Scottish Female Trauma In Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is To Keep Breathing

As a well-known female avant-garde writer and an advocate for feminism, Janice Galloway has gained prominent reputation in the field of Scottish literature. She focuses on the marginalized status of Scottish women who live in a marginalized place of Scotland. Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing seems to be a life elegy full of sentimental keynotes and gloomy colors with Joy’s chaotic life, shattered memory and illusionary perception. Meanwhile, the author adopts unique narrative techniques which embody the Scottish post-modern literary style so as to deliver the heartfelt wishes of Scottish working-class women with Joy as the representative. They desire to get rid of the constraints of patriarchy, find proper tricks to cope with the banal reality and establish an ideal world for Scottish females in Scottish literature.On basis of trauma theories of Cathy Caruth and other scholars, Joy Stone’s traumatic experiences are explored from the perspective of family, emotion and society, which presents the tough situation of women and their miserable struggles under the oppression of the patriarchal system. It is the male-centered culture that works as the source of alienated aesthetic standards and endless identity crisis for adult females. They get caught in traumatic memories which intertwine with the empty body and hinder the continuing of the normal life. Women start their awakening progress through testimony and narration that are effective means of traumatic recovery. Joy makes use of humorous, ironic and witty words to show her resistance to the society and schema to crystallize her emotional practices. By extracting and assembling personal life fragments, she rebuilds her own narrative pattern and gets out of the self-predicament gradually. With the traumatic analysis based on the text and historical research on Scottish cultural backgrounds, this thesis is organized to express close concerns of Scottish writers like Galloway to Scottish women and find out tricks to help them vent their negative moods and attain relief from trauma.