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Such divisions within the subject relate here to the impact of change, modernization, war. In Brett, 'the Victorian faith in sexual polarity'89 does battle with the ideology of autonomy and liberation associated with the New Woman of the 1920s. Jake is likewise decentred as a result of the tensions between romantic and religious conceptualizations inherited from a nineteenth-century world, and that secular irony produced by the sudden collapse and discrediting of such norms. The vital thing to note here is that character is composed of a number of subject positionsin Catherine Belsey's terms: The individual consciousness .

22nd to 26th, and certainly 8th and 9th. Perhaps others. Come. Mary. Telegrams are, of course, the most condensed forms of communication. What is more, the young lady never receives the answers to these messages; they are sent to another office. She has to try and construct meaning by reading metaphorically between the lines; filling in the gaps between the words, filling in also the missing answers between telegrams. She also tries to construct the meaning of Bradeen and Everard's relationship from her position 'in framed and wired confinement', 19 caged off from their lives by the wires of the post office in which she works.

154). html8/9/2009 11:32:58 AM next page > page_121 < previous page page_121 next page > Page 121 and religious and community rituals are exclusive, rather than the opposite. A growing sense of unreality and of impending violence accompanies the bursting of the Fiesta into life: 'At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the Fiesta exploded' (p. 152). With this explosion, the tensions, emotional conflicts of the characters also come to a climax. The Fiesta's end ('the Fiesta was finished . The Fiesta was over') is paralleled by emotional exhaustion, depression, and sense of an ending, which hangs heavily over Jake: 'The three of us sat at the table, and it seemed as though about six people were missing' (p.