ABSTRACT
The recessionary climate in Ireland sees a shift from the Tiger shaming and blaming of the girl as too closely tied to the commodity to a more feminist critique of the commodification of girlhood in post-Tiger texts, specifically in texts aimed at teenage girl readers themselves. However, what is significant is the space that is given in texts like The Dancers Dancing and 32A to a girlhood that does not have to be characterized by damage. Eimear McBride’s 2013 debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing plunges the reader directly into the consciousness, or rather, the pre-consciousness of an unnamed teenage narrator. However, McBride’s style—its broken, staccato phrasing—highlights the problematics of the teenage girl both literally and representationally in a much more brutal and immediate way than the stream of consciousness of Ulysses. The sucking away of the vowels highlights the sucking away of self, the claustrophobia of violation.
