Therapeutic texts: anxiety, eating and substance abuse disorders as metaphors of healing in Dominican fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT In literary analysis, discourses of degeneration and illness have often been used to “diagnose” the ills plaguing a nation. This study seeks to expand this traditional assumption, suggesting that the pathologies found in two recent Dominican novels are actually part of a therapeutic experience. In both Alanna Lockward’s Marassá y la nada and Rita Indiana’s Hecho en Saturno, existential anxieties are produced by a profound feeling of not belonging. These anxieties cause protagonists to engage in pathological behaviors related to addiction – self-starvation and substance abuse – to self-medicate painful affective states of isolation, disconnection and unhappiness. In both texts, the experience of these pathologies forms an inherent part of a therapeutic journey and works as a catalyst to discover a new way of thinking about nationhood, belonging and identity.