The Recuperative Power of Autopathographical Writing in Tess Gallagher’s “The Women of Auschwitz”

Abstract

This study aims to examine the American author Tess Gallagher’s “The Women of Auschwitz” in terms of narrativisation of illness as autopathography. In a confessional mode, the poem depicts Gallagher’s subjective experience of breast cancer and her medical treatment. The study attempts to demonstrate the ways the historical author makes use of poetry as a means of cancer wellness and a search for consolation as well as a meaningful confrontation with her breast cancer. It suggests that through the acts of writing and narrating, the author fights not only against the illness but also the metaphors and images collected around the concept of illness in such a way that the readers and the poet attempt to manage health-related stigma through recreating and reconstructing a new self, the poet through writing and narrating, and the readers through the therapeutic act of reading. Referring to the biographical details of the writer, the study deploys the theory of Susan Sontag concerning the metaphors of cancer and health-related stigma, and the terminology of Julia Kristeva regarding the recuperative power of writing.

Keywords

• tess gallagher, autopathography, cancer, susan sontag, julia kristeva