Childhood Grief and Trauma in The Discomfort of Evening and Western Lane

Abstract

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening (2018) and Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane (2023) are fictional narratives that examine the pervasive effects of childhood grief and trauma following the death of a central family member. Rijneveld’s novel, set within a reformed Christian family in rural Netherlands, portrays ten-year-old Jas’s trauma through grotesque imagery, bodily obsession, and fragmented consciousness, illustrating how grief embeds itself in both mind and body. Maroo’s work, situated in a British-Gujarati household, follows eleven-year-old Gopi, who channels her father’s unspoken sorrow through the disciplined repetition of squash, demonstrating how trauma can manifest through controlled physicality and heightened sensory perception. Both narratives foreground the relational, psychological, and socio-cultural dimensions of bereavement, highlighting how silence, memory, and domestic spaces shape emotional development and identity formation. This paper analyses these texts through the lens of Trauma Theory, drawing on Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, and Bessel van der Kolk, to explore the embodied, relational, and cognitive consequences of unresolved loss. The study argues that grief is neither uniform nor predictable but is mediated by familial dynamics, cultural context, and interpersonal modelling, offering nuanced insights into literature’s representation of childhood trauma and the enduring imprint of bereavement.