AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMPONENT IN THE WORKS OF HILARY MANTEL

Abstract

The article examines the autobiographical component in the works of the contemporary British writer Hilary Mantel and its connection to the theme of traumatic experience. The study is based on Mantel’s psychological novels and short story collections published between 1994 and 2014. Although autobiographical material is employed to varying degrees throughout her prose, knowledge of the author’s biography allows to identify several key experiences reflected in her fiction, including events from her childhood, her experience of living abroad, and aspects of her physical health. The plots of Mantel’s novels and short stories frequently engage with recurring themes and issues that resonate with her own life experience. These include the existence of a “non-traditional” family structure (mother–father–mother’s lover/stepfather), the social and religious otherness of the protagonists, and narratives centered on the loss of a child or the inability to have children (as a form of specifically female trauma). In addition to the presence of traumatic plots or traumatic context in Mantel’s works, the author’s persistent focus on these themes suggests, in our view, their traumatic significance for Mantel herself. Mantel’s continual return to various episodes from her past functions as a form of acting out, enabling reflection and the construction of her own language of trauma through corporeality, that is, through detailed descriptions of physiological experience. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the defining feature of the usage of autobiographical elements in Mantel’s creativity is the gradual fictionalization of personal experience. The author increasingly moves away from first-person narration and straightforward retrospection, favoring more complex narrative strategies and forms. As a result, biographical facts incorporated into her works undergo artistic transformation, and the trauma narrative acquires a broader and more universal interpretation.