Subverting Injurious Language: How Ilse Aichinger’s Narratological Strategies Liberate the Protagonist of “Spiegelgeschichte”

This essay examines the narratological and rhetorical features of Ilse Aichinger’s story of a botched abortion, “Spiegelgeschichte,” in order to highlight the challenges associated with putting female, bodily trauma into language. By focusing its analysis on the text’s second-person narration and imperative statements it makes an argument about the degree to which the protagonist is liberated from the oppressive conditions that lead to her death. Through her act of reflective storytelling the protagonist divides herself into narrated and narrating selves in order to experience herself as both subject and object and to fight back against her entrapment in a temporal chain of cause and effect. Reaching the limits of this reflective language, however, she must eventually turn to defiant silence in order to (re)establish herself as a unified subject and escape the injurious language that surrounds her.