National peculiarities of a traumatic experience in H. Mantel’s novel “A Change of Climate”

This article examines the problem of depicting traumatic experiences in modern British literature based on H. Mantel’s novel “A Change of Climate” (1994). In the course of the trauma literature development and its research (trauma studies), new opportunities and ways of depicting a traumatic event in fiction appear, for example, the attention of writers shifts from a large-scale description of historical trauma to the private lives of certain people and individual traumas. Mantel’s work presents several traumatic events at once, but only one is actual – the loss of a child by the Eldred family during their missionary trip to South African. In addition to the “standard” devices of trauma literature (unreliable narrator, lacunae, etc.), H. Mantel also introduces a national component into the novel, which determines the specifics of the main characters’ traumatic experience. So, such concepts as family, religion, virtue, good manners and missionary work become important for the characters born and raised by English society, through the prism of these concepts they perceive reality and try to overcome their trauma. However, this trauma is not only a personal experience, but also a cultural one in a certain sense, since leaving Africa after the child’s death at the hands of aborigines shows the failure of their mission. Thus, in his novel, H. Mantel demonstrates how deeply English national character traits are rooted in people’s lives, and how they become an obstacle in overcoming a traumatic event.