Short stories on domestic violence Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 1 Ines Gstrein This article adopts an approach to the literary representation of domestic violence through a focus on gendered spaces, voices, and perspectives in two short stories of Janice Galloway’s debut short story collection Blood (1991). Situating itself within the context of feminist narratology, it assumes that all aspects of narrative reality - elements of the story world and of the narrative discourse alike - are informed by sex, gender, and sexuality. By comparing and contrasting the short stories “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”, the article investigates two different narrativisations of domestic violence. While tensions in the private home are just beginning to develop in the former text, in the latter text, a femicide has taken place. Using “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” as examples, the article examines gendered narrative voices and perspectives on the discourse level as well as the control that male characters exert over the public and private space. The (looming) domestic violence that Galloway’s characters are exposed to is effectively conveyed by intrusions into the private home and the averted eyes of strangers alike. The careful choice of narrative mode and gendered descriptions of space make entrenched gender hierarchies and their injustices glaringly obvious. In short, the literary form of the short story collection enables Galloway to place different settings, voices, and perspectives alongside each other so as to consider domestic violence from various angles. 1 An earlier version of this article was submitted in partial fulfilment of the credit mark for the course module “Text and Context: Scottish Literature” held at the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School in 2022. The author thanks the instructor, Dr Fiona Paterson, and the anonymous external reviewer for their constructive feedback on the initial submission. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0012 Ines Gstrein 188 1. Aim and scope of the article This article sets out to assess Janice Galloway’s literary engagement with gender, specifically the depiction of domestic violence in two short stories, by using concepts and the terminology of feminist narratology. Generally speaking, the analysis of gender is not new to the study of the topics, characters, and literary genres employed by Galloway. For instance, Ali Smith concludes that “[c]learly Galloway is driven by the question of gender; her writing unwraps huge social dilemmas, shows you the state of things without offering any notion of what to do about it” (1993: 179). Jorge Sacido-Romero notes that Galloway’s short fiction “functions as an enduring channel for a woman to speak in a different voice against a contemporary social system that considers women” (2018: 192) to be unimportant. According to Cristie Leigh March, the author “reiterates a problem she notes not only in Scottish literature but also in many literatures - the validity of women’s writing and its critical reception” (2002: 109). Moira Burgess maintains that Galloway’s “characters explore what is to them very definitely a man’s world, and question its assumptions” (1996: n.pag.). As these examples illustrate, many discussions of gender in Galloway’s work focus on how gendered experiences are depicted in characterisations. By contrast, the present article shifts focus: it examines the representation of domestic violence in Galloway’s short story collection Blood through a focus on gendered narrative structures. While gendered narrative structures appear in Galloway’s longer and shorter fiction alike, it is worth singling out Galloway’s short stories for a gender-based narratological reading. Dorothy McMillan observes that “Galloway often suggests that women’s lives are best represented as a series of short stories or vignettes with repeated epiphanies or clarifications, rather than as plot-driven toward definite closure” (2010: n.pag.). McMillan’s line of argument touches upon the question of whether short stories are particularly apt to describe women’s gender-specific experiences. The study of the interconnections between gender and the short story form has gained momentum ever since the late 1980s. As Emma Young and James Bailey note, the last forty years of short story criticism saw a “move from solely focusing on definitions and aesthetics to a broader consideration of these issues in tandem with wider socio-cultural and historical dynamics” (2017: 2). Early examples are Mary Eagleton’s contribution “Genre and gender”, published in the 1989 edited volume Re-reading the Short Story, and Julie Brown’s 1995 edited collection American Women Short Story Writers. Taking my cue from McMillan, I argue that the literary form of the short story collection is particularly suited to make gendered experiences intelligible because it offers a panorama of gendered settings and gendered narrative voices. In the case at hand, Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 189 these then shape the readers’ understanding of the domestic violence that Galloway’s characters are exposed to. This article explores the ways in which two short stories from Galloway’s debut collection Blood (1991) are informed and connected by their treatment of gendered spaces, voices, and perspectives. The short stories “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” can be seen as mirror images of each other. In both texts, the ever-present danger of domestic violence is brought out sharply by the effective use of gendered narrative structures. Thus, the article begins by an introduction to feminist narratology and a delineation of how the terms sex, gender, and sexuality are understood. Then, it examines how spaces and voices are gendered in “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”. The two aspects are brought together when considering gendered multiperspective narration across the two short stories. As will be demonstrated, the representation of domestic violence in Galloway’s short stories not only relies on the depiction of gendered human characters, but also on gendered spaces, voices, and perspectives. In fact, gender informs all aspects of narrative reality, so it is important to not only take characterisation into account. 