Responding to Trauma: Irish Girlhood and Intersubjectivity in Eimear McBride''s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians

• Main Authors: Amelia Wan-Chi Chen, 陳宛琪
• Other Authors: Duncan McColl Chesney
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/5g3p9w

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學研究所 === 107 === In this thesis, I read the works of the Irish novelist Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and The Lesser Bohemians (2016), as failed stories of development and trauma narratives. Marked by truncated words and broken syntax, McBride''s elliptical style enacts the impacts of sexual abuse on language and human psyche, and penetrates to the core of bodily experience and trauma, breaking out of the radical interiority of pain. Read together, Girl and Bohemians are two sides of the same coin, as they explore alternative models of subject formation in a hostile environment that hinders maturation. In Girl, the nameless girl''s interior monologue shows that she is incapable of externalizing trauma, and her profound isolation culminates in her half-formed identity and life. By contrast, in Bohemians, the conversation between the two protagonists indicates that survival is possible through the witnessing of trauma based on the responsibility towards the other''s alterity. A relational model of subjectivity, then, is needed in the face of trauma. On the other hand, the silenced mothers in the two novels suggest that the breakdown of the balance between self-assertion and mutual recognition, which leads to the polarities of effacement or unconditional elevation of the other, is the potential origin of trauma.