Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing (review)

Henke’s book examines briefly the autobiographical works of six “shattered subjects”: Colette, H.D., Anais Nin, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, and Sylvia Fraser. “The texts of both autobiography and bildungsroman,” writes Henke in her introduction, “exfoliate in the manner of mimetic histories but necessarily double back, like involuted Mobius strips, in haunting self-referentiality” (xv).

The book might disappoint those who wish to learn more about these writers than the traumas that Henke asserts shattered them; alas, her book does not illuminate other categories of experience. For Henke has grounded these literary figures firmly in the territory of traumatic experience—mainly incest. Typical is a passage describing Sylvia Fraser’s predicament, in which “both physical and psychological integrity are appallingly compromised by the exercise of paternal authority over a girl-child who is far too young to comprehend the pleasure or danger of adult sexual relations” (126). This type of trauma is the only connection made by Henke among and between these writers, “the hidden spaces between words that cannot be uttered” (127). A reader who has appreciated any of these writers’ autobiographical writings will learn here that they are writing solely out of the impulse toward healing the fragmented self, what Henke (and Freud perhaps) terms “scriptotherapy,” and not out of any sort of literary motive.

Henke’s small book is informed with psychoanalytic theory and jargon and replete with passages from Kristeva to Freud, making it difficult for the nonspecialist to read. I found Henke’s sentences very hard going; here, for instance is a passage from the chapter on Audre Lorde: “Perhaps the aporia, the substratum of Lorde’s poignant biomythography, is the shadow of a ‘prequel’ written in a different genre—The Cancer Journals, a confessional text of autopathography that confronts capitalism and its perpetrators along with destructive ideologies purveyed by the corporate beauty complex, to dismantle the master’s house with none but the poet’s tools—honesty, compassion, and clarity of vision” (113).

However, the author has provided useful notes and a good bibliography for those interested in looking further at women writers from this unidimensional perspective of “reconstructing the beleaguered subject and remembering the self shattered by traumatic experience” (144).