A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

The article argues that McBride's usage of the idiomatic language and stream of consciousness is part of the narrator's tertiary memory or epiphylogenetic memory. As a technical development, disorientation manifests itself in the girl's non-syntactic language and the gradual evolving linguistic repertoire as she matures. This article investigates Eimear McBride's novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing in the light of Bernard Stiegler's concept of disorientation.

Key-words: trauma, female sexuality, abjection, language. Moreover, I investigate the ways in which such an articulation is played out: by adopting a highly experimental style, which is very much indebted to the Modernist search for formal innovation, McBride develops new ways of giving voice to traumatic experience. Drawing on recent trauma theories, I analyse how the novel engages with the paradox of articulating the so-called unspeakable core of trauma by fictionally re-enacting it through narration. I examine how the tangled web of unresolved tensions impact both her self-representation and McBride’s development of a new form of narration. In telling the coming-of-age story of an unnamed, young girl in 1980s Ireland from her birth to her twenties, McBride explores the girl’s sexual awakening through several layers of trauma, ranging from verbal and sexual abuse to Catholic taboos, class differences and the disability of the protagonist’s brother. My article analyses the ways in which trauma governs the fictional world of Irish writer Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, published in 2013.

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride