The Shame to Cure: An Epic Journey of Gender, Language, and the Mind

The Shame to Cure is a 40-poem collection that served as my honors thesis for Stanford University’s Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies department. The aim of this project is to explore the dissolution of female mentality through an untraditional epic journey, specifically regarding the relationship between language and consciousness and how they mediate each other.

The epic undertaken by the protagonist of this collection, an unnamed young woman, is a journey of mental dissolution and recovery. As the collection progresses, the poetic language fragments in different ways, including through tense, form, point of view, to mimic the protagonist’s mental deterioration. Several motifs come to haunt her through this journey; digital error messages interrupt the narrative flow, blurring the line between connectivity and loneliness, as well as continual encounters with an ambiguous female figure who is always just out of her reach. Around the middle of the collection, this deterioration culminates in a serious breakdown as language finally fails and the protagonist’s consciousness dissolves. However, after the breakdown, the protagonist begins the process of recovery and piecing herself together; and slowly, the language and poetry reflect this positive change, finally ending the narrative with hope.