ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the singularity of Borden’s The Forbidden Zone and the interconnections between the form of the text and its author’s ideological and ethical stance. This chapter contends that Borden’s writing strategies, disorienting and often strikingly innovative, directly derive from her wish to dissociate herself from the traditional and consensual figures of the nurse and of the nurse writer. Borden establishes a phenomenology of the First World War through an emphasis on visuality that demonstrates the nurse’s scopic power, and on geography, through the generation of an ironical cartography. The study delineates the manifold significance of the ‘Forbidden Zone’ as a liminal space, a ‘non-place’ and a ‘zone of uninhabitability’: the space of the abject. Developing around absence, Borden’s prose displays an unstable narrative voice and a paradoxical sophistication; it navigates between mimetic representation and innovative techniques that cause these fragments, like their author, to evade categorisation. Borden’s resistance to convention has an ethical aspect. The nurse-patient relationship is revisited, with the aim of delineating the articulation between an ethics of care and vulnerability and Borden’s aesthetic choices.
