Satarupa Deb
Volume-XI, Issue-III, April 2023
Volume-XI, Issue-III, April 2023 | ||
Published Online: 30.04.2023 | Page No: 137- 145 | |||
Child Maltreatment and Developmental Issues in Alex Flinn’s Breathing Underwater: A Psychoanalytical Reading Satarupa Deb, Ph.D Research Scholar, Deptt. Of English, Assam University, Assam, India | |
Alexandra Flinn is the author of the 2001 novel Breathing Underwater. This is her debut novel. She is acclaimed for her young adult novels. Her young adult novels – Breathing Underwater, Breaking Point, Nothing to Lose, Fade to Black – all these have been praised for their edgy realism. Her work Breaking Point focuses on school violence and peer pressure. After completing her high school, she graduated from the University of Miami, acquiring a degree in vocal performance (opera). She then joined a law school at Nova South Eastern University. She had practiced law for ten years and then retired to devote all her time to writing. At the law school, while practicing as an intern, Flinn came across many cases of domestic violence. She was carried away by such harsh experiences and later drew her novel Breathing Underwater on these. By and by, she had got back to her writing and decided to devote more time on writing only. Her legal and volunteer tasks with deranged and wrecked women vigorously determined her choice for the subject-matter of her first novel Breathing Underwater. As statistics states, about twenty-six percent of high school and college goer women report having been in an abusive relationship. Moreover, one of the clients in the shelter for battered women (where Flinn volunteered) was put to death by her husband in front of her children. This event had exerted a strong influence on her mind and she came to the realization that the issue of abuse required comprehensive understanding. Flinn has discovered in her research that the troubled domestic life of the abuser sets the cycle for further abuse in action. She feels that through the character of Nick Andreas, the protagonist in Breathing Underwater, she could explore and examine the taproot of the cycle of abuse in details. | |
Keywords: Abuse, Childhood, Abuser, Dating violence, Psychoanalysis |