THE GRADATIONS OF TRAUMA: EXPLORING THE TRAUMATIC
AESTHETIC IN BRITISH MODERNIST LITERATURE
_______________
A Thesis
Presented to the
Faculty of
San Diego State University
_______________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
English
_______________
by
Megan Marie Morris
Summer 2014
iii
Copyright © 2014
by
Megan Marie Morris
All Rights Reserved
iv
If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like
psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and
it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic
theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.
—Cathy Caruth
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
v
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
The Gradations of Trauma: Exploring the Traumatic Aesthetic in
British Modernist Literature
by
Megan Marie Morris
Master of Arts in English
San Diego State University, 2014
This paper explores the varying degrees of trauma, and its aftermath, within literature
in the British modern period. Utilizing the works of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf,
James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, I argue that the British modernist techniques, unique to
that period, mirror the psychological aftermaths of trauma. Despite the inclusion of the
aftermaths of trauma within these texts, the authors are unable to successfully communicate
the point of trauma within their works, which indicates an inability to recognize or cope with
the trauma itself.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
ABSTRACT ...............................................................................................................................v
INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................................1
CHAPTER
1
KATHERINE MANSFIELD - BLAZING MOMENTS .............................................10 2
VIRGINIA WOOLF – THE PATTERN HIDDEN BEHIND THE COTTONWOOL OF DAILY LIFE.............................................................................................15 3
JAMES JOYCE – IRRLAND’S SPLIT LITTLE PEA ...............................................31 4
D. H. LAWRENCE – HAD NOT THE POWER TO BREAK AWAY......................49 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................63 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................65 1
INTRODUCTION
Virginia Woolf writes, “in or about December 1910…human character changed”
(“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” 635). This bold declaration is documented by modern
literature’s drastic departure from its Victorian and Edwardian predecessors.1 Contributing to
this change in character were the radical new ideas and technology that separated the Modern
period from the Victorian period.2 Most notably, the moderns differ with their experimental
style and their treatment of exile, which, for the moderns, had a much more positive
connotation (Levine 5). To depart from earlier literature, the modernists adapted stylistic
techniques that many scholars have identified as exemplary to that period: stream of
consciousness, impressionisms, non-linear plots/disregard for plots, being outside of time,
repetition, and most notably, the epiphany, to name a few. Rather than being purely aesthetic,
I would argue that these modernist techniques are all symptoms of the aftermath of trauma
partially caused by the upheaval and turmoil of the modern period. The radical change in
thought triggered a crisis consciousness which exposed not only personal trauma, but also a
more pervasive general trauma that resulted from the turmoil of the modern period.
During the modern period, the aftermath of trauma had recently been recognized and
became more widespread due to Freud’s work on the subject. In the late nineteenth century,
women’s trauma was first to be acknowledged when Freud began to investigate hysteria in
1
Victorian novels are largely characterized by having a strong moral voice portraying an unidealized life
which focuses on the quotidian aspects that lead to the formation of an individual. These novels are generally
lengthy, as far as novels are concerned, which is appropriate for a style of writing that uses many minute details
to create a larger picture of a character. See Levine. After the Victorians, the Edwardians begin to rebel against
the conserativism of the Victorian period by treating traditional figures of authority, such as religion and
politics, as something or someone to be mistrusted. Woolf suggests that where the Edwardians fall short is their
materialism, meaning they were concerned with the body rather than the spirit (Modern Fiction 629). See
Woolf’s “Modern Fiction.”
2
It would be naive and unnecessarily encompassing to suggest that the point of trauma is the same for all
modernists, although there were common stressors. The drastic restructuring of scientific and technological
framework had a significant impact on the modern age. On the brink of the modern period, Einstein, Darwin,
and Freud all published their revolutionary ideas, and the technology at the time had increased rapidly, bringing
with it much more destructive weaponry to be used in the following wars.
2
Studies on Hysteria and found that it stemmed from childhood sexual trauma.3 According to
Judith Herman, the examination of psychological trauma relies upon the support of a political
movement; for example, women’s trauma is reflected upon only if society does not subjugate
women and children. Likewise, war trauma is only considered if people begin to regard war
as an atrocity. War trauma, on the other hand, began to be proposed after World War I, yet it
was still largely controversial during the modern period. The framework of trauma allowed
the moderns to explore a still controversial social phenomenon that had become
simultaneously more visible and more pervasive from the impact of the crisis consciousness
at the time.
Suzette A. Henke argues that “the modernist period is not only circumscribed but
virtually defined by historical trauma” (“Modernism, Trauma, and Narrative Reformation”
555) in part due to the violence of both World Wars, but also stems from any “physical or
metaphorical wounds that devastate the psyche” (“Modernism, Trauma, and Narrative
Reformation” 556) which can occur from the traumatic upheaval of the modernist period or
any personal psychological trauma. The works that I explore include specific traumas caused
by war, death, and repressed/hidden sexuality4 as well as general, more pervasive, trauma
that stems from colonization and class status. Despite the gradations between the slightly less
obvious traumatic experiences, such as class status and unhealthy familial relations, to the
more recognized traumas, such as trauma that stems from inappropriate sexual encounters
and war, there are still clear indications that all these traumatic experiences resonate
traumatic aftermaths in the characters’ lives and therefore ought not to be discounted.
In response to atrocity, the experience is often banished from consciousness after the
incident – and as seen within the texts, the moment of trauma is only hinted at, if mentioned
3
4
Freud later recanted this assertion and declared that the hysteria stemmed from fantasy.
While repressed or hidden sexuality may not be considered to be traumatic, according to Colleen Lamos,
many modernist works contain a “crisis in sexual definition…torn…by the scission between [homosexual and
heterosexual which are] (supposedly) incongruent longings” (337). The unspeakable nature of same-sex desire
during the modernist period is in large part due to Wilde’s public homosexuality trail which gave rise to
criminally punishing homosexuals and led to the concealment of homosexuality, if not outright repressing
homoerotic thoughts and feelings. In these modernist texts, Lamos suggests that because same-sex love is
unspeakable, homosexual desire is often concealed by many authors through affection toward the dead (and will
be shown in this text through Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer” and Joyce’s “The Sisters” and “A Painful
Case”) and can also be routed between the opposite gender (as seen in Mansfield’s “Bliss”) (338).
3
at all. Rather, these texts focus mainly on the aftermath, or the symptoms, of the traumatic
experience. The moment of trauma cannot be experienced as real – in the Lacanian sense of
the authentic unchangeable truth in being and experience - and is outside of consciousness
and is therefore is represented as vorstellungsrepräsentaz: a signifier that comes in the place
of a repressed representation that is at the center something that cannot be articulated, such a
moment of trauma. Notably, the moment of trauma is rarely seen or discussed in these texts;
however, we do perceive the aftermath of the trauma and the vorstellungsrepräsentaz, and
the trauma itself is a glaring lacuna. Christine van Boheemen argues that trauma is a
“paradoxical structure, working by means of indirectness: it manifests itself through and as
its consequences, its aftermath and effects, but is itself not directly accessible to
consciousness or memory” (19). Since the trauma generally cannot be accessed through
consciousness, the modernists fused the “medical symptoms” experienced by trauma victims
and the techniques of modernism, such as “gaps in the narrative, and startlingly vivid
images” (Higonnet 92) to mirror these symptoms.
Some of the modernist techniques that mirror traumatic symptoms include repetition,
stream of consciousness, blind spots (or lacunae), and epiphanies. To further clarify the use
of these techniques within the modernist texts, I will briefly explain trauma theorists’
conception of these traumatic symptoms. Repetition, Lacan argues, is caused by “the very
split which is produced in the subject at the place of encounter” (qtd in Hartman 543). That
is, traumatic experiences can be compulsively repeated by the victim, which can be viewed
as an attempt to master the trauma and repair the “split” or as destructive to yourself and
others. Repetition can occur both in language as well as in action. In the modern texts, this
most often appears as maladaptive cyclic patterns, including inflicting the same trauma upon
multiple generations. In “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” Lawrence depicts a largely
ineffectual middle class family who has been bankrupted after their father’s death. The eldest
son, Joe, uses self assurances to dull the trauma of finding his position diminished; while he
asks his sister, Mabel, what she intends to do, he silently reassures himself that, “he felt quite
safe himself. Without listening for an answer…He did not care about anything, since he felt
safe himself” (Lawrence, “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” 441). Later we find that Joe has
traded his economic insecurity to marry “and go into harness. His life was over, he would be
a subject animal now” (Lawrence, “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” 442). Joe chose to
4
become economically safe at the price of what he considers slavery. For all his proclamations
to himself about being safe, Joe does not seem secure with his decision. Joe has traded his
freedom for his economic safety and the repetition of his phrase indicates how insecure he
feels with his decision.
Stream of consciousness is another technique that can indicate the aftermath of
trauma - although, it is important to distinguish between non-traumatic and traumatic forms.
Non-traumatic stream of consciousness explores choppy thoughts and associations that have
clear connections to the thinker, while traumatic stream of consciousness is irrepressible,
vivid, fragmented, and paralytic – and often the thinker does not know where the thought was
triggered. In The Waves, one character, Neville, is haunted by a stream of consciousness
association he has had since he was a boy: “The man lay livid with his throat cut in the
gutter…and going upstairs I could not raise my foot against the immitigable apple-tree with
its sliver leaves held stiff” (Woolf 124). When Neville was a child sitting on the stairs gazing
at an apple-tree in the moonlight, he overhears the maids discuss a man whose throat was cut.
Because of his traumatic experience, Neville continues to associate the apple-tree with death
and personifies the tree with death’s attributes by describing the tree as immitigable and stiff.
Trauma has fixed an illogical association between the apple-tree and death into his brain.
Lacunae, or blind spots within the text, point out what may be kept hidden based
upon what is ignored or overlooked. These are used as defense mechanisms to prevent shame
from non-normative behavior or thoughts. In Mansfield’s “Bliss,” the protagonist, Bertha,
attempts to dissuade her husband, Harry, from what she perceives as dislike for Pearl,
“Oh, Harry, don’t dislike her…besides, how can you feel so differently about
someone who means so much to me. I shall try to tell you when we are in bed
tonight what has been happening. What she and I have shared.” At those last
words something strange and almost terrifying darted into Bertha’s mind. And
this something blind and smiling whispered to her: “Soon these people will go…”
For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband. (348)
Bertha is unable to see that the bliss and passion has not been stirred by Harry, but comes
rather from Pearl. In what seems likely to be a subconscious maneuver, Bertha’s mind
suppressed what was not hetero-normative sexuality and transferred it to a more socially
appropriate outlet, her husband. Bertha’s transferred thought is perceived by her as
“something strange and almost terrifying [and] blind.” Interestingly, Bertha is able to
5
recognize the strangeness of the displaced thought and notes that it is “almost” terrifying
which suggests the thought that was displaced might have evoked that reaction. At the end of
the story, Bertha discovers that she has been betrayed by her the woman she craves, Pearl,
and her husband, Harry, when she discovers their affair. Bertha does not process the affair
immediately; instead she focuses on the pear-tree, which she considered symbolic of her
feminine love with Pearl. The shock Bertha has experienced from discovering the affair and
her close call from almost discovering her sexual identity are not only unspeakable but are
also unthinkable.
Epiphany, although not considered by many trauma theorists to be a symptom of
trauma, is, I would argue, one of the clearest indications of trauma. Epiphany stresses the
significance of one moment that shapes and defines the character, and is a device that
suggests that not all experiences are equal – some moments have more impact in shaping a
life. Epiphany is traditionally defined as “a sudden spiritual manifestation…being out of
proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it” (Beja 18),
but becomes radically redefined when handled by the modernists.5 The modern definition of
epiphany can be traced to James Joyce’s unfinished work, Stephen Hero.6 Stephen’s
epiphanic moment occurs after he overhears a whispered conversation between a man and a
woman and realizes:
Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the
mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality.
This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one
integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a
thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are
adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul,
its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the
commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The
object achieves its epiphany. (Joyce, Stephen Hero 213)
5
The concept of the epiphany was not new to modern writers; however, it greatly evolved from its origins
as a literal appearance of a deity. In the Romantic period, the epiphany no longer stemmed from a deity, but
rather from nature to bring moments of insight.
6
James Joyce later reworks ‘Stephen Hero’ (an unfinished autobiographical novel) into Stephen Daedalus,
the protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
6
Claritas is quidditas, or the bright and vivid quality of beauty is the essence of being. Joyce
indicates that these short-lived, yet powerful, epiphanic moments define an individual’s
essential character. Through Stephen Hero’s contemplations, Joyce formulates his concept
of the epiphany: an (often) trivial situation that triggers a connection that acts like building
blocks to create a whole that is more brilliant and enlightening than its parts.
Joyce’s “A Painful Case” details the epiphany of the protagonist, Mr. Duffy, which
stems from his discovery that an old friend has died. From a newspaper clipping, Mr. Duffy
learns that that Mrs. Sinico, a woman whom he had cut off relations with four years prior due
to what he deemed to be inappropriate physical contact when she pressed his hand to her
cheek, had died after being hit by a slow moving train while allegedly going to get alcohol.
Mr. Duffy’s thoughts following her death prove to be contradictory; at first, he feels she has
done more than degrade herself, “she had degraded him” (Joyce, “A Painful Case” 115).
Later, his attitude drastically changes due to an epiphany about his role in her death: “Why
had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature
falling to pieces…He felt that he was alone” (Joyce, “A Painful Case” 117). In the newspaper
clipping detailing Mrs. Sinico’s death, her husband states that she had turned intemperate two
years ago, while Mr. Duffy had broken off their relationship two years prior which suggests
Mr. Duffy’s epiphany inaccurately attributes the importance of his role in her death. Rather,
Mr. Duffy’s epiphany seems more likely to arise from angst about being alone because he
cannot reconcile his non-normative sexuality. After Mr. Duffy ended his relationship with
Mrs. Sinico, he articulates, “Love between man and man is impossible because there must
not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because
there must be sexual intercourse” (Joyce, “A Painful Case” 112). Notably, Mr. Duffy was a
solitary man before he met Mrs. Sinico, which indicates that he did not feel comfortable in
relationships with either sex. His relationship with Mrs. Sinico is relatively safe because she
is married, and when Mrs. Sinico initiates a physical relationship by touching his face, Mr.
Duffy ends their relationship. Mr. Duffy’s later epiphany serves to protect him from a painful
truth that his “moral nature” is in fact challenged by non-normative sexuality.
The commonality between Stephen’s epiphany in Stephen Hero and the actual
epiphanies we see within the modern text seems to extend only to the structure: there is no
instance of “radiance” in these epiphanies, instead they are darker and much more
7
ambiguous. While they occasionally enlighten the receiver, the enlightenment is often
paralytic, for instance, those found in “Araby” or “Eveline;” sometimes the character does
not even perceive the epiphany and instead is experienced by the reader. I would argue that
these authors construct the modern epiphany to reveal more about their character than the
epiphanic moment actually reveals to the character. These epiphanies, then, are not “radiant”
and often stem not from trivial encounters but from traumatic experiences, like the young
narrator’s experience in “The Sisters.” These epiphanies closely resemble traumatic
memories in the way they are perceived by the receiver; arguably, they can be positioned as
one and the same. Patricia Moran postulates that non-traumatic experiences are stored in the
brain as linear narrative memory while traumatic experiences “persist as preverbal ‘body
memories’ that resist narration: they reoccur as incomprehensible and intrusive memory
fragments that are almost hallucinatory in their intensity” (5). Notably, the definition of
epiphanic in the Oxford English Dictionary is strikingly similar to Moran’s definition of
traumatic memories: “patterns of imagery…or fragments of significance, [that] are oracular
in origin…the flash of instantaneous comprehension with no direct reference to time”
(“epiphanic”). Both have no direct reference to time, are extreme cognitive states
(hallucinatory and oracular), fragmentary, and are sudden and unpredictable.
Although the symptoms of trauma can be found frequently throughout modernist
texts, the concept of recovery is never fully developed. According to Daniel Goleman, a
characteristic of the modernist experience is the inability to locate anxiety or pain – therefore,
it cannot be placated (20). This is also reflected within modernist writing – they
communicate the aftermath of the trauma and rely on the readers to render a narrative of the
traumatic experience. Herman states that the recovery procs for trauma relies upon telling the
story to integrate it as a narrative – trauma isolates its victims and these victims need to
reaffirm their sense of community to begin healing. The group can bear witness and assist in
creating a narrative out of a traumatic memory. However, this process is precarious because
there is an equally strong desire to deny the traumatic event as there is to communicate it.
