"Untitled". Trauma and the Feminine in Frankenstein (PDF)

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Gender Studies, grade: A, , course: Seminar II, language: English, abstract: I wish to suture Frankenstein with a dialogue bound up with theories of trauma. It is my aim to probe the linkages of trauma inflicted upon female bodies and how these traumatic bodies are not simply rendered passive recipients, but rather how the afflicted female body becomes a site of resistance; how agency can be reclaimed through renarritivization and resistance.

The spaces and geographies of theoretical female trauma contained in Frankenstein are not merely traumas unique to Shelley's novel, but rather signifiers emblematic of and imbricated in our dominant ideological geographies and collective psyche.

It is here that I reject both the phallocentric logics of Freud and Lacan and the anti-Oedipal structures of Deleuze and Guattari and instead put forth my own framework of a non-Oedipal, non-phallic apparatus of the Real. The separation from this non-Oedipal/non-structure, the original trauma of the severing of the child from the mother (the biological excision, psychic cleaving of the I and the non-I) is what inaugurates the formation of severalties and subjectivization, the birth of the gender binary, the masculine and the feminine (a sort of traumatic construction in and of itself.)