Trauma In Post-war Britain In Muriel Spark's The Girls Of Slender Means

Muriel Spark is a female Scottish writer with great talent for art.Though she began her literary career at a rather late age,she writes industriously with more than twenty novels.The Girls of Slender Means is a novel of her written in the year of 1963.The story happens in a girls' hostel forged in the First World War and continually employed to the Second World War.It raises the daily lives of people living a communal life sharing space and resources.The thesis,based on the trauma theory,explores the haunting trauma of the public under the influence of the state policies and individual efforts through the analysis of their daily lives.Though the works on post Second World War are numerous,most of them put focus on wartime violence,or directly writing trauma.Muriel Spark puts focus on a group of ordinary people,allowing a peek over their light and seemingly normal life,and encourages the readers to explore the trauma hidden behind and their efforts to work through under the complex context.The introduction part briefly introduces Muriel Spark and The Girls of Slender Means,summarizes previous studies on the works and illustrates the research focus,supporting theory and structures of the thesis briefly.The main body includes three chapters.The first chapter is about the conflict-affected environment in London when the war had just ended in Europe battlefield in July,1945.On one hand,though the war had ended,the public were still under its influence.London was the city which suffered the greatest in the Blitz.It was almost paralyzed with houses destroyed,walls missing and windows shattered,meanwhile subjected to the threat of buried bombs exploding.On the other hand,under such circumstances where resources were in extreme shortage,the life of the public was arduous.Thus the state did not cancel the wartime rationing policies and pushed it to all fields of life.However,the state declared that the Second World War was "People's War",beautifying the reality and encouraging the public to move forward to reconstruction.The surrounding and the social environment were characterized by insecurity,restriction and deprivation,bringing negative influence,constantly traumatizing the public.The second chapter contains depiction of traumatized public under the conflict-affected environment,from the following three perspectives:physical,psychological and spiritual.Thus the public were blighted by the trauma,with physical impairment and functional disabilities,psychology overwhelmed with PTSD symptoms featured by denial,numbness etc.,dissociation in relationships and loss of faith and moral standards.The third chapter analyzes the traumatized subject's efforts to recover from the trauma and embrace the future.The primary task was to regain control over themselves and their life.Above all,the public sought safety and calmness to confront the trauma.And then they,in their own way,met a higher level of need,making self-realization through rebellion.However,with the explosion of the buried bomb,their efforts crumbled with the club.Unable to reconcile with the past trauma,and create meaning out of the so-called brand new future by the state,they were trapped in a perpetual middle space.The trauma haunts the public just as a sense of eschatology like fate haunts The Girls of Slender Means.The conclusion summarizes the previous discussion and the main idea of the paper.The thesis explores trauma and their efforts to work through,under the influence of the war and the conflict-affected environment.Exploring serious business under the surface of lightness is also a primary step to explore Muriel Spark's works.