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Chapter- I
Introduction
Alice Sebold is an American writer who has gained fame with her first novel
Lucky (2002), especially due to her focus on the dark subjects of rape, child murder and
the dissolution of families. Through The Lovely Bones, Sebold attempted to manage the
impossible. According to Daniel Mendelsohn, "Ms. Sebold [has] the ability to capture
both the ordinary and extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental
prose" (16 January, 2003). The Lovely Bones has drawn the attention of critics who dealt
with the narrative techniques and the comparison between literary and religious heaven.
Literature is a forum to express and pour out the thoughts and feelings of our self.
It is the criticism and interpretation of life through characters which evokes our sense of
America and its preceding colonies. Before the founding of the United States, the British
colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States were heavily influenced by
English literature. The American literary tradition thus began as part of the broader
American literature is considered as the most popular literature across the world.
It reflects the practical condition of people and society. The harsh realities and sufferings
faced by the Americans are seen through the works of American writers. American
literature began as soon as pamphlets, poem and other convenient forms of literatures
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began to be written. History of American Literature reveals that it has developed with
admirable freedom, energy and completeness depicting more or less usable past and war
anxieties. Americans wrote their own historical narrative, they crafted their own glorious
heroic past and purposely inducing the sense of American nationhood to rise above from
Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. Thomas Jefferson's United States
Declaration of Independence solidified his status as a key American writer. It was in the
late 18th and early 19th centuries that the nation's first novels were published. An early
example is William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy published in 1791. Brown's
novel depicts a tragic love story between siblings who fall in love without knowing they
are related.
number of key new literary figures emerged, perhaps most prominently Washington
Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson started an influential
Thoreau wrote Walden, which celebrates individualism and nature and urges resistance to
the dictates of organized society. The political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired
the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her famous
novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. These efforts were supported by the continuation of the slave
American Slave.
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opus The Scarlet Letter, a novel about adultery. Hawthorne influenced Herman Melville,
who is notable for the books Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. America's greatest poets of the
nineteenth century were Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Mark Twain (the pen name
used by Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was the first major American writer to be born
away from the East Coast. Henry James put American literature on the international map
with novels like The Portrait of a Lady. At the turn of the twentieth century a strong
naturalist movement emerged that comprised writers such as Edith Wharton, Stephen
stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the mood of the 1920s, and John Dos
Passos wrote too about the war. Ernest Hemingway became famous with The Sun Also
Rises and A Farewell to Arms; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. William
Faulkner became one of the greatest American writers with novels like The Sound and
the Fury. American poetry reached a peak after World War I with such writers as Wallace
Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and E. E. Cummings. American drama
attained international status at the time with the works of Eugene O'Neill, who won
Both World War II and Vietnam War left vicious mark on American history.
Human struggles, harsh futile realities are seen through are seen through the eyes of the
people. They experienced the brutalities of war and they lose their dignity and esteem.
They saw world as a grim. The sad ruthless reality is portrayed in all contemporary
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playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as by the maturation of the
American musical. Depression era writers included John Steinbeck, notable for his
novel The Grapes of Wrath. Henry Miller assumed a distinct place in American Literature
in the 1930s when his semi-autobiographical novels were banned from the US.
From the end of World War II until the early 1970s many popular works in
modern American literature were produced, like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
America's involvement in World War II influenced works such as Norman Mailer's The
Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut
Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The main literary movement since the 1970s has
been postmodernism, and since the late twentieth century ethnic and minority literature
love and horrible behavior due to some psychological distress. Each and every writers,
poet, novelist explore the crux of this American concept and epitomizes the
unsympathetic attitude. Brutality and inhumane attitude was captured in most of the
literature. The literature calls out lack of love that is the root cause of all violence
happening in the society, this is due to the disillusionment of World Wars. Many writers
explore the suffering and violence of women. Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Morrison’s Bluest
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Eye, Alice Walker’s Color Purple and many other works are known for the sufferings of
women
Alice Sebold was born on September 6, 1963, in the college city of Madison,
Wisconsin, where her father was a Spanish professor. Family life in the Sebold household
was difficult. Alice's mother, Jane, was addicted to Valium and alcohol and suffered from
serious anxiety attacks. Both parents criticized Alice about her weight and compared her
unfavorably to her older sister, Mary, whose grades were better than Alice's.
Sebold enrolled at New York's Syracuse University in the fall of 1980. During her
first semester there, she was brutally raped in a tunnel on campus. Her assailant beat her
badly, took her virginity, and then urinated on her before leaving. When Sebold managed
to crawl to safety and was taken to the police station, a police officer told her she was
lucky: another young woman had recently been murdered and dismembered in the same
tunnel.
Sebold took time off from Syracuse to recover but returned in the fall of 1981 and
enrolled in the college's creative writing program. In October 1981, she chanced to see
her rapist on the street. She reported him to the police, and the rapist, Gregory Madison,
In the late 20th century, rape victims were often treated harshly and accused of
having encouraged their attackers. Though Gregory Madison's defense lawyers made the
trial very difficult for Sebold, Madison was found guilty and sent to prison. The
following year, just before Sebold and her roommate were due to graduate, Sebold's
After college, Sebold moved to New York City and worked as an adjunct
professor at Hunter College, occasionally publishing magazine articles on the side. Her
story about her rape appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1989 and garnered an
appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." Despite the outward trappings of success,
Sebold suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and became a heroin addict.
