Research background
'‘The Mourning Dress’ is a fictional piece distilled from a novel exploring themes of ambivalence and creativity. It takes as its starting point Hélène Cixous’ concept of entredeux or ‘between two’ which, she argues, refers to ‘[e]verything that makes the course of life be interrupted’; its effect is that ‘we do not know how to “live”’ (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1997: 9). The piece considers such a time in a character’s life and explores ambivalence, a state of being caught between two intense, interlocked positions: love and hate, desire and repulsion.'