2. Feminist narratology The present article adopts ideas and concepts of feminist narratology. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the conception of gender as a distinct narrative category proved to be a watershed moment for literary studies. It brought about reconsiderations, modifications, and creations of narratological tools, terms, and concepts. Early examples of research into feminist narratology include studies by Susan Sniader Lanser and Robyn Warhol. Both critics carried out analyses of the discourse level of literary texts and focused on female narrative voices (Allrath & Surkamp 2004: 143). Their works reveal that narrative techniques and the sociocultural context are intertwined: narrative forms are shaped by and reflect the material and practical circumstances surrounding literary production (Nünning & Nünning 2004: 17-19). Marion Gymnich highlights that feminist narratology aims to “reveal the pitfalls of supposedly gender-neutral approaches to the structural analysis of narratives, demonstrating that gender neutrality, which is more or less taken for granted by classical narratology, usually turns out to be an illusion” (2013: 707). Classical narratologists favour “supposedly ‘objective’ description[s] of narrative structures” (Gymnich 2013: 707). Feminist narratology modifies and develops an array of narratological tools, terms, and concepts to grasp the role of gender in narrative texts and their contexts. Inter alia, gender pertains to “the relationship between story and plot, narrator and author, and the text and its analysis” (Young 2018: 917). The present article sin- Ines Gstrein 190 gles out three aspects for analysis: gendered spaces, gendered voices, and gendered multiperspectivity in Galloway’s Blood. In spite of a steadily growing body of literature on the subject, feminist narratology has not developed into a distinct branch of narratology. As Tory Young notes, “[t]here are very few monographs that openly identify with something called feminist narratology [...] and many more feminist works that attend to the relationship between narrative structure and sexuality more generally” (2018: 913, original emphasis). Feminist narratology is subject to constant change. Tory Young emphasises that “[t]heories of narrative, like forms of narrative themselves, are permanently in flux, and accordingly, the formulation of feminist narratology by its named practitioners has dissembled into diverse queer and feminist theories of narrative” (2018: 914). Although feminism has left its mark on narratology, a clear-cut new field of feminist narratology has not emerged. Rather, feminism’s “influence and relevance is more diffuse” (Young 2018: 913) in narrative theory. Sex, gender, and sexuality are keywords in feminist narratology. The present article employs Lanser’s basic distinction because it convincingly connects the concepts with the principal aim of feminist narratology, which Lanser defines as follows in The Living Handbook of Narratology: In most academic pursuits today, “sex” stands for the biological designations of male and female (with some scholars including “intersex” as a designation), while “gender” marks social identities, roles, and behaviors as well as qualities of masculinity and femininity that have been associated with a specific sex, and “sexuality” refers to the orientation of desire toward a particular sexed or gendered object. The distinction between “sex” and “gender” has been challenged, however, by postmodern theorists and by biological confirmation that “sex” itself is not a singular entity. The term “gender” is now the most common anchor term, since it avoids binary assumptions about bodily identities and recognizes transgender and “gender-queer” possibilities. The field of gender and narrative stakes its diverse approaches on the shared belief that sex, gender, and sexuality are significant not only to textual interpretation and reader reception but to textual poetics itself and thus to the shapes, structures, representational practices, and communicative contexts of narrative texts. In claiming that these key vectors of social positioning carry narratological weight, feminist narratology marked a significant departure of value from classical narrative theory. (Lanser 2013: n.p.) Lanser presents the core argument of feminist narratology in conjunction with the terms sex, gender, and sexuality. According to Lanser, these are not only important for grasping the readers’ responses to text, but also for understanding the very elements that narrative texts are made of. The passage quoted above makes the transition from delineating the basic Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 191 assumptions of feminist narratology (as opposed to classical narrative theory) to the description of the object of feminist narrative analyses, namely textual poetics. In a similar vein, the present article now moves on from the more general discussion of feminist narratology to the examination of a gendered structure in Galloway’s Blood: space. 