The desire to repress traumatic memories is not necessarily limited to a single individual;
often widespread atrocities, such as war and times of upheaval, can cause traumatic aftermath
to pervade throughout the affected community. However, in larger communities, there is a
greater desire to repress the trauma to maintain the status quo because to accept the traumatic
8
event is to accept a shared responsibility for the victim. Often, it is far easier for communities
to create a lacuna and ignore or repress the trauma. I would argue that the lack of viable
recovery for trauma victims in modernist literature is a reflection of inability of the majority
of the modern community to acknowledge the trauma of the time on a larger scale.
Through the texts of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H.
Lawrence I will show the different gradations of trauma, beginning with more personal
individual trauma and moving toward the general trauma aesthetic that pervades modernist
works. Using concepts developed by trauma theorists, I will argue that the techniques utilized
by the moderns can, and should, be considered as effects of either a personal trauma, or a
trauma aesthetic. Beyond describing traumatic aftermath, these writers explore the
association between trauma and its relation to language, community, and identity. What I will
explore throughout this paper is (1) how the aftermath of trauma manifests itself within the
modern work, (2) the inability of the trauma victims to have a viable recovery due to inability
to integrate their traumatic narrative with the community and show that their best option
might be exile from community.
To introduce the concept of modern trauma, Mansfield’s works are ideal because
there is a clear point of trauma. Mansfield focuses upon traumatic occurrences themselves,
rather than the aftermath of trauma, with indications of more general trauma from societal
expectations – including maintaining class positions. In Mansfield’s work, the aftermath of
trauma is characterized by repeating the trauma and an inability to communicate the trauma.
Because there is more focus on the point of trauma and her works are all in short story
format, there is not a complete look at the aftermath of the trauma. Mansfield’s texts
anticipate the aftermath of trauma which we will see in Woolf, Joyce, and Lawrence. While
Mansfield’s characters cannot articulate their point of trauma, Woolf’s characters, who have
had a considerable amount of time with their traumatic aftermath, go a step further and focus
instead upon the ineffectuality of language to communicate trauma. Just as class positions are
enforced in Mansfield at the cost of articulating trauma, we see a similar concern in Woolf:
any behavior that is considered outside normative is actively suppressed. Both Septimus in
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Rhoda in The Waves kill themselves because they feel
suppressed by their respective communities. In Woolf’s work, there is a large impact of
trauma on the life of an individual. Contrasted to Woolf’s, Joyce’s work focuses on the
9
repetition of paralysis proliferated by adults onto children to show the long term effects of
trauma and how trauma is perpetuated cyclically so the community cannot move beyond the
initial trauma. These characters often have lacunae that prevent them from comprehending
their trauma. Characters in Joyce’s work do find some respite in communicating with rhythm
rather than with language, unlike Woolf’s characters that do not have any communicative
outlet for their trauma; however, they are ultimately unable to recover from their trauma due
to their inability to understand it. Finally, in Lawrence’s works we see both specific trauma
caused by war and repressed sexuality, as in Woolf and Joyce, and a more generalized
trauma caused by social normative such as maintaining social class hierarchies. In attempt to
placate the trauma that is further inflamed by their community, Lawrence’s characters
ultimately resort to exile to cope with their trauma.
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CHAPTER 1
KATHERINE MANSFIELD - BLAZING
MOMENTS
Katherine Mansfield’s work explores trauma on a personal level and provides a clear
link between epiphanic moments and their traumatic origin. Mansfield’s epiphanic moments
can be characterized as fragmented realizations that occur not through a cognitive thought
process, but appear rather suddenly and incompletely. As quickly as they appear, they also
disappear; these epiphanic moments are generally not allowed the chance to come to fruition
because they are constantly interrupted. Although not fully fleshed out, these interrupted
epiphanies suggest the desire of the individual and the community, often spearheaded by
those who wish to maintain social hierarchies, to repress the non-normative revelations they
may have gleaned from their traumatic epiphanies.
In “The Garden Party,” Mansfield’s protagonist, Laura, is portrayed as a young
woman brought up in a high society household who yet is preoccupied with moral qualms
about the constraints placed upon the different social classes. Throughout the story, Laura
runs into several conflicts with her family over her sensitivity concerning the amount of
respect shown to individuals from other classes. Laura and her family are in the midst of
preparing to host a garden party when they overhear of a lower-class neighbor’s death. Laura
insists that the garden party be cancelled because it is not considerate, but her idea is brushed
off by her family as foolish. Later, Laura’s family encourages her to take a basket of the
party leftovers to the deceased’s house, another act that Laura believes to be offensive. Her
epiphany ultimately stems from a crisis: Laura is forced to acknowledge death. Laura is led,
against her will, to ‘pay respect’ to the deceased man, an event with strong potential to
traumatize such a sensitive young woman. Laura’s epiphanic moment arrives after she views
a body of a lower-class neighbor in a funeral casket and perceives him as
“happy…happy…All is well…This is just as it should be” (Mansfield, “The Garden Party”
12). What is significant about Laura’s epiphanic moment is it is fragmented; almost as if she
11
is narrating her emotions rather than expressing a thought that has been processed
cognitively. Laura conceives of this moment in the same manner as a traumatic moment
because she is not able to comprehend her epiphany with language; instead, it becomes
expressed as a strong emotion that she attempts to verbalize. Interestingly, Laura’s reaction
to the corpse is the opposite of what she has felt throughout the rest of the story; she has
bemoaned the death of her impoverished neighbor, and did not agree to celebrate on such a
sad occasion. However, her reaction upon viewing the corpse is decidedly content.
According to Spiegel, this may be due to “conflicting patterns of association,” or trauma
which causes discontinuity with what was previously believed (556). Laura’s epiphany acts
to soothe Laura from the harsh reality of death by reframing it in her brain.
While Laura attempts to communicate her epiphanic experience by uttering, “isn’t
life…isn’t life…,” her brother Laurie interrupts her speech with a pacifying response: “isn’t
it, darling?” thereby discontinuing any further thought on the subject. Laurie’s comment,
although seemingly sympathetic, actually discourages her from articulating her epiphanic
moment. Christine Darrohn states that “in contrast to Laura's earnest attempt to express what
life is, Laurie's remark sounds glib” (“Blown to Bits” 56) but I would go further and suggest
that Laurie propagates their family’s upper class social normative by brushing off the
traumatic topic. According to Susan J. Brison, exhorting others to forget their traumatic
memory is a common occurrence for those who hear an account of the event because they are
‘wounded’ by the post memory of the event. This defensive mechanism intended to ‘protect’
the listener and the victim unfortunately inhibits the victim in creating a narrative memory of
the traumatic events (87). By disregarding the attempted narration of Laura’s trauma, Laurie
upholds the status quo by disregarding anything that does not match the perception of
normative order maintained by their family. Throughout the story, Laura’s family suppresses
Laura’s suggestions that do not maintain class hierarchy. Laura holds out hope that her
brother Laurie will understand, but she fails to communicate her concerns to him. When she
does finally attempt to communicate her trauma, Laurie, representative of his class, again
represses any thought Laura might have had that is non-normative.
While masked in humor, traumatic symptoms similarly flare up in Mansfield’s “The
Daughters of the Late Colonel,” an account of two sisters, Josephine and Constantia, after the
death of their oppressive father. Although the story begins after the death of Josephine and
12
Constantia’s father, it is clear that both women have been traumatized by him, and remain
visibly afraid of him after death: “she had the most extraordinary feeling that she had just
escaped something simply awful. But how could she explain…that father was in the chest of
drawers…ready to spring” (Mansfield, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” 472). Both
sisters experience real dread whenever they happen across a ritual in which they had been
previously degraded by their father. Their irrational and shared fear of their deceased father
occurs in waves triggered by proximity to their father’s personal items, or events that trigger
memories of their father’s rage. Right after their traumatic memories, Josephine and
Constantia almost immediately revert back into a normal, however childish, narrative of
events which indicates a repression of frightening thoughts and attempts to self soothe. This
vacillation from terror to a childlike state indicates that their trauma is incomprehensible to
them and they do not have the power or means to deal with their trauma.
These two sisters, with very different mindsets, develop surprisingly parallel
epiphanies simultaneously. The sisters’ epiphanic moments differ in their content, yet both
messages are remarkably similar. While Josephine contemplates their inability to meet a
single man while their father was in the picture, her moment of epiphany is suddenly
triggered: “but now? But now? She lifted her face. She was drawn over to the window
beams” (Mansfield, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” 482). Josephine’s epiphanic
moment expresses her previously extinguished hope to find a husband after years of being
kept away from men by her father. Constantia’s epiphanic moment also occurs after a
reflection of her past, while she is contemplating a statue of a Buddha kept in her father’s
office:
This time her wondering was like longing. She remembered the times she had
come in here, crept out of bed in her nightgown when the moon was full, and lain
on the floor with her arms outstretched, as though she was crucified. Why? The
big, pale moon had made her do it. The horrible dancing figures on the carved
screen had leered at her and she hadn’t minded. She remembered too how,
whenever they were at the seaside, she had sung something, something she had
made up, while she gazed all over that restless water. There had been this other
life, running out, bringing things home in bags, getting things on approval, and
arranging father’s trays and trying not to annoy father…It wasn’t real. It was only
when she came out of the tunnel into the moonlight or by the sea or into a
thunderstorm that she really felt herself. What did it mean? What was it she was
always wanting? What did it all lead to? Now? Now? (Mansfield, “The Daughters
of the Late Colonel” 483)
13
Constantia’s train of thought is different in content from her sister’s; however, both stem
from past experiences, or lack thereof. Yet unlike her sister, she identifies her sexuality with
foreign objects that her father has collected abroad. The only times Constantia feels alive is
through a seemingly contradictory combination of nature, specifically when it is wild and
untamed, and foreign art works that depict masculine images. Constantia is moved by the full
moon, restless water, and thunderstorms – all of which are dominating depictions of nature.
The full moon seems to create lunacy within Constantia: she is driven to abnormal behavior
“by the full moon.” The moon and nature are generally considered feminine, so her entry of
her father’s office on the full moon is doubly transgressive. The feminine nature is
juxtaposed with harsh and dominating descriptions which further suggest a contradictory
combination. The imagery of restless water also serves to illustrate an uneasy, powerful force
that has the potential to swallow one within the depths. The violent naturalistic imagery
serves to illustrate the dominant physical force that Contantia craves. Similarly, she pictures
the foreign painting as ‘leering’ at her and does not mind which indicates her own desire for
an aggressive male presence. In response to the dominant physical strength, Constantia
accentuates her own fragility by lying prone beneath these foreign objects. In a sense, she
also is a foreigner in the room: she is invading a territory that is marked with her father’s
possessions on the full moon, creeping into a location and an action that would likely have
been met with verbal abuse, at the very least, had she been discovered by her father.
Constantia feels that she is really herself, and more feminine, in the presence of very
dominant, masculine imagery which indicates her view of the masculine originates from her
father - the only man she had extended contact with outside of clergymen. Now that the
dominant opposing male has gone from her life, Constantia, ironically, desires to find another
dominating man to replace him which indicates that she may repeat the cycle of trauma that
was inflicted by her father.
While both sisters have radically different personal memories and preferences, they
share a common hopefulness that unfolds at the same time: their desire to find a man or a
dominant figure, now that they are free from their father’s control. Unfortunately, their
epiphanic moments are interrupted by the other’s verbal contemplation of their thought. After
their failed initial attempt to explain their epiphanies, Josephine and Constantia lose their
momentum to articulate their hope for a different future. Rhoda Nathan argues “their
14
unfinished sentences trail off into silence as they contemplate their uncertain future. The
mood of the final episode is set by fragments of speculation” (238). I would go further and
suggest that the sisters’ interrupted fragments are not due to the contemplation of their
uncertain future, but because they are repressing the uncomfortable fact of their uncertain
future. While they remain very supportive of what the other sister was going to say, they each
successfully repress their own epiphany until they are forgotten altogether.
Mansfield clearly shows the point of trauma for her characters, but her stories end
shortly after the characters have their epiphany so it is ambiguous if or how the traumatic
aftermath will affect their lives. I would argue that these abrupt endings anticipate the drawn
out aftermath of trauma that we see in the individual lives of Woolf’s characters, and the
repetitive traumatic cycle of the younger generation in Joyce’s fiction. The
repression/suppression of trauma in Mansfield anticipates the problems that will arise
throughout the traumatized individual’s life and the damage that will be inflicted upon the
subsequent generations.
15
CHAPTER 2
VIRGINIA WOOLF – THE PATTERN HIDDEN
BEHIND THE COTTON-WOOL OF DAILY LIFE
Shock is essential to Woolf’s writing: she attributes her “shock receiving capacity” as
the reason she was a writer. It is these shocks in her life that generate her epiphanies, or as
Woolf would call it, moments of being. These shocks can be generated by deep rooted
Freudian trauma, by experiences generated from society, or by a crisis of culture. Adam
Parkes asserts that the moments of being can take the form of materialistic shock, or “take
the form of Freudian trauma, lurking deep in the unconscious only to reappear
‘unexpectedly’ with the force of ‘a sudden violent shock’” (147). Woolf, herself a victim of
childhood trauma, mirrors her fiction on her perception of shocks. Wulfman maintains that,
“the language of shock adheres to Woolf’s writing more than to that of many other
writers…because her own life history is inextricably linked to trauma” (157). In Virginia
Woolf’s works, trauma is subjective. It ranges from a personalized experience to a
foundation of the modern condition. Beginning with Woolf’s own Moments of Being through
Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and Orlando we can see different gradations of trauma: Septimus
and Rhoda provide the clearest examples of individuals suffering from specific traumatic
experiences. In The Waves the remaining 5 characters suffer from “the shock precipitated by
a perpetual, haunting awareness of the fragility of human life” (Henke, “The Waves as
Ontological Trauma” 124). Finally, in Orlando we see trauma induced by the crisis of the
modern period. The traumatic aftermath can be gleaned through the shocks the characters
receive, their inability to communicate their trauma, and their difficulty integrating with
society.
In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf explicates “moments of being” that shaped her
youth. Woolf describes these moments of being, much like Joyce defines epiphany, as a sum
that is greater than its parts: “I mean all human beings--are connected with this …we are the
words; we are the music; we are the thing itself” (Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past” 72). As we
16
will see later in Joyce, Woolf’s examples of moments of being can be radically different from
her description. Rather than connection, these moments of being often highlight loneliness,
particularly in Rhoda and Septimus. Often these moments of being are described as paralytic,
inexplicable, and shocking. One specific traumatic memory from her youth was when Woolf
heard about a neighbor’s suicide. Later while walking in the garden, she finds herself unable
able to pass an apple tree, “looking at the grey-green creases of the bark—it was a moonlit
night—in a trance of horror” (Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past” 71). Woolf identifies her
“moments of being” with shock and loss of control, and as outside of her conscious
comprehension: all symptoms of a traumatic aftermath. Notably, Woolf uses this moment of
being in The Waves for her traumatized character, Neville.7
Woolf constructs her works of fiction around these moments of being that define the
individual life. In her essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf proposes a new form of fiction that
defines itself apart from the Victorian era by utilizing a concept exceedingly similar to
Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle for her re-conceptualization of fiction. Freud argues
that the mind protects itself from overstimulation by filtering all the stimuli through a
protective screen. Trauma occurs when the protective screen is penetrated but if left intact the
stimuli are absorbed by the hardened consciousness. In comparison, Woolf’s conception of
fiction describes a similar recording of consciousness:
The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a
myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness
of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms,
composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself; and to figure
further as the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from
the beginning of consciousness to the end…Let us record the atoms as they fall
upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however
disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores
upon the consciousness. (“Modern Fiction” 631)
Woolf’s ‘new’ fiction records the materialistic and traumatic shocks of characters that create
impressions upon the consciousness, rather than maintaining a linear narrative focused upon
driving the plotline. These impressions that Woolf documents illustrate the patterns of the
7
Woolf uses several of these ‘moments of being’ almost word for word in The Waves and in some other
works; much like Joyce used versions of his recorded epiphanies within his fiction.
17
mind - and many of these patterns indicate the aftermath of trauma. As Parkes argues, “it is
this model of mind – externally orientated and time-bound, courting everyday shocks and
distractions in the hope of avoiding a timeless unconscious wound – that Woolf elicits in her
vision of an unscaffolded novel” (153). Throughout Woolf’s fiction we can see the concept
of protective screen similarly transcribed; for example, within The Waves Bernard describes
the process, “A shell forms upon the soft soul, nacreous, shiny, upon which sensations tap
their beaks in vain…but it is a…lie. There is always deep below it…broken dreams…that
rise and sink even as we hand a lady down to dinner” (Woolf, The Waves 255).
