Epilogue

Abstract

In Homemaking, Fiona Barnes and Catherine Wiley assert that “women write in order to negotiate the tensions between definitions of home as a material space and home as an ideal place” (xix). As the works discussed illustrate, the writing and rewriting of home is often a journey in itself, a way of making sense of personal and inherited histories. For the characters, home is steeped with contradiction and can be a site of great tension. In many of the texts, home operates as a place of oppression as well as subversion. The realities of the characters’ lives counter a view of home as a place of freedom and security, and it is the act of flight that underscores the connection between trauma, migration, and social norms. The characters’ embodied and ideological transgressions in response to social convention render them exiles in or outside their homelands. As a result, the characters embrace change and pursue adaptive solutions to preserve selfhood in the face of violence, illness, and exclusion. These forces propel the characters’ migration, but trauma and shame do not define the narratives; rather, the protagonists’ navigation of trauma, oftentimes through dissociation and flight, foregrounds the emotional work that underlies and often precedes emigration. The authors position the characters’ homelands as spaces of individual and collective trauma and situate migration as the force that facilitates the protagonists’ homecoming. The works showcase women responding to challenges to safety with moves toward autonomy and self-determination....