title: "Lizzie do you mind": Gertrude Stein's laws of genre in blood on the dining-room floor.
abstract: Against previous critics' readings of Stein's Blood on the Dining-Room Floor as a failed attempt at the hard-boiled genre, this article argues for the many ways in which the novel re-writes the gothic/domestic detective story in a brilliant tour de force that frames all that is un-natural about heteronormative Victorian family life while offering a lesbian alternative. In Stein's subversive and serious play with the forms and conventions of popular fiction, her positive invocations of Lizzie Borden as textual witness, her wide-reaching references to lesbian relationships in other of her works, and, finally, her virtuosic use of silence, Stein writes a profound critique of the patriarchal family through a radical unmaking of a thoroughly domestic literary form.
authors: Department of English, Hunter College, CUNY, New York, NY 10065, USA. Amy.Robbins@hunter.cuny.edu
authors: Amy Moorman
authors: AM
authors: Robbins
mesh_terms: D005190:Family / Q000266:history*; D005260:Female; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D018452:Homosexuality, Female / Q000266:history*; D006801:Humans; D008019:Life Style / Q000266:history*; D008093:Literature, Modern / Q000266:history*; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D014481:United States