Scriptotherapy as a Healing Agency of Trauma in Contemporary Female Narratives

Abstract

Unyielding statistical implications of modern sociology reveal that, murder, rape, war , incest, child abuse, mauling, electronic crimes, domestic violence, females’ battering and other atrocious offenses are the most horrific events that the postmodern age is hosting.These disturbing events are prone to lead to trauma. Trauma studies, at first, appeared in the field of psychology and then penetrated the field of literature. Deeply concerned with revealing an authentic representation of the terrific traumas that befell on the post modern age, contemporary authors, especially female authors, managed to create the genre of postmodern trauma fiction through testimonial life narratives. Thus, the main research problematic of this thesis is to analyze the way female traumas are represented in three selected contemporary female writers’ narratives and investigate the means by which they survived these traumas.Ultimately, the main qualitative research method that is used, and which is premised on a métissage approach, is scriptotherapy. Blending different literary genres and techniques together, scriptotherapy is the eclectic theoretical foundation of this research.The major objective of this research is to analyze the process of recovery from multiple female traumas through practically investigating the deployment of scriptotherapy’s techniques on the selected narratives.The study aims to show that scriptotherapy proves to be therapeutic making self acceptance, personal growth and social visibility possible.The findings of this study point out that the highest rate of using techniques of scriptotherapy are to be found in Susan Abulhawa’s The Blue between Sky and Water (2015). Medium rate of using other techniques of scriptotherapy are found in the second novel: Push by Sapphire (1999).The last results on the usage of scriptotherapy techniques reveal that the lowest degree of using scriptotherapy is maintained in Shafak’s Black Milk (2007).These consequences are followed by potential interpretations that justified these differing rates.Our achieved findings are also condensed with an open discussion about other possible interpretations of the significance and symbolism of protagonists’ names, places and narratives titles and the way they contribute to the major healing process of the female protagonists.The closure of this thesis provides the readers with some recommendations for future research