Trauma, healing, mourning and narrative voice in the epistolary mode

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The epistolary mode in fiction has long been associated with the expression of trauma experienced by women who are confined to a private, domestic and interior space. However, this mode also, paradoxically, opens up this space because the sending of a letter to an addressee invites the letter's fictional recipient to act as witness to the letter writer's account of her painful experiences. This thesis will, firstly, provide a brief historical overview of the development of epistolary fiction and will then set out to examine how epistolary narratives position the external reader in relation to the private exchange between narrator and trusted confidant. This voyeuristic position influences the way in which the text will be read regardless of the historical context in which the text is written. The period on which this thesis focuses is the 1980s to the turn of the millennium during which feminist ideals spread and found reflection in literature. This study analyses how Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter (1981) and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1983) appropriated the epistolary mode to reveal and critique the silencing mechanisms suppressing its female narrators who write from within societies where multiple forms of marginalisation continue to constrain women and limit their engagement with the public sphere. Although the narrative voices of the two novels differ, both narrators use their letters to work through their experiences of trauma and heal through the process of sharing their recollections with another. In Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003) no such resolution is possible for its narrator writes to her husband who has been killed by their son. This thesis will demonstrate that Shriver's novel, while sharing many of the features of the epistolary mode, unsettles the certainties that underpin the reader's associations with the mode. Whereas Bâ's and Walker's novels affirm the importance of motherhood, female connections and self-determination for women, Shriver presents us with a pessimistic text with an ambivalent, unreliable narrative voice which calls these affirmations into question. Her novel uses the epistolary mode to show that motherhood is embedded in socio-political issues that continue to constrain women. We Need to Talk about Kevin inflects motherhood with the prominent debate about school shootings and its attendant culpabilities, as well as the narrator's struggle with constructions of nationality, belonging and identity. This study will show that, as such, this text demonstrates a shift in how the epistolary mode is used. Its prior associations with healing from trauma through corresponding with an empathetic witness have made way for irremediable mourning and absolute isolation. The epistolary mode in this novel is used to articulate alienation from the historical precedents set by the mode itself.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University