While the characters in Mansfield’s stories had vague epiphanies that did not come to
fruition, Woolf’s characters have epiphanies that expose parts of the “deep below;”and what
is uncovered is often horrifying and stagnant. Woolf suggests that “the point of interest lies
very likely in the dark places of psychology,” (“Modern Fiction” 632) and thus her characters
expose their either acknowledged or unacknowledged traumatic aftermaths. In a moment of
retroactive epiphany at the end of his life, Bernard, the main protagonist of The Waves,
decries the inadequacy of language to communicate real meaning; and, he describes the pain
he felt at Percival’s death and decides,
Words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over
chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of
extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close;
flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted – beneath all of
which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.
(Woolf 263)
Bernard describes the need for language to communicate viscerally, and describes the need in
such a way that mirrors the aftermath of trauma. Bernard longs for an onomatopoeia for pain;
words fused with the sensory: feeling, sight, and sound that accurately depict the essence of
the word. Many of Woolf’s characters have similar epiphanies: bodily, visual, and pre-verbal
flashes that closely mirror traumatic memories.
In The Waves, Woolf depicts acute attacks of traumatic memories upon Rhoda’s
character. After entering the restaurant to meet up with her childhood schoolmates, Rhoda
sees the door open which triggers intense feelings of terror. In particular, note the repetition
of terror: “one moment does not lead to another. The tiger leaps. The door opens; terror
rushes in; terror upon terror, pursuing me” (Woolf, The Waves 130). Rhoda’s thoughts are
18
fragmented, similar to the style of stream of consciousness; however, for her, “one moment
does not lead to the next.” The defining characteristic of stream of consciousness is choppy
thoughts that, to the thinker, flow smoothly.8 For Rhoda, the lack of continuity within her
thoughts renders her incapable of creating meaning from experiences that are associated with
her traumatic memories.
The inability to find significance in her immediate surroundings develops a
maladaptive defense mechanism – to remain afloat in a world where she is unable to connect
to other people or places, Rhoda copies the behavior of others. None of her actions or
appearances are organic; every action she takes derives not from herself but from a sense of
grounding, “But since I wish above all things to have a lodgment, I pretend, as I go upstairs
lagging behind Jinny and Susan, to have an end in view” (Woolf, The Waves 131). Rhoda’s
mimetic behavior is a result of her inability to create meaning from quotidian experiences.
Without knowing Rhoda’s specific trauma, the reader can see the behaviors she affects to
give herself a sense of control, connection, and meaning in the world which was severed by
her trauma.
More detrimental to Rhoda’s recovery than her ability to make connections between
commonplace events is her inability to make connections with her community. Rhoda’s
existence depends upon two opposing forces: she is drawn to people for a sense of lodgment,
yet her identity is shattered in their presence. Rhoda joins her childhood playmates for
grounding, but they comprehend that “[Rhoda] fears us because we shatter the sense of being
which is so extreme in solitude – see how she grasps her fork – her weapon against us”
(Woolf, The Waves 133). Rhoda’s closest connection is with Louis, another character who is
uncomfortable in his skin. Occasionally Rhoda and Louis will have an aside from the larger
group (generally marked by parenthesis within the text) where they converse “like
conspirators who have something to whisper” (Woolf, The Waves 227). Rhoda’s connection
8
“[Thought] feels unbroken; a waking day of it is sensibly a unit as long as that day lasts, in the sense in
which the hours themselves are units, as having all their parts next each other, with no intrusive alien substance
between. To expect the consciousness to feel the interruptions of its objective continuity as gaps, would be like
expecting the eye to feel a gap of silence because it does not hear, or the ear to feel a gap of darkness because it
does not see. So much for the gaps that are unfelt” (James, The Principles of Psychology 239). See William
James’, The Principles of Psychology
19
with Louis lessens after she leaves him because she “feared embraces” (Woolf, The Waves
205). While with others, Rhoda anticipates the shocks and blows from her community so
much so that it is all she can perceive: “even casual experiences…become major psychic
traumas” (Henke, “The Waves as Ontological Trauma” 130) Rhoda’s identity is so far
removed from “any referentiality or intersubjective purposefulness” in her community that
she cannot make connections because she does not share the same meanings as them. Yet,
when Rhoda is alone, she describes herself as “often fall[ing] down into nothingness…[and I
must] bang my hand against some hard door to call myself back to the body” (Woolf, The
Waves 44). Rhoda is stuck between her inability to connect with her community because they
do not share common meanings and her necessity to be within a community to restore herself
back to her body. Ultimately, she cannot rectify these opposing forces and commits suicide.
Rhoda’s own extreme solitude prevents her from making any connections within the
community, but in Mrs. Dalloway it is the community that hinders Septimus’ recovery
through their marginalization of his trauma. After WWI, ‘shell shock’ came into brief focus
because of all the soldiers who had symptoms of traumatic aftermath from the war but was
largely overlooked. Semiotics assisted in degrading this trauma; describing it as ‘shell
shock,’ compared to what Smith and Pear called ‘war strain’ or ‘war neuroses’,9 and allowed
it to be a ‘physical’ disease, rather than mental. Also, many psychologists at the time
devalued traumatic experiences; although they accepted the idea of ‘war neuroses,’ it was
still generally believed that it occurred to soldiers that were considered ‘weaker.’ The
military had a different take altogether; at best, they treated war neuroses with skepticism, at
worst it was considered dishonorable.10 In Mrs. Dalloway, we can see the power of language
to maintain normative beliefs. To uphold their preconceived notions that the war was worth
the sacrifice of so many young bodies and minds, normative societal beliefs marginalize
9
Smith and Pear preferred the term ‘war strain’ to ‘shell shock,’ because they held that ‘shell shock’ was a
“popular but inadequate title for all those mental effects of war experience which are sufficient to incapacitate a
man from the performance of military duties (Magee). Additionally, Smith and Pear disputed the popular
opinion that ‘war strain’ resulted in ‘shock,’ described at the time as a loss of reason and senses.
10
Thomas Solomon, a military medical officer, believed: “War neurosis which persists is not a creditable
disease to have…as it indicates in practically every case a lack of the soldierly qualities which have
distinguished the Allied Armies…no one should be permitted to glorify himself as a case of ‘shell shock’”
(Magee)
20
those that contradict that message. Septimus’ first doctor, Holmes, declares that “there was
nothing whatever the matter” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 90) with him, which cultivated his guilt
because his traumatic aftermath is entirely ignored. When he returns from the war, nobody
acknowledges the aftermath of the war.
Modernist fiction acutely depicts the aftermath of trauma in a time when most did not
acknowledge the negative effects of traumatic events, yet there are very few portrayals of
recovery. Notably, Woolf’s traumatized war veteran, Septimus Smith, kills himself after his
unsuccessful re-integration into society. Unlike The Waves, we have a sense that his
community is intentionally trying to silence and suppress Septimus’ traumatic aftermath from
the war. After seeing a doctor who claims the aftermath from his trauma from the war is
nothing, he is referred to Sir William Bradshaw, who “not only prospered himself but made
England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it
impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of
proportion” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 99). By noticing what is not talked about, we can guess
at what is hidden based upon what is being ignored (Goleman 127). Bradshaw, who strives to
create a mental hegemony, does so by suppressing non-normative ideas in hopes of
concealing England’s unpleasant realities. However, when a group that large is unable to
communicate their realities, it inhibits their ability to recover.
Victims of trauma often waver between dissociation and hypersensitivity.
Dissociation is characterized by feelings of depersonalization and numbness, and occurs as a
defense mechanism to moderate intense feelings of terror. Hypersensitivity is another defense
mechanism designed to protect the body from another traumatic experience. However, these
defensive mechanisms can become so extreme for trauma survivors that they no longer serve
a healthy purpose. In response to his dissociation, Septimus attempts to affect his feelings:
“When peace came he was in Milan…[where he encountered] daughters making hats, and to
Lucrezia, the youngest daughter, he became engaged one evening when the panic was on him
– that he could not feel” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 86). Immediately after the war, Septimus
attempts to reintegrate himself back into the community he felt before the war by becoming
engaged – a normative behavior that he believes will provide refuge. For four years,
Septimus was able to mimic a semblance of reintegration – however, dissociation is not a
permanent state, so he vacillates toward hypersensitivity. While Septimus is dissociated, he
21
appears not to be “mad,” as Lucrezia terms it, because he has separated himself from his
trauma. This façade crumbles when he becomes hypersensitive to his traumatic memories.
In addition to engaging in normative behavior by not feeling after the war, Septimus
also engages in hetero-normative behavior that seems to be against his desire: “love between
man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him
before the end. But Rezia said, she must have children” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 89).
Septimus transfers his own homosexual thoughts onto Shakespeare and easily transitions
these thoughts into his own life; specifically, his lack of desire to copulate. After the war,
Septimus prides himself on feeling nothing from Evans’ death and arguably, he does the
same with his homosexual feelings. Septimus marries Lucrezia because “he could not feel”
(Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 86). According to Jean Kennard, most critics read the relationship
between Septimus and Evans as, at minimum, homoerotic while many consider the
relationship to be blatantly homosexual (“Power and Sexual Ambiguity” 158). Evans’ and
Septimus’ relationship states that Septimus drew “the affection of his officer, Evans…It was
a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug…They had to be together, share with each other,
quarrel with each other” (86) and when Lucrezia meets Evans she perceives him to be
“undemonstrative in the company of women” (Woolf Mrs. Dalloway 86). There are many
indications that Septimus’ and Evans’ bond goes beyond friendship, particularly Kennard’s
suggestion that use of the verb “share” was “used to describe homosexual tendencies
between men” around the turn of the century (158). When he returns from the war, Septimus
not only represses his traumatized experiences from the war, he also represses his homoerotic
relationship with Evans.
Because Septimus is expected (and to some extent expects himself) to return as the
same person he was before the war, he cannot rectify his identity before the war with his
identity after the war. According to Goleman, these “vital lies are lies that are told to
maintain ‘normative’” (17) beliefs. Because Septimus has come back different, he uses selfblame to describe the discrepancy. Septimus condemns himself for marrying Rezia without
truly loving her, and by association, lying to her; outraging Ms. Isabel Pole, the woman he
desired before the war; and lastly, but most notably for not caring when Evans died.
Septimus imagines himself literally ‘pockmarked’ from the actions that were induced by the
trauma he experienced during the war. Septimus blames himself for his body’s irrepressible
22
response to trauma - dissociation from Evan’s death, an event that was too painful to process
at the moment of occurrence and his subsequent lack of feeling which leads him to mimic
feeling. Additionally, his hypersensitivity leads him to project his self-blame upon others as
well. Septimus deems himself judged by the people of England for his ‘sins’ which he
believes are ‘pockmarked’ on his body: “the verdict of human nature on such a wretch was
death” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 91). This is an extremely harsh judgment, although, it is not
an entirely misplaced thought. Rather than indicting the society that caused the war,
Septimus blames himself for the aftermath of his trauma because society does not accept any
portion of blame.
Due to the repression of war trauma, there is little opportunity for Septimus to rectify
his identity before the war with his identity after the war. Because his worldview has been so
drastically altered, Septimus rejects his identity before the war and loathes what he once
loved: “That boy’s business of the intoxication of language…had shriveled utterly. How
Shakespeare loathed humanity…this was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in
the beauty of words” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 88). Trauma has damaged the assumptions that
Septimus had held before the war, and he is unable to rectify his thoughts before the war with
those after the war. Septimus cannot recognize his role within his community after returning
from the war because his traumatic experience is not acknowledged: “London has swallowed
up millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like
Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
84). Herman suggest that this "disordered and fragmented identity derive[es] from
accommodations to the judgments of others" (386). Septimus views his identity as being
“swallowed” because of his distinguishing mark – traumatic aftermath. Septimus is unable to
recover his identity from the millions of London because his identity has been socially
disavowed. Not only does this point to the alienation that war veterans faced, it also directs
attention to a larger aftermath of trauma that has affected the community and the defense
mechanism is to create a lacuna to avoid the confusion and pain that comes with the
acceptance of war trauma.
While the effectiveness of language to adequately communicate is challenged, there is
also the concern of “to whom” can the traumatized communicate? This refrain weaves
throughout several of Woolf’s texts, which indicates that the connections are severed
23
between those who need to communicate and their community. Lucrezia, having travelled to
England after she married Septimus in Italy after the war, has no ties to England other than
Septimus and that thread has become thin. While walking with Septimus, Lucrezia
contemplates her inability to discuss Septimus’ illness and her own suffering, when her
attention is drawn to the English gardens: “For you should see the Milan gardens,” she says
aloud; however “there was nobody” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 23). Septimus and Lucrezia
cannot communicate with one another because Septimus’ ability to communicate is altered
by his traumatic aftermath. Because of their non-linear timeless nature, Septimus’ traumatic
memories muddle with the present time disabling him from communicating because his
contemplations lie outside of language. After Lucrezia’s proclamation that “there was
nobody,” the omniscient narrator notes that although, “her words faded…but though they are
gone…they exist more ponderously, give out what the frank daylight fails to transmit – the
trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
23-4). The narrator suggests although communication can be repressed due to its subversive
subject matter, to the dismay of Holmes and Bradshaw, it never goes away.
In a similar fashion, albeit with different content to convey, Rhoda is repeatedly
driven to ask “to whom” she can communicate her trauma. As we have seen, Rhoda’s lack of
shared meaning with her community prevents her from communicating with them. Rhoda
wants to present the beauty that is in her mind, symbolically described as a bouquet of
flowers, but always questions: “Oh! To whom?’(Woolf, The Waves 57, 206). Percival, whom
she feared in life, becomes after death, someone safe to whom she can present her bouquet.
To Rhoda, death represents safety: a bodiless, non-communicative place where she can rock
her petals, as she does from early childhood to self-soothe herself. Her suicide, contrasted
with Septimus’, is an attempt to gain the first stage of trauma recovery: ensuring safety from
a community she does not understand and cannot understand her.
Of all the characters to question “to whom” to present their thoughts, Septimus is the
only one who is able to answer. Unlike Lucrezia and Rhoda, Septimus attempts to
conceptualize a way to communicate his trauma to the community. In an epiphany, Septimus
recognizes he can share his ‘truth’ with everyone:
Septimus, was alone, called forth in advance of the mass of men to hear the truth,
to learn the meaning…was to be given whole to …. “to whom?” he asked aloud.
24
“To the Prime Minister…he muttered, gasping, trembling, painfully drawing out
these profound truths which needed, so deep they were, so difficult, an immense
effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them forever.” (Woolf,
Mrs. Dalloway 67)
Septimus’ ‘moment of being’ recalls his traumatic experiences; and the temporary access to
these memories leaves Septimus gasping and trembling and it is only with difficultly that he
can conceive of speaking them. Although this moment of being is painful, visceral, and
difficult, Septimus is able to begin trying to reintegrate into his community. Although these
thoughts are often attributed to megalomania or schizophrenia,11 Septimus touches on a
potential way to heal himself and draw attention to this lacuna within his community. Even
up to the moments before his suicide, Septimus attempts to make connections with his
community. Right before he jumps out of the window, Septimus acknowledges his
connections with his wife, stating, “it was their [Holmes and Bradshaw’s] idea of tragedy,
not his or Rezia’s, (for she was with him)” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 149). Additionally,
Septimus has his final connection with a man who “coming down the staircase opposite an
old man stopped and stared” right before his jump (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 149). Septimus
wants to communicate and have connections, but he is inhibited by the men who wish for
him not to communicate his trauma to his community.
Although re-integration into the community is a necessary step for trauma recovery, it
can also hinder an individual’s chance to recover. Lucrezia’s character demonstrates how a
community can be detrimental to traumatic recovery: no one is discussing the lasting effects
from the aftermath trauma due to the war. Lucrezia does not communicate either the mental
health of her husband, nor her own suffering while caring for him. Both Septimus and Rezia
are unable to communicate their trauma because it is not socially accepted by society: “Dr.
Holmes said nothing was the matter with him…it was she who suffered – but she had nobody
to tell” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 23). Because Septimus is not physically ill and a voice of
authority, Dr. Holmes, said there was ‘nothing the matter,’ Rezia has trouble acknowledging
Septimus’ behavior as manifestations of the trauma he faced during the war. Additionally,
11
Many critics accept Septimus as a megalomaniac without further inquiry, such as Brian Shaffer’s
account: “A prime example…can be found in the treatment of the shell-shocked and megalomaniac Septimus
Smith” (The Blinding Torch 85).
25
she perpetuates society’s normative behavior by perceiving his condition as something to be
kept hidden: “[she] would never, never tell that he was mad!” (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 24). So
Lucrezia complies with normative beliefs out of a combination of embarrassment (Septimus
was not able to cope with what he faced) and loyalty (which reinforces the belief that the
madness is not caused externally, and is something to be ashamed of). Although the
aftermath of trauma had been studied by Freud and his contemporaries in the cases of sexual
trauma in women, it had not been considered extensively in the case of war veterans. Herman
asserts that society’s acceptance of trauma intermittently occurs, “the knowledge of horrible
events periodically intrudes into public awareness but is rarely retained for long. Denial,
repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level” (2). Society
cannot accept that the veterans are emotionally scarred from their experiences because it
would mean some culpability rests upon society itself. Rather society utilizes, as Goleman
argues, nuclear numbing to “avoid acquiring information that would make vague fears
specific enough to require decisive action” (19). It is much easier for a community to believe
there is no trauma than to accept that the war caused trauma, and then to have to rectify the
trauma that was inadvertently caused by its actions.
Septimus and Rhoda provide clear examples of individuals affected by a specific
trauma; however, the remaining characters in The Waves experience a more general trauma:
the crisis of meaning and mortality. The Waves’ structure is comprised of nine sections
interrupted by what Woolf calls ‘interludes.’ The interludes begin at dawn and end at dusk,
and mirror the structure of each section, which records the consciousness of six characters
from childhood to old age; however, there is one voice that dominates the others in the novel.
This text begins and ends with Bernard’s perspective, the raconteur of the six, and the final
section is devoted exclusively to his perspective. In this section, Bernard decries “how
tired…[he is] of phrases that come down beautifully” (Woolf, The Waves 238); and instead,
he wishes for a language that is “more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and
triumph” (Woolf, The Waves 239). This proclamation by Bernard is a far cry from his earlier
beliefs; such as his recorded lyric phrases in notebooks: “fin in a waste of waters.” This leads
one to wonder why Bernard eschews his earlier belief in the aesthetics of language, and
ultimately decide that “we need not whip…prose into poetry” (Woolf, The Waves 263).
26
Similarly to Septimus’ disappointment of re-reading Shakespeare after the war,
Bernard becomes disillusioned by the language that once enchanted him because of the
inability for poems and lyricisms to convey moments of being. These moments of being,
often traumatic memories, cannot be communicated as stories because they exist on the prenarrative level – they are timeless, lack content, and are often vivid sensations or images. So
Bernard calls for a language that is more primal, that involves connections with others:
I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children
speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up
some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry.
When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch
unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its
feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and
chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts, making wild music, false phrases. I
have done with phrases. (Woolf, The Waves 295)
Although Bernard declares that he is ‘done with phrases,’ he still makes use of them while
imparting his story to a stranger, because ultimately, it is the only method he has for
communicating with those who do not hold those same experiences.
In the final section, Bernard attempts to communicate the “meaning of [his] life” to a
stranger; although he states “none of it is true.”12 The ability of language to communicate the
‘truth’ is called into question - and Bernard understands that language is not sufficient
enough to tell the “meaning of life.” Henke argues that Bernard’s “psychological refuge
always lies in the salvific possibility of aesthetic webs and social communion made possible
by language” (“The Waves as Ontological Trauma Narrative” 128), while I would argue that
it is not language that makes it possible, but shared moments of being. Bernard sees himself
fused with the other 6 members of his cohort because of their shared experience. When
Bernard attempts to communicate these experiences to a stranger, he finds words are lacking.
His task to communicate “is therefore fundamentally a traumatic response: the repeated
attempt to declaim an event that has been missed in order to transmit it to the reader”
(Wulfman 161). Bernard’s repeated attempts to communicate his trauma differentiate his
ultimate attitude from Rhoda’s. Bernard’s attempts at communication, however ineffectual,
12
This can be seen throughout traumatic works – traumatized storytellers attempt to grasp the ‘real’
through stating nothing that is true. See Tim O’Brien’s works.
27
provide him with incentive to raise arms against death, while Rhoda succumbs to death
because she has no meaningful communication with her community.
In The Waves, all the characters act as foils; but none more so than Rhoda and
Bernard. Rhoda is comfortable with her identity “alone, I rock my basins; I am mistress of
my fleet of ships”; but her identity is “broken into separate pieces…no longer one” (106) in
the presence of others. Rhoda is comfortable with herself and her status in her imagined
worlds; however, that knowledge is shattered when she encounters others. On the other hand,
Bernard relies upon others to validate his selfhood: “I need the illumination of other people’s
eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self” (Woolf, The Waves 116). While
both Rhoda and Bernard struggle with, as Heidegger terms, being-toward death due to their
trauma, their starkly different outlooks lead them to cope with their trauma in dissimilar
fashions. Ultimately, Rhoda succumbs to her angst and embraces death by suicide while
Bernard confronts his impending death by confirming his being-in-the-world: “Against you I
will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” (Woolf, The Waves 297). Despite
their shared trauma, experiencing their friend Percival’s untimely death, both Rhoda and
Bernard have entirely different strategies for coping with trauma. Although it is unidentified,
Rhoda appears to have suffered another unnamed trauma indicated by her strong adverse
reaction to people, including life long friends. Rhoda leaves her closest companion, Louis,
her fellow conspirator, because she “feared embraces” (Woolf, The Waves 205). Woolf
appears to suggest that belonging to a community is necessary for being-in-the-world. By
declaring his allegiance to life, Bernard portrays a possible hopeful view of traumatic
recovery: “Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I
to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken” (Woolf, The Waves 266). This
phrase, as seen later in Stephen’s call to action at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, indicates that the method of communication does not matter, but retelling the
trauma is a necessary step for recovery from their trauma – and then for integration back into
the community.
Woolf’s works that we have explored thus far have considered the aftermath of
trauma throughout an individual’s life. Orlando, which is commonly considered a roman á
28
clef that indulges in a fantastical life by both Woolf and many of her critics,13 illustrates a
more generalized trauma induced by the modern period rather than by a specific traumatic
event. Woolf writes, “In or about December 1910…human character changed” (“Mr. Bennett
and Mrs. Brown” 635) and then documents this change within Orlando. Beginning in the
fifteenth century, Orlando tells the story of a gender-bending character whose life exceeds
four centuries. Rather than focusing on the aftermath of a specific trauma, Woolf explores the
trauma inherent within the modern period. Orlando experiences a moment of being when she
finally reaches the present day:
There was something definite and distinct about the age…there was a distraction,
a desperation – as she was thinking this, the immensely long tunnel in which she
seemed to be travelling for hundreds of years widened; the light poured in; her
thoughts became mysteriously tightened and strung up as if a piano tuner had put
his key in her back and stretched the nerves very taut; at the same time her
hearing quickened…she saw everything more and more clearly…it was the
present moment. (Woolf, Orlando 218-9)
The description of Orlando facing the terrifying revelation that she is in the present moment
is visceral, as though she is awaiting some threat. Her sensory stimulation can be
characterized as hyperarousal. Too much arousal from a situation that does not depend upon
that arousal for life threatening moments causes anxiety that narrows the attention spent upon
other aspects of her life. Rather than providing insight, Orlando’s ‘moment of being’ seems
to cause more confusion and stress.
Similarly to traumatic memories, Orlando’s thoughts are not communicated
sequentially; but rather, the traumatic memories are always perceived as being in the present
moment and mix speciously with past events. Throughout the novel there is some
recollection of the past; however, it is not until the ‘present moment,’ or the modern period,
arrives that Orlando becomes confused by the different ages that have passed:
“Time has passed over me” she thought, trying to recollect herself; “this is the
oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one thing. I take
up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice. Someone
lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers. When I step out of doors –
13
Maria DiBattista argues that Woolf suffers no distress from her “time-consuming digression into
fantasy,” and she argues that it distances herself from human life. Woolf herself refers to the novel as a ‘writersholiday’ (Orlando xxxvii)
29
as I do now,” here she stepped on to the pavement of Oxford Street, “what is it
that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I see mountains. Turkey? India?
Persia?” Her eyes filled with tears. (Woolf, Orlando 223)
Orlando’s rough transition into the ‘modern’ time indicates that the modern period distinctly
different from prior eras she has lived through. In the ‘present time,’ everyday objects trigger
memories that are more real for Orlando and suggests that this period is traumatic because
the present time is conflated with past memories. What Orlando recognizes as the “oncome
of middle age;” is a conflation of traumatic memories with narrative memories, which does
not allow her to disassociate previous memories with the products of modernity, like
handbags, pink candles, and paved sidewalks.
In the final scene, Orlando seems to show a “rupture in continuity between present
and past…[and] give[s] the appearance of returning to ordinary time, while psychologically
remaining bound in… timelessness” (Herman 381). Orlando becomes confused by all he/she
has been and experienced; she confuses the prior years and personalities and she begins to
call out, “Orlando?” yet “Orlando did not come” (Woolf, Orlando 226). Orlando is then
haunted by flashes of all of his/her previous identities and as the narrator ‘listens’ to
Orlando’s changing of selves, there is only fragmented adjectives associated with specific
nouns or verbs. It is only when she begins pondering something other than her identity that
she is able to grasp a more “solid” identity once more. Orlando, having lived for over three
centuries, switched from male to female bodies, felt the pressure of accommodating herself
with the changing of times and beliefs, did not have a crisis of identity until the modern
period. Woolf seems to suggest the innate trauma inherent within the modern period that led
to Orlando’s confusion and fragmentation of her different selves which suggests Orlando
situates the modern period as traumatic aftermath.
As a method to cope with trauma of the period, Orlando uses rhythm, the elevation of
sound above language, which will also play a significant role in Joyce’s work. Woolf strives
to write “to a rhyme, not to a plot” (qtd. in Paccaud-Huguet para. 34). Preceding the “present
moment,” Orlando turns into a rhythmic poem, accompanied by barrel-organs playing from a
distance: “Let us accept the intervention [of music]…to fill this page with sound until the
moment comes which it is impossible to deny is coming” (Woolf, Orlando 215). Orlando
recognizes that a change is coming, and in the meantime she reverts to a child-like rhyming
30
poem until ‘the moment comes.’ The use of theses child-like rhyming as self-soothing for
trauma is also seen in Joyce’s “An Encounter” and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The use of poetry combined with musicality suggests that plain language is incapable of
communicating trauma – and notably, the text never states the precise moment of trauma.
Instead, Woolf sets rhyme to an imagined barrel-organ, and begins by hailing happiness, but
within the joyful tune, fears of the inevitable invade and she fears life will be, “duller and
worser than that is our usual lot; without dreams, but alive, smug, fluent, habitual…hail not
those dreams…which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and wound us and split us apart
in the night when we would sleep” (Woolf, Orlando 216). The playful rhythm serves to
distract Orlando from the trauma, yet interwoven within the light-hearted playfulness of the
rhyme lie dark premonitions for the onset of the modern period.14
14
While the modern period is not the only troubling age in Orlando, it does introduce the problems as
largely psychologically traumatizing. Other troubling eras in Orlando include the end of the “great frost” when
the ice melts and people become stranded on the floating chunks of ice and presumably cannot be rescued. After
the great frost, Orlando falls asleep for seven days and remains depressed. Later, a dark cloud looms over as the
nineteenth century begins and Orlando feels she must “yield to the spirit of the age” and take a husband, a
feeling which is thoroughly disconcerting to Orlando.
31
CHAPTER 3
JAMES JOYCE – IRRLAND’S SPLIT LITTLE PEA
Joyce states, “my intention [in Dubliners] was to write a chapter in the moral history
of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of
paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects:
childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order”
(Joyce, Letters 134). Beginning with childhood, we see children disillusioned by the adult
world. By the section of maturity, the reader understands the cyclical nature of the paralysis –
the parents suppress their own ineffectualness and take it out on their children. The section
on public life considers the ineffectuality of the main aspects of public life through individual
stories. Because it discusses uncomfortable, traumatic situations, Dubliners was accused,
most notably by Joyce’s editor, of being indecent. In a letter defending himself against that
charge, Joyce stresses the moral purpose of his text: “I seriously believe that you will retard
the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look
at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass” (Joyce, Letters 63-64). Joyce recognizes,
in his text as well as in Ireland, that some individuals cannot see the paralysis, while the ones
that can often self-perpetuate the cycle. The hope in this story seems to remain for the readers
to glean.
Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man illustrate the cyclical nature of
paralysis which ultimately ends up in stagnation for every character. In Dubliners, there is a
cycle of trauma and repetition: as children, they are traumatized and as adults, they
participate in traumatizing the youth. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen
Daedalus remains paralyzed by having the same response to every crisis – to disavow his
previous allegiances. Cyclically, these new allegiances become rejected in face of a new
crisis. The framework for trauma that begins in childhood in Dubliners can be used to
consider A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Joyce’s work, trauma can be clearly
seen, although the traumatic aftermath is not as clear. Unlike Woolf, who shows a darker,
and more realistic, aftermath of trauma that affects all aspects of the traumatized life, Joyce
32
focuses instead upon how trauma is repressed and how that repression leads to stagnation.
Similarly to Woolf, Joyce uses different gradations of trauma in different texts. Joyce
presents the moments of trauma more frequently in Dubliners while A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man illustrates the broader effects of the aftermath of trauma and how it shapes
the individual development within his/her community.
“The Sisters,” Joyce’s first story in Dubliners, begins by setting the tone for the
subsequent stories: the child narrator acknowledges “There was no hope for [his mentor, the
preist] this time” (9) while gazing through his mentor’s window in attempt to perceive a
change in lighting which would indicate a departure from his mentor’s paralysis, albeit
through death. “The Dead,” the final story of Dubliners, brings the boy’s search at the
beginning in full circle; it ends with a parallel to the first story: the protagonist gazing out of
the window and recognizing that: “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all
over Ireland…upon all the living and the dead” (Joyce 223-4). While the young protagonist
looks in the window for change in the priest’s paralytic condition, Gabriel looks out of the
window and confirms that it is “general all over Ireland” and even suggests that there is no
respite after death. Joyce presents the trauma that is innate within the Irish community by
exposing the stagnant and paralyzing lives and epiphanies of the citizens of Dublin. “The
Sisters” starts with the narrator contemplating paralysis, which he associates with other
“strange sounding” words like “gnomon” and “simony.” These words provide context for the
entire work: paralysis, not only physical but also mental and emotional, within the
characters’ lives; “gnomon”, the geometrical shape that is defined by absence, which
suggests trauma that is alluded to by what is not included; and “simony”, the exchange of the
temporal, such as money, services or goods, for spiritual rewards, such as pardons, religious
offices, or emoluments, which on the surface suggests corruption, but can also be read as the
attempt to solve problems of the spirit or soul with inadequate methods that shift ownership
of the problem from the individual to an authority.15 These three themes are most clearly
illustrated in “Counterparts.”
15
Gnomon
33
In “Counterparts,” Joyce most clearly illustrates the cyclical nature of paralysis and
provides a portrait of an abuser. We find Farrington, a copier and an alcoholic who is stuck in
cyclical disappointment due largely from his coping mechanism that he uses to numb the
rejection. After going out for five drinks while working, Farrington is unable to complete his
assignment and is yelled at by his boss. After which his concern turns to realization that he
does not have enough money to go to the bars so he pawns his watch. Once at the bars he
quickly loses his money from the rounds of drinks he buys his friends, loses a feat of strength
to a “mere boy,” and was ignored by an English woman he desires at the pub.
After being chastised at work, “his body ached to do something…all the indignities of
life enraged him…Could he ask the cashier privately for an advance? No, the cashier was no
good, no damn good: he wouldn’t give an advance…He knew where he would meet the
boys” (Joyce, Dubliners 90-1). His body aches to do something – this metaphor literally
describes a paralyzed body. The ellipses in this section are quite revealing; after his physical
feeling of paralysis and his bout of rage from being chastised at work there is a pause as he
considers where he might find money and then the ellipses trail to where he will meet the
boys. Without making the connection to alcohol or bars in his stream of consciousness, he
contemplates how to get money to meet up with his friends. Unconsciously, Farrington
avoids thinking about his habit; if he avoids language that would suggest it is a problem, he
does not have to perceive it as one. Throughout the night, Farrington’s pleasure is mostly
derived from the dulling of his senses: “drinking with his friends amid the glare of gas and
the clatter of glasses” (Joyce, Dubliners 89) in the “hot reeking public house” (Joyce,
Dubliners 97). All the aspects of the bar overwhelm Farrington’s senses which in turn
distract him from recognizing his cyclical paralysis as an alcoholic.
