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B E G I N S ’ : 
T H I N G S ,  T R A U M A  A N D 
F E M I N I N E  P R O X I M I T I E S 1
A n n e  M u l h a l l *
“Something comes to pass which does not belong as one’s own to the one 
or to the other. Something arrives which did not exist and that the bringing 
together of two worlds produces. What in this way occurs gives itself to each 
one inasmuch as he, or she, wants to welcome it, and to secure its memory. 
Not in order to keep it as a thing but as the mysterious legacy of an encounter 
which it is important to remember without simply appropriating it.”
Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 153.
As Lisa Baraitser notes, “From a psychoanalytic perspective it seems 
strange and slightly perverse to make a distinction between material ob-
jects and embodied subjects” (Baraitser, p. 130). The object, even when it 
appears to aggregate from a material thing rather than a person, ineluc-
tably slides back into the originary object, the maternal object, which 
the material thing covers over, “holds”, preserves. Baraitser, in her phe-
nomenology of motherhood, is interested in articulating a relationship 
with the thing that approaches something like Jane Bennett’s “agentic 
assemblage” (Bennett, p. 21) and the force within the object that em-
places it as an actant in symbiosis with other actants, both human and 
non-human. There must be, Baraiter believes, “elements of the external 
world that escape our projective impulses, that resist internalisation, 
that remain intact despite our need to relate them in fantasy as part of 
our internal world” (Baraitser, p. 133). Christopher Bollas has likewise 
expressed a desire –very different to Baraitser’s enquiry into maternal ob-
jects– to attend to the “thing-ness” of material objects, that in the object 
that resists a purely substitutive function but that, for Bollas, enables 
thought itself. He attempts to distinguish the “evocative processional 
potential” of the object in its “integrity” and “thing-ness” (Bollas, p. 79) 
from the maternal transformational object (although as a kind of reverie 
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in the material world, it unavoidably evokes just this) and the “nostalgic 
evocative object” (p. 80), instead extending Winnicott’s transitional ob-
ject “to argue that our encounter, engagement with, and sometimes our 
employment of, actual things is a way of thinking” (92), the effect of our 
everyday perambulatory free associating among the material objects we 
encounter on our capacity to think in a way that is distinct from “cogni-
tive thought” (p. 93). The difference that embodied difference makes in 
relation to the kinds of objects that we encounter, objects whose speci-
ficity and integrity Bollas argues have an effect on our psychic constitu-
tion, is elided in this analysis. While there can be, for psychoanalysis, 
no absolute distinction between our experience of material reality and 
our “mental life”, yet the direction of movement in this instance is from 
out-side to in-side: “the source of that psychic moment will be from the 
real and will carry the weight of the real with it down into the uncon-
scious” (p. 84). The precise quality of such perambulation is, however, 
effected by our ability to move freely among objects and, as Iris Marion 
Young elaborates in her phenomenology of female embodiment, the 
way in which the woman is positioned in space. The ease of movement 
that Bollas locates as one prerequisite for a plenitude of thought is, for 
many, constrained and restricted in particular ways that are inextrica-
ble from their situation within space, gender being, of course, one such 
qualifying structure that likewise structures the material reality that the 
subject takes as the ground of his perambulatory reverie. So, he notes 
of Emily Dickinson that her confinement to the space of the home had 
an impact on what he interprets as the degeneration of her capacity for 
thought; poetic form “decomposed in her intelligent hands as she lost 
the holding force of linear thinking and, as Helen Vendler illustrates, 
she moved around in increasingly crazed circles” (p. 84).
“I didn’t realise for a long time what the thing was that showed be-
hind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman” 
(Gilman, p. 1140). Written in the late nineteenth century, ‘The Yellow 
Wallpaper’ is the interior monologue of a woman confined, ostensibly 
to ‘cure’ her madness, to her bedroom-prison in the uppermost reaches 
of her husband’s house. Thus imprisoned, she becomes increasingly ob-
sessed by the wallpaper lining the room: by its confounding pattern, and 
by the women, indistinct yet perceptible, trapped beneath the pattern 
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which itself seems to hold them caged beneath the wallpaper, stuck so 
close to the walls that it seems impossible to find any rending purchase. 
In the end, having finally torn the paper from the walls, it is herself 
that she frees from incarceration beneath the “sub-pattern” : “I’ve got 
out at last… And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me 
back!” (Gilman, p. 1144). The story speaks to the structural position-
ing of the woman within material and psychic space. Responding to 
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, Young shows how 
women’s “immanence” emerges from the specificities of this position-
ing. For Merleau-Ponty, space is constituted as such by the presence of 
the embodied subject. As with Bollas’ perambulatory reverie among 
objects, this generative capability of the embodied subject assumes the 
affordance of free movement. However, such fluid motility is impeded, 
Young argues, by the woman’s experience of herself as thing as well as 
subject. In the “modalities of feminine spatiality” (p. 40) that she elabo-
rates, this expresses itself in the “inhibition” (p. 41) of the woman’s con-
stitutive relation to space. “Feminine existence lives space as enclosed or 
confining, as having a dual structure, and the woman experiences herself 
as positioned in space” (Young, p. 40). To go further: she is positioned in 
space, and yet that positioning is ascribed to her as a quality intrinsic to 
her nature as woman. One mechanism for such attribution is suggested 
by Sara Ahmed’s extension of Heidegger’s apprehension of the object-
in-itself, which becomes perceptible when the object fails to do the work 
that it is intended for. As she explains, the failure of the object is in fact 
“the failure of the object to extend a body”; its “failure” is “not a prop-
erty of an object”, but it has repercussions for the object insofar as the 
“experience of this ‘non-extension’ might then lead to ‘the object’ being 
attributed with properties, qualities and values. … If this table does not 
work for me, I would ‘turn toward’ it a different way. I might then at-
tribute my failure to write to the table, such that it becomes the cause 
of the failure” (Ahmed pp. 49–50).
