Who Are You? was published by Peter Owen in London in 1963. The novel draws on Kavan’s early life as Helen Ferguson — specifically her first marriage and her time in Burma, where her husband was a colonial official. The unnamed woman at the novel’s center is trapped: in a marriage to a man she calls “the husband” (never named, always referred to by his social role), in a colonial posting where the heat, the insects, and the social rituals combine to create a suffocating environment, and in a body that is failing her — she is ill, possibly malarial, possibly suffering a psychological collapse.
The novel operates in two registers: the “daytime” register of colonial life (dinner parties, servants, the husband’s administrative duties, the claustrophobic social world of the British in Burma) and the “nighttime” register of the woman’s inner life (hallucinations, memories, a growing inability to distinguish between what is happening and what she is imagining). As the novel progresses, the nighttime register takes over: the woman’s reality fragments, and the reader can no longer determine which scenes are “real” and which are products of illness, madness, or despair.
The husband is Kavan’s portrait of a particular kind of masculine obtuseness: he is not cruel but incapable of seeing his wife as a person. Her illness, her unhappiness, her inner life — all of these are invisible to him, not because he is hostile but because his consciousness is organized around external things (his work, his status, his physical comfort) and has no apparatus for perceiving internal states. The woman’s dissolution is, in part, the result of being unseen for so long that she loses the ability to see herself.
Collecting Who Are You?
First edition (Peter Owen, London, 1963): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
- Very good: $75–$200