“Re-Imagining the Mediterranean: Vita Sackville West’s Fictional Excursions in Challenge (1924)”

This essay analyses Vita Sackville-West's second novel, 'Challenge' (1924), which re-imagines the Mediterranean as a space full of possibilities where the discrepancies, gaps, and silences of one’s own story of coming to a representable/readable identity can be articulated. As in Gothic fiction, the Southern spaces in which events are set, the fictional Greek city Herakleion and the smaller island of Aphros in the nearby archipelago, enable a subtle and powerful interplay of sex, travel and subversion, as they give voice to alternative subjectivities embodying conflicting and tabooed political, identititarian and sexual feelings which could not be so easily expressed at home. However, as I discuss, while Sackville-West searches for “pleasure” and “escape” in her fictional representation of the Mediterranean, which is largely based on her own travels and experiences, she also consolidates a number of stereotypes about Southern populations along the lines of nationality, class and gender identity. Thus, I demonstrate that the novel is characterised by a tension between subversiveness and tradition which, ultimately, reveals Sackville-West’s own ambiguous positionings towards a wide range of issues, from gender identity to sexuality, from colonialism to class disparity.