After the Fact, Contemporary Feminist Fiction and Historical Trauma

grantor: University of TorontoDuring the 1980s and 1990s, novels dealing with past traumatic experiences in both the public and private spheres appeared with some regularity. These works depict historical atrocities, including slavery and genocide, as well as varying forms of interpersonal violence, and notably childhood sexual abuse. They draw on the growing body of interdisciplinary research and theory which has come to be known as trauma studies, an area of concern heavily inflected by psychoanalytic approaches to memory and narration. Many trauma novels take the form of historical fiction, narrated in the first-person by fictional or fictionalized survivors whose accounts bear witness to the need for violent actions to be admitted into public consciousness. This dissertation proposes that concerns about the construction of identities, chiefly in terms of gender, race, and sexuality, have been grafted onto past events, creating a testimonial and explicitly feminist form of fiction authored by women writers from a range of cultural backgrounds. These novels frequently deal with women survivors, highlighting the relationships between narration, gender, and trauma. The works I examine--Margaret Atwood's 'Alias Grace', Nora Okja Keller's 'Comfort Woman', Joy Kogawa's 'Obasan ', Edwidge Danticat's 'The Farming of Bones' and Julia Alvarez's 'In the Time of the Butterflies'--stress that both trauma and recovery have collective as well as individual dimensions. These novels are explicitly pedagogical, teaching lessons about historical events and emphasizing the need for an ethical engagement with the past. They make claims on readers to function as the receivers of painful and complicated stories, in order to assist in the creation of historical memory. These five Canadian and American novels respond to recent questions raised in a variety of disciplines and contexts about the nature of historical storytelling. With the exception of Margaret Atwood's 'Alias Grace', they counter the dominance of postmodern approaches to historical recreation, focussing instead on the significance of telling apparently transparent, if not always verifiable, truths about the past. These works are acutely interested in the telling of trauma as a socially constructed and meaningful act, one requiring the active participation of both a witness and an engaged listener. Reciting accounts of trauma, and listening to these horrifying narratives, are the primary activities depicted by the novels I study.Ph.D