Integrating the Narrative: Ellen Douglas's Can't Quit You Baby and the Sub-Genre of the Kitchen Drama

This article examines Ellen Douglas's novel Can't Quit You, Baby, which can be situated in the subgenre of the kitchen drama, focusing on the relationships between housewives and their black housekeepers in the South, at the crossroads of the issues of race, class and gender, as they come out in the privileged locus of the meeting between black and white women, the kitchen. Douglas's novel transcends the convention of the genre through an innovating narrative perspective and through her style.