South Central Review

Sexual trauma often occurs in literature through conventional plots, but Joyce Carol Oates’s novel We Were the Mulvaneys offers an alternative representation of sexual trauma by employing mental underrepresentation to emphasize the severity of Marianne Mulvaney’s rape. Mental underrepresentation occurs when Marianne’s thoughts appear graphically as a black mark that reinscribes trauma by diminishing Marianne’s mind. The narrator Judd uses the mark as a way to both narrate traumatized minds and show how Marianne’s mental distress affects his own, destabilizing his ontology as narrator. Mental underrepresentation deepens scholarship’s understanding of trauma, upholding the importance of Oates’s fiction.