Resilience Stories: Individualized Tales of a Metanarrative 9783839458365

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Hamideh Mahdiani Resilience Stories

Lettre

Hamideh Mahdiani, born in 1986, works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine, university medical centre, Mainz. Trained in English and American Literary and Cultural Studies, she has been studying the topic of human resilience as a narrative form. Her research focuses on human resilience as a social and narrative construct.

Hamideh Mahdiani

Resilience Stories Individualized Tales of a Metanarrative

A DFG funded three-year PhD program at the graduate center “Life Sciences, Life Writing” Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience. Resilience Research: A Narrative Study Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee Prof. Dr. Norbert W. Paul Dr. Michael Ungar

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de © 2021 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: https://pixabay.com Proofread: Graeme Currie Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5836-1 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5836-5 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839458365 ISSN of series: 2703-013X eISSN of series: 2703-0148 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Acknowledgements ..........................................................9 Preface ..................................................................... 11 Resilience Research: The Need for a Narrative Turn......................... 13 Bibliography ................................................................. 31 Life Sciences and Narratives of Resilience ................................. 35 Resilience Research in the Present Project................................... 44 Bibliography ............................................................... 45 Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction..................... 51 Reading for Resilience in Narratives ........................................ 55 Power of Sympathy and Resistance .......................................... 62 Moby-Dick and the Dark Side of Resilience ................................... 73 Captain Ahab: The Epitome of a Paradox ............................... 74 Captain Ahab, the Self-Enhancer ....................................... 77 Captain Ahab: Negative Appraisal and Hubris ........................... 80 Captain Ahab, the Self-Created Prometheus ........................... 82 The Great Captain Ahab in Solitude..................................... 84 Identity and Heritage: Song of Solomon ...................................... 86 Pilate ................................................................. 90 The Role of Agentic Characters in Resilience: Pilate’s Happy Solitude ..... 91 Self-Efficacy and Cultural Heritage ..................................... 93 Ruth: Self-Manipulation ................................................ 95

Milkman: Macon III Dead ............................................... 98 Macon II ............................................................... 105 Middlesex: A Resilience Reading ............................................. 109 Protective Factors – The Personal Level: Coping Strategies ............. 112 Desdemona’s Eternal Suffering ......................................... 113 Lefty and His Sister-Wife .............................................. 119 Calliope/Cal ...........................................................123 Protective Factors – The Socioecological Level ......................... 127 Role of Family Background and Traditions ............................. 127 The Importance of Place ............................................... 128 Bibliography ............................................................... 130 A Memoir-Based Reading of Human Resilience .............................143 Tara’s Story............................................................ 146 Ego or Personality Resiliency .......................................... 148 Having a Voice......................................................... 148 Coping Mechanism and an Educated Perception of the Self ............. 151 Resilience as a Process ................................................ 154 Role of Social Support ................................................. 154 “Odds are Better if You Rely Only on Yourself” ........................... 161 Bibliography ................................................................ 165 Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust ........................... 167 Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust ............................. 174 Narrative, Narrative Identity, and Resilience ................................. 177 Agency ................................................................ 179 Communion ...........................................................180 Meaning making ......................................................180 Exploratory narrative processing.......................................180 Coherent positive resolution ........................................... 181 Redemption ........................................................... 182 Contamination......................................................... 182 Methodology ................................................................ 182 Sample, Study Design, Procedure ............................................ 184 Narrative Analysis – The Complexity of Boom-Bust Adjustment ...............186

Analysis of Narratives: Complexity of Boom-Bust Adjustment ................. 191 Agency ............................................................... 191 Communion ...........................................................193 Redemption & Meaning making........................................193 Exploratory narrative processing....................................... 195 Coherent positive resolution .......................................... 195 Contamination......................................................... 196 Discussion ................................................................. 196 Conclusion .................................................................. 199 Appendix A (examples from the Interview Guide) ................................... 201 Bibliography ............................................................... 203 Concluding Remarks........................................................ 213 A Narrative Analysis of a Narrative Study of Resilience ....................... 214 Education ............................................................. 214 Social Support, Family, and Communion ................................ 216 Ego-Resilience ........................................................ 218 An Analysis of Narratives on a Narrative Study of Resilience................. 222 Resilience within the Life Sciences and Life Writing ......................... 224 Bibliography ............................................................... 229

Acknowledgements

The book you hold in your hands is the fruit of the doctoral research I undertook as part of the DFG Research Training Group “Life Sciences – Life Writing.” This graduate program at the University of Mainz provides researchers with a multidisciplinary environment to explore human boundary experiences. I am thankful to my supervisors, for granting me the honor to be part of an extraordinary experience, for their continued support and encouragement, and to professor Norbert W. Paul for the magical “brainstorming sessions.” My sincere gratitude also goes to Dr. Michael Ungar for offering me an invaluable learning opportunity and for providing me with his indispensable insights. This project could not have been accomplished without the support of my colleagues at the graduate school, whose precious input and stimulating discussions acted as guiding lights at difficult moments. And to Thomas – thank you for allowing me time away from you to research and write. You forever have my deepest gratitude.

Preface

Be resilient! These days, we hear this advice in all kinds of contexts: when facing a work or study crisis, dealing with personal problems, or in relation to adverse economic, ecological, social, or psychological situations. Resilience is among the most common contemporary buzzwords. But how is it defined? Why has there been, at least theoretically since the mid-20th century, such an emphasis on studying and fostering this concept? Why, simply, do we need to be resilient? Resilience, to put it provocatively, is nothing and everything at one and the same time: it can be a personal trait, a developmental process, or a positive outcome. However, the definitional ambiguity, at least in recent years, has moved the research into the realm of neurobiology, whereby the focus has shifted towards studying and mapping resilience as a biological trait. This may in the future shift the target of resilience research towards a more biological approach overall, and away from sociology and the humanities. Such an approach, I contend, is in its core reductionistic. Therefore, in the present project I attempt to underscore the role of humanities in resilience research. To do so, I propose an anthropological approach to this relatively new term: studying individuals themselves by reading, listening to, and analyzing stories of resilience. The present book is a case study in how the stories that people tell can be employed for the purpose of understanding human experiences in all aspects of human life.

Resilience Research: The Need for a Narrative Turn “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” —Charles Darwin

Let me start my introduction with the following three steps. First, by citing Ann S. Masten, an acclaimed resilience researcher from the field of child psychology, who introduced her groundbreaking book, Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development as follows: Probably as long as humans have told stories to one another, there have been tales of individuals who overcame difficulties to succeed in life. Traditional folktales and fairytales portray themes of struggle and transformation, persistence and heroic deeds in the face of adversity, and young people of humble origins who rise in life through their wits and actions, sometimes assisted by a guide or magical figure […] In the 21st century, when it is possible to share stories in many different ways – through social media, in books or newspapers, in films or television shows, through e-mails or blogs, on various digital communication devices – people remain intrigued with stories of youth who face grave danger or grow up in poverty and nonetheless turn out well. (Ordinary Magic 3) Secondly, from the context of indigenous storytelling, I would like to relate the following short story: An old Cherokee was teaching his

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grandchildren about life. He said, “A battle is raging inside me…it is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.” The old man looked at the children with a firm stare. “This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too.” They thought about it for a minute, and then one child asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee replied: “The one you feed” (The Two Wolves1 n. pag.). And thirdly, I would like to look at another story, a fable entitled The Farmer and the Donkey.2 One day a farmer’s donkey fell down a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway – it just wasn’t worth it to retrieve the donkey. He invited all of his neighbors to come over and help him. They each grabbed a shovel and began to throw dirt into the well. At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone’s amazement, he quieted down. A few shovel-loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well. He was astonished at what he saw. With each shovelful of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up. As the farmer’s neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and happily trotted off!

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The story of two wolves is a Cherokee legend retrieved from firstpeople.us, however, it appears to be first mentioned in a 1978 book called “The Holy Spirit: Activating God’s Power in Your Life,” by Billy Graham. Although the story is taken from the webpage of College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin, the author of the story is not known at the time of writing the present book.

Resilience Research: The Need for a Narrative Turn

The three texts I chose to cite to start my introduction represent my attempt at introducing the breathtaking scope of the overarching topic of the present book: Narratives of Resilience.3 These stories may be summed up by the age-old cliché never give up. Yet, I want to point out in the following pages that these short stories, as trivial as they may at first seem, in fact correlate with research findings corroborated by the life sciences in the fields that are researching human resilience. There is therefore a clear connection between what we may term stories (narratives) of resilience, on the one hand, and the perspective on resilience in the life sciences, on the other. In this vein, a scientist involved in the first wave of resilience research might have told the first story (the two wolves) this way: resilience is a quality, termed protective factors or resources, within individuals. A researcher whose thinking was more in line with the second story (the donkey in the well) would have gone a step further and claimed that it is the adaptive processes, or coping, that facilitates resilience. This researcher would therefore have focused on the significance of environmental factors, including interactions between individuals and their environment. The work of these two groups of researchers has resulted in the concept of resilience being defined as either a trait or a process. I should also mention two additional groups of researchers. Those who, on the one hand, try to foster resilience through interventions designed to promote resilience, such as the promotion of positive parenting as advocated by Brooks and Goldstein (n. pag.); and, on the other hand, those who study the interplay of genes, neurobehavioral development, and statistics to better understand the complex processes that lead to resilience. These studies often focus on a more molecular level, examining how processes may interact biologically. Clearly, despite their differences, all these waves of research converge in their ultimate goal: determining what resilience is, how it functions the way it does, and how it can be fostered.

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Humans, and adult resilience in particular.

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However, “complex aspects of human functioning are not always neatly deconstructed by researchers or reconstructed for intentional application” (Prince-Embury, 9). Such is the case for the construct of resilience. As ancient as the mythical concept4 of resilience might be, or as present a theme in various narrative forms, the scientific study of human resilience5 did not start until the mid-20th century. Resilience is a term that emerged from a longitudinal study of children born into poverty.6 This study followed the lives of 505 individuals who were born in 1955 on the island of Kauai. Werner and Smith documented the life course of these individuals with extensive multivariate and longitudinal data that includes biological and psychosocial variables. Their study assessed these children at birth, infancy, early and middle childhood, late adolescence, and adulthood. They used methods drawn from Natural History to document the life trajectories of these individuals and assessed the long-term consequences of perinatal and prenatal complications, rearing conditions, development, and adaptation. In their sample, one in three experienced perinatal stress. Some parents were not educated, and some children lived in chaotic family environments due to parental divorce, alcoholism, or mental illness. In a series of five major publications from 1971 to 2001, Werner and Smith published their results on the Kauai cohort, each book focusing on a particular age group: birth to age ten, teens, 20s, 30s and finally when they were in their 40s.7 In the Kauai study, approximately two-thirds of the children growing up in poverty eventually developed 4

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C. S. Holling’s myth of ‘Resilient Nature’ for example, describes a perspective on reality that takes rapid changes into account and “explicitly recognizes the unknown and the ability to survive and benefit from ‘failures.’” See, Holling, Myths of Ecological Stability. Cf., Kuhlicke, Resilience: a capacity and a myth. The research on resilience dates back to Holling and discussions of the stability/instability of systems (cf. Holling, Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems), however, in the present work the focus is only on human resilience. Cf. Werner and Smith, Overcoming the Odds and Journeys from Childhood to Midlife. See, Werner et al., The Children of Kauai; Werner & Smith, Kauai’s Children Come of Age; Werner & Smith, Overcoming the Odds; Werner and Smith, Journeys from Childhood to Midlife: Risk, Resilience, and Recovery.

Resilience Research: The Need for a Narrative Turn

serious problems as adults; however, the remaining third developed and matured into competent, caring adults. Even though most of the children grew up in similar environments, the strikingly different outcomes of those who grew up to become competent, caring adults begged the question: How come? Since then, researchers from various fields have been focused on answering this question. Yet it is the scientific understanding of resilience that has become the dominant discourse in recent decades. Fletcher and Sarkar (Psychological Resilience 12) wrote that over the past two decades, psychologists’ understanding of human functioning in demanding situations has developed rapidly, with resilience being examined across a range of contexts, including business organizations, education, military, sport performance, and communities. This variety of contexts only complicates the issue at hand, namely: what is resilience?8 And this is a question that itself leads to another: what is an appropriate way to study resilience? Of particular interest to me, or rather within my realm of expertise as an American Studies scholar, is the idea of studying resilience in the world of narratives. Which is why I simply ask, with an eye on the opening quotation form Masten’s Ordinary Magic: how is human resilience narrated? To get closer to a possible answer to this question, I want to add another step to the previous three introductory steps. In 1917, neuroscientist Ramón y Cajal described the relationship between dendrites and axons in the brain as an “epic love story” (cf. Moezzi et al., 2). Ramón y Cajal’s thinking has served as a frame for modern neuroscientists interested in explaining this complex process (cf. Joerges, 414). On the same note, Emily Martin (The Egg and the Sperm 485), an anthropologist, has shown how high-school health science textbooks describe the interaction of an egg and sperm like a romance

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One could argue that the possibility of settling on a single definition is rather slim seeing that each field may have its own criteria, or that why there should be only one definition in the first place if the fields are so diverse! However, I will not join the party of those who conclude the term to be endlessly ‘in-Themaking.’

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novel, replete with gender roles and heroic deeds. This kind of idiomatic expression is often eschewed in the sciences in an attempt to preserve neutrality. Against this background, and with a quick flashback to the start of this chapter (Masten’s references to stories of resilience), I will begin to elaborate briefly on my chosen platform for studying resilience, that of narratives. Taking Ramón y Cajal’s metaphor of resilience as an “epic love story” as a case in point, I will accentuate the significance of narratives for resilience studies. Conversely, as I have already implied by highlighting the uncanny convergence of indigenous storytelling and contemporary resilience research, narrative studies may also have much to gain from a dialogue with the life sciences. As an exemplary case for studying potential convergences between life sciences and life writing, resilience studies may be a key to such a dialogue: To resilience studies, narrative analysis brings a careful focus on the role of culture, social contexts, and individual coping strategies; to narrative studies (and the humanities), a scientific reading of resilience may bring an understanding of the centrality of resilience to human nature. Furthermore, in efforts to foster resilience, narratives and narrative enquiry may become tools for generating and propagating indirect experience and knowledge. If, as many critics have argued, the humanities have long run the risk of dismissing the biological and the material nature of human life, a dialogue with the life sciences may serve to ameliorate this bias. An example may help set the scene. The 1918 Flu Pandemic (controversially known as the Spanish Flu) is one of the topics that is scarcely narrated in the stories of the time. But those very few examples9 are the only relatable memories of the disaster for those who cannot relate to the tragedy through statistics.10 Take Katherine Ann Porter’s novella Pale Horse Pale Rider, for example. The nature of

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Only three novels chose the pandemic as their main theme: Katherine Ann Porter’s Pale Horse Pale Rider (1939); John O’Hara’s The Doctor’s Son (1935) and William K. Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows (1937). Joseph Stalin was famously quoted as saying: one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is only statistics!

Resilience Research: The Need for a Narrative Turn

the flu shaped the whole book: a hallucinatory state of mind that could not be narrated except by using the stream-of-consciousness technique that was introduced around the same time by the Modernist movement, which was moving away from the previously dominant realism. In turn, this story made the disease ‘readable’ and hence knowable: distortion of time, loss of contact with external reality, and an inability to recall the acute period of illness were all packed into the dreamlike narration of the protagonist’s first-person point of view. The author needed to understand the disease in order to narrate it, and the disease needed the modernist narrative techniques to be told. Modernism gave the disease, if not the pandemic, its language.11 The interaction between the narrative (in this case Porter’s novel) and the topic of narration (the 1918 pandemic) thus became a biocultural dialectic: the text and the illness co-constructed each other. In a like manner, reading narratives from different periods of history will, I believe, reveal that the phenomenon of resilience is a socially constructed narrative, closely related to the historical, social, and cultural context of the time, by virtue of which a ‘narrative turn’ in resilience research can be encouraged. Resilient individuals narrate their stories in particular ways: these people have particular stories to tell (in the sense of ‘ordinarily magical’ stories) which can potentially act as new avenues to examine resilience-related factors. At the same time, the act of telling the story can itself increase resilience. The only obstacle, from a methodological point of view, is the scientific world’s general mistrust of narrative enquiry as a research method. Asking if we can take science as a form of narrative or if we can look into scientific concepts as narrative representations, is not a new question. The distrust in narrative forms can be traced back to Plato’s disapproval of the ‘lying poet’. In contemporary discussions, narrative is mostly treated as a “suspicious, dangerous tool that might foster comprehension but also be used for persuasion, and therefore 11

Virginia Wolf’s 1929 essay, On Being Ill, has been credited with drawing attention to subjective experiences of sickness, in term of the changes an illness makes to a sick person’s perception and their ability to describe the experience.

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might create inaccuracy” (qtd. in Backe, 72) due to, for example, narratives’ usage of the first-person pronoun or created temporality. Hans-Joachim Backe writes about academics, journalists, and scientists who are under the assumption that “narrative is an alien, distorting factor in factual writing” (72), as contrasted with science’s “facticity and weight” (73). Arguments against narrative, rather falsely, connect it to fictionality – as opposed to facticity. “While scientific writing operates under the assumption that there can be a completely neutral, truthful depiction of things, literary theory is more occupied with the question of how literature can be non-fictional (i.e., how the nonfiction novels of authors such as Miller, Wolfe, or Capote can be conceptualized)” (qtd. in Backe, 74), or how “nonfiction as a related text type or genre besides fiction can be categorized” (Lehman, 235). Among the most prominent narrative theorists is Jerome Bruner, who, not surprisingly, draws a sharp boundary between scientific and narrative discourse. He divides cognitive functioning into two irreducible “modes,” being “the narrative mode and the logico-scientific mode,” and argues that “narrative and scientific discourse represent two completely different ways of rationalizing experience” (Actual Minds, 11). Richard J. Sheehan and Scott Rode believe that “Bruner’s perceived irreducible division between narrative and scientific discourse could be primarily due to differences in content, audience, and purpose,” and that “the same differences, of course, could be highlighted between a fictional novel and a historical monograph – two very different uses of the narrative genre” (338). Contrary to Bruner and his advocates, there have been many attempts at bridging the gap between the life sciences and life writing in their different understandings of narratives. For example, Backe claims that “the assumption that scientific writing is (or should be) inherently non-narrative ignores both traditional usage of narrative in some disciplines (like social sciences) and findings of cognitive science” (Narrative 73). Sheehan and Rode in their On Scientific Narrative Stories of Light by Newton and Einstein highlight the “parallels between narrative and historical scientific discourse,” to “demonstrate that narrative theory illuminates the scientific enterprise as yet another way

Resilience Research: The Need for a Narrative Turn

in which humans use stories to come to terms with the strangeness of reality” (336). They begin their argument with the initial premise that “scientists use narratives to invent rational accounts of changing or changeable natural phenomena” (337). Drawing on William Labov’s concept of “narrative patterns,”12 they claim that a similar conventional pattern is present in both a narrative text and a scientific text. Labov identified five steps that every narrative follows, more or less: abstract (introductory part of the narrative), orientation (contextual information), complication (series of events in the world of the story leading to a climax), evaluation (making the point of the story clear), resolution (releasing the tension), and coda (end of the narrative) (Sociolinguistic Narrative Patterns 72). In the genre of scientific literature, these steps are, respectively, literature review, identification of anomaly or gap in research, methodology of the study, results, discussion, and conclusions. In other words, “a scientist’s description of a research methodology is a step-by-step recounting of how that scientist went about studying the events that make up a particular phenomenon.” In short, “scientists’ accounts of their experiments are narratives about how they made sense of their experiences with reality” (emphasis in the original, Sheehan & Rhode, 338–339). However, Sheehan and Rhode move a step beyond a merely structural comparison and analyze the vocabulary involved, using Dan E. Polkinghorne’s definition of narratives, which they consider to offer a concise summary of the concepts that are central to narrative theory. Polkinghorne’s definition of narrative emphasizes the following elements: “meaning structure (or genre which organizes events and actions), actions (as the importance of time and change), events, a sense of wholeness, and temporality” (Sheehan and Rhode, 340), to which Sheehan and Rhode add Holton’s concept of ‘themata,’ which they consider to complete Polkinghorne’s list. For Sheehan and Rhode, themata is “almost identical to discussions of theme in narrative theory” (342). One should also underscore that “Holton does not speak of scientific texts as narratives, but his claims for themata in the texts and history of science are almost identical 12

Cf. William Labov, Sociolinguistic Narrative Patterns.

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to discussions of theme in narrative theory” (342), since he refers to scientific themes as “the essence of what the scientific discourse is about, and he claims that themes help scientists shape descriptions of natural events into whole accounts that are familiar to the scientific community” (Sheehan and Rhode, 342). In short, to point out why it is imperative to study the supposedly ‘scientific’ concept of human resilience using the narrative medium, I argue that, first, the distinction between fact and fiction, especially the theories propagated by Monika Fludernik on the differences between nonfiction and fiction, help forward the argument. Fludernik claims that the differences “do not lie in internal features of the text but in the intentions of the writer (entertainment vs. information), the reception of the text (escapism vs. study of the real world), and the process of dealing with the text (interpretation vs. extraction of information)” (Towards a Natural Narratology 92). Her argument also supports my previous insistence of including novels as examples of life writing since I, as the receiver of the narratives and their reader in this study, choose to read the narrative as a source of data, not as a form of escapism that provides purely subjective interpretations for entertainment purposes. Speaking as a literary scholar, literature then becomes my laboratory. Secondly, “Narrativity has recently become understood as less of a category than a continuum, a soft, scalar concept. A folk tale or a fairy tale is more prototypical of the idea of a narrative than a modernist or postmodernist novel, yet it is a distinction of degree and not of kind” (qtd. in Backe, 74). Aside from the degree of narrativity, Backe also discusses its forms and levels, the most foundational of which is the distinction between story (the ‘what’ of a narrative), and discourse (the ‘how’ of presentation) (qtd. in Backe, 74). Backe also discusses the two topics of narrativity and referentiality in terms of the relationship between biomedicine and narratives. Since “every account of developments will have a setting and agents, as well as a temporal structure with some unavoidable gaps […] even a scientific text will often need to complement statistical data or a simple chronicle of events with at least some narrative devices” in order to communicate complex observations (Backe, 71). Referentiality, which refers to the

Resilience Research: The Need for a Narrative Turn

relationship between a text and what it refers to, is crucial in the argument for using narratives in sciences, since “biomedicine figures in popular culture mostly in the form of fictional texts referencing scientific discourses, transgressing boundaries between media, text types, demographies, popularizing a potentially dry subject matter through reducing abstractions and complexities” (71). Despite these arguments in justification of the affinities between life sciences and life writing in their treatment of narrative, by training, scientists often shy away from the indeterminacy of the latter. They adopt what Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg calls a “roughand-ready realism, a belief in the objective reality of the ingredients of our scientific theories” (Rouse, 167). Yet viewing scientific texts as narratives is an invitation to creativity, write Sheehan and Rode (357). The primary drawback to naive realism is that it assumes that scientific discourse somehow gets beyond a society’s narratives. It supposes that when scientists describe their theories or their experiences/experiments, they are somehow doing something different than narrating a history. But if scientists were aware of the themes on which their theories rely, this might actually be a productive means by which they could look for new avenues of research. In support of the pivotal role played by Labov and Waletzky’s 1966 essay Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience, Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh write that “in the wake of Labov and Waletzky’s approach to natural narrative, the seemingly clearcut borderline between the realm of fictional and nonfictional stories has become blurred. Once freed from dualisms and binarisms, such a distinction loses its foundation” (6). As Bernstein (45) writes: “Although any given story might be classified as natural or literary, oral or written, simple or complex, those classifications are not binary opposites, but merely the definable extremes of endless possibilities.” Following in the footsteps of Bernstein, I treat fiction, nonfiction, and interview transcripts as ‘opportunities’ to portray and further investigate human experiences. I believe any attempt to trace the dividing line between narrative and scientific knowledge in texts regarded as representing

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one of the two kinds of knowledge soon reveals that the life sciences are closer to narrative than one might think. In the social sciences, scholars speak of a ‘narrative turn’ in a number of different fields, dating variably from the mid-twentieth century to the 1980s. This narrative turn is often identified as having to do with life histories and representations, though one major strand focuses on policy narratives and organizational narratives. Looking at the issue at hand from the other side of the imaginary wall, Barbara Czarniawska claims that “there is an abundance of stories and metaphors in scientific texts, while folktales and fiction build on facts and sometimes even play with formal logic” (A Four Times Told Tale 7). Her conclusion, which is similar to my proposition about the scientific world’s mistrust of narrative studies, is that many works in the humanities and social sciences suggest a rapprochement between the two kinds of knowledge, and consequently between the two types of texts (qtd. in Czarniawska, 7). Here as elsewhere, life science research may simply not be very conscious of its narrative dimension: its ‘epic love story’, just as life writing is often not mindful of its factual side. From a postmodern perspective, however, all knowledge becomes narrative. The telling of history is, after all, a narrative, in the sense of W.H. Walsh’s account of history as ‘significant narratives.’13 Some approaches, such as Hayden White’s, have rendered the “telling” of history close to other practices of storytelling; yet historical narratives may nonetheless be different from (merely) fictional accounts. Literature, of course, with its classic genres such as romance, satire, tragedy, and comedy, is the embodiment of narrative. This would suggest that, as White argues: far from being one code amongst many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrative is a metacode, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of shared reality can be transmitted. (White 6)

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See, Mandelbaum, A Note on History as Narrative.

Resilience Research: The Need for a Narrative Turn

In agreement with this conception, Noel Gough (607) argues that science fiction texts should be integral to both science and environmental education and that narrative strategies of fiction may be more appropriate for representing science than the expository textual practices that have dominated science to date. It is through literary fiction, he states, that the problems of human interrelationships with environments become intelligible. This idea may also prove fruitful for resilience studies, when we consider Gough’s suggestion that by simply ‘stating’ scientific facts – the factors contributing to environmental damage, for instance – little can be gained in terms of environmental education.14 Such education, he asserts, depends on the creation of a convincing narrative. (Science) fiction can hence be a fruitful way of narrating the results of scientific research. Pursuing the same line of argument, Masten & Obradovic (Competence & Resilience 15) stress the urgent need for “multiple levels of analysis” in resilience studies, integrating research by interdisciplinary groups of psychologists, geneticists, and neuroscientists. These writers and others underscore that there should be no merely reductionistic approach to bioscientific research in resilience, and the powerful role of the interaction of context, experience, and environment should retain a central place. It is against this background that I believe a narrative perspective on resilience research can help broaden our understanding of the concept. In the present study, for the reasons given above, I will be investigating the role of narratives in communicating human resilience. The scope of narratives selected for close, comparative reading is limited to narratives from the life sciences (psychological, sociological, and neurobiological studies of resilience) and life writing (fictional novels, memoirs, and disaster survivors’ narratives). In the course of the present study, I will investigate five main research questions. First, I explore the possibility that the concept of resilience is narratively constituted. Second, I will inquire into the reasons why the humanities have been so reluctant about engaging with the life sciences regarding resilience research. Third, I will inquire into the potential 14

Kathrin Ann Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider is once again a case in point.

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link between literary studies and resilience studies. My fourth enquiry concerns the question of whether there is an inherent difference in the approach towards human resilience of fictional and non-fictional literary narratives. And finally, and most significantly, I will research the possibility that narrative analysis can bring a new layer of knowledge to resilience research and vice versa. The present book is thus structured around five chapters, including this introduction. In chapter two, I review research into human resilience research through the decades, starting from the 1970s and continuing into the fourth wave (current and ongoing research), pointing at the modifications and challenges in establishing a unified definition. I sketch the development of the field from its very early origins, which went beyond the accepted models of psychopathology – then considered the only models that could explain human psychology – towards models that were instead based on health and growth; to the first wave’s attempt at creating a ‘shortlist’ of protective factors that act as supportive variables for individual resilience; and thereafter to the second wave, which rose above the questions of ‘whatness’ that occupied the first researchers, to ‘howness’ questions engaging with the processes and mechanisms that lead to resilience. These researchers studied resilience as a process of interaction between individuals and the systems they are situated within, such as family, community, and society. In the next step, I summarize the third wave of resilience researchers in their attempts to create resilience-building interventions, initiating programs and policies to create resilience when it did not occur naturally. I then depict the fourth and current wave, which focuses on the molecular level of resilience, mapping brain development and the neurobiological systems that underlie it. The current wave also emphasizes the multidisciplinarity of resilience research and underscores the need for scholars from different fields to communicate their findings in order to portray human resilience in the most accurate way possible. This involves biomedical researchers exchanging data with sociologists and psychologists and, more recently, with the humanities. I conclude this chapter by providing a brief

Resilience Research: The Need for a Narrative Turn

explanation of existing models and approaches to the field as provided by experts in a range of fields. In the third chapter, the longest part of the book, I begin by introducing several theories of narrative and focus on the justification of reading resilience from a narrative perspective. I also discuss narratives from the perspective of the life sciences, comparing this to the role of narratives in life writing. While in previous generations content analysis was used primarily by journalists and communication researchers to quantify the frequency of words and phrases in texts and other media, it is now actively used by social scientists to study the latent meaning embedded in texts and other media within the context of their uses (Krippendorff, 481–495). In the second part of chapter three, I provide close readings of the chosen fictional narratives, reading novels from a literary and cultural perspective in relation to resilience research. I then proceed to answer the question of how human resilience is reflected in the fictional narratives. The fictional narratives for these close readings are four unrelated American novels,15 which also cover a range of major adversities in human history. In my close readings, I aim, first of all, to depict textual representations of protective factors of resilience; second, to address the texts’ attitudes towards resilience as a trait, process, or outcome and to consider how they justify this; and finally, to consider whether or not one can observe a preference for a particular approach in the narratives studied. The narrative reading of resilience in the selected novels is based on a literary close reading of the texts that merges resilience attributes. In other words, via a close reading of a referential world referred to as “a world” (Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography 10), which is the imagined world of the fictional text, I will read the characters’ world in relation to resilience attributes or lack thereof. This close reading, though it broadly follows the style of the New Critics, is guided by the hermeneutic approach I have structured for my project based on the resilience factors which will be discussed in the second chapter. Instead 15

The Power of Sympathy, William Hill Brown; Moby-Dick, Herman Melville; Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison; Middlesex, Jeoffrey Eugenides.

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of attempting to find out the inherent interpretation of the novel, I will look for the inherent resilience factors, with the assumption that each of the characters in the novels takes a specific path towards resilience or vulnerability. Using this approach, this chapter will also delineate the literary representations of the topics in the corresponding research questions. In other words, it will seek both to answer which protective factor is dominant and why, while simultaneously looking into how that specific factor is presented in literary terms, how the text benefits from a literary genre, and how the form and the content follow a chosen approach. In sum: I picture which narrative techniques, thematically and formally mediate or moderate the resilience story. In the fourth chapter, I study the same questions with relation to another narrative form: memoir.16 In both of these chapters, one of my goals is to point at the possibility of looking at literature as a laboratory on its own, with each literary text taken as a case study. The narrative reading of resilience in the chosen memoir follows Smith and Watson’s theorizations on reading memoirs, close reading of a referential world referred to as “the world” (Reading Autobiography 10). Smith and Watson write that “in contemporary writing, the categorization of memoir often signals autobiographical works characterized by density of language and self-reflexivity about the writing process, yoking the author’s standing as a professional writer with the work’s status as an aesthetic object” (Reading Autobiography 4). In other words, the only difference between reading Tara Westover’s memoir and a fictional novel is the assumption that Westover’s world is not purely fictional.

16

Tara Westover, Educated.

Resilience Research: The Need for a Narrative Turn

In chapter five,17 I switch to another narrative form: the interview. As will be explained, in this chapter I present the results of my team’s study of a community in Canada that has been going though adverse conditions for the last decade. 37 individuals, adults aged 31–76, were interviewed regarding their life stories, and particularly the difficulties and challenges they have faced as a result of economic boom and bust. We asked individuals to tell us about their lives, how they went through hard times, and what helped them stay strong. I analyzed these adults’ narratives of suffering and survival, looking for the underlying themes and structures. The methodological details are explained in the fifth chapter. In chapter five, a narrative reading of resilience in the interview transcripts focuses on Polkinghorne’s theorization of narrative enquiry in qualitative research.18 Narrative inquiry has been defined as a methodology “in which stories are used to describe human action” (Polkinghorne, Narrative Configuration 5). Schwandt further explains that stories are central to all aspects of narrative inquiry (Sage Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry). Narrative inquiry includes not only generating data in the form of stories but is also a means of analyzing stories about life experiences and a method of representing and reporting the findings of that analysis. Narrative inquiry is grounded in the assumption that stories “constitute a fundamental form of human understanding, through which individuals make sense of themselves and of their lives” (Ylijoki 22). Polkinghorne’s narrative theories introduce two versions of narrative inquiry: “analysis of narratives” (i.e. “the attempt to identify common themes across a series of narratives”), and “narrative analysis” (i.e. “taking an in-depth look at one narrative to identify the aspects of 17

18

This chapter is originally published as a collaborative paper (authors in the order of appearance: Hamideh Mahdiani, Jan Höltge, Linda Theron and Michael Ungar) titled: Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust: A Narrative Study of a Rural Population Dependent upon the Oil and Gas Industry (2020). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. In this chapter, which consists of qualitative research based on field work and interview transcripts as data, I also explain the narrative analysis methodology I employ, introduced by Dann E. Polkinghorne as theories of narrative enquiry.

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narrative processes, cognition, tools, and language used”). In analysis of narratives, a structure emerges from a comparative look into the totality of narratives. It requires the collection of stories as data, followed by paradigmatic analysis that results in “descriptions of themes that hold across the stories” (Polkinghorne, Narrative Configuration 12). In narrative analysis, perception is through the plotline of a story. The result of narrative analysis is “an explanation that is retrospective, having linked past events together to account for how a final outcome might have come about” (Polkinghorne, Narrative Configuration 16). I apply narrative analysis to understand resilience mechanisms as revealed in the interviews. To compare and contrast the findings from these chapters, the final chapter brings a third question to bear: how do resilience and narrative studies converge when one looks at the stories of individual characters, authors, or subjects? To achieve this, the results of chapters 3, 4, and 5 are compared to assess the confluence between fictional (novels), semi-fictional (memoirs) and nonfictional (scientific results; interviewee’s narratives) narratives of resilience as a means of traversing the boundaries between different fields touching on the topic of resilience. My interpretations will aim to answer how resilience is depicted in narratives (as an individual trait, a contextual outcome, or a process); which literary features/styles/themes/forms are present in a resilience-oriented fictional/non-fictional narrative; and what narrative constructs are relevant to resilience (following on from McAdams’s life narrative constructs, as presented in chapter three, four and five). My final chapter examines the artificial border between life writing and the life sciences in the context of American policy making, which leans toward emphasizing individualism rather that communal growth, all in relation to understandings of resilience. In this chapter, I further contemplate the effect of cultural and contextualized narratives of resilience on the individual narratives, on the one hand, and on the interchange between lifeworld, science, and narration, on the other. I argue that this interchange tends to be withheld due to an artificial boundary that hinders a healthy, fruitful exchange between the life sciences and life writing.

Resilience Research: The Need for a Narrative Turn

Bibliography Backe, Hans-Joachim. 2019. “Narrative.” In Handbook of Popular Culture and Biomedicine, edited by Arno Görgen, German Alfonso Nunez, and Heiner Fangerau, 71–78. Cham: Springer. Bernstein, Cynthia. 1997. “Labov and Waletzky in Context”. Journal of Narrative and Life History, vol. 7, nos. 1–4: 45–71. Brockmeier, Jens, and Donal Carbaugh, eds. 2001. Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture, vol. 1, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Brooks, Robert and Sam Goldstein. 2002. Raising Resilient Children: Fostering Strength, Hope, and Optimism in your Child. New York: McGraw Hill Press. Brown, William H. 1996. The Power of Sympathy. Penguin. Czarniawska, Barbara. 1997. “A Four Times Told Tale: Combining Narrative and Scientific Knowledge in Organization Studies”. Organization, 4(1): 7–30. https://doi. org/10.1177/135050849741002. Eugenides, Jeffrey. 2002. Middlesex. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fletcher, David, and Mustafa Sarkar. 2013. “Psychological Resilience: A Review and Critique of Definitions, Concepts, and Theory.” European Psychologist, 18(1): 12–23. Fludernik, Monika. 2002. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. Abingdon: Routledge, 2002. Folkman, Susan, and Richard S. Lazarus. 1984. Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. New York: Springer Publishing Company. Gough, Noel. 1993. “Environmental Education, Narrative Complexity and Postmodern Science/fiction”. International Journal of Science Education, 15(5): 607–625. Holling, C.S. 1978. “Myths of ecological stability: resilience and the problem of failure”. In: Studies on crisis management, edited by Smart CF and WT Stanbury, 93–106. Toronto: Butterworth & Co. Ltd. Holling, C.S. 1973. Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems, Annual Review of Ecological Systems, 4: 1–23.

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Joerges, Bernward. 1999. “Do Politics Have Artefacts?” Social Studies of Science, 29(3): 411–431. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/03063129902900300 4 Krippendorff, Klaus. 2013. “Commentary: A Dissenting View on So-called Paradoxes of Reliability Coefficients”. Annals of the International Communication Association, 36(1): 481–499. Kuhlicke, Christian. 2013. “Resilience: a capacity and a myth: findings from an in-depth case study in disaster management research”. Natural Hazards, 67: 61–76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-010-9646 -y Labov, William. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Volume 4 of Conduct and communication, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lehman, Daniel W. 2001. “Mining a rough terrain: Weighing the implications of nonfiction”. Narrative, 9(3): 334–342. Mandelbaum, Maurice. 1967. “A Note on History as Narrative.” History and Theory, 6(3): 413–419. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2504 424 Martin, Emily. 1991. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles”. Signs, 16(3); 485–501. Masten, Ann S. 2014. Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development. New York & London: Guilford Publications. Masten, Ann S., and Jelena Obradović. 2006. “Competence and Resilience in Development”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1094(1): 13–27. Melville, Herman. 2018. Moby-Dick. A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton. Moezzi, Mithra, Kathryn B. Janda, and Sea Rotmann. 2017. “Using Stories, Narratives, and Storytelling in Energy and Climate Change Research”. Energy Research & Social Science, 31: 1–10. Morrison, Toni. 2004. Song of Solomon. New York: Vintage. Polkinghorne, Donald E. 2006. “Narrative Configuration in Qualitative Analysis”. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 8(1): 5–23.

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Prince-Embury, Sandra. 2014. “Review of Resilience Conceptual and Assessment Issues”. In Resilience Interventions for Youth in Diverse Populations, Edited by Sandra Prince-Embury and Donald Saklofske, 13–23. The Springer Series on Human Exceptionality, New York: Springer. Rouse, Joseph. 1990. “The Narrative Reconstruction of Science”. Inquiry, 33(2): 179–196. Schwandt, Thomas A. 2007. The Sage Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Seligman, Martin E. P. 1996. The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children from Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Sheehan, Richard Johnson, and Scott Rode. 1999. “On Scientific Narrative: Stories of Light by Newton and Einstein”. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 13(3): 336–358. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. 1992. Overcoming the Odds: High Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood. New York: Cornell University Press. Werner, Emmy. E. and Ruth S. Smith. 1992 Journey from Childhood to Midlife: Risk, Resiliency, and Recovery. New York: Cornell University Press. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. 1977. Kauai’s Children Come of Age. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. 2001. Journeys from Childhood to Midlife: Risk, Resilience, and Recovery. New York: Cornell University Press. Werner, Emmy E., Jessie M. Bierman, and Fern E. French. 1971. The Children of Kauai: A Longitudinal Study from the Prenatal Period to Age Ten. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. White, Hayden. 1980. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”. Critical Inquiry 7(1): 5–27. Ylijoki, Oili-Helena. 2001. “Master’s Thesis Writing from a Narrative Approach”. Studies in Higher Education, 26(1): 21–34.

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In a project dedicated to the study of resilience, it seems apt to start with an attempt to clarify the meanings of the key concepts of resilience research.1 Use of the term resilience has been traced back to writers from Seneca the Elder to Ovid and Cicero, through Francis Bacon, who first used the term in its modern scientific form in his Sylva Sylvarum (1625), via its first use in connection with disaster recovery by Tomes (Americans in Japan), to finally being popularized in the study of social ecological systems by Holling (Resilience and Stability) and then in psychology by a lengthy list of researchers in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Alexander, Resilience and Disaster 2709–10). The word resilience originates from the Latin verb resilire, to leap back, and is defined in the Oxford Dictionary of English as being “able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions” (Soanes & Stevenson, 1498). The term has been defined for use in various scientific and mathematical fields, for example, in physics, where resilience is considered to be the “ability of a strained body, by virtue of high yield strength and low elastic modulus, to recover its size and form following deformation” (Geller et al., Dictionary 458). Lazarus (qtd. in Fletcher and Sarkar, Psychological Resilience n. pag.) cites the example of elasticity in metals, with a resilient metal bending and bouncing back (instead of breaking) when stressed. When adapted to the biological sciences, the term evolved to incorporate dynamic processes of adjustment and

1

As will be discussed, no single universally agreed upon definition of resilience exists, at least not at the time this research was conducted, 2018–2020.

