{"id":2699,"date":"2013-01-18T14:15:07","date_gmt":"2013-01-18T19:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bsuenglish.wordpress.com\/?p=2699"},"modified":"2018-11-12T12:57:28","modified_gmt":"2018-11-12T17:57:28","slug":"dr-andrea-powell-wolfe-recommends-room-by-emma-donoghue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bsu.edu\/english\/blog\/2013\/01\/18\/dr-andrea-powell-wolfe-recommends-room-by-emma-donoghue\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Andrea Powell Wolfe Recommends &#8220;Room&#8221; by Emma Donoghue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This semester we are introducing Recommended Reads, a new\u00a0segment\u00a0in which Ball State students and faculty contribute a short review of a recommended piece of literature. Continue below to read our first installment in the series, Dr. Andrea Wolfe&#8217;s\u00a0review of <\/em>Room <em>by Emma Donoghue.<\/em> <em>Be sure to check back for a new Recommended Reads post every Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>A thrilling and often heart-wrenching page-turner, Emma Donoghue\u2019s <i>Room<\/i> also serves as a study of the stages of psychosexual development set out by Lacan and revised by later feminist psychoanalytic theorists.\u00a0 The novel is narrated by Jack, a seemingly contented boy of five who, at the beginning of the story, has never left the single-room apartment that he shares with his mother.\u00a0 The only person to enter and exit the room is Old Nick, who comes in the night after Jack is supposed to be asleep in the wardrobe where he sleeps.\u00a0 Ma eventually reveals to Jack that Nick abducted her seven years ago and that she and Jack are his captives.\u00a0 The two of them implement an escape plan, and the rest of the novel is about their adaptation to the outside world.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Due to the extreme circumstances of his early life, Jack remains in a state of intense attachment to his mother long after infancy. Indeed, Jack imagines that he and his mother are perfectly joined, \u201clike coloring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green\u201d (10).\u00a0 Jack exists in a pre-Oedipal state, that which Lacan calls \u201cthe Real,\u201d in that he lacks an understanding of the boundaries between Ma and himself.\u00a0 He happily describes their daily activities in the room: he rests on top of Ma in the bath, listening to the \u201cbang of her heart\u201d (14), and he lies down with Ma and \u201chas some\u201d breast milk before nap.\u00a0 Their routine might remind us of Kristeva\u2019s \u201csemiotic,\u201d a realm in which mother and child exist without the need for language.\u00a0 Jack resists leaving this realm and entering into the \u201csymbolic,\u201d wherein, psychoanalysis would suggest, his use of the language of our culture would reflect conformity to its social structure.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time that he remains dependent on Ma in many ways, though, Jack becomes more and more autonomous throughout the narrative.\u00a0 Even in the first chapter, he knows that the image that he sees in the mirror is not really him.\u00a0 He thus passes through Lacan\u2019s \u201cmirror stage,\u201d in which he recognizes the discrepancy between \u201cthe image\u201d and \u201cthe I\u201d\u2014and fully recognizes himself as an independent subject.\u00a0 Ultimately, Ma asks Jack to play a crucial role in a new escape plan, one that will work only if he can be \u201cscave,\u201d scared but mostly brave (116).\u00a0 Jack agrees to separate from her temporarily and to communicate with those Outside.\u00a0 Although he is inexperienced with talking to anyone but Ma, he effectively enters into the \u201csymbolic\u201d by leading the authorities to Room, where they rescue Ma and discover the evidence that they need to arrest Nick (155).<\/p>\n<p>In general, psychoanalysis assumes that we progress through psychosexual stages in order to learn our proscribed gender roles and, ultimately, to enact these as adults.\u00a0 In a patriarchal culture, this means that boys learn to either subdue or, Kristeva argues, \u201cabject\u201d women (i.e. their mothers) in order to define their own subjectivity. \u00a0Indeed, Jack starts to see himself as separate from Ma after they escape from the room.\u00a0 He literally says goodbye to his mother\u2019s breasts (303) and to Room (321).\u00a0 Also importantly, the identity that he claims is a distinctly male one.\u00a0 He repeatedly reminds strangers that, despite the fact that his hair has never been cut, he is a boy.\u00a0 He later engages in play traditionally coded as masculine, learning to build LEGOS with his grandfather (281) and play soccer with Uncle Paul (310).\u00a0 But instead of rejecting Ma, Jack seems\u2014even at the age of five\u2014to begin to recognize her subjectivity.\u00a0 He relates to the reader his mother\u2019s need for \u201ca room of her own\u201d in their new independent living apartment and her desire to one day return to college (304).<\/p>\n<p>And, in the end, Jack poignantly renders a narrative of his development that, however indirectly, also depicts his mother\u2019s story of trauma, resistance, motherhood, and recovery.\u00a0 Instead of rejecting the (m)other in order to reify and claim the power of the patriarchy, Jack accepts Ma as a subject in her own right and incorporates her experiences as central to his own.\u00a0 In this way, <i>Room<\/i> perhaps starts to imagine an alternative to that which Lacan calls \u201cThe-Law-of-the-Father.\u201d\u00a0 It challenges the idea that we must subject or abject our (m)others in order to develop into independent adults, demonstrating instead that healthy development\u00a0 might allow for\u2014or even require\u2014the acceptance of otherness.\u00a0 Emotionally stirring and intellectually provocative, this novel is recommended for those interested in contemporary reformulations of the psychosexual stages of development\u2014as well as anyone looking for a good read.<\/p>\n<p>Donoghue, Emma.\u00a0 <i>Room<\/i>.\u00a0 New York: Back Bay Books, 2010.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This semester we are introducing Recommended Reads, a new\u00a0segment\u00a0in which Ball State students and faculty contribute a short review of a recommended piece of literature. Continue below to read our first installment in the series, Dr. Andrea Wolfe&#8217;s\u00a0review of Room by Emma Donoghue. Be sure to check back for a new Recommended Reads post every [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[99,492,1298],"class_list":["post-2699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommendation-station","tag-andrea-wolfe","tag-emma-donoghue","tag-room"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Dr. Andrea Powell Wolfe Recommends &quot;Room&quot; by Emma Donoghue - Ball State English Department<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bsu.edu\/english\/blog\/2013\/01\/18\/dr-andrea-powell-wolfe-recommends-room-by-emma-donoghue\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dr. Andrea Powell Wolfe Recommends &quot;Room&quot; by Emma Donoghue - Ball State English Department\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This semester we are introducing Recommended Reads, a new\u00a0segment\u00a0in which Ball State students and faculty contribute a short review of a recommended piece of literature. 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