Farrington’s job as a copier implies the lack of autonomy he has in his life: he repeats
“Bernard Bodley be…and thought how strange it was that the last three words began with the
same letter” (Joyce, Dubliners 90). Mirroring his work as a copier, Farrington’s method of
bullying is to mimic his boss’ and his son’s accents. Farrington projects his inadequacy on
others because he is unable to fathom or perceive his own flaws as illustrated by his inability
to contemplate his alcoholism by suggesting instead that he is just “meeting the boys.”
Farrington’s life, although marked by paralysis, does not suggest that Farrington’s own life is
marked by trauma, rather it provides a description of the traumatizer. After Farrington arrives
34
home drunk and unsatisfied by his evening, he beats his son despite his son’s proclamations
that he will do anything his father asks, such as make him dinner, or light a fire. The son even
appeals to God: “I’ll say a Hail Mary for your, pa, if you don’t beat me….” (Joyce,
Dubliners 98). Out of desperation, Farrington’s son tries to bargain with his father for his
safety by offering him an opportunity to be forgiven by a higher power because his own
efforts have had been to no avail. Just as Farrington is stuck in a paralyzing cycle due to his
alcoholism, he inflicts pain upon his child who finds that neither he nor a higher power can
intervene. With no escape route, Farrington’s child can rely on his hope that his appeal to a
higher power will be heeded by his father, and when that (presumably) does not occur, the
son is left in a situation he cannot effect. Thus this story shows how the inadequacies of one
generation traumatize the next generation and perpetuate a paralysis.
By and large, trauma in Joyce’s “The Sisters” is the most controversial and disagreed
upon topic by critics in Dubliners.16 Although critics are divided upon how to interpret this
text, I would argue that by focusing our attention on what is ignored in “The Sisters,” we can
speculate upon which defense mechanisms the boy uses and what may be buried deep in the
boy’s unconsciousness. When Old Cotter begins to give his opaque opinion of Father Flynn,
the boy angrily thinks, “Tiresome old fool! When we knew him first he used to be rather
interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories
about the distillery” (Joyce, Dubliners 10). Notably, Old Cotter is not talking about the
distillery, or a dull subject for the boy; rather, he speculates about the boy’s mentor. While
the child proclaims to himself that he is angry because old Cotter’s stories are tiresome, old
Cotter’s words reappear in his thoughts no less than twice: “Though I was angry with old
Cotter for alluding to me as a child I puzzled my head to extract meaning from his unfinished
sentences” (Joyce, Dubliners 11). The boy finds the information he has heard from old Cotter
interesting enough to contemplate, but at the time of occurrence, he has a visceral reaction to
16
There is much disagreement regarding trauma, particularly sexual trauma, in “The Sisters.” Bernard
Benstock and Edward Brandabur have suggested that there might be homosexual relations between the priest
and child; Thomas E. Connelly argues there is no evidence to suggest any homosexuality other than Cotter’s
vague and ambiguous comments, and hardly any evidence for simony; and Michael West suggests that Old
Cotter refers to childhood masturbation rather than a homosexual relationship between the priest and boy. See
“Joyce’s ‘The Sisters’: A Pennyworth of Snuff” by Thomas E. Connelly and “Old Cotter and the Enigma of
Joyce’s ‘The Sisters’ by Michael West.
35
the information and rejects it altogether. Also, the boy incorrectly associates at least part of
his anger. The first time he refers to old Cotter as a “tiresome old fool!” old Cotter had not
yet spoken to him, thus it is not conceivable that the boy could be angry for his comment
made at a later time. Since the two explanations that the boy provides for his anger are
logically faulty, the narrator is either intentionally deceiving the reader or unintentionally
deceiving himself. Because of the multitude of lacunae that the narrator experiences, I would
argue that these thoughts are most likely unacknowledged by the boy. By looking at what
triggers the boy’s anger, it appears as though his anxiety is derived from old Cotter’s topic:
Father Flynn. The boy uses selective inattention to avoid what he does not want to hear or
see, in this case Father Flynn – a memory that he regularly attempts to repress. Instead, he
transfers his anger about the subject onto the speaker, old Cotter. While it is not entirely clear
where the anger originates from it could be attributed to two likely motivations: either the
stress of Father Flynn’s impending death/learning of his death or from conflated feelings due
to repressed sexual trauma.
Subsequent to his contemplations, the boy consciously attempts to avoid the image of
Father Flynn. After the boy imagines that he sees Father Flynn’s “grey heavy face,” the boy
“drew the blankets over [his] head and tried to think of Christmas” (Joyce, Dubliners 11).
Although the boy’s original intent was to contemplate what old Cotter meant about Father
Flynn, he visualizes Father Flynn and immediately self-soothes by picturing Christmas, a
generally happy time in a child’s life. The boy consciously tries to repress the image of
Father Flynn yet he is still haunted by him, and then his feelings toward the image radically
change. After the initial terror issued from the first frightening image, the boy’s feelings
about Father Flynn appearing in his dream/memory are notably muted, which seems to
indicate a defense mechanism is in place. Arguably, the boy could be remembering his
response to a trauma: “I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region” (Joyce,
Dubliners 11). Although receding to a pleasant and vicious region could be representative of
falling asleep, it is equally plausible that he is having an irrepressible traumatic memory and
coping with it in the manner in which he coped with the traumatic event: by dissociating. If a
traumatic event had occurred between the priest and the boy, a common defense mechanism
for him would be to detach himself from the bodily experience to keep his mind and soul
intact.
36
Another indicator that this “dream” may be a repressed memory is pre-verbal
experience the narrator has in the dream. The images the boy has of Father Flynn are visceral
and bodily; the boy feels that he recedes to a “viscous” place, indicating that he feels a sticky
sensation; where the priest is muttering, an auditory sense but notably pre-verbal; and his lips
are “moist with spittle,” a grotesque image of the priest’s mouth which repeatedly haunts the
boy. This may be the boy’s vorstellungsrepräsentaz of his traumatic experience categorized
by the brain’s schema to make the memory safer to access. The next day, the boy again
“remembered old Cotter’s words and tried to remember what happened afterwards in the
dream” (Joyce, Dubliners 13) to no avail. After the boy remembers a few vague details about
a foreign land, he is unable to recall the rest of the dream/traumatic memory. What was so
clear and irrepressible the night before has become irretrievable to the boy, which again
alludes to a possible defense mechanism at work.
“The Sisters” is purposefully ambiguous on whether any sexual trauma occurred, but
the lacunae in the boy’s recantation of events and the defensive tactics seem to indicate there
is a trauma that the boy has not even admitted to himself. Such a trauma would be difficult to
acknowledge because of the opposing pressures the boy faces: the priest was a mentor with
whom, as his father reminds him, he was very close and he should feel grateful for all the
knowledge that he bestowed upon him; and yet the boy “felt even annoyed at discovering in
myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death” (Joyce,
Dubliners 12). While the surmounting evidence does not definitively point to sexual trauma,
it does seem extremely suspicious. The language the boy uses does not indicate sexual
trauma – however, what he ignores provides a compelling case.
In another example of sexual trauma, two boys ditch school in search of an adventure
– what they find is an old pervert. Similarly to the boy in “The Sisters,” the narrator in “An
Encounter” avoids and denies the traumatic experience he faces with the old man in the
pasture. This story goes a step further than “The Sisters” – we clearly see a traumatic event
and therefore can also identify the defense mechanisms put in place by the narrator. The
narrator is introduced as a character who bands himself together with the wild antics of his
friends because of his “fear…to seem studious” (Joyce, Dubliners 20). Already, we can
perceive that the narrator’s sensitivity to the social norm can and ultimately will lead him
into a traumatic encounter. Contrastingly, the narrator’s friend Mahony acts in a manner that
37
is outside of what the narrator often considers acceptable. For example, Mahony wants to
charge the young boys for flinging stones at them, but the narrator declares that the boys are
too small to charge. The narrator acts with a sense of social propriety while Mahony’s
attitude is to do what he wants. Mahony’s behavior is indicative of his response to their
impending traumatic encounter: he removes himself from the negative situation. However,
the narrator’s inclination to act out of obligation does not leave him with a clear standard of
what behaviors to tolerate. The narrator agrees to go along with a ‘ditch day,’ where the boys
skip school to find an adventure. The night before their outing the narrator sleeps poorly.
Without acknowledging the poor night’s sleep is due to anxiety, the narrator begins to selfsoothe: “The granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with
my hands in time to an air in my head. I was very happy” (Joyce, Dubliners 22). The
narrator utilizes his senses to create a rhythmic poem to calm his anxiety, a characteristic we
will see later in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Because the narrator is inclined to
go along with others despite his own reservations, it sheds light on why he remained in the
traumatic situation.
While in search of an adventure, the boys encounter an old man in a field. The old
man engages them in a conversation which vacillates between encouraging the boys to have
sweethearts to a rant on how schoolboys should be whipped. The old man’s speech revolves
around whichever topic he is ‘magnetised’ by, without regard to logical continuity:
He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned
by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was
slowly circling round and round in the same orbit….He repeated his phrases over
and over again, varying them and surrounding them with his monotonous voice.
(Joyce, Dubliners 26)
The narrator is mute for the majority of what he describes as the ‘old jossers’’ monologue
which indicates that the perverted old man is incapable of communicating his revolving
thoughts effectively; although the narrator feels he “seems to plead” to be understood. His
messages are contradictory and are less focused on the content than the rhythm and rhyme of
the speech. For the old man, as Richard Pedot suggests, “Each repetition, then, signals the
event of the pure, singular occurrence of affect, the affect forever presenting itself each time
as what cannot be represented, the irreconcilable” (8). The old man perpetuates his own
cycle of trauma upon the boys, while also still trying to communicate the pre-verbal trauma
38
that appears to have occurred to him. In attempt to communicate his own trauma, he commits
a similar atrocity to that done to him.
In a dual paralysis, the old man repeats his phrases in attempt to communicate while
the young boy repeats the socially normative, yet stress-inducing, behaviors. After his first
monologue, the old man temporarily departs on a presumably sexual escapade. After
Mahony shouts to look at what the ‘queer old josser’ has done, the narrator refuses to look.
The narrator and Mahony seem to be representative of society’s powerful desire to both deny
the atrocity and to tell it. The narrator and Mahony represent the two dichotomous reactions
to witnessing an atrocity, which is to declaim it and deny it. By looking away, the narrator,
“avoid[s] acquiring information that would make vague fears specific enough to require
decisive action” (Goleman 19). The narrator’s reaction is a passive, yet harmful, defense
mechanism that allows him to remain in a psychologically stressful situation without
necessarily acknowledging it as such.
By remaining when the ‘old josser’ returns after his presumably inappropriate sexual
escapade, the narrator acts with repetition compulsion and places himself in a potentially
dangerous situation. Mahony’s proclamation to look what he is doing, followed by calling
him “a queer old josser,” should have sounded a warning alarm. Rather than escaping this
potentially harmful situation, which Mahony does, the narrator only vaguely considers
leaving the situation, and ultimately decides that changing their names would be a sufficient
defense. The narrator is so accustomed to anxiety-filled situations, that this one does not
cause the alarm that it should. The narrator appears to be paralyzed by the same social norm
that restrains him daily; although the old man’s conversation is inappropriate, the narrator
waits until the monologue has ended, and then “[stands] up…lest [he] should betray [his]
agitation [and] delayed a few moments pretending to fix [his] shoe properly and then, saying
that [he] was obliged to go…bade him a good-day” (Joyce, Dubliners 27-8). Despite the old
man’s wildly inappropriate rhetoric, and the narrator’s own feelings of terror, he is “obliged”
to perform social niceties before making his exit.
The narrator’s recurrent blind spot toward dangerous situations prevents him from
being able to acknowledge his trauma or address his complacency. After the narrator escapes
in terror from the old pervert, he calls out for Mahony: “How my heart beat as he came
running across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my
39
heart I had always despised him a little” (Joyce, Dubliners 18). While the narrator’s rapidly
beating heart indicates the danger of the situation his mind does not accept it, indicated by
the narrator’s perception that Mahony ran “as if” to bring aid that he did not need. Mahony,
who the narrator claims is “stupid,” comprehends the harrowing nature of their situation far
better than the narrator.
The characters in “The Sisters” and “An Encounter,” who thus far cannot
acknowledge their trauma, are contrasted with characters in later stories who do acknowledge
their traumatic experiences; however, they do not seem to find themselves in a much better
position. The epiphanic moments in Joyce’s texts often reveal paralysis; specifically, these
epiphanies generally suggest to the receiver that his or her situation in society cannot be
improved. It is interesting to note that although Joyce coined the modern conception of the
‘epiphany’ as an illuminative and influential moment, this characterization of epiphany
remains conspicuously absent, or close to it, from Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. The epiphanic moments in this work are characterized by a sense of falsity by
artificially affirming movement in a static life in these individuals, or conversely, the
illumination from the epiphanic moment reaffirms bleak outlooks and the paralytic
conditions of these characters. Peter Mahon argues that “the ‘epiphany’ as found in
Dubliners is something fragmentary and incomplete” (4), which I would argue is the
manifestation of a trauma that has been banished from consciousness. While the characters
may be enlightened to their paralytic condition, they are no closer to comprehending why or
how their situation began because it remains as a pre-verbal traumatic experience.
Additionally, these epiphanies can remain unknown or be perceived differently by the
narrator, protagonist, and reader.
Arguably, the powerlessness to affect one’s conditions could lead to an investigation
for a point when everything went downhill. This tactic would allow an individual to maintain
a sense of control in a world where he/she remains stagnant. I would argue in “Araby” that
the protagonist has a “retrospective epiphany” which, according to Beja, “is one in which an
event arouses no special impression when it occurs, but produces a sudden sensation of new
awareness when it is recalled at some future time” (15). Epiphanic moments could come
years after as a defense mechanism by creating a reason for the stagnation in his/her life. In
Joyce’s “Araby,” we encounter the protagonist, a young adolescent boy whose epiphanic
40
moment is a realized after he decides to attend the Araby fair to buy a present to impress his
friend’s sister: “gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by
vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (Dubliners 35). This epiphany seems
like a pretty harsh criticism for a young adolescent boy and is coupled with a complete lack
of a child-like tone telling the story which indicates that it might not be an authentically
presented epiphanic moment. The previous story in Dubliners, “An Encounter,” uses
language much more reminiscent of how children speak which immediately draws attention
to the lack of child-like language in “Araby.” It seems as though the narrator might be an
adult version of the boy reflecting years later upon what he considers to be the quintessential
‘epiphanic moment,’ as a method to cope with the stagnation of his current situation.
Although the narrator does not explicitly state that this epiphanic moment came to fruition
years later, there are indications that that is the case. Specific passages indicate that it is
probably not a young boy speaking: “I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life
which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly
monotonous child’s play” (Joyce, Dubliners 32). The scorn the narrator feels toward ‘child’s
play’ seems to indicate that the narrator must necessarily be in an older state of mind, or have
created some construct to define himself apart from ‘children’ his own age.17 “Araby,” much
like Joyce’s “The Sisters” seems to be purposefully ambiguous – although, it seems to be the
work of a retroactive epiphany based upon the themes throughout Dubliners.
The narrator constructs the ‘epiphanic moment’ as though it occurred to the young
protagonist, but it seems far more likely that it is his own construction of the moment years
after. If that is indeed the case, the protagonist is haunted by the aftermath of his perceived
17
Some critics suggest there is another explanation for the discrepancy between the narrator’s voice and
an actual language of a young boy. If we assume that it is the actual narrative of a young boy, it would appear
that he has acquired his language and ideas from a source outside of himself. At the beginning of the story, the
protagonist describes his exploration of a former priest’s house. Inside the house, he finds several books
including The Abbot by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq. The first two
books, if absorbed by the young boy, might have provided the language and basis of guilt for his ‘epiphany.’
The protagonist uses religious metaphors throughout the story, indicating that he may have parroted language
that he has accrued from the priest’s books: “I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes”
(Joyce, Dubliners 31) which seems to be a plausible construction for a child to make between religion and
adventure, and seems to be a plausible fusion between the adventures in The Memoirs of Vidocq and the
religious texts. Even if some might suggest that the narrator is a child, it still supports my argument that the
narrator is using borrowed language to construct his epiphany and therefore it is still constrictive.