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transformation, because living things do not merely “spring back” (Kirmayer et al., Healing Traditions 87). Norman Garmezy is generally credited with developing resilience research in psychology; his focus on resistance and growth under adverse circumstances signaled a move away from earlier research in psychopathology, poverty, and traumatic stress (Condly, Resilience in Children 213). This interest in positive adaptation arose during the early 1970s, when Garmezy was conducting a study on children at risk of psychopathology.2 Finding that some disadvantaged children remained competent and failed to display the behavioral problems anticipated of them led Garmezy and his colleagues to ask how it is that certain children develop well in spite of their risk status.3 However, it is Werner and Smith (1971) that are credited with initiating the boom in literature on resilience, beginning with the groundbreaking Kauai Longitudinal Study. Their study identified children who were at risk of psychopathology based on familial and environmental factors. They found that a number of the participants were doing well despite the expectation of negative outcomes (Masten, Resilience in Developing Systems 921), and they began to identify the personal and environmental qualities, or protective factors, present in these children who were deemed ‘resilient.’ The importance of this line of research lay in the fact that it initiated a change in focus from mental illness to mental health and represented a “paradigm shift from looking at risk factors that led to psychological problems to the identification of strengths of an individual” (Richardson, The Metatheory 309). Increasingly, researchers focused on identifying the characteristics of individuals, particularly young people, who thrived while living in difficult circumstances, such as poverty and parental mental illness.4 Examples of such qualities were: an easy temperament, good self-esteem, planning skills, and

2 3 4

See for example, Garmezy, Vulnerability; Garmezy, Competence; Masten and Powell, Resilience Framework. See, Garmezy, Stress; Garmezy et al., Study of Stress; Garmezy and Rutter, Stress. See Garmezy, Resilience in Children; Rutter, Commentary; Werner & Smith, Overcoming.

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a supportive environment inside and outside the family. Thus, the thrust of early research examining resilience was the search for factors that protect an individual from the stressors they encounter and distinguishing between those who adapt to the circumstances and those who succumb to negative environmental factors. Prince-Embury writes that several existing definitions of resilience share a number of features all relating to human strengths, some type of disruption and growth, adaptive coping, and positive outcomes following exposure to adversity. There are also a number of distinctions made in attempts to define this construct. For example, some investigators assume that resilience is located “within a person” (Prince-Embury, Translating Resilience 9). Others propose that there are multiple sources and pathways to resiliency, including social context (e.g., family, external support system). Luthar et al. (The Construct 545) separate the definitions of resilience as a developmental process from that of resiliency5 which is a characteristic of an individual’s personality. Suniya S. Luthar and Dante Cicchetti define resilience as “a dynamic process wherein individuals display positive adaptation despite experiences of significant adversity or trauma” (858). They further write that resilience cannot be interpreted as a characteristic of an individual’s personality, due to the fact that for resilience to occur, there needs to be an “exposure to adversity” followed by “the manifestation of positive adjustment outcomes” (The Construct 858). Similar to Luthar and Cicchetti, Kathryn M. Connor and Jonathan R.T. Davidson proposed that “Resilience is a multidimensional characteristic that varies with context, time, age, gender, and cultural origin, as well as within an individual subjected to different life circumstances” (Connor & Davidson, Development 76). Elsewhere, Ann S. Masten proposes that resilience refers to “a class of phenomena characterized by good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development” (Ordinary Magic 228). Another world-renowned resilience researcher, George A. Bonanno, defines resilience as “the ability of adults in 5

See Block, J. H., & Block, J. The Role of Ego-control and Ego-resiliency in the Organization of Behavior.

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otherwise normal circumstances who are exposed to an isolated and potentially highly disruptive event, such as the death of a close relation or a violent or life-threatening situation, to maintain relatively stable, healthy levels of psychological and physical functioning, as well as the capacity for generative experiences and positive emotions” (Bonanno, Loss, Trauma & Human Resilience 20–21). Michael Rutter underscores the role of protective factors, proposing that “resilience refers to protective factors which modify, ameliorate or alter a person’s response to some environmental hazard that predisposes to a maladaptive outcome” (Rutter, Psychological Resilience 316). And lastly, from a socio-ecological perspective, in the context of exposure to significant adversity, Michael Ungar defines resilience as “both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain their well-being, and their capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these resources to be provided in culturally meaningful ways” (Social Ecology 11). Although these various definitions share certain fundamental premises, the very existence of such a multiplicity may suggest that no one definition is entirely correct. But despite disagreements over which definition may be the final, comprehensive one, researchers do agree on subcategories of resilience research, which can be the key conceptual means of achieving a more unified understanding of the term. One key term with an extremely crucial role in resilience research is protective factor. The concept of a ‘protective factor’ was first systematically developed by Michael Rutter (1985) as “a variable that decreases the likelihood of a negative outcome under adverse conditions” proposing that protective factors have “an interactive relationship with risk factors and thereby provide beneficial effects” (Rutter, Resilience in the Face of Adversity 600). Further research has shown that protective factors include factors such as “characteristics of the child, family, and wider environment that reduce the negative effect of adversity on child outcome” (Masten & Reed, Resilience in Development 88). Protective factors and mechanisms need not be extraordinary for individuals to experience resilience. Masten and Powell refer to “ordinary magic” (A Resilience Framework 15) to

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describe the ability of individuals to overcome significant adversity and hardship with only “the usual human adaptational capabilities and resources, functioning normally” (15), as opposed to rare or exceptional capabilities. These protective factors may reside, write Lewis P. Lipsitt and Jack Demick (48), in the physical (e.g., age, sex, race), interpersonal (e.g., intelligence, personality, values) and sociocultural (e.g., socioeconomic status, religion, roles) aspects of the person as well as physical (e.g., physical locations such as home), interorganismic (e.g., people, pets), and sociocultural (e.g., community, sociohistorical context) aspects of the environment, as may the risk factors. Risk factor is a variable that increases the likelihood of a poor outcome under adverse conditions or, as Tim Rhodes and Linda Cuscik (Love and Intimacy 5) put it, the “potential actuality of harm, the likelihood of which may be assessed.” Where protective factors and mechanisms refer to assets or resources that increase the likelihood of a positive outcome in the face of adverse circumstances, risk factors are usually defined as “measurable characteristic[s] in a group of individuals or their situation that predict[s] negative outcome on specific outcome criteria” (Wright & Masten, Resilience Processes 19). Examples of commonly established risk factors for young people include: low self-esteem, poor physical or mental health, and problematic attachments to family/friends at the individual level; parental mental or physical health problems, patterns of neglect, and sexual or emotional abuse at the familial or social level; and poorly resourced housing, inadequate public transport, and poor schooling or local employment opportunities at the environmental or societal level (Pearce, Risk and Resilience 203–215). Furthermore, Steven J. Condly (Resilience in Children 213) points out that there are different levels of interaction between risk and protective factors that must be recognized for resilience to be understood. These are demarcated into three levels within the literature: individual-level factors (personality characteristics, talents, skills), social-level factors (family and peer network relationships, the degree of support that can be gathered from these relationships), and societal-level factors

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(community, school environment, cultural norms, institutional and other outside supports).6 These levels are meant to be understood as interacting with one another. They act as conceptual tools for research in that they serve to illustrate and identify the diverse influences that may impact resilience processes. For example, in their review of literature on adolescent resilience, Olsson et al. (2003) have identified several protective mechanisms including sociability and intelligence at the individual level; a close relationship with a caring adult and belief in the child at the family level; and socioeconomic status, school experiences, and supportive communities at the social environment level. Resilience research can also be divided up temporally into four waves, undertaken primarily by developmental researchers who approached the study of this construct from different perspectives across time.7 The first wave of research mainly includes those studies that attempted to create a list of traits and environmental characteristics that predicted resilient outcomes. First wave researchers enumerated the resilient qualities within individuals, and measured resilience in its various forms.8 The qualities identified were, as discussed earlier, termed protective factors or resources, and risk factors (Luthar et al., The Construct of Resilience 543–562; Masten, Ordinary Magic 227). It is important to point out that the first wave of researchers also investigated external variables such as family and community. Among adult populations, the resilience factors that have benefitted from the most research attention are social support, self-efficacy, self-esteem, spirituality, and optimism.9 6 7 8 9

See also Greenberg, Promoting Resilience; Olsson et al., Adolescent Resilience. See also Masten, Resilience in Developing Systems; Wright & Masten, Vulnerability and Resilience. See also Masten Resilience in Developing Systems; G. E. Richardson The Metatheory. Since these factors will play a role later on in the narrative analysis, I will briefly explain these terms. Extended clarifications are to be found in the resilience-narrative readings. Social support has been defined as a multifaceted phenomenon involving warm, positive interactions with members of a social network who seek to aid across a variety of life situations (Helgeson & Lopez,

Life Sciences and Narratives of Resilience

The second wave of resilience research moved beyond describing the factors or variables associated with resilience and focused on the adaptive or coping processes that facilitate resilience.10 This wave was characterized by the investigation of processes of resilience or “how” questions. As a result of this focus on processes of resilience, the significance of environmental factors expanded, including interactions between individuals and their environment. In this way, an ecosystemic perspective was encouraged (Waller, Resilience in Ecosystemic Contexts), which acknowledges the interdependence between systemic levels (Stokols, Establishing).11 In light of these findings, research shifted toward identifying ways in which resilience factors can inform

10 11

Social Support 309–330). Self-efficacy is a sense of competence and capability in effectively negotiating a variety of life challenges (Bandura, 200), while the very similar term self-esteem has been defined as the sense of positive value and worth that individuals ascribe to themselves (Baumeister et al., High Self-esteem 20). The term spirituality may be mistaken for religion in general, however religion has been broadly defined as “a search for significance in ways related to the sacred” (Pargament, Psychology of Religion 32). Within this definition, the search for significance is comprised of both meaningful goals and the pathways by which individuals pursue these goals (Pargament, Bitter and Sweet 168-180). Spirituality, then, is the personal search for significance informed by the sacred. As such, spirituality serves several potentially important functions following trauma. It provides a framework for making meaning of life events, and it often conveys a sense of comfort, interpersonal connectedness, wellbeing, and closeness with the divine (cf. Arnette et al., Enhancing Spiritual Wellbeing; Kennedy, Davis, & Taylor, Changes in Spirituality; Pargament & Cummings, Anchored by Faith.). And finally, optimism has been defined as a cognitive process of expecting positive outcomes from participation in a variety of situations (Scheier & Carver, Optimism 219). Subsequent theorists have added that in addition to informing future expectancies, optimism may also appear as a positive explanatory style for past events (Buchanan & Seligman, Afterward 247–252). Therefore, optimism consists of not only positive expectancies about the future, but also positive characterizations of the past, which tend to be stable over time. See Garmezy Children in Poverty. See Luthar, Resilience in Development; Bonanno et al., Weighing the Loss of Disaster; Agaibi & Wilson, Trauma, PTSD and Resilience.

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interventions designed to promote resilience adaptation in groups of at-risk youth and adults. The third wave began with efforts to test ideas about resilience processes through interventions designed to promote resilience, such as the promotion of positive parenting as advocated by Brooks and Goldstein (Raising Resilient Children). In other words, after gaining a clearer conceptualization of the mechanisms behind resilient adaptation in the context of risk, researchers in the third wave of resilience research turned toward developing, implementing, and evaluating preventive interventions designed to promote competence in the face of adversity. The fourth wave of resilience includes discussion of genes, neurobehavioral development, and statistics for a better understanding of the complex processes that lead to resilience (Masten, Resilience in Developing Systems). These studies often focus on a more molecular level, examining how biological processes interact. Concepts generated out of this work include “differential susceptibility” and “sensitivity to context,” which explore the possibility that some children are more susceptible or sensitive to the influence of positive or negative contexts (Prince-Embury, Translating Resilience 16).12 12

In relation to the various waves of research, I need to also briefly discus models of resilience which include the “compensatory model,” the “challenge model,” and the “protective factor of immunity versus vulnerability model” (O’Leary, 425–446) which are equivalents to Masten’s “risk-focused,” “assetfocused” and “process-focused” model of resilience, respectively. These terms will appear in more details in the sections on close readings but very briefly, the compensatory model proposes that resilience has some kind of a neutralizing effect in adverse situations. The compensatory factors (qtd. in Ungar, Constructionist Discourse on Resilience 342) include optimism, empathy, insight, intellectual competence, self-esteem, direction or mission, and determination and perseverance. Contrary to the compensatory model, the challenge model proposes that risk can actually be a mediator towards resilience, granted it is not a high level of risk. This model brings to mind Michael Rutter’s concept of “steeling effect.” And finally, in the protective factor model of resilience, the emphasis is put on the interplay between risk and protective factors.

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In my reviews of resilience literature, I found out that most, if not all, of the definitions of resilience are based around two core factors: the presence of adversity and positive adaptation. Most researchers concur that, for resilience to be demonstrated, both adversity and positive adaptation must be evident (Fletcher et al, Psychological Resilience 13–14). There is further debate about the exact definition of adversity and adaptation. Some researchers (cf. Luthar and Cicchetti, The Construct of Resilience: Implications 858) define adversity as “negative life circumstances,” while others (cf. Jackson, Firtko & Edenborough, Personal Resilience 19) take risk as a synonym for hardship. In the present work, I do not differentiate between mild versus strong or everyday versus severe and traumatic adversities. In the analysis of the narratives, I consider any level of disruption in the characters’ lives to constitute adversity. Turning to the second core concept, positive adaptation has been defined as “behaviorally manifested social competence, or success at meeting stage-salient developmental tasks” (Luthar & Cicchetti, Construct of Resilience 858) or “symptoms related to internal wellbeing” (Masten & Obradovic, Competence and Resilience 15). In order to demonstrate positive adaptation, Luthar and colleagues have asserted that the indicators used to represent this concept must be “appropriate to the adversity examined in terms of the domain assessed and the stringency of criteria used” (qtd. in Fletcher et al., Psychological Resilience 14). My interest in delineating resilience attributes is to clarify the framework of analysis in my close readings, whose deductive steps will be guided by these attributes. This will be explained in more detail in each close reading. My hypothesis is that there will be differing depictions of the nature of these interactions within various narrative forms. In other words, the life sciences and life writing do not share a common understanding of protective factors of resilience. This goes beyond the substantial difference in how researchers approach the concept of resilience in different fields.

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Resilience Research in the Present Project My summary of this chapter has two parts. First, I would like to conclude the section on theories of resilience by briefly listing the key definitions and concepts. For the purpose of the present study, resilience is broadly defined as a dynamic developmental process of adaptation in the face of adverse circumstances. Risk is defined as any experience that disrupts the individual’s normal developmental process. In the analysis section, the focus on resilience will be limited to these questions: Which protective factors, mediators, or risk factors are observed, how are they justified, and what is their implication? Do individual narratives of resilience follow the same structures of arguments? Do the survivors narrate social support as a prominent factor? How important is the role of the individual in resilience stories? Secondly, scientists unanimously agree about the basic structure that is necessary for resilience to occur: the presence of an adversity, a developmental process, and a concluding (resilient) outcome. This being said, each of the three stages can be further broken down into smaller analytical segments, attributes, and factors, which are diverse even among scientists within the same discipline. Therefore, perhaps a very basic narrative is resilience is bouncing back from adversities. This was the first definition of resilience I came upon three years ago, and after three years of searching for a better, more comprehensive, more all-inclusive definition, I do believe in a slightly different master narrative. As this project will further show, I believe a more comprehensive definition of resilience would be self-awareness. I will explain and expand on this idea throughout the project. In the following section, I will discuss how human resilience is conceived of in literary and cultural American Studies and will defend the need to take resilience research to the humanities and look at this field from a narrative perspective. In other words, I will discuss why it is not only a possible approach but rather necessary to study resilience as a narrative.

Life Sciences and Narratives of Resilience

Bibliography Agaibi, Christine E., and John P. Wilson. 2005. “Trauma, PTSD, and resilience: A review of the literature”. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 6(3): 195–216. Alexander, D. E. 2013. Resilience and disaster risk reduction: an etymological journey. Natural hazards and earth system sciences, 13(11): 2707–2716. Arnette, Natalie C., et al. 2007. “Enhancing Spiritual Well-being among Suicidal African American Female Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence”. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 63(10): 909–924. Bandura, Albert. 1977. “Self-efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change”. Psychological Review, 84(2): 191–215. Baumeister, Roy F., et al. 2003. “Does High Self-esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles?” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4(1): 1–44. Block, Jeanne H., & Jack Block. 2014. “The Role of Ego-control and Ego-resiliency in the Organization of Behavior”. In Development of Cognition, Affect, and Social Relations: The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, vol. 13, edited by W. A. Collins, 49–112. New York: Psychology Press, e-book. Bonanno, George A. 2004. “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive after Extremely Aversive Events?” American Psychologist, 59(1): 20–28. Bonanno, George A., et al. 2010. “Weighing the Costs of Disaster: Consequences, Risks, and Resilience in Individuals, Families, and Communities”. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 11(1): 1–49. Bronfenbrenner, Urie. 1979. The Ecology of Human Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brooks, Robert, and Sam Goldstein. 2001. Raising Resilient Children: Fostering Strength, Hope, and Optimism in Your Child. Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books. Buchanan, Gregory M. and Martin EP Seligman. 1995. “Afterword: The Future of the Field.” In Explanatory Style, edited by Gregory

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M. Buchanan and Martin EP Seligman, 247–252, Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum. Condly, Steven J. 2006. “Resilience in Children: A Review of Literature with Implications for Education”. Urban Education, 41(3): 211–236. Connor, Kathryn M. and Jonathan R.T. Davidson. 2003. “Development of a New Resilience Scale: The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC)”. Depression and Anxiety, 18(2): 76–82. Davis, Mary C., Linda Luecken, and Kathryn Lemery-Chalfant. 2009. “Resilience in Common Life: Introduction to the Special Issue.” Journal of Personality, 77(6): 1637–1644. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14676494.2009.00595.x Davydov, Dmitry M., et al. 2010. “Resilience and Mental Health”. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(5): 479–495. Fletcher, David, and Mustafa Sarkar. 2013. “Psychological Resilience: A Review and Critique of Definitions, Concepts, and Theory.” European Psychologist, 18(1): 12–23. Garmezy, Norman and Michael Rutter, editors. 1983. Stress, Coping, and Development in Children. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Garmezy, Norman, Ann S. Masten, and Auke Tellegen. 1984. “The Study of Stress and Competence in Children: A Building Block for Developmental Psychopathology”. Child Development, 55(1): 97–111. Garmezy, Norman. 1971. “Vulnerability Research and the Issue of Primary Prevention”. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 41(1): 101–116. Garmezy, Norman. 1973. “Competence and Adaptation in Adult Schizophrenic Patients and Children at Risk”. In Schizophrenia: The First Ten Dean Award Lectures, edited by S. R. Dean, 163–204. New York: MSS Information. Garmezy, Norman. 1991. “Resilience in Children’s Adaptation to Negative Life Events and Stressed Environments”. Pediatric Annals, 20(9): 459–466. Garmezy, Norman. 1993. “Children in Poverty: Resilience Despite Risk”. Psychiatry, 56(1): 127–136.

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Geller, Elizabeth et al. 2003. McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Engineering, (2nd ed.), London, UK: McGraw-Hill. Greenberg, Mark T. 2006. “Promoting Resilience in Children and Youth: Preventive Interventions and Their Interface with Neuroscience”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1094(1): 139–150. Helgeson, Vicki S. and Lindsey Lopez. 2010. “Social Support and Growth Following Adversity”. In Handbook of Adult Resilience, edited by J. W. Reich, A. J. Zautra, & J. S. Hall, 309–330. New York: Guilford Press. Holling, C.S. 1973. Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems, Annual Review of Ecological Systems, 4: 1–23. Jackson, Debra, Angela Firtko, and Michel Edenborough. 2007. “Personal Resilience as a Strategy for Surviving and Thriving in the Face of Workplace Adversity: a Literature Review”. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 60(1): 1–9. Kennedy, James E. et al. 1998. “Changes in Spirituality and Well-being Among Victims of Sexual Assault”. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37(2): 322–328. Kirmayer Laurence J. et al. 2011. “Rethinking Resilience from Indigenous Perspectives”. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 56(2) Summer 2011: 84–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/070674371105600203 Lipsitt, Lewis P. and Jack Demick. 2012. “Theory and Measurement of Resilience: Views from Development”. In The Social Ecology of Resilience, edited by Michael Ungar, 43–52. New York, NY: Springer. Luthar, Suniya S. 2006. “Resilience in Development: A Synthesis of Research Across Five Decades”. In Developmental Psychopathology: Risk, Disorder, and Adaptation, edited by Dante Cicchetti & Donald J. Cohen, 739–795. Hoboken, J: John Wiley & Sons Inc. Luthar, Suniya S., and Dante Cicchetti. 2000. “The Construct of Resilience: Implications for Interventions and Social Policies”. Development and Psychopathology, 12(4): 857–885. Luthar, Suniya S., Dante Ciccheti and Bronwyn Becker. 2000. “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work”. Child Development, 71(3): 543–62.

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Masten, Ann S. 2007. “Resilience in Developing Systems: Progress and Promise as the Fourth Wave Rises”. Development and Psychopathology, 19(3): 921–930. Masten, Ann S. 2011. “Resilience in Children Threatened by Extreme Adversity: Frameworks for Research, Practice, and Translational Synergy”. Development and Psychopathology, 23(2): 493–506. Masten, Ann S. 2014. Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development. New York: Guilford Press. Masten, Ann S., and Jelena Obradović. 2006. “Competence and Resilience in Development”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1094(1): 13–27. Masten, Ann S., and Jennifer L. Powell. 2003. “A Resilience Framework for Research, Policy and Practice”. In Resilience and Vulnerability: Adaptation in the Context of Childhood Adversities, edited by Suniya S. Luthar, 1–25. Cambridge: Campridge University Press. O’Leary, Virginia E. 2010. “Strength in the Face of Adversity: Individual and Social Thriving”. Journal of Social Issues, 54(2): 425–446. https://d oi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1998.tb01228.x Olsson Craig A. et al. 2003. “Adolescent Resilience: A Concept Analysis”. Journal of Adolescence, 26(1): 1–11. Pargament, Kenneth I. 1997. The Psychology of Religion and Coping. New York: Guilford Press. Pargament, Kenneth I. 2002. “The Bitter and the Sweet: An Evaluation of the Costs and Benefits of Religiousness”. Psychological Inquiry, 13(3): 168–181. Pargament, Kenneth I., and Jeremy Cummings. 2010. “Anchored by Faith: Religion as a Resilience Factor”. In Handbook of Adult Resilience, edited by John W. Reich, Alex J. Zautra and John Stuart Hall, 193–210. New York: Guilford Press. Pearce, Jenny J. “Risk and Resilience: A Focus on Sexually Exploited Young People”. In Growing Up with Risk, edited by Betsy Thom, Rosemary Sales and Jenny J. Pearce, 203–217. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Prince-Embury, Sandra. “Translating Resilience Theory for Assessment and Application with Children, Adolescents, and Adults: Conceptual

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Issues”. In Resilience in Children, Adolescents, and Adults, edited by Sandra Prince-Embury & Don Saklofske, New York: Springer: 9–16. Rhodes, Tim, and Linda Cusick. 2000. “Love and Intimacy in Relationship Risk Management: HIV Positive People and Their Sexual Partners”. Sociology of Health & Illness, 22(1): 1–26. Richardson, Glenn E. “The Metatheory of Resilience and Resiliency”. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58(3): 307–321. Rutter, Michael. 1985. “Resilience in the Face of Adversity: Protective Factors and Resistance to Psychiatric Disorder”. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 147(6): 598–611. Rutter, Michael. 1986. “Psychosocial Resilience and Protective Mechanisms”. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 57(3): 316–331. Rutter, Michael. 1990. “Commentary: Some Focus and Process Considerations Regarding Effects of Parental Depression on Children”. Developmental Psychology, 26(1): 60–67. https://doi.org/10. 1037/h0092669 Scheier, Michael F. and Charles S. Carver. 1985. “Optimism, Coping, and Health: Assessment and Implications of Generalized Outcome Expectancies”. Health Psychology, 4(3): 219–247. Soanes, Catherine, and A. Stevenson. 2006 Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd ed., Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Stokols, Daniel. 1992 “Establishing and Maintaining Healthy Environments: Toward a Social Ecology of Health Promotion”. American Psychologist, 47(1): 6–22. Ungar, Michael. 2004 “A Constructionist Discourse on Resilience: Multiple Contexts, Multiple Realities Among At-risk Children and Youth”. Youth & Society, 35(3): 341–365. Ungar, Michael. 2012. The Social Ecology of Resilience: A Handbook of Theory and Resilience. Boston, MA: Springer. Waller, Margaret A. 2001 “Resilience in Ecosystemic Context: Evolution of the Concept”. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 71(3): 290–297. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. 1992. Overcoming the Odds: High Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Windle, Gill, Kate M. Bennet and Jane Noyes. 2011. “A Methodological Review of Resilience Measurement Scales”. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 9(8). https://doi.org/10.1186/1477-7525-9-8 Wright, Margaret O. and Ann S. Masten. 1997. “Vulnerability and Resilience in Young Children: Development and Syndromes”. In Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol.1, edited by S. I. Greenspan, J. D. Osofsky, & K. Pruett, 202–224. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Wright, Margaret O. and Ann S. Masten. 2005. “Resilience Processes in Development”. In Handbook of Resilience in Children, edited by Sam Goldstein and Robert B. Brooks, 17–37. Boston, MA: Springer.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

Resilience has become a buzzword in various forms of media1 outside the scientific realm. It would take a whole project to merely name the self-help books2 on building resilience; for example, in the same style in which Elisabeth Gilbert in her Big Magic encourages the reader to “create whatever causes a revolution in your heart,” in Resilience: Hard Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life, Eric Greiten writes on the ordinariness of resilience. Aside from adult experiences, childhood3 years are a major topic in these books. For example, in Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood, Wayne Muller follows in the footsteps of the advocates of the challenge model of resilience,4 and suggests that our woundedness contains powerful resources for healing and spiritual growth. Martin Seligman’s5 studies demonstrate that pessimistic children are at much higher risk of becoming depressed than optimistic children. His purpose in The 1 2 3

4 5

Nonfiction and fictional novels, autobiographies and memoirs, poems and short stories, video games and magazine articles, talk shows and so forth. See, for example, Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. On the theme of childhood resilience, see also: Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein, Raising Resilient Children: Fostering Strength, Hope, and Optimism in your Child. Cf. chapter two. See for example, V. E. O’Leary, Strength in the face of adversity: Individual and social thriving. See, The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program.

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Optimistic Child is to teach parents how to instill in their children a sense of optimism and personal mastery. He proposes that selfesteem comes from mastering challenges, overcoming frustration, and experiencing individual achievement. Seligman’s self-help book offers a concrete plan6 of action based on techniques of self-evaluation and social interaction. Aside from self-help books, the most accessible platform for the public might be the movies.7 From early in the history of cinema, resilience was present as a concept, if not as a terminological marker. Frank Capra’s American Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life may be the most obvious example. It stars James Stewart as the iconic George Bailey, a selfless man who has sacrificed all his dreams to help others in need. However, his long list of altruistic deeds just prolongs his quest for happiness, leaving him depressed and suicidal. Magically, however, an angel shows him a parallel world in which he had never existed, and seeing how things would have been without him changes his mind and saves him. The movie portrays the two concepts of family and religion as the main factors in resilience. From a different angle, Roberto Benigni’s Italian comedy drama Life Is Beautiful follows a comical and optimistic Jewish Italian bookshop owner, Guido Orefice (played by Benigni himself) and his family during the 1930s, introducing the idea of perseverance as willpower. Guido shows this time and again, by winning the love of Dora and protecting his son in the concentration camp. More recently, in 2007, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir of the same name, depicts Bauby’s (Mathieu Amalric) life after he suffers a stroke that leaves him with an incredibly rare condition known as “locked-in syndrome.” This not only paralyzes him from the neck down, but leaves him unable to speak. Yet despite his incredibly limited circumstances, Bauby, with the help of his speech therapist, Henriette (Marie-Josee

6 7

On the theme of planned resiliency see also: Andrew Statte and Karen Reivich, The Resilience Factor: 7 Essential Skills. Some examples include: 2009 The Blind Side, 1998 Hope Floats, 1998 The Thin Blue Line, The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Forrest Gump (1994).

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

Croze), utilizes his left eye, the only part of his body over which he retains control, to communicate with others. On the same thematic level, Jacques Audiard’s French–Belgian romantic drama film Rust and Bone (2012) based on Craig Davidson’s short story collection of the same title, follows two people who are faced with challenges and who become close to each other while dealing with them. Furthermore, the theme of resilience has also been portrayed regarding LGBT communities, for example, in the 2017 movie Call Me By Your Name, where we have the emphasis once again on the role of a supportive family in times of distress (in the case of this movie, the character’s discomfort at being in love with the male guest).8 Regarding this medium, as the very few examples illustrate, the role of family and one’s self-efficacy and motivation have been the core resilience-related themes. Chaplin’s Modern Times (1939) could even be read in this way, at a stretch. Among the various media, novels are the least discussed regarding resilience, perhaps because it appears that fictionalized representations of resilience can be refuted as non-realistic with little effort. However, one could also argue that the underlying theme in human life in general is a quest for growth and happiness, and therefore that every fictional text or rather any novel is in one way or another about resilience, perseverance, grit, or hardiness. Why then, does the number of studies on the proximity of fictional narratives to themes of resilience remain so small? Is this a reflection of the age-old dispute between life writing and life sciences on the untruthfulness of fiction? Or is it due to the ‘epidemic of trauma’ and the public and scholarly infatuation with trauma narratives? Whatever the reason, this field is very slowly starting to grow, and as much as I am not the first to either defend or initiate

8

The aforementioned list excludes self-evidently resilience-themed movies such as Resilience (2006), which is subtitled: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope or the 2006 movie The Pursuit of Happiness, Gabriele Muccino’s biographical drama, based on Chris Gardner’s best-selling memoir of the same name.

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it, I will provide some very inconspicuous9 examples to illustrate my initial claims regarding how commonplace the concept of resilience is, and how distinct its various exemplars are in fictional texts. Many novels have endured through decades due to their timeless themes, among which are Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and the works of many Russian novelists (for example, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Ivan Turgenev, to name but a few), which explored complex philosophical and theological concepts. Regarding the topic of the present project, quite candidly, choosing a particular novel to study resilience is both simple and at the same time very arduous. It is simple since there are hundreds of stories about individuals or communities that have gone through minor or major hardships and come out of them successfully,10 therefore every story can be looked at from a resilience perspective. However, is that how resilience is defined? We are, time and again, faced with the ongoing question regarding the definition of resilience. As was indicated earlier, there is no single definition that all scholars agree on. Rather what is commonly subscribed to are the key variables or factors, which include: the presence of (an) adversity, protective factors, risk factors, and mediators/moderators of resilience, among others. My voyage into the world of the novel is therefore an attempt to portray various representations of these resilience factors and key variables, the preferred models, and evidence that resilience is a trait, a process, or an outcome. Furthermore, my purpose of studying novels is not to determine whether or not they primarily concern resilience, but rather to show that novels, as one of the most accessible and popular forms of modern culture, have been and 9

10

In this project, by ‘inconspicuous examples’ I am referring to those novels that are not implicitly studied from the resilience perspective and are popular or well received due to other criteria, such as literary prominence and cultural relevance or are pioneers in a particular style of writing. I also chose novels from very diverse periods to point out that narratives of resilience did not start with the scientific study of resilience, and go further back than the 1970s. In the sense of positive developmental process, either returning to homeostasis and restoring equilibrium or managing to grow out of the adverse experience.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

are still portraying a theme that the sciences claim as their own, or as an area of research restricted to the neurobiologists, or as a new science in general. I have therefore confined my consideration to a very limited number of texts, which I use as examples to, on the one hand, disavow the view that resilience is a new topic, a merely scientific matter, and a ‘magic ordinary’ for everyone alike, and on the other hand, to widen the hermeneutic circle of resilience studies.

Reading for Resilience in Narratives Although there has in recent years been a certain interest in creating the field of resilience narratives,11 all attempts so far have been limited in scope and spectrum. Among the very few examples of this approach, Maria Fernandez San Miguel, in her article titled Towards a Theoretical Approach to the Literature of Resilience looks into E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975) as a case study. “Without claiming a unified field theory” (San Miguel, 153) to explain her hypothesis that literary texts may be profitably discussed from the perspective of resilience, her paper draws on psychological theories of resilience and psychoanalytical concepts to reflect on Ragtime’s “alternative approach to human suering and trauma response” (San Miguel, 153). San Miguel contends that Ragtime emphasizes the characters’ ability to absorb the damage produced by a society governed by prejudices. She concludes that Ragtime renounces a definition of trauma where the emphasis is on a long-lasting disease-like condition from which it is almost impossible to recover. She then argues that the novel’s thematic and formal focus is rather on resilience and the capacity to “overcome immobilization, helplessness, and passivity in the face of insidious traumatization” (San Miguel, 164). In Ragtime, according to San Miguel, trauma is portrayed as a “force” that mediates “a transformation in which not just negative symptoms but also positive survival strategies may be developed” (San Miguel, 164). Resilience and 11

See, Susie O’Brien, Resilience Stories.

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its factors are further represented in the narrative through a number of strategies that evoke the phenomenon formally, such as the use of irony and humor, metafictionality, the creation of an unplaceable collective narrator, and the elaboration of a fast-paced, seamless, and apparently detached narrative style. More importantly, through the analysis of Ragtime as a case study, her paper argues for the existence of resilience fiction, opening the door towards a new theoretical approach to what may be termed “the literature of resilience,” which she believes was first mentioned by Angelica W. Lawson. Lawson, quoting Tusaie and Dyer in the abstract to her 2006 dissertation on Resistance and Resilience in the Work of Four Native American Authors, writes that: Resilience literature as a concept in literary criticism does not yet exist, but the construct of resilience as theorized in psychological research ‘extends from the 1800’s to the present’ and focuses on how individuals and communities have adapted, survived, and even thrived despite adversity. (3) According to Lawson’s survey of the literature on theories of cultural resilience as it applies specifically to Native Americans, Iris HeavyRunner (now Iris PrettyPaint) is at the forefront of this discussion. In her work with tribal colleges and student retention, HeavyRunner identified a number of factors that contribute to personal and cultural resilience in Native American cultures. Speaking of Native American traditions and fostering resilience, in an article authored jointly with Sebastian J. Morris, HeavyRunner writes: Cultural resilience is a relatively new term, but it is a concept that predates the so called ‘discovery’ of our people […] [our] traditional process is what contemporary researchers, educators, and social service providers are now calling fostering resilience. (1) Those traditional processes include community support and storytelling. “Thus, resilience is not new to our people; it is a concept that has been taught for centuries. The word is new; the meaning is old” (HeavyRunner and Morris, Traditional 1). In describing traditional processes, she and Morris outline specific “core values, beliefs, and

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

behaviors” (2). These include spirituality and the interconnectedness of all things. They claim these traditional processes have helped Native people survive despite hardship and trauma. Certainly, Native Americans have a history of trauma due to the colonization of their country. Yet, despite these hardships, Native Americans have adapted and continue to demonstrate cultural resilience. Resilience manifests itself in all aspects of their culture, including literature. It is a literature that grows out of the insistence of Native people on maintaining their culture and core values. These values, largely contained within the oral tradition, are present in Native American written literature. Indeed, songs, stories, and prayers have sustained them. Despite massive change and great loss, these aspects of Native American culture are a part of and contribute to resilience. According to HeavyRunner and Morris: Ceremonies and rituals, humor, oral tradition, family, and support networks are essential protective strategies. These are the things that have kept us strong […] These resources foster our cultural resilience. (HeavyRunner and Morris 8–9) Lawson believes that “the presence of aesthetics and ethics from the oral tradition in Native American literature is evidence of and demonstrates resilience” (49). Against this background, she attempts to develop a theory of “resilience literature” to address and highlight those aspects of Native literature. African literature has also underscored the need for literary studies of resilience. For example, in A Literary Exploration of Trauma and Resilience in Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope, Ina Cloete and Nelson Mlambo talk about applying trauma and resilience theory as “a way of accounting for the challenges, realities and hopes faced by 21st century African states and citizens” (92) and argue that: Literary theory has to address itself to the issues and concerns raised in fiction and that it is through balancing the traumatic realities of life and how the ordinary people resiliently face these challenges that African literature can truly mirror. (92)

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Cloete and Mlambo believe that Tagwira’s novel reflects on the “hardships and trauma endured by the characters and how they come up with survival strategies that enable them to reconstruct their lives and hope for a better future” (92). Analyzing the novel, they underscore how the writer emphasizes the “sense of agency, fortitude and apt capability to find humor and positivity in the midst of the drudgery of life” (95). They also propose that Tagwira’s novel represents what Gerald Vizenor has termed “survivance.” Although the term is rather ambiguous,12 it is commonly used to refer to a “combination of survival and resistance”, which Cloete and Mlambo propose as being portrayed through Onai, the main female character in Tagwira’s novel. My third example is Dana Phillips’ study of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013) in her study Collapse, resilience, stability and sustainability. Phillips contends that: One might be tempted to argue, if one were an environmental historian, that collapse and sustainability are in something like a dialectical relationship, with stability and resilience serving as mediating terms. (140) Going through the first book, Oryx and Crake, she focuses on Snowman and his horrible experiences as apparently (though not really) the sole survivor of a global pandemic. What makes reading Snowman’s situation bearable for the reader, writes Phillips, is “Atwood’s unfailingly jaunty and often salacious sense of humor” (151) – something that was also mentioned by San Miguel in the previous work I discussed.

12

In Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, Vizenor defines survivance as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name” (vii). He proposes that “Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry” (vii). However, in his 2008 essay Aesthetics of Survivance, Vizenor describes survivance as “the heritable right of succession or reversion of an estate” (1). In her The Mechanics of Survivance in Indigenously-Determined Video-Games: Invaders and Never Alone, Deborah L. Madsen interprets survivance as a combination of survival and active resistance.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

Another work on the theme of resilience related to sustainability would be Resilience Stories: Narratives of Adaptation, Refusal, and Compromise, by Susie O’Brien. Referring to the UN Rio+20 Conference held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012 and entitled The Future We Want, she recites the definition presented at the conference as “a strategy of adaptation that will enable us to shape ‘the future we want’ rather than fatalistically succumb to disaster and impoverishment due to climate change and other socioecological challenges” (43). Despite their recent popularity, she contends that there is nothing new about resilience stories by referring to a 2001 essay, “Une littérature de résilience?” in which Angelo Gianfrancesco reviews the emergence of the theme of resilience in nineteenth-century literature (O’Brien, 44). In authors ranging from Dickens to Hugo, he traces the recurrence of narratives focused on characters’ – generally children’s – transformation through adversity. In each of these examples, “after much suffering, [the children] moved up in the world by dint of hard work, merit, and honesty, achieving good positions and whatever happiness, comfort, and respect one could ask for in this world” (qtd. in O’Brien, Resilience Stories 45). I agree with O’Brien’s proposition that examples taken from Dickens or Hugo cannot do justice to the more recent definitions of resilience where not only individual qualities but also – and rather more importantly as Michael Ungar formulates in his The Social Ecology of Resilience – socioecological factors are considered. Against this background, it may be fruitless to return to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), or The Great Gatsby (1925) from the perspective of resilience studies, though I (positively) doubt if it has been done previously. However, since my expertise lies in American literature and culture, and for the purpose of presenting prototypical examples, my close reading is focused on four

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other (whether they are all also ‘great’ is admittedly quite disputable13 ) American Novels: Firstly, the first American Novel: The Power of Sympathy or The Triumph of Nature (William Hill Brown, 1789), written in the epistolary format, claiming in its preface to “represent the specious causes, and to expose the fatal consequences of seduction; to inspire the female mind with a principle of self-complacency and to promote the economy of human life.” Most probably no one remembers The Power of Sympathy, but it was arguably a milestone in American literature: the first real novel that was uniquely American. At the surface level, there is no clear relation, either thematically or formally, between the novel and the topic of human resilience. However, a close reading of the text reveals another underlying image. In line with Raymond Williams’14 take on how keywords evolve, resilience enjoys multiple meanings, including one of resistance, which I will argue is a theme of implied significance in The Power of Sympathy. Secondly, I consider what is undoubtedly one of the greatest American Novels: Moby-Dick or The Whale (1851), in which Herman Melville, “makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage.”15 The book has been studied from innumerable perspectives,16 thematically, formally, and stylistically,

13

14 15

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No doubt Moby-Dick and Song of Solomon belong to the category of Great American Novels; however, The Power of Sympathy might be, as Herbert Ross Brown put it, in his edition of The Power of Sympathy (Boston, 1961), the “first and worst” (iii) – not only for literary critics, but also the average reader! Nevertheless, scholars mostly agree that it was the first novel written by an American author about American life, entitling it to the title of first American novel. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised Edition. Taken from Kennedy, Randy, “The Ahab Parallax: ‘Moby Dick’ and the Spill,” New York Times, accessed July 10, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/weeki nreview/13kennedy.html. This will be discussed in depth in the section on Moby-Dick.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

though only superficially in terms of the theme of resilience. MobyDick is, fundamentally, a revenge tragedy. It’s about one man’s maniacal obsession with vengeance. I propose that instead of obsessing over Ahab’s infatuation with the white whale (as a symbolic representation of the lack of adaptive skills), one can examine Ahab’s maniacal obsession, his thirst for vengeance, or his obsession with defeating the whale from the other side of the resilience bridge: as an illustration of the resilience paradox. I will read Melville’s characterization of Ahab as a quintessential example of how strength can be negative. In my reading, Ahab does indeed show high levels of resilience, however, these levels are too high to be positive or constructive anymore, and instead his superhuman courage destroys him and his crew. Thirdly, I will read one of the most widely read and reviewed books by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1978). In view of the literary – not to mention cultural, social, and historical – importance of this narrative, I believe it to be more than worthwhile to analyze the theme of resilience in this novel. Unquestionably, this outstanding novel speaks for itself, or, as readers and critics alike have repeatedly confirmed, it speaks for the identity of women and is an outspoken example of anti-racism. However, as is the case with the previous novels, there has as yet been no attempt to read the text from the perspective of resilience narratives. I will show how, among the multifarious readings of the novel, the theme of ‘flight as a means of escape’ alludes to coping mechanisms and resiliency. I will further interpret the key role played by identity and belonging as resilience factors in the contexts of African-American cultural heritage. My last reading will be of one of the most fiercely debated American novels and the 2002 winner of a Pulitzer Prize,17 Middlesex (2002). If Melville in Moby-Dick sets up an anthology of whaling, Jeffrey Eugenides builds his collection of Greekness. This novel follows almost a decade after Eugenides’ astonishing debut, The Virgin Suicides, is a reflection on sex and death, and considers the links between sex, life, and 17

Among many texts written about Middlesex, to my knowledge as of 2019, only one was broadly disparaging! See, Samuel Cohen The Novel in a Time of Terror.