This attribution of blame for the subject’s inability to extend itself to 
the object that thereby becomes the “bad object” (Ahmed, p. 50) reso-
nates with Bracha L. Ettinger’s critique of the “mother-monster ready-
made”, the mother of primal phantasy–the “originary not-enough moth-
er’, ‘the abandoning mother’, ‘the devouring mother’” (Ettinger, 2006a, 
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p. 106)–a “ready-to-hand” figure, we might say, that psychoanalytic 
theory and practice has, for Ettinger, perpetuated in its failure to rec-
ognize the primal nature of these phantasies of maternal not-enough-
ness, attributing them instead to the “real” mother, the “mother-mon-
ster readymade”. Making a similar point, Jacqueline Rose has written 
of her unease with the tendency in the “British School” – the work of 
Christopher Bollas after Winnicott in particular – to “reassert early en-
vironment against fantasy, what is done to the infant against what the 
infant or patient projects on to her world” (Rose, p. 153). For Ettinger, 
this “disrealization caused maternity, feminine sexuality and most of all 
the daughter/mother relation a catastrophic damage”; the failure to rec-
ognize these primal phantasies “destroys mainly the mother/daughter 
relationship since it systematically rechannels hate toward the mother 
and destroys the daughter’s desire for identification with the parent of 
her own sex” (107). This situation is in stark contrast to that of the fa-
ther, where psychoanalysis has long recognized the distinction between 
the primal father of phantasy (“paternal seduction”) and the real father. 
This recognition of the primal father and “disrealization” of the primal 
mother comes at the cost of the maternal-feminine; “primal phantasies 
that organize male sexuality and paternal authority were more easily 
recognized, causing benefit to the symbolic organization of the subject 
according to parameters of maleness and masculinity. It is the primality 
of the not less prevalent phantasies, that tortured mainly daughters vis-
á-vis their mothers, that was disrecognized” (107). In Ettinger’s reading 
of Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, repression itself inevitably causes anxiety to 
“stick” to what is repressed, so that when what is repressed returns, the 
anxiety that is intrinsic to the structure of repression itself reemerges. 
The “mother-monster readymade” is the figure to whom these anxieties 
without a cause are then attributed. So Ettinger argues that “Devouring 
and abandonment were mistakenly recognized by Freud as phenomena 
that are caused by something (rather than as primal). With Winnicott and 
Kohut (to mention just a few) these phenomena are already explained by 
real maternal failures, while in fact, being primal phantasies, they arise 
in the psyche and re-arise in transferential relationships in order to or-
ganize and give meaning to pain and anxiety brought about by human 
existence itself ” (108).
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In this essay, I want to explore this abjection and objectification of 
the maternal-feminine, a mortification that results from this attribution 
of qualities to the woman and mother that are misrecognised as intrinsic 
to her rather than as the effects of her positioning within material and 
psychic spaces. I am especially drawn to the interrelationship between 
the maternal-feminine and domestic space, most particularly the ob-
jects that populate and “clothe” that space. The novels and non-fiction 
w riting of the Irish writer Anne Enright involve a serious engagement 
with such subject-object traversals, seeking to unfold not only the im-
mobilization of the woman within the home – a position with specific 
juridical weight in the Irish case – but also the way in which Enright 
elucidates a spectral feminine stratum, one that resonates with Ettinger’s 
matrixial stratum, through the revelation and enigmatic articulation of 
a coinhabitation that is trangenerational and that undoes subject/object 
relations, while also registering the trauma of occlusion and non-recog-
nition that Ettinger’s work so comprehensively and enigmatically brings 
to our notice. As such, the transitivities between the ‘theoretical’ and the 
literary might point toward that which eludes conventional significa-
tion and representation, a maternal-feminine that survives its occlusion 
within a dominant phallic mode of seeing and being.
During her memoir of her pregnancy with her two children and their 
first two years of life, Enright describes what she thinks may be her first 
memory. She begins: “My earliest memory is of a pot stand. It is set into 
a corner with a cupboard on one side and, on the other, a shallow step. 
This is where my head begins. The step leads to another room, and far 
on the other side of the room, there is a white-haired woman sitting on 
a chair” (Enright 2005, p. 65). With her mother, Enright reconstructs 
the scene: the woman is her grandmother, and the pot stand was in 
her house by the sea, where the infant Enright stayed the first time her 
mother left her to bring her older brother to casualty with a broken leg. 
