Familial trauma and search for parents in Joyce Carol Oates' Marya: A life

The loss of parents, especially the loss of mother causes a psychological trauma in a person. If this loss is experienced in childhood, it will have crucial effects on the child and her future life. Only by the help of the social environment can this person get rid of its staggering effects. These institutions may be her companions or relatives she shares her life with or feels close to herself. They can be an asylum as religion, success in life or affairs with lovers or husbands in the future. The absence of mother figure leaves the person in a big gap which she tries to fill with the above institutions. The traumatized person strives for healing her self by facing the event which causes her the trauma.In the specificity of Joyce Carol Oates? Marya: A Life, the protagonist Marya can only reach peace in her life by reuniting with her mother. When mother-daughter bond, which was once broken, is established, it fixes the wounds in Marya?s inner self. Oates? ?daughter? Marya has a strong personality and she is reluctant to let her life be shattered by the trauma she encounters. She is a woman who fights against the masculine symbolic order. Marya suffers from loss of mother; however, the maternal silence in her life turns into a maternal discourse by means of her self assurance. Oates resists the limitations of the patriarchal culture on women. Despite societal limitations imposed upon maternal power, Oates? novels indicate that mothers who strain to assert their own desires and rights leave their daughters a powerful heritage.