UCLA

How does a woman writer memorialize her own traumatic history, when it happens to be part of a larger History dominated by male narratives (as far as Holocaust and slavery go), or when it is altogether silenced (as is the case for madness and institutionalization)? This work applies interdisciplinary memory studies to the gendering of trauma in eight contemporary historical and (auto) fictional narratives. The common point among these authors lies in their suffering from a triple alienation: as women, as dominated subjects in history, and as writers kept at the margins of the literary canons.

Following Michael Rothberg's concept of "multidirectional memory," which demonstrates how marginalized collective memories interact productively instead of competing with one another, this study reads in conversation Black women writing about slavery (Maryse Condé and Toni Morrison), Jewish and non-Jewish women writing about the Holocaust (Charlotte Delbo, Sarah Kofman, and Cécile Wajsbrot), and (formerly) mad women writing about madness (Leonora Carrington, Emma Santos, and Unica Zürn). So far, the commonality between women's writings of slavery and of the Holocaust has barely been touched upon in French and Francophone literature, and their potential kinship with texts by mad women has not been studied at all. They resort to a set of shared tropes, in order to reclaim their stories: ghosts, metaphorical and historical infanticidal mothers, distorted lineages, and rewritten fairy tales and myths, which are used - albeit in different ways - by all of them, so as to debunk myths held by male narratives about "femininity."

Thus, in the process of re-appropriating the traumatic history they have inherited, or experienced first-hand, these writers blur gender boundaries by deconstructing the notion of "motherhood." If multidirectional memory emphasizes trauma as a link between cultures, it can thereby be furthered by being applied to gender studies, and extended to a realm of literature located outside of history, and yet, anchored in it: the writing of madness. A close study of how the memory of the traumatic past becomes literature in eight texts serves to emphasize how the circulation of recurring tropes among narratives dealing with different time periods and different types of traumas creates a resonance among these writers, allowing them to reclaim agency and giving rise to a transnational literary voice of the gendering of trauma. Ultimately, this project's aim is to create a multidirectional feminist trauma theory.