41
shame. The acute shame described by the epiphany in “Araby” indicates the aftermath of
trauma through the method in which it manifests itself. The protagonist, “gaz[es] up into the
darkness… [and sees himself] as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and [his] eyes
burned with anguish and anger” (Joyce, Dubliners 35). The protagonist’s shamefully recalled
epiphany is imagistic, bodily based, and painful to recollect. Shame is not only characterized
by appearance but also of imagined appearance – meaning that shame from one’s behavior
can be imagined, or exaggerated. Arguably, the protagonist’s epiphany/moment of shame
seems rather extreme for the context. I would argue that the moment identified by the
protagonist is a vorstellungsrepräsentaz – what is represented in the story is not the actual
moment of trauma, but rather a representative moment in which the protagonist has pinned
his stagnation upon. The idea of no hope is too difficult to bear and by blaming his actions on
a specified past event, the protagonist is able to have a coping mechanism for his current
situation.
Dubliners provides clear examples of trauma, but the structure of A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man evidences the reliving of trauma. The trauma that Stephen experiences
is more subtle than those experienced in Dubliners, although the traumatic aftermath from
dysfunctional family relations weaves throughout Stephen’s life. The childhood trauma
evidenced in Dubliners provides the groundwork for a critical analysis of Stephen’s youth.
Much like the larger cycle of paralysis we see throughout the whole of Dubliners, each
chapter in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins on a low note and ends in a
moment of ecstasy, much like a wave which breaks, recedes, reaches its crescendo, and
repeats. The highest and lowest points in Stephen’s life illustrate how his character has been
shaped. In every chapter Stephen becomes disillusioned by something/someone he has held
in esteem and then stumbles on a solution; however, each solution is overturned by the
subsequent chapter, which suggests that Stephen’s artistic hopes at the end of the novel may
be defeated by some new challenge – which is ultimately what happens in Joyce’s later
novel, Ulysses. The repetitive cycle signals that there is a point of trauma underlying the
novel that leads Stephen to have a relatively similar crisis at each point in his life which he
resolves by rejecting his previous allegiances. Stephen faces a paralysis in the form of
repetition – although he moves in different directions, he never moves beyond his initial
trauma. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen receives a rebuke by Dante early
42
in his life for his affection for a protestant girl – the trauma that results is from Stephen
feeling different from the girl while not entirely comprehending why, and results in guilt for
his feelings, which must be “wrong.” The text ends in hopefulness for Stephen – he leaves
Ireland for the continent, presumably along with the paralysis that Joyce would suggest is
inherent with Ireland. However, in Ulysses we find Stephen called back to Ireland after a
three year stint in Paris to be with his mother on her deathbed. Her one request was to have
Stephen pray for her, which he refuses, resulting in a low point again. Overcome with guilt
for his refusal to pray, he dreams, “she had come to him after her death, her wasted body
within its loose brown grave-clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath,
that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes” (Joyce, Ulysses
102-7). Stephen’s dream paints a horrifying image of his mother as a corpse wasting away.
The degradation of Stephen’s mother’s in his dream, particularly her “reproachful breath”
indicates that he projects his overwhelming guilt concerning his mother in the dream.
Stephen finds himself once again at a cyclic crisis from feelings of guilt that he is unable to
break.
Much like his character, Stephen, Joyce eschewed his “Irrland” to live in several
different countries on the continent, but he always returns to Ireland in his texts.18 In his
works, Joyce writes what he knows: he conveys the trauma of a nation that has been
colonized and subjected by England. Notably, when Arthur Power told him he intended to
write like the French satirists, Joyce replied, “you are an Irishman and you must write in your
own tradition. Borrowed styles are no good. You must write what is in your blood and not
what is in your brain” (Joyce, Letters 505). Ironically, the Irish, and Joyce himself, utilize a
“borrowed” language – the English language, to communicate. In Dubliners, Joyce attempts
to communicate in plain English the resounding trauma of Dubliners – and in all fifteen
stories the characters indirectly express their repressed condition which has led to their
paralysis. Within the first paragraph of the first story in Dubliners, Joyce alerts the reader to
the peculiarity of the (English) language: “Every night as I gazed up at the window I said
18
On Shem’s exile to Europe in Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce writes “He even ran away with hunself and
became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle
with Irrland's split little pea” (Joyce 171).
43
softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word
gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like
the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be
nearer to it and look upon its deadly work” (Joyce, Dubliners 9). The narrator notes his
sensory reaction to the word – it sounds strange to his ears, indicating an unfamiliarity and
unnaturalness of the word. Notably, the other words that perturb the narrator, gnomon and
simony, are symbolic of figures of authority – education and the church. These lines indicate
the unnaturalness of the borrowed language to the Irish narrator which “fills him with fear,
and yet” he longs to be near it to “look upon its deadly work.” The narrator fears the
oppressive nature of language and is simultaneously drawn to it, as the only method of
communicating – particularly of communicating trauma. It is horrifying, yet we need to look
upon its deadly work to acknowledge trauma to stop the cycle of repetition.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce experiments with different
techniques that, in addition to shaping the language of modernism, also carved out a unique
language that was all his own. Joyce creates an offshoot of the English language that allows
him to effectively communicate on his terms. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
expands the modern literary technique known as stream of consciousness,19 and was even
further developed throughout his later novels. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man posits
the need for a language that is different than their oppressors: “the language in which we are
speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, mater, on his
lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language,
so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech” (Joyce, A Portrait
137). This meditation suggests Stephen understands that English will never be ‘his’ language,
and thus he cannot communicate as effectively with it as his oppressors. Thus Joyce subverts
the English language and creates a form of modern communication that becomes more and
more his own creation as his works continue.
Because of the subversive nature of the English language in Ireland, it is not the
primary defense mechanism that Stephen uses. For example, when Stephen feels “small and
19
Dorothy Richardson is generally credited in crafting stream of consciousness but it developed
simultaneously in many modernist authors.
44
weak and pained” as a child because he does not contextually understand “what politics
[mean]…[and] where the universe ended”(Joyce, A Portrait 8) he copes with it through an
imaginary travel through time and space: “First came the vacation and then the next term
and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a
train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys eating in the refectory
when you opened and closed the flaps of the ears. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop.
How far away it was!” (Joyce, A Portrait 9). Stephen’s thoughts move by association – he
imagines a time when he will have more knowledge and concurrently, power, which spirals
out to a general meditation on what will happen until he reaches that point. In these
associations, Stephen utilizes all the sensory organs – notably, this seems to suggest that
language is not privileged. Van Boheeman-Saaf postulates that Stephen’s action of opening
and closing his earflaps in conjunction with sounds and words is “Stephen’s method for
coping with the anxiety…the ears in conjunction with language patterned as ritual play,
poetry almost” (57). Stephen’s coping mechanism for his perceived weakness is a
combination of bodily movement fused with language, which is a new form of
communication that doesn’t rely solely upon language.
In his youth, Stephen uses rhythm to dissociate from uncomfortable realities, but at
the culmination of the novel, he uses a journal. Up until the final few pages, Stephen’s
thoughts are communicated by free indirect speech, or stream of consciousness, in the third
person. By concluding with a diary written in the first person, the reader is in the unique
position to overhear what Stephen refers to as “his revolt,” and then see what Stephen has
written about that same event. The conversation begins with Cranly asking whether or not
Stephen has felt love for anything, such as his mother. In response, Stephen questions what
Cranly means by love. Once defined, Stephen admits that he has tried to love God, but that
has failed. From there Stephen declares that he must leave Ireland and Catholicism because
he “will not serve that in which [he] no longer believe[s]” (Joyce, A Portrait 181). Stephen
then steers the conversation to why he can leave: “I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned
for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even
a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too” (Joyce, A Portrait
181). Stephen proclaims his freedom from mistakes yet throughout the novel and into
Ulysses, he is plagued by guilt from his mistakes. While Stephen denies the guilt that has
45
previously plagued him, he switches the subject, perhaps to avoid too much contemplation, to
exposing Cranly’s pre-vocalized fear of loneliness. Stephen exposes Cranly’s fear which
allows him to divert the attention from his own fears onto his friend. Notably in his diary,
which van Boheemen argues is “words written by the self, to the self, in order not to forget
the self – as a speech act of linguistic self-maintenance in the face of the threatened
dissolution of subjectivity” (259) Stephen chooses to focus exclusively on the first, and
arguably least important, part of the argument: “Attacked me on the score of love for one’s
mother” and from there he moves toward a tangent trying to picture Cranly’s mother – again
diverting the attention from his own psychology to Cranly’s. As van Boheemen suggests,
Stephen uses language to maintain an ideal perception of himself and to avoid contemplation
of any situations that do not support that ideal.
Stephen’s declaration that he does not love suggests another traumatic disconnect –
Stephen has no connections with a larger community. Like many of the characters who suffer
the aftermath of a trauma, Stephen does not feel a strong sense of identification with anyone.
In his childhood, we can clearly see fragmented self notions based upon his relationship with
his peers. Stephen’s sense of community is often damaged by encounters with his peers as a
schoolboy; however, he uses remarkable methods to re-establish his identity. At school, the
boys tease Stephen by asking, “Do you kiss your mother before you go to bed?” (Joyce, A
Portrait 6). After receiving laughter for his original answer, Stephen quickly changes his
response. Whatever his response, he is met with the same mockery. Much like the narrator in
“An Encounter,” Stephen creates his response based upon negative feedback from his peers.
Despite his efforts, he does not receive approval as a schoolboy. After these painful
encounters, Stephen utilizes anchoring as a defense mechanism to maintain identity despite
trauma, much like Rhoda in The Waves. In response to feeling small and weak in his school,
Stephen anchors himself by listing himself in incrementally larger groups that he categorizes
himself as:
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Congowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
46
The World
The Universe (Joyce, A Portrait 7-8)
Because Stephen does not fit in at school, he relies upon listing facts that anchor him to that
identity. Thus by documenting his place within the community, Stephen carves a place for
himself in the world that is more solid than his confused relationship with his peers.
In Dubliners, we encounter a group of individuals who are defined by a larger
community: they are canvassers for a local politician. As the story goes on, we can see that
their sense of community is in name only. The disillusioned canvassers in “Ivy Day in the
Committee Room,” which take place on Ivy Day20 demonstrates the lack of faith and the
fragmentation within the political realm. The story describes canvassers who half-heartedly
support their candidate: Mr. Crofton had been a canvasser for the conservative party, but
when the party withdrew he chose “the lesser of two evils, [and had] given [his] support to
the Nationalist candidate” (Joyce, Dubliners 131); Mr. Henchy alternates between supporting
and condemning his candidate; and all of the canvassers remain in the committee room and
drink instead of rallying for their candidate. The group is assembled to spread their politics to
a larger community; ironically, they have no sense of communal identity within their own
party. This is most clearly evidenced by their radically different opinions of Parnell, a
politician whom many believed could unify Irish politics.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man goes beyond “Ivy Day in the Committee
Room,” by illustrating not only the fragmentation within Irish politics, but also the
fragmentation caused by Irish politics. Stephen prepares for his journey home for the
Christmas holiday from school, a moment he has been counting down throughout the year,
when news arrives of Parnell’s death. Stephen’s idealized Christmas, which marks a move
toward adulthood, never comes to fruition due to a fight that erupts over religion and politics
20
Ivy Day, celebrated on October 6th, commemorates Charles Stuart Parnell’s death in 1891. Parnell’s
achievements include popularizing Home Rule which was a form of self-rule, whilst remaining part of the
United Kingdom and President of the Irish Land League which worked toward first reducing rent that farmer
tenants owed land lords and then toward tenant farmers eventually owning the land themselves. Unfortunately,
much of Ireland turned against Parnell after his affair with Kitty O’Shea was made public. After her divorce, he
married her, which was not popular among his numerous Catholics supporters because remarriage after divorce
is forbidden under Catholic doctrine. Subsequently, Irish politics were largely fractured.
47
stemming from the Catholic opinion of Parnell.21 Although Stephen does not recognize many
of the political illusions, he understands the general tone of the dinner. The dinner begins in a
joking manner: while trying to figure out if Mr. Carson had a purse of silver in his throat,
Stephen checks the palm of Mr. Carson’s hand when he notices his fingers cannot be
straightened. Mr. Carson responds “he got those three cramped fingers making a birthday
present for Queen Victoria” (Joyce, A Portrait 17), meaning Mr. Carson has been a prisoner
and his hands are permanently cramped from making sacks and picking oakum in prison
camps (Ellmann 23). Stephen brushes off these comments because he does not understand
them, and laughs at his own ideas and perceptions while his family laughs at their own jokes.
In an already tumultuous move to adulthood, a heated debate occurs regarding the role of
religion in politics; in particular, the Catholic’s rejection of Parnell. The fight illustrates the
fragmentation of the varied beliefs and the fragmentation it causes within Stephen who
attempt to confirm the validity of both arguments out of love and loyalty to each faction.
Stephen is faced with denying his own identity because two factions of his collective family
identity, his father and his aunt, tear down their others’ fundamental beliefs. Stephen works
to figure out which one, or both are correct. Ultimately, he rectifies their fraction, and his
own internal strife, by concluding, “He was for Ireland and Parnell and so was his father: as
so was Dante too for one night at the band on the esplanade she had hit a gentleman on the
head with her umbrella because he had taken off his hat when the band played God save the
Queen” (Joyce, A Portrait 24). Stephen rectifies their argument through his reasoning that
they are both for Ireland and thus both are correct. However, his efforts are too little avail:
the adults are not able to perceive Stephen’s broader sense of community. Dante storms off
angrily and his father and father’s friend are in tears. His collective family becomes literally
fractured.
The inability to identify with others is also demonstrated in Dubliners final story,
“The Dead.” To conclude Dubliners, Joyce characterizes the protagonist, Gabriel, by his
inability to accurately read his relationships with others. Gabriel focuses solely upon his own
21
When Joyce was a boy, a very similar scene occurred also at a Christmas dinner – the fight between his
governess, Dante, and Mr. John Kelly, a political prisoner who was imprisoned for giving speeches in defense
of Parnell, seemed to be traumatizing enough to stay with him.
48
unknowingly inaccurate interpretation of events, while, ironically, worrying about how he is
perceived by others. This misperception of others’ feelings results in embarrassment caused
by assuming Lily’s romantic status, a misinterpretation of Miss. Ivor’s intentions, and
mistaking his wife’s sorrow as romance. Unbeknownst to Gabriel, his wife is overcome when
she hears a song that her childhood sweetheart used to sing. While watching his wife, he
imagines that she is “symbolic of something” which rekindles his romantic feelings toward
her. Gabriel’s perception of Gretta as a symbol suggests that their relationship is built upon a
representation of what he perceives a relationship is rather than a relationship forged by
connection. After his wife confides that the music triggered sorrow for her childhood
sweetheart, Gabriel recognizes the depth of his misperception. Gabriel’s epiphanic moment
occurs when he looks into the mirror and “[sees] himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a
pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and
idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous figure” (Joyce, Dubliners 220). Back
to back, Gabriel recognizes the falsity of his marriage and his own inadequacy among all his
relationships which leads to him tearing down his belief systems, all which indicate a more
generalized traumatic experience. Similarly to the previous stories, this epiphany is
characterized by shame and dread. While Gabriel comprehends that his behavior is
“ludicrous,” he misunderstands why. He attributes his foolishness to his sentimentalism and
idealizations that his “vulgarian” audience would not understand, and yet failing to see that it
is his lack of connection with his community that causes his misperceptions. His epiphany,
which succeeds in enlightening Gabriel in his foolishness, fails to expose what would likely
provide an opportunity to heal: that he is the author of his own misperceptions.
Many of these moments are recalled due to their traumatizing nature – the impact
upon the individual is far greater than quotidian experiences. In Dubliners, the opportunity
for an epiphany from these traumatic experiences is stifled by what Goleman describes as
vital lies: which are defense mechanisms to reframe one’s traumatic or paralytic situation to
maintain normative beliefs. These characters only catch glimpses of their trauma or epiphany
before they reframe it into a vital lie that fits in with the narrative they believe to be true. As
Joyce points out, particularly in Dubliners, the collective paralysis shows the repeated
inability to perceive ones trauma and therefore change one’s situation. Throughout these two
works, we see acute symptoms of trauma, but it is never coped with or discussed.
