The Absent Child: Manifesting Transgenerational Environmental Trauma on Stage

Authors

Victoria Olwell

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the essay follows:

How can theatrical performance represent the transgenerational traumas imposed by ongoing environmental catastrophes? Trauma theorists have generally approached the representation of trauma from a phenomenological angle, arguing that literature, theatre, film, and other genres formally echo its psychological symptoms. Cathy Caruth, building on Freud's account of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, argues that trauma so completely overwhelms the psyche that it is not consciously experienced at all and thus is not properly remembered; as she writes, "The shock of the mind's relation to the threat of death is thus not the direct experience of the threat, but precisely the missing of this experience, the fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known."¹ Rather than being known or remembered, trauma manifests as "repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena" that can find their structural echo in literary works featuring repetitive, rather than linear, structures.²

Notes

1. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Twentieth Anniversary edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 64.

2. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 94.

Recommended Citation

Olwell, Victoria (2025) "The Absent Child: Manifesting Transgenerational Environmental Trauma on Stage," Comparative Drama: Vol. 59: Iss. 1, Article 5.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol59/iss1/5