Lacanian Repetition and Recollection: From Trauma to Fantasy in Emma Donoghue’s Room

Abstract

The fascination of Emma Donoghue’s Room relies on the timeless wonder it has presented to the world of literature. In the novel, when the protagonist steps out of the room after seven years of incarceration, she is a mother of a five-year-old son named Jack, after whom the entire story is narrated. The protagonist endures the evil moments of confinement with the desire to return to her home; however, when she is released, she encounters her father’s apprehension in accepting them as his child and grandchild. Besides, insensitive social institutions tend to exaggerate the drama of their misery. This article takes a retroactive exploration of the traumatic sensibility before and after the abduction, where it notices the traces of a malfunctioned father’s signifier. Such traces emerge after the abduction in the process of repetition and recollection when Ma begins to symbolize how being an adopted girl in the family, repeating in the guise of other miserable occurrences. The truth that the outside no longer protects her subjectivity drags her to lose her phantasmatic structure about the outside as a dear place. Moreover, this article draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis as the instrumental approach to assess the post-trauma human condition in the symbolic structure where the interplay of death drives resigns the fantasy structure. The result will illustrate how the sublimated death drive could invoke the Name-of-the-Father to re-establish the victims in the symbolic order and provide them with the vital fantasy to defend against the intrusion of the real.