The thing – here, the pot stand – marks the severance of mother and 
child; it is where the narrator’s “head begins”, the separation from the 
mother that has engraved the material object and its surrounding scene 
as a screen memory. The object both obscures the originary event and 
is yet the object through which that event is preserved and made par-
tially accessible to re-emergence and reimagining. It is, in a sense, the 
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material object that enables the resonance within Enright of the origi-
nary separation from the mother into partial awareness. The pot stand 
is itself the “holder” of a “container,” and Enright dimly apprehends 
two pots positioned on its shelves. The structural contiguity of these 
material objects with the mother’s function as holder and container 
of the child makes this a particularly resonant image for the trauma of 
separation. The maternal function of containment is one that Enright 
returns to frequently in her work; it is explicitly described elsewhere in 
Making Babies, when she wryly connects this function of the mother 
to the woman as “old bag” – that “‘Mother’ thing… The container (the 
old bag, my dear, the old bag)” (2005, 57).2 Steven Connor alights on 
the bag as one of the “magical things” whose intricacies he unfolds in 
Paraphrenalia.3 A magical thing is “more than a mere thing. We can do 
whatever we like to things, but magical things are things that we allow 
and expect to do things back to us” (Connor, p. 4). Moreover, some 
things “interrupt” our sense of being in the carried forward by a time 
imagined as processional and throw us back, or afford a re-emergence 
of the past in the present: “such things inhabit space, but are a kind of 
temporizing with it. … things link us to our losses”; things can “haunt” 
us (p. 4). Bags are a particularly significant sort of thing for Connor, who 
connects this significance, of course, to parts of the mother’s body – to 
the mother’s breasts and to our experience of the womb; we are “carried, 
like bags, for long enough to come to know this intermediate condi-
tion [“living on the inside of another body”] intimately, and never to 
be able to forget it” (p. 16). Our attachment to bags resonates with the 
mother as “holding” environment: “holding things together, holding 
things up, and being ourselves held and held up, are so important to 
us” (p. 16). Enright’s narrative of this first memory travels forward to her 
daughter in the present: “At nine months, the baby puts her head into a 
pot and says, Aaah Aaah Aaah. She says it very gently and listens to the 
echo. She has discovered this all by herself ” (Enright 2005, p. 65). The 
pot here may signify the “passing on” of this holding function between 
generations of women; an ambivalent inheritance, “fixing” the woman 
and mother within her functionality as object for use by the subject in 
the manner that Connor’s reverie on the bag as substitute for the inter-
nalized maternal part-objects nostalgically describes. However, in the 
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transitivity in Enright’s account something else is suggested that is other, 
I think, than this intergenerational transmission of the maternal role. 
This transitivity is in part described by the temporal movement of the 
narrative and the transitivity between and within subject-positions that 
accompanies this, as the account weaves between past, present and fu-
ture, between Enright as infant, and her own infant daughter, between 
herself as mother, her own mother, and her grandmother. Although the 
material object – here, the pot stand – marks the beginning of the end 
of the dyad, from an Oedipal perspective, it is involved with a mode of 
connectedness as well as separation that persists despite the severance 
from the mother, an umbilical transconnectedness, after Luce Irigaray, 
that Enright intuits here in the transitivity between grandmother, moth-
er, daughter and the objects of domestic space (Irigaray 1993, p. 14). It is 
the transitivity of the material object here, in particular, that suggests a 
reaching toward something like Ettinger’s matrixial borderspace, as an 
interval in the subject-object distinctions in Enright’s narrative brings 
fleetingly into apprehension a submerged level of being wherein “traces” 
are shared between partial subjects and partial objects that transconnect 
beyond and before any phallic substitutive function.
Is there a connection here to what Iris Marion Young has called “the 
temporality of preservation”, a mode of temporality that may suggest 
an association with this spectral feminine (Young p. 143)? While Young 
locates the preservative in “time and history,” does this aspect of “dwell-
ing” also intimate something of the traversal between the transsubjects 
and transjects that Ettinger apprehends as matrixial (p. 141)? Follow-
ing Irigaray, Young retrieves the “preservative” as what is set aside in 
Heidegger’s adumbration of “building” and “dwelling” – as she says, 
“a curious abandonment” (Young, p. 125). These preservative rhythms 
are described by Young in terms of transgenerational connectivity and 
they find their pulse in the relations between bodies and things, a pro-
cess that Young describes as “sedimentation”: things become sedimented 
with meanings that accrete to the object through time, and “things and 
their arrangement bear witness to the sedimentation of lives lived” in the 
home (p. 140). She continues: “The history embodied in the meaningful 
things of the home is often intergenerational. Traditionally women are 
the primary preservers of family as well as individual histories. Women 
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trace the family line and keep safe the trinkets, china cups, jewelry, pins, 
and photos of the departed ancestors” (p. 141). As Susan Pollock says 
of her grandmother’s rolling pin in Sherry Turkle’s collection Evocative 
Objects, “the evocative object is transitional in the fullest sense of the 
word – it can bring together generations, anchor memory and feeling, 
and evoke attachments that have been long forgotten” (Turkle, p. 230). 
Is there something else here, however, something that elides the fixity 
suggested by “sedimentation”, evocative objects and transitional objects?
