ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to engage Rachel Cusk, “The Expansive,” and the titular essay of her memoir of post-divorce life, Aftermath. The simile is the rhetorical device at the heart of Cusk’s project; in this she is expansive. Similes, along with clarity and philosophical problems, also constitute Cusk’s pedagogical style. Both Fitzgerald’s and Cusk’s stories are those of the aftermath; what makes hers new is its shaky but confident belief in the future; there is no giving up in “Aftermath.” Cusk is prompted to confront her position in the couple by her husband’s anger, by his claim that she is taking the role of the “male oppressor.” In the end, Cusk looks forward to a different mode of womanhood and to a new, less constrained family life. She says goodbye to the home that she lived in it with her now ex-husband; when it was both “both shelter and prison.
