Daniela Lillhannus: Unquiet Afterlives: Ghosts Narrating Rape Trauma in Contemporary Swedish and American Fiction (1990–2018)

Abstract

This thesis examines contemporary Swedish and American novels that employ ghost narrators to recount experiences of deadly sexual violence: Carina Rydberg’s Osalig ande (1990), Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), Sara Stridsberg’s The Antarctica of Love (2021 [2018]), and TE Carter’s I Stop Somewhere (2018). Through contextualization and comparative analysis, the study traces how trauma fiction draws on supernatural narration to engage with understandings of rape and trauma that were shaped by feminist consciousness-raising, trauma research, and psychiatric diagnostics of the mid-twentieth century and onwards.

The study asks why these novels use ghosts as narrators, how they do so, and to what effect. Building on feminist narratology, genre theory, and scholarship on rape myths, the thesis analyzes focalization and first-person narration of sexual violence. It situates the primary texts within a broader cultural framework by examining entanglements of myth, intertextuality, and psychological discourse in dialogue with contemporary psychotraumatology. This interdisciplinary approach treats trauma as a conceptual knot—a phenomenon whose meanings are historically and culturally contingent.

Addressing the largely underexplored topic of sexual violence in Swedish literature, the thesis offers new insights into the influence of American trauma discourses on the Swedish texts. It also demonstrates how an interdisciplinary approach to trauma fiction can identify and illuminate rape as a core ethical theme in novels. The study contributes to the theoretical orientation of hauntology in literary studies and medical humanities, proposing spectrality as a subject position and framework for conceptualizing experiences of social isolation and lack of agency after traumatic events.

Examining how victims are depicted through culturally available scripts and other characters’ perceptions, the study argues that fiction can yield critical insight into how social dynamics contribute to the emergence and perpetuation of trauma. It demonstrates that ghost narrators produce stories where other people’s responses fundamentally shape rape trauma through loneliness and shame. At the same time, spectrality provides victims who are made invisible with a means of refusing complete obliteration—by continuing to observe others, waiting for the gaze to be returned.