The Aesthetics of Trauma: Magical Realism as a Narrative of Healing in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams and Sarah Addison’s Allen’s Garden Spells

Abstract

Trauma studies have explored new narrative strategies to represent trauma survivors’ experiences in words. Among these strategies, magical realism has emerged as an important literary tool through which novelists can represent survivors’ psychological wounds, fragmented memories, and emotional recovery. This paper presents a comparative study of magical realism in novels by Indian-American author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams (2004) and American writer Sarah Addison Allen’s Garden Spells (2007) to examine how magical realism functions as a narrative of trauma and healing. Divakaruni sets her concept of trauma within the context of fractured cultural identity shaped by diasporic displacement and maternal silence. Allen’s work explores self-identity, emotional neglect, maternal dominance, familial breakup, and personal loss through the enchanted landscape of the American South. The study draws on three theoretical approaches: Caruth’s view of trauma as an experience that exceeds ordinary representation, Judith Herman’s theory of trauma and recovery, and Wendy B. Faris’s theory of magical realism. Though the novelists’ cultural settings differ, both novels represent healing as a gradual process of emotional recognition, self-realisation, and acceptance of the past. This article contributes to contemporary trauma studies by showing how magical realism extends trauma narratives beyond psychological realism and offers alternative aesthetic possibilities for representing distress, resilience, and recovery.