The Characters Of Trauma, By Margaret Atwood And Jane Smiley

Fiction that depicts trauma incorporates varied responses and survival behaviors within the characterizations of survivors. Writers such as Margaret Atwood and Jane Smiley often depict characters as narrators of their own stories, after the fact, where they revisit their process of awakening. The environment of social relations and cultural values can be a source of trauma or a force that silences victims out of denial or guilt. It can create veils of illusion, attempts to mask or reinterpret behaviors that induce trauma. Societies, communities, or families may want to preserve stability or be willing to sacrifice victims for other goals. Both writers covered in this chapter depict these sacrifices. However, individuals or circumstances
Traumatized characters are offered clues and bits of memories to reassess survival and finally engage in new ways of thinking and being. Trauma is an individual’s response to events so intense that they impair emotional or cognitive functioning and may bring lasting psychological disruption. Survivors might live with a fragmented memory or a diminished sense of self, or might feel alienated (Herman 2009: 42–47). Traumatic responses may include shame, doubt, or guilt, or may destroy important beliefs in one’s own safety or view of oneself as decent, strong, and autonomous (Janoff-Bulman 1992: 19–22). Trauma is located within a dynamic process of feeling, remembering, assimilating, or recovering from that experience. Trauma has a range of causes and effects, which moves away from a focus on internalized isolated psychic elements found in the traditional trauma mode and toward an alternative trauma model that considers the interaction of social and behavioral constructs associated with trauma. Learning theorists explain that trait-driven conceptions of personality are less accurate measures of behavioral causes than the individual’s personal history of conditioning, personal constructs, and their psychological
Thus environmental contingencies are crucial to behavior.1 The social environment, the severity of the event, and the individual’s characteristics and sense of control help determine how someone copes with trauma (Root 1992: 248; MacCurdy 2007: 17).2 The social environment influences the causes and outcomes of traumatic experience in a variety of ways. It not only forms the circumstances out of which trauma is created, but can also provide or refuse the needed support for healing.3 Cultural attitudes about trauma and family responses to it may either bring the victim together with healing connections, or may prevent them (Van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth 1996: 27). These attitudes and practices influence notions of expected behavior, responses, and even symptoms. Life roles and emotional management are “facilitated and ordered” within a culturally prescribed social and community structure where stress, illness, and grief are dealt with on personal and group levels (De Vries 1996: 401). Optimum circumstances for healing exist when a “society organizes the process of suffering, rendering it a meaningful mode of action and identity within a larger social framework” (401–402). When cultures do not function this way, individuals feel