The Embodied Subjectivity of a Half-Formed Narrator: Sexual Abuse, Language (Un)formation and Melancholic Girlhood in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Abstract

Set in Ireland, in some undetermined time and place, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2014) is a story about the crisis of identity of a nameless girl who has been sexually abused by her uncle in her teens. The aberrant sexualisation resulting from rape and the socially pre-established discourses of girlhood and womanhood provoke the fragmentation of the protagonist’s identity as a female subject and her transformation into a “half-formed thing”. McBride tries to capture this process of half-formation by means of language and other experimental narrative strategies, which are a clear legacy of modernism and the works by female writers from the Celtic Tiger period. The violent world, in which the main character is under the rule of her authoritative mother and predatory uncle, contrasts with the loving relationship with her terminally ill brother. The melancholic experiences of shame and guilt invade the Girl’s sense of embodied identity and interfere with the process of becoming an individual. The death of her brother is the ultimate trigger for the half-formed girl to disengage permanently from her “sinful” body, opening the possibility of an alternative mode of being in the world. The analysis of this novel-long stream-of-consciousness focuses on the narration of the conflicts with corporeality, abnormal sexualisation, the dissolution of subjectivity and failure to regain agency over a powerless body.