In the “Introduction” to The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction, Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone argue that “the contemporary eludes – and sometimes actively resists – the fixity and definition which periodization necessarily aims to entrench” (2019: 1). Peter Boxall suggests something similar in Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction when he comments that any “attempt to offer a definition or a critical description of any twenty-first-century cultural activity is beset by the problem that attends all efforts to capture the contemporary: that is, that the time we are living through is very difficult to bring into focus, and often only becomes legible in retrospect” (2013: 1). This article does not aim to offer an overall definition of the present moment of contemporary fiction in Ireland, which would be an impossible task. Instead, it will focus on Louise O’Neill’s Young Adult novel Asking for It (2015) as a specific example of the representation of fragmentation in twenty-first-century Irish writing. In The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drąg make the point that recent writing in America and Britain has “seen a renewed popularity of fragmentation in works of fiction that deny completeness, linearity and coherence in favour of incompletion, disruption and gaps” (2019: xi). They go on to argue that fragmentation is

commonly associated with loss, lack and vulnerability – a word whose etymology is significantly vulnus, i.e., the wound. It might thereby come as no surprise that in our “era of the vulnerable” (Ganteau, The Ethics 5), works of fiction which relate personal and collective traumas, with a focus on bodily frailty and a dramatization of loss, should opt for the trope of vulnerability and for modes of fragmentation and dislocation. (2019: xii)

This line of thought has a specific connotation with Asking for it given its narrative tendency towards representing the fractured psychological world and experiences of its central character, Emma O’Donovan.

We are reminded of certain features of Modernism that engage with fragmentation – here we might think of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) or the fragmentary poetics of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) – recurring again in our contemporary moment. This is something that the work of David James and Urmila Seshagiri (2014) has drawn us towards in what they term Metamodernism. They suggest that at a moment when “postmodern disenchantment no longer dominates critical discourse or creative practice, the central experiments and debates of twentieth-century modernist culture have acquired new relevance to the moving horizon or contemporary literature” (2014: 87-88). Within an Irish context, Ruth Gilligan (2018) and Paige Reynolds (2016) have both signalled modernist techniques being employed by Eimear McBride in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) with its fragmentary narrative style and representations of girlhood. In Asking for It, O’Neill’s work is connected with the wider trend towards fragmentary writing in the twenty-first century. However, fragmentation in O’Neill’s novel will be discussed from two very distinct perspectives, mainly through the lens of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic thinking. The first element of fragmentation within the novel that will be interrogated relates to Emma’s desire for objects and commodities. Emma’s initial sense of self is somewhat fractured as she cannot reach a state of wholeness because she constantly experiences a sense of lack with regard to not possessing certain commodities and the attention of others. The second experience of fragmentation is related to the fracturing of Emma’s sense of self in the aftermath of being raped by the four young men. This fracturing becomes heightened by pictures of that event being spread on social media as well as the shame that is projected on her by her family and the local community of Ballinatoom. We witness Emma’s fragmentation on two Lacanian fronts in the novel: one in terms of the never-ending sense of desire and movement towards the illusory Ideal-I, and the other in the context of the fragmentation of the body and her sense of self in the aftermath of rape. The article will first outline the theoretical approach that this analysis is grounded in, moving to a discussion of shame and then towards a reading of the novel.

Lacan: The Mirror, Misrecognition and Fragmentation

Lacan’s work on the mirror stage and the Imaginary Order is an interesting angle through which to read Asking for It because it offers a way of addressing and understanding the proliferation of shame, its impact on the individual, the fragmentation of the body and the role of social media in society as a tool for shaming others, as set out in the novel. It also offers an insight into how Emma O’Donoghue negotiates the world around her, growing up in a particular culture that she seeks to mimic. In the context of what Lacan terms “imaginary intersubjectivity”, he argues that “in the mirage of play, each identifies himself with the other. Intersubjectivity is the essential dimension” (Lacan 1991: 215). In this sense, the imaginary and symbolic orders that interweave in the subject suggest that the crux of the imagined self lies outside the individual as they interact with the world around them regarding language, culture and identity, for example.