3. Space Scholars in feminist narratology and short story criticism have developed various criteria to analyse gendered settings. Natascha Würzbach groups the interrelations of gender and space in narrative texts into three categories: the accessibility of places, the position and movement of characters, and gendered narrative styles used to describe places (2004: 57). A conventional yet contested distinction is drawn between private and public space. Whereas the former has traditionally been conceived as the realm of women, the latter has been regarded as a predominantly male space (Würzbach 2004: 52-57). However, ascribing gender to a place is not as straightforward as it might seem. Kate Krueger highlights the varying interpretations of gendered spaces which are subject to “time, location, and the acts that occur within them” (2014: 1) and calls attention to liminal spaces such as thresholds and streets (2014: 2). The artificial separation of male and female areas highlights how significant it is for female characters to transgress spatial boundaries in their struggle for participation in the political, social, and cultural sphere (Würzbach 2004: 52). Depending on their gender, characters have different perceptions of places. As Würzbach (2004: 53) shows, the private home (“das Haus”) is a prime example for the ways in which setting can mirror gender hierarchies. Up until the 20th century, women characters were confined to the house while their male counterparts primarily used the house only for short periods of time to rest and recover. For women protagonists, the house can be both the source of happiness and of fear. Often, the private home is associated with family life and romantic relationships. Whether the private home really is a place of safety, however, crucially depends - in stories that feature heterosexual relationships - on the main male character. Although the house may initially promise comfort and security, it may also turn into a scene of domestic violence. Accordingly, contradictory connotations are attached to the house and tension is created (Würzbach 2004: 53). Gender also influences the ways in which space is presented on the discourse level. In narrative texts, space is mediated through the narrative act. As Ina Schabert notes, “[t]he I who narrates cannot avoid adopting viewpoints, modes of thought, styles of speech, shades of voice which Ines Gstrein 192 are more or less firmly associated with either femininity or masculinity” (1992: 313). Literary descriptions of space carry gendered connotations. On the one hand, the attribution of value to a place, attention to detail, and the use of rhetoric strategies such as metonymy and comparison are often identified as typically feminine and are associated with a woman narrator. Internal focalisation facilitates such descriptions. On the other hand, panoramic views of space, objective classifications, and the character’s ability to maintain emotional distance from the surroundings carry male connotations. Fact-based descriptions demonstrate the character’s in-depth understanding of place and their ability to maintain control over the place they find themselves in. These, too, are commonly associated with male narrators (Würzbach 2004: 62-66). It is important to note that these categories refer to how space is described in the narrative text rather than to the gendered nature of space itself or the gender identity of the narrator. Readers may use gendered descriptions of space to make assumptions about the narrator’s gender identity, but this undertaking may lead them astray: a woman narrator can adopt a way of narrating that carries male connotations, and vice versa. Not all descriptions of space in narrative texts fit the stereotypes of the emotional, feminine narrative discourse and the distanced, masculine narrative discourse. As the title of Galloway’s “Love in a changing environment” already indicates, the setting plays a crucial role in this text. Due to their length, short stories usually present only a small range of spaces. This adds even more value to spaces “because they accrue symbolic significance” (Krueger 2014: 2). “Love in a changing environment” is told by an unnamed and ungendered narrator who is also the protagonist of the short story. Readers obtain only sketchy information on the narrator-protagonist. The major part of the short story is set in the one-room flat that the narratorprotagonist shares with their romantic partner, a man. The text revolves around the domestic life of the two characters. The development of the couple’s relationship is aligned with the ongoings in the shop underneath their flat. At the beginning of the short story, the business premises are occupied by a bakery; later on, they are taken over by a butcher’s. It is the enmeshment of and the changes within two spaces - the flat and the shop - that heavily influence the actions of the short story’s characters. “Love in a changing environment” shows intersections of private and public spaces. As Ellen-Raïssa Jackson emphasises, “the bakery is more than a background to their [the couple’s] lives, it is a living context which plays an active role in them, pervading and defining even their thoughts” (2004: 9). The couple’s private space cannot be clearly separated from the shop underneath it. A window marks the permeable boundary between the couple’s flat and the bakery. Windows are liminal spaces as they overlook the outside world. In feminist narratology, they may be Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 193 read as a symbol for a (female) character’s longing to leave the home (Würzbach 2004: 53). In Galloway’s short story, the window of the couple’s flat connects the private space of the couple to the bakery on the ground floor, a public place. Yet this boundary crossing between inside and outside differs considerably from Würzbach’s reading of windows in narrative texts. The private space is not seen as a confinement in “Love in a changing environment”: instead, both partners - one of them male, the other one ungendered - voluntarily stay in for most of the time while the scents and sounds of the bakery enter the flat by the window. Not