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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Carey Mickalites is a professor of English at the University of Memphis, specializing in modern British and Irish literature.

Abstract

Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel, The Wonder, centers on eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, a “fasting girl” whose apparent ability to live for months without food prompts the formation of a local committee of men who hope to prove her to be a miracle. Lib Wright, the English nurse hired to observe the girl, gradually learns that Anna had been abused by her brother and that her dangerous fast is an attempt to cleanse his soul of sin. As such, critics have rightly read this neo-gothic novel as part of an ongoing reckoning with the Irish church’s long history of abuse and as an indictment of the religious and political patriarchy responsible for silencing her story.

Set in 1859, the novel is also concerned with the historical memory of the Great Famine as a defining catastrophe of colonial history. The novel repeatedly gestures to Britain’s colonial political economy and its role in Ireland’s mass starvation and establishes a metonymic link between Anna’s self-imposed hunger and the historical trauma into which she was born. In doing so, the novel’s fictional historiography suggests links between the colonial abuses of the past and the neoliberal impositions of austerity today. At the same time, I argue, the novel represses the colonial social conditions that produce famines and thus reinscribes a colonial model of capitalist development we might expect it to challenge.

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