In ‘Time’, Enright wonders what object her daughter might dimly 
retain from the first time she left her – again, with her own mother, who 
she imagines from her baby’s perspective as a spectral “someone”, im-
plying a continuity with Enright’s own memory of her grandmother as 
an indistinct white-haired woman. She hopes that her daughter will re-
member the carpet in her parents’ house, the carpet Enright remembers 
from her own childhood. The carpet functions as one of Young’s sedi-
mented objects, those objects that are both themselves preservative and 
that resonate with the preservative aspect of dwelling associated with 
women and the feminine. It is also an evocative object such as Turkle 
describes: it is the container of memory and of transgenerational trans-
connection. But does this transitive quality have further resonances with 
something more difficult to articulate; is there in this infinite pulse of 
connection and separation between mother and daughter and between 
generations something of the matrixial where the object becomes trans-
ject? The preservative object of the cot – the layers of paint accumulated 
on its chipped surface the material manifestation of its ‘sedimented’ and 
transgenerational force–becomes in Enright’s account both expressive of 
the relations between the oedipal subjects of mother, father, and child 
while at the same time this transitive, transsubjective quality that enig-
matically and temporarily emerges and then fades comes into fleeting 
apprehension in and through the encounter between something sub-
merged yet present ‘beneath’ both the subject and the object:
“The baby sleeps in my cot now – the one my father made over forty years 
ago with some half-inch dowel … I sat beside it one night, feeding her, and I 
tried to remember what it was like to be inside: the view between the bars and 
the ripped wallpaper on the wall. Someone, over the years, had painted it a 
nursery blue, but I remembered a green colour, I could almost recall chewing 
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the cross bar at the top. … I saw, under a chip in the blue paint, the very g reen 
I ate as a child. A strong and distant emotion washed briefly over me and was 
gone.” (Enright 2005, pp. 69–70; my italics)
The house in which you grow up is, to use Sara Ahmed’s phrase, a 
“sticky object” (Ahmed 2003, pp. 44–46). The first home leaves its im-
print on me, shapes me; and I likewise shape that house in specific ways, 
leave my mark upon it. Home is traumatic as well as generative, carceral 
as well as sustaining. A romanticising nostalgia for the home has incar-
cerating and impeding effects for the woman whose function it is to pro-
vide its ground, as Irigaray has demonstrated. For instance, Bachelard 
says of the house: “Without it, man would be a dispersed being … It is 
body and soul. It is the human being’s first world. Before he is ‘cast into 
the world’ … man is laid in the cradle of the house” (Bachelard, p. 7). 
The nurturing protection and imaginative sustenance that the house ide-
ally provides for its inhabitants are described by Bachelard as its “mater-
nal features” (p. 7). The association between woman and home is under-
lined by the aspects of care and preservation: “housewifely care weaves 
the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch”, and such care 
builds the house “from the inside … we become conscious of a house 
that is built by women, since men only know how to build a house 
from the outside” (p. 68). Valuable as Bachelard’s “topoanalysis” is, the 
house is not the “first cosmos” as he describes it, and is not originary 
of the nurture, protection, containment and creativity that he ascribes 
to it in his exploration (p. 68). In evoking such feelings and in enabling 
poetic reverie, the house reanimates the memory of the maternal body, 
a reanimation that resonates with the house’s structural contiguity with 
that body. There is a sense in which Bachelard’s topoanalysis, while ges-
turing toward the mother, again in his nostalgic longing fixes her as the 
ground of dwelling, simultaneously displaces her and in particular the 
transsubjective relation between the becoming-infant and the mother-
to-be that the house evokes, reinscribing these positions as subject/ob-
ject, positing the house as origin and source in place of what Ettinger 
describes as the matrixial borderspace, a space that has its origins in the 
transconnectivity of co-emergence in the womb that persists as a dis-
tinct, non-oedipal psychic structure. Irigaray has, of course, articulated 
the grounds of Heidegger’s “dwelling”, which is for him man’s way of 
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being in the world. Through building, man reveals this prior ground of 
dwelling: “The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. 
…the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it: rather, a 
location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge” (Heidegger, 
pp. 331–2). For Irigaray, “Dasein founds its being-in-the-world” on “a 
constitutive oblivion”, the “forgetting” of the mother, and this amne-
sic dwelling thus positions the maternal-feminine as “void” (Faulkner, 
p. 131). “Built on the void, the bridge joined two banks that, prior to its 
construction, were not: the bridge made the two banks. And further: 
the bridge, a solidly established passageway, joins two voids that, prior 
to its construction, were not: the bridge made the void” (Irigaray, The 
Forgetting of Air, qtd in Faulkner, p. 129). For Irigaray, then, Heidegger’s 
dwelling is built over the void that woman’s dereliction opens up. As 
Young pithily summarises, the woman’s role “is to be the home by being 
at home” so that the home that displaces and substitutes for the mother, 
is, like the dwelling-place of language, founded on the void where the 
relation to the mother once was and is impelled by a chronic nostalgic 
urge to recoup this loss by assigning woman “to be place without occu-
pying place” and by building for man a new home in language (Young, 
p. 129). Young describes woman thus positioned in space and woman be-
coming thing in terms of her function as mirror for man’s speculation: 
“Through projecting outward he makes objective works where he can 
see himself reflected. In this objectifying self-reflection woman serves as 
material both on which to stand and out of which to build, and wom-
en likewise serve as a primary object for reflecting himself, his mirror’ 
(Young, p. 128). ‘Home’ becomes for woman not a facilitative space, but 
her crypt, the place of her entombment.
