The Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction by Ashlee Joyce

Author:Ashlee Joyce
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030267285
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Like the uncanniness that characterizes the Tallis household and the ghostliness that marks Briony and Emily’s relationship, Cecilia’s impressions of the abjectified kitchen refuse perverts the archetype of the family dinner as a site of the ritual performance of domesticity.

As theorized by Julia Kristeva (1982), the abject refers to the human reaction to that which threatens the boundary between subject and object, self and other. The epitome of the abject is the corpse, which serves as a reminder of the body ’s materiality (this image will take centre stage in Part Two, when the injured Robbie, retreating to Dunkirk with two fellow soldiers, is struck by the sight of a young child ’s severed leg in a tree). But filth (including food waste) also poses a threat to the cohesive self, and is, as such, cast off. “[F]ilth,” Kristeva writes, “is not a quality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin” (p. 69, original emphasis). Given that the scene immediately follows Cecilia’s failed attempt to assume the role of feminine authority, her view of the kitchen refuse reinforces the sense that the narrative of the nuclear family is being undermined. The various layers of kitchen refuse (while likely innocuous to the kitchen staff themselves) are rendered through Cecilia’s perspective as an image of corruption at the heart of what should be a ritual reinforcing the Tallis family ties. The scene immediately following confirms the undermining of the family relationship: incredible tension is felt between the “nauseous” dinner guests when they later gather in the “airless dining room” (McEwan 2001, p. 125) to eat a meal in an anxiety-riddled silence which, readers are told, “would easily have been dispersed” (p. 126) by Jack Tallis’s paternal influence—if only he had not, in effect, abandoned his family. Once again, the home becomes a scene of suffocating entrapment, setting the stage for the rape scene that will make up the text’s traumatic locus.5

The height of Part One’s mounting tension is of course the dinner party itself, which, as already mentioned, alludes both to Woolf and to the conventions of the Gothic. As in the dinner scene of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the guests, while seated together, are completely withdrawn into their own individual concerns, oblivious to each other’s inner turmoil: Robbie and Cecilia have just been interrupted in their lovemaking by a fuming and hostile Briony; the fifteen-year-old Lola has just been physically assaulted by the twenty-four-year-old Paul Marshall (and, unbeknownst to readers, is soon to be the victim of a rape); and her unhappy nine-year-old twin brothers, Jackson and Pierrot, are plotting to run away. The tension is palpable, the emphasis on isolated individual consciousness adding to the sense of fractured familial bonds that contribute to the circumstances leading to the rape itself. But the dinner scene may also be read as an example of what Donna Lee Brien (2014) calls “morbid dining” (p.

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