Violence and Difference in Sabina Berman’s Narrative: “The Woman Who Dived Into The Heart Of The World”

Abstract

The paper is a study of Sabina Berman’s (1956 -) novel The woman who dived into the heart of the world (2010). In this work, the Mexican writer presents aspects of the historic and social reality of her immediate social environment. She focuses on the phenomenon of violence and how it is reflected within the family and in the society, as well as in the animal world, through a feminist and ecological perspective. Berman on the basis of the reality of the contemporary Mexican society, builds the personality of the protagonist, Karen Nieto, who was the victim of domestic violence because she was autistic, and consequently different from other children. In the present article, a literary analysis of violence, its various forms and their role in the novel is made, through a historical and cultural approach. The study documents the relationship of literature and reality, and shows how the thematic nucleus of violence is directly related to the established norms, in the specific social environment of the novel. These norms determine the life of the protagonist.

Keywords

• violence
• gender
• discrimination
• marginality
• ecological consciousness