Gossamer

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses child abuse.

In Gossamer, Lois Lowry uses the genre of magical realism to explore trauma and healing. Magical realism originated in Latin America and incorporates fantastical elements into a realistic text without overt comment upon the fact that these elements are fantastical. Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier coined the term in the 1940s. Well-known examples of magical realist literature include Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Jorge Luis Borges’s Fictions (1944), and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982). While the genre originated in Latin American literature, examples can be found across cultures and historical eras.

Gossamer demonstrates some of the key conventions of magical realism. First, she places impossible and fantastic events in an otherwise realistic narrative. John is visited by dream-givers and Sinisteeds in his sleep, but his day-to-day life is focused on the human concerns of a young child who survives abuse, lives with a foster caretaker, and struggles with the lingering effects of his trauma. In a twist on the genre, none of the novel’s human characters are aware of the magical elements. This increases the novel’s sense of urgency by stressing that, while the dream-givers can assist John and the other humans in some ways, they cannot magically solve all their problems. Second, the novel uses fantasy as a metaphor—in One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, García Márquez uses visitations from ghosts as a metaphor for the inescapability of Latin America’s past. Lowry uses dream-givers to explore The Role of Empathy and Compassion in Addressing Trauma and The Healing Power of Happy Memories. In Gossamer, Lois Lowry continues a cross-cultural literary tradition of using magical elements to examine real-world problems.