Her narrative is so much concerned with the ‘space’ of the house that nearly every other page describes her house, more specifically, the lack of ‘space’ - “practically a ward” (Azzopardi 6). The title of the novel resonates the fact that Dolores is being hidden away against her wishes, in closed chest, in rabbit’s cage - reiterating the claustrophobic, dehumanizing, and demeaning places of captivity and ostracism, of rejection - “there’s really no more space for anyone else in this house” (Azzopardi 5). The same place of security, of contentment can be turned into a place of trauma, as is the case with Dolores, the autodiegetic narrator in The Hiding Place. But this paper attempts to read the line in a different light. Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)utters this line to give the readers an idea about how she desires to get back to her home in Kansas. But an invitation to a more literal reading of the phrase: there is no such place, renders the fact that home exists only in imagination. Frank Baum as this cliche singles out the unique aura of home, a place where human restlessness is supposed to give way to genuine contentment. Keywords : Autodiegetic narrator, Corporeality, Home, Trezza Azzopardi, Trauma, Stigmatisation. The paper also endeavours to look into how the space of home can be turned into a space of trauma through the constant stigmatisation and othering in the familial context. Drawing theoretical insights from Rosemarie Thomson, Cathy Caruth, and Judith Butler among others, the paper explores the process of the autodiegetic narrator’s retelling, retracing, and recollecting a traumatic past. This paper is an attempt to read the novel’s depiction of trauma and the body, and the nuanced psyche of stigmatisation through the lens of trauma psychology and disability studies, and to read home as a space not of security, but of horror. Dolores’s disfigured hand as the object of stigmatisation ushers a series of corporeal and verbal abuse. The concept of “trauma” in this paper encompasses an individual’s suffering, and in doing so, the paper attempts to read the nuances of traumatic and post traumatic psychology.
Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place (2000) is a novel about traumatic childhood experiences in the familial context, within the home.
0 kommentar(er)