Lacan’s thinking in his essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” is a perfect starting point to begin a discussion of the Imaginary Order. The focus in this essay is on infants between the age of six and eighteen months, and he makes the point that, while the infant is still highly dependent on others to survive, they cannot walk or stand, for example, the infant still holds the gaze of their reflection when they encounter it in a mirror. Lacan notes that “we have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification […] namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (Lacan 2001: 2; original emphasis). The infant in this case sees an image of wholeness, of totality, that is in direct opposition to their fragmented reality as they require support from a caregiver – as such, the first image of wholeness that they see is a misrecognition, it merely provides an illusion of totality. Lacan would suggest that the specular image that the infant encounters in the mirror is that of the “Ideal-I”, an identification that is part of an idealised image of the self. This identification, and the function of the mirror-stage itself, for Lacan, is one that sees the infant move from the Innenwelt (the inside world) to the Umwelt (the outside world). If the Ideal-I is to be considered an image of wholeness, of totality, then the reality is one of insufficiency and lack. The infant moves from the “fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity” (Lacan 2001: 5). The key point here, in the context of my reading of O’Neill’s text, is the assuming of an image, that who we imagine ourselves to be is fictional, and that we constantly strive to eradicate feelings of lack by chasing an ever fictionalised version of ourselves. Sean Homer argues that

the ego is the effect of images; it is, in short, an imaginary function. Lacan is arguing here against Ego psychology and its tendency to prioritize the ego over unconscious processes as well as to equate the ego with the self. Lacan insists that the ego is based on an illusory image of wholeness and mastery and it is the function of the ego to maintain this illusion of coherence and mastery. The function of the ego is, in other words, one of mis-recognition; of refusing to accept the truth of fragmentation and alienation. (Homer 2005: 25; original emphasis)

In our quest to reach the ideal version of ourselves we begin to mirror and reflect the world and people around us, our locus of evaluation is external rather than internal as we take the external world into us. This journey towards the Ideal-I is one that is not attainable as the idealised version of the self is constantly shifting and changing as we move through life, with Lacan suggesting that the Ideal-I is set “in a fictional direction” (Lacan 2001: 3), which will always remain. The image is in itself a desired, unattainable image and brings us to Lacan’s idea of méconnaissance – the unified whole is nothing but a mis-recognition.

Importantly, in the context of the literary analysis being undertaken here, it is worth drawing attention towards the fact that Lacan’s thinking extends beyond the infant, with Élisabeth Roudinesco (2003) making the point that the mirror stage is not only something rooted in infancy but a phase that is a constituent factor of human subjectivity. She notes that, although Lacan initially observed it in children between the ages of six and eighteen months, as he developed his theory, he realised that it no longer had “anything to do with a real stage or phase in the Freudian sense, nor with a real mirror. The stage becomes a psychic or ontological operation through which a human being is made by means of identification with his fellow-being” (Roudinesco 2003: 29). This point is especially important in the context of reading O’Neill’s text, as the central character is not an infant, but an eighteen-year-old whose actions and psychological experiences in the novel connect with what Lacan is outlining in terms of identification with an image, the shifting, fictional nature of the Ideal-I, and the alienating, fragmentary nature of the ego. Eugene O’Brien comments on Lacan’s thinking that alienation is “inaugurated at the coming into being of the subject; the image in the mirror is alienating because it means that the image of subjective unity is actually outside of the subject, and therefore it suggests that there is a lack at the core of the subject” (2016: 213).

In essence, what O’Brien is drawing us towards here is the fractured, fragmented nature of subjectivity. In The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, Lacan makes the distinct point of connecting shame and existence. He coins the word hontology as a signifier of the connection between both and notes that “it’s a shame [une honte], as they say, which should produce a (h)ontology [hontologie], spelled properly at last” (Lacan 2007: 180). This distinction is an important intervention in examining the nature of existence and our cultural, social and personal experiences of shame. Joan Copjec distinguishes between the veiled nature of shame and the borderless certitude of anxiety in the context of Lacan’s work, commenting that “shame is not a failed flight from being, but a flight into being, where being – the being of surfaces, of social existence – is viewed as that which protects us from the ravages of anxiety, which risk drowning us in its borderless enigma” (2006: 111). Lacan sees shame through the interconnection, and disconnection, between the ideal-ego (linked with the Imaginary Order) and the ego-ideal (linked with the Symbolic Order). When the distance between the ideal-ego and ego-ideal becomes too great, then feelings of anxiousness and shame can arise. Shame here arises because there is a recognition of the fragmented reality of existence within the ego, that the subject is now under the gaze of the Other as the sense of lack has been exposed. Dylan Evans offers the following on the gaze for Lacan:

whereas Sartre had conflated the gaze with the act of looking, Lacan now separates the two; the gaze becomes the object of the act of looking, or, to be more precise, the object of the scopic drive. The gaze is therefore, in Lacan’s account, no longer on the side of the subject; it is the gaze of the Other. And whereas Sartre had conceived of an essential reciprocity between seeing the Other and being-seen by-him, Lacan now conceives of an antinomic relation between the gaze and the eye: the eye which looks is that of the subject, while the gaze is on the side of the object, and there is no coincidence between the two. (2006: 73)

In terms of imaginary intersubjectivity, Lacan himself notes that “I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not even see, not even discern” and that “from the moment this gaze exists, I am already something other, in that I feel myself becoming an object for the gaze of others. But in this position, which is a reciprocal one, others also know that I am an object who knows himself to be seen. The entire phenomenology of shame, of modesty, of prestige, of the specific fear engendered by the gaze” (Lacan 1991: 215). In the context of Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It, Lacanian notions of the gaze, shame, desire and fragmentation become emblematic of Emma O’Donovan’s fractured psychological experience throughout the text.

