Representations of Trauma in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

Eimear McBride’s novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), tells the story of a young woman who experiences multiple traumas. It was hailed for its modernist-style innovative and experimental prose and won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize for “fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”. When Annie Ryan adapted the novel for the stage (2014), theatre reviewers were less enamoured of the modernist strategies used in the novel. This paper compares strategies used by McBride to represent trauma in her novel with those used by Ryan in her stage adaptation of the text. Reading the novel through the lens of the theatrical staging reveals the overlooked but important role of McBride’s understanding of theatre to her prose writing. It also demonstrates McBride’s unique contribution to the representation of trauma in fiction, providing new directions for literary trauma theory

Girl · Irish and British Studies · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism