Negotiating dark matter: trauma and ecology in the fiction of contemporary Australian women writers

This thesis examines Janette Turner Hospital’s novels within the context of sites and expressions of trauma: locally, nationally and globally. Its focus is on rereading representations of trauma that destabilise dominant discourses about memory, place, nationality, community and gender. This dissertation also argues for a new interpretative paradigm for reading texts that deal with trauma and proposes a lens comprising eco-feminism and trauma theory. The framework I have created explores the phenomenon of trauma in literature as one of the defining features of human nature that shapes our ecological ontologies. Reading Turner Hospital’s fiction through a colloquy of trauma theory and eco-feminism shows how sites of wounding, embodied in land, the human form, art and music, can be reimagined to acknowledge the personal and cultural significance of working through pain. Using traumatic sites of national and global significance in Turner Hospital’s work also invites a reconsideration of trauma theory through examining different modes of hearing about and engaging with wounding to actualise bodily and psychic restoration. The major focus of my research is on the ways that eco-critical concerns interact with trauma and how this approach to reading Australian women’s fiction provides deeper understanding of trauma’s impact, both at the literal and metaphysical levels of experience. A case study of selected texts from Turner Hospital’s collection of writing will be used in conjunction with Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Lily Brett’s Too Many Men to examine how trauma affects Australia’s immigrant culture, mobilises the dispossession of its Indigenous people and speaks to discourses that are of international concern, including Australia’s vulnerability to the threat of international terrorism and the ways we respond to situations that violate basic human rights. The selection of Australian texts written by women provides a rich context for examining ongoing personal, national and global issues that underpin trauma.