Shame and Contemporary Irish Literature

Before discussing Asking for It at length in the context of fragmentation, desire, the gaze and shame in Lacan’s thinking, it is worthwhile to offer an overview of some recent scholarship on shame as well as shame in contemporary Irish writing. This will situate the discussion of the novel within a wider field of writing on shame in Irish fiction, while showing that shame is something that consistently recurs in contemporary Irish fiction, especially in the context of the female experience. Firstly, I would like to distinguish the difference between guilt and shame. I would suggest that guilt allows for a possibility of redemption and atonement for past mistakes while shame does not. Marcus Free and Clare Scully, drawing on the work of Michael Lewis, argue that “whereas shame is manifested as the mortification of the ‘exposed self’ in the eyes of an imagined ‘other’, guilt focuses on atonement through specific undertakings” (2018: 310). Shame is something which lingers within the psyche, shame is something that damages how we perceive ourselves and our self-worth. Mario Jacoby suggests that “feelings of guilt appear when I cause another person injury or fail to live up to certain standards. But while I may feel ashamed of my unethical behaviour, I can also be ashamed of my clumsiness or my weight. In any case, feelings of shame always brings a loss of self-respect, whereas someone who feels guilty can hope to make amends” (2002: 2). Those who experience feelings of shame may feel defective, dirty, at fault, worthless or be the target of negative comments. In this sense, shame is a personal experience and one that is reflected and refracted in how we imagine ourselves, and how we imagine others perceive us. Shame is not only cast upon us by society, but we also cover ourselves up in shame. The question of shame revolves around notions of selfhood, how we define ourselves and our self-worth. It is particularly concerned with notions of a flawed sense of self and very often society and culture control what actions, both socially and morally, should evoke feelings of shame. Kaye Mitchell maintains that shame is centrally concerned with questions of “self–other relations, self-awareness, self-consciousness, and visibility to others; the experience of shame is, at least partly, the experience of becoming an object for others, even if that ‘other’ is in some instances an internalised ‘other’” (2020: 4). So, while feelings of shame may be concerned with the personal, shame is influenced by what goes on around us; it is an experience defined by the self but which is given to the Other as we judge ourselves on what occurs outside us.

Asking for It recasts the trope of shame in Irish literature into a contemporary context for the twenty-first century. Recent novels such as A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013) by Eimear McBride, The Glorious Heresies (2015) by Lisa McInerney, Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018) and Mia Gallagher’s Hellfire (2006) all feature women and young girls who experience violence, (sexual) assault / abuse and shame. Shame in Irish literature is not something new if we think about works like The Dark (1965) and The Barracks (1963) by John McGahern, Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger (1942), Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960) or Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle (1936), for example. In Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien’s Reimagining Irish Studies for the Twenty-First Century, Sylvie Mikowski suggests that contemporary women’s writing brings about a return of the repressed and that it recalls us to the violence experienced by women’s bodies:

In post-nationalist, decolonised Ireland, women seem to have been returned to the “realness” of their bodies which were for a long time strictly controlled, and altogether ignored; but the violence of the repression of women’s bodies in the past seems to have paved the way for the violence of the return of the repressed in the present. This, together with the commodification of bodies which accompanies the turn in the twenty-first century to a neo-liberal, hyper-capitalist economy, makes for the devastating accounts of rape, sexual exploitation and psychological torture which have emerged in the recent period in writings by women. (Mikowski 2021: 208)

This is an interesting point to consider in the context of twenty-first-century Irish literature and society. Either nothing has changed since the twentieth century in relation to shame and violence wrought upon women – here we might think of Mother and Baby homes – or there is simply a renewed violence that has been intensified by the technological landscape that we find ourselves in today. Eóin Flannery argues that shame is a recurring feature of Irish society and has its root causes in the “protracted influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland. And as a result, shame is all too often laden with negative connotations when cited” which neuters shame’s “potential as a revolutionary affective resource” (2019: 85).

Indeed, shame can be a positive force for change in many instances but in O’Neill’s novel that is not the case as it becomes a malignant, destructive force for the individual. Writers such as O’Neill, McInerney, McBride and Enright, to name but a few, are demonstrating that, while these issues may have been voiced by previous generations, they have not been addressed – shame is a recurring feature of the context out of which these texts are born. Susan Cahill has accurately noted that “what we see in the post-Tiger literary landscape is a marked increase in registering trauma and vulnerability within the contemporary moment” (2017: 158).

