A Life in Fragments: The Legacies of Sexual and Ritual Abuse

Abstract

The creative part of this thesis, a fictional memoir, explores the experience of sexual and ritual abuse, and the individual’s ability to survive profound childhood trauma. It is composed of multi-genre fragments – narrative, poems, scripts, fairy tales, ledger entries – that reflect the disintegration of the self and that self’s equally painful attempts towards regeneration. This hybrid form mirrors the fragmentation and temporal disunity of trauma and the strategies involved in its narration. Past and future become fluid, key characters morph into totemic animals, objects anthropomorphise and the protagonist adopts shifting subject positions as incest and ritual abuse are uncovered and a family’s dysfunction exposed. Anorexia becomes a tactic for both self-defence and self-destruction, while a walking doll articulates the horrors of childhood trauma, and the challenges of survival.

The exegesis interrogates notions of traumatic enunciation – the social and cultural ‘unspeakability’ of trauma – through the work of trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth and Meera Atkinson and neuroscientist Bessel van der Kolk. Chapter One focuses on Kristeva’s use of the semiotic space, alongside Caruth’s traumatic latency, to examine the potential of an inanimate object (the child’s life-sized doll) to express the inexpressible. Chapter Two investigates the nuclear family as a foundational site for abuse and neglect through the analysis of poems by Sharon Olds and Barbara Kingsolver. Chapter Three takes an auto-ethnographic approach, documenting the author’s embodied response to the writing of trauma in order to chart the lived effects of its expression and ongoing re-inscription of the body. This thesis underscores the possibility of trauma’s enunciation through new/non-narrative forms and strategies, while acknowledging the tenacity required to survive it.