A Bodily Haunting

Abstract

The woman’s wordless scream in Not I and Happy Days acts as a spectral-yet-embodied rendering of unspoken and apparently unspeakable sexual trauma. If trauma symptomology is itself a form of bodily haunting—the past intruding into the present—the wordless scream performs this phenomenon on Beckett’s stage, as a disruptive return of the repressed through the body itself. This essay explores how the performed scream returns embodied trauma to embodied expression in Not I and Happy Days, emphasising the voice as a simultaneously spectral yet profoundly corporeal force. It then examines the potential therapeutic effect of the scream in performance, drawing on a range of actor testimonies.