Trauma and Narrative Healing: A Study on Rebecca Ross’s Elements of Cadence Duology

S. Hemalatha¹, Dr. S. Ramya Niranjani²

¹Ph. D. Research Scholar, Sri Sarada College for Women (Autonomous), Salem -16.

²Associate Professor of English, Sri Sarada College for Women (Autonomous), Salem -16.

Abstract

Literature is a privileged space where writers, through various works, articulate and integrate the ruptured minds of humans. Rebecca Ross, a young adult fantasy writer, uses this literary space to help people heal from fragmented lives. This paper explores how Ross represents the psychological rift of the characters in her duology, Elements of Cadence, and how they recover from their trauma. The researcher analyses this through the theoretical framework of Cathy Caruth, to show how the protagonists undergo multiple traumas in a world of political hostility, elemental imbalance, and inherited adversities, both personal and collective. Ross, in this duology, represents trauma as not just a catastrophic event but a disruption between consciousness and identity. She also depicts trauma as a condition of emotional detachment, disrupted faith, and the weight of remembrance. This study explores how psychic disruption occurs and how the protagonists struggle with internal rather than external conflicts. The negotiation between fear and vulnerability, memory and desire, resentment and reconciliation make them feel traumatized. Ross’s portrayal of trauma within a mythological and political framework shows how literary narrative remains a transformative medium for confronting and reshaping pain by reinterpreting and accepting a new beginning, which supports psychic survival. The article concludes that healing emerges through the acknowledgement of the past rather than its erasure from memory through reconstruction, which is the ultimate power of the human psyche. 

Keywords: Human psyche, Trauma, Fantasy, Renewal, Narrative reconstruction.