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inheritance around themes such as racial tension, family problems, religion, and incest. I will argue that the main theme of Middlesex is human resilience, and different kinds of resilience for that matter, over multiple generations and regarding not only personal traumas, but also adversities of real historical significance.

Power of Sympathy and Resistance The Power of Sympathy has been called the first uniquely American novel.18 In the tradition of early American fiction, William Hill Brown’s work was also influenced by the Puritan sermons of the time, which were all about rigid morality. However, according to Leslie A. Fiedler, there are deeper influences that helped shape early American novels. He believes that early American fiction was directly influenced by British fiction writers: The novel proper could not be launched until some author imagined a prose narrative in which the Seducer and the Pure Maiden were brought face to face in a ritual combat destined to end in marriage or death; the form and its mythology were born together, in the works of Samuel Richardson. (Fiedler, Love and Death 62) It is Richardson’s epistolary style that is repeated in the work of Susanna Rowson (Sarah: or, The Exemplary Wife), Hannah Foster (The Coquette: or, The History of Eliza Wharton), and William Hill Brown (exemplified here by The Power of Sympathy). Richardson’s novels are also based around the theme of seduction, or attempted seduction, which are characteristic of the American sentimental novel. A sentimental novel then follows a standard pattern: a stereotypical seduction featuring a set of characters from different social classes (the heroine always from the underprivileged group), used to preach the benefits of virtue and 18

Putting aside all the debates surrounding the definitions of a novel, or ‘American’ or ‘the first American Novel’, Brown’s work achieved the title by majority vote, although he was not recognized as the novel’s author until 1894.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

the vices of succumbing to temptation. It is to this sentimentalist end that Brown writes in his preface to the novel: In Novels which expose no particular Vice, and which recommend no particular Virtue, the fair Reader, though she may find amusement, must finish them without being impressed with any particular idea: So that if they are harmless, they are not beneficial. Of the Letters before us, it is necessary to remark that this errour on each side has been avoided—the dangerous Consequences of SEDUCTION are exposed, and the Advantages of FEMALE EDUCATION set forth and recommended. (Preface to The Power of Sympathy 5) Alongside Brown’s practice of sentimentality, and more importantly for my argument, comes his emphasis on the “fatal Consequences of SEDUCTION” (Power of Sympathy, emphasis in original). Both of the novels ascribed to William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Ira and Isabella (1807), mainly focus on the topic of incest. While in The Power of Sympathy, the characters commit suicide before any actual acts of intimacy take place, in Brown’s second (and last) novel, Ira and Isabella (1807), the characters marry and later discover they are siblings.19 A critical reading can point to the possibility that this repeated theme might reflect the fear of the dreadful condition incest symbolizes: the absence of a well-defined social system. As Anne Dalke wrote in her Original Vice: The Political Implications of Incest in the Early American Novel: The first American novelist, William Hill Brown, the first best-selling American novelist, Susanna Rowson, and the first American gothicist, Sarah Sayward Wood, as well as a medley of less known writers (some of them anonymous), demanded in their fiction the careful establishment, and as careful maintenance, of social and economic difference and responsibility.” (188) Dalke justifies her theory by recounting the common storyline of the novels of the time: a male character of high social rank selects a wife 19

The theme of incest is also prominent in the works of other authors from the period. For example, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown.

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from a class beneath his own; he discovers somehow that she is either his bastard half-sister or daughter! A resilience reading of such an epistolary seduction novel reveals a few themes that support the role of contextual factors in individual responses to adverse events, blanketed within thematizations of virtuous conduct and ironical tales of incest. The story opens in Boston. Thomas Harrington is exchanging letters with his friend Jack Worthy. Harrington confesses that he is passionately in love with a young woman named Harriot Fawcet, and the story revolves around the fate of these characters, accompanied by multiple similar subplots. The story is told in an epistolary style, and, in the end, it is revealed that Harrington and Harriot are half brother and sister. In despair at the horrific news, they both commit suicide. Alongside the main plot, four subplots unfold, all based on stories of seduction, incest, and, in most cases, the seduced female character’s suicide. Brown’s characters, or rather Brown himself, then comment on the events, either in conversation with each other or via letters. These comments are the sources of my arguments. For example, Mrs. Holmes’ letters to Myra Harrington are rich with social commentary. In one instance, Mrs. Holmes presents an interesting perspective on the possibility that a young woman might be responsible for her own ruin. “[…] when a woman, by her imprudence, exposes herself, she is accessary; for though her heart may be pure, her conduct is a tacit invitation to the Seducer” (Brown 69). To avoid such catastrophic consequences, Mrs. Holmes states, “What I mean […] is to impress the minds of females with a principle of self correction” (60). To this she adds, “Suspect him, therefore of insincerity and treachery, who sacrifices truth to complaisance, and advises you to the pursuit of an object, which would tend to his advantage” (7–8). Her advice continues, “Do not be apprehensive of acquiring that title [learned lady], but remember that the knowledge which I wish you to acquire, is necessary to adorn your many virtues and amiable qualifications” (14). This is how the Power of Sympathy becomes a story of resistance. It is a narrative on how individuals, women or men, need to be in control of their faculties in order to resist temptations. Brown maintains that such resistance can, and should, be achieved through education. Although

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

the story targets women and how they can resist temptations of society, my reading points to Brown’s targeting both genders. As for women, in his magazine writings, Brown indicates that women are “essential intellectuals for the natural aristocracy,” and in this novel Mrs. Holmes plays that role. She sends many didactic letters to Harrington’s sister, Myra, discussing topics ranging from education to religion. As part of a class of “learned ladies” who are “justly celebrated as ornaments to society, and an honour to the sex” (Brown, 56). Within the pages of Brown’s novel, Holmes acts as such an intellectual: she is the first to disclose that Harrington and Harriot are blood relatives, and she works to stop their impending marriage. One of the main topics in her letters, though, is that of education. In letter XI, Mrs. Holmes writes to Myra about her day, relating conversations between Mrs. Bourn and Worthy about education and reading since “It is a matter of more importance” (26). Her letter discusses at length how “Novels, not regulated on the chaste principles of true friendship, rational love, and connubial duty, appear to me totally unfit to form the minds of women, of friends, or of wives” (28). In other words, for a woman to be well-educated, she has to be reading the books which are not “just calculated to kill time—to attract the attention of the reader for an hour, but leave not one idea on the mind,” rather those books “which contain excellent sentiments” (29). She proposes that such readings not only train the mind in rationality, friendship, and loyalty, but will ultimately also affect the woman’s self-esteem as she gains more knowledge about the world. Learning about the world is particularly crucial in the Puritan society of Brown’s audience, as it is a world in which one should not make mistakes, particularly if one is a woman. Puritan preaching of virtue and chastity did not leave room for giving in to temptations, therefore women are encouraged to learn how to resist temptations by reading about it in books. Reading for Brown’s readers is deemed to be self-education and second-hand experiencing: a substitute for experiences that would in real life be fatal in such a society, especially if women are confined to a limited “store of knowledge” (Brown, 31).

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Mrs. Holmes further voices how true knowledge of the world should include specific topics such as faithfulness of friendship, constancy of true love, and honesty as the best policy. In short, according to Mr. Holmes, “Those books which teach us a knowledge of the world are useful to form the minds of females, and ought therefore to be studied” (Brown, 34). The choice of topics appears more readily justified when we consider the historical context of this novel: Puritanism. However, these topics are not necessarily restricted to the puritan mindset, because they are also suggestive of interpersonal skills that promote personality resilience. “The ‘prosocial’ personality traits may be grouped under the general concepts of sociability, emotional expressiveness, and interpersonal understanding” (Skodol, Resilient Personality 112). Therefore, in order for a woman to have knowledge of the world, reading and gaining second-hand experiences are encouraged, which in turn strengthen her ego resiliency. The emphasis placed on the role of reading constructively goes hand in hand with the role of personality resilience or ego resilience that I discussed in chapter two as a resilience-related protective factor. “Ego-resilient individuals are perceptive and insightful and have the capacity for warm and open relations with others. They also possess the necessary interpersonal skills and social poise to effectively negotiate the social world” (Klohnen, Conceptual Analysis 1075). Mrs. Holmes is the epitome of an ego-resilient woman. She not only reads appropriate novels, but also educates herself in history. One strand of current education research emphasizes that “Learning is situated in real-world practice and occurs through recursive interactions between individual learners and their social and biophysical environment” (Krasny et al., Education n. pag.). Brown’s emphasis on the role of constructive conversations with good company may be considered an illustration of this, as portrayed in Mrs. Holmes’ frequent letters to Myra. Moreover, Mrs. Holmes is aware of the importance of understanding and adapting to dominant cultural models. She advises Myra, “Habituate your mind to remark the difference between truth and fiction,” especially regarding potential suitors, which she says

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

will allow Myra to be mindful of “insidious gentlemen, who plan their advances […] on the Chesterfieldian system of flattery and duplicity” (Brown, 53). Although her words may resonate with Puritanism, they also reflect the role of adaptive skills, a key factor in resilience research. Perhaps rather symbolically, and for a modern mind, somehow closemindedly, Myra’s being educated in how to differentiate between the true and false love of the suiters, would also demand adaptive skills. As Mrs. Holmes further explains, more than being mindful of deceitful men, this knowledge also provides women with the means to adapt to the world of men. “We owe ourselves a detestation of folly,” Mrs. Holmes continues, “and to the world, the appearance of it. […] Pretend, therefore, should a vain youth throw out illiberal sarcasms against […] any serious subject, not to comprehend the point of his wit” (55). Since women are ignored if they are perceived as either coquettish or prudish, Mrs. Holmes advises a level of feminine duplicity – or an adaptive strategy. She suggests that women become cognizant of and adapt to their social situation. Although the audience seems to be limited to women, such invitations to adaptation encourages strategies that will help any individual when faced with similar situations. The emphasis is on the role of flexibility and adaptation to the realities of life, which suggests ways to help women avoid possible failures and negative outcomes. Put differently, the story communicates an invitation to preparedness and wisdom to reduce the probability of negative results. Women are encouraged to learn from the tales of seduction, which are based on the reality of their society; to develop a method to preserve their grace while at the same time avoiding being antisocial, resisting seduction and preserving their purity, because, as Mrs. Holmes writes to Myra, “We owe to ourselves a detestation of folly, and to the world, the appearance of it” (91). This emphasis on adaptation is later accompanied by the importance of self-efficacy. Mrs. Holmes writes that “Virtue does not consist in affluence and independence—nor can it be reflected on us by the glory of our connexions—true merit is personal” (98). Although one could argue that her comment on the nature of virtue is preaching individualism, from the perspective of resilience research, this can

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also be an invitation to self-efficacy and depending on oneself as the sole source of merit. In other words, Mrs. Holmes is preaching the necessity of self-esteem. A strong sense of self, writes Skodol (The Resilience Personality 114), is “evidenced by self-esteem, self-confidence or self-efficacy, and self-understanding […]”. Interestingly, these same factors also contribute to ego resilience and bring to mind Brown’s focus on encouraging women towards self-education. Furthermore, as Ann Masten theorizes in her ‘short list’ of resilience-related protective systems, reading books can act as a resilience protective factor, instigating self-awareness and wisdom. Mrs. Holmes voices such an emphasis with one short rule of conduct: “SELF complacency is a most necessary acquirement […] REVERENCE THYSELF” (emphasis original, Brown, 94). Her insistence on selfcomplacency and creating a sense of security as an essential quality for a lady, through reading and self-education, mirrors the resilience factor of ‘internal locus of control’. “The proposition is that selfconfident individuals believe events that occur in their lives are most often influenced in large degree by their own behaviors and not a result of ‘fate,’ ‘bad luck’ or another person’s actions” (Skodol, The Resilience Personality 114). Having a high internal locus of control can be a crucial ability in a society where seduction is the most frequent topic. Therefore, women’s acts of resistance in the novel, their developed coping mechanism, transcend social class. I would like to take a moment to point out how, even in this very early example, resilience is related to social critique. This is important due to the role literary and cultural studies, or the humanities in general, can play in relation to resilience research. Around the time the novel was published, the United States was going through unrest, constitutional debates, and rebellions, resulting in a lack of coordinated political union. It may not be surprising, then, writes Elisabeth Barnes in her Affecting Relations: Pedagogy, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Sympathy that Brown’s novel: locates the conflicts of a newly emerging political body in the individual bodies of its middle-class characters. It then dramatizes

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

these conflicts in the context of the family structure. Through its sensational story line of seduction and sibling incest, Brown’s epistolary novel foregrounds issues with which post-Revolutionary politics was most concerned: the nature and location of authority, the importance of individual rights in community, and the role of feeling in the maintenance of a stable and ordered society. (597) Barnes proposes that Brown not only “explores the dangers as well as the attractions of familial sympathy” but that his work also “alludes to the pedagogical model by which sentimental literature claims its own authority over the hearts and bodies of its readers” (Barnes, 604). I reformulated these propositions in relation to human resilience as forms of coping strategies, namely adaptive skills and the role of selfeducation in the context of a society in which incest is a common narrative theme. This is to say that disasters that occur in early American fiction such as Brown’s are to be seen as a consequence of a social structure that encourages irresponsibility on the part of some (dominant) actors. It is Brown’s society that has made it possible for upper-class men to grant themselves the right to take advantage of the lower-class females, and then in return to blame them for falling into traps of seduction, tagging them as seduced women who lack virtue. Brown’s social critique is relatively unapparent but might become more obvious when Harriot appears to seduce Harrington to virtue. The opening of the scene seems to support this interpretation, for while Harrington begins by explaining to Worthy that their (Harrington and Harriot’s) difference in class standing precludes their ability to marry, he quickly changes his mind. Harrington first writes, “Harriot has no father—no mother […] I must take the liberty to acquaint you, that I am not so much of a republican to formally wed any person of this class” (Brown, 11). Instead, he plans to “remove this fine girl into an elegant apartment, of which she herself is to be the sole mistress” (12). However, in his next letter, Harrington declares that the “all-conquering force of Harriot’s eloquence” had reformed him into principles “the most just, and the most honorable” (14). As such, he decides to renounce their difference in social stature and marry her in spite of his father’s

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objection. Their difference in social status hints at how social inequality, as an environmental risk factor, can affect the individual’s self-efficacy. Furthermore, Harriot’s resistance appears to be contending that when an individual learns how to adjust herself to her society and its expectations and norms, she will be able to manage through life. This is a theme that is repeatedly referred to in resilience research: One’s ability to adapt to the context is a key factor in one’s resilience. Similarly, Brown uses other characters to elaborate further on choicemaking and adaptability: in letter VII, Mrs. Holmes broaches the topic and underscores how it is always a matter of choice when it comes to happiness as “A GREAT proportion of our happiness depends on our own choice” and depends on our understanding of the “beauties of the mind” (Brown, 19, 22) and learning from “conversation of people of ideas” (26). It is in this regard that Brown also elaborates on ‘the principle of self-correction” in the context of education and reading useful books “for among all kinds of knowledge which arise from reading, the duty of self-knowledge is a very eminent one; and is at the same time, the most useful and important” (40). I also need to point out that, although Brown chooses to portray a strong woman who fights for her virtue despite her lower social class, what we read in other seduction novels does not follow the same line. For example, in Charlotte Temple the female character gives in to seduction and is not portrayed as a strongminded individual. Lack of personality resilience, in those cases, makes women vulnerable to seduction, considered as a contextual risk factor of the age. The Power of Sympathy refers not only to the power of personal feelings – self-control, self-efficacy – but to the importance of interpersonal relations, particularly in the social context of Brown’s novel. However, going back to my previous proposition that Brown is being ironic, the family situation portrayed in the novel is one in which some members suffer because of the errors of others. Within the subplots of the novel, we learn that Harriot and Harington’s father’s misconduct with a lady named Marya is the cause of all their present confusion, guilt, separation, and eventual death. Had he not seduced Marya, or had he done the right thing and married her, she would

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

not have committed suicide and the two lovers would (probably) have not begun their incestuous relationship in the first place. The same holds for Ophelia, Martin’s mistress, and the reaction of her father, Mr. Shephard, to the shame she brought on the family. Mr. Shephard decided to protect the name of the family above all, regardless of Ophelia’s pleadings against confrontations of any sort, and eventually “unfortunate Ophelia died by her own hand.” The novel tells us that Ophelia decided on her death because she “lamented she had no friend to enlighten her understanding, or unravel the mysteries of futurity” (Brown, 67), while she also knew she had hurt her sister, who was nothing but kindness to her. Martin blames Ophelia’s father for her unfortunate end, due to “severe use of paternal power” (70) and “parental authority”, which blinded him and caused him to seek to preserve the family’s honor and to ignore his daughters’ pleas completely. Had there been some form of support from Ophelia’s family, she may have not ended her life in despair. As was discussed earlier, family support is a crucial element in an individual’s resilience, and the lack of it may result in tragedy. Such interpersonal relations can also be read through a contextual understanding of sympathy. Sympathy, though “initially applied to nature and the anatomy” (Van Engen, Puritanism 533) and signifying organic connections, was appropriated by the Puritans to mean communal political and religious affections, a “fellow-like feeling” (Puritanism 533), or a “blurring of ego boundaries”, which is indeed not a possibility in a nonegalitarian social system. It is in such contexts that discussions of resilience take the form of resistance to societal vices. In short, and looking at the totality of the novel, two points are worth mentioning regarding the role of adaptation and learning. Brown’s story implies that when the adversity is too great, an individual has no chance of taking a developmental path, as is seen with the many examples of suicides. Furthermore, as the novel’s title indicates, sympathy is the cause of several characters’ actions, the excess of which leads to tragedy. It is implied that Harrington’s suicide, for example, is spurred on by an over-identification with The Sorrows of Young Werther, a copy of which is found alongside his dead body. These excesses are

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contrasted with the rational thinking of characters such as Worthy, who strives to uphold normative social and moral ideals. While the overly sympathetic characters do not survive the course of the novel, the rational characters do survive, suggesting that rationality should tame excessive sentimentality. In this respect, the novel portrays personality resilience as something that can be achieved through appropriate education, in particular that which Brown formulates as genderspecific knowledge, as a prerequisite to an adaptive developmental process in challenging and stressful times. The focus in the novel is on women’s education not just in the intellectual sense, but also in terms of education’s role in making women wiser and more discerning when difficult or otherwise untenable situations arise. Worthy, Myra, and the elder Mr. Harrington are the novel’s survivors, as they have learned to adapt to the reality of their society, are strong-minded and well educated. Ophelia, Maria, Fidelia, Harriot, and Harrington, however, lack such knowledge and are defeated when faced with life’s brutalities. The novel discusses themes such as the importance of education and the role of family, friends, and social skills. Consequently, it reflects on the necessary protective factors for women – and people in general – in Puritan society, while, on another level, preaching resilience. However, as a whole, The Power of Sympathy draws upon the topic of resilience to present an example of social critique. As social critique, the novel uses the popular topic of the period – and the historical reality – incest as the superstructure to discuss social injustices. Were the society resourceful enough, or just and equal enough, women would not have been the subject of seduction in the first place, and would not have had to exercise constant levels of self-control. This is not to devalue the positivity of such personal characteristics, but rather to underscore the dark contextual factors – the unjust social structure – that need to be seen as the main problem. Seduction, incest, temptation, and gender inequality were only the consequences of such a structure. Resilience in such structures then, as early as the first American novel, becomes social critique.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

Moby-Dick and the Dark Side of Resilience Do we not all know the story of the evil white whale and the lunatic Captain Ahab chasing after him? Have we not watched cinematic adaptations based on Herman Melville’s story? One way or other, we all somehow know the story. You might therefore wonder how one can have a resilience-based reading of such a plot. To answer that, I need to move away from a common understanding of resilience as a positive process/outcome to where I can ask: Is resilience always a positive phenomenon or can we also discuss negative resilience? My reasons for reading this novel from the perspective of resilience studies is to answer that question. As much as I am not the first person to ask such a question, and while there are a few theories regarding resiliency as a negative phenomenon, I doubt there has ever been an attempt to evaluate Moby-Dick as an example of the dark side of resilience.20 Moby-Dick has been subject to many readings, with focuses ranging from macro-cultural changes in the conceptualization of whales in North America (Lawrence & Phillips, From Moby Dick 689) and American political symbolism (Heimert, Moby-Dick 498), to a metaphorical, philosophical reading (Zoellner The Sea Salt 1973). My interest in this astounding piece of literature lies in its ability to portray resilience in its most radical form. Even today, as of 2021, the idea that resilience may have a negative side is not being studied. As I will show in my close reading, however, this novel, developed just such a perspective already in the mid-19th century, which time and again encourages me to insist on how literature is an enormously rich laboratory with its immense storage of data. I will argue that the context of the whaling industry and economic development in the mid-19th century combined with the culture of the American rugged individual resulted in a state of resilience that was not only undesirable, but actually destructive. Within the story, there are many chapters on whaling, whale anatomy – external and internal, including the skeleton – the 20

For detailed discussions regarding the dark side of resilience, refer to Mahdiani, H., Ungar, M. (2021). The Dark Side of Resilience. ADV RES SCI.

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shipmates, the harpooners and their skills, and every detail one can imagine about the whaling business, narrated through one of the characters in the novel, Ishmael, using a third person point of view, mixed with the first-person perspective of the other characters’ direct speech. Outside that, of all the many characters, it is Captain Ahab, his character descriptions, his actions and reactions, which are of interest to my argument regarding the dark side of resilience. To undertake this, the reading needs to start from Melville’s (or Ahab’s) time and place: the context of whaling industry.21 Americans had been whaling since colonial days, but the industry peaked in the United States in the 1840s. As Charles Olson points out in Call Me Ishmael, “Of 900 whaling vessels on the seas in 1846, 735 were American” (19). Nantucket Island and New Bedford, Massachusetts, were the most important whaling ports in the world. Moreover, Tony Tanner in his Introduction to Moby-Dick (1998 Oxford World’s Classic edition) asserts that the America in which Melville was living was some version of the promised land, a powerful country not only in the Western world but the whole world. This power, and the confidence brought by this promised land created people like Ahab: determined, strong-headed individuals who are “liable to regard other men as merely arms and legs for the fulfilment of their purposes, and arid and exhausted in their burnt-out souls” (Matthiessen, American Renaissance 442). I will argue that individuals like Ahab are examples of strength and determination in its extreme form, so much so that the consequences are catastrophic.

Captain Ahab: The Epitome of a Paradox In Moby-Dick, Ahab is the protagonist, but reading Moby-Dick, one has to, rather frustratingly, wait almost a hundred pages into the novel

21

Herman Melville drew on his experiences as a whaler, and the real-life fate of a Nantucket whaling ship, called Essex, for his 1851 novel Moby-Dick, the story of Captain Ahab and the whaling ship Pequod, doomed by a quest for revenge on the white whale, Moby Dick.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

to meet this curious captain, and until then we only hear about him from his officers and shipmates, through Ishmael’s narration. Ishmael may also be said to be playing the role of the reader – the inquisitive outsider. Ishmael, and we as readers, learn about Ahab’s leg being “devoured, chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that even chipped a boat!” (Melville, 72). Captain Peleg further tells us that “he is a queer man, Captain Ahab – so some think – but a good one” (78) and assures Ishmael that he will like Ahab, “no fear, no fear. He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man” (78). Ahab “doesn’t speak much, but when he does speak, then you may well listen” because: Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ‘mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales. (emphasis in the original, 78) All we read about Ahab is how perfectly different this person is, particularly in Ishmael’s comparison to Ahab the king of Israel, which foreshadows Ahab’s fate. The biblical king was “a very vile one […] When that wicked king was slain,” Ishmael asks Peleg, “the dogs, did they not lick his blood?” to which Peleg objects, claiming that he knows Ahab well enough to claim the accusation of lunacy to be false. He sailed with Ahab as mate years ago, and believes Ahab to be a “good man” (78) although he is “never very jolly” and that after the attack by Moby Dick, on the passage home, “he was a little out of his mind for a spell”, which Peleg blames on “the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump” (78). Peleg believes that Ahab’s moodiness will pass in time, and he is still a very good captain. Through Peleg we learn that Ahab has a young wife and a son, and “stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities” (79). Reading these words, we may agree with Captain Peleg, at least at this stage of the novel, that having experienced such a traumatic encounter with the whale, Ahab has the right to lose his temper now and then and act harshly on occasions. He has experienced a very adverse situation and may be now, as Peleg believes, in the process of overcoming the traumatic memories and their aftermath. As I discussed in the previous chapters, Mancini & Bonanno’s research on

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the human response to potentially traumatic events concludes that only a very small group of traumatized people end up developing “chronic pathological reactions” (261), underscoring the role played by the “type and degree of exposure” (Resilience to Potential Trauma 261). I maintain that encountering Moby Dick can be categorized under Bonanno’s “isolated stressor event” (Resilience to Potential Trauma 263) whereby Ahab, although used to whaling – as mentioned earlier by Captain Peleg, this is a normal situation for a person like Ahab, who has been through much more adverse situations – experiences an outof-the-ordinary adversity: the loss of his leg, which is “devoured” and “crunched.” The point is that “because developmental considerations are less pronounced in adults,” as is the case with the old Ahab, “responses to potentially traumatic events can usually be assessed in terms of deviations from or return to normative (baseline) functioning” (Carver, qtd. in Macini and Bonanno, Resilience to Potential Trauma 263). To explain this point further, let us read further in the novel and see what other captains, who had similar encounters with the white whale, have to say. On the course of her journey, Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, comes across a number of whaling ships, heading out to or coming back from their whale-hunting journeys. Each ship is stopped by Ahab, and their captain questioned on whether or not they have seen Moby Dick during their voyage. Upon Ahab’s inquiry about Moby Dick, Mayhew, captain of the first ship they encounter, the Jeroboam, recounts a grim story, “pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God incarnated” (Melville, 252) and having received Ahab’s response that he, regardless of Mayhew’s story, is determined to hunt the monster, tells Ahab that “thou art soon going that way […] dead” (254). In this case, a somewhat similarly traumatized person’s reaction contrasts with that of Ahab. In other words, not every traumatized (adult) whale hunter who fought Moby Dick turned into an Ahab. They all left the chase and commenced their recovery away from the white whale, except for Ahab. After Mayhew, Pequod meets the ship called the Samuel Enderby of London, whose captain had lost his arm to Moby Dick. This time Ahab engages with the captain about the whereabouts of the white whale. The captain of this ship tells Ahab how he agrees that Moby Dick is

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

the mighty whale, “the noblest and biggest I ever saw” (Melville, 336). Ahab patiently listens to the stories the captain and his surgeon and his crew have to tell about their experience, and finally asks “What became of the White Whale?” (339), to which the captain answers that they don’t know, they let him be because, having lost one arm, “didn’t want to try to: aint one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm?” Whereupon the surgeon explains that the whale cannot biologically digest the arm, he just wants to bite to “terrify” (339). They all agree that it is best to leave Moby Dick alone, despite the fact that “there will be great glory in killing him” (340). But to Ahab all that fear is “a magnet,” which initiates bewildered responses from the other captain and his crew, who think he is crazy with “boiling blood” (340). The English captain and his crew have been through almost the same adverse situation as Ahab has, however, they choose to move out of the trauma by leaving Moby Dick alone, arguing that chasing the monster will not end in victory or any kind of success. Their behavior can be interpreted as a return to normative functioning, following Bonanno’s theory. Why then is Ahab so deeply infatuated with the source of his misery? One possible answer to that could be what the resilience researchers have termed self-enhancing.

Captain Ahab, the Self-Enhancer Mancini and Bonanno speak of a “dispositional tendency to view the self in highly favorable and even unrealistic terms” (269), often described as ‘trait self-enhancement.’ They explain that although having a positive self-view can be a mediating factor towards resilience, this view needs to be based in a realistic view of the person’s “limitations and negative

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characteristics” (269). Ahab’s non-normative22 functioning can be better delineated, particularly with regard to his lack of psychological health and positive emotions, as stemming from his self-enhancing attitude. His unstable mental health is reflected on multiple occasions, for example, in his infatuation with the hunt, Ahab even asks a dead whale where Moby Dick is; or elsewhere when, for no apparent reason, he becomes a scornful old man and names Stubb “dog, and kennel” and “ten times a donkey and a mule and an ass,” and orders him to leave his cabin or “I’ll clear the world of thee” (Melville, 111). Ahab, the selfenhancer,23 despite being a dexterous captain with respectable sailing experiences, in the present of the plot timeline, is living on one foot. He is constantly referred to as Old Ahab, which reveals that he is not physically capable of such a task. The reality of his situation does not support his intense beliefs in his capabilities, despite the fact that men’s “fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate” (Melville, 388). It is perhaps easier to understand the situation when we think of the cause of the crew’s fear: Ahab’s character. His strong-mindedness, his will to do what he wishes despite all the odds has made him a captain to be scared of. Or perhaps the crew are astonished by Ahab’s compulsive insistence on hunting the white whale as his destiny. When his first mate, Starbuck, inquires as to whether Moby Dick “took off thy leg?” he replies: Aye, Starbuck, Aye, […] it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brough me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye, […] it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day! […] and I’ll chase him round Good

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For this section, I am particularly interested in taking resilience as: “the ability of adults in otherwise normal circumstances who are exposed to an isolated and potentially highly disruptive event such as the death of a close relation or a violent or life-threatening situation to maintain relatively stable, healthy levels of psychological and physical functioning… as well as the capacity for generative experiences and positive emotions” (Bonanno, Loss and Trauma 20-21). Individuals with trait self-enhancement are referred to as self-enhancers.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give up […]. (139) Despite his physical condition, Ahab is a proof that “self-enhancers appear to cope unusually well with extreme adversity” (Mancini & Bonanno, Resilience to Potential Trauma 269). However, since, according to empirical research, personality explains less than ten percent of individuals’ resilience outcome – which may be the reason for Ahab’s exceptionality – the question remains as to how to explain his extreme resiliency. One possible explanation, I propose, would be his extreme sense of revenge, which he also voices all through the novel and of which the above quotation is an example. His desire for revenge is also rather paradoxical when we consider Connor & Davidson’s study on the role of spirituality, resilience, and anger in survivors of trauma. They report that “Following violent trauma, survivors who exhibit better health or less distress from the trauma are less angry” (Connor et al., Spirituality 493). Ahab’s speaking of vengeance, retribution, and revenge then becomes a sign of his acute mental distress. Revenge, as opposed to forgiveness, pushes him further into his sadistic determination to hunt Moby Dick, rather than perceiving the incident as a severe whaling incident and moving on. Even his crew members point out his mad behavior, for example, “Vengeance is a dumb brute,” Starbuck shouts at him, pointing out that the whale “simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous” (Melville, 139). But to these remarks, Ahab simply replies: How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. The inscrutable thing is simply what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or the white whale principle, I will wreak that hate upon him […] I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. (140)

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His anger is apparent in every word. What kind of range would instigate an attack against the sun? One explanation would be what I mentioned earlier as to the degree of his loss. Arguably, the pain of losing a leg for Ahab is not comparable to what he has to endure as a blow to his selfesteem. The whale is the target of such deep anger because his hubris was attacked, and his lost leg reminds him of this failure. However, whether out of revenge, anger, or pure shame, Ahab’s high self-esteem, or his self-enhanced sense, promotes his resilience because, as Shelly E. Taylor and David A. Armor maintain, “the aversive experience of loss” (Positive Illusions 877), in Ahab’s case the loss of not only the battle against the whale but also his leg, “represents a potential threat to the self and may induce feelings of vulnerability and weakness” (Positive Illusions 877) and as a response, the bereaved person is “likely motivated to restore their sense of control over the event and their sense of optimism about the future” (Positive Illusions 877). A close look at the quotation above also reflects this theme, if we simply count the number of times he pronounces I. It is his I, his proud self that suffers the most. Elsewhere, Kathrin Boerner and Daniela Jopp emphasize the fact that in their research, “The relation of self-enhancement and positive effect was only observed in individuals who did not experience high levels of physical danger” (Resilience in Response to Loss 135). I believe this factor could explain Ahab’s one-sided self-enhancement, where his self-esteem is highly boosted without positive effects. The absence of a leg, and the constant tapping noise coming from the ivory substitute whenever Ahab walks on the deck, is indeed a perpetual reminder of the physical defeat, intensified by his nightly vivid dreams, which all impede a sense of positivity.

Captain Ahab: Negative Appraisal and Hubris Ahab’s rather negative attitude towards events in general can also be further explained in terms of his lack of gratitude. He has survived a lethal wound and a dreadful battle, however, unlike the other surviving captains, he does not show any signs of “thankfulness and appreciation toward others – other people, nature, God” (Reich et al., Handbook 312).

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

“The interpretation of the significance of the event for the individual” (Reich et al., Handbook 197) can be positive or negative. Granted that positive reappraisal of an adverse event – “a form of coping in which the significance of the event is reinterpreted in a more positive way” (Reich et al., Handbook 109) – is not the only path towards resilience, and that, on occasions, negative appraisal may lead to better results, Ahab’s attitude toward his traumatic experience can be classified as negative appraisal. Ahab sees the whale not as Starbuck does, as an animal acting on instinct, but as the embodiment or agent of some power outside the physical world of visible nature acting from behind a wall. It is this, I would argue, that has led him to develop a negative appraisal of the accident, which would also explain his sense of revenge. His interpretation of the traumatic incident has a negative signification. Although Ahab deems Moby Dick a supernatural power, he is also aware of his own internal conflicts that drive him towards the whale. In a self-reflective mood, as if talking to himself, he voices that his acts are not “[…] so much predictions from without,” as they are “verifications of the foregoing things within” (Melville, 141). Ahab’s urge to hunt stems from “the innermost necessities in our [his] being” (141). If the other captains chose to withdraw and abandon the hunt of such a monster, despite being hurt, Ahab’s hubris, his innermost urge, pushes him ever closer to the whale, since, as Ahab thinks to himself, “What I’ve dared, I’ve willed, and what I’ve willed, I’ll do!” (143). He prophesies that he will “dismember the dismemberer,” because “Ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden” (390). Although he is able to reflect on his urges for revenge, his self-assured sense of pride is also always present. This arrogance is remarked upon by many of his crew, but the harshest comments on Ahab’s arrogance come from Starbuck: “Let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man” (362). Ironically, Ahab is aware of Ahab. His inner thoughts reflect that awareness. However, Ahab’s urge, I would like to argue, stems partially from his lack of mindfulness, once again rather paradoxically. Mindfulness is defined as “a skill, which enhances adaptive coping to stressful events by the self-regulation of attention towards the immediate experience and an open and accepting orientation towards

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one’s experience of the present” (Bishop et al., Mindfulness 232). Ahab is indeed present in the present with all his strength in order to seek vengeance, and this is where the paradox shows itself, because, as Bishop et al. (Mindfulness 231–236) propose, mindfulness occurs when individuals learn not to forcibly control their negative thoughts and instead acknowledge that the thoughts and emotions are present. It would not be true to interpret Ahab’s behavior as that of a person who is not aware of his situation, but rather it is quite the opposite. Ahab himself is aware of his nature, as also portrayed in his order to the blacksmith to “forge him a pair of steel shoulder-blades” because “there is a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack” (359) – an allusion to himself, who is bearing the woes he feels which are piled on him. However, the paradox is in how deep his present is intertwined with the pain that should have stayed in the past. All he can think of, talk of, plan, or dream of is his revenge for that past. Perhaps one could argue for a paradoxical mindfulness rooted in his physical and mental pain. It has been found that: When pain progresses from an acute to a chronic condition, it loses its usefulness as an indicator of injury and instead becomes a toxic influence unto itself […] A chronic high level of pain is a prominent stressor that can significantly increase the allostatic load (the strain or burden put on an individual’s physiological and psychological system in order to maintain homeostasis), leading to deleterious effects on health and emotional well-being. (Sturgeon and Zautra, Resilience 105) Ahab’s behavior reflects his deeply tormented mind, which once again exemplifying Bonanno’s theory of an intense stressor.

Captain Ahab, the Self-Created Prometheus Ahab’s pain also manifests itself in his dreams “when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship and with glaring eyes” he escapes out of his cabin (Melville, 169). Although Ishmael provides some presumably real-life examples of the cases

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

where the whale, in this case a sperm whale, has acted monstrously, in the end he concludes: God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates. (Melville 170) Ahab is the self-created Prometheus. Like Prometheus with his arrogance, he defies the gods and is eternally punished. Although resilience requires self-confidence as a protective factor, arrogance would function as a risk factor. Ahab’s hubris thwarts any sense of social responsibility or conscientiousness, and drives all the crew to their death as a result (except for Ishmael). However, one should not overlook the fact that despite his apparent contempt, Ishmael, alongside the other crew members, gives Ahab due credit for his extraordinary bravery. For example, when the sailors are discussing how they would react if they had lost a leg, Stubb points out that “you would not catch me in a boat” (Melville, 190), but Ahab, not giving up against any adversity, would never “kneel” and admittedly is a “wonderful old man” (190). Ironically, although his strength or rather his extreme resilience, is praiseworthy, this same power will end his life. Extreme resilience can drive people to become overly persistent in pursuit of unattainable goals. Although we tend to celebrate individuals who aim high or dream big, it is usually more effective to adjust one’s goals to more achievable levels. In their literature review on different forms of optimism, Kathleen R. Tusaie and Kathleen Patterson (Relationships 144–150) write about three forms of optimism: trait optimism, which is “a relatively stable generalized expectation that good outcomes will occur across important life domains and across time” (Scheir, Carver & Bridges qtd. in Tusaie and Patterson, 144); situational optimism which is self explanatorily “the expectation of positive outcomes in specific situations” (Tusaie and Patterson, 144); and comparative optimism, which is defined as “the prediction of a certain event happening to oneself compared with others” (Tiger qtd. in Tusaie and Patterson, 144). Clearly, all three types describe positive states,

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however, I would suggest adding a fourth version, which can describe Ahab’s situation: that of paradoxical optimism. Paradoxical optimism can be described as too much optimism, which creates an illusionary state where expectations are unrealistic. If Moby Dick is such a monster that all the other captains run away from, Ahab’s persistence in seeking not only to catch but to hunt the beast, is not justifiable. His hubris, his deep sense of vengeance, and his negative appraisal have all created a paradoxical state in which a captain who is praised for his superhuman bravery sails to his death because of that same bravery.

The Great Captain Ahab in Solitude Every time I have watched a cinematic adaptation of Moby-Dick, Ahab was pictured as an arrogant, self-centered monster of a captain. But reading the novel, I am always astounded at how human Melville’s characterization of Ahab is. Masterfully, Ahab’s selfexplorative thoughts on how it is his fate to chase Moby Dick, how he has been whaling for forty years, summarizes his life story: I struck my first whale – a boy harpooner of eighteen! Forty – forty – forty years ago! Forty years of continual whaling! Forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! Forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore! When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without – oh, weariness! Heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command […]. (407, emphasis added) From my perspective, this passage portrays how human this evil captain is, once again paradoxically. He repeatedly points out his solitude, his weary and heavy solitary life. Ahab hasn’t been able to maintain warm and open relationships with others, and is admittedly very lonely. But curiously, despite being aware of his solitude, he doesn’t seem to be doing anything to solve this issue. This solitude

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

may also be said to be a possible clue to his unusual behavior. Concerning adult life, “Loneliness is characterized as feelings of social isolation, absence of companionship, and rejection by peer groups with feelings of an isolated life in a social world forming the dominant experience” (Cacioppo & Hawkley, People Thinking 92) and is corelated with lack of social support and satisfying relationships (Archibald et al., Loneliness 296). Ahab’s accounts of his solitary state also match those of “unipolar depression, also known as major depression” (Reivich et al., From Helplessness 202). Since he suffers from “intense sadness or irritability, disrupted concentration, sleep, eating” and also “feelings of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts” (Reivich et al., From Helplessness 202). Ahab even goes on to compare himself with Adam carrying the whole weight of the world since paradise, and in all his comparisons, his emphasis is on his solitary life. Upon the third attempt to hunt Moby Dick, having lowered the boats to the sea, Ahab says goodbye to the tearful Starbuck, knowing he will not survive: “Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood; – and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old; – shake hands with me, man” (Melville, 421) and sails to his doomed loneliness. All in all, a resilience-based reading of Moby-Dick considers the concept not as a positive phenomenon but, as one that, if taken to extremes, can lead to negative outcomes. A self-centered, arrogant captain leads himself and his crew to their death. Ahab shows high levels of strength as a captain: he stands on his own feet after a traumatic voyage, gathers a crew and sails again with a goal, plans every day of the trip and tracks the whale’s route, takes measure and prepares. However, all his actions stem from his desire for revenge, his unforgiving attitude, and a very high sense of self-enhancement. Ahab’s hardiness is an example of negative resilience. Captain Ahab is the selfcreated Prometheus doomed by his hubris. In Moby-Dick, Melville shows us the dark side of resilience, the kind of strength that should not be praised.