In Irish Feminist Futures, Claire Bracken aptly argues that throughout Irish history “the symbolic rendering of the feminine as icon of worship functions to strip women of their actuality, of their ‘realness’. She is always object, never subject, in the varying political, religious, popular and literary discourses of Irish nationalism” (2016: 7). Here we might recall W.B. Yeats’s Cathleen Ní Houlihan (1902) or Patrick Pearse’s poem “The Mother” (1916). Viewed in this way, and especially in the context of Asking for It, womanhood and girlhood are rooted in being an object and icon of patriarchal ideology and domination. Asking for It actively encourages the reader to unravel this repetitive cycle of male dominance and violence towards women even if by the end of the novel it does not accomplish this. The victim remains wholly victimised and justice is not achieved. Susan Cahill has commented that Asking for It is “a searing critique of the illusions and limitations of power afforded to the girl in neoliberalism” (2017: 165).

Desire, Fragmentation and Emma O’Donovan Asking for It

Asking for It opens and closes with Emma standing in front of a mirror. The image at the beginning is one of wholeness but by the end of the novel the reflection becomes fragmented. What is important to recognise in both of these instances is the projection of shame. In the first instance, shame is cast upon Emma by her mother because of her body image and the sexualised nature of Emma’s nipples poking from her vest top. Eugene O’Brien has noted that in the novel “images and reflections are foundational in terms of the creation of a positive sense of self, and also seminal in the traumatic sense of the abject self that we see after Emma’s rape, and more specifically in terms of the ongoing social media representations of that rape” (2023: 97). From the beginning, Emma internalises this shame, learns the behaviours of the society and culture that she is growing up in and transmits them out into the world herself – in Lacanian terms, this connects with the imaginary intersubjectivity of which he speaks. Lacan notes that “we want to become for the other an object that has the same limiting value for him as does, in relation to his freedom, his own body” (1991: 217). We see the sense of shame ring through when Nora enters Emma’s bedroom: “‘Morning,’ she says. ‘What are you doing, just staring at yourself in the mirror?’ She frowns at my chest, at where the nipples are outlined through the sweat-stained fabric. ‘Nothing,’ I say as I wrap my arms over them” (O’Neill 2016: 4). Immediately, the female body is a source of shame, something to be covered up and maintained for the gaze of others: “Her fingers rest on my stomach. ‘Do you have your period?’ she says. ‘You look a little bloated.’” (O’Neill 2016: 5). We also see judgement soon after this when Nora judges her daughter’s body image: “she turns at the door to look at me, her gaze working up my body, lingering on my face. And I know exactly what she is going to say to me. ‘You look beautiful this morning, Emmie. As always’” (O’Neill 2016: 6). The beginning of Asking for It lays the foundations of shame, judgement and the focus on the body that are a fundamental feature of the rest of the novel. Negotiating this terrain is difficult and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic work goes a long way towards understanding Emma’s desire for beauty, attention and the ultimate fragmentation of sense of the self later in the novel. Emma negotiates her internal world through the very specific cultural and societal codifications and signifiers that are a part of the external world. In other words, she is shaped by what Lacan terms the symbolic order. In his essay on the mirror stage Lacan notes that identification with the external world is paramount to shaping the “I”. Lacan notes that the fashioning of the ego is a linking “of the I to socially elaborated situations” and a “cultural mediation” (Lacan 2001: 6) of the imago. The I is a mirroring of, and identification with, the external world. I choose the word fashioning here on purpose to describe the creation of the self, because the imaginary order, the phase in which the mirror stage operates, is merely fictional and illusory. The movement towards the Ideal I, the imagined future self that once reached will create wholeness and happiness, is fictitious and fluid. Samuel Weber argues that “the imaginary can be defined as that fictive, illusory realm of the mirror-image, of the optical illusion, of the image which can no longer hope to be an accurate and faithful representation of its model, since the latter is fashioned in its image: I am the image of that image, a mirror without end” (1991: 18). Now we can begin to see that the physical mirrors that bookend the novel are not the only important mirrors that are at work. We can read Emma’s fashioning of her sense of self as being connected with her mother’s projected judgement of the body and the shame that has to be negotiated. The effort to negotiate this terrain is what leads to the desiring of commodities and the ideal body image, which in themselves are a site of self-fashioning as they mirror what is popular or on trend at that moment in time. In “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”, Lacan makes the point that “the symbolic dominates the imaginary” (Lacan 2001: 341) and that “man’s desire is the désir de l’Autre (the desire of the Other)” (Lacan 2001: 345). So, in Lacanian terms, Emma’s desires and self-fashioning are a reflection of her mother, her society and culture (the Symbolic Order). She reflects the symbolic order in which she exists and constantly strives towards betterment through commodification and attention (social capital).