only do the scents and sounds transgress the boundary between two places, but they completely dissolve it. As soon as the couple move in, they adapt their daily routines to the business activities of the bakery: “[c]rumpets, and fruit scones, the crackling echo of cellophane, the sulphur stink of egg mayonnaise led us through lunchtime and an hour with coffee at three was signalled by the moist, animal vapour of cream meringues” (Galloway 1999: 17). The couple do not own a clock; instead, they navigate through the day by the smell and sound of the bakery’s various goods. Private and public space are intertwined. While the shared private space is not clearly gendered, the description of the settings bears strong similarities to the stereotypically feminine narrative discourse as outlined by Würzbach. Würzbach argues that attention to detail and mood (“Sensibilität für Stimmungen in der Raumdarstellung”) is a common feature of the stereotypically feminine narrative discourse (2004: 65). “Love in a changing environment” is interspersed with descriptions of the sounds and smells of numerous pastries. Phrases like “[w]e slept well, waiting for the early-morning drift of wholemeal” (Galloway 1999: 18) show the couple’s emotional involvement in their surroundings and point to the “interlocking patterns of experience and the reactive basis of everyday life” (Jackson 2004: 10). The narratorprotagonist and their partner perceive the blend of the bakery and the flat as delightful; it is a setting in which they prosper. As long as the bakery is in working order, all is well with the couple’s love life. The narrative discourse conveys the couple’s feelings towards their surroundings in great detail, thus boasting characteristic features of the stereotypically feminine narrative discourse. Towards the end of the short story, however, the domestic space acquires more and more threatening aspects which eventually drive the narrator-protagonist away. After the bakery has closed down, the premises are adapted for a butcher’s shop. Like the scents and sounds of the bakery, the noises and smells from the butcher’s enter the flat, haunt the couple’s imagination, and ultimately destroy the relationship (Sacido- Romero 2019: 141). March notes that “Galloway’s landscapes become hostile and dangerous for men and women on a domestic, city-scape, and Ines Gstrein 194 even a national level” (2002: 127). The couple have no control over the place they live in because they cannot step back from their emotional and physical entanglement with space. Their attempts to create a distance between themselves and the butcher’s by thoroughly washing themselves every morning fail. Consequently, the narrator-protagonist has no option but to leave. They transgress a boundary and seek refuge in a neutral, private space, “a new flat on the ground floor smelling only of damp” (Galloway 1999: 19). While the narrator-protagonist of “Love in a changing environment” is able to escape the ever-present danger of the butcher and the “bone grinder” (Galloway 1999: 19), the butcher’s wife in “The meat” is the victim of “homicidal domestic violence” (Sacido-Romero 2019: 137). The latter short story revolves around a murderous butcher who puts up a part of his dead wife’s body for sale in his shop. Since nobody wants to buy the carcass, he throws it out on the street and only keeps what stray animals cannot digest. Surprisingly, domestic violence is not hidden behind closed doors here but exposed in a public place: the corpse is displayed in the shop for everybody to see. This does not lead to a public outcry or an intervention from the outside, though. None of the “unnamed/ ungendered shoppers” (Sacido-Romero 2019: 137) addresses the elephant in the room. The embarrassed silence on a glaringly obvious act of domestic violence resulting in murder aggravates women’s precarious situation in the private home as the public deliberately overlooks the matter (Galloway 1999: 108). A reason for this could be that the carcass serves as a warning to the customers. In marriages, it is mainly women who do grocery shopping (Sobal 2005: 144). Hence, Gina Lyle assumes that also in Galloway’s short story, the majority of customers is probably female. She points out that the shoppers do not speak up because they interpret the corpse as a threat to their own safety: “the presentation of the body offers a warning to other wives of the consequences of failing to conform and submit to the demands of patriarchy” (2021: 88). Keeping quiet about domestic violence in the presence of both the murderer and his victim is a means of selfprotection for the female members of the public. The ensuing silence aggravates the perilous situation that all women characters potentially face at home. Again, the distinction between private and public is blurred as domestic violence is publicly and deliberately exposed yet not deplored. As this passage already shows, the butcher knows how to handle the different demands of private and public space. He is able to perform transitions from the public to the private sphere because he is in control and apparently emotionally distant. Like in “Love in a changing environment”, elements from the public space invade the private space and ren- Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 195 der the present circumstances unbearable (Sacido-Romero 2019: 137): “he [the butcher] could detect its [the smell’s] unmistakeable seep under the door to his living room when he was alone in the evening” (Galloway 1999: 109). In her analysis of “The meat”, Lyle finds that “[b]utchery refuses to stay confined within a finite space, as the spatial boundaries of the home are crossed, collapsing notions of the workspace and the domestic space as discrete and separate” (2021: 88). Everything that is close to the corpse acquires negative qualities. “Something about the meat was infecting” (1999: 108), writes Galloway. Since the male protagonist is in control of both the private and the public space, he is capable of responding to the situation and can reduce the danger caused by the dead body. He disposes of the corpse and successfully reintegrates its remains into his flat. The “wee minding” (Galloway 1999: 109) is hidden under the marital bed where it cannot do emotional harm to the butcher and even acquires the status of “a sort of macabre trophy” (Sacido-Romero 2019: 137). Men exert power over the house and its female inhabitants and shoppers: in “The meat”, all spaces - be they private or public - are maledominated. 