'Compulsively readable and deeply moving': women's middlebrow trauma fiction

This paper examines contemporary women’s middlebrow fiction from the standpoint of trauma theory. Taking Roger Luckhurst’s analysis of popular and middlebrow trauma narratives as a starting point, I analyse the generic features of female authored texts that deal with the trauma of maternal bereavement. According to Luckhurst, middlebrow fiction tests the limits of the trauma paradigm in adopting popular and, therefore accessible, mainstream forms. While sharing motifs and features with the trauma canon, such texts clearly pose a challenge to its prescriptive modernist aesthetics of rupture and unrepresentability. In contradistinction to the etiolated and aporetic narratives of the canonical trauma novel, middlebrow forms represent an eager narrativisation or putting into discourse of traumatic experience, and a positive spur to storytelling. They encourage, not alienation, but shared listening, and a witnessing of suffering and pain. Underlying the trauma paradigm is an assumption that formal radicalism and difficulty equates to political radicalism. It may be that middlebrow fiction is critically ignored because their narrative pleasures are too explicit for a trauma aesthetic that privileges difficulty and aporia. Like Luckhurst, I want to problematise the dominant trauma paradigm, and suggest the middlebrow as an important site of the narrativisation of trauma, particularly female trauma, partly because it is such a liminal category.