The home in Enright wears the dual aspects that feminist phenom-
enology suggests: the house is protective, nurturing containment; the 
house is carceral, toxic entombment. In The Gathering, we witness the 
narrator Veronica’s deep mourning for her brother, who has committed 
suicide having emigrated to England, having become increasingly es-
tranged from his family, on the downward spiral of chronic alcoholism 
and the doss house. Her narrative is, however, focused on the trauma of 
sexual abuse that has led to Liam’s pitiable and lonely death; this trauma 
is the terrible “gap” at the centre of the novel, for most of the narrative 
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pointed toward through allusion, metaphor, metonymy, hallucination, 
slippage – those gaps in language that bespeak the unrepresentable – a 
trauma that her brother, and possibly herself, and, it is hinted, genera-
tions of her family have suffered. The houses that Veronica and Liam 
lived in as children are intimately, inextricably involved in this trauma 
and in its ‘passing on’ and persistence across generations – the parents’ 
house, the grandmother’s house persist within Veronica, lending her a 
particular psychic shape. These houses are suffused with animism: the 
family home grows as a living thing as the family sprawls outward, and 
the narrator describes it as haunted by the ghosts of the children she and 
her siblings once were. Not only are the houses haunted by these ghosts; 
Veronica is herself, importantly, haunted by these houses, too. These do-
mestic spaces – the houses that ‘gather’ the family, to limn Heidegger’s 
bridge that makes the void–are themselves crypts of the transgenera-
tional trauma of abuse, not static objects but rather vitally implicated 
with the transgenerational phantomatic preservation and passing on 
of trauma. Does this traumatic coinhabitation suggest a connection, 
a bridge, between Ahmed’s phenomenological reorientations, whereby 
she reanimates the mutually shaping interplay between objects and bod-
ies that coinhabit space, and Griselda Pollock’s exposition of the Lacan-
ian Thing, that shapeless yet shaping void? For Ahmed, “Bodies as well 
as objects take shape through being orientated toward each other, an 
orientation that may be experienced as the co-inhabitation or sharing 
of space. … Bodies are hence shaped by contact with objects and with 
others, with “what” is near enough to be reached. Bodies may even take 
shape through such contact, or take the shape of that contact” (Ahmed, 
p. 54). Filtering this through Enright’s enigmatic exploration of the mu-
tual shaping of the house, no longer quite an object but neither quite a 
subject, and the bodies that inhabit it, no longer quite present but yet 
shaping in their absence, bespeaks the enigmatic absence/presence of 
trauma itself. Pollock explicates:
“the Thing, la Chose, which is the affectively, corpo-real and for which the 
psychic object creates but a shaping within which the Thing’s unsignifiable-
ness, nonetheless presses, acting like the apparent void inside a vase that, in 
effect, determines the shape the vase takes for us to see and hold: does the vase 
hold nothing, or does that no-Thing press the vase/object into its perceptible 
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shape, on the other side of the Real revealing to us both the psychic shaping 
and the unsignified or unimaged ghost: the Thing which none the less donates 
something important to what we then work with psychically in the object?” 
(Pollock, p. 42).
In the traumatic currents relaying between the subject and the object 
that “holds” them, between the family and the house, as perhaps the 
most symbolically freighted of what Ahmed calls “kinship objects” that 
‘gather’ (Ahmed, p. 81) – and therefore in a sense give shape to while 
being shaped by – the family, where is this governing Thing that is no-
Thing to be located? For Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, in their 
analysis of transgenerational trauma, the crypt is the no-place that 
‘hides’ or houses this no-Thing. Gabriel Schwab expands: “The crypt 
is a melancholic, funereal architectonic in inner space, built after trau-
matic loss [which] needs to be silenced and cut off from the world. The 
crypt contains the secrets and silences formed in trauma … entombed 
and consigned to internal silence by the sufferers” (Schwab, 45). This 
crypt finds expression in those ‘gaps’ that disarticulate language and 
symbolic representation – a “cryptonomy” concealed within the “house” 
of (phallic) language to which I will shortly return. Such trauma does 
not remain entombed within the bachelor subject, but can be both col-
lective and transitive: the “secret” is communicated beneath and within 
speech and representation, between generations, becoming a phantom 
whose origin is not within ‘me’ but that haunts me nonetheless. For 
Bracha Ettinger, the transitivity of trauma as described by Abraham and 
Torok reveals something that has somehow escaped full recognition: 
that is, that trauma is thus shared, not as a sealed-off tomb that passes 
from subject to subject, but on a sub- and trans-subjective level: at this 
matrixial level, trauma–its traces, its residues, its phantoms–is “carried” 
between partial subjects, and thus Ettinger proposes metramorphosis as 
the capacity that enables the passage of ‘crypts’ between subjects on the 
transsubjective level of the matrixial borderspace, a psychic capacity first 
inscribed in the transmissions between the partial subjects of mother-
to-be and becoming-infant before originary repression and castration. 
