. Martin's, 1999.

In the following essay, Rowland asserts that Roberts utilizes a social realist narrative in her novel In the Red Kitchen to make feminist ethical claims.

This essay will examine the ethical encounter with the Other in a contemporary feminist novel: In the Red Kitchen by Michèle Roberts.¹ I will argue that the novel is designed not only to display an ethical field structured around gender paradigms in the social realist content of the novel but also that it is crucially concerned with ethics in its narrative form. Such a narrative form problematises realism while exposing and challenging theories of psyche implicit in historical categories of gender...