Emma’s position as the popular person within her peer group is one that is semi-fictional and also fashioned. Certainly, she upholds a dominant place within that group but it is primarily achieved by shaming others. In this instance, there is no shame to be found. Instead, her identification with commodities is an attempt to cover the feelings of lack cast upon her by her mother in the early stages of the novel by desiring objects and attention. In Seminar I, Lacan articulates this point by noting that, because the individual identifies with an idealised image, they can often feel threatened by an Other who may embody it. Thus, interpersonal relationships concerning imaginary intersubjectivity can oftentimes register as jealousy and aggression. This is also experienced during the mirror-stage, with Malcolm Bowie making the point that

the body once seemed dismembered, all over the place, and the anxiety associated with this memory fuels the individual’s desire to be the possessor and the resident of a secure bodily “I”. These projections towards the ego are constantly threatened by a retrospective pull towards fragmentation; and the very rigidity of the ego’s armour can act as a violence upon the individual and scatter again his disjecta membra. Lacan insists that what is involved here is a Janus-faced phantasy structure rather than a simple set of memories associated with real bodily parts. (1991: 26)

When Emma visits Ali’s house her attention is drawn towards material things, social signifiers of wealth and prestige, so much so that she even touches them – a more affective and personal sense than sight – whereby she in confronted by feelings of envy and jealousy:

I run my hand over the wallpaper, embossed magnolia with gold flowers etched on it. There’s a freestanding bath with gold claw feet, the toilet paper folded into a point by Magda, the housekeeper, Aveda hand wash and hand cream by the deep cream sink, the taps plated in gold. There’s an antique dresser painted in cream, a selection of perfume bottles on top. Coco Mademoiselle perfume. (O’Neill 2016: 41)

Emma does not desire the objects and commodities for their functionality or aesthetic pleasure, but rather for what they reflect and signify within the symbolic order. Her idealised image is one rooted within the very specific symbolic order in which she has grown up. Her willingness to tell us the colours, textures and brands here is demonstrative of the significance of these items in the social order. Emma’s focus on the Other here, Ali’s wealth, pushes her towards a desperate attempt to achieve or move towards her Ideal-I, to reflect the prestige symbolised by the commodities. Lacan makes an important distinction between imaginary identification and symbolic identification in that imaginary identification is rooted in the illusory relationship with an image. He argues that symbolic identification is a possible avenue towards a movement away from a cycle of misrecognition with the image. Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder notes that “according to Lacan, we sublimate our desires and identify the object of desire with a specific object that Lacan called the objet petit a. Although this object in an imaginary – in the technical sense – substitute for the symbolic object of desire, we make it function retroactively as the object cause of the desire” (1998: 108). The misrecognition within the imaginary order has the capacity to lead to aggressivity, rivalry and negative behaviours as it is consistently based on identification with an ever shifting, illusory external image. In this context, a Lacanian reading offers a possible avenue towards understanding why Emma ultimately steals the Coco Mademoiselle perfume but does not feel shame for doing so. Outside of the shaming, judgemental gaze of the external world she is free to step outside the social parameters that condition behaviour. Lacan argues that “the unconscious is ‘discours de l’Autre’ (discourse of the Other)” (Lacan 2001: 214) and to be somewhat repetitive in my argument here, the external signifiers of the world are made internal through the subject’s mirroring. Emma’s quest for beauty and social status is a reflection of the symbolic order of her community, one that values these things. After she steals the perfume her sense of self becomes elevated and she reinforces and reflects her mother telling her that she is beautiful in the first mirror scene at the beginning of the novel. Emma notes here that “I stuff it in so quickly I barely even notice myself doing it, so it’s like I didn’t do anything at all. I stand up straight, staring at myself in the mirror. I am beautiful. I mouth the words at my reflection. That is something Ali’s money can’t buy” (O’Neill 2016: 41). Emma’s concern is with physical beauty and not the ethics of stealing from her friend, her Ideal-I is a fiction that moves towards the attainment of desired things and becoming physically beautiful. Possibly feeling that she lacks these things in reality, she desires and identifies with them. To be beautiful means to be whole in Emma’s world and psyche. Indeed, Emma’s stealing of perfume could in many ways be connected to a memory she holds, and that we are privy to as readers, at the beginning of the novel when before going on a night out the last thing her mother “would do was take her perfume, unscrewing the gold top, and spray some on her wrists” (O’Neill 2016: 5). Perhaps the significance of “gold” in the earlier memory and Emma’s recognition of the gold items in Ali’s bathroom is important to consider, as is the spraying of the perfume on her wrists before she steals it.