49
CHAPTER 4
D. H. LAWRENCE – HAD NOT THE POWER TO
BREAK AWAY
Trauma theory is particularly relevant to reading the modern novel because the
techniques of modernism lend themselves to this reading; by considering modernist
techniques such as stream of consciousness, fractured language, and epiphanies as symptoms
of trauma we can begin to understand the attempt to cope with the traumatic event.
Attempting to placate their trauma, characters use repression, self-soothing, and repetition –
which although easing temporary discomfort, cannot provide a long-term recovery from the
characters’ trauma. Throughout all the modernist works explored, we see no indication of
recovery from the traumatic event, yet we see a lot of attempts to placate the initial trauma.
Ultimately, the greatest hope for these characters is exile, a concept which had negative
connotations in earlier literature, but seems to hold some hope for the traumatized modern
period. In Mansfield, we confront the traumatic situation and see an anticipation of the
aftermath that is to follow the trauma. Woolf focuses on the much more personal effects of
the aftermath of an unnamed traumatic events and Joyce focuses on the more general trauma
that is caused by the paralysis of a nation. Contrasted with the other authors explored here, D.
H. Lawrence much more vastly interprets the characters’ mental states for the reader. Rather
than letting the symptoms of traumatic aftermath indicate fissures in the character, Lawrence
clearly states the mental effect these traumatic events have on the characters. In Lawrence’s
texts, we find a range of traumatic situations, from more general traumatic conditions to
complete trajectories stemming from the point of trauma and can even lead to the untimely
death of the characters. Cornelia Nixon contends that Lawrence’s “characters become sick or
well, powerful or weak, according to their psychological condition” (128). Most of the deaths
in Lawrence’s work are psychological in nature, as seen in the works discussed here. Again,
the trauma in Lawrence’s works illustrates a full spectrum of trauma, including unhealthy
familial relationships, class relations, repressed sexuality, and war trauma. All of Lawrence’s
50
stories that are considered here have one uniting aspect: the characters experience trauma
resulting from the character’s epiphany. When the characters begin to recognize that their
perceived identity does not match their real identity the characters must confront the
discrepancy or attempt to mask it. The problem according to Michael Squires, is that “part of
Lawrence’s modernity is that – for his characters, as for Virginia Woolf’s – history is
registered as a set of inherited human prejudices that are antagonistic to instinct and
intuition” (85). Despite the character’s efforts to make autonomous decisions regarding his
or her identity, he or she is met by ineffectuality and futility because their identities are based
upon false conceptions. No matter if the characters attempt to control, accept, or rebel from,
their surroundings, they find themselves precariously supporting an identity that is built from
defense mechanisms. Thus many of the characters look to exile themselves to escape facing
the crushing of their carefully crafted façade.
D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow unfolds a family saga that follows three generations.
In particular, the final generation, and longest section, focuses on Ursula whose traumatic
relationship with her father, Will Brangwen, negatively influences her later actions. Squires
suggests that “Lawrence’s characters often move toward a fateful or violent act linked in its
contours to history, than shy away from it – rejecting, repressing, or evading it” (86), and
thus, Ursula is trapped by traumatic patterns from her childhood. Ursula’s traumatic
relationship with her father stems from psychological causes rather than more obvious
physical or verbal causes, yet the symptoms of traumatic aftermath from her mistreatment
follows Ursula into adulthood. As a child, Ursula develops in an environment of tumultuous
passion between her parents, Anna and Will, and is often caught in her father’s crossfire.
Ursula unintentionally walks over her father’s newly planted garden and he chastises her and
she feels “her vulnerable little soul was flayed and trampled… She stood dazzled with pain
and shame and unreality. Her soul, her consciousness seemed to die away. She became shut
off and senseless” (Lawrence, The Rainbow 266). Later, Ursula “will[s] herself to forget” and
to play instead. At a very young age, Ursula quickly learns defense mechanisms to keep her
father from shattering her delicate self-esteem. Despite always being on guard for her father’s
abusive behavior, Ursula believes “everything her father did was magic” (Lawrence, The
Rainbow 282) yet the narrator describes her as one who, “seemed to run in the shadow of
some dark, potent secret of which she would not, of whose existence even she dared not
51
become conscious, it cast such a spell over her, and so darkened her mind” (Lawrence, The
Rainbow 282). According to Goleman, blind spots are especially tempting to those who are
sensitive to pain, and subsequent to her traumatic encounter is her proclamation that her
father’s actions are “magic.” This indicates that Ursula is likely repressing her father’s abuse
to herself and masking his behavior as “magical.”
Will Brangwen deliberately and repeatedly frightens Ursula as a child by jumping off
bridges into water (Lawrence, The Rainbow 267) and by taking her daringly high on the
swingboats. Despite her wide, dialated eyes, her white lips, and the onlookers crying shame,
Ursula’s father does not stop swinging the boats until they are nearly horizontal. Upon
exiting the swingboats, Ursula has a visceral reaction: she vomits. Ursula’s father compels
her not to “tell your mother you’ve been sick” (Lawrence, The Rainbow 268) and she never
does tell, further indicating either her fear or loyalty to her abuser. The chapter, “The Child,”
shows that Ursula acts through repetition compulsion. Ursula repeatedly goes along with her
father’s daredevil stunts even though she is either terrified, ill, or injured by these events.
Ursula is haunted by repetitive compulsion long after she is tortured regularly by her father.
While she is pregnant, Ursula believes she is about to be run down by horses, that “they
would burst before her. They would burst before her. Her feet went on and on. And tense,
and more tense, became her nerves and her veins, they ran hot, they ran white hot, they must
fuse and she must die” (Lawrence, The Rainbow 540). While she fears that the horses will
burst through and kill her, she does not or cannot do anything to avoid contact with the
horses. Yet, “she must draw near” despite the possibility of being injured or even dying
(Lawrence, The Rainbow 541).22 Ursula’s fear is indicated by her repetition of language and
the imagistic flashes in which the scene is described. After her traumatic encounter with the
horses, Ursula falls sick for a fortnight which was likely psychological in nature and one of
the causes of her miscarriage.
22
Nixon suggests that the horses could represent male virility, childbirth, opposition between primal urges
and civilized behavior, and could be either real or imagined. Whatever the horses are symbols of, I would like to
suggest an unconsidered psychological interpretation for her interaction with the horses – repetitive compulsion
based upon the past traumatic experiences with her father.
52
The traumatic events in Ursula’s life are not exclusively personal traumas, like the
examples above. Ursula also suffers from more general trauma that causes feelings of
misanthropy and depression. Ursula’s first epiphany occurs after her disillusionment of the
purpose of the university and the wave-like nature of events in her life.23 Ursula recognizes
there is a world beyond what most acknowledge - a world of darkness and beasts:
That which she was, positively, was dark and unrevealed, it could not come
forth…This world in which she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp. This
lighted area, lit up by man’s completest consciousness, she thought was all the
world: that here all was disclosed for ever…This inner circle of light in which she
lived and moved, wherein the trains rushed and the factories ground out their
machine-produce and the plants and the animals worked by the light of science
and knowledge, suddenly it seemed like the area under an arc-lamp, wherein the
moths and children played in the security of blinding light, not even knowing
there was any darkness, because they stayed in the light. (Lawrence, The Rainbow
487-88)
Ursula’s epiphany provides a flash of what is beyond “the light,” and the inability of most to
acknowledge more primal blind spots within the unconscious mind. Ursula’s comprehension
of blind spots pits her against any modern mind that refuses to acknowledge a more
animalistic and primal urges within the unconscious mind, and can be seen in her repulsion
for her Uncle Tom and her former lover, Winifred. In the same chapter as her first epiphany,
“The Bitterness of Ecstasy,” her first epiphany is expounded upon while she is looking at the
nucleus of a cell, Ursula suddenly feels “she could not understand what it all was. She only
knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preservation, and
self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite”
(Lawrence, The Rainbow 491-2). This epiphany frees Ursula from being forced to do
anything based upon social reasoning. It ultimately empowers Ursula to make her own
judgments based upon what she deems best, not what is best for society. These epiphanies
remove illusion from her life and she begins to recognize the illusions of those once close to
her, such as Sherbensky, Winifred, and her Uncle Tom which eventually leads to her
alienation from them.
23
Like Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ursula runs into a similar cyclical routine of
anticipating the next move in her life only to be disappointed. Unlike Stephen, Ursula is able to recognize this
cyclical paralysis: “Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon
approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead” (487).
53
The culmination of The Rainbow brings hope for Ursula. Although she is aware that many
still live only within the “arc-light” of consciousness she has a premonition that “she saw in
the rainbow the earth’s new architecture…the world built up in a living fabric of Truth,
fitting to the overarching heaven” (Lawrence, The Rainbow 548). Ursula finds optimism in
the rainbow despite, or because of, her traumatic experience. She is able to exile herself from
most of the relationships that do not benefit her, with the exception of her relationship with
father. In Women in Love, Ursula finds a partner who has seen the darkness beyond human
consciousness, albeit to a greater extreme. While Ursula has the same hesitancies about
marriage as she does in The Rainbow she finds herself attracted to Rupert Birkin, but she
resists his proposal because she does not believe he can provide her with self-abandoned
love, and “she wanted to have him, utterly, finally to have him as her own” (Lawrence,
Women in Love 477) After a tumultuous courtship, Ursula and Rupert marry; however,
Rupert still holds fast to the idea of having two loves.24 Women in Love ends with Ursula
declaring that he “can’t have [two loves], because it’s false, impossible,” to which he
responds that he believes it is possible (Lawrence 882). While The Rainbow ends in an
edifying moment, Women in Love suggests that Ursula and Rupert will likely continue to
have a difficult and argumentative relationship, not unlike her parents.
In The Rainbow Ursula’s epiphanic moments allow her to see the darkness beyond
the arc-light of consciousness; in “The Prussian Officer,” we find characters who repress
aspects of themselves in order to have a self-image that is according to their beliefs.
Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer” details traumatic events which cause the characters’
desperation to escape the traumatic aftermath by developing more elaborate defense
mechanisms that become ingrained into the identity of the characters. “The Prussian Officer”
focuses on the trauma caused by latent homosexuality between an officer and his orderly.25
24
Birkin does have a diverse sexuality and to discuss all the complexities of their relationship would take
further exploration.
25
There is some disagreement about homosexuality in the story which ranges from reading the two main
characters with latent homosexuality, as I do, to a more middle of the road approach, such as Graham Hough
who suggests that the story is about a “quasi-homosexual relation between an officer and his peasant orderly.”
See Graham Hough’s The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. Some critics even deny any homosexuality at
all between the two officers, “there is nothing homosexual about this relationship.” See Mark Spilka’s The Love
Ethic of D. H. Lawrence.
54
Both the officer and the orderly suppress their homosexuality, but they use different defense
mechanisms. When the orderly catches the officer’s eyes he feels “some of his natural
completeness in himself was gone… And from that time an undiscovered feeling had held
between the two men. Henceforth the orderly was afraid of really meeting his master”
(Lawrence, “The Prussian Officer” 97). The orderly avoids looking at his officer so he does
not need to repress the “undiscovered feeling” between them. The orderly’s defense
mechanism largely relies upon the concept out of sight out of mind to maintain his lacuna
regarding his homosexuality. On the other hand, the officer does not avoid the orderly to
maintain his lacuna because he blames the orderly for any misplaced feelings he has: “the
officer tried hard not to admit the passion that had got hold of him. He would not know that
his feeling for his orderly was anything but that of a man incensed by his stupid, perverse
servant” (Lawrence, “The Prussian Officer”100). To repress his unconscious homosexual
desires, the officer must maintain his façade of control and to blame any “stirring[s] of his
innate self” (Lawrence, “The Prussian Officer 98) on the orderly.
The officer’s attempts to repress any “stirring[s] of his innate self” creates a different outlet
for his stirrings - sadism:
So, keeping quite justified and conventional in his consciousness, he let the thing
run on. His nerves, however, were suffering. At last he slung the end of a belt in
his servant’s face. When he saw the youth start back, the pain-tears in his eyes
and the blood on his mouth, he had felt at once a thrill of deep pleasure and of
shame. But this, he acknowledged to himself, was a thing he had never done
before. The fellow was too exasperating. His own nerves must be going to pieces.
(Lawrence, “The Prussian Officer 100)
The officer transfers his homosexual desires to sadistic behavior, an outlet that is still
unacceptable for his closely monitored façade, “he had prevented his mind from taking it in,
had suppressed it along with his instincts, and the conscious man had nothing to do with
it…Of the drunkenness of his passion he successfully refused remembrance” (Lawrence,
“The Prussian Officer 103). After both physically and emotionally abusing his orderly, the
officer drinks to repress the memory of his sadistic behavior. The homosexual or sadistic
behavior does not fit into the officer’s schema of how he identifies himself, so he represses
any behavior that does not match what he perceives to be his identity. Homosexuality and
sadism do not fit into the officer’s perception of his identity, thus he must repress those
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feelings or suffer from cognitive dissonance, or a crisis from holding two beliefs that cannot
coexist.
In response to the physical and emotional traumatic events he endures, the orderly
develops defense mechanisms to numb the aftermath: “Gradually his head began to revolve,
slowly, rhythmically. Sometimes it was dark before his eyes, as if he saw this world through
a smoked glass, frail shadows and unreal” (Lawrence, “The Prussian Officer” 106). The
orderly develops blindness or fogginess to prevent himself from perceiving the harsh
brutality of his officer, and the officer himself. Similarly to the officer’s repression of his
sadistic behaviors, the orderly attempts to repress his officer entirely. The orderly’s defense
is ultimately less successful than his officer’s because fails every time he detects a living
being within his captain: “He clung to this situation – that the Captain did not exist – so that
he himself might live. But when he saw his officer’s hand tremble as he took the coffee, he
felt everything falling shattered” (Lawrence, “The Prussian Officer”105). The orderly’s
attempt to repress the knowledge of his officer is ultimately unsuccessful because he wishes
to repress the existence of the officer: a near impossible task when the orderly’s job identity
is tied to serving the officer. Rather than ignoring specific behaviors that are unacceptable to
the officer identity, the orderly attempts a much larger task to repress the officer entirely.
Accordingly, the orderly is “shattered” because he simultaneously depends on repressing the
officer entirely to maintain his identity, yet his job identity is dependent upon serving the
officer.
Because the orderly cannot preserve his identity while acknowledging the officer’s
existence because it would acknowledge abuse and latent homosexuality, and yet still
depends upon the officer for job identity, the orderly has a split identity that cannot be
maintained. As a result, the orderly kills the officer to rectify his identity. After killing the
officer the orderly feels, “It was a pity it was broken. It represented more than the thing
which had kicked and bullied him” (Lawrence, “The Prussian Officer” 110). Even after the
officer’s death, the orderly cannot acknowledge his existence as a human, and instead refers
to his deceased officer as an “it.” Interestingly, the orderly acknowledges that the officer’s
death “represents more than the thing which had kicked and bullied him,” which indicates
that he is aware on some level that the need to kill the officer was driven by more than the
physical abuse. But whether he can perceive the latent homosexuality or just the need to
56
maintain his identity is left unclear. Squires states that the orderly’s murder of the officer
does not have the liberating effect, “the Orderly escapes not into freedom but into the subtle
captivity of mental derangement” (86-7).
“A Shadow in the Rose Garden” by Lawrence uses war as trauma more subtly than
“The Prussian Officer,” and even The Rainbow, yet it plays a more integral role in the story.
In “A Shadow in the Rose Garden,” the female protagonist suffers a traumatic shock when
she realizes that the man she used to love is not only alive after the war, but is also a
“lunatic.” After she accidentally runs into him, the female protagonist flees home in a panic
and attempts to restrict her feelings to limit the pain. Yet she is unable to maintain her stoic
façade when questioned by her husband: “but suddenly she lifted her head again swiftly, like
a thing that tries to get free. She wanted to be free of it. It was not him so much, but it,
something she had put on herself, that bound her so horribly. And having put the bond on
herself, it was the hardest to take it off. But now she hated everything and felt destructive”
(Lawrence, “A Shadow” 230). The female protagonist’s behavior vacillates from cold and
unfeeling to hateful and destructive. By repressing her initial shock, she represses to
unfeeling her intense feelings of meeting her old lover who has gone mad. However, she is
not able to maintain unfeeling, and it transfers to hate and destructive behavior toward her
husband.
