They become highly vulnerable human beings, Ma more than Jack as she is also a victim of verbal, psychological, physical and sexual abuse. He forces them to live under precarious conditions: isolated in a confined space, provided with little food of poor nutritional value, insecure and subjected to violence. They are locked up, subjugated and humiliated by a man nicknamed Old Nick, their kidnapper, who feels entitled to do so because they are “things that belong to him, because Room does” (Donoghue 2010, 81). It narrates the story of Ma, a 26-year-old woman who has been imprisoned for seven years in an eleven-by-eleven-foot soundproof garden shed in an unnamed place in America with her son, Jack, born out of sexual abuse and raised in this room up to the age of five.
The Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue describes Room, 1 her seventh novel, as “a universal story of parenthood and childhood” (Donoghue in Prospero 2010). Judith Butler’s Theory of Vulnerability helps us understand how Emma Donoghue resorts to the notion of vulnerability in resistance to shape Room characters’ subjectivity, Julia Kristeva’s Theory of the Abject lets us explain why Ma and Jack fall into the category of socially disturbing elements in a patriarchal symbolic order and Boris Cyrulnik’s Theory of Resilience is paramount to examine the process that the protagonists must undergo to overcome trauma.
This present chapter deals with the abusive conditions of oppression and confinement that Ma and Jack must face both in captivity and after escape, the impact that these conditions have on their body, psyche and social life, the different practices of resistance that mother and child enact to cope with them and the transforming process they must undergo to bounce back from them. Emma Donoghue’s novel Room narrates the story of Ma, a 26-year-old woman who has been imprisoned for seven years in an eleven-by-eleven-foot soundproof garden shed in an unnamed place in America with her 5-year-old boy, Jack.
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