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Identity and Heritage: Song of Solomon Published in 1977, Toni Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon, is yet another masterpiece. Like all her other works, the novel is an example of both American literature and African-American literature. It challenges the question of African-American identity and relationships among African Americans and between black and white individuals and communities. The novel begins and ends with scenes of flight symbolizing the main conflict of the novel: Milkman’s search to gain selfrealization. Set mostly in a fictional town in Michigan, where the protagonist – Milkman Dead – lives, part of the story takes place in Danville, Pennsylvania, where Milkman’s paternal grandfather lived and was killed, and where Milkman learns the story of his family, and partly in a little town named Shalimar, where his ancestors are from, and where Milkman achieves self-realization. The events take place mostly between the 1930s and 1963, but there are also references to the 19th century lifetimes of Milkman’s great-grandfathers. Although the story focuses mainly on Milkman’s life from birth to age thirty-two, the presence of other characters gives his apparently meaningless life its direction. One such character is Pilate, his paternal aunt, who is a direct foil to Milkman and his family’s lifestyle. The climax of the story may be around the time when Macon convinces his son, Milkman, that Pilate has a bag full of stolen gold in her house that belongs to him. Milkman starts looking for this gold, and his search takes him to the South, a small city called Shalimar – resonating with the name Solomon – where his ancestors lived and where he discovers the true meaning of his inheritance. This acclaimed novel has been reviewed from many diverse perspectives. Gay Wilentz (Civilizations Underneath) has studied the book for its representation of African heritage as a cultural discourse. For Gerry Brenner, Morrison benefits from multiple forms of collective fiction:

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

A riddling nursery rhyme that presages his birth and, later chanted by children, leads him to discover his heritage; fables, like the one his father, Macon Dead, tells of the man who rescues a baby snake only to be poisoned to death by its bite; fairytales, like “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and “Hansel and Gretel”; a common black folktale, like “People Who Could Fly” (as collected by Julius Lester); and family legends, like that of Milkman’s great-grandfather’s ability to fly. (emphasis original, Brenner, Song of Solomon 13) Elsewhere, Dorothy H. Lee reminds us that this is “the story of man’s archetypal search for self and transcendence” (64). In more recent years, the critical literature has been interested in the novel’s portrayal of Black English culture and subjectivities (cf. Du, Magic World; Phiri, Expanding); Pilate’s character as a symbol of Christian love, (cf. Anderson, Pilate Dead); its alternative historiography (cf. Tom, Toni Morrison; Willis, Eruptions); or the relation between space and identity (cf. Teixeira, The City). Morrison is known primarily for her womanist writings – a term coined by Alice Walker for feminists of color24 – whose work represents a critique of a white, male-dominated culture, and the challenges it puts forth for women of color. This choice of topic goes hand in hand with the objectives of the Black Arts/Black Power25 movements, whose 24

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Cf. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. In this book, Walker has written on womanism in different formulations, the most beautiful of which may be: “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” (Walker, In Search of, 2005, xi). The historical debates surrounding the Black Arts movement, the related phenomenon of Black Cultural Nationalism, and the pros and cons of integration and separation are discussed here only in passing, as the theoretical debates are not only beyond the scope of the present work, but they deviate from the main objective of reading Morrison. My reading of Song of Solomon in the present book reflects on the African-American resilience strategies, highlighting the role of heritage and African-American traditions, and has very little to do with the political debates concerning the role of art and racial equality. This is not to ignore the role of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as a major contribution to Black Cultural Nationalism.

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proponents, according to Amiri Baraka’s poem Black Art, believed that art should be: […] like fists beating niggers out of Jocks or dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews. […] we want “poems that kill.” Assassin poems, Poems that shoot guns. […] Poem scream poison gas on beasts in green berets Clean out the world for virtue and love, Let there be no love poems written until love can exist freely and cleanly. Let Black people understand that they are the lovers and the sons of warriors and sons of warriors Are poems & poets & all the loveliness here in the world We want a black poem. And a Black World. Let the world be a Black Poem And Let All Black People Speak This Poem Silently or LOUD. (Baraka, Transbluesency 142) Song of Solomon is a tribute to the Black Arts movement: The men in Tommy’s Barbershop – Milkman’s daily gathering corner – discuss the day’s racial injustices, as do the people in Shalimar’s only café. However, while overall, Morrison’s main theme follows that of her previous novels: “For better and worse, humans use and make fictions to give their lives meaning and significance” (Brenner, Song of Solomon 13), this novel has not yet been analyzed from the perspective of its portrayal of human resilience. My resilience-based reading of the novel will add yet another layer of interpretation to this densely packed novel, as I find this text a perfect illustration of how life writing can provide the life

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

sciences with context-specific data. In the case of this novel, I will read human resilience as portrayed in Black American communities. In other words, if life sciences focus on a universal human resilience, life writing with its broad spectrum of historicized, contextualized, gender- and race-specific, and even localized examples, can be seen as an already available set of localized data. In the first two novels, my analysis focused largely on the main characters, whereas in this reading, due to the rich plotline and Morrison’s world of details and subplots, I will analyze almost the totality of the plotline and characterizations in the novel. This reading compliments resilience studies by using literature as a case in point to ponder a localized African-American community. I will discuss Song of Solomon’s main themes in relation to resilience, in particular the ideas of self-efficacy, spirituality, heritage and identity, and social support. All of these factors are key concepts for human resilience. The story starts with flight. An insurance agent named Robert Smith leaps off the roof of Mercy Hospital wearing blue silk wings and claiming that he will fly to the opposite shore of Lake Superior, however, he ends up on the ground, dead. The next day, Ruth Foster Dead, the daughter of the first black doctor in town, gives birth to the first black child born in Mercy Hospital, Macon (Milkman) Dead III. The plotline then focuses on Milkman, his family and relatives (Pilate, her daughter and granddaughter) and a friend, Guitar. Milkman is constantly showered by the love of his mother (at times to extremes) and his aunt, Pilate, his sisters, First Corinthians and Magdalene (called Lena), and is adored by his lover and cousin, Hagar. Unlike the rest of his family, Milkman’s father, Macon Dead II, is a ruthless landlord who pursues only the accumulation of wealth. By the time Milkman reaches the age of thirty-two, he feels stifled living with his parents and wants to escape to somewhere else. His father chooses that moment to tell him about a sack full of gold that Pilate has in her house, which was stolen many years ago. This new piece of information initiates a series of journeys that changes Milkman’s character completely. As this very brief plot summary shows, there are many major and minor characters and main and sub-plots. In order to do justice to this

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beautiful novel, I will study all the main characters and their actions in detail in relation to their resilience or lack thereof to portray a case of African-American resilience.

Pilate Although the storyline circles around Milkman, I consider Pilate to be the strongest character in the novel. Morrison introduces Pilate in the very first pages, but she remains a mystery until almost one-third of the way through the novel. When the plotline reaches Pilate’s life story, it is richly narrated. As a young girl, she becomes an orphan after being a witness to her father’s murder; she has to survive on her own as a teenager running from the murderers who do not want to leave a witness behind; she is forced into leaving her only family member, her brother; she has to abandon her love and raise her child among strangers, and there are many more details, which are mainly negative and painful experiences. Added to all these external events, she also has a physical defect: she has no navel. After running from her dad’s murderers and finding temporary solace on an island, her physical abnormality estranges her once again. Her flat belly, “isolated her” (Morrison, 148). Morrison writes of her: Already without a family, she was further isolated from her people, for, except for the relative bliss on the island, every other resource was denied her: partnership in marriage, confessional friendship, and communal religion. Men frowned, women whispered and shoved their children behind them. (Morrison 148) Due to this physical difference, Pilate is rejected by others, who cannot tolerate her apparent dissimilarity. Some even suggest that she is a mermaid. Her life story demands a superhuman strategy for mere survival. From a person with such experiences, one may expect to see the same sad and negative responses. But is she sad? Can one categorize Pilate as a negative person? The next subsections answer this question and what I would like to call Pilate’s mental rebirth.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

The Role of Agentic Characters in Resilience: Pilate’s Happy Solitude One of the most highly valued protective factors in resilience is that of communion and relationships. Friendships, peer groups, and romantic partners are among the adaptive systems26 that studies have proven to be fundamental against adversity. These systems act as protective factors. However, as is the case with the very young Pilate after her dad’s murder, “The most devastating threats to child development occur when these systems are damaged, destroyed or develop abnormally as a result of adversity” (Masten & Obradovic, Competence and Resilience 21). Pilate’s relations, if anything, were disparaging and thus acted as risk factors. Pilate “was hampered by huge ignorances” (Morrison, 149) – ignorant people who could not comprehend her physical difference and thereby rejected her from their communities. Resilience studies have shown that being excluded from one’s community is especially harmful to a person’s mental health, since “community, connectedness, and historical consciousness all provide sources of resilience” (Kirmayer et al., Rethinking Resilience 21). This forced marginalization, however, rather than causing Pilate to drown in self-pity or depression, encourages her to take another route. Wonderfully, and perhaps superhumanly, “When she realized what her situation in the world was and would probably always be, she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero” (Morrison, 149). Devoid of any support system, she reaches 26

Masten and Obradovic categorize these adaptive systems as: “Learning systems of the human brain (problem solving, information processing); Attachment system (close relationships with caregivers, friends, romantic partners, spiritual figures); Mastery motivation system (self-efficacy processes, reward systems related to successful behavior); Stress response systems (alarm and recovery systems); Self-regulation systems (emotion regulation, executive functioning, activation and inhibition of attention or behavior); Family system (parenting, interpersonal dynamics, expectations, cohesion, rituals, norms) School system (teaching, values, standards, expectations); Peer system (friendships, peer groups, values, norms); Cultural and societal systems (religion, traditions, rituals, values, standards, laws)” (Competence and Resilience 21).

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towards the only resource she is left with: herself. She has a mental rebirth. As the novel goes on to show, Pilate creates her own renewed worldview, her own customized life path. She even makes changes in her looks along with every other aspect of her life. She asks herself some key questions: “When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?” (149). This way, everything else ceases to matter. Pilate becomes the definer of her experiences. In relation to resilience research, and particularly in terms of narrative studies of the survivors of trauma, the questions Pilate asks herself are in line with highly agentic narrators. As an agent, Pilate takes control of her life by deciding to act on her own. She is an example of the definition of strong agents, people who are “able to affect change in their own lives or influence others in their environment, often through demonstrations of self-mastery, empowerment, achievement, or status”27 (McAdams & McLean, Narrative Identity 234). Of importance here is how high agency affects her capabilities in dealing with trauma and moving on with her life. But how does she achieve such a strong sense of self? One explanation is a phenomenon referred to as the ‘steeling effect’ in resilience research. According to Michael Rutter, “Exposure to stresses or adversities may [either increase vulnerabilities through a sensitization effect or] decrease vulnerabilities through a steeling effect” (Resilience 337). This means that certain levels of adversity can create a more resilient individual for a later similar stressful life situation in the same manner that immunity to infections comes not from avoiding such sources, but rather from exposure to certain levels of it, akin to vaccination. Pilate’s early life experiences seem to have made her immune towards adversity in general. This is not to say that she is never hurt or is emotion free, rather she has become the sole interpreter of her life, adaptive to circumstances and free from burdens.

27

I will discuss this topic, narrative identity, and the role it plays in resilience, in chapter five in relation to the interviewees’ life stories.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

Self-Efficacy and Cultural Heritage Although she acquires a deep concern with human relationships and privacy, and a sense of compassion for troubled people, her unconventional choice of attire, her looks and lifestyle mean she is “just barely within the boundaries of the elaborately socialized world of black people” (Morrison, 149). Morrison’s portrayal of Pilate shows someone that is not bothered by negative judgements. As a strong agent, she resorts to mapping out an entirely different life journey for herself that symbolizes a transformation from within. Pilate’s strength comes from her self-efficacy as a black woman. As resilience studies have shown, self-efficacy is among the key factors of individual resilience, which is defined as “people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives” (Bandura, Encyclopedia 71). Pilate’s strong sense of self-efficacy helps her in maintaining a sense of psychological wellbeing. Studies show that self-efficacy can be increased in several ways: “mastery experiences, vicarious social modeling, and social persuasion” (Taylor & Reyes, Self-efficacy 1). Taylor and Reyes maintain that among the three methods, mastery experiences are the most effective way to increase self-efficacy. Although Pilate does not have access to vicarious social modeling or social persuasion, since she neither credits the normative social models nor does she receive any form of acknowledgment by the people around her in her “ability to succeed and master certain activities” (Self-efficacy 1), her own ability to master her life experiences provides her with a rich resource to boost her self-efficacy. Pilate’s loving nature does not connote weakness but rather strength. On many occasions, Morrison suggests that Pilate’s seemingly supernatural powers, great strength, lasting youth, and boundless love come from African-American cultural traditions; her spirituality is not characterized in terms of religion per se, but rather as a strong belief in traditions. She is very respectful of mother earth, lives in a house that does not have electricity, gas, or any man-made means of luxury, “no soft worn-down chair, not a cushion or pillow, no napkins, no

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tablecloth, no fluted plates or flowered cups.” But despite her poor style of living, her house is where both Macon II and Milkman find peace. In the middle of Shalimar, listening to children’s songs, and missing Pilate, Milkman thinks of her house where “peace was there, energy, singing, and now his own remembrances” (Morrison, 301). What is important here is the reference to a contextualized, or rather localized – if we focus on the little town of Shalimar as the center of attention – example of human resilience. As I mentioned above, with such particular narrative examples, literature creates a realm of data to be explored, not only by literary scholars but also by researchers from other fields. According to this novel, what matters most to African Americans, aside from self-efficacy, is one’s association, appreciation, and connection with one’s cultural heritage, or in other words: Black Pride, either literally or symbolically. Morrison is voicing her own version of Black Pride via Pilate (and other characters) in her encouragement to appreciate culture and heritage. Aside from her strong sense of self-efficacy, and being the agent of her story, Pilate maintains close ties to her ancestors’ traditions and her black culture, pictured in the songs she sings when happy or sad, her choice of food and clothes, and her beliefs. She is an embodiment of how a strong woman’s “[culturally]-aligned values and practices shape which universal resilience mechanisms [she] prioritizes and how these mechanisms of resilience operationalize” (Theron & Phasha, Cultural Pathways 51). Research shows that “The worldview of African Americans is grounded in a strong spiritual/religious belief system, extended familial and fictive kinship bonds, a collective social orientation, and affective expressiveness” (Goings & Walker, Disrupting the Myth 101). There is further evidence from empirical studies that support Goings and Walker’s findings in which African Americans’ strong connection to their cultural practices mediates a path toward resilience.28 Such cultural resources shape Pilate’s coping strategies, thereby promoting her positive adaptive responses in difficult times 28

See for example, Harvey, Aminifu, and Hill, Africentric Youth and Family Rites of Passage Program; Taylor, Chatters, and Levin, Religion in the Lives of African Americans.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

throughout the novel. One prominent example would be her ritualistic singing at Hagar’s funeral. […] halfway through the service, it seemed as though Ruth was going to be the lone member of the bereaved family there. A female quartet from Linden Baptist Church had already sung ‘Abide with Me,’ the wife of the mortician had read the condolence cards and the minister had launched into his ‘Naked came ye into this life and naked shall ye depart’ sermon, which he always believed suitable for the death of a young woman; and the winos in the vestibule who came to pay their respects to ‘Pilate's girl’ but who dared not enter had begun to sob, when the door swung open and Pilate burst in, shouting, ‘Mercy!’ as though it were a command. (Morrison 320) She continues to sing: In the nighttime Mercy. In the darkness Mercy. In the morning Mercy. At my bedside Mercy. On my knees now Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy. Although the ceremony was taking place at a church, through this African-American burial ritual, Pilate seems to be reminding the participants of their roots.

Ruth: Self-Manipulation Ruth, Macon Jr.’s wife and Milkman’s mother, can be considered Pilate’s foil. Unlike Pilate, who is a strong-willed woman, Ruth is mainly presented as a subdued character, living the life of a wealthy, uncomplicated woman who has been provided for by men – her father

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and her husband – all her life. Halfway through the novel, however, Ruth shows her side of the story – at a cemetery. Milkman, having followed his mother to her father’s, Dr. Foster’s, grave, confronts her at the entrance of the graveyard and accuses her, “You come to lay down on your father’s grave? Is that what you’ve been doing all these years? Spending a night now and then with your father?” (Morrison, 123) to which Ruth, with “surprisingly steady voice” replies, “Let’s walk toward the train stop” (123), and then narrates her story. She starts in the middle of her own thoughts on how she has always wanted some compassion, some love from people, and she never had that love from anyone but her father. People she expected to love her, to accept her and to nurture her, have not done so, as she explains to her son: […] Because the fact is that I am a small woman. I don’t mean little, I mean small, and I’m small because I was pressed small. I lived in a great big house that pressed me into a small package. I had no friends, only schoolmates who wanted to touch my dresses and my white silk stockings. But I didn’t think I'd ever need a friend because I had him. I was small, but he was big. The only person who ever really cared whether I lived or died. Lots of people were interested in whether I lived or died but he cared. He was not a good man, Macon. Certainly, he was an arrogant man, and often a foolish and destructive one. But he cared whether and he cared how I lived, and there was, and is, no one else in this world who ever did. And for that I would do anything. It was important for me to be in his presence, among his things he used, had touched. Later it was just important to know that he was in the world. When he left it I kept on reigniting that cared-for feeling that I got from him. I am not a strange woman. I am not a strange woman. I am a small one. (126) Time and again, the theme of communion and relationships as a supportive system can be inferred from Ruth’s words. If lack of peer support led Pilate to recreate her own world and turn into a strong agent, Ruth sought refuge in pretension and denial. I would like to propose that Ruth’s situation stems more likely than not from her lost sense of belonging, defined as “the experience of personal involvement

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

in a system of environment so that persons feel themselves to be an integral part of that system or environment” (Hagerty et al., Sense of Belonging 173). Ruth simply does not matter to anyone. Her presence or absence creates the same effect, as there is no “recognition or acceptance” (Hagerty et al., Indicators 236) towards her from her family. All Macon cared and cares for, according to Ruth, was/is her father’s money, but all she ever wanted was to be cared for and to be able to take care of her babies. All she ever wanted, and also the reason for her graveyard visits is “To talk. To talk to somebody who wanted to listen and not laugh at me” (Morrison, 125) regardless of that person being under the ground, because what she expected to be a romantic relationship, a supportive partner, or a nurturing family life always turned out otherwise in reality. Due to her need to have that human belonging, and to escape the humiliation of loneliness, she even accepts Pilate’s voodoo ways, by means of which Macon, who is apparently under a spell, sleeps with her for a couple of nights, and as a result she becomes pregnant with Milkman. In Milkman, she finds a new object to pour her caring on. All she needs to survive is to be able to love, to care, to nurse. “When the baby was born […] she regarded him as a beautiful toy, a respite, a distraction, a physical pleasure as she nursed him […]” (Morrison, 132). She therefore breastfed Macon III until he was four, hence his nickname, Milkman. Although breastfeeding her four-year-old son was not correct, at least from the perspective of social norms and taboos – which is exemplified by people calling Macon III Milkman afterwards – for Ruth this was the only part of her existence that kept her strong enough to live the life she had. This secret was her own fantasy world, which she possessed outside Macon II’s powers, something he could not take away. But this is taken away from her as Milkman grow older, so she finds new smaller lives she can control. Kim Bartholomew and Leonard M. Horowitz distinguished four attachment styles according to models of the self and of others:

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secure attachment (i.e., positive models of the self and of others, reflecting confidence in interactions with others), fearful attachment (i.e., negative models of the self and of others, referring to avoidance of personal interactions because of anxiety of being hurt or deceived), preoccupied attachment (i.e., negative model of the self and positive model of others, characterized by anxiously trying to get acceptance and validation of others), and dismissing attachment (i.e., positive model of the self and negative model of others, reflecting selfconfidence and striving for independence). (Attachment Styles 226) Ruth’s girl-like behavior in front of her husband, and her constant need to be loved by not only her family but anyone, may be reflected in her ‘preoccupied attachment,’ whereby her actions can be justified by her need for validation, or as she puts it, “to be loved” (Morrison, 125). And if nothing is there for her feelings, she takes care of flowers and plants.

Milkman: Macon III Dead From the early pages of the novel, what we read about Milkman suggests a person without a strong sense of self. Symbolically his last name, Dead, emphasizes his non-existence. Despite these feelings, he is very protective of the very name he hates. When Pilate announces to Milkman and Guitar that she is Milkman’s daddy’s sister and “ain’t but three Deads alive” (38), Milkman screams at her, “I’m a Dead! My mother’s a Dead! My sisters. You and him ain’t the only ones” (Morrison, 39). Milkman’s thoughts at that moment come as a surprise even to him: He had always hated that name […] now he was behaving with this strange woman as though having the name was a matter of deep personal pride, as though she had tried to expel him from a very special group, in which he not only belonged, but had exclusive rights. (39) This strange outburst in defense of a name he doesn’t even like, can also be read as a sign of Milkman’s effort to assert some kind of identity for himself. As I discussed previously with regard to Pilate and her role

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

as an agent in her life, Milkman’s daily struggles seem to cause him to cry out for some degree of agency in a life that is being written for him by everyone but himself. His name is the only piece of identity he has: “Except for the one time he had hit his father, he had never acted independently”29 (Morrison, 120). Milkman doesn’t want any responsibility. He accepts nothing that would make him care for another being, not even his own family, and continually finds others responsible and feels abused by the knowledge they impose on him. When his dad, Macon II, asks him to go get the ‘inheritance,’ the gold, from Pilate’s house, he again ponders his life and how everyone seems to be using him for something. “Everything they did seemed to be about him yet nothing he wanted was part of it” (Morrison, 165). Although his family assumes they are protecting him, his sense of ‘not belonging’ makes him feel devoid of appreciation. He even feels betrayed by his own family and his only friend. Even his girlfriend “the only woman who claimed to love him more than life, more than her life, actually loved him more than his life,” because after Milkman breaks up with her, “she had spent half a year trying to relieve him of it [life]” (165). Besides, his only friend, Guitar, the person he trusted the most, has gone insane. As mentioned above, peer support, friends, family, and loved ones make up a strong protective factor, and Milkman seems to have no supportive system left. The key here is that it is not the number of people around an individual that make up the support system, but rather the individual’s feeling of being supported. Although Milkman may seem to be showered in love, his perception of the situation communicates a different scenario. A counter-example would be Reba, Pilate’s daughter. Reba’s whole support system is limited to Pilate and Hagar, her own daughter. They are the only people in the world for her. Although the number is very small, even without Hagar, Reba feels no resourcelessness, as she has always had Pilate’s emotional, spiritual and even physical support. 29

The irony of the situation is that later on, near the end of the novel, it becomes clear how important the name Dead is, how his great-grandfather was the flying Solomon, and how a whole city is based on his generational history.

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This strong feeling of belonging is what Milkman misses in his life and therefore his luxurious meaningless life makes him want to go away, far away from Not Doctor Street, and Sonny’s Shop, and Mary’s Place, and Hagar, to new people, new places. Simply put, he just “wanted to beat a path away from his parents’ past, which was also their present and which was also threatening to become his present as well” (Morrison, 180). Though he is in his early thirties when he finally wants to see himself as someone outside his family definitions, there is still some credit in this initiation. He sets out to find the gold that his dad told him of, and instead ends up uncovering the mystery of his ancestors, the true symbolic gold. It is during his journey to Danville and Shalimar that he finds his undiscovered self. For the first time he stops evading and this only happens when he is outside his family: “He had stopped evading things, sliding through, over, and around difficulties. Before he had taken risks only with Guitar. Now he took them alone” (Morrison, 271, emphasis added). One of the changes in Milkman is his style of coping with adversity. Coping researchers often distinguish between emotion-focused coping and problem-focused coping. In problem-focused coping, the individual focuses on the immediate problem and “typically includes elements such as generating options to solve the problem, evaluating the pros and cons of different options, and implementing steps to solve the problem” (Baker & Berenbaum, Emotional Approach 96). Emotion-focused coping, however, ignores the problem itself and deals with “the emotional distress that is associated with the situation” (96). Baker & Berenbaum write that, although the range of emotion-focused strategies is quite broad – including strategies such as denial, focusing on and venting of emotions, positive reinterpretation of events, and seeking out social support – scholars commonly agree that emotion-focused coping processes are maladaptive (96). An example of Milkman’s focus on denial instead of problem solving is how he walks in a particular manner to hide the fact that one of his legs is shorter than the other. This is symbolic of his attitude towards every problem in his life: denial. Denial remains his strategy until he faces real challenges on his own in the

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

apparently strange land. Before starting his journey to Pennsylvania, where Macon last saw the gold as a child, Milkman tells Guitar that: I don’t want to be my old man’s office boy no more. And as long as I’m in this place I will be. Unless I have my own money. My family’s driving me crazy. Daddy wants me to be like him and hate my mother. My mother wants me to think like her and hate my father. Corinthians [his sister] won’t speak to me; Lena [his other sister] wants me out. And Hagar wants me chained to her bed or dead. But the quote also reaffirms my previous proposition about Milkman’s sense of belonging and appreciation, which is not about the number of people in his life – whom he enumerates – but how well he is integrated in their circle. He affirms that his family and his girlfriend do not understand him the way he would want them to. It is this verbal recognition of his loneliness that begins his journey within. Milkman’s quest is hereafter purely symbolic, because what Milkman keeps finding instead of Pilate’s hidden gold is the genealogy of his own family. “Milkman’s journey is one that works because he forges out of it a blueprint for knowing himself” (Harris, Song of Solomon 14) and discovering his true identity. If Milkman’s family in Michigan was his main problem, his ancestors turn out to be the solution. Milkman’s father has had only one goal in his life: to move himself and his family away from their real roots, to only focus on money so much that he even uses his own people – impoverished African Americans – to accumulate wealth. But in the South, Milkman is now on his own, without his rich family and his money. In order for him to find his roots, he needs to acknowledge his people’s past, and “strip off external symbols of separation” (Harris, 14). For that to be achieved, he has to shed his city-life skin, not only materially – as is symbolized in the loss of his huge suitcase, his torn suit and shoes, and his broken watch – but also personally. All the adjustments he has to make in those Southern towns prepare him for what he learns by the end of his journey: “If you surrender to the air, you could ride it” (Morrison, 337). His adaptation process begins with Danville. One of the biggest steps in his adaptation is seeing

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his arrogance and letting go of it. The description of his first days in Shalimar portrays the distance between him – a wealthy black from the North – and his own people from the South, to whom he cannot and will not relate. Upon arriving in Shalimar and buying a second-hand car for 75 dollars and then spending another hundred or so to fix it, he still mentions that he will buy a new car if the old one cannot be repaired, thereby humiliating the men in Solomon’s store. “He hadn’t bothered to say his name, nor ask theirs, had called them ‘them’. […] his manner, his clothes were reminders that they had no crops of their own and no land to speak of either” (Morrison, 266). When he locks his car, in a town “where there couldn’t be more than two keys twenty-five miles around.” Those not-so-well-to-do men can see how Milkman – although his skin color is similar to theirs – is like the white men for whom they sit and hope for a day’s work: “They looked at his skin and saw it was as black as theirs, but they knew he had the heart of the white men who came to pick them up in the trucks when they needed anonymous, faceless laborers” (Morrison, 266). Having been offended by one of their own color, the men at the shop start to verbally banter with him, which leads to a knife fight where “Milkman did the best he could with a broken bottle, but his face got slit, so did his left hand, and so did his pretty beige suit, and he probably would have had his throat cut if two women hadn’t come running in screaming […]” (268). However, with that fight, he earns himself a tinge of respect, a step that showed them he is not weak, maybe also he showed himself that he has it in himself. However, his arrogance is still intact, as is evident in his accepting the next challenge. He is invited to go hunting at night with some older men. Milkman has to accept the invitation/challenge, as it seems to him that not joining the party of hunters would diminish his superior status, so he boasts that he is the “best shot there is” (269). In fact, as Trudier Harris points out, there are multiple reasons why Milkman has to join the hunt: “It is part of Milkman’s journey south, part of the ritual testing, and most importantly, part of his journey inward, his ‘hunt’ for the best within himself” (18). Although the hunt begins with everyone in a group, as they move forward in the dark woods, at some point Milkman

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

finds himself on his own. In the middle of the night, drained by all the physical activity and the earlier fight, and left behind, he sits on the ground out of exhaustion and has a long moment of reflection: “There was nothing here to help him […] His watch and his two hundred dollars would be of no help out here, where all a man had was what he was born with, or had learned to use. And endurance” (emphasis added 277). In other words, Milkman, sitting in the dark night in the woods, ponders: “If he was to grow accustomed to the dark, he would have to look at what it was possible to see” (273) not merely to try in vain to just follow the light. The symbolism of darkness and light accompanied by the “sitting on the grounds in the woods” as his first steps in going back to nature, his own nature, can be interpreted as the first steps of his journey inward. He had to learn to appreciate the situation, and then step forward. This attitude follows resilience theories that emphasize the role of appraisal (discussed earlier in positive and negative forms) as protective factors. Cognitive appraisal is the “process of categorizing an encounter, and its various facets, with respect to its significance for well-being” (Lazarus & Folkman, Stress 31). Southwick et. al., however, believe that “although a substantial body of evidence does point to the resilience-enhancing effects of positive appraisal, negative appraisal (e.g., ability to detect and respond to danger) is also critical for resilience and survival” (Resilience Definitions 79). However, they also maintain that, “Overly positive appraisals may ‘involve selfdeception or convincing oneself of desired beliefs without appropriate reality checks’” (79). In other words, attention to the adversity at hand needs to stay realistic rather than overtly positive or negative. Milkman’s reflections during his journey step away from mistaken perceptions, where he blamed his parents for even sharing their life stories with him, and towards his becoming a person who analyzes the matter at hand rationally. This mirrors the transition, discussed above, from emotionfocused towards problem-focused coping. This reflection is further intensified when, in that dark night, Guitar tries to strangle Milkman with a wire around his neck – unsuccessfully. “Having been tested verbally, physically, emotionally, and sexually, Milkman is better prepared, more sensitized to recognize that his

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family history is more important than any gold he could seek” (Harris, Song of Solomon 20). In the darkness of the hunt as well as in later scenes, Milkman comes to know many of his limitations and faults, particularly in his relationships. He has been especially abusive to Hagar. “He had used her – her love, her craziness – and most of all he had used her skulking, bitter vengeance” (Morrison, 301). All these versions of selfrealization are also factoring in ego-resiliency, triggered by the attacks and the troubles he has been through in that place. If the hunts – symbolic and literal – are necessary for him to realize his limitations, mistakes, and his true self, such realizations help him get closer to a stronger sense of himself. He ponders what he himself has always complained about: that he doesn’t deserve this or that. But now he was thinking: “Why shouldn’t his parents tell him their personal problems?” (Morrison, 277). He concludes to himself that maybe all he was really saying was: “I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness” (277). But why does Milkman have this character in the first place? Morrison seems to be contending that Milkman’s one-sided egoistic personality is the product of history itself: specifically, of slavery. It is because of escaping slavery that his ancestors pursued particular lives. From Solomon to Macon I and Macon II, escape is the main motif: Solomon wanted to fly away, Macon I wanted to escape the whites, Macon II wanted to escape his father’s life, and now Milkman is escaping from everyone and everything. Milkman is finally able to heal his wounds by traveling to Shalimar, the site of Solomon’s flight toward liberty. That place not only holds his family history, but also, as Milkman himself confesses, makes all the stories he has repeatedly heard from Macon or Pilate feel real. The Solomon song that the children sing in Shalimar, “O Solomon don’t leave me here,” gives him all the pieces of his family puzzle. He finds out that the whole song, which is similar to what Pilate used to sing all the time, is indeed based on the fate of Solomon: having 21 children, flying away from slavery, dropping the only baby he was taking with him, and that baby becoming Milkman’s grandfather. This discovery provides him with the symbolic gold, his roots, for which he

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

has come to Shalimar, and afterwards he is a new person: sympathetic, strong, and ready for his leaps of faith. Again, his newfound sense of belonging creates all these emotions. He becomes Morrison’s second representative of Black Pride.

Macon II Before reaching this state of self-awareness, Milkman was indeed an unsympathetic character, something that can partly be attributed to his father, who raised him that way, as he himself had been raised. Macon II is also a foil to Pilate (especially after they drift apart). All the respect, or rather fear, the city shows towards him, is because of his money. As a human, no-one deems him worthy. His greed has taken away any hint of sympathy. When he first approached Ruth’s rich father – the most important black man in the city – he had only two keys in his pocket, two keys to houses he owned, and “if he had let people […] have their way, he wouldn’t have any keys at all” (Morrison, 22). It is because of those keys that he could approach the most important black man in town and ask for his daughter’s hand. He is what he owns. His properties have been the source of his power. However, his childhood and teenage life somehow point to the source of his behavior, manner, and inclinations. He was orphaned, watching his father get murdered, and had to escape to save his and his younger sister’s (Pilate) life. Along with his sister, he had to hide in the house of the very people that had killed their father. He had been through such a heavy trauma at an early age that for him to only care about money, and to think only of becoming rich enough to escape his miserable life, does not seem very illogical. Macon actually demonstrates some adaptive skills (perhaps this time he depends on his brain as a resource, following Masten’s short list of protective systems, see Masten Promoting Resilience). He schemes to marry Ruth, whose father is the richest man in the city. He learns about real estate, invests money, and acts wisely regarding his fears, the fear of being poor and on the run. He makes himself so powerful that he doesn’t need to be on the run anymore. He creates his own path to recovery, even though the price is instigating fear in everyone around

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him. His perspective is more apparent when he preaches to Milkman his motto in life: Let me tell you right now the one important thing you’ll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own, own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too. (Morrison 55) When we look back to his childhood, he was very loving towards his sister and father. However, after his father’s death, the world changed him. He was an eyewitness to his father’s being shot, and experienced several tragic situations as a teenager. His life turned him into this greedy, heartless person, who only cares about ‘owning’ people. In other words, his version of resilience may be similar to Captain Ahab’s, as they both go to extremes in taking control of their lives, during which they hurt those around them. While Ahab sailed his crew to their death, Macon II, aside from the hate and fear which he has instigated in the hearts of his tenants, has also created two submissive daughters, a lifeless wife, and an empty son. In the case of both these characters, I would like to argue, resilience has turned negative. Although they both manage to move past the initial trauma, their coping style is more destructive than adaptively positive. An analysis of the main characters has shown multiple protective (self-esteem, ego resiliency) and risk factors (over-protective parents, hostility, revenge) affecting their resilience or lack thereof. In short, one of the focal themes in Song of Solomon is the search for identity, since, for Morrison, ties to one’s community and ancestral past are key to one’s true, deep identity. Without these ties, life is disconnected, and it is difficult to relate in truly meaningful ways to others. I discussed above the incident in which Milkman defends his identity as a Dead family member against Pilate. On another occasion, when Milkman is in Danville, talking to Rev. Cooper, Morrison shows how one’s identity is tied to one’s family history, name, and one’s people. Rev. Cooper starts talking about how he knew Macon Dead I (Milkman’s grandfather), and how Rev.’s daddy and him were good friends and how he knew Circe and Pilate. The more they drink, the more Rev. talks about Milkman’s family. Even Milkman starts to like the stories:

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

Maybe it was the whiskey, which always made other people gracious when he drank it, but Milkman felt a glow listening to a story come from this man that he’d heard many times before but only half listened to. Or maybe it was being there in the place where it happened that made it seem so real […]. (Morrison 231) As Milkman’s thoughts suggest, his search for identity is also on multiple occasions connected to place and spatial meanings. For example, in connection to the last conversation he had with Rev. Cooper, Milkman ponders, “sitting in a cane-bottomed chair near an upright piano and drinking homemade whiskey poured from a mayonnaise jar, it was real […] It was the living room of the son of the man who made Pilate’s earring […]” (Morrison, 231). Milkman’s words emphasize the role of place and its associated meanings. Place is more than just a location. Cliff Hague and Paul Jenkins write that the importance of place is how it associates meaning to locations (Place Identity 4). This idea, they continue, is supported by Rose’s observation that “places are infused with meaning and feeling, therefore, place implies some mix of memory, sensual experience (in particular visual, but possibly also aural and/or tactile) and interpretation” (qtd. In Hague and Jenkins, Place Identity 4). In other words, “A place is a geographical space that is defined by meanings, sentiments and stories rather than by a set of coordinates” (Hague and Jenkins, 4). They further relate these propositions to ‘place identities’ which they purport “are formed through milieus of feelings, meanings, experiences, memories and actions that, while ultimately personal, are substantially filtered through social structures and fostered through socialization” (7). Milkman is experiencing the effect of such a place. This idea is once again connected to a ‘leap of faith’. Morrison writes that whether it is a land they [residents of Shalimar] want to revive or their own identity, regardless of the goal, all they need is to believe that they can do whatever they want to. This passage also underscores the importance of family, community, and traditional beliefs. Morrison’s characters cannot carry on as individuals. Solomon’s power comes from uniting his people in their faith in themselves. That’s how they

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survive. And to that legend, Milkman adds the tales of his father’s accomplishments, how he is the richest black person in the city, how he drives the best car there is, how he married the prettiest girl, and on he goes. This is how he revives their old spirits and beliefs, “If he want it, he’ll get it! […] Can’t nobody keep him down! […] not in this world! And not in the next!” (Morrison, 236). And Milkman “glittered in the light of their adoration and grew fierce with pride” (236). By recounting his father’s life, he becomes part of the community, takes pride in his own father, his own family, and his own name. Milkman’s newly formed appreciation for his name is rooted in his act of narrating his life in the forms of the tales and sketches for his audience in Shalimar. Before that day, all his ponderings about his life were in the form of questions and hostile feelings about why everything turns out the way it does. The gathering with the elderly of Shalimar is his first attempt to narrate his responses to all the questions he had till then. Morrison conveys the theme of searching for identity mainly through Milkman, Pilate, and Macon. Pilate has kept a strong connection with her traditional roots, enabling her to heal people and show compassion for them. Because of a misunderstanding, however, her sense of family unity remains incomplete. Perhaps this is why she wandered throughout the United States for many years looking for her story. Macon, on the other hand, has disconnected himself from the black community where he lives and also from his ancestral past. Similarly, Milkman grows up with that disconnection, but eventually goes on a quest to find his true self. Morrison also shows how, for some women, such as Ruth and Hagar, a sense of identity is based on their connections to men, and how abandonment results in a tragic damage to their identity. Ruth believes she needs to attach herself to a strong male figure to endure life. As a result, she becomes unnaturally close to her father even after his death, and later to her son for the first four years of his life. Similarly, Hagar becomes obsessed with having a man, the desire for which drives her insane. In summary, the novel wonderfully illustrates multiple elaborate versions of human relations, communion, and the role of peer groups, both positively and negatively and, by doing so, is a reminder of

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

how literature can be a context-specific case study for complicated topics such as human relationships. The characters’ portrayals reflect the key aspects of resiliency: self-efficacy, spirituality, social support. These factors are also further modified throughout the plotline at the thematic level. As has already been mentioned, Morrison uses symbols to represent black people’s desire to transcend problems. The themes I have discussed enhance the character’s strength to face the adversities they have to go through. The role family or ancestral heritage plays in the character’s approach towards difficulties is tied to its effect on their identity formation and worldview.

Middlesex: A Resilience Reading Why should Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex be discussed in the context of resilience studies? What makes this novel a case study in resilience? As I have argued so far, any story about humans’ lives involves some kind of adversity, a quest, and a narrative of survival or success. Although a scientific study of resilience demands a structural portrayal of the protective factors and coping mechanisms, Middlesex is yet another literary case of resilience research – specifically a narrative based on three generations of an immigrant family going through wars, riots, deaths, loves, and many more types of instability, stress, and transition. Therefore, using literature as a case in point, this section, like the other close readings, sets out to do a ‘resilience reading’ of Middlesex with the main aim being to provide an example of the currently highly relevant topic of resiliency and immigration. In this context, my reading highlights themes such as self-efficacy and spirituality as personal factors of resiliency, and the role of place, routines, and social support as the socioecological factors that either affect or help a migrant in a quest to settle in a foreign land. Middlesex has been described as a Greek-American contemporary epic, a bildungsroman, and a reflection of racial hybridity.30 Francisco 30

See Francisco Collado-Rodriguez, Of self and country.

