Undoing the Iconography of Female Hysteria in Una’s Becoming Unbecoming

Similarly to closely reading image/texts, psychoanalysis, or the talking cure, depends on paying attention to what a patient utters, to the embodied shape of the utterance and, potentially, to the silences that may accompany it. For this reason, it is thought to have given rise to narrative medicine. Graphic illness narratives invite readers to read and look at, and into the bodies and the stories they present in order to gain insightful perspectives on personal experiences of disease. They show how writing and drawing the embodied impact of illness can have a healing effect on the person who shares their story and on the one who witnesses it. In this article, I examine Becoming Unbecoming (2015), a graphic memoir of childhood sexual abuse, trauma, and PTSD written by the British cartoonist, Una. My goal is to illustrate how the book undoes the docility of the sexually abused and mentally ill girl and woman through its autobiographical subject’s testimony, and the cartoonist’s intertextual allusions to William Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Jean- Martin Charcot’s star patient, Augustine—two icons of female hysteria—that complicate and enrich the articulation of Una’s trauma.