the blood staining your mouth
“The reactivation of trauma is an attempt to recognize, not relish, the incredible and unspeakable that nonetheless happened” (Massé).
“The originating trauma is the prohibition of female autonomy in the Gothic, in the families that people it, and in the society that reads it. History, both individual and societal, is the nightmare from which the protagonist cannot awaken and whose inexorable logic must be followed” (Massé 681-682).
...
Girlhood is uniquely gothic: it is the house and the haunting, is the madwoman and attic. The “originating trauma” is that of being socialized and conditioned into existing as a “girl.”
There is joy, too, and creativity, and boredom, there is so much versatility and variety, but the insidious, creeping everywhereness of patriarchy inflects girlhood with a constitutional kind of Gothicism, defined by constriction and narrative suffocation and fragmentation. The nightmare “from which the protagonist cannot awaken and whose inexorable logic must be followed” is, here, girlhood itself, is patriarchy, is its construction of “girl” and how we are forced to live within its cruelty. How do we mediate and negotiate that nightmare?
How do we possibly survive it intact? Do we? Does anyone?
Do we reduce ourselves to archetypes and tropes not because we are desperate, attention-hungry, self-important, dramatic open wounds, but because those archetypes, those tropes, those narrow media-made forms, are the only life-rafts we have, the only reachable storylines to keep ourselves afloat?
![]()
How do we possibly survive it intact? Do we? Does anyone?
Do we reduce ourselves to archetypes and tropes not because we are desperate, attention-hungry, self-important, dramatic open wounds, but because those archetypes, those tropes, those narrow media-made forms, are the only life-rafts we have, the only reachable storylines to keep ourselves afloat?
