Trauma, Healing, and Literature : an Examination of the Real-world Implications of Fctionalized Trauma Narratives

Abstract

Trauma has become a common thread throughout literature because of its unavoidability in life. With this has come a body of theory aimed at discussing and analyzing this common theme, sometimes supporting trauma narratives and other times critiquing them. While critics of fictionalized trauma narratives raise some valid points about the ethics of writing fictionalized trauma narratives, the arguments supporting fictionalized trauma narratives show ways to minimize the possible harmful effects of these narratives while giving reasons as to why these narratives are actually beneficial. In this paper, I will show that fictionalized trauma narratives are important because of the ways they can help people heal from traumas and possibly prevent future traumas, such as through helping people to find like-minded communities, discover spaces for real-life interventions, preserve stories, amplify voices, and fight stigmas. In order to do this, I will analyze five different fictionalized trauma narratives, drawing from the preexisting works of Suzanne Keen, Lucy Bond and Stef Craps, Dominick LaCapra, Amy Hodges Hamilton, Grace Lee Boggs, and various other literature and psychology scholars. I will analyze five diverse works of fiction: Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper, Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, and Jonathan Reiss’s Getting Off. The varied situations that these texts represent not only showcase a variety of traumatizing events and trauma responses, but also show different configurations of the good and bad aspects of writing trauma, allowing for a broader picture of why authors write about trauma.