1

Chapter- I

Introduction

Alice Sebold is an American writer who has gained fame with her first novel

Lucky (2002), especially due to her focus on the dark subjects of rape, child murder and

the dissolution of families. Through The Lovely Bones, Sebold attempted to manage the

impossible. According to Daniel Mendelsohn, "Ms. Sebold [has] the ability to capture

both the ordinary and extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental

prose" (16 January, 2003). The Lovely Bones has drawn the attention of critics who dealt

with the narrative techniques and the comparison between literary and religious heaven.

Literature is a forum to express and pour out the thoughts and feelings of our self.

It is the criticism and interpretation of life through characters which evokes our sense of

feelings; sometimes we meet our own reflection of characters by means of literary

characters. It picturizes society and gives the pleasure for mind.

American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of

America and its preceding colonies. Before the founding of the United States, the British

colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States were heavily influenced by

English literature. The American literary tradition thus began as part of the broader

tradition of English literature.

American literature is considered as the most popular literature across the world.

It reflects the practical condition of people and society. The harsh realities and sufferings

faced by the Americans are seen through the works of American writers. American

literature began as soon as pamphlets, poem and other convenient forms of literatures
 2

began to be written. History of American Literature reveals that it has developed with

admirable freedom, energy and completeness depicting more or less usable past and war

anxieties. Americans wrote their own historical narrative, they crafted their own glorious

heroic past and purposely inducing the sense of American nationhood to rise above from

the clutches of Britain.

The revolutionary period is notable for the political writings of Benjamin

Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. Thomas Jefferson's United States

Declaration of Independence solidified his status as a key American writer. It was in the

late 18th and early 19th centuries that the nation's first novels were published. An early

example is William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy published in 1791. Brown's

novel depicts a tragic love story between siblings who fall in love without knowing they

are related.

With an increasing desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture, a

number of key new literary figures emerged, perhaps most prominently Washington

Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson started an influential

movement known as Transcendentalism. Inspired by that movement, Henry David

Thoreau wrote Walden, which celebrates individualism and nature and urges resistance to

the dictates of organized society. The political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired

the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her famous

novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. These efforts were supported by the continuation of the slave

narratives such as Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an

American Slave.
 3

In the mid-nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne published his magnum

opus The Scarlet Letter, a novel about adultery. Hawthorne influenced Herman Melville,

who is notable for the books Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. America's greatest poets of the

nineteenth century were Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Mark Twain (the pen name

used by Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was the first major American writer to be born

away from the East Coast. Henry James put American literature on the international map

with novels like The Portrait of a Lady. At the turn of the twentieth century a strong

naturalist movement emerged that comprised writers such as Edith Wharton, Stephen

Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London.

American writers expressed disillusionment following World War I. The short

stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the mood of the 1920s, and John Dos

Passos wrote too about the war. Ernest Hemingway became famous with The Sun Also

Rises and A Farewell to Arms; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. William

Faulkner became one of the greatest American writers with novels like The Sound and

the Fury. American poetry reached a peak after World War I with such writers as Wallace

Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and E. E. Cummings. American drama

attained international status at the time with the works of Eugene O'Neill, who won

four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize.

Both World War II and Vietnam War left vicious mark on American history.

Human struggles, harsh futile realities are seen through are seen through the eyes of the

people. They experienced the brutalities of war and they lose their dignity and esteem.

They saw world as a grim. The sad ruthless reality is portrayed in all contemporary
 4

American fiction. To define modern American literature is to recognize how merciless,

brutal, isolated they are and it cannot be defined fully.

In the mid-twentieth century, American drama was dominated by the work of

playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as by the maturation of the

American musical. Depression era writers included John Steinbeck, notable for his

novel The Grapes of Wrath. Henry Miller assumed a distinct place in American Literature

in the 1930s when his semi-autobiographical novels were banned from the US.

From the end of World War II until the early 1970s many popular works in

modern American literature were produced, like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

America's involvement in World War II influenced works such as Norman Mailer's The

Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut

Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The main literary movement since the 1970s has

been postmodernism, and since the late twentieth century ethnic and minority literature

has sharply increased.

