‘She’s a Fine Girl’: Early Experiences of Sexuality and Selfhood in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands

Abstract

This chapter will look at the sexual awakening of teenage girls through the experimental and sensational narratives of Eimear McBride in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) and Charlotte Roche in Wetlands (2009). The chapter will be written using an auto-theoretical framework following on from Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008) and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) using the work of queer theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on shame, and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to draw out a comparison with my own experiences of sexual awakening. As Jill Locke explains, “Rather than focus on changing the world in ways that might lessen her shame, the shamed subject focuses on changing herself so that she might accommodate the demands of her milieu” (2007, 151). The “half-formed” selfhood of a teenage girl is a tentative, affective state and one that can be either positively or negatively impacted by the sexual imagery and experiences that girl encounters.

Revisiting A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Wetlands made me consider my childhood sexual awakening formed primarily through guiltily watching the 1990s television programme Eurotrash in the dark of the living room with the sound turned down. The shameless, sexual frivolity on display was unknown to me as a Catholic girl in a small town in West Cork.

This chapter examines the sexual education girls receive, find, and have pushed upon them and how the meld of experimentation and sensation in women’s literature can capture that affective state that fluctuates between shamed and shameless.