ABSTRACT
This essay inhabits Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “In a cheap hotel,” her letters on hotel living, and a Harlem hotel in Ann Petry’s novel The Narrows. It argues that these literary depictions of cheap hotels both respond to and articulate postwar anxieties about interracial sexuality, women’s more public expressions of sexual desire, and re-imagined gender identities facilitated by the rapid social changes that followed World War II. Analyzing these “cheap” spaces as sites of aesthetic and sexual exploration, my close readings engage the racial politics of this affective and manual labour, but also critique many modernist fantasies about the hotel as utopia, as escape, as liminal possibility.
