This essay reads Philip Larkin’s letters to his lifelong companion, Monica Jones, in order to present an alternative to the ‘easy misogynist’ and ‘crusty’ Tory caricatured and condemned by critics for more than two decades. Exploring Larkin’s textual construction of selfhood in these letters, the essay looks at the apolitical nature of the correspondence, its subtly-gendered experience of the everyday, and its surprisingly subversive view of sex and sexuality. Anti-essentialist in his approach to gender, Larkin projects a feminine, almost lesbian sensibility. However, by adopting a text-centred approach to the correspondence, this essay also highlights the way in which Larkin’s constructed persona obscures and conceals – against the grain of the critical response so far, which has privileged the letters as exceptional in their vulnerability and revealing intimacy.

中文翻译：

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“一种伪装的同性恋关系”：拉金给莫妮卡琼斯的信

这篇文章阅读了菲利普·拉金 (Philip Larkin) 给他的终生伴侣莫妮卡·琼斯 (Monica Jones) 的信，以呈现二十多年来被评论家讽刺和谴责的“容易厌恶女性”和“冷酷无情”的托利党的另一种选择。这篇文章探索了拉金在这些信件中对自我的文本建构，着眼于信件的非政治性质、日常生活中微妙的性别体验，以及对性和性的令人惊讶的颠覆性观点。拉金对性别的态度是反本质主义者，他表现出一种女性化的，几乎是女同性恋的敏感性。然而，通过对信件采用以文本为中心的方法，这篇文章还强调了拉金构建的人物形象模糊和隐藏的方式——与迄今为止的批评回应相反，