Most of the American writings consist of sexual abuse, harassment, absence of

love and horrible behavior due to some psychological distress. Each and every writers,

poet, novelist explore the crux of this American concept and epitomizes the

unsympathetic attitude. Brutality and inhumane attitude was captured in most of the

American fictions. Violence harassments are taken a common platform in American

literature. The literature calls out lack of love that is the root cause of all violence

happening in the society, this is due to the disillusionment of World Wars. Many writers

explore the suffering and violence of women. Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Morrison’s Bluest
 5

Eye, Alice Walker’s Color Purple and many other works are known for the sufferings of

women

Alice Sebold was born on September 6, 1963, in the college city of Madison,

Wisconsin, where her father was a Spanish professor. Family life in the Sebold household

was difficult. Alice's mother, Jane, was addicted to Valium and alcohol and suffered from

serious anxiety attacks. Both parents criticized Alice about her weight and compared her

unfavorably to her older sister, Mary, whose grades were better than Alice's.

Sebold enrolled at New York's Syracuse University in the fall of 1980. During her

first semester there, she was brutally raped in a tunnel on campus. Her assailant beat her

badly, took her virginity, and then urinated on her before leaving. When Sebold managed

to crawl to safety and was taken to the police station, a police officer told her she was

lucky: another young woman had recently been murdered and dismembered in the same

tunnel.

Sebold took time off from Syracuse to recover but returned in the fall of 1981 and

enrolled in the college's creative writing program. In October 1981, she chanced to see

her rapist on the street. She reported him to the police, and the rapist, Gregory Madison,

was arrested and brought to trial.

In the late 20th century, rape victims were often treated harshly and accused of

having encouraged their attackers. Though Gregory Madison's defense lawyers made the

trial very difficult for Sebold, Madison was found guilty and sent to prison. The

following year, just before Sebold and her roommate were due to graduate, Sebold's

roommate was raped, possibly by a friend of Madison's to avenge the conviction.

 6

After college, Sebold moved to New York City and worked as an adjunct

professor at Hunter College, occasionally publishing magazine articles on the side. Her

story about her rape appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1989 and garnered an

appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." Despite the outward trappings of success,

Sebold suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and became a heroin addict.

Desperate to regain her health, she took a two-month writing fellowship at a rural artists'

community in California. After a brief return to New York City, Sebold moved to

California and took a caretaking job at the artists' community where she'd stayed. From

there, she applied and was accepted to graduate school at the University of California,

Irvine.

It was in graduate school that Sebold wrote Lucky, a memoir about her rape,

which was published in 1999. There, she also met and married Glen David Gold, a fellow

writer in the graduate program at Irvine, and began work on a novel, initially

called Monsters, that would become The Lovely Bones.

The Lovely Bones was published in 2002 and became a near-instant sensation,

popular with critics as well as the public. For five months it held the first spot

on The New York Times best-seller list, and it stayed on the list for more than a year.

Sebold won the 2002 Bram Stoker Award for First Novel in 2002 and the 2003 American

Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award. A film version of the novel, directed by

Peter Jackson, appeared in 2009. Stanley Tucci, the actor who played Mr. Harvey, was

nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and the film brought in more than $93 million

worldwide.
 7

Sebold's second novel, The Almost Moon, was published in 2007. Its plot

concerns a suburban woman who suddenly murders her elderly mother. The Almost

Moon fared less well than The Lovely Bones, but it did reach number one on

the Times best-seller list, and many critics praised its Gothic mood and black humor.

The story of Sebold’s life and rape become the subject of her memoir Lucky. The

memoir designates her experiences of being a rape victim and how the incident changes

the rest of her life. Her next novel The Lovely Bones gained great fame to her. Referring

to The Lovely Bones, one interviewer asked Sebold: ‘Why write about something so

horrible, so unthinkable’ as the rape and murder of a 14 year old girl? Sebold answered:

‘Because it’s part of life… It’s very much part of the experience of what it is to live in

this culture. It happens all the time’ (Bianculli 2009).

