Aposiopesis and repression in Kate Bernheimer’s novel “The complete tales of Lucy Gold”

The article analyzes the methods of implementing the aposiopesis as a result of the defence mechanism of repression, which becomes a narrative feature of the final novel of the Gold sisters’ trilogy, “The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold”, by Kate Bernheimer, a contemporary American writer who actively explores and develops the fairy tale genre in her work. On the one hand, Kate Bernheimer’s novels have much in common with personal diaries in which women reflect on their childhood spent in the same house, filled with both joyful and traumatic memories, as well as on their adult years and careers, on the other hand, the novels represent fairy tale collections that each sister creates herself, selecting fairy tales and illustrations. At the beginning of each book there is a list of German, Russian, Yiddish, and, in the novel “The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold” - Chinese, fairy and folk tales, the texts of which are actively transformed and recontextualized in the novels. The sisters are united by common traumas; as conceived by Kate Bernheimer, they suffer from the inability to talk about what happened to them, which, however, somehow manifests itself in their narrative. While Merry and Ketzia, the older Gold sisters, partially verbalize traumatic experiences, the youngest of the sisters, Lucy Gold, actively represses traumatic episodes from her past, related to taboo topics such as sex and violence, replacing them with false memories, which is emphasized by Kate Bernheimer through the use of the aposiopesis, expressed through text gaps, riddles, and graphic features of the text, illustrations.