Trauma And Recovery In The Novels Of Eimear McBride

Eimear McBride(1976-)is one of the most prominent emerging Irish writers in post-millennial years.With the thought-provoking motif and innovative writing style,her debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing(2013)has caused great sensation in the literary world,winning several important awards,including the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction,the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize.A Girl is a Half-formed Thing narrates a story of an anonymous girl's failure to come of age.The dysfunctional family,traumatic experience and social repression have inflicted great agony on her,yet she endeavours to struggle with the miserable life.The eventual death of the girl's brother who has brain tumour totally breaks her down,leading to her suicide,which signi:fies the ultimate failure of her struggle.The book is not only outstanding in literary skills,such as language,structure and character portrait,but the incisive topic has also triggered enormous social concerns about women's right and child sexual abuse in Ireland.McBride's second novel,The Lesser Bohemians was published in 2016 after the great success of her debut.It has also earned widespread critical acclaim,consolidating her status as a well-reputed writer domestically as well as internationally.Narrated by a young Irish girl Eily who pursues her drama study in London,the story mainly develops around the relationship between her and Stephen,an elder actor.As the two fall in love,the secrets behind them are gradually unfolded.Both of them are haunted by past traumatic experience of being sexually abused,but their physical as well as spiritual communication help them gradually extricate themselves from traumas.The protagonists in the two novels are similar but different:all of them suffer from traumas and endeavour to liberate themselves from the shadow of the traumatic past,whereas their different responses to the traumas determine their completely different destiny.Based on Cathy Caruth's trauma theory and Judith Herman's theories on trauma therapy in tandem with the feminist theories of Helene Cixous,Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva,the thesis examines the traumas that protagonists have experienced and their subjectivity in the process of trauma recuperation,further exploring the reasons why the characters ultimately have different ends.Sexuality and love are crucial for the protagonists to achieve self-realisation in both novels,in which both the girl and Eily have subverted the traditional female image and exerted their subjectivity to varying degrees.McBride authentically and boldly delineates female sexuality and precisely portrays the pain and sufferings inflicted on the protagonists through her experimental writing style.The striking style and the subtle portrayal of traumas and female subjectivity in McBride's novels manifoldly reflect the features of contemporary Irish women's writing,and meanwhile,the enormous success of her novels is also the epitome of the prosperity and flourishing of Irish women's writing since the 21st century.The thesis consists of five parts,including an Introduction and a Conclusion.The introduction reviews the critical reception of the books and constructs the theoretical framework.Chapter one analyses the traumas that the girl,Eily and Stephen have experienced and the aftermaths of the traumas from the perspectives of individual,family and society.Chapter two explores how three protagonists react to their traumas and what results they get,further comparing the failure of the girl's struggle and the plausible recovery of Eily and Stephen.Chapter three identifies the themes as well as the style of McBride's novels and traces the trajectory and the flourishing trend of Irish women's literature in the post-millennial era,and elucidates the relationship between McBride's literary creation and Irish women's writing in post-millennial years.The conclusion concludes the traumatic narrative and the awakening of female consciousness in McBride's books,and further illuminates how her works reflect the social context in Ireland and reveal the trends in contemporary Irish literature.