Ettinger describes the process:
“A crypt, when transmissible in the matrixial borderspace, is a lacuna that 
corresponds to an unsymbolized event belonging to someone else. Thus we 
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can conceive of a chain of transmissions, where the traumatic Thing inside my 
other’s other is aching inside me, and where a forsaken Event that took place 
between ‘my’ unknown others struggles for recognition through me and with 
me.” (2006, p. 166).
The representation of the house as a kind of body that must be gut-
ted and eviscerated, exorcised of its psychic ghosts through the evacua-
tion of the things that clothe it, recurs in Enright’s fiction, and it is here 
too in The Gathering. If it is true that, as Bachelard has it, each one of 
us is inhabited by the “oneiric house”, the “house of dream-memory”, 
then it is her grandmother Ada’s house, rather than her mother’s, that 
forms the “crypt of the house we were born in” for Veronica (Bachelard, 
p. 15). Toward the end of the novel, Veronica fantasises about buying her 
grandmother’s old house so that she can strip it down, gut it, unmake 
the scene of a trauma deepened by generations of wounds that have 
never been spoken:
“I am standing in Ada’s front room, pulling up a corner of the wallpaper, 
talking to some nice architect about gutting the place […] while telling him to 
rip out the yellow ceiling and the clammy walls; to knock down the doorway 
to the front room, but save the Belfast sink in the little kitchen […] I will ask 
him to get the place cleaned out with something really strong, I don’t want a 
woman with a mop, I will say, I want a team of men in boiler suits with tanks 
on their backs and those high-pressure steel rods” (Enright 2007, p. 238).
The only object that Veronica wants to preserve from Ada’s house is 
the Belfast sink: this is the place, she has told us earlier, where her imag-
ination began, and continues to begin. It also retains its specific integ-
rity here as a thing that cleans – in a full empathy with Veronica’s need 
to cleanse. The object mediates transconnection in the feminine, not 
solely ascribable to the sink’s association with domestic work, although 
that association is part of what is transmitted, not alone in its “preserva-
tive” function but also in the structuring trauma that is ‘passed down’ 
the female line in the phallic inscription of the female subject that the 
woman at the sink evokes. Like the pot holder that marks the place 
where Enright’s “head begins” in ‘Time’, so here the Belfast sink is where 
her imagination begins: both beginnings are also endings, separations, 
signifiers of originary trauma, but the transitivity again between not-
quite-object and not-quite-subjects manifests another and specifically 
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feminine stratum of exchange, an ethical relation that Veronica intui-
tively wishes to preserve.
The toxic and generative capabilities of domestic objects and spaces 
are recurring motifs in Enright’s work and this toxicity is often coun-
tered by the focalising protagonist’s evisceration of such spaces and the 
things that give these spaces and the gendered subjectivities they co-
constitute their shape. The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? and 
The Gathering all feature climactic moments in which female protago-
nists tear the insides of the house apart, or fantasise about doing so, im-
pelled by a suffocated desperation toward necessary acts of unmaking 
and remaking. Torn wallpaper, and the shape of the gap it leaves behind, 
likewise recur in Enright’s fiction, a recurrence that recalls the yellow 
wallpaper of Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ short story.4 Talking elsewhere 
about the ‘Yellow Eyes’ chapter in The Wig My Father Wore, where Grace 
eviscerates her sitting room, Enright describes it as “a menstrual image.” 
She explains: “Well, it’s all buried under the wallpaper. We are living in 
it; it’s in bits, it’s half-mad, the wallpaper and all the historical bits and 
scraps which are all real things. That’s a menstrual image – we have to 
rip at the lining of this for something new to happen” (Moloney, p. 64). 
In The Wig My Father Wore, Grace first tentatively pulls off a tongue of 
wallpaper that has come loose, and then with an increasingly frenetic ur-
gency rips off its sedimented layers, down to the newspapers that line the 
walls, and finally gouging through to the “plaster underneath” which, 
anticipating the plaster revealed beneath the torn wallpaper in Making 
Babies, is “an old-fashioned pink” (Enright 1995, p. 86). In her analysis 
of this section of the novel, Patricia Coughlan draws out the historical 
and sociological significance of these layers of uncovered history:
The previously confessional nature of Ireland makes its presence felt … in 
the snatches of text from the 1930s and earlier which she finds when she strips 
the wallpaper in her house. [It is a] kind of anthology of Irish culture, especially 
in its devotional aspect, from the previous one hundred years … References 
to our Lady’s protection of Franco’s troops in the 1930s are jumbled together 
with a Theatre Royal 1939 playbill, a nostalgic emigrant’s letter, and a recipe 
for ‘Faggots’. (Coughlan)
Reproductive and menstrual images, images of an eviscerated female 
body that is “written over” by language, that language renders indeci-
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pherable–but a body which, in its return, calls into question the given-
ness of the reality language orchestrates, become inseparable from the 
space and ‘skin’ of the house here, suggesting the dwelling spaces of 
both home and language that Irigaray unfolds in her analysis of Hei-
degger’s dwelling that constitutes maternal origin as void and woman 
as home who is thereby left homeless. The gaps, the menstrual shreds, 
that Grace’s eviscerations leave in the newspaper and the madness of 
the textual palimpsest beneath the wallpaper render their conventional 
cultural meanings and inscriptions as vertiginously jumbled and only 
partially decipherable: “Sharp edged flakes of pink stick to the paper in 
liquid shapes, blotting out words and phrases, or they fall of in scabs, 
leaving the page pockmarked with meaning, or a piece shreds as I pull it 
off, leaving a central tongue stuck to the wall” (Enright 1995, pp. 86–7).
