"The Frontiers of Love" and Queer Literature of Place: Sexual and Territorial Ambiguity in Durrell's Novels

My title queers Lawrence Durrell’s notion of “spirit of place,” the idea that identity is protean and has more to do with embeddedness in place than any essentialist or fixed being. To do so, this article reads two passages in Durrell’s novel Monsieur that link sexuality and colonialism by presenting similar ambiguities. The novel’s formal innovations combine themes of sexuality and colonial territory that mirror its indeterminate sexualities and overlapping national landscapes. The ambiguities in both (both passages and both indeterminacies) relate to and seemingly derive from Durrell’s dismissal of stable identity, which is a prominent feature in Monsieur and also runs across his oeuvre. It is also closely akin to his ambiguous sense of form and structure.