Writing Of Trauma In Foxfire:Confessions Of A Girl Gang

Joyce Carol Oates(1938-)is a famous contemporary American novelist,who has been nominated for the Nobel Prize repeatedly.Foxfire:Confessions of a Girl Gang is her 22nd novel,a work widely regarded as possessing a most powerful emotion and a most appropriate description of details.Foxfire:Confessions of a Girl Gang narrates such a story:unwilling to endure oppression in the patriarchal society,a girl gang in the 1950s of America tries to revenge by force,which shows the author’s sympathy to women’s suffering and criticism to patriarchal society.Many critics make an elaborate analysis of the novel in light of feminism,initiation novel,violence and revenge.And this thesis tries to analyze the trauma and recovery in the novel with trauma recovery theory and intensive reading from the following aspects.Firstly,it analyzes Foxfire girl’s trauma and their contributing factors,which shows mainly in two aspects of family trauma and violence trauma and the basic reason of trauma is the double oppression of patriarchal society and class society.Through revealing women’s miserable sufferings in the patriarchal society,it reflects the author’s criticism to social reality.Secondly,it probes into their hard trauma recovery and shows the author’s attention and thoughts about the female trauma recovery.Finally,it discusses the novel’s positive effects on the female trauma recovery.Compared with other trauma research,this thesis is a textual analysis of the contributing factors of trauma and recovery about a social group.Therefore,to some degree,it is social indeed,which also coincides with the author’s writing purpose behind the character’s social,political and moral environment that she is always concerning.The author writes collective trauma of women in the 1950s of America by virtue of narrator and reveals the female’s hard living conditions under the social environment of powerful patriarchy,it intends to arouse the self-awareness of female and tells them how to overcome their suffering and to walk out of trauma.