Victorian vertigo: What are you? An approach to the concept of 'non-binary' identity and intelligibility in the Crimson Petal and the white by Michel Faber

This thesis seeks to defend the ambiguous state of individuals as regards gender by questioning to what extent we are labelled as a woman or a man. In order to demonstrate this, the concept of 'intelligibility' is explored in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White by comparing literary and linguistic approaches. While investigating fluid and crystallised intelligibility in the characters of the novel, this work aims also to deconstruct 'intelligibility' and access the ambivalent boundaries of the unintelligible. The explanations are supported with some mathematical diagrams in an attempt to look at the different aspects of the topic. The article by Rosalind C. Morris, All Made Up: Performance Theory and the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender will be discussed in relation to the concept of 'unintelligibility' and some solutions will be provided to give other perspectives to the argument. The concepts of fluid intelligibility & unintelligibility and crystallised intelligibility & intelligibility will be shown to be related in a cultural context and some suggestions will be made to answer the problematic question of who or what we really are.