A Study Of Brick Lane From The Perspective Of Trauma Theory

Brick Lane, published in 2003, was the debut publication of a British writer Monica Ali who is a minority woman in England. Since published, this novel has topped the list of various awards. Monica Ali was born in the former East Pakistan(now Bangladesh) Dhaka, and immigrated to Britain with her parents when she was three years old. Brick Lane is the first novel with a theme of immigrant Bangladeshi women living in the UK. It shows us a comprehensive picture of an immigrant’s life full of ups and downs with difficulty and complexity. Due to Monica Ali’s special life experience, most of her novels explore the oppressive status of women in patriarchal society, the East-West cultural collision, the post- colonial oppression and the awakening of female self-consciousness issues. In Brick Lane, Ali successfully creates an image of a Bangladesh immigrant Nazneen and depicts the living conditions of this woman who left her homeland with her husband Chanu and the life in the Brick Lane area of London, which makes South-Asian immigrant woman suffer both physically and spiritually damage.From the perspective of trauma theory, this thesis attempts to analyze Monica Ali’s Brick Lane as trauma fiction, and illustrate its characteristics, present the trauma symptoms of each character in it. The thesis consists of five parts. The introduction part summarizes Monica Ali’s life experience and her literary work and emphasizes the importance and significance of this thesis. Chapter One introduces the trauma theory, describing the concept of trauma, traumatic events, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the origin and the development of trauma fiction. Chapter Two analyzes the individual and collective traumatic symptoms of the main characters in this novel, such as Nazneen’s mental dissociation caused by the fate and her marriage, Chanu’s repeated humiliation and despair, and Hasina’s emotional and mental depression; and this chapter also discusses the traumatic symptoms of Bangladeshi women who suffered unhappiness in marriage and of second-generation immigrants whose life full of violence and alcohol abuse. Chapter Three explains the impacts of traumatic events on different characters in the novel: some are unable to extricate themselves, some adapt to trauma, while few others can recover from a traumatic event. Meanwhile we can see Nazneen’s self-awareness plays a significant role in her process of trauma recovery. Chapter Four explores the causes to trauma from the cultural, ethnic and religious perspectives.In a word, by interpreting this novel, especially the analysis of gender, race and social issues, the living conditions of Bangladeshi migrants, especially female migrants, their special social status, the desire to seek for identity, and the trauma they have suffered we hope to arouse readers’ sympathy toward those figures who have suffered trauma and raise more people’s concerns on women all of the world.