In interviews, Sebold has rebutted the stereotype of raped women as weak, ruined,

passive or falling apart and has insisted that ‘you control things by naming them’,

refusing to refer to her rape as ‘that horrible thing that happened’ (Viner 2002). Both in

her memoir and outside of it, she demands that the community talk about rape and

recognize that it is an everyday experience and fear for many women.

Sebold encountered a variety of responses by critics, including crime novelist Ian

Rankin who said that he thought less of The Lovely Bones when he read of Sebold’s

actual experience of rape.12 Sebold stated in a subsequent interview that Rankin’s

critique ‘ripped me a new arsehole’, illustrating how critical reception of deeply personal

writing can become another experience, which further injures and disempowers the

survivor. Regarding Rankin’s comment, Sebold stated: ‘The one thing I’m certain my

rape gave me in terms of writing The Lovely Bones is a feeling that I could write a scene
 8

of violence with authority. It is extraordinary that knowing I’ve been raped should lessen

my achievement in anything’ (Viner 2002).

The plot of this novel is quite different. Susie, an young girl of fourteen who was

brutally raped and murdered by a thirty six year old Harvey, a serial killer. Surprisingly

the story was narrated by a dead rape victim Susie. She narrated her own tragic tale of

murder from her personal heaven.

In the first eleven pages of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, the reader is

presented with the rape and murder of its 14-year-old narrator, Susie Salmon. For the next

317 pages, we witness the aftermath of Susie’s violation—her father dissolves into rage

and grief, her mother spirals out and away from the family; her sister, Lindsey, struggles

to survive in Susie’s shadow.

Given that The Lovely Bones was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, it was

clearly a widely accepted and accessible novel. Its success could certainly be attributed to

the fact that it contains elements of classic horror, of a thriller/murder mystery, and a YA

coming of age novel—it gives us a soupcon of all these, and a huge serving of good old-

fashioned family romance. Although The Lovely Bones has elements of a murder mystery,

it doesn’t really focus on the police investigation or the search for and arrest of the

perpetrator. One could argue that The Lovely Bones could be classified as a horror novel

in that it was awarded a Bram Stoker for First Novel, indicating that it had enough

recognizable conventions of horror to be placed in that genre. And it contains elements of

the supernatural (it is, after all, narrated by a dead girl) that we might find in such classic

gothic novels as Mysteries of Udolpho or Wuthering Heights, or in the work of Poe or

Hawthorne.
 9

Susie realizes that she can do nothing but watch. There she watches her family

suffered due to her loss and struggles to move on. The novel explores the psychological

effects of rape for both victim and her parents. Sebold in a roundabout way condemns the

act of killing young females and antisocial behaviors and attitudes of American society in

1970s. She voices out for injustice, horror, pain which happens to young innocent girls.

The powerful narrative voice of Susie makes the reader to feel that they also stand with

her and watch the things happening in her family on earth. Sebold also explores the

concept of heaven and afterlife in this novel. Both Susie and her family members suffered

with traumatic memories. Being a rape victim and dead in teen age, one cannot accept

because, Susie’s life ended before it started. The crime done to Susie not only kills her

but also creates a wound in her family and friends; they also suffered the same kind of

trauma that Susie experienced in her heaven.

Whilst Sebold’s first book Lucky was the autobiographical account of her own

rape, The Lovely Bones is Sebold’s first novel, and tells the fictional story of the rape and

murder of fourteen year old Susie Salmon, in December 1973 on the eve of her high

school career. Sebold’s text is told in first person point of view by the main character

Susie, who, having just been murdered, is able to watch her family and her killer from her

own personalised heaven (in the company of other characters who also have their own

personalised heaven, interwoven with that of the character, Susie). After a brutal

description of her own rape and murder by George Harvey in a purpose-built

underground cave hidden in a cornfield, Susie narrates, in present tense, the many

subplots of the story – her killer’s success in destroying the evidence; her father’s
 10

obsession with finding her killer; her mother’s withdrawal from the crumbling family and

into an affair; and her two surviving siblings and their childhood experiences without her.