Trauma and Recovery in Julia Glass's Three Junes
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Abstract
This research work investigates characters’ sense of his in trauma in Julia Glass’s Three Junes. It amplifies how Paul, in efforts to heel his trauma with death of Maureen, travels to Greece, meets fern, and narrates stories of his tragic life. It studies how the people live beyond heartbreak, shame, and regret over opportunities lost because of the emotional barriers they raise. Even in the difficult emotional trauma they manage not to give up on love and come out of the painful memories in Glass’s narrative. Different characters suffer through a recent death in each of the characters and has experienced the loss. Paul, a wealthy Scottish widower in his sixties in the first section, Fenno, his gay expatriate son in the second section, and a young American woman, Fern, in the third section make a fibric of Three Junes. Their trauma is presented in parallel to various historical incidents in such a that creates horrors and sufferings in minds of people of the time. Plane crash in Lockerbie, Ireland, and the outbreak of AIDS epidemic in America and the horror of gays and common public are intermingled with the trauma of Paul and Fenno respectively. Though Paul dies without coming out of the trauma, Fenno and Fern recover from it with acceptance of social role and responsibility at last. Glass’s protagonist in his live fun the dead wife relates his past life to transform his traumatic experiences into pleasant moments in the course of time. In this fiction Paul undergoes a process of healing though travel and narrates.