Trauma, resilience and recovery in women’s writing is fine

Abstract

This paper explores how women’s writing across diverse genres and historical contexts represents trauma, negotiates resilience and imagines possibilities of recovery. Rather than simply depicting injury, women authors construct formal strategies voice, temporality, silence, fragmentation, hybridity that enable unspeakable experiences to be approached, witnessed and re-narrated. Through close readings of works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Anna Burns’s Milkman, the paper demonstrates how women’s literature transforms private suffering into public memory and political critique. Drawing on feminist theory, trauma studies and intersectional criticism, the analysis shows that trauma is never merely individual but shaped by structures of patriarchy, race, class, caste, sexuality and empire. Testimony emerges as a central mode, transforming the reader into an ethical witness and enabling collective forms of survival sisterhoods, listening communities and counter-publics. Ultimately, women’s trauma narratives resist closure and reject neoliberal notions of “bounce-back” resilience, instead insisting on recovery as an ongoing, collective and politically situated practice. Women’s literature itself becomes an archive of suffering and a laboratory of survival, teaching readers the ethical labor of attention, remembrance and solidarity.