Neo-Victorian Incest Trauma and the Fasting Body in Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder

Abstract

The Catholic nuclear family, as a product of historical and cultural contingencies, has predominantly figured as dysfunctional in Irish literature. Emma Donoghue’s most recent novel, The Wonder (2016), builds on trauma, dysfunctional family relations and the Gothic: three master tropes that have become well-established within neo-Victorianism. She has written three neo-Victorian novels up to the moment, and this time she returns to post-famine Ireland to narrate the story of a fasting girl who is caught up in a struggle between sainthood and patienthood. My principal aim is to analyse how Donoghue explores the figurative language of food-refusing behaviour to convey trauma. First, I will establish an analogue between the fasting body and anorexia nervosa, to subsequently explore the psychological-cum-corporeal in the novel through an anorexic lens. Then, I will analyse the non-verbal and symbolic language of the fasting body to disclose psycho-somatic traces of incest trauma drawing on Judith Butler’s ‘Quandaries of the Incest Taboo’ (2004). By doing so, I hope to demonstrate how Donoghue confronts the boundaries of the incest taboo and dissolves the limits of ‘the nonnarratable’ in The Wonder.