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Trauma, Testimony, and Community in Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth" Author(S): Richard Badenhausen Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol

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Trauma, Testimony, and Community in Vera Brittain's Mourning through Memoir: Trauma, Testimony, and Community in Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth" Author(s): Richard Badenhausen Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 421-448 Published by: Hofstra University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3176034 . Accessed: 22/01/2011 19:26 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=hofstra. 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Hofstra University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Twentieth Century Literature. http://www.jstor.org Mourning through Memoir: Trauma,Testimony, and Community inVera Brittain's Testamentof Youth RichardBadenhausen A s she first began to sketch out a plan for writing Testamentof Youth, Vera Brittain (1893-1970) confessed to a male associate who traveled in similar literary circles that she was working on "a kind of autobiog- raphy."This fellow writer greeted Brittain's admission with contempt and remarked: "An Autobiography! But I shouldn't have thought that anything in yourlife was worth recording!" (Brittain,"War Service" 367). One might imagine Paul Fussell offering a similarjudgment in The Great Warand ModernMemory, the seminal 1975 study that made the Modern Library'slist of 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century and helped establish the tone and terms of the critical debate about literary representations of the war for many years following its publication. In Fussell's text, women are noticeably absent and seemingly unimportant. His 335-page study contains only two brief mentions of Vera Brittain, for example, and in both of those instances, Fussell does not assign Brittain's work an authoritative status that allows it to stand or speak on its own. Instead, the two references arrive with the male perspective attached, presumably to validate Brittain's own words.' This omission can be explained by Fussell's valorization of (physi- cal) experience, typically configured as male, over other encounters with the war that were in any way removed from the locale of the war front. Such a critical position leads him, in a chapter-long discussion of bina- ries entitled "Adversary Proceedings," even to pass over the fundamental opposition of male versus female.While this emphasis results partly from Twentieth-CenturyLiterature 49.4 Winter 2003 421 RichardBadenhausen Fussell'sown service in the Second WorldWar, he also suffers from having no access to a theoretical model that demonstrates how the viewpoint of "nonparticipants" (at least as configured along Fussell's narrow lines) can shed light on the war experience as a resultof that marginalization.2 Important scholarship in the past 20 years has chipped away at this narrow perspective by expanding the scope of what it means to be in war and by arguing that "war must be understood as a genderingactivity, one that ritually marks the gender of all members of a society," to quote the editors of one particularly influential example of this new school of reading (Higonnet et al. 4).3 An enormous amount of archival and edi- torial work has served to recover a wide range of excluded voices and demonstrate the rich and diverse ways in which women experienced war. While notable examples of women engaged in direct combat do exist, most of their participation occurred on the borders of battle: at the edges of the front as nurses and other support staff,at workplaces as professional replacements for men sent off to fight, and at home as managers of de- pleted households who were forced to wait anxiously to hear the fate of family, friends, and neighbors serving their country. Yet because this recent research has often tried to draw distinctions between the ways in which men and women confronted and processed the war, it has also tended to downplay the fact that writing their stories required female authors to adopt certain coping strategies employed by male solider-writers. I therefore agree with Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate that early scholarly attempts to value women's service, which habitually find a unified women's experience separate from men's, were necessarily limiting and potentially reductive (2). In Brittain's case, I would like to keep that danger in mind while following the promising lead of Dorothy Goldman, who, in writing generally about women writers of the war, highlights their dilemma of having "to perform a different and complex double function; they were actors in their own war and spectators of the soldiers' war" (102). In fact, for me the central narrative challenge of Testamentof Youthis Brittain's effort to resolve the tension between the conflicting roles of active participant (as nurse) and passive spectator (as mourner of the dead)-though, as we will see, mourning cannot be un- derstood simply as a passive activity of spectatorship,since Freud theorizes the melancholic subject's active denial, self-hatred, and fidelity.This essay explores how those dual roles forced Brittain to wrestle, much like the shell-shocked male soldiers, with the effects of trauma on her own psyche, 422 Trauma,Testimony,and Community inVeraBrittain's Testament of Youth while also engagingin a drawn-outprocess of mourningfor some soldiers killed in the war-the most importantmale companionsin her life. Freud'sseminal essay on mourning,written in 1915 during the early period of the war and publishedin 1917, is a usefulprism through which to investigateBrittain's struggle to managethe deathsof friendsand fam- ily."Mourning and Melancholia"draws a distinctionbetween successful modes of mourning-in which the ego graduallysevers its attachment to the departedobject of desire(and thus becomes "freeand uninhibited again" [245])-and the distorted form, which he terms melancholia. That latter state is markedby the subject'sloss of interestin the world, an inabilityto take on anotherobject of desire,a disruptionof sleep and appetite,a manic need to communicate,and especiallya severeself-hatred. Brittain'scondition, as describedin the memoir,clearly resembles Freud's melancholia,and it derivesfrom her statusas spectatorof the tragic ac- tion. She cannot accept consolationbecause she wishes to remainfaithful to those who have died, for to process their deaths successfullywould in some respectsserve as a betrayalby making her availablefor other relationships.Instead, she retreatsfrom the social world and engagesin a variety of masochisticbehaviors in an attempt to sharethe sufferingof her male counterparts.YetBrittain must ultimatelyconfront this block- age, for to survivethe traumaof her participationin the war,she will, as I discussin the next paragraph,have to reestablishher relationshipwith these lost voices and take part in a conversationabout their collective strugglethat will necessitateworking through her melancholia. Recent work by critics theorizing trauma4can help us understand how Testamentof Youthtook shape in ways that mimicked male repre- sentationsof war;for in effect, Brittain'sstatus as participantin the war forcedher to confronttrauma in the samefashion as male soldier-writers. What used to be broadlyreferred to as shell shock and is now termed posttraumaticstress disorder (PTSD) has typicallybeen discussedin rela- tion to its effectson male soldiers.But I see the condition as the motive behind many of the rhetoricaland narrativetactics in Brittain'smemoir. FollowingJonathan Shay's assertion that victims of PTSD must enact a "communalizationof the trauma,"must be "ablesafely to tell the story to someone who is listening"(4), and KirbyFarrell's observation that thera- peutic approachesto curing the disordertry "to help the victim complete the blocked processof integrationby reexperiencingthe crisis in a safe environment"(6), I view Brittain'slengthy autobiographicalaccount as 423 RichardBadenhausen an attempt to reenact traumatic events as a way of understanding them and recovering from their devastating effects. The use of many different narrative voices of Testament,then, operates primarily not as a modernist experiment with polyvocality but as an attempt to create a sympathetic communal body of listeners. As Judith Herman's study of trauma vic- tims has shown, "[r]ecovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation" (133). Also, because Brittain repeatedly defines her serving as a way of sharing the suffering of her male counterparts, when she strives narratively to establish community to overcome her trauma, she must do so through an almost exclusively male group.The remarkable
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