Emma Donologue's Room Analysis

In ‘Ma’s anxiety in Emma Donologue’s Room’, Himmah Sofiana Mursyidah talks about the psychological make-up of Jack’s mother. She draws unbreakable ties between Sigmund Freud’s concepts of Id, Ego and Superego and anxiety. She believes that Ma’s anxiety is the direct result of the traumatic, past experiences. She further illustrates how being imprisoned in the room affect the mental state of Ma, making her believe in impossibility of escaping from Old Nick. By keeping her son in the dark about his birth and their imprisonment, Ma exacerbated her trauma and fears. Sharing the hurt and pain perform the function of counselling. We do this daily on an unconscious level. However, Ma was denied this basic human need as a result she developed anxiety …show more content…
She examines how Donoghue “dislocates the narration by narrating the novel not from the perspective of the abducted captive, but her five-year-old son, Jack.” Jack’s innocence confuses the reader and forces him to experience incarceration in a new light. When a wife goes missing, the husband is generally the first suspect. Flynn’s novel uses the same general conception, but with a different twist. Both the protagonists are hyper-active of this fact. “The stark contrast between ignorance of conventions and mastery of them in Room and Gone Girl reveals the constructions of the true-crime narratives.” She also cites the example of a sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. This sitcom is based upon the life of a woman who tries to readjusts to life after fifteen years of captivity in a bunker, making use of the comedy device to underscore resilience after …show more content…
The novel can be roughly divided into two parts the imprisonment and the aftermath of escape, each shedding a different light on the each other. The author has divided the novel into five sections: Presents, Unlying, Dying, After and Living. The first two sections recount the life in the room. The focus of these sections is not to bring about the horror of captivity but to bring to the fore the relationship of mother and son as a mini tribe of two. The third section acts as a plot twist. It is here that Ma finally decides to break away from the chains of her captivity and dreams of a life outside the room with her son. In After and Living, Donoghue doesn’t give the readers a conventional happy-ending. She shows the struggles of Ma and Jack in adjusting to the external environment. Ma in seven years of imprisonment had created a small parallel reality for herself and Jack. In the absence of society, Ma had forgotten about the rules and regulations of the outer world. On the other hand Jack, being born in confinement and living in the world created by his mother, was overwhelmed as well as petrified by the existence of other human beings and their strange rules. Donoghue uses this to show the effect of imprisonment over Jack and Ma, while using Jack as her mouthpiece to critique the hypocrisy of the