“A Cropped Silhouette, Neither Mammal Nor Avian”: Liminality and Becoming in Sarah Hall’s “M”

Although the English writer Sarah Hall is mostly known for her novels about the Cumbrian borderlands between England and Scotland, from Haweswater (2003) to The Wolf Border (2016), this paper employs a wider understanding of borders and boundaries not just as spatial issues, but as constructs related to embodied and identitarian processes in which borderlines are erected, breached, or destroyed. The story “M,” from Hall’s last short story collection, Sudden Traveller (2019), will be taken as a case in point to illustrate how characteristics of Hall’s fiction, such as the representation of an abjected force at the core of human behavior and of the multiplicity of female and bodily experience, are reflected by the articulation of liminal states and the blurring or breaching of different borders: geographical, corporeal and symbolic. “M” joins thus Hall’s previous stories “Bees” and “Mrs. Fox” as the final episode in a trilogy that problematizes the construction of female subjectivity and the crossing of animal-human boundaries.