4. Narrative voice and authority The interrelations of voice, gender, and narrative authority have been an object of feminist narratological research since the late 1980s. Lanser identifies “three narrative modes”: “authorial, personal, and communal voice” (1992: 15). The authorial voice belongs to a heterodiegeticextradiegetic narrator who addresses an extradiegetic narratee. As its name already suggests, issues of authority are key to this type of narrative voice. Since authorial narrators are not part of the diegesis, they “appear[] to control the story in all respects” (Gymnich 2013: 709) - similar to the author of the text. Even though the narrator’s gender is not necessarily mentioned in a text, for a long time, authorial voice has been attributed only to male narrators. Identifying an authorial voice as female may even destroy its credibility (Lanser 1992: 18). However, a female authorial voice can also be used to subvert readers’ stereotypical assumptions of gender attributions and may be regarded as an attempt to “claim narrative authority for a female voice” (Gymnich 2013: 709). “The meat” complicates the gender issues of authorial narration. The short story is told by a heterodiegetic-extradiegetic narrator whose gender identity is not marked. This is common in authorial narration (Allrath & Surkamp 2004: 149). While the authorial narrator of “The meat” remains ungendered, the butchered body in the story world is gendered. It is important to think about sex, gender, and narrative voice in relation to Ines Gstrein 196 the female body in this short story, especially as “notions of the body [are] hidden within the text” (Lyle 2021: 86). In an interview, Galloway relates that “I’m obviously fascinated by physicality, partly to do with my own obsession with [...] death. Death is the most bizarre idea. Being then nothing” (Galloway cit. in March 1999: n.p.). The butchered female body is at the centre of “The meat” yet neither the narrator, the male protagonist nor the customers ever designate it as a human corpse. Thus, it is rendered invisible on the discourse level. Lyle emphasises the absence of both the narrator-as-character and the butchered body from the text: The narrative voice is a disembodied third person, and the story has no direct speech, removing any effect of mimesis in the text. No clear interiority is offered for the perspectives of the butcher or his customers, and the choices of focus suggest an emotional removal from the scene. The narrative avoids visual confrontation with the body and attention skirts around the nearby items in the store, listing items that have been purchased [...] (Lyle 2021: 86) “The meat” abstracts from the woman’s body in order to tell the story of femicide. Lanser argues that “the authorial mode has allowed women access to ‘male’ authority by separating the narrating ‘I’ from the female body; it is of course in the exploitation of this possibility that women writers have used male narrators” (1992: 18). Even though Galloway’s bodiless narrator remains ungendered, they assume power over the way in which a femicide is represented. Gaby Allrath and Carola Surkamp consider the use of authorial voice in women writers’ texts as rather questionable because it may suggest an alliance with male-centred positions (2004: 145). However, I argue that it is precisely the point of Galloway’s short story to expose a stereotypically male-gendered perspective on domestic violence, to show it in all its appalling atrocity, and to draw attention to the general public’s acceptance of it. Authorial narrators “conventionally carry an authority superior to that conferred on characters” (Lanser 1992: 16). The butcher serves, in some parts of “The meat”, as reflector figure and exerts physical power, but he is subordinate to the ungendered narrator’s rendering of the story. The authorial voice is adopted to highlight and sharply criticise entrenched gender hierarchies. The most important woman character of “The meat” is silenced in more than one sense of the word. Throughout the short story, the murdered wife remains an object encountered by male subjectivity. Her voice is completely eradicated from the discourse level. Sacido-Romero points out that for Galloway, “to give voice to women, or, more precisely, to write as a woman entails an engagement with what is silenced, dispossessed, ignored, considered not normal” (2018: 195, original emphasis). Lyle notes that “[t]he butcher’s wife is rendered incapable of contributing Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 197 to the narrative, silenced both literally in death, and metaphorically by a culture that neither looks nor listens to those who experience domestic abuse” (2021: 86). The dead woman’s status as an object of discourse is mirrored in the use of the pronoun “it” which relegates the body to the status of something edible - “the carcass” or “the meat” (Galloway 1999: 108). With the loss of her personal pronoun and her gender identity, the butcher’s wife is bereaved not only of her womanhood, but of her humanity.Moving on now to consider communal voice, the present article examines only one of the many different narrative stances that communal voice