Distorted Voice, Perverted Gaze: the Ambiguous Figure of the Child-Victim in Dorothy Allison’s Incest Story

Authors

Keywords:

Incest, Agency, Perverse sexuality, Silence, Trauma

Abstract

This contribution studies Dorothy Allison’s fictionalized incest narrative and explores how the traumatized child’s gaze and voice subvert social models of the child developed by social studies and feminist discourses, which promote the innocence, powerlessness and inferiority of children and victims of abuse. The child seizes the power of representation only to describe her reduction to silence by violence and incomprehension, yet the transcription of her thoughts makes up for her inability to speak, making the readers the only witnesses of abuse. To overcome terror, the girl invents gruesome stories, reveals her darker side and develops a disturbing sexual maturity in which trauma, suffering, pleasure and power mingle. However, fantasized agency fails to translate into resistance, the victim/abuser binary is not completely subverted, and the girl oscillates at the frontier between weakness and power, childish ignorance and adult maturity.

Author Biography

Mélanie Grué, Paris-Est Créteil University

Mélanie Grué is a temporary teaching and research fellow at Université Paris-Est Créteil. She defended her doctoral thesis on Queer Grotesque and Abject Knowledge in the Work of Dorothy Allison in 2013. Her fields of research include trauma literature and subaltern writing, the literary representation of the body, gender studies, queer theory and the American liberation movements. She has published several articles on Dorothy Allison, including “Trauma and Survival in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, or the Power of Alternative Stories” ( Trauma Narratives and Herstory, Silvia Pellicer-Ortin and Sonya Andermahr, eds., Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); “‘Bearers of babies, burdens, and contempt’: Reclaiming the Female Body in Dorothy Allison’s Testimonial Writing” (National Taiwan University Studies in Language and Literature, 2013) and “The Internal Other: Dorothy Allison’s White Trash” (Otherness: Essays and Studies, 4:2, 2014).

Leaves n°2 : Voix d’enfants, regards d’enfants / The Child’s Voice, the Child’s Gaze

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Published

2016-04-29

How to Cite

Grué, M. (2016). Distorted Voice, Perverted Gaze: the Ambiguous Figure of the Child-Victim in Dorothy Allison’s Incest Story. Leaves, (2), 127–139. Retrieved from https://revues.u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr/leaves/article/view/219

Issue

No. 2 (2016): The Child’s Voice, the Child’s Gaze

Section

Collection of articles

License

Copyright (c) 2016 Mélanie Grué

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.