Testimony·Memory·Repetition

Jesmyn Ward is a new star novelist in the 21st-century literary world of American South.Salvage the Bones,her second novel,is a novel of the Southern Gothic genre,telling the story of how a poor southern black family endured Hurricane Katrina.The twelve days that make up the novel’s framework represent their misery and existence plight.The rich connotations of the poignant and poetic novel have drawn a wide critical interest abroad and at home.Scholars have studied the startling work full of the aura of a classic from various perspectives of stylistics,narratology,mythological archetype,political and sociological theories,etc..This thesis applies the trauma theories of Cathy Caruth and Judith Herman to the analysis of the theme of trauma running through the novel,based on the immigration background and the resulting traumatic experience of the writer.It analyzes the personal traumatic experience of the protagonist Esch through the traumatic memory difficult to be integrated into one’s self-experience(Chapter Three),the collective traumatic experience of the Southern black community embodied by the family through the traumatic acceptance of the knowledge of disaster unable to communicate with others(Chapter Four),and the movement from trauma to self-knowledge through the Repetition-Return-Epiphan mourning and positive identification.Finally,the thesis highlights the possible action of the characters’ return to nature and the collective,and reveals the author’s implicit hope for political and spiritual transformation(Chapter Five).It thus argues that the novelist Ward’s trauma writing is,to a certain degree,the representation of her own experience,that Ward’s unfortunate experience in early years is an indispensable part of her memory,and also an inexhaustible impetus for her creation.The thesis further demonstrates that not only has trauma an inherently ethical,social,political and historical dimension,but literature is also ethically responsibilized and empowered to represent traumatic experience and it illustrates the mental trauma by the literary studies.