comprises: the “singular form in which one narrator speaks for a collective” (Lanser 1992: 21, original emphasis) rather than only for themselves. As Lanser notes in her analysis of communal voice in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), “the narrator begins to adopt a collective vision, a focalizing consciousness that represents itself in a plural ‘we’” (1992: 249, original emphasis). Singular communal voice finds expression in the use of the first-person plural pronoun and reveals insights into other characters’ thoughts. There are inextricable links between the narrator’s identity and the group (Lanser 1992: 241; 251). “Love in a changing environment” is a “we-narrative” that obscures the gender identity of its narrator-protagonist. The personal pronoun “we” refers to a male character and his ungendered partner, the unnamed narrator-protagonist. It is a fallacy to impose the “heterosexual default structure (if A loves B, and A is a man, then B must be a woman)” (Fludernik 1999: n.p.) to the text. While the gender-specific narrative strategies outlined in the previous section contribute to the construction of a female gender identity for the narrator-protagonist, they are by no means sufficient to determine the narrator-protagonist as female. Narrators of all genders may adopt stereotypically gendered descriptions of space. For this reason, it is dubitable whether “Love in a changing environment” actually “articulates women’s voices mainly in relation to the conflicts that affect female experience” (Sacido-Romero 2018: 192) in the same way that many other texts in the short story collection Blood do. Although quarrels with male partners and threatening domestic spaces are recurrent elements in heterosexual female experiences, the text does not give enough useful hints about the narrator-protagonist’s gender identity. The obscurity of the narrator-protagonist’s gender identity has left its trace in scholarly work on “Love in a changing environment”. The “linguistic marking of sex is in no way inevitable” (Culler 2011: 60) yet it is a key feature of the English language. In order to choose the right pronoun for narrators, their gender identity must be known to readers (Lanser Ines Gstrein 198 1999: 172). As a result of the uncertainty in Galloway’s short story, scholars have avoided to refer to the narrator-protagonist’s gender identity: in their respective articles on “Love in a changing environment”, Jackson and Sacido-Romero either address both characters together as the “couple” and “they” (Jackson 2004: 9, Sacido-Romero 2019: 141) or abstain from using a personal pronoun in place of the noun “narrator” (Jackson 2004: 10). In a similar vein, I use the pronoun “they” instead of “he” or “she” to emphasise that the gender identity of the narratorprotagonist is not marked. The alteration of communal narration and personal narration shows the (lack of) cohesion of the couple in “Love in a changing environment”. Communal narration is used at the beginning of the text but begins to dissolve upon the couple’s first quarrel. From this point onwards, the first-person singular pronoun is more frequently used: The afternoon there was hammering non-stop from eleven till three, we had a mild disagreement. I said something unkind and went downstairs for two cheese rolls and an apple pie for later - we seldom cooked. It wasn’t till the door refused I saw the sign. The bakery were selling up. We had toastless beans and cheddar at teatime and I blamed myself. Now I look back, there had been something different the whole morning. I looked up but he said nothing. He didn’t think it his place to talk about relationships. (Galloway 1999: 18, emphasis added) As can be taken from this passage, communal narration is adopted whenever reference is made to the couple as unity. The text shifts back and forth between communal and personal narration. Two opponents get involved in a quarrel - this makes it impossible to have communal narration in those passages in which the couple have different opinions. Now, the “collective vision” (Lanser 1992: 249, original emphasis) breaks apart in two distinct perceptions. In the immediate aftermath of the quarrel, the partners keep to themselves and go out on their own. With the arrival of the butcher, communal narration largely replaces personal narration again in a joint effort to fight off the danger that the butcher’s shop represents. Yet this effort fails: the final break-up puts an end to communal narration. The shift in narrative voice from communal to personal is very effective in conveying the ups and downs of the sexual relationship. The end of the relationship is already foreshadowed in the above-cited passage: it is only the first-person narrator, not both partners who can share a memory from the past. Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 199 5. Multiperspectivity Like space and voice, multiperspectivity is a gendered narrative structure. Multiperspective texts present different versions of a story’s events. This can be achieved, for instance, by using several narrators, adopting different types of focalisation, or composing the text like a collage. For scholars in feminist narratology, exploring multiperspective narration allows for insights into the relation between the sexes as it highlights the differences in lived experiences and alerts to conflicts. Moreover, this narrative technique points to the hierarchisation of voices and draws attention to questions of whether different narrations are compatible with each other and whether women’s narratives have a place in the dominant patriarchal discourse. Lastly, with some multiperspective narrations, readers have considerable difficulty in identifying the gender identity of characters and narrators because of the ambiguous use of pronouns and ungendered given names (Allrath & Surkamp 2004: 