The traumatic narratives of sexuality in Taiwanese writer Shao-Lin Chu’s trilogy

Abstract

This paper explores the narratives of the Taiwanese woman novelist Shao-Lin Chu’s trilogy to see how the problem of female sexuality and resistance to parental wedlock tragedy becomes a traumatic experience. The traumatic symptoms in the narratives are taken as Peircean signs for tracing the negative influences of traumatic experiences on the formation of personal identity and the associated depressive disorder. The scenes portrayed in Chu’s traumatic narratives of female and male sexuality are implications and representations of how sexuality is conceptualized and confined by the traumatic events while backgrounded with regulations and restrictions of a traditional society. The stories of Chu’s female narrators reveal the persistent and resisting feminine power. This paper adopts the concept of feminist narrative to analyze the traumatic and sexual events in Chu’s trilogy. The decoding and re-encoding of resistance and sexuality in the traumatic narratives prove that the narratological textual analysis and semiotic reading strategy together offer a solid approach to the discovery of the persistent traumatic impacts of the secret veiled in the narratives and reveal the probable strength of compassion that has its roots derived from deplorable trauma but later transforms itself to stimulate a positive reconstruction of the traumatic survivors’ identity.