Overcoming Trauma: Nature, Sorority and Self-discovery in Holly Ringland’s The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

Abstract

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a novel written by the Australian writer Holly Ringland and published in 2018. The novel deals with the coming-of-age of Alice Hart, a young girl who faces a tragedy and is taken by her grandmother to her flower farm, a community of women who suffered male abuse and are there learning to heal. In her teenage years, Alice will set out on a journey to the Outback with the purpose of finding herself, but love will put her in danger again. This dissertation will focus on the causes and consequences of trauma, especially the ones resulting from male-perpetuated violence and from women's subordinate position in a patriarchal society. My main intention is to show how the author and the characters of the novel deal with and overcome pain and guilt. To serve this purpose, I will tackle the regenerating and relieving powers of writing in Ringland’s work, whose own traumatic experience inspired the novel. Nonetheless, I will also focus on the characters' alternative ways to heal and free themselves from the painful memories of the past. In this sense, this dissertation will also examine sorority, intergenerational relationships and feminism, as evident in the novel in the flower farm, a community of women established to resist male abuse whilst also having as central these women's contact with nature as therapy in the native Australian context. In consequence, this dissertation will also critically examine the language of flowers and flower imagery as an alternative mode of expressing fear and trauma, as well as the importance of self-discovery in the process of maturation. In order to do so, this dissertation will be informed from a methodological perspective by trauma studies, paying special attention to seminal works such as Cathy Caruth's The Unclaimed History: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996) as well as by the concept of "Dangerous Writing" (Tom Spanbauer, 2016), which consists in using fiction to write about unresolved past traumas. Finally, I will also refer to works related to gender studies and feminism, among others.