Wounds and Words

Christa Schönfelder Wounds and Words Lettre Christa Schönfelder teaches English literature at the University of Zurich. Her research interests include Romanticism, postmodern fiction, trauma theory, and gender studies. Christa Schönfelder Wounds and Words Childhood and Family Trauma in Romantic and Postmodern Fiction This thesis was accepted as a doctoral dissertation by the Faculty of Arts of the University of Zurich in the autumn semester 2012 on the recommendation of Prof. Dr. Angela Esterhammer and Prof. Dr. Therese Steffen. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative ini- tiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (BY-NC-ND). which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Natio- nalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or uti- lized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. © 2013 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Guglielmo Sandri, picture library Sandri-Schrefler, Südtiroler Landesarchiv Bozen Typeset by Christa Schönfelder Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-2378-9 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-2378-3 Contents Acknowledgments | 7 Introduction Towards a Reconceptualization of Trauma | 9 Chapter One: Theorizing Trauma Romantic and Postmodern Perspectives on Mental Wounds | 27 Chapter Two: The “Wounded Mind” Feminism, Trauma, and Self-Narration in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman | 87 Chapter Three: Anatomizing the “Demons of Hatred” Traumatic Loss and Mental Illness in William Godwin’s Mandeville | 127 Chapter Four: A Tragedy of Incest Trauma, Identity, and Performativity in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda | 163 Chapter Five: Polluted Daughters Incestuous Abuse and the Postmodern Tragic in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres | 203 Chapter Six: Inheriting Trauma Family Bonds and Memory Ties in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces | 241 Chapter Seven: The Body of Evidence Family History, Guilt, and Recovery in Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place | 279 Conclusion | 315 Works Cited | 323 Acknowledgments I would like to express my thanks to a number of people who have been especially important to me in embarking on, moving through, and completing this project. My professors, colleagues, and fellow students at the University of Berne played a key role in the early stages of my work on trauma and literature. In particular, I wish to thank Werner Senn, Gabriele Rippl, Philipp Schweighauser, Julia Straub, and Cindy-Jane Armbruster. Moreover, the project Haunted Narratives, co-organized by the Universities of Berne and Tartu, Estonia, was seminal in shaping my think- ing on trauma, and the research colloquia at the University of Zurich (by Angela Esterhammer, Allen Reddick, and Elisabeth Bronfen) and the Graduiertenkolleg Gender Studies (led by Therese Steffen) provided further fruitful environments for testing out ideas. A number of people have generously supported me with their knowledge and expertise to help me tackle the challenges of an interdisciplinary project. I am grate- ful to Andreas Maercker, Markus Landolt, Esther Fischer-Homberger, Lutz Witt- mann, and Hans Menning for many insightful comments and observations in rela- tion to traumatic stress studies, the history of psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, as well as to Anne Whitehead and Matt Boswell for their input regarding literary memory and trauma studies. I also thank Joel Faflak, Alan Richardson, and Fre- derick Burwick for very inspiring discussions about Romanticism and psychology. A warm thanks also to my colleagues and friends at the English Seminar in Zu- rich, who have contributed considerably to making this project an enriching and stimulating experience. I wish to thank especially Diane Piccitto, who has been an exceedingly generous, understanding, and inspiring colleague and friend as well as Martin Mühlheim for his critical eye, challenging questions, and numerous thought- provoking ideas. Moreover, I am much obliged to Doug Vincent for his careful reading of the entire manuscript. A special thanks to Angela Esterhammer for being such a supportive and motivating supervisor and thoughtful and dedicated mentor. Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially my parents, whose heartfelt support has been invaluable. And a very special thank you to my partner, Stefano Reggiani, whose liveliness and passion are a constant source of inspiration to me. Introduction Towards a Reconceptualization of Trauma “I had no one to love me; or to make me respected, to enable me to acquire respect. I was an egg dropped on the sand; a pauper by nature, hunted from family to family, who belonged to nobody – and nobody cared for me.” (MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, THE WRONGS OF WOMAN) “Years pile up in front of me: the sign on the door saying KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU!” (TREZZA AZZOPARDI, THE HIDING PLACE) In Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman (1798), Jemima – an unwanted, abandoned, and mistreated child – compares herself to an “egg dropped on the sand” (95) to express the experience of growing up motherless, without affection and care, in an environment that failed to provide even the most basic sense of secu- rity and familial or social acceptance and support. Like Jemima, Dolores, the pro- tagonist-narrator of Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place (2000), is a child victim- ized by multiple traumas and rejected by family and society. After she is injured in a fire as a baby, Dolores’s childhood is dominated by physical and emotional vio- lence and stigmatization: her father, a frantically superstitious man, interprets her disfigured hand as the devil’s imprint, while her sisters regard her as a despicable “cripple.” The novels by Wollstonecraft and Azzopardi both emphasize the power- ful and persistent impact of childhood trauma and the pressing need of trauma victims to make sense of and come to terms with their harrowing past. Like a number of Romantic and postmodern novels, The Wrongs of Woman and The Hiding Place focus on traumatic childhood experiences in the familial context and explore in de- tail the trauma victim’s later quest for meaning and recovery. These texts are pro- foundly concerned with the complex psychology of their protagonists and the proc- 10 | WOUNDS AND WORDS ess of narrating the traumatic past, investigating whether or not and to what extent it is possible to heal wounds by expressing them in words. I use these glimpses into Wollstonecraft’s and Azzopardi’s novels as a point of departure to call attention to the discrepancies between two uses of the concept “trauma”: one at play in “trauma fiction” (a term that Anne Whitehead investigates in Trauma Fiction), and the other operating in important paradigms of literary and cultural theory. The meaning of trauma in a text such as The Hiding Place, which emphasizes an individual’s suffering and explores the nuances of traumatic and posttraumatic psychology, contrasts with the general, (often problematically) ex- pansive meanings the term has acquired in leading currents of literary trauma studies. One of the most influential theorizations of trauma in the humanities is that of Cathy Caruth.1 Her Unclaimed Experience (1996) offers a number of crucial in- sights for literary trauma studies. For example, it explores how representations of trauma can facilitate understanding by enacting a collapse of meaning and how trauma, which challenges conventional forms of narrative, might, paradoxically, be expressed through the failure of words, through the breakdown of language. How- ever, Unclaimed Experience also exemplifies the inflationary uses of the term trauma in literary studies. In Caruth’s approach, the meaning of the term is broad- ened to such an extent that the distinction between traumatized and non-traumatized individuals and between victims and perpetrators seems to dissolve;2 in the process, history becomes, essentially, a “history of trauma” (18). For Caruth, trauma figures as a metaphor for the general limitations of language and representation and for the notion of history as characterized by “indirect referentiality” (18). Caruth’s generalized approach contrasts sharply with the embodied approach of literary texts such as The Wrongs of Woman and The Hiding Place. Taken together, 1 The theorists who laid the groundwork for trauma studies in the humanities (especially Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, and Dominick LaCapra) still function as leading figures in the field in the sense that current trauma critics continue to anchor their work in the older work. Even though the study of trauma has flourished since the mid- 1990s, it is difficult to identify recent studies that hold the status of key publications in the field. One exception is the work of Michael Rothberg, particularly Traumatic Realism (2000) and Multidirectional Memory (2009), although Rothberg plays a leading role more in the field of Holocaust and memory studies than in trauma studies. 2 For example, in the introduction to Unclaimed Experience, Caruth reinterprets Freud’s reading of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in such a way that the figure of Tancred (who wounds his beloved Clorinda twice, as if unknow- ingly) comes to represent the trauma victim par excellence, while Clorinda (the wounded) is marginalized (see Unclaimed 2-5). A detailed discussion of Caruth’s trauma theory can be found in my first chapter.

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