Shattered temporalities : an investigation into trauma, time, and the monstrous in Maria Dahvana Headley’s The mere wife (2018)

This thesis offers a close reading of The Mere Wife (2018), Maria Dahvana Headley’s modernized adaptation of the Old English epic Beowulf. I argue that the monstrous, most immediately represented by the characters Dana Mills and Gren, is a social construction concealing cultural anxieties and the desire to preserve a sociocultural status quo. The characters who dwell within the gated suburban community attempt to preserve a status quo, treating those outside of the community, namely Dana Mills and Gren, as monstrous. However, in the dynamic of the novel, the monstrous is not simply what is excluded from the gated suburban community, but also something instantiated and veiled within it. I argue that the repudiation of the monstrous aims at preserving a suburban, homogenous, straight, and white sociocultural identity, but this very attempt at repudiation leads to this sociocultural identity’s annihilation, and reveals a monstrosity already lurking within the culturally specific status quo. I also argue that most of the characters initially judged as monstrous carry marginalized intersections of identity such as being Queer, feminine, racialized, lower class, and traumatized. I take particular interest in the ways that manifestations of trauma, when paired with these marginalized intersections of identity, are pathologized by the dwellers in suburban Herot and reduced to the monstrous, whereas their traumatized counterparts, who do not share these marginalized intersections of identity, do not suffer the same stigmatization. I analyze the temporally fragmented realities of the traumatized individual embodied in the monstrous, with particular attention to the work of Robert Stolorow, Richard Kearney, and Cathy Caruth.Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)Graduat