Poetics of Trauma in Olga Ravn’s My Work: Towards Matricentric Writing

Abstract

Over the past two decades, numerous novels and memoirs have explored contemporary motherhood. In contrast to idealised portrayals of mothers, new narratives of motherhood have emerged that foreground the subjective maternal experience. The evolving discourse often invokes ironic and critical self-consciousness, addressing questions related to work, sexuality, and identity. The works frequently explore the more complex and often troubling aspects of motherhood, including controversial topics such as maternal ambivalence, maternal trauma, voluntary childlessness, and queer mothering. My Work (2020) by the Danish author Olga Ravn belongs to the emerging canon of new motherhood narratives. It is a work of autobiographical fiction, documenting the periods of pregnancy and the early years with a child. My Work deals with the subjective maternal experience, exploring issues related to maternal subjectivity, ambivalence and trauma, blending personal narrative with broader cultural critique.

In this paper, I discuss Olga Ravn’s novel My Work through literary trauma theory and explore how trauma and survival, disruption and continuity, absence and loss shape the poetics of Ravn’s novel. After outlining the basic features of traumatic experience and trauma literature, I will explore the poetics of My Work, more specifically, how stylistic features attributed to trauma literature, most importantly those of fragmentation and repetition, are employed to convey the lived experience of postpartum trauma. My focus will also be on the ways in which postpartum trauma reconfigures patterns of temporality, narrative coherence and voice. To conclude, I will show how the novel represents a working-through of an experience of discontinuity of narrative identity and a creation of maternal subjectivity.