Mini Essay: On the shore of a river, red: Female Pain, Trauma, Horror

The short story On the shore of a river, red is, at its core, a piece about trauma. My goal was to explore the feminist notion of female rage and the historic voyeurism of artistic explorations of female pain, suffering, and trauma, especially as it pertains to horror. The protagonist of my short story, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s character Ophelia from Hamlet, subverts traditional ideas of the passive, martyred female character and grants her the ability to embody both her physical existence and her metaphysical state as told through narration. Sexual trauma is implied in this piece to contrast with traditional ideas of the ‘mad woman’ and the “erotic trance of the hysteric” (Showalter) that comes from this notion relating to passive embodiment. Helene Cixous asserts that a “woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.” (Cixous, 875.) Feminist theory is used to advise the style with which my work is written, as well as the voice used to write it. An existing figure prevalent in both art and literature was utilised in this sense to explore how women’s voices are often taken from us and granted to those who wish to exploit our suffering for the sake of art. Cixous posits that only “by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been… confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display.” (Cixous, 880.) The goal of my piece was to take a passive voice of a woman “used to shrinking into shadow” (Grills) and grant her the right to her own rage in relation to her trauma. The structure of the piece itself experiments with traditional narrative structure by having no clear beginning, middle, or end, and instead exists in a sort of stasis that attempts to mirror the experience of being stuck within a woman’s suffering. However, rather than exploring this from an external view or reliving an instance of trauma, the focus is on the female protagonist, and utilises horrific imagery to showcase the extent of her rage, the driven and passionate-- not passive-- internal feminine monologue, and the female experience as told with a more poetic, though decidedly not gentle, style of prose.



Reference List

Cixous, Helene. The Laugh of the Medusa, from Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4. The University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Grills, Eloise. Sexy Female Murderesses. Glom Press, 2018.

Showalter, Elaine. Ophelia, gender and madness. The British Library, 2016.