A growing cohort of female novelists examines the question of a woman's independent self outside traditional relationships. They portray characters, like those in Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy and Katie Kitamura's works, stripped of personal identities, navigating life with hollowed self-concepts. These protagonists lack defined backgrounds and often exist as observers, reflecting on their disconnection. Kitamura, in her novel Audition, articulates the difficulty of defining an "authentic" self when traditional roles are removed, leading to questions about identity and stability in contemporary narratives.
"I don't really know what 'authentic' means. When you take away all of the role-playing, all of the performance, what is left? I don't know if that's your authentic self, or if it's a profoundly raw, destabilized, possibly non-functioning self."
"If a female narrator is extracted from her core relational ties, what kind of consciousness is left?"
"They are loners, dispassionate and disassociated, floating through foreign places in dreamlike Woolfian internal monologue."
"Given how often women are forced to understand themselves as fundamentally in relation to others, is it possible for a woman to have an authentic, independent self?"
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