Are You Now or Were You Ever: An Exploration of the Hauntological Feminine

Abstract

This thesis explores the idea of impossible futures and haunting pasts in both creative and critical practices, beginning with a novel – Are You Now or Were You Ever. This novel focuses on three female protagonists. Corrina Emerson is in her mid-sixties, and struggles with her mental health, including bouts of paranoia and delusions. Maureen Valentine is around the same age as Corrina, and lives with anterograde amnesia in a care facility, unable to process anything without forgetting it for the last forty years. Edelenia Ruiz is Maureen’s nurse, who ensures she is looked after but, when a new treatment for amnesia becomes available, she has doubts of its ethicality. The lives of these women intersect around a single moment of violence; Corrina let herself into Maureen’s house one night, murdering her family and leaving Maureen with severe head trauma. The reader enters the story over two decades after this night, with Corrina showing signs of relapsing into dangerous behaviour, Maureen so unable to put thoughts together that her narrative is fractured and bordering on poetry, and Edelenia trying to do right by a patient whom she has grown to think of as a friend.

Are You Now or Were You Ever applies ideas of hauntings through the portrayal of women characters who are resistant to typical novelistic structures: Maureen, with amnesia, cannot participate in narrative developments, and Corrina, navigating poor mental health, directly rebuffs them. This resistance creates an effect that connects this language of haunting to the feminine; the long-established linguistic conditions of femininity create a multitude of impossible futures for women, as with these characters, which return to haunt the present. It is informed by the work of Jacques Derrida, whose approach to hauntology underpins this study, in addition to Julia Kristeva, particularly her essay ‘Women’s Time’ and ideas of the semiotic. To further the application of these ideas to creative writing, two other novels by women writers are explored through this lens: Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall. Both texts, as with the creative contribution of this thesis, expose the linguistic constructions of femininity and use this to create a sense of otherness for their protagonists. Furthermore, the characters’ challenges to language are symbolic of a wider push against patriarchal ‘always-already’ conditions of feminine being; as language masks patriarchal ideological structures, elements of the feminine are repressed by it, and the novel as a form can alert readers to this through an estrangement from standard patterns and constructs of prose.

This thesis includes a personal interlude, which contextualises and grounds the interest in this area of research with a lived experience for further illumination and discussion. Through its autobiographical slant, it posits that the linguistic explorations into hauntology and the feminine have a basis beyond literary theory, and the application of these ideas to creative works can open discussions around language and identity both on and off the page. Last, this thesis concludes with a chapter on my writing practice, which endeavours to finalise the integration of these creative and critical elements through an exploration of the process behind the project.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Bangor University
Supervisor	Zoë Skoulding (Supervisor) & Fiona Cameron (Supervisor)