The Cosmopolitan Stranger in Muriel Spark’s The Finishing School

Abstract This paper aims to offer a critical discussion of the representation of the cosmopolitan stranger (Marotta 2010) in Muriel Spark’s last novel, The Finishing School (2004). A category taken from the social sciences, mostly from the work of G. Simmel and Z. Bauman, the stranger as a literary figure has been associated with binary modes of relationship, whose versatile presence is usually responsible for destabilising socio-cultural spaces through his/her permeability and ambivalence. This notion will provide a valuable background for a better understanding of the game of doubles played in Spark’s novel through which the author challenges binary logic in character development and trespasses symbolic boundaries involving the encounter of otherness and a re-evaluation of the self. Our study re-examines Spark’s avant-gardism and foresight in her perception of a figure who reflects contemporary, multiple, playful and hybrid identities, one who may occupy this interstitial and ambivalent space which problematises social and cultural boundaries as unstable and permeable rather than reinforcing them. It adds a new perspective on Spark’s final novel which, as most of her later ones, may be said to be permeated by a sense of hybridity as a synonym for completeness, and a yearning for transition by implying the acceptance of new forms of interpretation and in-between spaces where fictional representation is negotiated and the intersection of opposites may enhance the inherent duality of existence. 1