Sermily Terangpi

The paper is an endeavor to negotiate the implications of trauma which is entrenched in Chinese women’s life through a reading of Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls. It tends to advocate how mental wound surpasses physical agony which creates a rift in a victim’s personality. As trauma is an inseparable part of human challenges, for Chinese women it validates the shadowed part of their existence in a patriarchal society coupled with devastation following war. Various traumatic events engulf Chinese women and psychical trauma enters the mind which remains inseparable from their memory. The novel entails how a person inflicted with severe mental injury negotiate trauma.

The study shall attempt to analyse and interpret the orphan hero in the select novels of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. The orphan character which dominates a considerable space in literature makes a unique literary hero. The orphan character is not just one of the most preferred models but as illustrated by Terri Windling, “The orphaned hero is not, however, a mere fantasy cliché; it’s a mythic archetype, springing from some of the oldest stories of the world.”(Windling, P-1) The archetypical orphan hero occupies a substantial space in literature and the inevitable presence of an orphan as a protagonist which is a representation of reality has many dimensions to explore. The study therefore, shall attempt to analyse and interpret the orphan archetype as a marginalized and a colonized figure.