The breaching of the walls of the homely dwelling place by a kind of 
unhomely feminine writing are recalled by Jacqueline Rose during her 
critique of Christopher Bollas’ “fantasies of the mother” (Rose p. 156). 
Writing about H.D.’s narrative of her experiences as Freud’s analysand, 
Rose alludes to H.D.’s visions in her hotel room while on holiday in 
Corfu – a pivotal moment for her as a poet. H.D. describes her “pictures 
on the wall” as hieroglyphs, like the pictographic writing of the dream 
and the unconscious. Freud sees in what H.D. calls the “writing on the 
wall” “a desire for union with the mother”, interpreted not as the work-
ings of inspiration but as a disturbing symptom (Rose, p. 154). Freud’s 
discomfort, Rose observes, the “moment of danger”, is “the point where 
the boundaries of consciousness are transgressed, where the limits be-
tween inside and outside, between a subject and a world of objects that 
surround her, breaks down” (p. 154). For Freud, then, this blurring of 
the threshold between “me” and “not-me” evokes an uncanny return of 
what has been repressed, the relation to the mother. What might hap-
pen, Ettinger asks, what might be apprehendable and recognised, if this 
“intrapsychic remnant of the body” that so disturbs Freud here were 
acknowledged as revealing “a transferential unconscious field stretched 
between several individuals unknown to each other?” What is perceived 
as a dangerous breach of threshold between ‘me’ and ‘not me’ would 
instead be shown to belong to an entirely other order of psychic co-
inhabitation:
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“Such a transgression of the celibate boundaries would disclose what I call 
a matrixial aesthetic borderspace, where rhythms of interval capture and trace 
co-engendering with/by the stranger. … In matrixial transferential relations, 
several I(s) and uncognized non-I(s) are interlaced, beyond space and time, in 
matrixial space and time, together opening repeatedly the wounds of nomad-
ic places, and working-through to re-in/di-fuse the celibate place” (Ettinger 
2006, p. 158).
For Abraham and Torok, “cryptographic speech” manifests the traces 
of trauma in language: a “psychic aphasia” (Rand qtd in Schwab p. 54) 
whose “haunted language” (Schwab p. 54) disarticulates conventional 
signification and the speaking subject. Cryptographic speech, like the 
crypt itself, can be transgenerational, and in “extreme cases, secreted 
“phantom words” can become the carriers of another’s story” (Schwab 
pp. 54–5). Ettinger’s elaboration of metramorphosis and its manifestation 
and working-through in the transcryptum of art-working significantly 
reconfigure our understanding of this transmission of trauma. The crypt 
that travels across the boundaries of “bachelor” subjects 
“can be transmitted from one subject to another by metramorphosis, be-
cause a capacity and an occasion for this kind of transmission, co-affectivity, 
co-acting, co-making already occurred in the archaic relations between each 
becoming-subject and the m/Other. Metramorphosis turns the subject’s boun-
daries into thresholds, and co-affectivity turns the borderlines between subjects 
in distance-in-proximity and between subject and object, into a shareable bor-
derspace” (Ettinger 2006, p. 166, and qtd in Pollock pp. 49–50).
The potential for representational systems to act as a metramorphic 
“transport station” of a shareable trauma whose traces are transmitted 
in the matrixial rather than phallic stratum unfolds what would other-
wise be the “madness”, the “psychic aphasia”, of the three generations of 
women whose enigmatic transconnectedness is at the core of Enright’s 
second novel, What Are You Like? In this novel the sacrificial mother 
Anna speaks from the grave. She is literally the sacrificial mother: dur-
ing her pregnancy, she is diagnosed with a brain tumour, and in accord-
ance with the law of the theocratic state she is denied medical treat-
ment so that the lives of her daughters-to-be may be preserved. She 
bleeds to death while giving birth to her daughters, and her husband 
Berts makes the decision to keep one daughter, Maria, giving his other 
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daughter Rose up for adoption. The mutilation of the relation between 
mother and daughter within a phallic economy that both Irigaray and 
Ettinger have so powerfully elaborated in their work is shown in this 
all too recognisable material way, demonstrating the inseparability of 
the psychic dereliction of both mother and daughter within an Oedipal 
teleology from the transformation of the female subject to a fleshly ob-
ject whose primary value is in reproducing the nation and being made 
to carry the burden of the murderous consequences of an iconography 
of maternity as coerced sacrifice of the mother for the other. Despite 
this traumatic severance, and despite the fact that Anna and her daugh-
ters are unknown to each other – and that Rose, named as such by her 
adoptive parents, does not know her birth family or the circumstances 
of her abandonment by her father – each of these women carry traces of 
their transconnectedness, a transconnection that is both traumatic, trau-
matized, and generative. This transitivity expresses itself as, precisely, a 
kind of aphasia – a disruption in expression and in the relation between 
the woman and objects, particularly objects of domestic space. Phanto-
matic words ghost the narrative and bespeak both severance and joint-
ness; “Rose”- the name given to Anna’s abandoned daughter and thus 
the embodied “sign” of the traumatic wound to the matrixial enacted 
by phallic repression and matricide – becomes a signifier that haunts 
both Anna and Maria. Staying in her grandmother’s house–where she 
is expected to do the work for which she is, as woman-object, intended 
and attend to her male relatives, emphasising the connection between 
her severance from her sister and the ideology of compulsory domes-
ticity that was one of the founding principles of the Irish state–Maria 
sees roses everywhere, beginning with the unexpected contiguity of the 
“rose” with the animal-turned-object for consumption by the subject 
and then moving through conjunctions between roses and domestic 
things: “The blood of the joint was salty-sweet and pink, the same col-
our as the roses on her grandmother’s delph. There were roses on the 
cloth as well as roses on the wallpaper and modern roses blocked out in 
triangular petals on the new plastic breadboard” (Enright 2000, p. 48). 
