Trauma and Literature: Process Log 01

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• Chirag Mehta
• Trauma and Literature
• Prof. Martin J. Gliserman
• 29 Jan. 2003

Trauma and Literature: Process Log 01

"Trauma" is quite possibly one of the most exploited and misused words in the English language, enduring a sacrilegious abuse by the hungry media, avaricious lawyers, hopeful political candidates, and spotlight-seeking celebrities. Somewhere behind this hoopla of glamorized, fabricated, and pretentious trauma, lay hidden, infinite stories of real trauma, as if chastised and exiled. Before citing examples of trauma, it is very crucial to define what trauma really is, and how it can be classified. Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery presents a wide spectrum into which traumatic disorders can be categorized, from "effects of a single overwhelming event to the more complicated effects of prolonged and repeated abuse." Stress, pain, and shocks all seem to be extremely distressing to the emotional well-being of a human; however trauma, in the psychological sense, is an invisible emotional shock, effects of which are anything but invisible, which more often than not leads to a long-term neurosis and may or may not be possible to recover from.

In Original Bliss, A. L. Kennedy shows Mrs. Brindle as an emotionally distraught wife, who goes through domestic abuse on a regular basis. It is evident from the first page that she has a very traumatic life and seems to have given up hope in life, especially after losing her faith in God. Edward Gluck on the other hand suffers from addiction to pornography and has seemingly tried every possible prescription to remedy his "illness." While he does a great job of hiding the trauma of loneliness from his business acquaintances and audiences, it has inevitably driven him to cross the taboos of sexual conduct and into the realm of perversion and guilt. His real trauma lies not just in having to resort to socially unacceptable sexual fantasies, but also in having to live up to a false image of inner-perfection that he pretends to show the world, while knowing that inside of him lies a confused, guilty, unsatisfied, lonely being. The cause of trauma can be the witnessing of a mass tragedy, loss of a loved one, unrecoverable physical accident, or constant abuse. But all traumas have one universal effect: emotional devastation of the victim; the latency time being from a few moments after the realization of the event, to years and decades of trying to forget the incidents ever happened.