Translating trauma to text : exploring female trauma in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Surfacing’ and Gillian Flynn’s ‘Sharp Objects’

Abstract

This dissertation intends to explore the representation of women’s experience in the face of traumatic events, as presented in contemporary Western fiction written by women novelists. A relatively new and emerging area of research, the interdisciplinary field of trauma theory seeks to investigate the impact and effects of traumatic experiences. The two main chapters analyse Margaret Atwood’s ‘Surfacing’ (1972) and Gillian Flynn’s ‘Sharp Objects’ (2006) by means of this theory, merging literature and trauma studies together to assign meaning to the trauma(s) presented in each narrative. The literary analysis of the two novels uncovers the ways in which women writers express and translate trauma—as well as the subsequent behaviours, mental and biological reactions, and long-lasting psychological damage and ramifications that accompany traumatic life events—into text; more specifically, the ways in which modern women write about, treat, and represent female trauma and the female body through the genre of trauma fiction, as termed by Anne Whitehead. Moving beyond trauma theory per se, the dissertation considers the political, social and literary statements the writers make through their narratives. That the novels’ female characters fall victim to male perpetrators and patriarchal society, in some form or another, does not go unnoticed, thus shifting their experiences from the personal to the political sphere, giving rise to certain implications that emerge in terms of women’s rights and feminist issues. Drawing upon the contemporary resonance of such matters, the dissertation reflects on the profound significance that lies within the writing of women’s trauma.