Emma’s perceived sense of wholeness from a psychoanalytic perspective is maintained through careful constructions of her life and the narrative surrounding her experiences. That the ego is set in a fictional direction and that the individual mirrors the external world through identification with such fantastical imaginings is pertinent to Emma’s maintenance of her social capital. As in the scene discussed in the previous paragraph, desire and a movement towards the Ideal-I dominates her representation of her trip to London. Instead of telling her friends that she did not enjoy it, she focuses on the commodities, the signifiers of prestige and status in her social group that elevates her above her friends in respect of social standing. Again, shame is not felt here by Emma as she lies about her holiday because she is not under a judgmental gaze. There is a desire to be the centre of attention and to be popular, even at the expense of truth, and shame does not arise because the falseness of the image that she is presenting to her friends is not uncovered. In order to elevate her status, she focuses on the objects of social prestige – time spent in Hammersmith and time spent “eating salads” and “drinking glasses of Pimms” (O’Neill 2016: 72). She also tells Ali and Maggie of her aunt Beth’s “shabby-chic home, the forest-green wallpaper and velvet couch, the Union Jack cushions, and her Proenza Schouler bag, her daily Bikram yoga classes, and her office with a view of Big Ben, and the shopping spree she treated me to at Topshop” (O’Neill 2016: 73). Emma’s isolation from the truth here, that people’s eyes skimmed over her skinny jeans and pumps (O’Neill 2016: 73) and that you could not see the stars because of the smog and city lights (O’Neill 2016: 72), alienates her from her true self. At the level of subjectivity, Emma’s psychological realm is fractured between her true self and her desired, imagined self, between the Lacanian ego-Ideal and the Ideal-ego.

Shame, Social Media and the Fragmentation of the Body

The previous section demonstrated the workings of desire, fracture and shame in the context of commodities and materialism in the novel. In this section I will discuss the impact of rape, and the shame that follows Emma, in the context of the fragmentation of the female body. Social media has heightened the subjection of the female body as an object of the Lacanian Gaze. While the visibility of ideas, bodies and feminist movements have appeared on websites such as Twitter and Facebook – here we might think of #MeToo on a global scale, for example – Mary McGill has pointed towards the dangers and the shaming gaze that is an aspect of social media websites in The Visibility Trap: Sexism, Surveillance and Social Media:

On these platforms, judgement and shaming arise from multiple sources that centre around images and visibility, from a critical self-gaze to a misogynistic male gaze to the tracking and monitoring gaze of the technology that gobbles up user date and shadowy algorithms that dictate who gets to be seen and who doesn’t, reproducing inequalities in the process. These gazes are funnelled through systems designed to normalise and encourage the surveillance of self and others, offering up a visual and emotional feast to get users hooked. (2021: 11)

Drawing on the work of Susan Bondo, who in turn draws upon Michel Foucault’s idea of the “docile body”, J. Brooks Bouson argues that “through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity […] female bodies become docile bodies – bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, ‘improvement’” (2010: 3-4). This endless subjection to the gaze of others contributes to feelings of shame when these standards are not met, with Miner-Rubino et al. arguing that “self-objectification can cause feelings of depression, shame, and anxiety” (2002: 168).

Claire Connolly argues that “Irish feminist debates have taken shape and form in the context of Ireland, and cannot be separated from its laws, history and culture” and she goes on to add that “this has been most painfully experienced at the level of women’s bodies” (2003: 3). Indeed, this level of shame is experienced at the level of women’s bodies in the first instance where we see Emma O’Donovan’s fragmentation begin. This occurs after Paul O’Brien rapes Emma and he is “yanking my underwear aside, and he’s inside me, and I’m not ready and it hurts” (O’Neill 2016: 108). After this takes place, Emma’s sense of self begins to become distorted and broken. Even more interesting is that this fragmentation takes place in front of a mirror immediately afterwards: “When I straighten up, I wipe my mouth in the mirror. I look different somehow, like the bones of my face have shifted. My jaw is jutting at an odd angle, my pupils so large that my eyes look completely black, but I’m still me” (O’Neill 2016: 110). The strangeness of Emma’s facial features may be due to the alcohol or drugs that she consumed, but I would read this as the first instance when she begins to fragment. After this traumatic experience, she is on the cusp of a movement away from the desire to attain the unified whole image, the ideal I, and instead through the trauma and pain experiences a heightened fragmented state of being. This fragmentation becomes further exacerbated by the images that appear on social media of later events that night whereby Emma is sexually assaulted and abused while she is unconscious by Paul, Dylan, Seán and Fitzy. Emma disassociates herself from the images on social media as her identity begins to fracture: “she has no face. She is just a body, a life-size doll to play with. She is an It. She is a thing” (O’Neill 2016: 146). Indeed, this fragmentation of the body and identity is heightened by the gaze of others viewing these pictures, liking the pictures and commenting under them on social media sites. It also corresponds to Lacan’s thinking on the fragmentation of the ego when it encounters aggressiveness or violence. He notes that aggressiveness provokes “images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body, in short, the imagos that I have grouped together under the apparently structural terms of the imagos of the fragmented body” (Lacan 2001: 13; original emphasis). Emma’s psychological response to the rape is a wholly rational one and her fragmentation is one that sees her turn away from aggressivity and desire towards the fracturing of the body. Indeed, Lacan goes as far as to suggest that children who play with toys often pull them apart and that their imagination is drawn to this breaking down of toys, especially dolls – he notes that his thinking on fragmentation is “corroborated by the experience of the doll torn to pieces” (Lacan 2001: 13). Emma’s psychological state reflects Lacan’s thinking and her fragmentation is made worse by the shaming gaze of others as three hundred and forty-five people have liked the photos, more likes than a picture of her in a bikini had received (O’Neill 2016: 146). The gaze becomes more intensified and out of control as her social media image, which was once curated with holiday pictures, is reduced to pictures of her raped, brutalised and unconscious body: “I think of the hundreds of likes, of all the people who have seen this, who have seen her like this” (O’Neill 2016: 147) as she reaches the point that she feels “shame ripping through me, breaking me apart” (O’Neill 2016: 147). While the initial crack of fractured identity and image occurred in the physical mirror post rape, the mirror of social media and shame ruthlessly fragments Emma’s sense of self and identity. The shaming of Emma on social media, by her family and by her local community, leads to this fragmented state of being as the gaze of the Other is judging her. Laura Mulvey would connect this with the “male gaze” in that women are placed as “objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men” (2009: 13).

