Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy (2007)
Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy (2007)
Recommended Citation
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University of Westminster
Article 17
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A novel I would like to recommend is Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy. It
challenges conventional notions of identity on multiple levels. Despite her
international high profile, Smith is often left out of the Scottish literary
canon. This could be a reflection of the fact that her work doesn't always
directly reference Scotland or Scottish national identity, although,
arguably, her work is deeply concerned with identity.
Girl Meets Boy, as its title suggests, attempts to challenge existing
views about gender and sexuality. The primary story level follows the love
story of Anthea and Robin, a modern-day lesbian couple, whose
relationship stands for a dynamic way of conceiving love as opposed to the
conventional trappings Anthea's sister, Imogen/Midge, finds herself in.
This is also underpinned by the story's secondary level, which references
Ovid's queer myth of Iphis and Ianthe, of which Smith's Girl Meets Boy is
a conscious rewriting.
But the novel doesn't just question the patriarchal foundations of
heteronormativity by celebrating queer desire, although the imagined
happy wedding scene—legally impossible at the time of publication—
certainly endorses queerness as a subversive force within the novel. More
than the actualisation of same-sex desire, queerness embodies an
alternative way of being, one which focuses on the fulfilment of individual
happiness rather than the execution of corporate dictates impersonated, in
the novel, by the PURE water company, a multinational corporation Midge
and Anthea work for.
Against the sexist and exploitative ethos of the consumerist-capitalist
culture PURE stands for, Anthea and Robin represent the voice of the
oppressed, women and homosexuals, persecuted and discriminated against
on the basis of reductive readings of gender and sexuality. Juxtaposed to
the closed-mindedness of the company—and the problematic globalised
politics it entertains—is the fluidity of queer identity and desire, captured
in the image of the River Ness, which flows freely, unlike the water bottled
by PURE, and is the chosen background of the fantasy wedding scene.
In this sense, attention to Scottish scenery displays the novel's
articulation of a Scottish identity which is simultaneously embedded in the
local and subversively borderless. While the novel appears to lament a
certain loss of community due to the politics of global economics
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responsible, for instance, for the establishment of soulless shopping malls,
it also exposes anxiety around a Scottish identity simplistically formed in
binary opposition to England. Instead, the novel points to the
transformative potential of queer identity to embrace a clever reconciliation
of local community and cosmopolitan mindset.
Smith's Girl Meets Boy should be included in the list not only because
it represents one of the most original voices in Scotland, but also because it
produces a reading of Scottish identity that is culturally progressive and
politically sound.
Monica Germanà (...truncated)