160-169). Multiperspectivity is a concept that affords analysing the similarities and differences between “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” as regards the depiction of domestic violence. In the previous two sections, the article has examined the two texts separately. However, it can also be useful to read them together because both short stories shed light on the same issue: the two texts illuminate each other in respect to the ever-present danger of domestic violence. In order to examine the connections between “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”, the article zooms out to the literary work in which the two component texts are placed, namely the short story collection Blood. I suggest adapting Allrath and Surkamp’s feminist narratological findings on multiperspectivity to volumes of short fiction, specifically to short story collections such as Blood. Plurality and narrative openness are not only characteristics of the multiperspective novel the two scholars investigate, but also of the short story collection. Short story collections contain several stand-alone texts that may employ different narrative situations, focalisations, and spaces. In spite of the differences between the component texts, short story collections nevertheless display a number of connecting elements: A short story collection almost always possesses a measure of unity. The author carefully makes a selection and creates a specific order or structure among the stories; the selection is often made on the basis of similarities in theme. Stories may also share a resemblance in setting, tone, and style. (Lundén 1999: 43) There are strong thematic and stylistic links between many of Blood’s individual texts, among them “Love in a changing environment” and “The Ines Gstrein 200 meat”. Mary McGlynn notes that the collection’s short stories “explore the dark side of human relationships and the limitations of trust” (2001: 15). McMillan highlights that “Galloway’s short stories in both Blood and [her second collection of short stories] Where You Find It are often disturbing, even weird [...] The narrating voice is unsettling, usually but not always female” (2021: 355, emphasis added). McGlynn’s and McMillan’s descriptions hold true for “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”. Both texts are told by ungendered narrators and form part of the strand in Blood that is dedicated to the deeply disturbing topic of domestic violence. Connecting “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” allows to get a broader picture on domestic violence in Blood. “The meat” reads like the gruesome continuation of “Love in a changing environment”. The latter’s ungendered and unnamed narrator-protagonist moves out just in time before the murderous butcher opens his business. “Love in a changing environment” finishes on the following lines: “[t]hinner and wiser, I eat no meat and avoid cakes. The very sight of them makes me sick” (Galloway 1999: 19). The narrator-protagonist has disturbing memories of the goods from the bakery and the butcher’s shop alike. Ever since the narrator-protagonist has heard the sound of the butcher’s tools from downstairs and has felt threatened by the clatter of knives, eating meat is out of the question. In a similar vein, the customers in “The meat” buy neither the corpse nor foodstuffs that are placed too close to the dead woman’s body (Galloway 1999: 108). While it has been remarked that butchers, butcher’s shops, and meat are recurrent textual elements in Galloway’s fiction (Sacido-Romero 2019: 138), no direct connection has been established between the two short stories of Blood yet. Multiperspective narration throws the traditional power hierarchy between the sexes into even sharper relief. I understand “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” as instalments of the same story, one of them taking place before a murder can be committed, the other one after the fact. The arrangement of short stories in Galloway’s collection can be used as a guide to align the different perspectives in “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”. Allan Weiss’s brief survey suggests that the majority “read the stories [of a short story collection] in order from beginning to end” (2021: 31). When reading Blood from cover to cover, readers will first encounter “Love in a changing environment”, short story number 3 out of 22, and only much later reach “The meat”, short story number 17 out of 22. As explained above, the two texts differ from each other regarding narrative mode. Authorial, communal, and personal narration are employed. The distinctive voices do not exclude each other but approach the subject of domestic violence from different angles: from the interior perspective of the frightened narrator-protagonist in “Love in a Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 201 changing environment” and from the exterior perspective of the authorial narrator, which is distanced from the matter, in “The meat”. When they discover the authorial narrator’s detached rendering in “The meat”, readers will already have been introduced to the narrator-protagonist’s anxiety in “Love in a changing environment”. First and foremost, Blood presents a look from the inside - through the eyes of the narrator-protagonist in danger - before it moves on to a look from the outside on the victim. The victim is key for orienting the perspectives in Galloway’s two texts. “Love in a changing environment” adopts the perspective of a narrator-protagonist who almost becomes a victim; in “The meat”, the general public averts its eyes from the corpse but the authorial narration closely examines the gradual decay of the corpse and the butcher’s handling of the corpse. The perspective of the frightened narrator-protagonist comes closest to that of a victim. Even though they are not