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Collado-Rodriguez has argued that, with his second novel, Eugenides is denouncing categorical thinking and its social consequences (see, Of self and country). In order to develop this ideological attack, Eugenides constructs the figure of Cal as a bodily and narratorial space where different interpretations meet. She/he is narrator and character, Greek and American, woman and man. The narrator Cal/Calliope31 provides accounts of his family’s history, starting with his paternal grandparents in their home village in 1922 and ending with his father’s funeral in the 1970s. These accounts cover the conception of Cal, his teenage years, and the discovery of his intersex condition, hence the masculine/feminine name. The novel is set in the 20th century and benefits from many major and minor historical moments: the Balkan Wars and the wave of forced migration, the Nation of Islam, the 1967 Detroit riot, and the Watergate scandal. Woven into his family history, Cal also tells us about his life in the present, where he is working as a diplomat stationed in Berlin, meets Julie Kikuchi, a Japanese-American woman, and tentatively starts a relationship with her. Since this is a story about characters that experience many historical ups and downs and familial turmoil in multiple locations over an entire generation, a narrative analysis of Middlesex fits thematically and structurally within the framework of resilience studies. However, a bigger argument, I believe, is how Eugenides mixes the two worlds of the life sciences and life writing in his narrative accounts of medical topics related to, for example, genomes, intersexuality, and psychological differences between the two genders. Literary scholars have noted the role of biomedicine in Eugenides’ work from two main perspectives. Samuel Cohen is among those who disagree with Eugenides’ methods. Although he admits that Middlesex is a “critically acclaimed historical novel, has been praised as an

31

I continue to use both names at this point to preserve the intersex identity of the main character, who was born with the sex organs typical of both males and females. I will choose one gender later on in the analysis, parallel to the time when the character chooses which gender to stay with.

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expansive, epic portrait of the American twentieth century from its immigrant roots to the present,” he insists that it “fails aesthetically” (Cohen, The Novel 371). Cohen further argues that the novel’s aesthetic failure is due to “the way it imposes a false closure on its narrative of the main character’s gender crisis” (371). Contrary to Cohen, Olivia Banner argues for the aesthetic availability of the novel and its role in providing a basis upon which the life sciences could build a more positive attitude toward intersexuality. She claims that the novel’s use of “a familiar mainstream form for its evocation of a marginalized identity […] helped ease the medical profession’s transition from a policy of immediate surgical intervention to the acceptance of ambiguous genitalia” (Sing Now 843–844). She maintains that she sees literature and biomedicine “as intertwined in imagining the field of possibilities for bodies and subjectivities” (Banner, Sing Now 844). Banner’s comment on the novel’s uses of various different genetic explanations can be seen as undermining the assumed power of genetics “as the ultimate arbiter of self, identity, and behavior and suggest[ing] instead that sociocultural interpretations mold sex” (845). In other words, Cal/Calliope is the mediator between the taken-for-granted facts of the life sciences, and the more humane life writings, helping to alleviate the taboos associated with topics such as intersexuality. The depth revealed by this perspective strengthens my claim that this text can be considered a suitable case study. In a line of argument that gels well with my own, another gender critic, Debra Shostak writes that the novel can be read as a case study that “aimed at both stimulating and troubling theoretical attempts to account for the social construction of gender, especially the relations among gender, sexuality, and the body” (Theory Uncompromised 383). The theme of gender as a social construction is further explored by Robyn Warhol, who praises Eugenides for having “evidently read plenty of gender theory” (Philology 228), implying that such knowledge is employed instructively in his novel to promote social justice. As for criticism that is more negative towards the novel, Daniel Mendelsohn, for example, complains that the narrator is actually gender-unambiguous, that is, totally male, and that the novel thus

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reaffirms the conservative gender hierarchy (Mighty Hermaphrodite 18). For others, including Collado-Rodríguez, Middlesex “may be singled out as an example of the type of contemporary literature that sides with the hybrid in the ideological struggle against the artificial limits imposed by categorical thinking and supported by the American New Right” (73) in the sense of Hutcheon’s “historical metafiction” (Collado-Rodríguez, Of Self and Country 73). As far as the criticism goes, this controversial novel has attracted a set of responses that is as hybrid as its own subject matter. Against this background, I would like to argue for another possible angle of interpretation, one that hasn’t yet been touched upon: human resilience. How might a resilience reading enhance the other readings that have already been made? As can be inferred from the short review of criticism of Middlesex, the book has been mainly considered in relation to gender studies, in which the ‘intersexuality’ of the narrator has been explored in relation to postmodern intellectual currents. Despite the claim by other scholars that the novel indeed acts as a hybrid that bridges the gaps between biomedicine and literature, such analyses have studied the novel’s ideological underpinnings against strict disciplinary boundaries. I will, however, use the novel to provide individual and socioecological examples that play the role of protective factors (or risk factors), and I will further discuss details of how interpersonal, community, and environmental factors affect individual resiliency. Although the novel is admittedly a perfect read to challenge traditional binary definitions of race, gender, and sex, my interpretations will in particular highlight Eugenides’ postmodern style, which Linda Hutcheon termed “historiographic metafiction,” his revisionist history of 20th century America and, more importantly, his critique of the American Dream.

Protective Factors – The Personal Level: Coping Strategies As I outlined in chapter two, an individual’s resilience or lack thereof depends strongly on their individual, social, and societal resources, or, in different terms, on their personal and socioecological contexts.

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

Masten’s famous dictum that resilience is “ordinary magic,” proposed that “Resilience is common and typically arises from the operation of basic protections” (Ordinary Magic 7). Looking for these ‘basic protections,’ I will now not only read the characters’ reactions when facing adversity, but will also go over the general coping mechanisms that are mentioned in the novel – with regard to the Greek tradition, for example – in order to see if the individuals in the novel act in resilient ways, and how they achieve their resiliency.

Desdemona’s Eternal Suffering Desdemona Stephanides is Cal’s grandmother, who left Greece for America in 1922, when Turks started to invade the village she was living in with her brother, Lefty. Desdemona’s most apparent characteristic is her never-ending anxiety and concern about the future (and the past, as I will explain later). Scholars of resilience such as Michael Rutter, Michael Ungar, and Ann S. Masten have underscored the role of optimism as a mediating factor. In Desdemona’s case, the lack of this mediating factor causes her not only to become physically ill, but also to develop chronic depression. In 1919, Desdemona’s parents were killed during the war between Greece and Turkey. The resulting heartache, rooted in her deep sense of grief, meant that “Desdemona became what she’d remain for the rest of her life: a sick person imprisoned in a healthy body” (Eugenides, 23). Her body, though physically healthy, is controlled by a shattered mind that cannot believe in her own endurance. However, her most substantial concern stems from a marriage, or rather her marriage to her brother, Lefty. After their parents’ death, Desdemona, having promised her mother that she would take care of Lefty, tries to find him a wife. Lefty (who is, due to their complicated Greek family tree, not only her brother but also her third cousin) realizes that his sister is maybe the best person to marry because no girl (there are only two other single girls in their village at the time) in that small village is as good as she is. When he mentions his intentions to her, Desdemona responds positively, and they change their status from brother and sister to husband and wife! Since the city

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is at war with the Turks, they have to flee from their home, and after some very hard nights at the harbor, they have to even abandon the city as the Turks set it on fire. In these disconcerting circumstances, they manage to get aboard a boat to the United States, pretending they are strangers who have just fallen in love. Their love story becomes a topic of conversation for the other (rather bored) passengers, with whose help they get married on the boat before reaching America. In America, Desdemona slowly realizes the reality of her decision: Conscience-stricken at having married her own brother, she lives in constant fear of punishment sent by all kinds of deities. This fear grows much stronger when she gets pregnant. She goes through the first pregnancy with constant nightmares related to a single topic: giving birth to a monster. She prays all the time and promises the gods that she will not get pregnant again if this child is healthy. The child is born, a boy named Milton (known as Miltie) – healthy and normal. This brings her a degree of peace. But she gets pregnant again and goes through the same horror scenarios. But the second child, a girl named Zoe, is also healthy. However, Desdemona: began to watch her children closely […]. Milton got good grades at school and Zoe above average. But Desdemona wasn’t reassured by any of this. She kept waiting for something to happen, some disease, some abnormality, fearing that the punishment for her crime was going to be taken out in the most devastating way possible: not on her own soul but in the bodies of her children. (Eugenides 178) As a religious person, Desdemona’s beliefs in the gods’ power to punish any act of sin turns her religion into a source of discomfort rather than solace. In recent decades, there has been significant growth in research examining the association between religion, spirituality, and mental health. Although there is some inconsistency regarding the overlap or distinction between religion and spirituality, Kenneth Pargament and his colleagues’ work has revealed that many people turn to their religion or spirituality as one of the first resources when faced with potentially traumatic life events or significant stressors. For example, in a community-based survey, turning to religion was the

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

second most commonly used strategy – after support seeking – to cope with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (Schuster et al., A National Survey 1507). However, “Religious coping is a multidimensional construct and can have both positive and negative effects on outcomes” (Pargament et al., Patterns 710). Thus, not all religious coping strategies are useful. Positive religious coping is thought to be associated with benefits in psychosocial adjustment, whereas negative religious coping – defined by Hebert at al. (Positive and negative 537) as “feeling abandoned by or anger at God” – leads to poorer consequences and is therefore considered maladaptive (Pargament et al., Religious Coping). In Desdemona’s case, her otherwise strong physique cannot keep up with her weak mental state, which is under constant pressure from the fear of the punishment she thinks awaits her for her sinful marriage to her brother, especially after she enters the United States as an immigrant, away from her beloved Greece. It is this fear of God/the gods that haunts her in her pregnancies, more so in the second, since she had sworn to all her gods that if the first baby was healthy, she would not have any more children. After the second pregnancy, her fear is so great that she has herself sterilized afterwards. Paradoxically, although her religious beliefs cause her to live a fearful life, she also benefits from positive religious coping (i.e., “partnering with God or looking to God for strength, support, or guidance” [Herbert et al., 237]). The strongest example of her positive religious coping concerns Milton. Milton is in love with his cousin, and Desdemona’s fear of punishment leads her towards scheming to stop Milton from marrying his cousin by any means necessary. However, Milton is desperate, and chooses to join the navy, without knowing the severity of the geopolitical situation. It is in those moments of hopelessness that Desdemona goes to church to ask for help from St. Christopher to save Milton’s life while he is serving. She promises the saint that “Miltie will build” the church in her village, which had been burnt down by the Turks, and which she saw from the boat as she was leaving Greece. In moments of frustration at the lack of worldly support, Desdemona’s deep religious beliefs rekindle, and she uses the promise of rebuilding the burnt village’s church as a token. During this

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specific church visit, she believes that St. Christopher has responded positively to her prayers, causing a sudden feeling in her spine. She has such deep faith that she believes God will save Milton (and of course, when he arrives home safe from the war, Miltie has to build the church!). Desdemona’s deep conversation with God is an example of what some investigators have found as evidence in literature to support spiritual coping mechanisms such as “developing a collaborative partnership with God, experiencing a sense of spiritual contentedness, finding congregational support, reframing a stressful event positively, and seeking spiritual support to be associated with better mental health” (Harrison et al., 88). Desdemona’s collaborative partnership keeps her calm through yet another war, as she can believe that God will save Miltie. However, after she receives her final letter from her son, she loses all hope, and says “God has brought the judgment down on us that we deserve” (Eugenides, 220), the judgment of her sinful marriage. I would therefore like to argue that for Desdemona, due to her intense sense of guilt, religion in its totality is more of a negative factor than a positive one. However, rather amusingly, such fears of negative events, can paradoxically have positive outcomes. In Desdemona’s case, her fear makes her move forward with life and care even more for her family and loved ones. Yet in her old age, after Lefty’s (her brother-husband) death, with no-one left to care for and losing all her excuses to stay strong, she announces “I am going to bed” (305) after Lefty’s funeral, even though it was three in the afternoon, and stays there for the next ten years. She never gets up again. During those years, she is suffering from fatigue, dizziness, and circulation problems to the extent that not even her fear of God could make her leave the bed. In other words, her fear is not that she will be punished herself but that God will punish her loved ones. After Lefty’s death, that fear was no longer able to act as a driving force. As a young woman, when they had just moved to the United States, Desdemona would work all day long in the kitchen, preparing food, pickling, smoking meat, or simply making herself busy with some task while Lefty was at work. When they both got too old to work, they spent most of their time with the grandchildren or watching

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

television. Lefty had a stroke the very same day Cal/Calliope (his granddaughter/son) was born. When he woke up at the hospital, he was not able to talk anymore. Later he began to lose his mind. Lefty’s poor health gave Desdemona another reason to be strong, where “the necessity of caring for her husband during his final years had made Desdemona a bundle of activity” (Eugenides, 308). But after his death, “At seventy, the strain of having no one to care for but herself aged her overnight” (309). After Lefty’s death, Desdemona has no more reasons to live. The death of a spouse has consistently been identified as one of the most stressful of normative life events (Miller & Rahe, Life Changes). Findings reported by Daniel Carr and colleagues in their study Marital quality and psychological adjustment to widowhood among older adults suggest that “Characteristics of the marriage such as warmth, conflict, and instrumental dependence have distinct and complex associations with adjustment to the loss of one’s spouse” (55). Taking care of Lefty gave Desdemona her ‘instrumental dependence,’ with that being gone, she resorts to nothingness. This might have been different had they stayed in their homeland instead of migrating. Resilience is thus not seen only in individual terms, but there is also a communal dimension to it. I maintain that the role of place is more focal for her as an immigrant. As was mentioned earlier, her otherwise strong physique could not keep up with her weak mental state, and the constant pressure of awaiting punishment, especially after she and her brother-husband entered the US as immigrants. In Detroit, not speaking the language, Desdemona feels out of place; she doesn’t like the food and the shopping routines, and becomes even more isolated. Desdemona illustrates what has been termed the ‘immigrant paradox,’ and which is portrayed throughout the novel. Ann Masten writes that “data continue to be mixed in regard to the immigrant paradox, with stronger evidence for physical health and good conduct than mental health and well-being” (Ordinary Magic 249). Even before entering the US, she complains that “They [the Americans] should let us speak Greek if they’re so accepting” (Eugenides, 85) and she never learns English as well as Lefty does. Having had to let the YWCA agents cut her “immigrant braids,” she protests to Lefty that she never wanted to “look like an Amerikanidha”

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(Eugeides, 94, emphasis in the original) and starts a series of cultural rejections that makes it much harder for her to adapt. Her inability to speak English correctly, alongside her repudiation of American culture, worsen her solitude, especially in older ages. Loneliness in older people is a public health concern in many Western countries. While “not necessarily a symptom of mental disorder, it is often associated with depression and anxiety” (Davis et al., Resilience in Common Life 533). Davis et al., in their study on loneliness among widows found that: The participants negotiated the experience of loneliness following widowhood from an acute phase of experiencing an absence and the associated loss of routine connection to the establishment of new routines that provided new connections and a new sense of identity as an individual rather than a couple. (532) Desdemona, though, stops her ritual of routines. The lack of new routines, and therefore new connections and a new sense of identity causes her to be depressed, which in turn is an acknowledged risk factor for both mental health and physical problems (Hawkley & Cacioppo, Loneliness Matters). However, Desdemona should not be taken as a weak character. “There are clearly instances where first-generation immigrants show better adaptation” writes Masten (Ordinary Magic 249). Masten provides examples from the United States, Europe, and Canada to support this claim, and justifies it based on “the exceptionalism of the first generation” (249). Immigrants often have to go through major difficulties simply to arrive at their destination, as was the case with Desdemona and Lefty: In order to get a pass for the boat which would take them to safety and away from war and fire, they had to pretend to be French; on the boat to the US, they pretended to be strangers so that they could be together; and Desdemona had to have her hair cut to fit the American style, among other things. “A high achievement motivation, a strong work ethic, a propensity for delay of gratification, and optimism” are the factors reported by Buriel (Historical Origins 37) regarding the population of Mexican-American immigrant students. As for the immigrant paradox, using Buriel, Masten further explains that,

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

“Over generations, these qualities [the same ones by Buriel that I just cited] can erode, unless strong ties are maintained to the traditional culture through bicultural practices” (Ordinary Magic 250). Buriel’s case study is based on Mexican immigrants to the United States, where he proposes that “the retention of Spanish language fluency” is one of the factors leading to the second generation’s lower resiliency. In Middlesex, then, Desdemona’s initial hatred of becoming American, her insistence on remaining Greek, not only via language but also in terms of food and traditions, her rather self-inflicted non-adaptive character, may have caused her final sad loneliness. Desdemona’s character is therefore an amalgam of resilience and vulnerability. My readings show that when she has access to her selfdefined resources, namely her religion and her traditions, she appears as a strong agent in control of life, regardless of the severity of the situation. Correspondingly, she becomes a goal-free, empty, and dependent character when devoid of such resources. However, it needs to be pointed out that regardless of external factors – in her case living in a foreign land and not knowing the language properly – when she is determined to do something, she manages to achieve her goal, as shown by how she finds a job in Detroit, when the city is in the middle of civil unrest. A resilience-based reading of Desdemona therefore not only portrays the role of traditions and belonging, but also underscores the gravity of individual agency. Perhaps this is a rather perplexing conclusion, since so far in all my readings, the focal point has generally been placed on the individual as the sole player or author of their lifepath, highlighting the fact that regardless of external context, people are all “self-made” men and women, if they choose to be.

Lefty and His Sister-Wife Lefty might be the best foil for Desdemona’s character. While Desdemona stays home and mourns their parents’ death, back in 1922 in Greece, Lefty, though also depressed and broken, chooses to mourn at the bar, “by disappearing in a cloud of hash smoke while listening to the absolutely saddest music in the world” (Eugenides, 30). While

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Desdemona hates the new country and can never be an American, Lefty finds the new land and the new language a means to “push the past a little further behind” (113) and bury the guilt that Desdemona never grows out of. He is on occasions described as a Republican who believes in the American Dream, so much so that he sides with Americans in a dinner gathering at his home and loses his old friends who were defending the Greeks.32 Lefty is always able to find a way around his problems. For example, when Desdemona grows cold in their marriage after their first child, he absorbs himself in work. As discussed above, Desdemona’s religiosity meant her pregnancy was full of nightmares in which she was being punished for the sin of marrying her brother by giving birth to a monster. However, when Miltie was born a healthy and happy boy, she forgets about the nightmares and turns into a very loving mother, but no longer much of a caring wife. What she does is to push Lefty out of her life and replace him with her son, so much so that Lefty doesn’t see any place for himself in her heart after their son is born. The reason for Desdemona’s infatuation and obsessive behavior can be interpreted as her belief that she has been forgiven, for which, so as to be a thankful servant of her god, she swears not to have any more children. This approach does not favor Lefty. Several studies have linked faulty communication patterns (Eldridge & Christensen, Demand-Withdraw) or negative emotions (Gottman & Notarius, Marital Research) to low marital satisfaction. It is noteworthy that “Resilient individuals are optimistic about the future of their relationship, confident about their ability to find a creative solution to their marital problems, and have the interpersonal skills to elicit social support to aid the process” (Bradley & Hojjat, A Model of Resilience 589). However, being in a dysfunctional marriage, Lefty (as will Milton later on) resorts to other means: He opens a bar and “kept his body busy so that his mind wouldn’t have a chance to think: about the growing coldness of his wife, or the way their crime pursued them” (Eugenides, 152). Nevertheless, if up until the birth of their son, he seemed to be a strong character, motivated 32

See Alfred Arteaga, ed., An Other Tongue.

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towards building his life with Desdemona, after the birth of their son, Desdemona’s coldness and rejection reminds him of who she truly is: his former sister. If back in Greece, anytime he went to bars to be away from his mourning sister, he ended up sleeping with a girl who nonetheless resembled her, after the birth of their son, he was reminded that she is his sister whom he had married in sin. Yet when the economy is in turmoil and working in the bar is no longer enough, and Lefty joins a group of photographers to make erotic pictures, which are sold during the Depression for a nickel, he now no longer searches for his sister in those girls. Cal/Calliope reflects on this: Why did Lefty stop searching for his sister’s face and start searching for others, for blondes with thin lips, for gun molls with provocative rumps? Was his interest in these models merely pecuniary? Did the cold wind blowing through the house lead him to seek warmth in other places? Or had guilt begun to infect him, too, so that to distract himself from the thing he’d done he ended up with these Mabels and Lucies and Doloreses? (Eugenides 181) Although the questions are rather rhetorical, and the narrator is unable to answer them, later in the novel, Lefty is physically paralyzed. He is left unable to talk for the remaining years of his life, as if the burden symbolically mutes him and thereby frees him of the responsibility of keeping their secret. It is only near his death that he starts a new pattern, where his mind began recounting and reliving life backwards, as if “he were playing along, pretending to relive his life in the past so as not to face the present” (Eugenides, 302). This approach, referred to as discounting a life event – which I will discuss in more detail with regards to Cal’s life story – is a repeated pattern in this family. Ken Mellor and Eric Schiff believe discounting is an “internal mechanism” whereby “the person who discounts believes or acts as though some aspects of the self, other people or reality is less significant than it actually is” (Discounting 295). Lefty’s son, Milton, although he comes to disagree with his father when he is older, pursues a very similar pattern of decisions in response to undesirable events. One such event portrayed in the novel is the 1967 Detroit riot. Milton owns a diner in

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one of the main streets. To protect his property, he stays at the diner and does not leave for three nights amidst the gunfire and snipers: “He kept up a brave front” (265). The same self-destruction that left Lefty broken in his retirement appears time and again in Milton’s life. Before marrying Tessie (his cousin), with whom he was desperately in love and who had rejected him, he joins the navy in desperation. When confronted with the severity of war, he ponders: “Why had he joined the navy? For revenge, for escape. He wanted to get back at Tessie and he wanted to forget her. Neither had worked” (211). What fascinates me about Milton is how he can adapt to any situation, the best example of which would be the night of the riots again. When his diner is attacked and set on fire, at first, he “raced behind the counter to grab the fire extinguisher” but then “he suddenly stopped” because: Success depends on adapting to new situations, and what situation was newer than this? Flames were climbing the walls […] Milton’s mind was searching the bottom drawer of his desk, in particular a fat envelope containing the three fire insurance policies […]. (Eugenides 282) Although these insurance policies were the result of Lefty’s belief in multiple back-ups due to his experiences from the Great Depression, amusingly framed as “sometimes the insurance company burns too,” now Milton, too, instead of panicking or trying to save the property, lets the diner go on burning and instead gets rich on insurance money. One could argue that this is too satirical to be considered in terms of adaptation theory. However, defining resilience, Ungar writes that: In the context of exposure to significant adversity, resilience is both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain their well-being, and their capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these resources to be provided in culturally meaningful ways. (Social Ecology 17) Being in the midst of a riot is enough by itself to qualify as an adverse experience. For Milton, this experience is intensified by his diner being

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

on fire, since the prospect of losing his source of income is indeed a major adverse situation. What Milton does, though, is to navigate himself out of that situation by means of resources, in this case the paid-up insurance policies, which he once thought were redundant.

Calliope/Cal33 If Desdemona’s trauma is mainly the guilt that gives her nightmares, and Lefty’s is more or less the burden of earning enough money all the time, for Calliope, trauma is rooted in her own self: her biological condition. Before knowing her intersex state, she has to go through years of embarrassment, particularly during puberty (the one which she never got). It has been proven that physical abnormality can also initiate an adverse situation, for example Silverman and Deuster write that: Physical fitness, achieved through regular exercise and/or spontaneous physical activity, confers resilience by inducing positive psychological and physiological benefits, blunting stress reactivity, protecting against potentially adverse behavioural and metabolic consequences of stressful events and preventing many chronic diseases. (Biological Mechanisms 1) Although in Calliope’s case we are not faced with an inactive individual, but rather with a biologically special situation, the premise stands that the individual’s physical body is a mediator in terms of self-esteem and positive mental health. Calliope’s unusual body plays a major role in her self-reliance because “my [her] face wasn’t right […] The year I turned thirteen I was becoming freakier than ever […] My response to all this was to grow my hair […] I refused to let anyone cut it” (344-5). Although most, if not all, teenagers go through years of being unsatisfied with their looks during puberty, Calliope’s situation is the source of tremendous shame, as she refuses to even cut her hair short 33

For consistency, I will use Calliope when referring to the narrative before Dr. Luce’s examination and her subsequent escape from her family, and Cal for the narratives after that incident.

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or at least remove it from her face. Her mom, Tessie, tries many times in vain to convince her to cut it short. In response to Tessie’s frustration Calliope ponders: What could I tell her? That that was the whole point of having long hair? To keep it in my face? Maybe I didn’t look like Dorothy Hamill. Maybe I was starting to bear a strong resemblance to our weeping willow trees. But there were virtues to my hair. It covered tinsel teeth. It covered the satirical nose. It hid blemishes and, best of all, it hid me. (Eugenides 347) She is not only ashamed of a big nose or crooked teeth, she is ashamed of herself as a person. The way she uses her hair as a hiding place can be interpreted as a sign of her profound sense of shame. Some researchers describe shame as “the master emotion of everyday life” (Scheff, Elias 229). Having conducted a study on 215 women and the construct of shame, Brene Brown concludes that shame is “An intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging” (Shame Resilience 45), and introduces the term shame resilience. She associates shame with “feeling trapped, powerless, and isolated” and shame resilience with “empathy, connection, power, and freedom” (47). For Calliope, that gigantic bundle of hair helps her hide from or cope with the shame she has for her body and face. Further, she tells us that despite her unusual form, her parents’ (Tessie and Milton) love for her never changed. They love her all the same, although they are worried that she might not attract boys. They try to find a solution for Calliope’s unusual growth process by taking her to Dr. Luce. Luce works at New York Hospital in the Psychohormonal Unit. He founded the Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic in 1968 and then became a famous specialist on hermaphroditism. His examinations of Calliope identify her as a boy, which leads to the change of her name to Cal. He suggests surgery to correct the abnormality. Although her parents agree, she cannot accept her situation. Most importantly, though, their behavior does not seem to change. Previously, I talked about ‘discounting’ of events with regard to Milton and Lefty’s tendency to create some kind of engagement for

Narrative Enquiry on the Theme of Resilience in Fiction

themselves in order to evade the problem at hand. However, perhaps the strongest example of this negation can be inferred from Milton and Tessie’s attitude towards taking Calliope to Dr. Luce: I knew that my situation, whatever it was, was a crisis of some kind. I could tell that from our speedy exit from home. Still, no one has said a word to me yet. Milton and Tessie were treating me exactly as they always had – as their daughter, in other words. They acted as though my problem was medical and therefore fixable. (Eugenides 455) It is not quite clear whether they are acting as responsible parents who do not want to share their concern with their teenage daughter or simply believe her situation to be purely medical. What is certain is how Calliope sees the situation. She recalls, “For a year now they had been denying how I was changing, putting it down to the awkward age. ‘She’ll grow out of it,’ Milton was always telling my mother” (457). In all these examples, they ignore the truth either by denying the existence of a negative situation, or by being supportive parents towards a daughter who cannot control her biology. If it is the former, which is suggested by Cal’s telling us that for his parents’ ignorance seemed preferable to grief, and that they started to make love with a frequency they hadn’t known for years, then one could conclude that they preferred to suffer in silence. Research has shown that ‘positive illusions’ may help people to successfully adjust to threatening events, such as receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer (e.g. Taylor & Lichtman, Attributions), and that self-serving biases represent a necessary feature of psychological adjustment and healthy coping, particularly in the context of extreme adversity (Taylor & Brown, Positive Illusions). Notwithstanding, contrary to her parents ‘positive illusions’ or ‘selfserving biases,’ Calliope, the teenager, does indeed try to bring her situation under control. This may again be considered in terms of the role a ‘sense of control’ plays in resiliency, especially among young people, as Michael Ungar emphasizes in his formulation of “common and unique protective factors.” Ungar writes that “The youth’s ability to exercise some control [personal control and efficacy] over his or her world was important to experiences of empowerment” (Diversity

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39). When confronted by the fear of going to the doctor because her mother believes there might be something wrong with her, she plans a symbolic escape. Faking her period is perhaps not the best strategy in her situation, yet, her plan calms her mother down, and the tension is removed from the family. More importantly, she is in control of the situation. However, this does not last long. She eventually does go to Dr. Luce, and the news about her gender problems eventually leads to her literal escape from the family. In spite of her parents’ attempts at being empathetic, she runs away and tries to start a new life for herself. She tries to dress like boys and act like them, but having no money and nowhere to go, he ends up in a freak show, where he is finally arrested. To be freed from prison, he calls home and finds out that his father is dead, and goes home for his funeral. In intervals interspersed within his narrative, Cal takes us to his present life, where he has passed the escaping years and, having grown into an adult man, is living in Berlin and working at the embassy, but: I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It’s not the best way to live. But it’s the way I am […] only a few people […] know my secret. I tell more people than I used to […] some nights I tell people I’ve just met. In other cases, I keep silent for ever […] I leave […]. (Eugenides 122) One might argue that the only change is that he has come to accept his condition. His worries, his inability to enter into either physical relationships or to communicate the depth of his feelings and the resulting habit he has of abandoning relationships as soon as they begin to become intimate are consistent with this interpretation. In general, Cal’s narrative style, his constant flashbacks and circular narratives, taken alongside his habit of ‘keeping silent’ about his own feelings for most of the storyline, add up to the conclusion that ‘repression’ if not ‘dissociation’ is his preferred narrative approach to his own life story. In any case, Calliope, despite her age, becomes an epitome of agency. This strong sense of control is evident in her decision to become a boy. Looking at Cal’s story, I am persuaded to argue that he is yet another example of resilience as an individual trait,

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which can subsequently feed on external factors. His characterization communicates the idea that for a resilient outcome, the seeds of resiliency need to exist within the individual, and, if it is the other way around, if the context is rich enough but the individual is not an agent, we cannot expect such an outcome. I should, however, also point out that the story is not solely based on individual factors, as will be discussed in the following part.

Protective Factors – The Socioecological Level In the previous section, I discussed the characters’ individual resilience techniques or coping mechanisms (or lack thereof). Desdemona uses religion and her ego resilience as resources, whereas Lefty and Milton seek refuge in denial. I also discussed Calliope/Cal’s youthful attempts to take control of her problems. In this section, I will discuss their social and societal resources, or, to put it in different terms, resources stemming from socioecological contexts.

Role of Family Background and Traditions “Cultures and religions encode and transmit adaptive strategies through their cultural practices, beliefs and sacred texts” (Ordinary Magic 260) and, as Masten frames it, it seems reasonable to assume that strategies and ideas that promote resilience in times of threat and adversity “would be noted, valued and passed on from generation to generation” (Ordinary Magic 260). Desdemona’s silkworm box is a symbol of all the Greek traditions passed through generations of Greeks and immigrants down to Calliope. In times of acute stress, Desdemona picks beads, “exactly as her father had done, and her grandfather, and her great grandfather, performing a family legacy of precise, codified, thorough worrying” (Eugenides, 32). Another example is the Greek diet, which they still insist on in America. In recent years, there has been growing interest in the relationship between human biology

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and resilience, in particular gut microbiome and immune systems.34 Calliope writes how their Greek diet may be the reason for the family members’ longevity and overall health, in comparison to the American fast-food diet.

The Importance of Place Every family in this story is forced into relocation at some point. Desdemona and Lefty moved from Smyrna to Detroit because of war; Milton and Tessie moved the whole family to a new neighborhood and a new house (named Middlesex for its unique architecture, which aims at being modern and traditional at the same time) after the race riots; and finally, the adult Cal never stays at one place more than three years. As Robin Cox and Karen-Marie Elah Perry write “Place has most prominently figured in the research on disaster resilience as it pertains to displacement resulting from forced migrations or evacuations” (Like a Fish Out of Water 399), and they maintain that in cases of “forced dislocation”, many people demonstrate difficulty in navigating their new environments (399). Desdemona never stops describing the beauties of Smyrna. For her, America was never home; which is among the reasons why she never adapts fully to the new culture. When she and Lefty settle in Milton’s attic, not surprisingly, Desdemona feels better because “The vertigo of living up there reminded her of Mount Olympus. The dormer window provided a good view […] and when she left the window open, the wind blew through as it used to do in Bithynios. Up in the attic, Desdemona and Lefty came back to where they started” (Eugenides, 237). This sense of belonging can also be connected to the human need for stability and routines. Robin Cox and her colleagues have shown that, at the time of disaster and forced relocation, “The illusion of permanence, predictability, and stability that is established through routines and the structuring of familiarity was unmasked” (400). Back in Greece, Desdemona was the lady of the house, in contact with 34

See Kau et al., Human Nutrition, the Gut Microbiome and the Immune System.

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the whole village, master of her silk room, and a lady every girl in the village aspired to become. In America, however, as an immigrant who would not let go of her Greek routines, she lacks such status. To these problems, the inability of communication in a foreign language is added. Lefty, motivated by the need to have a job and provide for the family, learns English and ‘melts’ in the American melting pot, as symbolized by the pageant that marks his graduation from the Ford Motor Company’s language school. But Desdemona keeps rejecting assimilation to her last days. Furthermore, as Cox et al. note, not surprisingly for someone from a rural community, Desdemona appears to have a deep attachment to the natural environment. Detroit is not exactly a tiny village in the mountains, where she had the breeze and the view from her mountain home. To relate these place identities to narratives, though writing in the context of planning and policy making for sustainable place development, Cliff Hague and Paul Jenkins propose that “Past and present realities cannot be easily erased in favor of some ersatz new identity, even if those with power wish to do so […] memory and tradition remain important reference points in any construction of place identity” (Place Identity 11). This proposition holds true for the relation between place, identity, narrative, and resilience. An individual’s strength or weakness of narrative is depicted in the presence or absence of criteria that in turn depend on the individual’s experiences, memories, and perceptions of the place, and that further create the context for him or her to show strength in adversity. Simply put, contextual factors are co-dependent: Where we live affects who we are and how our life-stories are shaped; where we live provides us with memories to relate to; where we live constructs our identity; our identity is reflected in the narratives we tell; and our narrative identities reflect our degree of resiliency. Also relevant to the role of life experiences and human narrative identity are Calliope’s references to her genes, how her grandparents’ crime brought about her existence, and how “everything comes from an egg” (Eugenides, 224). Quite mockingly he writes about her aunt, Sourmelina Zizmo:

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So, to recap: Sourmelina Zizmo wasn’t only my first cousin twice removed. She was also my grandmother. My father was his own mother’s (And father’s) nephew. In addition to being my grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty were my great-aunt and uncle. My parents would be my second cousins once removed and Chapter Eleven would be my third cousin as well as brother […]. (Eugenides 224) This may be seen as Calliope implying that her genes are responsible for her current situation, no matter how hard she tries to be strong and adapt to the abnormality of being intersex. However, he also mentions that he himself is a living proof that neither evolutionary biologists who believe in the dominance of nature over nurture nor Dr. Luce’s theories of gender identity with their preference of nurture over nature are absolutes. “Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind” (Eugenides, 539), Calliope concludes. This last sentence is to me another way of talking about person and context relations that Ungar, among others, speaks about. He believes in a social ecology of resilience in the sense “that development is less biologically determined than it is socially facilitated” (Social Ecology). In Middlesex, we see clear evidence of such roles. Once again, through this reading, I would like to underscore the relevance of literature and the possibilities provided by the fictional world for a literary case study of a scientific topic. A resilience-focused reading of Middlesex underscores the individual coping mechanisms of spirituality and self-esteem, and focuses on the role of place and family support as external factors.

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Emerging Institutional Fields. Organization, 11(5): 689–711. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1350508404046457 Lawson, Angelica Marie. 2006. Resistance and Resilience in the Work of Four Native American Authors, (Doctoral Dissertation), Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press. Lazarus, Richard S. and Susan Folkman. 1084. Stress, Appraisal and Coping. New York: Springer. Lee, Dorothy H. 1982. “Song of Solomon: To Ride the Air.” Black American Literature Forum. School of Education, Indiana State University. Leslie A. Fiedler. 1960. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion Books. Leverenz, D. 1989. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornel University Press. Linda Hutcheon. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Madsen, D. L. 2017. “The mechanics of survivance in indigenouslydetermined video-games: Invaders and never alone”. Transmotion, 3(2), 79–110. Mancini, Anthony D., and George A. Bonanno. 2010. “Resilience to Potential Trauma: Towards a Lifespan Approach”. In Handbook of Adult Resilience, edited by John W. Reich, Alex, J. Zatura, and John Stuart Hall, 258–280. New York: The Guilford Press. Masten, Ann S. 2001. “Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development”. American Psychologist, 56(3): 227–238. Masten, Ann S. 2006. “Promoting Resilience in Development: A General Framework for Systems of Care”. In Promoting Resilience in Child Welfare, edited by Robert John Flynn, Peter M. Dudding, and James G. Barber, 3–17. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Masten, Ann S., and Jelena Obradović. 2006. “Competence and Resilience in Development”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1094(1): 13–27. Matthiessen, F., O. 1941. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press. McAdams, Dan P., & Kate McLean. 2013. “Narrative Identity”. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3): 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1 177/0963721413475622.

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McAdams, Dan P., & Kate McLean. 2013. “Narrative Identity”. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3): 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1 177/0963721413475622 Mellor K, & E. Schiff. 1975. “Discounting”. Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 5(3): 295–302. doi:10.1177/036215377500500321 Melville, Herman. 2002 [1851]. Moby-Dick, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, New York: Norton & Company. Mendelsohn, Daniel. 2002. “Mighty Hermaphrodite”. Review of Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex. New York Review of Books 7 Nov. 2002, www.nybooks.com/ articles/15794. Miller, Mark A. and Richard H. Rahe. 1997. “Life Changes Scaling for the 1990s”, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 43(3): 279–292. Morrison, T. 2004. Song of Solomon. New York: Vintage. Muller, W. 1993. Legacy of the Heart: The Spiritual Advantage of a Painful Childhood. New York: Simon and Schuster. Mumford, L. 1929. Herman Melville. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Brien, Susie. 2017. “Resilience Stories: Narratives of Adaptation, Refusal, and Compromise”. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 4(2–3): 43–65. O’Leary, Virginia E. 2010.“Strength in the Face of Adversity: Individual and Social Thriving”. Journal of Social Issues, 54(2): 425–446. https://d oi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1998.tb01228.x Olson, C. 2018 [1947]. Call Me Ishmael. Pickle Partners Publishing. Ebook. Pargament Kenneth I. et al. 1998. “Patterns of Positive and Negative Religious Coping with Major Life Stressors”. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37(4): 710–724. https://doi.org/10.2307/1388152 Pargament Kenneth I. et al. 2004. “Religious Coping Methods as Predictors of Psychological, Physical and Spiritual Outcomes Among Medically Ill Elderly Patients: A Two-year Longitudinal Study”. Journal of Health Psychology, 9(6): 713–730. https://doi.org/1 0.1177/1359105304045366 Pease, Donald E. 2001. “Introduction”. In James, C.L.R., Mariners, Renegades and Castaways and the World We Live In, vii-xxxiii. Ebook.

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Phillips, Dana. 2017. “Collapse, Resilience, Stability and Sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy”. In Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture, edited by Adeline JohnsPutra, John Parham and Louise Squire, 139–159. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. https://doi.org/10.7765/978 1526107633.00016 Phiri, Aretha. 2017. “Expanding Black Subjectivities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah”. Cultural Studies, 31(1): 121–142. Reconsidering Disaster Recovery and the Role of Place and Social Capital in Community Disaster Resilience, Society for Community Research and Action”. American Journal of Community Psychology, 48(3–4): 395–411. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-011-9427-0 Reed, H. 1988. “Toni Morrison, ‘Song of Solomon’ and Black Cultural Nationalism. The Centennial Review, 32(1), 50–64. Reich, John W., Alex J. Zautra, and John Stuart Hall, editors. 2010. Handbook of Adult Resilience. New York: Guilford Press. Reivich Karen et al. 2013. “From Helplessness to Optimism: The Role of Resilience in Treating and Preventing Depression in Youth”. In Handbook of Resilience in Children, edited by Sam Goldstein and Robert B. Brooks, 201-214. Boston, MA: Springer. Reynolds, D. 1992. “‘Its wood could only be American!’: Moby Dick and the antebellum popular culture”. In Higgins, Brian and Parker Herschel (eds.) Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, New York: GK Hall and Co. Rutter, Michael. 2012. “Resilience as a Dynamic Concept”. Development and Psychopathology, 24(2): 335–344. Scheff, Thomas J. 2004. “Elias, Freud and Goffman: Shame as the Master Emotion.” In The Sociology of Norbert Elias, edited by Steven Loyal and Stephen Quilley, 229–242. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheir, M., Carver, C., & Bridges, M. 1994. “Distinguishing Optimism from Neuroticism (and Trait Anxiety, Self-Mastery, and SelfEsteem): A Reevaluation of the Life Orientation Test”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1063–1078.

