Victimhood in Selected Post-Millennial British Fiction

Abstract

This thesis considers victimhood and associated states of trauma—interpreted through various key theorists, including Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, Fatima Naqvi and Joshua Pederson—in three examples of dystopian post-millennial British fiction. The first chapter focuses on a methodological and critical outline of a range of theorists and contexts explored in the subsequent analysis and interpretation, as well as introducing key features of the novels featured in following chapters. The second chapter outlines both the figure of the scapegoat and realities of victimisation found in Jim Crace’s Harvest (2013). It details both the associated rituals and the terror used to intimidate local villagers, so as to reconfigure their land, switching from common access to sheep-farming, relying on authority imposed to achieve such dispossession and repurposing. I draw on Karl Marx’s observations concerning enclosure and René Girard’s on scapegoating. Other important theorists deployed include Lucien Dällenbach on mise en abyme, and François Flahault on the monstrous and malice. The third chapter details the plight of clones raised for organ harvesting who feature in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), which is analysed through twin key themes of Homo Sacer (as outlined and theorised by Giorgio Agamben, as well as Slavoj Žižek) and abjection. The fourth chapter considers analytically alienation in the context of relevant theories that explain such states of being in Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom (2005). The analysis considers the way the novel’s four new dystopic states reconstruct brutally and radically social life in Britain by creating artificial, enforced families, each guided by the pseudo-science of one of the four humours. I draw on both Louis Althusser’s concept of Ideological State Apparatuses, or ISAs and Marx’s earlier theory of Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) that influenced Althusser. I conclude by arguing that these three selected novels are correlated and offer an intimate understanding of victimhood in post-millennium British fiction.