Date of Award

Spring 2021

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

English Language and Literatures

First Advisor

Elise Blackwell

Abstract

Wonderland Station is a love story about an affair between a Salvadoran line-cook and a white waitress who has lost custody of her daughter because of heroin addiction. It is a story about a love of necessity, about two people who love to forget their trauma, to imagine a new life in which they are seen and respected. Reality quickly finds them however, as they have no place to be together; Stephanie lives in a halfway house and Mauricio is in an unhappy marriage. Their romance takes them through a very different Boston than is often written about; they fall in love on trains and in stations, in the brief moments traveling from work to their homes. Stephanie relies on Mauricio to teach her how to parent, because he is a father and has a family who loves him. It is a story about learning to parent, of resignation and surrender to drug addiction, which illuminates the societal causes of addiction and violence, the universality of institutional violence and the perpetuation of trauma in Boston, a city that takes on a character of its own.

Rights

© 2021, Melanie Elizabeth Walker

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