Identity and Intertextuality in Kate Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird

Many women writers employ intertextuality to question gender identity and to produce female characters who are free of the narratives that have proven to be violent, oppressive and not viable for the contemporary female experience. In this article, I propose a reading of Kate Atkinson’s 2000 novel, Emotionally Weird in the light of Bakhtin’s argument on intertextuality in novelistic discourse to understand how the novel rewrites the gendered individual. Emotionally Weird combines the quest for a new female character and the investigation of postmodern novel’s relation to previous novelistic discourses. Kate Atkinson stages a quest of identity, crystallized in Euphemia Stuart Murray’s search for her true parentage, which merges with the quest of the paternity of the novel searched through the rewritings of literary traditions. The new woman that emerges when these quests are resolved is an illegitimate woman writer; a bastard born out of wedlock who disrupts the law of inheritance while the postmodern novel is similarly shown as an illegitimate novelistic discourse born out of its dialogism with previous novelistic discourses and other literary forms.