The revealing of the falseness of the image, as Lacan argues, is inextricably bound up in the sense of the shaming gaze of the other shattering Emma’s sense of self in the novel. The projected, illusory image of wholeness becomes fractured. Indeed, even when Emma looks in the mirror the image that is reflected back at her is not one of beauty or the sexualised object that we encounter earlier in the novel, it is that of a haunting image of shame: “The photos from the Easy Emma page sketch themselves on to the mirror, pink flesh, legs, a collection of body parts (some people deserve to be pissed on) and dance across the glass” (O’Neill 2016: 157; original emphasis) – her imagined image of herself has shifted under the gaze of the Other.

The source of fragmentation is the rape but the weapon of shame is what ultimately leads to Emma’s mental image of her body becoming distorted, ragged and abused through images posted on Facebook and Snapchat. Kaye Mitchell makes the telling point that

we are “held responsible for who we are” in an era of neoliberal self-fashioning, an era in which the self (viewed as performative, viewed as a possession and/or commodity) is precisely something that we are supposed to work on, adapt and improve. The shift from a guilt culture to a shame culture does not get us off the hook; it simply changes the nature of the hook. And I would argue that women in particular are continually made accountable to a model of femininity that encodes moral failure from its inception; that “failure” (experienced as shameful) is, then, part of what it is to be a “woman” in our culture. (2020: 13; original emphasis)

Indeed, the self-fashioning of ourselves on social media, as well as the dangerous and vilifying nature of social media contributes greatly to Emma’s fractured experience of the world. What is also interesting to consider is that because her memory of the event is remembered through pictures on social media, the memories are themselves part of a fractured chronology. Because she views the rape through the lens of photos her understanding of the event is also fragmented because the pictures only offer snippets of the framed narrative of the events:

I don’t remember. I…

Now Dylan has two thumbs up to the camera. In the next photos his fingers are inside the body, the girl (me, me, oh God I’m going to be sick) but she doesn’t move. Her head and shoulder have fallen off the edge of the bed. He spreads her legs, gesturing for the camera to come closer, the next few photos of pink flesh, and I think of the hundreds of likes, of all the people who have seen this, who have seen her like this.

Me. (O’Neill 2016: 146; original emphasis)

That Emma also does not recognise herself here, or maybe even refuses to recognise herself, is a further example of bodily and identity disconnection. If technology acts as a mirror of society in the novel in its shaming of the female body, then the physical mirror, when it appears again in Emma’s bedroom, distorts her image, recalls trauma, invokes shame and brings about fragmentation yet again:

Her face is slightly rounder now, her eyes like pieces of broken blue glass glued on to a papier-mâché. I pick up a hairbrush from the vanity table, my eyes watering as I try to wrench out some of the knots (when was the last time you brushed your hair, Emma?) and for a second I think I can see chunks of vomit in my hair, that I’m covered in it, so gross, like, Seán puked all over her, did you see that photo? (O’Neill 2016: 184-185; original emphasis)