Desperate to regain her health, she took a two-month writing fellowship at a rural artists'
community in California. After a brief return to New York City, Sebold moved to
California and took a caretaking job at the artists' community where she'd stayed. From
there, she applied and was accepted to graduate school at the University of California,
Irvine.
It was in graduate school that Sebold wrote Lucky, a memoir about her rape,
which was published in 1999. There, she also met and married Glen David Gold, a fellow
writer in the graduate program at Irvine, and began work on a novel, initially
The Lovely Bones was published in 2002 and became a near-instant sensation,
popular with critics as well as the public. For five months it held the first spot
on The New York Times best-seller list, and it stayed on the list for more than a year.
Sebold won the 2002 Bram Stoker Award for First Novel in 2002 and the 2003 American
Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award. A film version of the novel, directed by
Peter Jackson, appeared in 2009. Stanley Tucci, the actor who played Mr. Harvey, was
nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and the film brought in more than $93 million
worldwide.
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Sebold's second novel, The Almost Moon, was published in 2007. Its plot
concerns a suburban woman who suddenly murders her elderly mother. The Almost
Moon fared less well than The Lovely Bones, but it did reach number one on
the Times best-seller list, and many critics praised its Gothic mood and black humor.
The story of Sebold’s life and rape become the subject of her memoir Lucky. The
memoir designates her experiences of being a rape victim and how the incident changes
the rest of her life. Her next novel The Lovely Bones gained great fame to her. Referring
to The Lovely Bones, one interviewer asked Sebold: ‘Why write about something so
horrible, so unthinkable’ as the rape and murder of a 14 year old girl? Sebold answered:
‘Because it’s part of life… It’s very much part of the experience of what it is to live in
In interviews, Sebold has rebutted the stereotype of raped women as weak, ruined,
passive or falling apart and has insisted that ‘you control things by naming them’,
refusing to refer to her rape as ‘that horrible thing that happened’ (Viner 2002). Both in
her memoir and outside of it, she demands that the community talk about rape and
Rankin who said that he thought less of The Lovely Bones when he read of Sebold’s
critique ‘ripped me a new arsehole’, illustrating how critical reception of deeply personal
writing can become another experience, which further injures and disempowers the
survivor. Regarding Rankin’s comment, Sebold stated: ‘The one thing I’m certain my
rape gave me in terms of writing The Lovely Bones is a feeling that I could write a scene
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of violence with authority. It is extraordinary that knowing I’ve been raped should lessen
The plot of this novel is quite different. Susie, an young girl of fourteen who was
brutally raped and murdered by a thirty six year old Harvey, a serial killer. Surprisingly
the story was narrated by a dead rape victim Susie. She narrated her own tragic tale of
In the first eleven pages of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, the reader is
presented with the rape and murder of its 14-year-old narrator, Susie Salmon. For the next
317 pages, we witness the aftermath of Susie’s violation—her father dissolves into rage
and grief, her mother spirals out and away from the family; her sister, Lindsey, struggles
Given that The Lovely Bones was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, it was
clearly a widely accepted and accessible novel. Its success could certainly be attributed to
the fact that it contains elements of classic horror, of a thriller/murder mystery, and a YA
coming of age novel—it gives us a soupcon of all these, and a huge serving of good old-
fashioned family romance. Although The Lovely Bones has elements of a murder mystery,
it doesn’t really focus on the police investigation or the search for and arrest of the
perpetrator. One could argue that The Lovely Bones could be classified as a horror novel
in that it was awarded a Bram Stoker for First Novel, indicating that it had enough
the supernatural (it is, after all, narrated by a dead girl) that we might find in such classic
Hawthorne.
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Susie realizes that she can do nothing but watch. There she watches her family
suffered due to her loss and struggles to move on. The novel explores the psychological
effects of rape for both victim and her parents. Sebold in a roundabout way condemns the
act of killing young females and antisocial behaviors and attitudes of American society in
1970s. She voices out for injustice, horror, pain which happens to young innocent girls.
The powerful narrative voice of Susie makes the reader to feel that they also stand with
her and watch the things happening in her family on earth. Sebold also explores the
concept of heaven and afterlife in this novel. Both Susie and her family members suffered
with traumatic memories. Being a rape victim and dead in teen age, one cannot accept
because, Susie’s life ended before it started. The crime done to Susie not only kills her
but also creates a wound in her family and friends; they also suffered the same kind of
Whilst Sebold’s first book Lucky was the autobiographical account of her own
rape, The Lovely Bones is Sebold’s first novel, and tells the fictional story of the rape and
murder of fourteen year old Susie Salmon, in December 1973 on the eve of her high
school career. Sebold’s text is told in first person point of view by the main character
Susie, who, having just been murdered, is able to watch her family and her killer from her
own personalised heaven (in the company of other characters who also have their own
personalised heaven, interwoven with that of the character, Susie). After a brutal
underground cave hidden in a cornfield, Susie narrates, in present tense, the many
subplots of the story – her killer’s success in destroying the evidence; her father’s
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obsession with finding her killer; her mother’s withdrawal from the crumbling family and
into an affair; and her two surviving siblings and their childhood experiences without her.