physically injured, the narrator-protagonist and their partner feel threatened upon the arrival of the butcher’s van: “[o]ur arms touched as we both turned away, not sure what to say. I think we were afraid” (Galloway 1999: 19). Turning away, being silent and leaving the crime scene is also precisely what the shoppers do in “The meat”. Readers are offered a double perspective: making a lucky escape from the victim’s position in “Love in a changing environment”, then, being offered the position of an onlooker who could fall victim to an aggressor in “The meat”. This creates a highly uncomfortable, tense situation. Taken together, both short stories outline the discursive field in which the discussion of domestic violence is situated. “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” complicate the power issues at stake in the perspective structure. The hierarchy between the perspectives of Galloway’s two ungendered narrators can be grasped with the concept of perspective structure. Perspectives can be ordered in two ways: “[i]n traditional narrative the viewpoint (or point of view) of the narrator is often a privileged, closed perspective. The perspective structure remains open if the text provides no clear and obvious guidelines for the readers to decide between the narrator’s views and those of the characters” (Fludernik 2009: 39, original emphasis). In order to determine the hierarchy between various perspectives, they are considered “in relation to the meaning of the text overall” (Fludernik 2009: 39). Galloway’s short stories expose the violent turn that romantic relationships might take and condemn it. At first sight, it might seem that the perspective of the narrator-protagonist (“Love in a changing environment”) is less important than the authorial narrator’s (“The meat”). This misleading impression is reinforced by the breakdown of the narrator-protagonist’s relationship. At this point in the short story, communal voice - which represents the viewpoint of several characters - no longer exists and the narrator- Ines Gstrein 202 protagonist only speaks for themselves, using personal narration. Yet Gymnich’s evaluation of personal narration is twofold: In comparison to the authorial voice, the personal voice can only claim a substantially lower degree of narrative authority, since it is by definition bound to a subjective and limited perspective […] Still, the personal voice may be seen as a particularly apt instrument for highlighting the impact the cultural context may have on the life of an individual. In other words, this type of voice may for instance lend itself to emphasising problems and concerns from a feminine perspective. (Gymnich 2013: 710) The “problems and concerns” (2013: 710) that Gymnich alludes to are, in the case of “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”, domestic violence and the narrator-protagonist’s fear thereof. The “cultural context” (Gymnich 2013: 710) in which the ungendered narrator-protagonist in “Love in a changing environment” finds themselves in is subject to change. Only when the conditions are favourable, they can feel safe in the private home. The wellbeing of the individual crucially depends on the surroundings in which they are placed: the closing down of the bakery and the subsequent renovation for the purposes of opening a butcher’s shop are a threat to the narrator-protagonist. Both short stories play off the individual against the general public. The “cultural context” (Gymnich 2013: 710) in the late twentieth century is, as “The meat” shows, one that prefers not to openly address domestic violence even when it takes on its extreme form, femicide. The perspectives adopted in Galloway’s short stories mirror patriarchal frameworks in order to lay bare their injustices. 6. Conclusion Feminist narratology offers useful concepts to build and expand on the existing gender-focused research on Galloway’s work. Looking beyond characterisation opens up routes that have been less frequently explored: gender informs elements of the story world, such as space, and elements of the narrative discourse, such as voice and perspective, alike. The particular value of the short story collection to a feminist narratological reading is that it lends itself to diversity: different perspectives, voices, and settings can be placed next to each other without the need for a final resolution. This article has revealed that giving voice to women, seeing through the eyes of women, and describing spaces inhabited by women are highly complex matters in Galloway’s short stories. Galloway makes clever use of narrative techniques to play common notions of sex and gender off Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 203 against each other: the narrator’s gender is obscured while the narrative style is explicitly gendered. The “gender disorientation” (Jones 2009: 63) that the heroines of Galloway’s novels face when trying to escape a patriarchal system is, I argue, also an apt description of the narrative structures of the short stories “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”: they destabilise notions of gender and require readers to pay close attention to the ways in which the texts are narrated. In her multiperspective short story collection Blood, Galloway approaches domestic violence from different perspectives, thus exposing how domestic violence is ignored in the public sphere. Women characters are often in the public eye yet the public is rarely sympathetic to them; this discrepancy shapes narrative voice, perspective, and space in Galloway’s short stories. References Allrath, Gaby & Carola Surkamp (2004). Erzählerische Vermittlung, unzuverlässiges Erzählen, Multiperspektivität und Bewusstseinsdarstellung. In: Vera Nünning & Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies. 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