Gothic Misdirections: Troubling the Trauma Fiction Paradigm in Pat Barker’s Double Vision

Abstract

ABSTRACTTrauma theory has traditionally positioned itself as an ethical mode of critique. Theorists have since criticized the development, born out of trauma theory’s ethical imperative, of a dominant trauma fiction aesthetic seeking to mimic the inaccessibility of traumatic memory, advocating the use of genres like the Gothic to voice otherwise unspeakable subject matter. However, implicating the Gothic in trauma theory’s ethical project ignores the voyeuristic impulse that drives audiences to seek out the Gothic’s pleasurable excesses. These tensions collide in Pat Barker’s Double Vision (2003), whose seemingly clichéd use of Gothic conventions belies a sophisticated metafictional interrogation of trauma fiction’s ethical complexities.