ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Ann Quin’s second novel, Three (1966), from the perspective of queer temporalities in order to situate the text at the crossroads between the emerging, sexually liberated woman of the 1960s and the bourgeoise housewife of postwar Britain. Three (1966) recounts the ménage à trois between Ruth and Leonard, a middle-class British marriage, and S, a young girl who moved in with the couple as a tenant in their holiday home by the sea and who seems to have committed suicide by drowning. By refusing the linear temporality of the plot—in particular, the predictable genre of the whodunnit—the novel foresees no livable outcome for either of the two female protagonists, who are each entrapped in their assigned role. In this sense, this chapter examines both roles through Halberstam’s conception of queer failure as something that “allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development” (2011: 3) and provides a lens with which to read the sixties as a queer, destabilizing time that nevertheless fails to prevent violence against women.