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Schuster, Mark A. et al. 2001. “A National Survey of Stress Reactions after the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks”. New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 345: 1507–1512. Selby, N. (ed.) 1998. Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Cambridge: Icon Books. Selby, N. (ed.) 1998. Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Cambridge: Icon Books. Seligman, Martin E. P. 1996. The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safegaurd Children from Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience. New York: Perrenial Publications. Shostak, Debra. 2008. “‘Theory Uncompromised by Practicality’: Hybridity in Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex”. Contemporary Literature, 49(3): 383–412. Silverman, Marni N., and Patricia A. Deuster. 2014. “Biological Mechanisms Underlying the Role of Physical Fitness in Health and Resilience”. Interface Focus 4(5). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2014.00 40 Skodol, Andrew E. 2010. “The Resilient Personality.” In Handbook of Adult Resilience, edited by John W. Reich, Alex J. Zautra, and John Stuart Hall, 112–125. New York: Guilford Press. Southwick, Steven M., et al. 2014. “Resilience Definitions, Theory, and Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.3402/ejpt.v5.25338 Statte, A. and Karen Reivich. 2003. The Resilience Factor: 7 Essential Skills for Overcoming Life’s Inevitable Obstacles, New York: Three Rivers Press. Sturgeon, John A. & Alex J. Zautra. 2010. “Resilience: A New Paradigm for Adaptation to Chronic Pain”. Current Pain and Headache Reports, vol. 14: 105–112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11916-010-0095-9 Taylor, Heidi, and Helen Reyes. 2012. “Self-efficacy and Resilience in Baccalaureate Nursing Students”. International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship, 9(1): 1–13. Taylor, Robert J., Linda M. Chatters and Jeff Levin. 2004. Religion in the Lives of African Americans: Social, Psychological, and Health Perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Taylor, Shelley E., and Jonathon D. Brown. 1994. “Positive Illusions and Well-being Revisited: Separating Fact from Fiction.” Psychological Bulletin, 116(1): 21–27.

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Taylor, Shelley E., and Rosemary R. Lichtman. 1984. “Attributions, Beliefs About Control, and Adjustment to Breast Cancer”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(3): 489–502. Taylor, Shelly E., and David A. Armor. 1996. “Positive Illusions and Coping with Adversity”. Journal of Personality, 64(4): 873–898. Teixeira, Susana Vasconcelos. 2019. “The City and the Village in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: Reading the Space in Search for Meaning and Identity”. Via Panorâmica: Revista de Estudos AngloAmericanos, vol. 2: 23–40. Theron Linda C. and Nareadi Phasha. 2015. “Cultural Pathways to Resilience: Opportunities and Obstacles as Recalled by Black South African Students”. In Youth Resilience and Culture: Commonalities and Complexities, edited by Linda Theron, Linda Liebenberg and Michael Ungar, vol. 11, 51–65, Dordrecht: Springer. Tiger, L. 1979. Optimism: The biology of hope. New York: Simon and Schuster. Tom, Nayan Mary. 2017. “Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: The Making of a Postcolonial Space through an Alternative Historiography”. Editor’s Note, 4(1): 88–94. Tusaie, Kathleen R. and Kathleen Patterson. 2006. “Relationships Among Trait, Situational, and Comparative Optimism: Clarifying Concepts for a Theoretically Consistent and Evidence-Based Intervention to Maximize Resilience”. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 20(3): 144–150. Ungar, Michael. 2012. The Social Ecology of Resilience: A Handbook of Theory and Resilience. New York: Springer. Van Engen, Abram. 2010. “Puritanism and the Power of Sympathy.” Early American Literature, 45(3): 533–564. JSTOR, https://www.jstor. org/stable/25800113 Vincenzo Ruggiero. 2002. Moby Dick and the Crimes of the Economy, The British Journal of Criminology, 42(1): 96–108. https://doi.org/10.10 93/bjc/42.1.96 Vizenor, G. R. (1999). Manifest manners: Narratives on postindian survivance. U of Nebraska Press.

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Vizenor, Gerald, ed. 2008. Survivance: Narratives of native presence. Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press. Walker, Alice. 2005 [1983]. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: London/Phoenix: Womanist Prose. Warhol, Robyn. 2004. “Physiology, Gender, and Feeling: On Cheering Up”. Narrative, 12(2): 226–229. Wilentz, Gay. 1992. “Civilizations Underneath: African Heritage as Cultural Discourse in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” African American Review, 26(1): 61–76. Williams Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised Edition, Oxford University Press. PDF Online. Willis, Susan. 2016. “Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison”. In Black Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 263–283. Abingdon: Routledge. Zoellner, Robert. 1973. The Sea-Salt Mastodon: A Reading of Moby-Dick. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Zolli, A., & Healy, A. M. (2012). Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. Hachette UK.

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How is a novel different from a memoir? Seeing that in the last chapter I discussed novels as research resources, or as a narrative laboratory, this might be the obvious question with which to begin this chapter. Historically, memoir was considered a ‘lower’ form of writing, not worthy of being labeled real literature. It was too personal, too selfabsorbed for the critics of the past. Even in recent decades, memoir has been considered a popular rather than a literary genre, often treated by the literati with the same amusement as John Grisham novels. However, the past two decades or so have seen a reappraisal of the memoir form. Authors like Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr and Cheryl Strayed have given the memoir a prominent place in literary conversations, merging humor, self-critical honesty, and epiphany into books that not only keep the pages turning, but change minds, hearts and – perhaps more importantly – perspectives about the world we inhabit, past and present. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted are just a few examples. In all of them, what we receive from their authors is a piece of their lives, happy or sad, a narrative of a journey. But what exactly is a memoir? This is rather hard to explicate. Memoirs blend private and public; they contain writing about the self

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and about others1 (Rak, Are Memoirs Autobiography? 316). Memoirs are nonfictional depictions of real-life individuals, or as Thomas G. Couser writes: Both the novels and the memoir are ‘mimetic’. That is, they imitate life in the sense that art is said to imitate nature. Nevertheless, an important conceptual distinction obtains: memoir represents itself, and is therefore read, as a nonfictional record or re-presentation of actual humans’ experience. Fiction does not; it creates its own lifelike reality. (Memoir 15) This key distinction, that memoirs are based on actuality rather than fictionality, encourages readers to approach these two genres differently. Couser believes that memoir readers “buy into the story” (Memoir 17) and thereby overlook the fact that a narrative based mainly on the author’s memory and not research may be “highly unreliable” (Memoir 19). For my project, the fictionality or factuality of the memoir, whether its story is reliable or not, does not play a role, as I am interested in the narrative itself rather than the degree of its truthfulness. However, “when a narrative emphasizes its mode as memoir, as in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, readers are invited to think about the significance of the choice and the kind of reading it invites” (Smith & Watson, Reading Autobiography 4). My understanding of life writing is in line with Smith and Watson’s where they define life writing as “a general term for writing that takes a life, one’s own or another’s, as its subject” (Reading Autobiography 5). This kind of writing, they continue, is in essence “explicitly self-referential” (Reading Autobiography 5) and therefore, “… memoir…[is] encompassed in the term life writing” (5). With novels, or rather fictional writing to be more specific in this book, life writing

1

Julie Rak also believes memoirs are written by “the most powerful public men and the least known, most private women,” however, recent publications by world-renowned women such as Michelle Obama contradicts such a proposition. (Rak’s proposition could, however, be justified in 2004, the year she published her book).

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shares “plot, dialogue, setting, characterization” (9-10) and demands attention to “narrative tropes, sociocultural contexts, rhetorical aims, and narrative shifts within the historical or chronological trajectory of the text” (13).2 As a reader of Westover’s memoir, what interests me the most about her narrative is the process of education and her ultimate self-awareness. This narrative of education is Westover’s tale of a developmental process towards consciousness, which allows us to classify this memoir as a bildungsroman. Smith and Watson maintain that the bildungsroman, “whether novel or life writing” (Reading Autobiography 129), has been “taken up more recently by women and other disenfranchised persons to consolidate a sense of emerging identity” (263). Westover’s story follows the classification of memoir as a bildungsroman put forth by Smith and Watson: The plot of development may involve escape from a repressive family, schooling, and a journey into the wild world of urban life where encounters with a series of mentors, romantic involvements,

2

Although in this book, the discussions on the differences between memoir and novels are not my focus, I read memoirs as the examples of “nonfictional life narrative [writing]” (Couser, Memoir 23), and novels as examples of fictional life writing. In this view, life writing is a story on one’s or other’s life in a fictional or nonfictional manner, without being necessarily autobiographical. I am aware that this interpretation is against the common or rather the academic understanding of the term life writing which “has become the umbrella term used to refer to all nonfictional representation of identity” (Couser, Memoir 24), however, I insist on including novels under the same umbrella as I believe imagined stories of imagined characters are as valuable as the reallife identities, both belonging to the genre narrative (storytelling). Moreover, one could always argue that memoirs depend on the author’s memory for their ‘truthfulness’ which itself can be and has been the target of debates. In other words, if we overlook the factor of ‘truth,’ stories are stories, real or otherwise. This claim follows my overall approach to crossing the boundaries, although the discussions on what can be counted as fact and what as fiction is beyond the scope of this project.

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and entrepreneurial ventures lead the protagonist to evaluate assumptions. (Reading Autobiography 263) Westover’s narrative of education begins with her stepping out of the family, at least temporarily, and starting college. Her experience of living in a world outside what has been her life for almost two decades is indeed wild in nature. It is in this ‘other world’ that she encounters friends who care for her well-being, mentors who support her education, and social support that helps with everyday financial problems. She confides in her romantic partners, recounting her family issues and difficulties. All these external resources help strengthen a process of self-doubt, evaluation, and reshaping assumptions that has already been instigated.

Tara’s Story Tara Westover, the youngest of seven children, was born to Mormon fundamentalist parents in Idaho. Her father Gene was the prophet of their small family. He was convinced that the world was going to end at the stroke of the millennium; did not believe in sending his children to school; and held that dairy products are sinful, owing to a message from God. “Isaiah doesn’t say which is evil, butter or honey,” (Westover, 4) is how her dad delivers the good news. “But if you ask, the Lord will tell you” (4). Faye, Westover’s mother, largely defers to her husband, in spite of what evidently were some doubts about the divinity of his testimony. She finds some independence in her roles as a kind of faith healer and as an experienced but apparently unlicensed midwife. Eventually, she takes up essential oils, something called muscle testing, and “energy work.” Muscle testing, Faye believes, is an “act of faith in which God spoke through her fingers” (59). In this account, life is grim in all the ways one might expect. Money is a constant struggle; Gene works largely in scrap metal, but it isn’t enough. Cars driven by exhausted family members crash during long drives, but hospitals and western medicine are forbidden so injuries persist and fester. An amazing number of freak accidents befall the male Westovers, such

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as leg shreddings, burnings, or falls from high buildings. The author herself is repeatedly beaten and abused by an older brother who, in one instance, charges into her room while she is sleeping and fastens his hands around her throat, calling her a whore because of her friendship with a local boy. The seventeen-year-old Tara gradually makes her way out of all this. She has no formal education, but manages to selfstudy her way to college. She struggles initially but achieves good enough marks to do a PhD at Cambridge. And in the course of all that, Westover writes, she found herself – through what some might call a “transformation” and others a “betrayal.” As she puts it in the last line of the book: “I call it an education” (329). Educated is a story of resilience. It is a narrative about how a damaged girl takes control of her life. Reflecting on the text from the point of view of resilience brings to mind many of the attributes, protective and risk factors that I discussed thoroughly in the second chapter. For example, during her childhood and teenage years, she faced risk factors such as a dysfunctional family, a lack of social and communal support, constant physical and psychological abuse, and the lack of a nurturing environment, alongside traumatic incidents such as the car crash and her daily work in the junkyard. And these are only the most prominent examples. At college, once again, the lack of family support is the dominant risk factor, however, she also receives some rare and precious mentorship from her brother Tylor and the church community to which she is introduced by her roommate. She further benefits from a constructive relationship with her professor, who provides her with the opportunity to continue her studies in Cambridge. In addition, her personal character is important, her resilient self, which, despite breakdowns, keeps her moving forward until she reaches the clarity of self-love and self-respect. In order to study these factors in a more contextualized manner, in the following sections I will discuss them in relation to textual examples.

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Ego or Personality Resiliency To briefly review what is meant by personality resilience, I would like to refer to Skodol’s theorizations of the topic at hand.3 Speaking of individual differences that can lead to different responses to adversity, with some leading to further vulnerability and others to resilience, he writes: Resilient personalities are characterized by traits that reflect a strong, well-differentiated, and integrated sense of self (self-structure) and traits that promote strong, reciprocal interpersonal relationships with others. (emphasis original, The Resilient Personality 113) Self-structure may be the strongest trait in Westover’s story. Although the picture Westover presents to us of Tara, is never that of a weak girl, even when she was living at home under her father’s rules. As one would expect, however, Westover’s coping mechanisms change with her character. As she struggles to develop her own voice, her coping also shifts from repressive coping and denial to reflective and constructive stress management. Before becoming who she is at the time of writing her memoir, as a girl in a dysfunctional, survivalist family, experiencing injuries and beatings, she constantly chose to deny what the reality of her experiences was telling her and instead accepted the justifications her parents provided, or rather always blamed herself for any kind of negative incident. The following subsections provide examples of such incidents.

Having a Voice Reviewing the interviews that Westover gave, articles about her, and the very few academic papers written on her book, a similarity struck me. Both the public and the critical reception of the memoir praise the text as a story of self-education. As much as I find this factor 3

I used his theories earlier in the close readings as well, but here it has a deeper relevance.

A Memoir-Based Reading of Human Resilience

praiseworthy and I applaud Westover’s determination to step away from a dysfunctional family, what absorbs me the most in this book is what I interpret as a symbolic representation in the early pages. After their first car crash, Westover, who is trapped in the passenger seat under the overturned car, writes: There was a glare on the windshield from the morning sun. I saw crisscrossing patters of fissures and cracks. The sight was familiar. I’d seen hundreds of shattered windshields in the junkyard, each one unique, with its particular spray of gossamer extruding from the point of impact, a chronicle of the collision. The cracks on our windshield told their own story. (Westover, Educated 37) The symbolism of each shattered windshield having its own story can be interpreted as how every single damaged person, having been in similar adverse situations, tells their own version of the same story. Although it can be argued that stories of survival, abuse, education, and achievement are universal experiences, though more intense for some than others, Westover is telling us how she is telling her version of the story. Westover’s memoir is written after her escape from the dysfunctional home, but she tells us that during the years she was living at home she kept a journal in which she wrote down or rather reflected on the events of the day. However, she always writes Shawn’s (her older abusive brother) version of events. Better said, she used to write in Shawn’s voice. But one night, she starts questioning his voice. The incident that triggers the series of self-doubts is a violent beating at a shop. After a day of work, in “clothes heavy with dirt,” (Westover, 193) oil, and grease, Westover decides to stay in the car and wait for Shawn to do the shopping, but Shawn notices that her refusal to get inside the shop is because her boyfriend’s car is parked in the same parking lot, and she doesn’t want him to see her like that. Shawn sees this occasion as an opportunity to reprimand her and says “Don’t want your boyfriend see you looking glamorous?” (194) Westover writes that what happened after this is a blur in her memories because “I see my hands grasping the wheel, and I feel strong arms wrenching

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my legs. Something shifts in my ankle, a crack or a pop. I’m pulled from the car” (194). He drags her outside the car, and inside the shop and only responds to her screams and hysterical nervous laughter by repeating “you are going in” (194). The situation carries on in this absurd manner. That night, back at home, she asks herself, “why didn’t he stop when I begged him? It was like getting beaten by a zombie […] like he couldn’t hear me” (195) and continues “Was it really fun and games? Could he not tell he was hurting me? I don’t know. I just don’t know” (195). Although this is the start of her re-evaluation of the family’s behavior, that night she still tries to reason with herself. She tries to justify the incident as her fault for not asking Shawn calmly and politely enough, and writes: I decide that if I asked differently, been more calm, he would have stopped. I write this until I believe it, which doesn’t take long because I want to believe it. It’s comforting to think that the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power. (195, emphasis in the original) What she is doing here is totally ignoring Shawn’s act and focusing on herself. She tries to repeat the night in her mind the way she wants to believe it happened, but reality keeps coming back until finally she accepts what she has been fighting to reject: that her “humiliation” was Shawn’s “objective” (196). It is this realization that gives her the voice she had been denied for years. Westover writes: Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs. (Westover 197) Her reflexive thoughts are in line with a narrative characteristic termed exploratory narrative processing, which is “broadly defined as the active, engaged effort on the part of the narrator to explore, reflect on, or analyze a difficult experience with an openness to learning from it and incorporating a sense of change into the life story” (Pals, 1081).

A Memoir-Based Reading of Human Resilience

This narrative characteristic is further associated with coherent positive resolution, which is defined as the “construction of a coherent and complete story of a difficult event that ends positively, conveying a sense of emotional resolution or closure” (Pals, Narrative Identity Processing 1082). Tara’s realization that she has a voice of her own is a step in her exploration. It helps her observe how she has been writing her own journal in Shawn’s voice, and how, having been always dictated what to think, she has never stopped to think about how she would want to think. Through exploratory narrative processing, she starts a journey of self-reflection that years later ends up in “emotional resolution, the presence of a coherently structured conclusion, and the valence of the narrative ending” (Pals, Narrative Identity Processing 1083), which she refers to as her education.

Coping Mechanism and an Educated Perception of the Self However, after finding her voice, Tara becomes reflective in a realistic manner. This change of perspective is apparent in an often-quoted sentence from Westover: “You can love someone and still choose to leave them” (interview with Oprah Winfrey, 2019). This quote directly reflects how Westover eventually reaches the “sense of self” that is “evidenced by self-esteem, self-confidence or self-efficacy, self-understanding, a positive future orientation, and the ability to manage negative behaviors and emotions” (Skodol, The Resilient Personality 114). In her interview with CNN, Westover talks about the process by which she finally learned how to manage negative emotions. For her it was of the utmost importance to acknowledge her desire to live a life outside her parents’ definitions and to respect her own. Entangled in this realization is her enhanced self-esteem and self-trust. As a child she chose to believe whatever her parents presented to her as truth, but after the incident at the shop with Shawn, her reflections become more logical and she starts on the path towards thinking and living for herself, towards self-structure. Skodol links this resiliency attribute to what has been termed an internal locus of control. He defines this as the manner in which resilient

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people believe that they are in control of their life and are not affected by “fate, bad luck, or another person’s behavior” (The Resilient Personality 114). In Westover’s case, these external elements would be her parents’ religious and anti-government beliefs. Her parents deeply believe that the Lord controls everything in their lives, so if one of them is burnt, they will also be healed by some miracle. They also believed in the “Days of Abomination”, the end of the world, which they believed would come at the millennium. They therefore chose a survivalist lifestyle, always preparing for doomsday. However, Westover does not see the world as “threatening, problematic, and distressing;” she doesn’t see herself as “vulnerable” (Skodol, The Resilient Personality 115). In her final pages, she writes: When my father was in my life, wrestling me for control of that life, I perceived him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. […] what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. (Westover 328) Although she finally achieves the new self that allows her to put a stop to “perceiving her father with an eye of the soldier,” it takes years of struggle before she can find her voice. Her reflection on her newly gained self takes on a concrete form when she stares at her actual refection in the mirror one winter night as an educated woman. She is unable to call on her sixteen-year-old self. She writes: Until that moment she had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to change- how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance- I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house. That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. (Westover 329) For Westover, as for anyone exhibiting resilience, the moment of selfrealization, and the subsequent self-efficacy can be taken as the focal point. Had she stayed home, or had she chosen to remain that sixteen-

A Memoir-Based Reading of Human Resilience

year-old, she would not have found her voice and her true self in her life story. As the cited passage shows, perceiving her true self outside and away from her father’s version of her, or, in resilience terminology, her self-understanding, was a “critical initial task of [her] adult development” (Skodol, The Resilient Personality 115). Self-understanding goes hand in hand with three of the defense mechanisms introduced by American Psychiatric Association (2000) and cited in Skodol’s account: selfassertion, self-observation, and sublimation (the other categories being affiliation, anticipation, altruism, and humor). Westover learns to express her feelings directly without manipulation (self-assertion). For example, on the same night that she reflected on Shawn’s abusive behavior and decided to write in her journal using her voice instead of his, she wrote that “if I was larger, at that moment, I would have torn him apart” (Westover, 196) instead of, as she always did, justifying the incident as the result of something she must have done inappropriately. She also learns to reflect on her own behavior, thoughts, and feelings, as is evident from the quotation above on how she knows she is a new self now (self-observation). And finally, she manages to learn that instead of laughing hysterically or dreaming of tearing Shawn apart, or the constant feeling of guilt after denying her dad’s blessing, she needs to break the ties and move away from that family. She learns to “channel potentially maladaptive feelings or impulses into socially acceptable behavior” (Skodol, The Resilient Personality 116). In yet another categorization, Skodol draws on Pearlin and Schooler’s (1978) coping model by differentiating between three forms: “modification or change of the stressful situation, control of the meaning of the experience to neutralize its stressful nature, or management of the emotional sequelae of the experience” (The Resilient Personality 117). Another glimpse at the incident with Shawn reveals how Westover indeed follows these three steps: she modifies the situation at the shop by laughing and pretending that whatever is happening there is a joke between her and Shawn, she then neutralizes the meaning of the experience by taking responsibility for Shawn’s anger, and finally manages her emotional sequelae by forcing herself to believe that had

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she asked more politely, none of those beatings would have happened. However, in her version of the three steps, all are initially manipulated by her desire to suppress any association of a negative nature with her brother or her parents.

Resilience as a Process In the previous section, I read Westover’s book in search of evidence of personality resilience or ego-resilience, which is a trait rather than a process. According to Block’s theory, ego-resiliency is the ability to adapt one’s level of control temporarily up or down as circumstances dictate.4 Ego-resilient individuals then benefit from a higher probability of achieving positive results.5 Westover’s characteristic hardiness and determination do not only stem from her own ego-resiliency but also from what she refers to as her education. In the following section, I address this topic and ask: How does Westover picture this process of education in her life story? To that end, I narrow the scope of analysis down to some textual examples that elaborate on the role external support played in her life.

Role of Social Support Westover’s initial coping mechanism could rather be categorized as maladaptive, accompanied by “distancing, distractions, or escape” (Skodol, The Resilient Personality 118). However, as discussed earlier, this self-deceiving gives way to a logical reflection, to uncertainty, and eventually to a woman who respects herself. Nevertheless, one counter-argument to the thesis that Westover’s resilience should be considered a personality trait is worth mentioning here. Despite her

4 5

See for example, Block, Personality as an Affect-processing System.; Block & Block, The Role of Ego-control and Ego-resiliency in the Organization of Behavior. See for example, Block & Kremen, IQ and Ego-resiliency: Conceptual and Empirical Connections and Separateness; Klohnen, Conceptual Analysis and Measurement of the Construct of Ego-resiliency.

A Memoir-Based Reading of Human Resilience

resistance, perseverance, hardiness, and coping responses, had she not met with the right people, she would probably not have developed into the person that she became. Specifically, the initial motivational talks from Tyler (one of her brothers who left home to study and encouraged Tara to do so as well) encourages her to apply for college. Without such a role model, her life choices may not have led towards the path of education. When in college, the help she receives from her professor, the financial support she receives with the assistance of the priest, and, in graduate school, the academic connections that her supervisor assists her to establish are all necessary supportive contexts, moderating her path towards success. Skodol provides findings from empirical research that support such a claim about the importance of contextual factors such as social support. The Environmental Risk Longitudinal Study, a study conducted on twins in England and Wales, researched physically maltreated children in their environments. The research findings suggested that “for children in multiproblem families, personal resources might not be sufficient for successful adaptation” (qtd. in Skodal. The Resilient Personality 119). In my reading of Westover’s story, I have reached the same conclusion. For Westover to find herself, the support was indispensable. Two incidents in her story help make the role played by external support more apparent: one from when she was ten and another from when she was a young woman spending a scholarly year at Oxford university, when her parents decided to visit her. Westover was ten years old when her brother Tyler left the house for college and her dad decided that she could fill Tyler’s position in the junkyard. After one season at the junkyard, she learned to have fast reflexes; she “had entered a new reality” (Westover, 63) where she was seeing the world through her dad’s eyes and, as he told her, believed that angels were watching them and protecting them against accidents. She had simply “stopped shouting at Dad for throwing them [the metal scraps], and learned to instead ‘pray’” (63). But one day, an accident happened! As part of their routine work, Tara and her dad would fill huge bins of metal, holding up to “two thousand pounds of iron” (63). And then her dad would operate the loader, which was “a massive

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forklift with a telescopic arm and wide, black wheels” taller than she was (63). The loader would raise the metal bin that was full of scrap some forty-five feet into the air and then tilt the bin so that the metal could slide out into the trailer underneath, which was “essentially a giant [iron] bucket” that could hold about “forty thousand pounds of iron” (63). On the day of the accident, Tara fills a bin with two thousand pounds of scrap metal and calls for her dad to operate the loader to empty it. The usual procedure would be for him to empty the bin into the trailer, after which Tara would climb up to the trailer and settle the iron scraps. This time, he decides “we’ll get more in if you settle the iron after it’s been dumped. Hop in” (63). Tara writes that she couldn’t really understand what her dad meant by that sentence. “He wanted to dump the bin with me in it?” (63) she responds to him by repeating that she’ll climb up the trailer after he is done with the bin. However, her dad insists that with her in the bin, it will “be faster” and that he will “pause when the bin’s level with the trailer wall so you can climb out. Then you can run along the wall and perch on top of the cab until the dump is finished” (64). And they do it his way! With the eleven-year-old Tara in a bin on a twoton pile of scrap metal, hanging in the air, and her dad driving them all towards the trailer. On the last turn, the gravity of the situation is so intense that the whole scene needs to be read exactly as Westover writes it: the bucket swung with such a force that a spike of iron was flung toward me. It pierced the inside of my leg, an inch below my knee, sliding into the tissue like a knife with warm butter. I tried o pull it out but the load had shifted and it was partially buried… the bin was level with the trailer. Dad was giving me time to climb onto the trailer wall but I was pinned. ‘I’m stuck!’ I shouted, only the growl of the loader’s engine was too loud. I wondered if Dad would wait to dump the bin until he saw me sitting safely […] but even as wondered I knew he wouldn’t. (64) She goes on to describe how she slides towards an eighteen-foot fall, hoping to hit the ground and not the iron bucket. While she was in

A Memoir-Based Reading of Human Resilience

pain and shock, she writes, her dad responds by simply asking “How’d you manage that?” in a tone that to Westover was “sympathetic but disappointed” and, as a result of which, she “felt stupid. I should have been able to do it […] It’s a simple thing” (65). For an average person, an eleven-year-old girl working in a junkyard cannot be a simple thing. Her father tells her to go home so that her mother can stop the bleeding. She gets up and limps away. When her dad was out of sight, she “collapsed” and “was shaking” (65). She writes, “I didn’t understand why I was crying” (65). Looking at this incident, many questions present themselves: why did a ten-year-old have to work? Why did she have to work in such a dangerous situation? How could her father justify his belief in the safety of the job based on them being watched by angels? Why did he react so coldly and lacking empathy when his own daughter was injured so badly? And why didn’t her mom show empathy and affection rather than the neutral attitude of a professional merely dealing with yet another wound? All of these questions lead me towards the conclusion that, had Westover had a better living context, had she had more empathetic parents, had she had some level of support from the people around her, she might have not been injured in the first place. Furthermore, her reaction to the accident is also context dependent in the sense that instead of screaming out in pain, she is crying for having caused such an accident out of stupidity and having let her father down. Research has shown that “self-criticism is a […] risk factor for diverse forms of psychopathology, and self-compassion is a robust resilience factor when faced with feelings of personal inadequacy” (qtd. in Warren et al., 19). In Westover’s case, the strong feeling of self-blame is her repressive coping style, which ignores the reality of the situation – her dad’s irresponsible behavior that put her in that situation – and focuses on self-stigmatizing. As an eleven-year-old, her only concern is how she couldn’t have managed such a – as she refers to it – simple task due to the fact that she has never been outside the circle of her family. She is not allowed to go to school or socialize with anyone, at least not until she goes to college, therefore her perception of what may count as simple and what not is purely based on her parents’ preaching. In that family, working in a junkyard seems to be an ordinary, everyday job. This

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perspective does not leave room for any self-compassion for a girl who has a ripped leg and has just fallen off a scrap bin from eighteen feet. For her, letting her dad down is what she has to be thinking of at that moment. This situation is beyond any discussion of family support, the whole incident is an illustration of non-existing contextual supportive factors. The second example happens during her year at Harvard. The incident occurs when her parents pay her a visit in an attempt to give their daughter, one last “blessing” (Westover, 304). For this incident to be understood better, I need to recount her attempt at confronting her parents about her brother Shawn’s unstable character. She had been the target of his mood swings and brutal beatings and abuse for most of her life, but the incident that triggers her decision to confront her parents comes from her older sister Audrey. Audrey writes her an email confessing that, before Tara, she had been the target of Shawn’s abuse and that she should have stopped Shawn many years ago. But on talking to her mother, all Audrey received was accusations that her memories were false and the events she remembered could not have happened. “I should have helped you” Audrey writes, “but when my own mother didn’t believe me, I stopped believing myself” (Westover, 269). Tara, moved by her sister’s letter, responds with an empathetic email reassuring her that “of course they should stop Shawn” (270). Audrey shows Tara’s email to their mother to show her some kind of proof. Their mother responds to her email. After a long conversation online, her mother assures her that “we can rewrite the story” together and talk to Dad about Shawn’s situation, confessing that “you were my child. I should have protected you” (Westover, 272). After that night, Tara and her mother speak once more about the situation, at which point she tells Tara that “it’s being dealt with. I told your father what you and your sister said. Shawn will get help” (272). This conversation brings some level of peace to Tara’s life and she forgets about this matter, and engages in a lively graduate life in Cambridge, and fashions a “new history” for herself (273). Because of that conversation and her mom’s apparent opening up to Tara, she forgives the past, “now that mother had found her strength […] the past was a ghost, insubstantial, unaffecting. Only the future had weight”

A Memoir-Based Reading of Human Resilience

(273). Westover shows how a single act of support from her family transforms her whole mentality about them, their wrongdoings, the irresponsible behaviors she recalls from her mom and dad, the haunting incidents with Shawn, and the past generally. She creates a new past in her mind, believing that everyone has changed for the better. Trusting her mother’s words and believing in her own made-up history, she goes home for Christmas. Everything seems like before, until she goes for a ride with Shawn, who she believes is calm, whose “expression as well as his words, seemed to belong to a much older man, a man whose hot blood had cooled, who was at peace” (282). The ride goes almost fine, until, when they are nearly home, Shawn stops the car and asks Tara if she talks with Audrey much, because Audrey is “a lying piece of shit […] I’d put a bullet in her head […] but I don’t want to waste a good bullet on a worthless bitch” (283). Shawn’s comment encourages Tara to have the talk with her dad in person. The situation comes as a shock to Tara when her dad not only does not believe her, but begins to interrogate her and question her motives. A bigger shock to Tara is how her mother “was silent. Her eyes were fixed on the floor as if Dad and I were not there” (285). It is during this incident that she reflects on herself and her beliefs in the possibility of change. A change which she wanted so desperately to believe in. However, the situation gets even more chaotic when she finds out that her dad has called Shawn and he is on his way to have a talk with them. When Shawn arrives, Tara having been ordered by her dad to sit on the sofa, tries not to make any eye contact, but Shawn sits next to her and “he peeled open my fingers and dropped something into them. I felt the cold of the blade before I saw it, and sensed the blood even before I glimpsed the red streak staining my palm” (Westover, 286). Shawn tell Tara that if she is smart enough, she will “use this [the knife] on yourself. Because it will be better than what I’ll do to you if you don’t” (286). One would, quite rationally, assume that such a scene would be enough proof for Tara’s parents to believe her and do something about Shawn. But she tells us that all they did was sit there and listen to their father lecture them about how young girls should behave. After quite some time, Shawn tells Tara he is sorry, they hug, laugh and Tara

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“smiled at him like I’d always do” a “fake smile” (288). She flees the mountains the next morning and is unable to comprehend the situation for a year afterwards. That night’s horror later comes back to haunt her, when Shawn threatens to kill her either himself or by hiring an assassin. Her parents don’t believe her this time either and conclude that she is “hysterical,” that she has made “thoughtless accusations” and that her rage is “a real threat” (291). They conclude this incident by deciding that it is all Tara’s fault. A while later, while in Paris on a research grant, she hears again from Audrey. Her sister’s email says that their dad visited her in a symbolic act of cleansing. “He had testified to her that Shawn had been cleansed by the Atonement of Christ […] and it is God’s will that Audrey and I [Tara] forgive Shawn […] if we did not, ours would be the greater sin” (292). Audrey has not only accepted this atonement but has blamed Tara for provoking her and stirring up anger in her. She concludes that Tara is controlled by “Lucifer” (293). It is against this background that her parents plan to visit her at Harvard, so that her dad can perform an act of cleansing. She knows that what he is offering her is simply to “trade her reality with that of his” (304). However, Westover’s new self thinks “everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind” (Westover, 304). With the support of the educational system in which she had found her new home, she had grown into a person who was able to stop playing the role she was being assigned by her parents and could reject them. She “had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was the heart of what it means to self-create” (304). This new self rejects her dad’s final offer for his blessing, and simply says, “I love you. But I can’t. I’m sorry, Dad” (304). The overall attitude towards religion and spirituality is believed – by, for example, Faigin and Pargament – to be rather reductionistic, since scholars commonly agree on the positivity of the

A Memoir-Based Reading of Human Resilience

effect of such beliefs in the individual’s coping mechanism. Faigin and Pargament argue that “the area of psychology of religion might offer additional, essential information for better understanding the mechanisms of resilience” (Strengthened by the Spirit 164). However, they also argue for the possibility of a negative association between these two factors. They claim that “those who wrestle with spiritual struggles may experience unique forms of distress due to the profound nature and core relevance of these questions, doubts and tensions” (165). If for Westover’s parents and most of her siblings, religion is a “divine doctrine” (Westover, 4), and whatever question they struggle with, they can “inquire of the Lord” (4) because “if you ask, the Lord will tell you” (4), for Tara it brings feelings of guilt and fear. If for her family, spirituality is a resource, Tara’s fears act as risk factors. Perhaps choosing to study historians is Tara’s first educated step in an intellectual separation from her family’s misconceptions. In Cambridge, she chooses not to study history but historians, thinking that if she could accept that what they [the historians] have written was not absolute, but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe she could reconcile herself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history she had been taught. “Dad could be wrong, and the great historians […] could be wrong, but from the ashes of their dispute I could construct a world to live in. In knowing the ground was no ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it” (Westover, 238). Tara’s dad cherishes books such as the Bible and those written by Mormon prophets. All her life she is taught by her dad not to study those books, but rather to shape her mind “according to the contours of their faultless model” (239). She is taught how to read those books to learn what to think, not to learn how to think as an autonomous person. With her education, she changes these methods.

“Odds are Better if You Rely Only on Yourself” This quotation is from the pages where Westover describes how and what she would be thinking when working in the junkyard with her

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Dad. Although this section of my analysis could better fit under the previous subsection on the role of external support, the quotation is so deeply related to resilience research that I couldn’t help but give it its own quasi-independent place. The importance of this quote is how clearly it portrays Westover’s thought processes in times of adverse experiences. She maintains that in her life experiences, for example when her dad was “dumping the scrap bin” she was standing on, her instincts “had saved her” (102). Simply because her instincts “had understood, even if I had not, that it was better to fall from that great height rather than hope Dad would intervene” (102). Her instincts, she writes, always persisted in accordance with a single motto: “that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself” (102). The question here is whether Westover believed in this doctrine both before and after being educated? Or for how long did she maintain this doctrine? As a girl living in the context of a family who taught her nothing but survival, her belief in “only depending on her own” is understandable. However, as discussed in the previous section, her successful adult life and work shows that she needed to trust on support from others. Throughout her narrative, there are many examples of recovery or success that would not have been possible without support. Charles, her first friend from the other world, as Westover puts it, played a major role in her life. He was the person who told her that her “behavior was selfdestructive, that [she] had an almost pathological inability to ask for help” (185). But this person could not tolerate Shawn’s behavior towards her and had to break up with her because “he said he loved me but this was over his head. He couldn’t save me. Only I could” (190). She didn’t grasp what he meant by his words, because even then she wasn’t seeing what he was seeing regarding the behavior and condition of her family. She believed he was strong, she had the ability to “lie convincingly to myself [herself]” (189). Another person who was empathetically critical of Westover’s behavior was her second-year college roommate, Robin. She acted as an older sister towards Tara, teaching her how to behave towards others, encouraging her to go see the doctor for her broken toe and stomach ulcers, and encouraging her to talk to the bishop about her financial

A Memoir-Based Reading of Human Resilience

problems. Westover rejected all of her suggestions. Westover’s trust in herself and her ability to do whatever she wanted was reinforced when she passed an algebra test with the maximum score on her own, without anyone’s help. For her this was the proof that “nothing touches me” (191). However, Robin persisted and finally “I stood outside the bishop’s office on a cold night in February. I didn’t know what had taken me there” (200). Although she met the bishop every Sunday after that night and talked about herself, she would not yet accept any help, even when she was in deep financial needs or had a throbbing toothache. “That’s when Robin told the Bishop” (201). Despite the bishop’s multiple suggestions of grants she could apply for or even money from church, she rejected them all. But finally, Robin’s coercion, the bishop’s supportive words, and her financial situation, together with the physical pain, convinced her to apply for a grant. She received four thousand dollars and could pay her bills and live a little more easily. Later on, Dr. Kelly, her History professor, introduces her to Cambridge. And her time at Cambridge deepens the changes in Westover’s self. Professor Steinberg at Cambridge, and Dr. Kelly both act as powerful mentors, not only aiding Westover to become a successful scholar, but also assisting her in becoming who she is. And so, piece by piece, she finds her own true self. The resulting change is so intense that finally she says no to her father’s blessings and chooses to be who she wants to be. Westover’s definition of education is a “path of awareness,” (180) to “a new self” (329). Her path of awareness was not only dependent on her strong will and determination to find a truth of her own but was also enriched by the support she received from those who cared for her, personally or professionally. After winning a Gates Scholarship, while studying in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, she receives a song sent to her by a friend from BYU. This song summarizes, in my opinion, Westover’s path in her resilience and success: Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds. (Westover 257)

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Although I have argued that Westover’s exemplary well-earned emancipation is the result of external resources, the story suggests, time and again, that regardless of how much support she would have received from external sources, if not for her perseverance and hardiness, she would not have succeeded. Her professor in Cambridge, Dr. Kerry, had similar observations about her. During their last dinner at Cambridge, he talks to Tara about how he has been observing her behavior and how he believes she acts as if she is someone else, someone who does not belong at a place like Cambridge. He shares some words of wisdom which resonates with the poem: “Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you” (242). This struggle to know who she really is is repeated all through the book. Back in Buck’s Peak in the mountains, she was merely who she was supposed to be: her father’s daughter. But at college or university, her dad was a shadow, and his voice was not as clear anymore. However, the shadow was always there, she was always that little girl inside. She struggles with finding her true self throughout her narrative, up until her last words in her memoir: When I was a child, I wanted for my mind to grow, for my experiences to accumulate and my choices to solidify, taking shape into the likeness of a person. That person, or that likeness of one, had belonged. I was of that mountain, the mountain that had made me. It was only as I grew older that that I wondered if how I had started is how I would end – if the first shape a person takes is their only true shape. (Westover 327) When she is writing these lines, she has separated herself from her parents for years, and only hears about them via Tyler or the family members with whom she has kept in touch. Her separation from her parents has “brought her peace” (327). She accepts that she loves her father but needs to stay away from his controlling behavior. She writes that the space between her and her father is not that of a distance or time, but a change in self: “I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her” (328). By accepting her new self, she

A Memoir-Based Reading of Human Resilience

has symbolically crossed the threshold of her father’s house for ever. On a similar note, I believe, Westover’s mere act of writing her memoir is an act of resistance and a sign of resilience, as her work claims an autonomous voice for an accomplished woman who was an abused girl a decade ago.

Bibliography Block, Jack, and Adam M. Kremen. 1996. “IQ and Ego-resiliency: Conceptual and Empirical Connections and Separateness”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 70: 349–361. Block, Jack. 2002. Personality as an Affect-processing System. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Block, Jeanne H., & Jack Block. 2014. “The Role of Ego-control and Ego-resiliency in the Organization of Behavior”. In Development of Cognition, Affect, and Social Relations: The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, vol. 13, edited by W. A. Collins, 49–112. New York: Psychology Press, Ebook. Couser, G. Thomas. 1022. Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Faigin, Carol Ann, and Kenneth I. Pargament. 2011. “Strengthened by the Spirit: Religion, Spirituality, and Resilience through Adulthood and Aging.” In Resilience in Aging, edited by B. Resnick, L. Gwyther, and K. Roberto, 163–180. New York: Springer. Klohnen, Eva. C. 1996. “Conceptual Analysis and Measurement of the Construct of Ego-Resiliency”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(5): 1067–1079. Pals, Jennier. L. 2006. “Narrative Identity Processing of Difficult Life Experiences: Pathways of Personality Development and Positive Self-transformation in Adulthood”. Journal of Personality, 74(4): 1079–1110. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2006.00403.x Rak, Julie. 2004. “Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity”. Genre, University of Oklahoma, vol. 37: 305–326.

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Skodol, Andrew E. 2010. “The Resilient Personality.” In Handbook of Adult Resilience, edited by John W. Reich, Alex J. Zautra, and John Stuart Hall, 112–125. New York: Guilford Press. Smith, S., & Watson, J. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press. Westover, Tara. 2018. Educated: A Memoir. New York: Random House. Westover, Tara. 2019. “Oprah Talks to Tara Westover”. Interview by Oprah Winfrey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uss8Kt8fdHQ &ab_channel=SupperSoul. May 2019.

Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust1

In recent decades, the study of narratives beyond the fictional, semifictional and literary domain has initiated a ‘narrative turn’ not only in the humanities but within fields as diverse as sociology, medical science, and law. Narrative analysis is viewed as an approach towards understanding humans’ perception of life and its meaning. Resilience as a narrative can be interpreted as a broader story of adversity, a developmental process, and a positive outcome, or as some version of a bildungsroman. This master narrative is further localized in the major fields of Psychology, Sociology, Neuroscience, Economics, and Ecology. These fields provide extra details to explain the phenomenon of resilience. For example, sociologists emphasize the role of contextual factors, such as economic cycles and social discrimination, whereas neurobiologists underscore appraisal systems. In all these fields, the same master narrative is repeated.2 1

2

The original paper can be found: Mahdiani, H., Höltge, J., Theron, L. et al. Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust: A Narrative Study of a Rural Population Dependent upon the Oil and Gas Industry. J Adult Dev (2020). http s://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-020-09363-z. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. As mentioned in previous chapters, I repeat that resilience is not necessarily the outcome of the developmental process, nor does the developmental process definitely occur after exposure to adversity. It is also debated whether resilience is itself an outcome or a process. What I picture as the main narrative is merely the dominant one.

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Over the last five decades, resilience researchers have worked on several major themes: the dynamic connection between stress and resilience; what differentiates a resilient from a non-resilient individual; the neurochemical, genetic, and epigenetic mechanisms thought to be the neurobiological foundation of resilience or vulnerability to a stress-related disorder; and whether the ability to cope with high levels of stress is innate, inborn, inherited, and/or acquired through specific training (e.g., through a stress inoculation process) or the result of some combination of all of the above. It seems apt, at least for the sake of comprehensibility, to turn our gaze outside the realm of the pure life sciences and look for signs of resilience in more commonplace spheres, for which I will now present my reasons. First of all, scientists, or more specifically neurobiologists, claim that they will soon be able to demonstrate the neurological patterns that cause resilience in animals or humans; a claim that puts resiliency in the realm of biological, genetic or, at best, epigenetic traits. According to this view, one is either born resilient, or can be taught to be so.3 Quite candidly though, answering the now old question of whether resilience is a human trait, a process, or an outcome merely in terms of our brain behavior cannot do justice to the multi-systemic nature of human existence in general, and human resilience in particular. Whether neuroscientists are correct in foreseeing a future where they can map human resilience or not is beyond my expertise. Nonetheless, I find it valid to research representations of human resilience from the perspective of life writing. As discussed in Michael Ungar’s socialecological model of resilience research, a multilevel developmental system’s perspective in human resilience research considers the interactions between social, cultural, and ecological contexts of the individual to identify individual- (or community)- specific resilience mechanisms. Furthermore, a growing volume of literature is emerging that suggests that a positive social support environment can moderate 3

See chapter two, the section on the third wave of resilience research regarding interventions, programs, and policies to foster resilience when it does not occur naturally.

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individual environmental and genetic vulnerabilities and increase resilience. This being said, the good news provided by neurobiologists is that individuals can learn resilience through experience and hardship – in particular by developing qualities in younger ages that facilitate appropriate coping strategies, adaptation, and recovery from stress. These claims all point me towards questioning the notion that resilience is only a neurobiological mechanism that can only be dissected using the methods of the hard sciences. Some researchers have already started questioning such disciplinary monopolism. For example, the claim regarding the possibility of scientifically engineering resilience has been refuted by Astier A. M. Almedom and colleagues. They assert that: Human resilience, whether at individual, family, or community level cannot be engineered by external actors, however well-meaning. It is important to start from the realities of those experiencing extreme adversity and to engage them in the questions pertaining to their mental and emotional health.4 (Principles 9) The present study researches such ‘realities’ and experiences through their stories, which brings me to my second point: ordinary people and Masten’s “ordinary magic”. Research has shown that human resilience is the result of multiple systems’ healthy cooperation and interaction that help the individual to maintain some levels of normal functioning when faced with traumatic events. This brings me to my focal point: Human resilience has always been well understood by the people who live it, by those ordinary women and men by means of their ‘ordinary magic’ even if they would articulate it differently, using localized language and traditional stories or folktales and mythical tales. Masten’s book of the same title, Ordinary Magic, provides a comprehensive view of the past several decades of resilience research in an accessible way.

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I need to point out that the texts – the examples of both life writing and life science – were not approached with the assumption that they would necessarily portray different images of resilience. And as you will read in the concluding remarks in chapter seven, in many instances these two perspectives converge in their outlook on resilience factors, whatever their differences.

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Masten has identified resilience as arising “from ordinary resources and processes” (Ordinary Magic 3). She notes that interest in the sources of human resilience has never been greater, as we face an ever-increasing tide of human-made and natural catastrophes, as well as rising human population and dwindling resources. She breaks this down into four parts. Part one includes an introduction to the concept and various models of resilience in which Masten links resilience directly to developmental science and discusses competence over the course of a human life. There is also coverage of personand variable-centered models of resilience with a focus on the ways that cutting-edge research methods have been able to merge these models to take advantage of the benefits of both approaches. Part two is comprised of descriptions of studies of individual resilience, including studies of homeless children and those who have suffered from situations of extreme adversity, such as natural disasters. Part three, the lengthiest section of the book, is focused on adaptive systems such as internal characteristics and environmental supports that promote resilience. In this section, Masten presents a ‘short list’ of factors that consistently emerge as indicators of resilience – some factors are environmental (e.g., effective parenting, effective schools) and some are child characteristics (e.g., self-control, motivation to succeed). She then extends the information in this ‘short list’ with leading-edge neurobiological research that supports some of the adaptive systems, such as attachment, executive functions, and stress regulation, and explains the key contexts in which development occurs: families, schools, and culture.5 And finally, part four takes us forward

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An enlightening component of the chapter on cultural context is the discussion of the “immigrant paradox,” where first-generation immigrant youth tend to fare better than their offspring. The hypothesis is that there may be culturally based resiliency that is lost with succeeding generations as they become distanced from their culture of origin. Or it could be that resiliency is grounded in the exceptional qualities of the individuals who choose to immigrate. Refer to the analysis on Middlesex.

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with implications for prevention and intervention, particularly in early childhood, and ideas for future work. Masten’s ordinary magic rejects resilience as a trait and believes it to be a “common” phenomenon that “can be supported and promoted.” Her terminology, the concept of resilience as “ordinary magic,” originates from her belief that resilience, the phenomenon of resilience, and the promotion of resilience does not require anything rare or extraordinary, since a mere operationalization of the adaptive systems6 through strategies for positive change,7 leads to resilience. There is no denying that this is indeed the path towards promoting resilience, yet how ordinary is “ordinary magic”? Or, perhaps we should ask, for whom is resilience ordinary? For whom is it magical? Are the aforementioned adaptive systems efficiently available? If we take into account the factors of ethnicity, class, race, culture, and gender as parts of the so-called ‘context’, do we still define resilience as ordinary magic, as being “made of ordinary rather than extraordinary processes?” I would like to suggest that perhaps one reason there has been no agreement on a single definition of resilience so far is because, depending on who the subject of the study is, there needs to be modifications in the definition. Can resilience be defined similarly for a W.A.S.P. and a Native American, an immigrant and an African-American? Did they, or do they, live/go through the same adversities? Do they benefit from the same kinds of contexts? Perhaps for an African-American, being resilient is quite ordinary, though not magical at all, since they have to deal with difficulties on a daily basis; how they define adversity or how they manage a predicament is not the same as how a W.A.S.P. does. The availability of adaptive systems depends on community/ethnicity/race/gender – in sum, they are contextdependent factors.

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Family, attachment relationships, neurocognitive learning system and control systems, mastery motivation and record system, spirituality and religion, culture, education systems, and community. As was mentioned in detail in chapter two under models of resilience research: risk-focused, Asset-focused, and process focused strategies.

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This claim is in accordance with what has been pointed at by Ungar (Social Ecology), among others, in his emphasis on the need for revising the existing coping mechanisms8 associated with resilient characters in adverse situations. After he emphasizes the need for a contextually relevant understanding of resilience, in particular the individual’s social and physical ecology, he refers to Masten and Obradovic’s classification of coping mechanisms. They distinguish two types: Coping I, which refers to the individual’s internal integration, and coping II, which refers to external adaptation. Ungar, criticizing these two mechanisms as both “representing aspects of individual competence and reflecting a degree of personal agency” (Social Ecology 18), adds a third coping mechanism: “the adaptation of the environment to the individual in order to moderate exposure to risk, mitigate consequences of exposure when it does occur, or suppress risk altogether” (18). He believes that “the error of attribution in many studies of resilience is to measure personal agency and ignore the larger influence of sociopolitical, economic and cultural factors that shape developmental paths” (19). This problem is also reflected in the current definitions of resilience research, where, in some versions of the term, resilience is regarded as a process of recovery after experiencing adverse situations, in some other versions as a process of surviving, while in yet others it is defined as adaptation or even thriving. As I mentioned earlier, human resilience has always been well understood by the people who live it, for example, when a grandmother imparts wisdom to her teenage granddaughter or when a native survivor recounts her traumatic experience and how she managed to survive. The short stories with which I opened my introductory chapter may give a sense of this. Although the science of studying the mechanisms underlying resilience goes back no farther than the midtwentieth century, the concept itself existed for ages in multifarious contexts and diversified individuals. If we agree with Alasdair

8

See, Ungar. The Social Ecology of Resilience.

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McIntyre’s9 proposition that a human being is a storytelling animal, then perhaps the easiest and most accessible form of representations of resilience can be seen in the stories humans tell. Therefore, as was discussed in the close readings, the commonality of the notion of resilience can be illustrated through examples from the most familiar contexts and narratives, which existed long before the ‘big idea’ was given a name and (a) definition(s). In my close readings, I tried to show how literary works are and can act as a symbolic laboratory, as a platform for case studies that utilize an existing set of data on human resilience. These symbolic case studies not only represent human nature in general, but also provide samples of culturally specified contexts – for example Song of Solomon as a case study in Black resilience or Middlesex representing migrant and Greek/Greek-American resilience. In this chapter, I join a group of social scientists doing communitybased research in Canada to study the effect of a real-time adversity, that of economic flux, on the lives of the population of a small town in Central Canada. This is my attempt to research yet another form of narrative: narratives of resilience collected from interviews conducted with the population of this small town, which will be referred to as Maple Hill. Although I maintain my disciplinary position, this chapter will purposefully be closer to a narrative in social sciences, both stylistically and content-wise. The main difference is the use of APA format (the common style in social sciences) instead of MLA format for in-text citations (the common style in the humanities). My aim is to point out yet another topic of debate between the disciplines, that of writing style. We tend to criticize a paper even for its stylistic differences, but I want to underscore my belief that, just as the life sciences and life writing need to collaborate in their research and their understanding

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Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue writes that “man is a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part”?

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of resilience mechanisms, we researchers also need to be welcoming to other formats and styles. With the formal differences in this chapter, I wish to point out how content is more relevant than form.10 This is not to reject attempts to keep a fixed set of rules in disciplinary writings, rather it is a note on how disciplinary perspectives can also affect our writing styles, and if we are to communicate, collaborate, and appreciate research findings in other fields, it is crucial to appreciate their choice of writing format as well.

Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust11 Psychological resilience in adulthood is defined as individuals’ ability to “maintain relatively stable, healthy levels of psychological functioning” when facing “highly disruptive events” (Bonanno 2004, pp. 20–21). Based on various studies by Bonanno and colleagues (Bonanno et al. 2002; Bonanno et al. 2005; Bonanno et al. 2006), it is maintained that individuals who are exposed to atypical stressors generally show psychological resilience, and despite temporary setbacks, maintain their normal level of functioning. One such disruptive event is an

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By valuing content over form, I am not entering the age-old debate in the humanities, particularly in literary studies, over which is more important. I take the side of those who believe in the inseparability of content and form. However, for the purpose of pointing to the diversity of differences between life sciences and life writing, I believe it is also necessary to approach the question of style from this angle. As was mentioned earlier in footnote 36, the original paper can be found: Mahdiani, H., Höltge, J., Theron, L. et al. Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust: A Narrative Study of a Rural Population Dependent upon the Oil and Gas Industry. J Adult Dev (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-020-09363z. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. I need to point out that the original manuscript of this chapter was a collaborative work, although the modified version used in this book is written only by the present author. This may cause some variations between the subject ‘I’ and ‘we’ in the present text.

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unstable economy and the problems caused by commodity price fluctuations for people living in resource-dependent communities. All economies – local, community, regional, and national – are vulnerable to boom-and-bust cycles, which are characterized by phases of expansion, peak, contraction, and trough. Whereas psychological resilience is dependent on an individual’s ability to make use of available social-ecological resources (Ungar and Theron 2020; Masten and MottiStefanidi 2020), economic resilience is defined as “the policy-induced ability of an economy to withstand or recover from the effects of […] shocks” (Briguglio et al. 2008, p. 265) and the ability to cope with shocks through counteractive mechanisms. There is, however, a tension between psychological and economic approaches to resilience, with policies that support economic resilience dependent, in part, on individual psychological resilience for their actualization. Individual, community, and economic resilience seem to be not only interrelated, but also context-dependant (Ungar 2012). To illustrate, Lapuh (2018), via a study of socio-economic structure in Slovenian municipalities in 2008, concluded that the focus of “territorial policy” should be directed towards “entrepreneurship and ensure a diverse business structure” (p. 154) if the goal is to be more resilient. Such findings testify to the need to account for the actions of individuals (e.g., entrepreneurs) when considering broader economic processes. Therefore, interventions that bolster the psychological resilience of individuals (e.g., decreasing unemployment or supporting agency) will exert a positive influence on multiple systems at the same time (individual mental health, workplace productivity, national GDP, etc.) (Powdthavee 2012). It follows, then, that communities that depend on a single resourceextraction or processing industry, such as oil and gas, may be particularly vulnerable as shifting commodity prices and changing social behavior (e.g., the movement towards a low-carbon or zerocarbon economy) put additional pressure on community residents to adapt. Although research on economic resilience has measured a range of factors of socio-economic resilience regarding regional resilience (Christopherson et al. 2010), urban resilience (Leichenko 2011; Tyler and Moench 2012), or general adaptation to environmental change

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(Nelson et al. 2007), in all such examples the emphasis was placed on “a resilient region, in environmental and economic terms, one that retains the capacity to recover from external shocks” (Christopherson et al. 2010, p. 5). We believe that a comprehensive study of resilience has the potential to shift the focus from either regional economic resilience or psychological resilience and instead show the interdependence of resilience-promoting processes across social-ecological systems (Ungar 2012). Such a focus calls into question an individualistic and reductionistic approach to resilience and instead focuses on the contextualized reactions of individuals in relation to the changing availability of resources (Ungar 2012). In order to understand such interactions, this study analyzes individual narratives of resilience in the context of economic stress. Though it focuses on a unique population, a few previous studies have also accounted for economic conditions and individual resilience narratives. For example, Canvin et al. (2009) focused on narratives collected from interviews drawn from the youth and adult sample of the British Household Panel Survey to study resilience processes among households experiencing material hardship in Britain. They concluded that adults’ psychological responses to economic challenges are partially dependent on distal childhood experiences rather than more proximal factors such as personal finances, employment status, or training. For my project, what is relevant is Canvin et al.’s emphasis on asking people living in poverty what they see as achievements and positive transitions in their lives and identifying the resources (e.g., self-esteem and social support) they have depended on over time to cope with economic conditions. Research on the topic in the American context also supports similar conclusions (see Ennis 2015; Gourley 2012; Haggetry 2014; Pippert 2018). Moreover, longitudinal studies have, in recent years, shown how quickly residents of an economically challenged environment can adapt in ways that maintain mental health (Frijters et al. 2011).

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The present study focuses on a small community on the Canadian prairie, Maple Hill,12 which experienced growth over the past fifty years following expansion of the oil and gas industry (the current population of the town and the surrounding county is 14,600). During the 1970s, with oil prices soaring, rural areas in regions such as the province of Alberta saw their populations increase by a third. This was followed by a construction boom that outpaced larger cities on a per capita basis (Boom and Bust in Alberta, 2001). Since then, the economy has been through ups and down, with a major decline starting in 2014, when oil prices dropped. Given the lack of studies that account for the residents’ perspectives on resilience in boom-and-bust cycles, the present study is a narrative enquiry into what the resident adult population has to say about their boom-and-bust experiences within individual, communal, and social contexts. Therefore, in order to answer our team’s main question, which is what capacities the adults of this small town possess to deal with the multiple challenges they face, our interview questions targeted their individual, social, and work life. The participants’ answers were explored for potential promotive and protective processes of resilience with the goal being to provide a new understanding of resilience in economically adverse contexts. The data is presented organized around the benefits from the residents’ narratives and narrative identity. In the next section, we elaborate on these two terms.

Narrative, Narrative Identity, and Resilience At its most simplistic, a narrative is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end (Atkinson and Delamont 2008). The recent interest in the study of narratives beyond the fictional/semi-fictional and literary domain has initiated the narrative turn not only in the humanities but within fields as diverse as sociology, medical science, and law. By 12

The name of the town has been changed to preserve the anonymity of the participants.

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extension, narrative analysis can be viewed as an approach towards understanding humans’ perception of life and its meaning. The number of studies exploring the relationship between narratives and resilience is growing, with contributions from fields as diverse as gerontology (Randall et al. 2015) and talk therapy (White 2007). In general, using narratives as both a “conceptual framework and a research methodology” (Clark et al. 2018, p. 65) can not only serve the purpose of studying resilience (whether it is a process or an outcome) but can also “provide important insight into the lived experience of stressors and resilience”. Other researchers have gone a step further and created what has been termed a “grammar of resilience” through the study of narratives (Ramsey and Blieszner 2013). Ramsey and Blieszner (2013), for example, found that factors such as how much detail an adult’s story has, what their narrative tone is, which genre they use most, whether the adult is the author, hero, or villain of their story, and the metaphors, motifs, and themes they make use of (in Randall et al. 2015) are all narrative components relevant to understanding coping under stress. It is also assumed that “adults who score high on resilience will story their lives in identifiable ways” (Kenyon et al. 2011), as identified in Ramsey and Blieszner’s grammar. For the purposes of this study, we build on evidence that the presence or absence of specific themes in an individual’s life story can reflect resilience or the lack thereof. The themes are based on Dan P. McAdams’ theories of narrative identity (2013). McAdams provides a comprehensive categorization of life story constructs that are employed in studies of narrative identity (McAdams and McLean 2013). McAdams (1985) formulated a life-story model of identity, contending that people living in modern societies begin, in late adolescence and young adulthood, to construct their lives as evolving stories. He defines narrative identity as “a person’s internalized and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose” (McAdams and McLean 2013, p. 233). Similarly, Jennifer Pals’ (2006) work highlights the relation between explorative narrative processing and how people make sense of difficult life experiences. Pals writes that those adults who face

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adversities in their adult life may have more trouble constructing their identity. In other words, it is through narrative identity that individuals communicate their being in time: past, present, and future. Following this conceptualization of identity as storied, McAdams and McLean have identified a coding structure based on seven life narrative constructs: agency, communion, meaning making, explorative narrative processing, coherent positive resolution, redemption, and contamination. We see links between McAdams and McLeans’ life story constructs of narrative identity and the core concepts of social ecological (Ungar 2012) or systemic (Masten, 2014) resilience as found in resilience researchers’ understanding of resilience and identity development in stressed environments. Each of these associations is exemplified below.

Agency Agency refers to the extent an individual can take action to develop mastery over their life or others’ lives (McAdams and McLean 2013). As McAdams and McLean (2013) explain, adults with life stories that reflect the theme of agency under stressful situations tend to have higher levels of mental health, well-being, and maturity. Similarly, Ungar et al. (2007) identified seven critical factors associated with resilience across different cultures, which are also related to adaptation and meaning making, namely: relationships, powerful identities, experiences of efficacy, social justice, the meeting of basic needs, social cohesion, and cultural adherence. The two factors of powerful identities and experiences of efficacy are synonymous with the role of agentic narratives. Ungar (2015) defined powerful identity as a strong personal and collective sense of purpose, or self-appraisal of strengths and weaknesses. He further related self-efficacy to the ability to affect change in one’s social and physical environment in order to access health resources. Ungar’s research, like McAdams and McLean’s, associates resilience with highly agentic individuals in environments that facilitate personal growth and development.

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Communion Communion is defined as the extent individuals portray communal connections (McAdams and McLean 2013). Stories rich in communion emphasize “intimacy, caring, and belongingness” (McAdams and McLean 2013, p. 234). Similarly, social ecological accounts of resilience underscore the role of relationships with significant others, including peers and adults within one’s family and community. For example, Crummy (2002) studied the effect of relationships as a key resilience factor for bereaved older adults. Luthar and Brown (2007) claimed that resilience hinges on relationships. Accordingly, relationships that are rooted in abusive behaviors jeopardize resilience whereas “love, comfort and security foster resilience” (Panter-Brick and Eggerman 2012, p. 370) and reflect the role communion plays in wellbeing under stress.

Meaning making Meaning making as a life narrative construct is defined as the extent of learning from an adverse experience (McAdams and McLean 2013). In a longitudinal study investigating whether recognition of meaning in life is related to resilience to suicide, Heisel and Flett (2016) identified perceived meaning in life as an important factor, as did Edward et al. (2009), whose work focused on how adult patients of mental health services who have experienced mental illness describe the phenomenon of resilience. Theron and Theron (2014) also studied meaning-making processes among Black South African students in a broader study of resilience-promoting processes. In all these examples, a meaningful relationship between meaning making and individual resilience has been observed.

Exploratory narrative processing Exploratory narrative processing is the degree of “self-exploration as expressed in the story” where a resilient individual’s narrative would reflect “the development of a richly elaborated self-understanding”

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(McAdams and McLean 2013, p. 234). An exemplary study in the field of resilience research is the work by Lau and van Niekerk (2011) on narratives of resilience among burn survivors, in which the researchers reflect on the role of exploratory narrative processing. Lau and van Niekerk engaged with their participants through their stories, asking participants to reflect on their traumatic experiences. They found that individuals’ narratives were embedded within themes of “growth and transformation”, as their stories demonstrated how they learned positive lessons from traumatic childhood experiences. Their findings also reflect on the role of narratives and meaning-making processes in relation to the survivors’ “reconstruction of self”, where the dominant positive narratives reflected “self-enhancement, increased clarity of identity and life purpose, insight into self, and meaningful connections with others” (p. 1175).

Coherent positive resolution Coherent positive resolution is how much closure is produced in a story (McAdams and McLean 2013). For example, studies by King and Hicks (2007) and Lilgendahl and McAdams (2011) prove how positive resolution of negative events is associated with higher levels of happiness and well-being. Resilience research underscores this link. For example, Pals’ research (2006) on exploratory narrative processing, although dedicated to the field of narrative analysis, concluded that coherent positive resolution also “predicted increasing ego-resiliency between young adulthood and midlife (age 52),” which itself “mediated the relationship between coherent positive resolution and life satisfaction in late midlife” (1079). Similarly, Compton and Hoffman (2012) related human resilience to coherent positive resolution and happiness. Also, of particular importance is Fredrickson’s broadenand-build theory of positive emotions (2001). She posits that positive emotions, such as “joy, interest, contentment, pride, and love” (p. 3), can provide people with lasting resources. Elsewhere, she measured psychological resilience of participants during a speech task and concluded that more resilient individuals reported greater happiness.

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Redemption Redemption refers to storylines where there is a positive outcome rooted in a negative experience (McAdams and McLean 2013). The initial negative state is compensated for by the good that follows it. Returning to Lau and van Niekerk’s (2011) research, participants’ stories which demonstrated their transformation and growth out of traumatic childhood experiences reflect this theme. Furthermore, resilience scholars underscore the role of reappraisal (Kalisch et al. 2015) and optimism (Rutter and Pickles 2016), concepts reminiscent of the theme of redemption discussed by McAdams et al. (2013).

Contamination Contamination is the opposite of redemption. It refers to cases where a negative outcome is reached as a result of a positive experience (McAdams and McLean 2013) This factor, by its definition, should not be a frequent construct in resilience-themed narratives. In summary, we used all of McAdams’ constructs to inform a structured analysis of the narratives collected from the residents of the town of Maple Hill. These narratives detail residents’ accounts of lives lived during boom-and-bust economic cycles in a socioeconomically vulnerable context. Using McAdams’ constructs facilitated attention to resilience in this context.

Methodology Our methodology uses Polkinghorne’s theories of narrative inquiry (1995) to analyze the adult participants’ life narratives. This provides an effective tool to study McAdams’ life narrative constructs in relation to the resilience of adults who have lived through boom-and-bust

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cycles. Polkinghorne has introduced two versions of narrative inquiry:13 analysis of narratives (identification of common themes across a series of narratives), and narrative analysis (taking an in-depth look at one narrative to identify the aspects of narrative processes, cognition, tools, and language used). In analysis of narratives, based on a comparative look into the totality of the stories told, we create a new structure. This requires the collection of stories as data, followed by paradigmatic analysis that results in “descriptions of themes that hold across the stories” (Polkinghorne 1995, p.12). For the purpose of this paper, we are interested in those themes relevant to McAdams’ life story construct which illustrate the presence, absence, or degree of adult resilience. In contrast, narrative analysis is concerned with perception through the plotline of an individual story. The result of narrative analysis is itself a story (Smith and Sparkes 2009). What is important from a narrative perspective is the way in which events and experiences are connected and the process through which meanings are produced, rather than whether the events are true in themselves (Trapp-Fallon 2003). This method has been used by narrative analysts including McCance et al. (2001), who identified common themes using paradigmatic analysis of narratives to construct six stories of nurses’ experiences of delivering care. Likewise, Cussen et al. (2012) used narrative analysis to construct a set of common themes that explain adolescents’ aspirations for the future. Other researchers have employed Polkinghorne’s dual techniques successfully (see Kramp 2004; McCormack 2004). To sum up, in the first instance, our analysis of narratives seeks to produce a unifying narrative that expresses the totality of the stories heard from the participants. In the section on narrative analysis, by contrast, we compare the recurrent themes deduced from the narratives with those of McAdams, as detailed earlier.

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As the similarity of the terms may lead to some confusion, we will refer to the overall theories as narrative inquiry instead of narrative analysis. All the references to narrative analysis as a category of narrative inquiry will appear in italics.

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Sample, Study Design, Procedure We interviewed 37 adults (20 women and 17 men) between the ages of 30 and 76 (mean age = 51.51 years) who had resided in Maple Hill for an average of 27.5 years, with the shortest period of residency being two14 and the longest 63 years. The participants were recruited either by responding to the social media platforms of the project or the town or in person through contact with onsite researchers, for example during community dinners, or weekend farmers’ markets. In our sample, only one participant had indigenous roots, and one was in a same-sex relationship. The majority of the participating adults were in heterosexual relationships and had children. Following Glaser and Strauss’s iterative-cyclical process (1967) we conducted three rounds of interviews: In the first round, six interviews were completed using open questions related to the topic of resilience. The data collected from this round was then analyzed, and key themes such as family and community factors were identified. These themes were used in the second round, which consisted of 14 interviews, with specified questions on resilience in boom-and-bust cycles. The last round of interviews, with 17 participants, included questions about private lives, work lives, community lives, and future lives in the context of oil and gas industry cycles. For example, “How does the oil and gas industry affect your family life in relation to your partner, children and the family as a whole?” “What ways have you and your family found to handle the challenges of the boom-and-bust industry?” and “How does the oil and gas industry affect your social network in Maple Hill?”15 (see Appendix A for the final interview guide). Participants were not asked

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This participant’s narrative is also included despite her relatively short residency because her husband had worked in the oil and gas industry for the previous 20 years and therefore her narrative can still be representative of the experience. Some of the interview questions are provided in Appendix A. for the complete list of questions refer to the published paper in fn. 36.

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directly to define resilience (only two participants used the term in their responses). During all the interviews, two researchers were present who specialized in resilience research with sub-specialties in social studies, psychology, and narratology. All interviews were digitally recorded (with permission of the participants) and coded using ATLAS.ti 8 (2017), a software tool for the storage, management, analysis, and retrieval of qualitative data. When coding the data, the analytical strategy and focus were discussed by all the authors and a consensus was reached regarding the grouping of the codes. Data used for this chapter was grouped under narrative identity and focused on identifying McAdams’ seven constructs. The focus of this section is only one part of the analysis conducted on the collected data. The study’s coauthors have produced various analytical reports and articles, ranging from a gender-specific reading (Murphy et al. [under review]) to a study of the role of industry (Twum-antwi et al. [in press]), all within the larger framework of resilience research. Before every interview, the participants were informed of the details and purpose of the study and the confidentiality of their data. All the interviews took place at the same office building, which was provided to the research team by the town’s municipal government. Each participant was interviewed only once. The interviews were planned to last one hour and organized to allow more time if needed. While each interview broadly covered the main topics of the interview guide, the interviewers were flexible in focusing more on specific relevant topics in relation to the participants’ stories. Due to the relatively small size of the community, the participants might have known about one another’s participation in the study, though this appears to have had no effect on the data or our analysis, based on the feedback from participants and the local advisory committee that oversaw the administration of the research.

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Narrative Analysis – The Complexity of Boom-Bust Adjustment Complexity in the narratives was most evident when we examined people’s accounts of their lives during both boom and bust periods. Contrary to expectations, given the preference people tend to have for economic booms, participants talked more about the challenges boom times brought to individuals and families than the advantages. During boom cycles, there were jobs and good money, but that also meant fathers/male spouses were away at work for periods of time that lasted days, weeks, or months (all our examples were of men being removed from the family, even though an increasing number of women are now working in the oil and gas industry and other maledominated professions). Most of the female participants experienced periods as single parents or had to take on extra responsibilities for the household or farm. This occurred most often during economic booms. For example, in the words of one female participant: “My husband, he works far away though so it’s difficult and he’s also in his own very stressful situation” (Female, age 34). Another said, “It took a while for that adjustment […] so it was hard being at home all the time and you’re with somebody and they’re always gone. So that was hard to adjust” (Female, age 49). For her, ‘adjustment’ came with, on the one hand, being trained as a school bus driver and not only driving her own children everyday, but meeting many parents and expanding her social circle, communicating and socializing on a daily basis. The protective role of social networks is a proven resilience factor, referred to by Richardson (2002) as “social reintegration” (see also Wells 2012). She also talked about her own skills as a single mother before remarrying in “budgeting and managing”. On multiple occasions, she underscores how learning to save money and budgeting was a key adjustment factor. In resilience studies, characteristics such as self-organization and learning new knowledge have been observed to mediate resilience. The role of learning to adjust was recounted by other participants as well. For example, when men returned from work, the pressure to adapt to stressful schedules did not end. Participants described periods of adjustment following long absences:

Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust

When he is home and you do make decisions, you communicate, but it takes a lot to work like, you have to be strong about it […] he was so used to just doing everything his way and I was doing everything mine and then he’d come home and he’d try to change things and I’d be like, ‘Yeah, no’ and so it took a while. (Female, age 49). Likewise, some participants said that their family acts differently during periods when the father is home; “We have a system in place, when he’s not there and then he comes home” (Female, age 49). However, descriptions of learning and adjustment did not only come from women. In some cases, it was men who talked about the difficulties their jobs caused them in relation to their families. For example, one father said, “I wish I had more time with my son, him being the oldest, could have done things” (Male, age 72). Another man talked about how shift work during boom periods made him emotionally distant: “I think I was a zombie. Yeah. If I was talking to you, I wouldn’t even remember, sometimes, it got pretty bad” (Male, age 72). Whether it was because of the financial incentives to work long hours, or the necessity of supporting their family, participants described learning to adjust to the demands caused by boom-time conditions. As one female participant explained: “He’d work out of town a lot and I structured my life so that I could go see him” (Female, age 50). To her, the advantage of her husband’s work was a paycheck “ten times” larger than her salary, which made the sacrifices worthwhile. Another participant described the economic advantages of stressful work life as a blessing that demanded compromise: “I feel so blessed. Like, we put our family first. If it meant us going and staying in a hotel with them for a weekend, then we did that because the family unit was really important […] wherever he needed to go, we went” (Female, age 50). In each example, participants described ways they had maintained a sense of cohesion among family members even if the transitions from work to home life caused tension for both spouses and children, when work was plentiful and the financial benefits very good. In short, boom cycles placed stresses on residents’ personal lives, but they learned how to adjust, be it by learning new skills (e.g., bus driving) and creating broader social circles, or by rescheduling family life around the husband

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or father’s work shift, or simply by weighing the benefits of a substantial income over less family time. In each case, the change in their approach towards handling the situation did not occur overnight, rather they developed new coping styles over time. While we expected bust times to bring narratives of loss and stress as work evaporated and wages fell, the pattern of responses was much more complex. For example, one participant explained the ambivalence experienced during a period of economic contraction: “Dads are at home right now. So, that’s impacting the family in some ways positively but in a lot of ways negatively” (Female, age 50). Such changes disrupted family life, with children and spouses unaccustomed to seeing fathers at home so often. Despite the challenge, this participant said that she thinks during economic downturns, “Societies are putting on a lot more activities for people to be social and be together, for families to be together,” which also represents the developments taking place in the context of social support. This same ambivalence regarding the advantages and disadvantages of an economic bust was evident in the way men and women described their roles and the need to challenge traditional gender norms in order for families to adapt successfully. A 46-year-old male participant, for example, talked about how he is staying home while his wife makes money as a minister: “I was able to stay home for the first year of my now four-year-old’s life […] it was great.” Although he is not the breadwinner of the family any longer, he gets to enjoy family life and raise his children, which reflects a degree of positive adaptation. Positive adaptation is usually defined as “success at meeting stagesalient developmental tasks” (Luthar and Zigler 1991). This same pattern was found among other male participants. As one man living with his partner explained: I’m usually pretty adaptive to change. It has been three times over the last ten years of this industry that I haven’t been able to work either [due to] injury or just the last downfall […] It’s not pleasant because I prefer to work, he prefers to stay home, but we understand that reality is never nice, so that’s what we do. (Male, age 36)

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These participants, 46 and 36 years old, are typical examples of adults displaying developmental behaviour when faced with challenges, whereby after a period of time they not only learn how to adapt to the unwanted change but also start seeing it not as a merely negative modification. This developmental change presented itself in other aspects of the participants’ lives as well. Though participants noted that communities pulled together during economic downturns, the quality of their interactions changed. Many participants said they had stopped having “drink nights” (going out to a bar with friends) as often as they used to. They mostly attended community events instead, or made greater use of public facilities such as libraries and recreational spaces that had low or zero fees. For example, one male participant in his mid50s said, “I’m starting to attend my church more … becoming more spiritual.” This is not to say that participants did not spend money on alcohol. One participant explained: “I think the liquor stores are busier, none of them have closed down” (Male, age 51). Consistently, we found that when drinking alcohol was part of a participant’s narrative, there was a shift in what it meant, depending on whether the economy was doing well or poorly. During bust times, casual drinking changed from an opportunity to socialize to a coping strategy used to cope with feelings of failure. As one participant said: “I think people reach out to different things [during a bust] they feel might be able to help them cope…churches and liquor stores” (Male, age 30). Both spirituality and alcohol consumption can initiate participation in communal activities, where the individual can seek comfort in the company of others. With regard to participants’ work lives, economic busts changed how much people earned, but did not improve work-life balance. As one participant said: “They paid you well [during the boom] but there was a lot of what I call criminal exchange, like, we want you to work, you know, 12–14 hours days, seven days a week until you’re done, and yes you got paid” (Female, age 50). Though the experience may have had its advantages (e.g., more discretionary income), bust periods offered an opportunity to slow down and recuperate. As another participant said: “When there is a boom, you work till you drop […] because you never

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know when it’s not going to be there” (Female, age 56). Busts brought opportunities to establish balance, even if that balance was not explicitly valued. Examined all together, people’s experiences of family, community, and work lives through both boom and bust economic cycles are complex with multiple and competing narratives that account for the impact of a good or bad economy on how well individuals, families, and communities function. While the substance of the stories men and women in Maple Hill told was the same, the experience of each economic period entailed a different set of adaptations and stressors for each gender. We can group the participants’ experiences of both boom and bust economies into three interactive storylines: 1. Positive storylines: Participants adjusted to the prosperity or the economic downturns, having learned that life in a town dependent on the oil and gas industry requires flexibility. Such stories benefited from protective factors such as learning new skills, budgeting, and social networks. 2. Neutral storylines: Participants accepted that conditions would always be stressful. These stories portrayed a narrative tone which was neither positive nor negative. Life for these people seemed to always be the same. 3. Negative storylines: Family and community life is negatively affected by both good and bad economic conditions, with both booms and busts causing spouses to be absent (physically and emotionally). Financial support is either abundant or missing, with both conditions causing strained social relationships and contributing to substance abuse.

Regardless of which storyline was dominant in a given individual’s narrative, both boom and bust periods demanded a great deal of personal and collective resilience to cope with the stress caused by a changing economy. The importance of both personal and collective resources fits with social-ecological or systemic approaches

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to resilience. These approaches discourage accounts of resilience that report individual strengths without acknowledging that these strengths are invariably intertwined with the strengths of the human and structural systems that individuals are connected to (Ungar and Theron 2020; Masten and Motti-Stefanidi 2020). In our sample, adults’ developmental growth in facing new challenges reflects the role of personal and collective resources.

Analysis of Narratives: Complexity of Boom-Bust Adjustment In order to better understand the relationship between narrative identity and participants’ resilience, we invited the participants to tell us about their lives in the form of a story (in the last round of the interviews, n=17). A review of the plotlines, narrative tone, and the degree of complexity in the participants’ responses became the basis for an analysis of narratives and a deeper understanding of resilience processes in this unique context. For our analysis, we return to McAdams and McLean’s (2013) life-story constructs. Each of the seven aspects of narrative construction and identity development were reflected in the complexity of the stories that participants shared.

Agency All the participants had experienced boom and bust cycles, with many commenting on the level of control they exercised in their lives regardless of economic conditions. For example, some described themselves as very independent: “I have a very different perspective […] I did my own thing” (Female, age 39). Another participant said, “I’m, I’m a very uh, dominating person like, you know, I just, like, I said, this is what I’m doing, and I did it” (Female, age 63). Yet another said, “I was a very independent person and I looked after my own stuff” (Female, age 49). These participants all demonstrated a high agentic character reflecting empowerment and self-mastery.

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Other participants maintained a more flexible attitude towards the changing economic conditions. For example, one said that “There’s no hard feelings here or anything else, whatever. Any place you make it work […] all depends on your attitude” (Male, age 60). This was similar to another response, “It didn’t affect me that way kind of thing, perception, I’m pretty easy-going” (Female, age 56). Elsewhere another interviewee maintained that “Life just throws things at you and you just have to learn to … roll with it” (Female, age 53). Similarly, another said, “The way I looked at it is if you want something I still have to work” (Female, age 55). These participants’ agency stems from their adaptability to change, which can be due to their older age. If the participants mentioned in the previous paragraph represented a higher degree of self-reliance, the quotes here suggest a more flexible response. One possible explanation is the age of the participants. It has been shown that, despite the fact that people at older ages are usually exposed to more stressors related to their physical, mental, or social conditions, and as a result may seem more vulnerable, most manage to remain active and to age actively and successfully (Baltes and Freund 2003). Although there can be other reasons for such seemingly age-dependent responses, such as cohort effects. Very few of the participants held a negative attitude towards themselves, and the rare examples of such attitudes were usually expressed with a humorous tone to account for individual challenges. For example, one male participant said, “It’s like it’s kind of funny, my retirement plan is two Big Macs a week, I’m kind of hoping to drop dead some point within the next couple years because like I said I have no savings so …I’ll be so angry if I turn 60 [laughing]” (Male, age 51). Although few of the participants had this sense of humor, among all the interviews, only two participants started their life story negatively. As one explained, “It’d be pretty boring actually” (Male, age 54). In some cases, participants expressed a belief that higher powers were in charge of their lives. One participant said she “leave[s] it up to the Provider and I do a lot of that too, a lot of self-prayer and a lot of motivational to keep my own” (Female, age 66). Her strong spirituality may stem from her heritage that was reflected in her opening lines:

Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust

“I’m Metis raised […] So, now I’m related to probably every reserve in [the province] […] you get the privileges of the status.” Her optimism is reflected in her sense of belonging: “Even though we’re going through what we are I know that we’ll get through because we have family; we do pull together the best we can.”

Communion The experience of interpersonal connection (which McAdams and McLean [2013] describe as communion) was key to surviving economic cycles. As one participant explained, “It was always my mom. She was my biggest supporter […] Even though we were poor, I didn’t feel that we were poor because we had family” (Female, age 63). Another participant said, “We didn’t have much but we were happy, we were together. […] Ya. And we had love and ya we were safe so that’s really all that mattered” (Female, age 53). This emphasis on specific family members as a protective factor was consistent across the sample. Whilst this fits the emphasis in resilience studies on the protective value of family (Masten 2014), it accords less neatly with understandings that economic pressure, including stressful experiences related to the imbalance between low income and financial demands (Berkowitz 1989), is one of the biggest stress factors in marriages and leads to problems for both individuals and the couple (Conger and Elder 1994).

