Women and Trauma in the Works of Margaret Atwood and Anita Desai

This book highlights the everyday trauma that women experience while finding themselves as victims of a deeply masculine and prejudiced milieu. It details a kind of counter-memory, broadening readers’ awareness about women’s trauma narratives. The works analysed here are all authored by women, and have significant claims to be treated as feminist trauma fiction, that is, as novels that are preoccupied with a socio-political analysis of women’s status and that espouse social or psychological transformation. The book will serve to expand the reader’s awareness of trauma by engaging them with personalised means of narration that highlight the troubled ambivalence of traumatic memory and warn us that trauma gets reproduced if left unattended. For both Margaret Atwood and Anita Desai, trauma emerges as a major and dominating theme in their works. In spite of being culturally separate, both Atwood and Desai show striking similarities as far as their art of writing is concerned.