“I’m Viscous Lake”: Hydrofeminism, Traumatic Permeability, and Drowning Language in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Recent hydrofeminist theory celebrates water as a medium of relationality and generative becoming. This article argues that Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) exposes the traumatic underside of such fluidity. Drawing on Astrida Neimanis’s “bodies of water,” it shows how the novel accepts that bodies are porous and joined through water, yet draws the opposite conclusion: under illness, sexual violence, and Catholic patriarchal discipline, permeability becomes not connection but invasion, vulnerability, and loss. This article follows water through gestational intimacy, Catholic shame and failed baptism, and a fragmented prose that produces what may be called a “drowning language.” It further argues that McBride rewrites the transcendental water of W. B. Yeats, collapsing the Celtic Otherworld inward into the traumatized body. Bodily openness, far from guaranteeing relation, becomes the channel of harm, yielding a more ambivalent account of permeability than hydrofeminism has allowed.