When she speaks from the grave, Anna’s narrative likewise carries the 
traces of the daughter she has never known; her trauma manifests as a 
rupture between word and thing that, from a conventional perspective, 
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signals aphasia but that, “looking awry”, reveals the actual ‘gap’ between 
language and the objects it fixes in place, the illusion of the coincidence 
of language and the world that is the necessary fiction underwriting the 
speaking, “gathering” subject: “I wrote words down and I buried them 
in the garden, the names of flowers: wallflower, phlox, peony rose, dog 
rose, tea rose. A twist of baking soda, sugar, a wick, two wicks, a bar of 
soap cut down the middle so it leaves itself on the knife” (p. 247, my 
emphasis). The last list of household objects manifests Anna’s connec-
tion to her own mother, likewise “afflicted” by a kind of aphasia whereby 
she constructs her own “language” through the objects of the kitchen in 
place of conventional language: “My mother’s lists were things that she 
shifted around the kitchen; the tea cosy placed on the table for more 
tea, the lid of the bread bin propped open for flour … I would hold the 
list of things translated in my head as I ran down the road … a twist 
of baking soda, sugar, a wick, two wicks, a bar of soap cut down the 
middle so it leaves itself on the knife” (p. 234.) So, the aphasia that is 
attributed at the beginning of the novel to Anna’s brain tumour is re-
vealed enigmatically throughout the narrative and here, more explicitly, 
as a disruption in phallic language that is transgenerational and femi-
nine. This “psychic aphasia” is also transitive between the dead mother 
and the unknown daughter Rose; during her pregnancy Anna manifests 
“symptoms” that Berts attributes to the mysterious hormonal configu-
ration of the woman and that come to be retrospectively attributed to 
a more sinister disturbance in her brain’s functioning but that, read as 
metramorphosis, reveal the proximity-in-distance of the matrixial web: 
she drinks “out of the hot tap” and for her the “sound of a tap dripping 
smelt of roses” (p. 6), while later we are told of Rose that ‘When she 
opened her mouth, the wrong words hopped out of it. Everything she 
tried to do came out backwards. She drank from the hot tap” (pp. 153–4, 
my emphasis).5 In this novel, to recall Ahmed, both women and things 
fail to do the work that they are intended for. This “failure”, however, is 
the very idiom of a newly configured feminine proximity: a proximity 
that neither elides trauma nor deposits it to the account of the other, 
but that instead bespeaks the generative beyond the boundaries of the 
bachelor subject, a generative ethics of proximity that Ettinger likewise 
ascribes to the artwork as transcryptum: “In art, repetitions in anam-
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nesic working-through do not reestablish the lost object. Rather, they 
make present the unpresentable Thing, crypted in the artwork’s uncon-
scious, that keeps returning because its debt can never be liquidated’ 
(Ettinger 2006, p. 158).
* Anne Mulhall is a College Lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film Studies at 
University College Dublin where she teaches and researches in critical theory, gender and sexu-
ality studies, and Irish literary and cultural studies.
N o t e s
1 Thanks to Moynagh Sullivan for her invaluable comments on an early draft of this essay, 
and moreover for the influence and example of her own work which has been so important 
and groundbreaking in its brilliant analysis of the feminine and maternal in Irish cultural and 
literary aesthetics. Thanks also to Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke for our collaboration 
in organising ‘Reading Bracha L. Ettinger’s The Matrixial Borderspace’ in 2009, an event that 
continues to resonate. My debt to Noreen’s and Michael’s work is great, but needless to say they 
are in no way responsible for the flaws of this essay.
2 I discuss the significance of ‘bags’ and their connection to the umbilical at greater length 
in ‘“Now the blood is in the room”: the spectral feminine in the work of Anne Enright’, Anne 
Enright, eds. Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011).
3 Thanks to Michael O’Rourke whose work introduced me to Connor’s book.
4 Thanks to Luz Mar Gonzalez Arias for pointing out the significance of ‘The Yellow Wallpa-
per’ for a reading of this aspect of Enright’s novel.
5 See my article ‘“Now the blood is in the room”: the spectral feminine in the work of Anne 
Enright’ for a more thorough discussion of crypt, transcryptum, and the manifestation of trau-
ma in representation in this and other of Enright’s works.
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