« Propriety was re-established » : hétérotopie, loi et transgression dans « The Other Boat » d’E. M. Forster

This article aims to analyse E. M. Forster’s posthumous short story “The Other Boat” through the lens of the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia and to investigate how the space of the boat can function as a site for contesting the taboo of homosexuality. The study of heterotopic space in the story first seems to suggest that the boat fails to upend the norms and laws regulating sexual behaviour, unlike the utopian space of the greenwood, this mythical forest which serves as a refuge in Maurice. However, the central and irreducible place granted to alterity in the narrative hints at the power of heterotopia to disrupt regular relationships to the body, to language, to the other, and to space. Using Foucault’s different applications of the concept, we thus show how, in the short story, the heterotopic space of the boat fuels the dream of a space for resisting the regulation of sexuality.