Psychological Resilience in Emma Donoghue’s Room

Abstract

Emma Donoghue’s Room achieved international acclaim the moment it was published in August 2010 and, within the year, it had been awarded a considerable number of literary prizes.¹ This hit novel, the story of the survival of a captive mother and her child under appalling circumstances and their later adjustment to ‘real’ life, has attracted readers worldwide, mostly driven by the apparent connection of the plot with the actual experiences of long captivity undergone by Elisabeth Fritzl and Natascha Kampusch, among others.² However, as the author herself has explained, these stories only constituted the tip of the iceberg since her interest did not lie in writing about the side-effects of such traumatic hardships but, quite the contrary, on the strong mother–child bond that is established, and which secures their final survival and adaptation to society. Furthermore, as I hope to demonstrate, Donoghue’s narrative can be read as a superb exploration of the phenomenon of resilience, a psychological construct that explains how, under traumatic circumstances of distress, human beings might develop an unexpected capacity to cope with pain and suffering. Considering the relevance of this concept to the development of the plot, the aim of the present essay is to analyse the mother–son dyad as the pillar upon which the child’s eventual hardiness is erected, thereby converting the novel into a celebration of life rather than a dramatic story of the human struggle and agony of survival.

The research carried out for the writing of this essay was financed by the Spanish Ministry of the Economy (MINECO, research project FFI2011-23941).