Childhood Trauma In Recitatif And The Thing In The Forest

Inspiration and Rewriting: ““Recitatif”” and “The Thing in the Forest”
In both stories, two little girls are the main character of the story, they both have a strong bond that enforces their strength throughout the story. ““Recitatif”” written by Toni Morrison is a short story that revolves about the lives of two young, Twyla and Roberta girls that meet each other in an orphanage after they were taken away from their mothers due to the lack of parenting care they needed. As the story goes, they grow up an find their selves together again, but the worriment from their past starts to haunt them. Two other girls older than them had pushed a mute woman down the stairs. As timed passed guilt started to creep inside of their minds to a point, they

In the end of the story one of the girls heals from the trauma she experienced all those years ago, but the other girl still has that trauma in her head, and she still hasn’t gotten over it, it still wanders in her head. The article “Adulthood revictimization: looking beyond childhood trauma” talks about revictimization in adulthood from childhood trauma. In the story of The Thing in the Forest, the girl that wasn’t able to overcome what happened in her childhood when she grew up, so she went back to the forest to try to understand it all. In the article it says, “A dose–response relationship has also been reported, with exposure to multiple forms of childhood trauma associated with an elevated risk of developing a psychiatric disorder” (Cotter 1). This explains basically how childhood trauma affects adulthood, another quote states, “Evaluation of childhood trauma is clinically useful for identifying those people at elevated risk of adverse long-term physical and mental health outcomes. It should also trigger assessment of revictimization” (Cotter 1). This is more evidence supporting again how childhood trauma cause mental health problems when the person gets into adulthood, but also says that it can lead to

We see this since they both have similar victims Maggie and Alys where the main character girls go through a lot, they both have two girl characters that have a very close friendship throughout the story, and they both have a similar ending in where a girl heals from the trauma of the story and one that keep having that trauma haunting her. There are some many big and little details that prove that “The Thing in the Forest” is certainly inspired by “Recitatif”. Things that go from the first encounter of both girls to the reunion after many years of being separated from one another, to an ending where both girls share the trauma once again affecting their life once again. Primrose was basically the Twyla from “Recitatif”, Penny was the Roberta, and Alys was the Maggie, all sharing a traumatic life, of traumatic