Emma Donoghue Analysis

Setting her novel in a confined location Emma Donoghue opens it up to various interpretations on various grounds. Since it is the story of a young woman who has been locked against her will and is sexually abused at the hands of a man repeatedly one may simplistically view it as a tale of female subjugation and masculine oppression but that would be blatantly disregarding all the other issues simmering beneath the surface that might not be obvious at first sight. By focusing not only on the captive woman but also her five year old son Jack, even making him the narrator of her novel, Donoghue enables her readers to view the same situation from two varying perspectives. While Ma longs to escape the claustrophobic confines of the room that has …show more content…
The inside of a house, he said, acquires a sense of intimacy, secrecy, security, real or imagined, because of the experiences that come to seem appropriate for it. The objective space of a house—its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms—is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel: thus a house may be haunted, or homelike, or prisonlike, or magical. So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning... …show more content…
Their symbiotic relationship is frowned upon as it deviates from societal standards of what a healthy relationship between a mother and child should be. As Anne Fogarty says in this regard, “The mutual relationship of Ma and Jack is depicted as sustaining, but it proves a less effective weapon in a social world dominated by heterosexual norms and fixed proprieties with respect to gendered behaviour and parent-child interaction.”