IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-07647-2_8.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

A Particular Blessing: Storytelling as Healing in the Novels of Julia Alvarez

In: Healing Cultures

Author

Listed:
  • Karen Castellucci Cox

Abstract

While Susan Sontag refers in her classic essay, of course, to the experience of pathologically fatal disease,1 her reflection could as easily hold for the experience of mental illness or breakdown, that more inscrutable world of psychological dysfunction that resides as much in the human spirit as it does in the physical body. As Western science reaches for new palliatives for the troubled mind, applying medications, therapies, and analytic treatments to the myriad forms of mental affliction, socioreligious communities in Western and non-Western cultures have looked historically to the spirit world for healing. The Caribbean, with its multicultural matrix of blended religions and beliefs, is a unique site of such mystical curatives. While a thorough description of the richly varied tradition of Caribbean religious rites and healing cures is beyond this essay’s scope,2 tracing the influence of Haitian vodou and its healing practices in the fiction of Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez is useful in elucidating the episodes of mental breakdown and recovery in her novels. Though occasional vodou elements appear without elaboration in the novels, as in the “magic waters” that grace her fictional alter ego’s desk and windowsills, Alvarez makes neither the sacred practices of Afro-Caribbean spirituality, learned from Haitians in her household, nor the symbolic world of her family’s Dominican Catholicism central to her fiction.

Suggested Citation

  • Karen Castellucci Cox, 2001. "A Particular Blessing: Storytelling as Healing in the Novels of Julia Alvarez," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Margarite Fernández Olmos & Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (ed.), Healing Cultures, chapter 0, pages 133-148, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-07647-2_8
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-07647-2_8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-07647-2_8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.