Insidious Vulnerability

Abstract

This dissertation examines individual experiences of grief and trauma in Irish writing from 1935 to 2013, focusing specifically on novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Sebastian Barry, and Eimear McBride. It offers a feminist reclamation of personal forms of loss that fall outside the purview of documented history and that typically go overlooked in literary criticism. Examples in this study include the suffering caused by the natural death of a family member, infertility, domestic and sexual abuse, social ostracism, institutionalization, and forced adoption. Through careful close readings of Bowen’s The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938), Beckett’s Molloy (1955), Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008), and McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), I unpack how women’s insidious vulnerability to grief and trauma manifests in modern and contemporary Irish fiction. The works I discuss here reveal the depth and complexity of grief—making visible forms of loss and violence that society tends to ignore, working through what impedes the grieving process, and giving voice to underrepresented experiences of emotional and psychological suffering. Over three chapters, I engage with the discourses of trauma theory, Irish memory studies, and modernism and its afterlives. I draw on feminist psychiatrist Laura S. Brown’s discussion of “insidious trauma” to inform my own concept, “insidious vulnerability,” which I use to refer to the persistent threat of loss and violence that haunts marginalized groups in their daily lives. Likewise, I make reference to the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic definition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to distinguish trauma from other forms of emotional and psychological distress. I contribute to Irish memory studies by extending the critical conversation beyond public historical events (like the Easter Rising of 1916)—to include private forms of grief and trauma, particularly in the lives of women. Furthermore, I focus on authors who innovate, whose novels exhibit dissatisfaction with the limitations of conventional realist narratives and who attempt new modes of representation in an effort to articulate the inexpressible and the unexpressed. Bowen and Beckett stand as representatives of late modernism (1930s-1950s), while Barry and McBride help extend literary modernist afterlives into the twenty-first century.