Much like Septimus’ wife Rezia, who will not tell the world that her husband is
“mad”, the female protagonist faces great anguish to admit that her former lover has a mental
disease: “‘he is not dead, he’s mad…a lunatic’…it almost cost her her reason to utter the
word” (Lawrence, “A Shadow” 233). The female protagonist illustrates the societal mindset
toward mental illness – that it is to be feared and not to be discussed without consequences.
The female protagonist only blurts it out because of her vacillation into a “destructive” mood
from her traumatic experience. Interestingly, the protagonist believes that discussing her
former lover’s madness “almost cost her her reason.” While the feeling that she is “losing her
reason” is certainly caused by the shock and pain of learning that her former lover is indeed
alive, although mentally incapacitated, I would argue that it is also caused by her
acknowledgement of a socially inacceptable truth: that her former lover was mentally
handicapped by the war. There are only a few sentences dedicated to the origin of the
protagonist’s lover’s madness– he went off to fight in Africa, where he later died from
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sunstroke. Later the female protagonist admits to her husband that she had just discovered
that he had not died – that he was mad. The female protagonist is guilty of propagating the
same lie that had been told to her: that death is preferable outcome to madness.
While Lawrence explores the traumatic encounters, which stem from war and
sexuality, and the aftermath that ensues in “The Prussian Officer” and “A Shadow in the
Rose Garden,” which are more reminiscent of Woolf ‘s texts, he also explores a more general
trauma, seen in Joyce’s work as well as a pervasive class-based trauma, as seen in
Mansfield’s work. In “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” and “Daughters of the Vicar,” `the
modern traumatic aesthetic is widespread throughout the storylines. The pervasiveness of
trauma throughout Lawrence’s work is illustrated by his personification of the setting as
traumatized, hopeless, and paralyzed. In “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” the remaining
siblings sat around the “desolate breakfast table…[and] the dreary dining-room itself, with its
heavy mahogany furniture, looked as if it were waiting to be done away with” (Lawrence
441). This personified setting adopts the emotions of the siblings that remain in the room
after their father’s death and subsequent bankruptcy. In “Daughters of the Vicar,” the
personification of the setting goes beyond simply ascribing the feelings of the characters in
its room; it is personified as though it is perpetually under attack:
And so the little building crouched like a humped stone-and-mortar mouse…it
had an uncertain, timid look about it. And so they planted ivy, to hide its
shrinking newness. So that now the little church stands buried under its greenery,
stranded and sleeping among the fields, while now the brick house elbow nearer
and nearer, threatening to crush it down. (Lawrence 136)
Lawrence personifies the building as timid, and to guard against its weakness it hides under
its greenery, its defense mechanism, to keep the houses at bay that threaten to ‘crush’ the
mousey little church. By beginning his short stories with the personification of inanimate
objects, Lawrence sets the tone for the text and further suggests that trauma is innate within
the foundations of these texts.
The personification of these hopeless towns indicates the general trauma that lies
within Larwrence’s texts. The trauma lies less explicitly in the social relationships of the
characters in the next two works, “Odour of Chrysanthamums” and “The Daughters of the
Vicar,” than the previous texts. In “Odour of Chrysanthamums,” Lawrence examines the
trauma caused by maintaining an identity that is in conflict with her society, and, in
58
particular, her husband’s identity. Elizabeth dedicates her existence to maintaining a front of
organization that suggests a higher status; she ensures her life is clean and controlled, and she
does not speak with a local accent, all which suggest she creates an intentional barrier
between her and the lower classes. However, this social construct is something she must
consciously maintain. Elizabeth detaches herself from any traits that would contradict the
social construct she has created; however, it seems there are aspects of a personality that does
not fit within her ideologies that are within her and occasionally outwardly manifested.
Unconsciously, “she, suddenly pitiful, broke off a twig with three or four wan flowers and
held them against her face…her hand hesitated, and instead of laying the flower aside, she
pushed it in her apron-band” (Lawrence, “Odour” 284). Elizabeth stops to smell the flowers,
an act her front would not consider productive. It seems to escape Elizabeth’s notice until
her daughter pauses to comment on the beauty of the flowers, which she discourages as
nonsense. Elizabeth’s strong reaction to her daughter’s comment on the flowers’ beautiful
smell indicates that there is something behind her stoic front: “It was chrysanthemums when
I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever
brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole” (Lawrence,
“Odour” 289). This break in character reveals a repressed trauma: chrysanthemums, which
once signified happy events, now symbolize her largest grievance with husband. In light of
her reaction, the stoic front, an effect of her perceived social status, that Elizabeth maintains
is likely a defense mechanism – if she does focuses on controlling her reactions because she
cannot control, and does not approve of, his actions.
Elizabeth’s epiphany, reminiscent of Laura’s experience in “The Garden Party,”
occurs when she gazes at the body of her husband who suffocated in a mine, and recognizes
“she had denied him what he was--she saw it now. She had refused him as himself.--And this
had been her life, and his life.--She was grateful to death, which restored the truth. And she
knew she was not dead” (Lawrence, “Odour” 301). Elizabeth recognizes what has already
been alluded to by the cause of his death: suffocation, both literal and symbolic. Similarly to
the vicar in “Daughters of the Vicar,” their familial relationship has been built around her
ideologies, and she refused to accept any part of her husband that did not align with her own.
After his death, she feels fear and shame on recognition of the “truth” – that they were two
separate entities that did not know or accept one another. While she is grateful that the
59
epiphany has removed her lacuna, she is horrified by the self-deception that she now
recognizes. As her responsibility to the living she maintains her social construct, but “she
winced with fear and shame” when their self-deception would be acknowledged after life
(Lawrence, “Odour” 302).
Another case of self deception, D. H. Lawrence’s “Daughters of the Vicar,” follows
the lives and loves of the vicar’s two eldest daughters. It begins by creating the setting and
environment that shaped their decisions. This story does not provide explicit trauma, yet all
the characters are affected by an unhealthy familial relationship that is far too concerned
about its class status. Unfortunately the traumatic aftermath of the hateful policies is
seemingly continued in the subsequent generations. After finding that his community does
not acknowledge what he perceives as his superior societal position, the vicar “pass[ed] from
indignation to silent resentment, even, if he dared have acknowledged it, to conscious hatred
of the majority of his flock, and unconscious hatred of himself…and he had to submit”
(Lawrence, “Daughters of the Vicar” 137). Because the townspeople do not accept the
vicar’s societal standing he vacillates from dislike to hatred of them for diminishing what is
central to his identity – but what is more interesting is the narrator’s suggestion that this also
created an “unconscious hatred for himself.” This hatred seems to be a byproduct of the
vicar’s sense of shame from failing to convince others of his superior position, which
undermines what he considers essential to his identity. Again, Lawrence focuses on a classbased trauma that is unlike both Woolf and Joyce, but seen in Mansfield’s work. The vicar,
who “had no particular character, having always depended on his position in society to give
him position among men” (Lawrence, “Daughters of the Vicar” 137), suffers a serious
schism to his identity since his entire self worth is derived from a social standing that his
town and congregation refuse to recognize. His identity is in crisis – and to maintain a
semblance of his belief that he is from a superior class; he must reject the beliefs of the
townspeople and alienate himself from them. The vicar attempts to instill within his own
children the same regard for social status, or else threaten his identity. Ultimately, the eldest
daughter, Mary, accepts her parents’ social ideology and finds herself in an even more severe
identity crisis. His second daughter, Louisa, who rejects their social status, is ultimately
alienated because she does not fit in the identity he has contrived of his family. Similarly to
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Joyce’s paralysis, Lawrence portrays cyclical trauma unintentionally passed from parents to
children, or malencontre, within his story.
Mary, the eldest, is motivated by her family’s expectations to maintain a certain
position in society and her own willful sense of pride. To be assured of her class position,
Mary marries the only ‘genteel’ suitor available, Mr. Massey, “a horrid little abortion”
(Lawrence, “Daughters of the Vicar” 145), who lacks the capability to interact with others on
a social or emotional level. Mary expected to trade in her body for pure reason and social
class, which she does successfully until the birth of her first child:
When the child arrived, it was a bonny, healthy lad. Her heart hurt in her body, as
she took the baby between her hands. The flesh that was trampled and silent in her
must speak again in the boy. After all, she had to live--it was not so simple after
all. Nothing was finished completely. She looked and looked at the baby, and
almost hated it, and suffered an anguish of love for it. She hated it because it
made her live again in the flesh, when she could not live in the flesh, she could
not. She wanted to trample her flesh down, down, extinct, to live in the mind. And
now there was this child. It was too cruel, too racking. For she must love the
child. Her purpose was broken in two again. She had to become amorphous,
purposeless, without real being. As a mother, she was a fragmentary, ignoble
thing. (Lawrence, “Daughters of the Vicar” 154)
Mary becomes split between her desire to love the child, and her mechanic tolerance which
provides her with status but an inability to love her husband or herself. Mary suffers from
cognitive dissonance, or holding two or more conflicting beliefs, because she cannot rectify
her role as mother with her role as wife. Mary becomes stagnant because she cannot
successfully embody both identities, and yet she cannot choose one role over another. The
choppy sentence structure that vacillates from one position to the other is written similarly to
the way a traumatic memory is experienced: a sudden, unexpected preoccupation that is
fragmented yet evokes powerful emotional response. While the vicar’s identity is
precariously balanced by discrediting opposing beliefs, Mary’s identity is ruptured by her
inability to degrade her body in favor of her mind once she has a child.
Mary’s younger sister, Louisa, has very different factors that motivate her in choosing
a husband. Louisa declares she will settle for nothing less than love, no matter his status, and
falls for Alfred, a young and attractive coal miner, and assumes the dominant role in her
pursuit of him. Alfred and Louisa experience simultaneous epiphanic moments after they
have succumbed to their desire:
61
And at last she drew back her face and looked up at him, her eyes wet, and
shining with light. His heart, which saw, was silent with fear. He was with her.
She saw his face all sombre and inscrutable, and he seemed eternal to her. And all
the echo of pain came back into the rarity of bliss, and all her tears came up.
(Lawrence, “Daughters of the Vicar” 181)
Louisa’s epiphanic moment is rather ambiguous; she discovers the eternal in Alfred by
observing two physical characteristics, the somber and inscrutable. These words do not have
any overt connection to eternity, which suggests that Louisa wants to see this “eternal” love,
even if it is not necessarily present. Louisa’s epiphanies seem to be driven more by her desire
for nothing less than love, rather than by genuine inspiration. Similarly, Alfred’s epiphanic
moment seem to validate his view and motivations. Alfred, triggered by the look in her eyes,
recognizes that he has tied his fate to hers. Alfred’s epiphanic moment retains similar
characteristics from his personality: it is resigned to passivity; even his most enlightening
moments do not recognize the possibility to assume control over his fate. These simultaneous
epiphanies confirm the paralysis of their lives – despite Louisa’s assertions that she will have
love. While Mary and Elizabeth’s epiphanies are enlightening yet horrifying, Louisa’s is a
deception to maintain her ideology - that she is choosing love.
After Alfred adjusts to his “fate” with Louisa, he finds a sense of comfort because he
has relinquished control in his relationship: “He was sure of Louisa, and this marriage was
like fate to him. It filled him also with a blessed feeling of fatality” (Lawrence, “Daughters of
the Vicar”183). Alfred suggests he has found relief in having everything decided without his
involvement. Alfred’s use of “fatality” is especially interesting choice, considering its
various meanings which could indicate either (or both) something that has been established
by fate, or to be destined for disaster. The latter definition seems to foreshadow Alfred’s
eventual reliance upon Louisa, much like his relationship with his mother. There are several
indicators that their relationship might mirror the relationship Alfred had with his mother –
Alfred is dependent upon his mother/Louisa for validation and the mother/Louisa resenting
the protection they must provide to him lest he should be hurt by the truth. Additionally, he is
traumatized by his mother’s death, and before she had died, Louisa had assumed the role of
his surrogate mother. Both Mrs. Durant and Louisa use very similar phrasing to consider
Alfred’s passive behavior. While Alfred is requesting to marry Louisa, his parents boss him
around and Louisa “was angry to see him standing there, obedient and acquiescent. [And
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feels that] he ought to show himself a man” (Lawrence “Daughters of the Vicar185).
Similarly, Mrs. Durant feels that “at the bottom [Alfred] did not satisfy her, he did not seem
manly enough” (Lawrence, “Daughters of the Vicar” 164). The similarity in Mrs. Durant and
Louisa’s thoughts indicate that there might be a parallel relationship between Alfred and his
mother and Alfred and Louisa. It would not be too far a stretch to say that Alfred will
probably have similar feelings of dependency on Louisa, which could lead her to feel
contemptuousness and hostility toward Alfred. Despite Louisa’s ‘choice’ to marry for love,
and thus join the working class rather than maintain her parents’ lower-middle class, it seems
she is ultimately fated for an unhappy relationship because of the lacunas created by the need
for beliefs to match her perception of her identity.
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CONCLUSION
The traumatic knowledge gleaned from epiphanies and traumatic memories is called
into question by Geoffrey H. Hartman, because, by definition, the concept of traumatic
knowledge is contradictory because trauma is outside of consciousness. Hartman asks “what
kind of knowledge is art, or what kind of knowledge does it foster?” (537). I would argue
that the inclusion of traumatic aftermath into modernist works draws attention to the initial
point of trauma, such as war trauma, latent sexuality, and the paralysis of a nation, it also
explores the lacunas that the individual and society use for self-deception of these points of
trauma. Although the modern writers I have explored all provide rich, detailed descriptions
of the symptomatic aftermath of trauma, none of the characters are able to effectively
reintegrate their traumatic memories into narrative and thus are unable to successful cope
with their trauma. It is this characteristic that separates the traumatized characters from the
author: there are no successful attempts to communicate trauma.
While Mansfield’s work shows the traumatic event and anticipates the aftermath of
trauma, Woolf’s work does the reverse: she shows the aftermath but largely does not discuss
the initial point of trauma. And although Woolf’s work looks at the aftermath of trauma,
there is little placation for the traumatic aftermath other than death, with the exception of
Clarissa, from Mrs. Dalloway and Bernard, from The Waves, who are ultimately able to use
their community to continue their lives despite their trauma. For Joyce and Lawrence the
only possible escape from trauma, particularly a socially induced trauma, is exile, although
neither author produces a character who has successful exiled him/herself to appease the
traumatic aftermath. Stephen Deadalus ultimately decides to leave the cyclical paralysis of
Ireland and “learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what
it feels…I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the
smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (Joyce, A Portrait 185). Stephen
recognizes that his attempts to find the “reality of experience” have not been successful in his
homeland and he must journey outward to find the “conscience of [his] race.” However, we
learn in Ulysses that Stephen is unable to complete his mission and returns due to his
64
mother’s illness. Thus he is once again stuck in the cyclical paralysis of his homeland. In The
Rainbow, Lawrence provides the most successful example that exile is a method to overcome
trauma; however, it only addresses Ursula’s friends and lovers; it does not address her
traumatic past with her father. Ursula alienates those who live only within the consciousness
of human progress, which allows her to have a hopeful vision of the future. In “Daughters of
the Vicar,” unlike Stephen’s self-imposed exile, Louisa, in particular, is forced to choose
between staying in her hometown without Alfred, or marrying Alfred but leaving their
hometown because of her parents’ fear that it will denigrate their social status. The short
story ends there, yet we can imagine the two most likely outcomes; either Louisa is able to
entirely reject her family’s preoccupation with social standing because she will begin a new
life in a new land with her husband, or she will not be able to move beyond her preconceived
expectations of what marriage should be with Alfred in which case she may have a similar
ending to Elizabeth in “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” In “Eveline,” the protagonist finds hope
in the idea of escape from her abusive father, “escape!...She had a right to happiness. Frank
would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her” (Joyce 40). Yet on her
way out, she freezes, fearing “that he would drown her…[and so] she set her white face to
him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave no sign of love or farewell or recognition”
(Joyce, Dubliners 41). Eveline’s fear of the unknown ultimately leads her to reject her chance
at exile from her abusive situation. Eveline’s horror at the possibility that her exile could end
badly leads her to emotionally and mentally shut down; she no longer thinks rationally nor
does she exhibit any of her previous feelings for her lover. In the end, many of the characters
in Lawrence’s and Joyce’s works succumb to their traumatic existence when given the
chance to exile themselves from their circumstances. In particular, Lawrence describes the
submission of many of his characters to their traumatic circumstances. Despite the fact that
the realities of exile are largely unexplored in the texts, Lawrence and Joyce suggest that
exile may be the best option for these traumatized characters to have a chance at recovery.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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