Closed Circuits / Open Legs: Constructions of Femininity in Brooke-Rose’s Between and Quin’s Three

Chapter Two focuses on images and forms of circularity alongside depictions of feminised sexuality in Brooke-Rose’s Between (1968) and Quin’s Three (1966). Both novels figure their central female characters as passive and objectified, images or objects to be looked at and consumed; at the same time the characters perform small resistances, through absence, or slipping between categories and locations. This chapter highlights a parallel reassertion of the body in conceptual art and experimental fiction, investigating the novels’ presentations of gendered power imbalances in terms of cyclicity, repetition, and resistance. Readings in this chapter show the writers replaying motifs from (their) contemporary male nouveau roman writers, ‘reproductions’ (with a difference) through which Brooke-Rose and Quin critique the gender-blindness of their male contemporaries. Neither novel presents a very positive situation for its central female characters. However, while both Between and Three depict specific embodiments of femininity as objectified and ‘open’, under the control of others within the narratives, there is a sense in which they refuse to reproduce feminine norms – the closed circuit here prevents the flow and passive acceptance of normative subject requirements passed from form to form.