Redemption & Meaning making In our sample, the ability to learn a positive lesson from a negative event (redemption) was common to many participants’ accounts of their lives. For some participants, periods of economic bust brought opportunities for new personal growth and better social cohesion. For example, one participant said, “The big positive is that I get to spend a lot of time with my family […] I managed, I was able to stay home for the first year of my now four-year-old’s life. And it was great, the bonding was just great” (Male, age 46). Although he sees his job loss and economic downturn as a negative state, he is also able to extract a positive

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outcome from such a situation. Another participant said, “Because my whole life as a child was not poverty but definitely not wealth, right? And I always knew and I didn’t have the stability of two parents […]” (Female, age 53). She used this negative experience to commit to something positive: “I always knew that whoever I would marry had better be a very loving, understanding, and family-first kind of man, and so that’s who I married.” Economic volatility has encouraged robust personalities and a meta-narrative among residents of Maple Hill to explain their lives and the many hardships they have experienced as meaningful. Several participants characterized themselves as competent at handling hard times: “I am optimistic with life, […] you get hit in the head enough times, you kind of figure it out [chuckles]” (Female, age 65). Even poorly resourced single parents showed this same ability to make meaning out of hardship. As one woman said, “Because I’ve been a single parent for over 20 years, I’ve always been aware the need to prepare and not to be um, waiting for the next hand-out, because that hand-out may never come” (Female, age 55). Another explained that her life experience had taught her how to make meaning out of harsh and negative experiences and respect her own self, “You need to, whether you have children or not, you’re valuable, you’re important and whatever value you place on yourself will show on what supports you put around yourself. If you don’t value yourself, you won’t seek out help. I valued myself because I had two kids who I loved dearly” (Female, age 55). Finally, one participant simply said, “Well, I think you know just the concept of boom and bust and the stretch and the squeeze is that you do … you become more resilient or you die. […] So, I think that it has certainly made me more resilient” (Female, age 49). Such descriptions suggest that adversity can trigger a re-evaluation of life priorities. Whether through a regenerated emotional bond with the family members, by gaining new perspectives towards finances, or via leaning to appreciate little things in life, most of the participants demonstrated the ability to learn a lesson from difficulties, and such situations repeatedly supported their positive development.

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Exploratory narrative processing In looking back at past challenges, many of the participants asserted that these challenges produced desirable outcomes. For example, one female participant, age 55, told us how she chose to fight back against an abusive husband, weak health, and very poor financial resources: “As a result of that decision nine years ago, I think I am stronger, I think I have a greater respect for what it means to appreciate life […] don’t give up, keep going, life can be better than you’ve ever seen (Female, age 55). There is also evidence of meaning making through the highly agentic content of her narrative. She emphasized on multiple occasions how she chose to be a hero in her own story. Another participant, a 70-year-old man, explained why he didn’t leave the oil business as a sensible series of decisions over time, ones he recognized as risky but which were nevertheless the best possible ones he could have made under the circumstances. As he said, “There were lots of times I wanted to get out of it but what do you do? You know? I was good at what I did I mean you know so […].” While he may be retired, his narrative, like those of many others in Maple Hill, accounted for the boom-and-bust economy as a challenge from which he could learn and grow.

Coherent positive resolution Perhaps it was the participants’ collective emphasis on having a robust personality, or their penchant to narrate stories of personal redemption and growth, but far more of the stories told described the coherent positive resolution of crises than despair and failure. As one woman explained, periods of economic downturn had placed so much stress on her marriage to a man who could not manage money that she had decided to separate from him. After a period of several years, however, she described the growth that both she and her husband experienced and their eventual reunification: “I think we grew in that time like yes, we were apart but we grew to be better together” (Female, age 53). Another woman talked about periods of economic challenge but

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was careful to craft her account of that time as a period of personal transformation: “I guess [it is] humbling when you go to the store and you realize, okay I can only afford this and this and that […] but I […] realize over the years that material things aren’t as important as having a roof over your head and a place to live with heat and running water and food” (Female, age 47). Even though economic cycles continued to challenge her and her family, she learned how to cope: “It seems like the cycles have been getting easier kind of. I don’t know if it’s easier or we’re just coping with it better to get through.”

Contamination Though less common in the data, participants did occasionally narrate life stories that included positive experiences that turned bad or were ignored. To illustrate, an older woman recounted her regrets that she had not socialized more. “We kind of blew off a lot of our friends, and I don’t know why, […] now, I’m very lonely being a widow, ’cause, I don’t have any friends [short laugh]” (Female, age 68). Countering this theme of contamination was a general belief in people’s abilities to perceive the positive even in contexts where their future was threatened. As one participant said, “You can make it work or it doesn’t matter what kind of job you have or whatever or what kind of place, you can be living in a palace and if your attitude’s not right” (Male, age 60). It is this pattern of attribution which seemed to buffer the impact of negative life events, even though it required an over-emphasis on agentic qualities of individuals to meet challenges that might be beyond their control.

Discussion How do adult residents of small towns that depend on oil and gas extraction or processing industries withstand economic boom-andbust cycles? The collected narratives embodied many common elements related to the challenges and opportunities available in a singleindustry town experiencing economic boom-and-bust cycles. As per

Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust

the definition of resilience, challenges are a prerequisite to adaptive responses (Masten 2014). In summarizing the patterns we can identify in our data, we find that the most common adaptive response built on the theme of agency, a common factor found in resilience research (Masten and Motti-Stefanidi 2020; Rutter 2006). It is difficult to assert, however, whether the stress of living in Maple Hill created a “steeling effect” (Rutter 2006) that made the participants and their families and community more agentic, or whether our participants were a selfselected sample of individuals who chose to remain in an economically challenging environment, either because they had the skills to cope or were able to develop them. Regardless, life in towns like Maple Hill may require people to adopt the cognitive, social, and instrumental skills required to flexibly manage their lives under stress, whether that stress comes from economies that are booming or in recession. A number of personal and collective qualities of individuals in Maple Hill seem to be particularly adaptive. Participants changed jobs or daily habits and routines, including gendered roles, to survive changing circumstances. We observed only two participants who spoke more fatalistically, telling us they could do nothing but wait and see what comes next. The second common theme was the role played by friends, family, and community supports. Belonging to a club or a group was repeatedly underscored as a source of resilience. Related to this theme and the construct of communion, participants talked about how much they care for their neighbors, often mentioning the town’s motto, “Pull Together!” These can be taken together with narratives featuring redemptive sequences, indicating that people who cared more for others showed degrees of generative integration. Randall et al. (2015) have observed that generative integration means that our stories are connected to the world around us. Research on adult resilience supports the role of social connections and contextual support (Stewart and Yuen 2011). The value of social connections and contextual support fits with the social-ecological understanding of resilience as a process that draws on more than personal resources (Ungar and Theron 2020; Masten and Motti-Stefanidi 2020). In other words, this theme is a reminder that

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psychological resilience is intertwined with social and environmental resilience (Ungar and Theron 2020). Third, residents showed high levels of meaning making in their narratives. The residents shared with us many of the lessons they have learned: from weathering boom-and-bust cycles; via money management; to reconsidering the value they place on family, church, and spirituality. Most notably, this pattern of meaning making started early in life and continued through each cycle of prosperity and illfortune, with the very fact that economic cycles occur with frequency being the catalyst for robust personalities and belief in a better future. As reported elsewhere (Masten and Motti-Stefanidi 2020), it is possible that this meaning making was enabled or sustained by the family and community systems that the residents were connected to. Alongside these three life-story patterns, we observed some potential factors that may have shaped the participants’ resilience, either attenuating or accentuating their coping abilities. For instance, it became clear that both the culture of the industry and the gender of participants played a role. Whilst financial difficulties affected the lives of both men and women, for example, multiple narratives referred to the pressure being stronger on men. One explanation would be the traditional ‘breadwinner’ mindset, which is very dominant in the small community of Maple Hill. Similarly, Maple Hill’s culture of big money, which has its roots in the oil and gas industry, together with its side effects, was a repeated topic in almost all the interviews. Regardless of age, participants talked about a certain ‘attitude’ in Maple Hills, where those who earn ‘the big money’ seem to exclude those who are middle class from specific groups or gatherings. To better understand the potential influences of the effect of age, the culture of the industry, and gender-related aspects, a secondary analysis of the data, and/or a follow-up study would be useful.

Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust

Conclusion Our study seeks to understand how economic flux affects individual lives over time by means of narrative analysis. The analysis was based on narratives constructed by adult residents of a town dependent mostly on a single resource-extraction industry and the volatile economic conditions that creates. While there was plenty of vulnerability to be found, our data also points to many promotive and protective factors that operate in this economically fragile community. The recurrence of agentic narratives coupled with a strong sense of communion seems to be the basis for a complex set of characteristics that make residents both fiercely optimistic and, at least in the short-term, resilient. Aside from their individual resources (agency, meaning making) the participants referred to the role of friends and family (communion), spirituality, and learning as the most valuable protective factors, and maintained that a more stable socio-economic context would eliminate some of the major difficulties they were experiencing in the first place. However, we need to also point out that, although much of the data points to the resilience of the population in Maple Hill, this positive orientation towards struggle and the future may inhibit communities like Maple Hill from diversifying their economies, even as the world shifts towards less dependence on oil and gas. Participants in this study may have been able to describe the intersecting forces at play when changing economic conditions transformed family relations, meaning making, and identity, but that does not mean that they necessarily saw a need to fundamentally challenge the economic or social foundations of their community. We heard scant mention of the need for Maple Hill to adapt to permanent stagnation in the price of oil, or the need for a healthy pessimism regarding the prospects for future economic prosperity. Resilience was more aptly described as persistence (with governments colluding in the narrative of future prosperity) and resistance to negative thinking. Thus, the local narratives of resilience contrast with the need for thoughtful intervention by governments to direct the community towards a more diversified and economically resilient future. Aside from possible socioeconomic interventions that

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the local government can program to mitigate the damage, as also mentioned by some participants, there is a need for more fundamental training measures, such as teaching children at school about budgeting and money management. Finally, our results can help inform public policies that influence the mental health, social functioning, and economic sustainability of small towns that depend on a single resource-extraction or processing industry. As changing social and economic environments put pressure on these towns to diversify their economies, it is useful to understand the interactions between individual psychological and social processes, economic factors, and natural ecologies if we are to both facilitate future economic development and prevent the large-scale displacement of populations affected by boom-and-bust economic cycles. Although this study fills a significant gap in existing knowledge about how resilience is experienced from the perspective of adult residents of an economically challenging environment, it also has some limitations. For example, in our sample, none of our participants had noticeable physical or cognitive limitations, such a sample may have presented us with different results or strategies of resilience. This would require additional research. Additionally, it would have been more precise to have interviewed the participants more than once and at various stages to have a point of comparison regarding developmental perspectives, which could also allow for their narratives to be more detailed and focused. This can be a future follow up study. When it is used in the form of narrative care, focusing on narratives could become a tool for fostering resilience and helping communities to cope with difficulties. The narratives also reveal the residents’ expectation and needs, such as implementing financial management in the education system, which can also be taken into consideration in future policies. Furthermore, if we assume an imaginary line, a narrative line, connecting contextual difficulties resulting from economic predicaments, we can see a convergence of themes between the crew on Ahab’s ship, and the community in Maple Hills: Both groups (not counting Ahab himself) were motivated to do those arduous jobs based

Resilience in Times of Economic Boom and Bust

on the promises of prosperity; both were (the community in Canada still are) dependent on the economic flux; both dependencies are based on extraction of natural resources that are subject to international policies on things such as the climate, fossil fuels, and conservation; both had to adjust and adapt their private lives to their working conditions. When we pursue this line of thinking a little further, other communities with similar adversities come to mind, such as coal miners in Germany. Research on such communities can help explain the interactions between individual, psychological, and social processes, economic factors, and natural ecologies. These are vital if we are to both facilitate future economic development and prevent the largescale displacement of populations affected by boom-and-bust economic cycles. The potential implications of how people adapt to financial shocks needs further study in relation to public policy and welfare evaluation (Layard 2006; Loewenstein and Ubel 2008), specifically when we consider the fact that most of the risk factors are contextual and beyond individual control.

Appendix A (examples from the Interview Guide) Theme 1: Life Narratives •

I want to ask you to tell me about your life in a form of a story. Just imagine your life is a story, and in any way you like, just tell me about it. (You can choose what parts of your life to narrate, you can choose one of your lifelong memories, When it was, was it a good memory, or a difficult situation? How did you go through?)

Theme 2: Childhood •

We would like to know about your family life during your childhood. Where did you grow up? How would you describe your childhood at home? How did you spend your free time? Did you have to do any household tasks?

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Theme 3: Private life: family, social, finances, living standards • • •

•

Do you experience changes in your role that might be tied to the boom and bust economy? What is your usual role in your family? What ways have you and your family found to handle the challenges of the boom and bust industry? Do you experience changes in your living standards that are tied to the booms and busts of the local oil and gas economy? Can you still afford the same life today as before this bust or did you have to make any sacrifices in your daily life like in relation to housing, mobility, hobbies, or recreational activities? What would you change in your behavior if you would anticipate another upcoming bust during a next boom?

Theme 4: Work life • •

How is your job affected by the boom and bust cycles of the oil and gas industry? What factors do you know that determine how the oil and gas industry is doing? Since the recent election people seem to become very optimistic that the oil and gas industry will recover.

Theme 5: Community life •

•

How would you describe the social life in Maple Hill? We heard that it is supposed to be very cliquey here. But is there still a feeling of being one community in Maple Hill? What are the positive effects or opportunities the oil and gas industry gives to Maple Hill?

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In line with the stylistic choices of the Social Sciences, the references in this chapter are following APA format. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guid elines/paper-format/student-annotated.pdf

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Over the past five chapters, my aim has been to provide a narrative reading of human resilience from the perspective of a narrative scholar. While each chapter and the close readings have focused on specific topics such as a narrative reading of resilience studies, the relevance of resilience research for narratives, and different representations of resilience, in this chapter, I will discuss the results of this work in a more systematic manner. In line with Polkinghorne’s theory of narrative inquiry, which was employed in depth in the previous chapter, I will now read my own project as a narrative. In other words, looking at the present study in its totality as a narrative of its own, I will review the stories and themes shared among the different depictions of resilience that were analyzed throughout the present work. The ultimate objective is to answer to the proposed questions: What does a narrative study of adult resilience add to the field of resilience research, and what does a resilience reading add to American literary studies? In doing this, I will proceed in three steps. First, I will read my project as ‘narrative analysis,’ looking for overall commonalities between the different chapters. Second, I will read the present project with the aim of finding one possible overarching master narrative. And finally, I will take up the analysis of possible benefits from the dialogue between resilience research and American Studies or between the life sciences and life writing.

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A Narrative Analysis of a Narrative Study of Resilience A narrative analysis of the present project points at multiple themes shared by the life sciences’ take on resilience research and that of life writing. My close reading revealed education; social support, family, and communion; and the role of ego-resiliency as the most recurrent themes. For the purpose of consistency and coherence, I dedicate subsections to the analysis of each theme.

Education As I have discussed in various chapters, “current research in the field of education claims that learning is situated in real-world practice and occurs through recursive interactions between individual learners and their social and biophysical environment” (Krasny et al., Education and Resilience n. pag.). My reading of Power of Sympathy reflects this. In this text, the characters are encouraged to read well and educate themselves in the ways of the world and therefore protect themselves against temptations. They are encouraged to read stories of temptation and virtue as a second-hand world of experience since the world they are living in – a Puritan, non-egalitarian social system – not only lacks the necessary supportive structure but also reprimands the individual for any signs of vulnerability. This is the society where, sadly, resilience does indeed need to be an individual trait in the sense of the self-made man. Brown’s novel, therefore, criticizes such injustices and invites his readers to resistance. Perhaps it is not a far-fetched claim to argue for the role of education in Moby-Dick as well, by means of which the crew and captains have learned their trade. Learning via living, or in many examples within these two texts, learning via experience, has been and is still the method employed by many individuals to gather knowledge and wisdom about how to live a life. Furthermore, researchers (cf. Del Toro & Wang, School Cultural Socialization) have investigated culturally specific resilience processes, including the provision of support and education through racial socialization, practice of cultural traditions

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(e.g., language), development of a positive integrated racial identity, and transmission of ethnic pride. Song of Solomon, and Middlesex are great examples of such studies, in which I have argued for the role played by education via recognition and identification with one’s cultural traditions. In Morrison’s novel, the protagonist’s eventual maturity and self-efficacy comes from his journey, literal and symbolic, back to his own roots, whereby he receives an education in his ancestral heritage. In the case of Middlesex, the first immigrant generation’s ethnic pride grows out of the ashes of the melting pot, as they cling to the new language but keep their traditions intact, for instance by maintaining a Greek diet. Their education is, in other words, the ability to adapt in a new land to a new life whilst maintaining their core beliefs. In all the novels, I believe, adapting to one’s life circumstances and challenges is what has been termed in resilience research the protective factor of education. However, if the life sciences’ main focus is on the role of books, media, or formal education, life writing examples point at the even larger role played by cultural identifications and lifelong experiences. Life, on its own, is the source of self-education. If the life sciences emphasize the gravity of (a) developmental process(es) after exposure to a risk factor, narratives of resilience term that process life itself. As humans, we grow with our experiences as an everyday practice in know-how, a training in maturity and wisdom. The developmental process in real life stems from involvement with a lifelong education, an ongoing exposure to life as a teaching class in itself, in which our role as the students is to learn how to get educated. Westover’s memoir is an exemplary narrative of such a process. It has received both public and critical praise for her story as one of self-education. Westover’s definition of education as a “path of awareness,” (Westover, Educated 180) to “a new self” (Westover, 329) mirrors the importance of this protective factor. My interviews reflect the same approach. The participants’ narratives accounted for education in life as part of living life itself and did not underscore any form of formal education as a necessity. Their narratives recounted how their childhood experiences help them to navigate their paths in adulthood. Furthermore, they believed that

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their adult lives have been providing them with further occasions to enrich their knowledge about how to live a successful life. In other words, their multiple experiences of economic flux have educated them and made them more resilient for such difficulties in the future. This meaning of education fits under personal or individual resources rather than education provided by society. The emphasis in the narratives is on education as a path towards awareness and learning, some kind of life wisdom, if you will. Education is not necessarily a formal academic degree, it is rather reflection on one’s experiences, positive or negative, and adaptation to life in general.

Social Support, Family, and Communion In the life sciences’ narratives of resilience research, the role of relationships with significant others, peers, and adults within one’s family and community has been underscored as focal. As I discussed earlier, many resilience researchers, particularly in the social sciences, highlight the fact that most of an individual’s difficulties can be resolved if there is sufficient social support. Social support has been defined as “a transactional process whereby our relationships provide a platform for the exchange of emotional and practical support” (Soulsby & Bennett, How Relationships Help Us? 110). Elsewhere, Crummy (Resilience: The Lived Experience n. pag.) studied the effect of relationships as a key resilience factor for bereaved older adults. Luthar and Brown claim that “relationships lie at the roots of resilience” (The Construct of Resilience 947). Those relationships which are rooted in “love, comfort and security foster resilience” (Panter-Brick & Eggerman, Understanding Culture 370). In short, family, friends, and our circle of peers, create a support system to rely on in hard times. Similarly, in all the life-writing examples that I have read in this project, family and peer groups have been accounted for as a strong protective factor. Middlesex, Song of Solomon, and Power of Sympathy all underscore this topic. If in Middlesex, Cal’s family supports pushes him both to run away and later to come closer, in Power of Sympathy, family is a source of pure misery. Even Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick laments

Concluding Remarks

years of abandonment and separation from his wife and son. But none of these works can compete with the centrality of family and family traditions as portrayed by Morrison. In Song of Solomon, Milkman’s identity depends on him fathoming who he is and who his family has been before him. For most of the novel, Milkman complains about how he never wants to be involved in his family members’ lives and histories, as he despises the responsibility they place on him when they share their stories with him. He doesn’t know what he wants from life. He is placeless and aimless despite his wealth, despite having a mother who wants nothing but love for and from her children, and despite all the attention he receives from his friends. Although, it appears that he has every possible source of happiness an average person would ever need, his life is portrayed as empty and meaningless. It is not until he sets on the journey to find the literal gold that he finds his heritage: his roots. On that journey, he also gains the symbolic gold: learning who Milkman is. His awareness of his family history provides him with new perspectives by means of which he achieves a sense of self and self-awareness. However, if, for Cal and Milkman, family provides sources of support and acts as an asset, in Power of Sympathy, I argued for the depth of a tragedy that can be created by a dysfunctional family. Symbolically, and in a rather extreme form, the couple’s sad demise in this novel exemplifies how a neglectful family can affect its members in their immediate and future lives. However, nonetheless, as I argued in my close reading of Power of Sympathy, Harriot and Harington’s father’s incestuous acts are again to be blamed not on the individual but rather on the social system that has made such incidents a possibility. Finally, Westover’s life path could not have been more damaged, and at the same time shaped, by her family members. Though her parents, and her older brother Shawn, caused complications and hindered her, she would never have started down her path towards education without the support of her brother Taylor. In her college and graduate life, she receives much sympathetic and positive criticism from her peers, friends, and supervisors, all of whom help her to find the security and safety she needed in order to have the courage to know her true self.

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Many of the participants we interviewed also accentuated that without their family members, relatives, or close friends, they would not have been able to survive. Although the financial and moral support of peers was mentioned on many occasions as a protective factor, some also underscored how they found a reason to survive because of others. For example, for a mother, her children acted as her rationale not to give up. In other words, family as a protective factor does not necessarily imply an active role, or a concrete process by means of which one member helps another. Rather, on many occasions, an individual created a mental image within which a responsibility towards the other was a source of strength. What I am trying to point at with this section is that family support not only creates circumstances in which an individual can flourish, but also that a dysfunctional family may also lead in the same direction. The lack of such a protective resource also initiates the resilience of those individuals who have never had the luxury of being unconditionally supported. Or perhaps one could argue that these unsupported individuals are educated in better adaptive skills. What I believe I can propose based on such observations is that in the end, once again, the spotlight is on the individual. Whether it is a nourishing environment, or a flawed or a non-existing relation, time and again, it is the individual who has to take the first steps towards self-efficacy. Although it has been maintained that the individual is not the sole actor, he repeatedly appears indeed to be the main agent who decides to be the protagonist of his story or not.

Ego-Resilience One of the most commonly expressed factors, if not the most repeated one, in individual resilience has been personality or ego-resilience. I have discussed this term in many sections in my close reading chapters, whereby I underscored factors such as hardiness, self-esteem, and selfefficacy – the defining characteristics of resilient individuals. These individuals’ positive and energetic approach to life is grounded in confident, autonomous, and competent functioning and a sense of

Concluding Remarks

mastery within a wide range of life domains. In addition, ego-resilient individuals are perceptive and insightful and have the capacity for warm and open relations with others. They also “possess the necessary interpersonal skills and social poise to effectively negotiate the social world” (Klohnen, Conceptual Analysis 1075). In Power of Sympathy, my reading emphasized how Brown relates to self-help by means of education as a resource for enhancing an individual’s, and in particular women’s, effective negotiation skills. In Middlesex, this factor has been employed in multiple forms. For example, Desdemona’s ego-resiliency helps her find a job in impoverished Detroit, among the people whose language she never wants to learn and whose culture and traditions she never fully accepts. Cal, however, benefits from his ego-resiliency to define his own version of identity, character, choices, and life in general. As a young adult who has read almost any book he could lay his hand on, he benefits from a strong will to have his own sense of self and not let others determine his gender identity. He chooses to run away from home, despite being nurtured and supported by his parents and family, so that he will be the only one deciding about his life. Although he encounters many complications in his path towards self-efficacy, his rich self-esteem and strong will push him through. Similarly, strong characters are portrayed in Song of Solomon, the best example of whom may be Pilate. Having been devoid of any external supportive system, she turns to herself as her own major protector, so much so that she maps and creates her own version of reality. For Pilate, her will, want, and needs become the guidelines against which nothing else matters. She renounces prejudices and judgments, discredits worldly possessions, and tends to nothing more than her own family, her traditions, and her rich Black pride. Morrison’s characterization of Pilate portrays a very self-sufficient woman, whom everyone respects, although she may be the poorest and strangest woman Milkman knows. Milkman’s life can be seen as a microcosm of one element of Black experience. By reading his story, we can imagine what it’s like to be a young Black male living in a white and male-dominated

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society. Along the way, we learn that although society creates seemingly insurmountable obstacles (such as racism), it is up to us to overcome those obstacles and create full, meaningful lives for ourselves, using our inherent skills and talents. We also learn that how we view ourselves and our lives is more important than how others view us, and that seeing ourselves as a part of a larger community of people and recognizing that we have the right to choose our response to situations empower us to transcend boundaries. In effect, readers learn, alongside Milkman, that obstacles are not insurmountable barriers but can be viewed as hurdles on the path to success. Captain Ahab illustrates such an ego-resilient character as well. Although revenge may not be the best way to show one’s hardiness, the same premise applies to Ahab as well. I argued earlier that MobyDick is an exemplary text for negative resilience, for too much strength, which leads to harm of both self and other. Ahab is a very strong character, whose own superhuman strength becomes his own enemy. Finally, Westover’s life story is another example. From early on, she writes how in every challenging situation – which is, in her case, always – she believes she can do whatever she wills. Although before leaving her family, all her power is focused on pushing herself in situations that she should not have been in as a child, such as working in the junkyard, in her more mature years, her reflections on such situations helps her achieve the true self-awareness she has been missing most of her life. As I mentioned earlier regarding the study participants’ perception of education, an individual’s strong will to make it work was recounted as the most important factor in their resilience. The study shows that although factors such as supportive family and friends, availability of financial resources, and education are relevant aspects of a positive developmental process in situations of economic flux, the strongest resource is the individual’s will to survive. Although the town motto reads “Pull Together!” the residents’ narratives indicate that the availability of the resources does not necessarily determine that the individual will use them. For example, many of the residents mentioned that they would never go to a food bank or ask for money from a friend,

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despite the urgency of their situation. There seemed to be a tendency towards insisting that it was the individual who needed to make it work. All of the ego-resiliency examples further highlight the individual aspect of the developmental process. In the fictional works, the memoir, and the case studies, individuals portray the source of their strength to move forward as stemming mostly from their personal hardiness. This is not to deny the effect and importance of external resources; however, I believe it is the individual’s agency that determines the level of his or her resilience, regardless of other available resources. The very fact that in all the readings, it is we the readers as individuals who are encouraged to think that we can trust the myth of the selfmade man and go from rags to riches is itself an ironic critique of a society that has stepped away from its responsibility as a resourceprovider and instead left everything up to the individual. A narrative analysis of my project, therefore, points at multiple themes shared by the life sciences’ take on resilience research and that of life writing. Despite major similarities, I need to underscore how the examples of resilience in life writing quite unmistakably deem the individual to be ultimately the agent responsible. Whether the outcome is resilience or vulnerability, and despite acknowledging systemic factors such as contextual social and economic actors, the individual is the first and the last accountable agent. This might actually not be very different from the model established in the life sciences when we consider contemporary approaches within resilience research, whereby neurobiologists maintain the possibility of mapping human resilience as a neural behavioral pattern. Although the life sciences started by studying the individual, and later moved towards contextual factors and social-ecological components of resilience, the present line of research seems to be turning towards the individual again, which has been and remains the focus of life writing. Rather provocatively, this could be interpreted as the extent of fundamental knowledge one can gain via immersion in life-writing texts in general, and those of resilience narratives in particular. And this ‘one’ could also be a scientist perusing Song of Solomon!

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An Analysis of Narratives on a Narrative Study of Resilience What is, I ask, the bigger picture in which the story must be placed? What is it about resilience that has made the concept attractive to such different fields over the past four or five decades? What is the big picture? As simple as these questions may seem, I have had a hard time narrowing down the multiple conclusions I arrived at during my research. In my readings, and taking life sciences as an umbrella term for the fields of psychology, sociology, neuroscience, and biology, the story of resilience is the story of human well-being defined as developmental processes to re-establish a balance that has been disturbed. Quite plainly, the life sciences narrate resilience as a complicated story of war and peace: a bildungsroman with many roads to take before the final growth. A journey from homeostasis to imbalance and to allostasis. Whether scientists look into society, or human biology, or various contextual systems of the individual or the community, their aim, time and again is first, to define resilience; second, to measure resilience; and third, to create resilience when it is not naturally present. Of course, as my reviews in the second chapter reflect, the debates over whether resilience is a trait, a process, or an outcome remains ongoing. However, the big story revolves around how to foster resilience, regardless of the many questions and debates in the life sciences. In recent years, there has been a surge towards creating interventions that enhance individual resiliency or foster resilience in less privileged communities. However, what is of paramount significance is that it has been proven that despite adversities, humans, on average, are resilient beings. Only a small number of individuals, according to results from empirical studies, have shown behavioral or coping problems against adversities or stressors. In other words, although most of the literature on resilience deals with questions of definitions and interventions, the majority of the population is by nature resilient. In life writing, however, I would like to argue, the story is rather different. Although the big question is how one can be strong when facing adversity, life writing takes a more positive approach. If life

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scientists are studying how science and its interventions can help foster resilience, in life writing, I believe, individuals are presumed capable of war and peace on their own. Narratives of resilience, in all the examples I have analyzed, portray how one can accomplish any outcome if only one trusts oneself. Self-awareness is the key to all forms of adaptation and beyond. Although all my exemplary readings account for the external protective factors, such as family, friends, or social support, the first step towards change always starts with the individual’s will to change. Perhaps the approach of the life sciences can be framed as you can be resilient, and that of life writing examples as I can be resilient. In other words, the life sciences appear to be implying that one needs external resources to be resilient, despite their proposition that humans are by nature resilient. And although my examples of life writing do not deny the crucial role of external systems, my readings encourage me towards the proposition that such narratives put a deeper trust in humans themselves. In all my readings, the protagonists of the novels, Westover in her memoir, and the participants in the interviews I conducted, all voiced the same belief: I can make it. As my narrative analysis attempted to illustrate, ego-resiliency is the focal point of all the narratives. Individuals’ self-awareness, self-esteem, and selfefficacy, together with individual resources such as spirituality and hardiness, or even intelligence, provide the individual with sufficient protection against adversities. And yet what the life sciences have emphasized over and over again is resilience interventions and not egoresiliency interventions. This means that the focus in the life sciences is on how to prevent a further risk after initial or partial exposure to stressful experiences. In other words, the focus is on an already affected individual, and the goal of the life sciences is to attempt to protect this individual so that he or she will not suffer as much in potential future exposures. The message this communicates is you can be resilient.

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Resilience within the Life Sciences and Life Writing Time and again, I need to revisit my original questions: Why is there a need to study resilience from a narrative perspective? What does narrative research bring to resilience research? And what does resilience research add to American literary and cultural studies? My simple answer accords with what Laurel Richardson writes: “separating the researcher’s story from the people’s story implies that the researcher’s voice is the authoritative one, a voice that stands above the rest” (19). I believe that the current state of resilience research in the life sciences implies such authority. To date, as Paul and colleagues maintain, “the biological underpinnings of human behavior, be it the hormonal regulatory system, the neurological and neurobiological individuality, or genetic variability (e.g., if it comes to concepts of resilience) has not been sufficiently integrated into humanities research” (Life Sciences n. pag.). Literary and cultural studies in general, and my field of research, American Studies, in particular, are exemplary of such insufficient integration. However, taking all the steps together and looking at narratives and resilience, one of the main difficulties in conducting research on resilience is that wide discrepancies exist in the way resilience is defined and conceptualized. As I have discussed, the construct of resilience has variously been defined as a trait, a process, or an outcome. This definitional debate is important to highlight because concepts provide researchers with theoretical boundaries that help determine the nature, direction, and veracity of their research. Indeed, Davydov et al. (Resilience and Mental Health 479) observed that conceptual discrepancies hinder the evaluation and comparison of resilience research findings, preclude meta-analysis, and make it difficult to operationalize the construct for measurement purposes. Hence, they concluded that “clarification […] in this area must proceed firstly by conceptual unification” (479). Resilience as a concept has been criticized for being ambiguous and “seductively obscure” (Hazan, From Ageless Self 15), and is at risk of losing credibility due to a lack of conceptual clarity. While resilience has been used extensively in the academic literature,

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there remains a certain “murkiness” that prevents the full scope of the concept from being understood and applied (qtd. in Coatta, A Conceptual and Theoretical Analysis 3). One idea which may be interesting to consider here is whether the “murky,” the elusive, even the “mythical” nature of resilience as it is currently used does not in fact contribute to its seductiveness. Resilience, to put it candidly, is nothing and everything at one and the same time. I do not believe that a narrative reading of the topic will make the debates smoother, since my readings also point to the same discrepancies as to whether resilience is a trait, a process, or an outcome. Taking sides on this question brings about particular approaches and outcomes depending on which view one chooses to adopt. What I have observed, and endeavored to portray, is how stories of resilience in fictional and nonfictional life writing underscore the role played by individuals themselves, rather than their social-ecological systems. This might be a rather unfortunate conclusion to arrive at, as recent decades of resilience research have forcefully attempted to invigorate a resilience approach that focuses on studying and further fostering those resources that are external to the individual, such as the social, economic, ecological, in short, social-ecological resources. Whether this shifts in the future or remains in the realm of socialecological systems I cannot say. However, what I can conclude from my readings is how the myth of the self-made man is still relevant. Although resilience researchers have been proposing various methods to foster, intervene, or create resilience, individuals’ narratives portray how deep the belief count only on thyself is. My study postulates, therefore, a new wording for resilience: resilience is another name for self-awareness. Strength in adapting to adversity and growing further is described by stories of resilience as self-awareness. I, as a human being, need to get to a level of mindfulness so that I become the source of energy I may and probably will need in hard times. This is not to say that research pointing at the social factors needs to be dismissed. Quite the contrary, my observation can be interpreted as, on the one hand, an awareness of the deficiency in such resources, and, where they do exist, a lack of trust in their efficacy or sufficiency,

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on the other. Individuals seem to have been taught by their forefathers, their peers, and family members, or have learned by experience, not to count – or not to expect much from – social-ecological factors: the economy, ecology, institutions, organizations, or governments that create the contexts of their lives. This makes me ponder, first from my disciplinary perspective and then as a scholar who has been studying resilience for the last couple of years, whether the questions leading resilience research could be changed or modified in such a way that multiple aspects of human resilience become the target. For decades now, the main topics of inquiry in resilience research have been what resilience is; how it can be achieved, fostered, or created; and why some people/communities/ecologies/or systems, for that matter, are more resilient than others. What I see as a shared concern in all such queries is the assumption that adversity is part of human life and that it is humans’ task to strengthen their resources to bounce back against difficulties. However, one wonders why resilience research should not be targeting the systems in which humans live. In other words: why not target the context of such adversities? If social-ecological systems function properly: if an economy is stable enough, a culture supportive enough, a government resourceful enough, or a family functional enough, would then the individual be exposed to risk in the first place? This is not to say that the current questions in resilience research are wrong, rather, it is a general concern over how resilience can easily become a social critique rather than a topic for pure biological studies. From the perspective of the humanities, I can envision how such changes of direction in the targeted questions would be possible if the humanities and the life sciences were more collaborative. At the same time, as I discussed earlier, the life sciences are moving increasingly towards biological understandings of resilience. For several years now, studies on the neurobiological aspects of human resilience have been trying to prove that the main resource of resilience lies within the human brain, or rather, human biology. This approach not only downplays the role of social support but, more importantly, I would like to propose, gives the life sciences control over the creation of products

Concluding Remarks

in the near future that will target human resilience. In other words, if protective factors of resilience lie within the realm of human biology, then why not treat a lack of resilience as a biological deficiency: a simple disease to treat and cure? In any case, whether resilience researchers shift their focus or not, they can benefit from narrative-based studies. The stories that people tell can be employed to understand all facets of the human experience. As Polkinghorne writes, “when we want someone to know who we really are, we tell them our life story” (Polkinghorne, Ricoeur 29). Elsewhere, referring to an extreme aspect of human entertainment, Gottschall writes how pro wrestling is also based on stories, how “the spectacle, all choreographed in advance, gives us elaborate story lines with heroes to love and heels to hate” (The Storytelling Animal 12). Gottschall further provides examples from the Olympics, boxing, everyday advertising, and even the law courts, concluding that “humans are creatures of story, so story touches nearly every aspect of our lives” (15). Similarly, already at an early point of the narrative turn, the philosopher “Macintyre (1981) set out to show that narration is the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human action” (Brockmeier & Caraugh, Narrative and Identity 3), implying that the acting subject defines himself and describes his identity to other people with his actions within his personal narrative. The way in which human actions are given meaning within particular contexts is by being fitted into stories and narratives that necessarily extend beyond specific action settings to include the whole of the individual’s life, the stories of one-to-one relationships within families, society, and traditions of thought and enquiry. This claim was later supported by the field of narrative psychology, which is “a theoretical and methodological orientation that aims at examining the nature and role of narrative discourse in human life, experience, and thought” (Bruner, 9-10). Perhaps it is now high time for the humanities to take their narrative turn to the field of resilience research. Within the field of narrative medicine, or medical humanities, there can be a space for narrative resilience, whereby instead of an infatuation with trauma narratives, resilience stories can be fostered. Infatuation with trauma has become a grim reality of our time. Similarly, in an

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article curiously titled Why ‘9/11 is not unique,’ or: Troping Trauma, Sabine Sielke masterfully interrogates today’s infatuation with trauma and trauma studies, suggesting that “our repeated acts of reading trauma are approximations that cannot but fail” (404). With my work, I would like to expand such suggestions to the realm of resilience narratives. There needs to be an awareness about stories of resilience: stories of self-awareness. In the contemporary literary marketplace, the immense popularity of a genre termed the ‘misery memoir’ explicitly demonstrates a public infatuation with confessions of trauma. The success of the genre points to the lucrative opportunities that exist for authors and publishers to satisfy the voyeuristic fascination of readers with narratives of human degradation. However, I wonder if this is an infatuation with pain or rather with survival; Do readers read misery memoirs in order to get immersed in another’s troubles? Or do they just want to know that another person could make it? Perhaps all that has been said about the love of pain, trauma, and misery is indeed really about the readers’ love of the final resolving step, the eventual peace, the outcome demonstrating resilience. Perhaps one can argue that narratives of resilience are already out there, filling bookshelves and bestseller charts – only they are called by the wrong name. Perhaps all that needs to be done is to create an awareness of resilience instead of the perpetual narration of traumas. In short, interdisciplinary research linking the life sciences and life writing, both in general and in resilience research in particular, where an informed exchange between the life sciences and life writing is established, allows for a systematic approach that illustrates human boundary experiences not only universally but in specific contexts.      

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Bibliography Brockmeier, Jens, and Donal Carbaugh, editors. 2001. Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture, vol. 1, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Bruner, Jerome S. 1986. Actual Minds: Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coatta, Katherine L. 2014. A Conceptual and Theoretical Analysis of Resilience in the Context of Aging with Multiple Morbidities. BPHE, University of Toronto, Master thesis, Simon Fraser University Library. summit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/etd8283_KCoatta Crummy Dorothy B. 2002. Resilience: The Lived Experience of Elderly Widowers. Davydov, Dmitry M., et al. 2010. “Resilience and Mental Health”. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(5): 479–495. Del Toro, J., & Wang, M. T. 2020. School Cultural Socialization and Academic Performance: Examining Ethnic-Racial Identity Development as a Mediator Among African American Adolescents. Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13467 Following the Death of a Spouse, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of San Diego, California. Gottschall, Jonathan. 2012. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Hazan, H. 2011. “From Ageless Self to Selfless Age: Toward a Theoretical Turn in Gerontological Understanding”. In Understanding WellBeing in the Oldest Old, edited by L. Poon & J. Cohen-Mansfield, 11–26. New York: Cambridge University Press. Klohnen, Eva. C. 1996. “Conceptual Analysis and Measurement of the Construct of Ego-Resiliency”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(5): 1067–1079. Krasny, Marianne. E., Keith G. Tidball, and Nadarajah Sriskandarajah. 2009. “Education and Resilience: Social and Situated Learning among University and Secondary Students”. Ecology and Society, 14(2).

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Luthar, Suniya S. and Pamela J. Brown. 2007. “Maximizing Resilience Through Diverse Levels of Inquiry: Prevailing Paradigms, Possibilities, and Priorities for the Future”. Development and Psychopathology, 19(3): 931-955. https://doi.org/10.1017/S095457940 7000454 Panter-Brick, Catherine and Mark Eggerman. 2011. “Understanding Culture, Resilience and Mental Health: The Production of Hope”. In The Social Ecology of Resilience: A Handbook of Theory and Practice, edited by Michael Ungar, 369–386. New York: Springer. Paul, Norbert W., Mita Banerjee and Thomas Efferth. 2016. “Life Sciences – Life Writing: PTSD as a Transdisciplinary Entity between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience. Humanities 5(1), 4. Polkinghorne, Donald E. 2004. “Ricoeur, Narrative and Personal Identity”. In Changing Conceptions of Psychological Life, edited by Cynthia Lightfood, Michael Chandler, and Chris Lalonde, 39–60. London: Psychology Press. Sielke, Sabine. 2010. “Why ‘9/11 Is [Not] Unique, or: Troping Trauma.” Amerikastudien/American Studies, 55(3): 385–408. JSTOR, https:// www.jstor.org/stable/41158508. Accessed 9 Mar. 2020. Soulsby, Laura, and Kate Bennett. 2015. “How Relationships Help Us to Age Well”. Psychologist, 28(2): 110–113. Westover, Tara. 2018. Educated: A Memoir. New York: Random House. Writing: PTSD as a Transdisciplinary Entity between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience”. Humanities, 5(1).

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Wilhelm Amann, Till Dembeck, Dieter Heimböckel, Georg Mein, Gesine Lenore Schiewer, Heinz Sieburg (Hg.)

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