ECHOES OF THE SELF IN NATURE: ECOLOGICAL SPACES AND TRAUMA RESOLUTION IN MODERN FICTION

Abstract

Abstract

Nature, in literature, often serves as a profound objective correlative for human emotions. Apart from acting as an aesthetic backdrop, it becomes a therapeutic landscape for trauma-impacted psyches. This paper explores how natural environments function as sites of psychological restoration through the lens of trauma studies and ecotherapy. Through close readings of Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”, the study examines how the protagonists of the short stories engage with natural settings to navigate grief, emotional exhaustion, and post-traumatic stress. Using the trauma theory, the paper aims to recognise the lingering effects of emotional and psychological rupture marked by fragmentation, dissociation, and loss of narrative continuity. Another objective of the study is to trace the nuances of ecotherapy, through which the protagonists build a reconnection with the natural world as a pathway to healing, facilitating recovery and regeneration. Encounters with tranquillity, wilderness, and sensory stimuli in nature perform a therapeutic function, enabling the somatic and symbolic processing of trauma. Thus, the interdisciplinary inquiry reveals the processes with which the protagonists’ internal disarray or psychic disturbance is soothed by ecological rhythms, aligning with ecotherapy’s core principles of grounding, embodiment, and restoration.