Speaking trauma: of being woman, of marginalization and reification of the body, and its reiteration in literature

Abstract

This thesis examines trauma not merely as singular rupture but as condition: as a structure of being that precedes event and inheres within the female body. Trauma theory has traditionally centered the catastrophic incident (war, violence, disaster), but I argue that women-authored literature often begins within the fracture rather than moving toward it. The trauma under examination here is not exclusively the spectacle of harm but the ambient, inherited wounding of inhabiting a body already marked by marginalization, gaze and containment. Drawing from Freud, Reich, van der Kolk and Rothschild, I trace trauma as first somatic (embedded in posture, silence dissociation and “character armor”) before it is narrativized. Through Cathy Caruth’s formulation of belated experience, I consider narration as “reactivation”: the moment in which the body’s unassimilated history becomes legible. Literature here functions as representation and embodiment i.e. fragmentation, absence, recursion, and unstable subjectivity mirroring the nervous system’s imprint of trauma. Applying this understanding to Morrison’s Beloved, Engel’s Bear, Cusk’s Outline and Second Place, Duras’s The Lover, Sontag’s journals, and other texts, this thesis posits that trauma operates as inheritance in women; that it is a maternal and historical transmission sedimented in the body. The female body emerges not as a whole and later fractured but as constituted through lack: a self formed within negation, surveillance, and inherited silence; assuming that in women’s narration, trauma is ontological, a condition of being rather than a deviation from it. This stands in direct contradiction to most accounts of male trauma narratives presupposing coherence disrupted by event. Ultimately, this study proposes that women-authored literature be read as trauma literature even beyond the confines of the “trauma novel” because it articulates the embodied residue of a marginal existence.