The fractured nature of Emma’s eyes and what they have seen in terms of experiencing the rape itself, and the re-traumatisation of seeing the images on social media, suggests that the sensory function of them as interpreters of beauty in the world has fractured, they are broken and stuck onto a papier-mâché body, a body that is no longer envisaged as beautiful but rather as tainted and reduced to a pulp like structure. Shame is reinforced here not only in the sense of remembering fragments of the rape through what other people say about the it, and the pictures, but also in the sense that she no longer cares for her body, no longer engages in maintaining it for the gaze of others, and this haunts her: “when was the last time you brushed your hair, Emma?” (O’Neill 2016: 185; original emphasis). The mirror in Asking for It is a site of distortion and fragmentation, it is also a site and source of shame as it reflects perceived flaws of both the body and the self. In Lacanian terms, Emma no longer mirrors and identifies with commodities and things of beauty, and instead begins to mirror what others say about her – she identifies with the image of ostracization, disintegration and fragmentation with Muller arguing that

to threaten the place of the ego causes anxiety insofar as it has a retroactive effect and allows a resurgence of the experience of bodily fragmentation. The visual Gestalt of the human form, coherent, erect and masterful, promises a stability, unity, and wholeness that are in contrast to what Lacan (1953) calls the “corps morcelé”, the “body in bits and pieces”. The identification with this visual Gestalt allows the body image to serve as a defensive mask, concealing the aboriginal state of fragmentation and the experience of bodily fragmentation that may reemerge under stress. Thus, when the integrity of the body image is attacked or threatened […] the subject experiences the anxiety associated with bodily fragmentation. (2000: 45-46)

To remember in the novel is to feel shame, to be located in an involuntary spiral of fracture and fragmentation. Shame fragments Emma in a psychological sense and we see this distortion reflected in the many mirrors that appear throughout the novel. Emma’s body has been exposed to the world through social media and returns as a fragmented, fractured version of her former self as she is given to pain and shame. This broken image appears at the end of the novel where Emma, just like at the beginning, is staring into a mirror. There is a dual relationship at work here with reference to who Emma was in the beginning of the novel and at the end, between what she imagined herself to be in the beginning versus who she imagines herself to be in the final scenes. By this stage of the text Emma has decided not to continue with an attempt for justice because of the pressure her family and society place upon her. This is not her choice, but one that has been influenced by the shame that she feels and which is projected upon her.

The final mirror scene sees Emma fully fragment and become totally disconnected from her body. At the beginning of the novel the initial mirror scene saw Emma’s mother tell her that she is beautiful and this becomes an image to be mirrored throughout the early parts of the text, as mentioned earlier in this article. By the end of the novel when Emma stares into the vanity mirror she is “hoping for a slash of a hook across my skin, scraping away my beauty. Making me new” (O’Neill 2016: 339). She no longer reflects or identifies with the image of beauty but rather with a dissociated sense of isolation that separates her image from her body. Perhaps this is because she feels that to disconnect from beauty would imply relinquishing the past or maybe reduce unwanted attention. I would argue that this disconnection is a Lacanian one, a fragmentation that is caused by the intense suffering Emma experiences and the violence that is wrought upon the ego. By the end of the novel the image that Emma sees reflected back in the mirror to her is not unified or whole, it is fragmented and this suggests that the violence, aggression and shame that she experienced has impacted how she negotiates the world. That the shaming phrases she remembers, and now identifies with, focus on particular areas of her body – her “tits” and “ass” – further reinforces the notion that she is looked upon as a collection of body parts rather than as a whole figure. Emma mirrors and reflects this and identifies with that image of fragmentation:

I make eye contact with the girl in the mirror. I stand up, pulling down the leggings, and take the hoodie off, watching that pale body standing there in just a bra and knickers. I touch the girl’s breasts.

Fuck, Emma O’Donovan’s tits are tiny though. I thought they’d be way better

than that.

I turn around.

Her ass looks good though. (O’Neill 2016: 339-340; original emphasis)

The shame that Emma experiences is not productive in a personal sense. It is productive for society and community to tarnish her personality and sense of self in order to maintain the hegemonic and gendered structure of Ballinatoom. Life carries on as normal while the victim is left bereft of redress, justice and autonomy. The opinions and voices of society, anonymised at the end of the novel and written in italics, become universal because they are no longer attributed to an identity online or from a person in the community. These comments are now a part of Emma’s internal monologue as the mirror and the image of her body reflect these comments. The body is haunted by the shame that has been projected upon it and has become internalised. The presence of the mirror again at the end of the text is suggestive of a new refracted reality, one that is fractured from the image of Emma as a person at the opening stages of the novel Though her body is still being sexualised, the focus on nipples at the beginning and breasts here, as well as the “covering up of that body” (O’Neill 2016: 340), sees both scenes mirror and reflect each other in terms of style and content. However, the remarkable and torturous changes that Emma undergoes throughout the novel lead to this fragmented self at the end that has been torn apart by shame. She has become a fragmented, distorted version of her old self. Her image has become annihilated. Justice is not achieved and never will be in the novel. Emma is merely left to piece together the fragments of her life and consider that “it’s important that I look normal now. It’s important that I look like a good girl” (O’Neill 2016: 340).