Echoes of Silence and the Story of Many: The Transmission of Intergenerational Trauma in Elizabeth Strout's <i>My Name is Lucy Barton</i>

Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) explores a fragile mother-daughter relationship through the lens of a traumatic past involving poverty, abuse and maternal coldness. Strout portrays the mother-daughter relationship in an ambivalent way. Despite emotional distance and even neglect, Strout reveals an enduring and deep bond between mother and daughter. I will adopt a psychoanalytic approach to explore the impact of intergenerational trauma on a daughter's psychological and emotional development by examining how a traumatic/troubled past simultaneously becomes a space for escaping/forgetting and returning/remembering.