Vaught, Anna Catherine (2024) ‘Go there on a wing in your imagination.’ A critical and creative exploration of magical realism as therapeutic writing in novel Saving Lucia and memoir in-essays, These Envoys of Beauty. Doctoral thesis, York St John University.

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Abstract

The first part of this critical commentary focuses on Saving Lucia (2020). Violet Gibson, incarcerated, conceives a grand scheme, involving others who are suffering and silenced, thronged by the beautiful companions of her world: the birds of the air, paintings, the imagination and the
transformation of suffering through the Catholic faith. The worlds of real and fantastical blend; I offer her an adventure, abetted by her co-patient, Lucia Joyce, in which love and freedom are conjured through the imagination into bold life. Lucia is encouraged to save the story and, thereby, save the stories of lost women, intellects, loves and lives. I shall show how I have used the magical
realist mode to explore trauma, interrogating how this abuts theorists’ trauma writing, together with the work of contemporary psychiatrists. In the second section, I will also parse these theoretical and medical studies as I explore memoir-in- essays, These Envoys of Beauty.

While Saving Lucia centres the imagination as a mode of survival and its own substantial self in fiction, the second text investigates more directly what I personally learned to do through reading and deep immersion in the natural world, for its own sake, as a conduit to thought and new worlds; it was as if I had, without knowing the form, made magical realism of my life. We know from the pioneering work of psychiatrists and trauma specialists Judith Herman and Bessel Van der Kolk in works such as Trauma and Recovery (1992) and The Body Keeps the Score. Mind, Brain And Body In The Transformation Of Trauma (2015), that survivors of childhood abuse may shut down their imaginations so that responses are concrete; moreover, that when we are pulled
back into our past experience we may suffer from a failure of that imagination which gives us flexibility of thought, places to go to and hope for our future. As a child, I developed, without adult guidance, a way to rely on the imagination and on magical thinking to navigate. In addition, I will posit that, as a neurodivergent author managing trauma response, magical realism as a literary
mode feels like a safe home, the equivalent of an atypical mind, imaginatively freewheeling.

I will show how I have, through theme, character, imagery, refrain, repetition, inflexion, sound and even the use of punctuation, on a granular level, employed the magical realist mode to explore trauma in short fiction, a further novel, and nonfiction work, where the theme of intergenerational trauma and our release from it are uppermost. Contextually, I offer detailed reading of magical realist fiction texts, including those written in the last two years, and demonstrate the wonderful potential for exploring distressing themes in prose fiction and nonfiction, as I survey how this is all closely related to my own trauma experience, with its subsequent and permanent mental health challenges.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Status:	Published
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/11405

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