The Trauma Thesis: Medical and Literary Representations of Psychological Trauma in the Twentieth Century

Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2015 The Trauma Thesis: Medical and Literary Representations of Psychological Trauma in the Twentieth Century Sarah Louise Eilefson Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Eilefson, Sarah Louise, "The Trauma Thesis: Medical and Literary Representations of Psychological Trauma in the Twentieth Century" (2015). Dissertations. 1635. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1635 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2015 Sarah Louise Eilefson LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO THE TRAUMA THESIS: MEDICAL AND LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY SARAH EILEFSON CHICAGO, IL AUGUST 2015 Copyright by Sarah Eilefson, 2015 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A project of this scope could not be completed without the insights, criticisms, and encouragement of many individuals, and I am a grateful recipient of their time and energy. I would like to thank first the faculty in Loyola’s English and History Departments. Special recognition is due to Dr. David Chinitz and Dr. Joyce Wexler for their work with me in the fields of American Modernism and the British Modernist Novel; to Dr. Pamela Caughie as my teaching mentor; and to Dr. Peter Shillingsburg as my research mentor on the Woolf Online Project. I am especially grateful to my dissertation committee, Fr. Mark Bosco and Dr. Patricia Mooney-Melvin, for their teaching and engagement with this project. In my first semester of graduate school, I was fortunate enough to audit Dr. Allen J. Frantzen’s undergraduate seminar, “Men, Masculinity, and War Stories.” That course familiarized me with a number of the texts in this dissertation, trained me in new ways of reading and seeing, and introduced me to the professor who would become an extraordinary mentor and guide throughout the long process of coursework, comprehensive exams, and this dissertation. Words cannot express my gratitude to Dr. Frantzen for compassionately challenging me to be a better thinker, writer, educator, and person. iii Funding from Loyola’s Graduate School enabled me to work closely with an undergraduate student on much of the archival research on this project. I am grateful for their support and for the spirited and tireless efforts of Andrew Prior. To my graduate school cohort, especially Jenny Frey, Sean O’Brien, and Vicki Bolf, it has been a pleasure to study with you, learn from you, and laugh with you. To Devon Madon, my greatest sounding board and advocate, thank you for keeping me grounded. To the veterans I met and the friends I made at the National Veterans Art Museum, your resilience helped shape this dissertation. And to my parents, thank you for reading all of my seminar papers. I couldn’t have accomplished this without your love and support. iv Dedicated to my grandfather, Clifford “Bud” Emberg TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii PREFACE 1 CHAPTER ONE: THE TRAUMA THESIS 4 Historical Definitions of Trauma 5 Diagnosing Trauma: From 1860 to WWI 5 Codifying Trauma: WWI through 2013 9 PTSD Today: A Diagnosis and an Interpretive Device 17 Representational Language vs. Representative Samples 27 Conclusion: Dramatic Conditioning as a Double-Edged Sword 38 CHAPTER TWO: WARRIOR WRITERS 47 Reading War 48 The Authority of Experience 58 Erich Maria Remarque 59 Arthur Wesley Wheen 65 William March 68 James Jones 75 Conclusion 84 CHAPTER THREE: ART OF WAR, ART OF TRAUMA 86 Re-reading War 88 Remarque: Representing Trauma in All Quiet on the Western Front 88 March: Representing Trauma in Company K 105 Jones: Representing Trauma in The Thin Red Line 118 Conclusion 127 CHAPTER FOUR: WOMEN AND WAR 129 WWI on the Home Front 131 Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychological Stress 132 Spanish Influenza 137 Reverberations of War: Seeing the Battle Front on the Home Front 140 Virginia Woolf and the Trauma Thesis 141 Representing Trauma in Jacob’s Room 144 Katherine Anne Porter 161 Representing Trauma in Pale Horse, Pale Rider 164 Conclusion 181 CHAPTER FIVE: THE WAR COMES HOME 183 The Trauma Thesis and Homecoming Narratives 184 An Alternate Approach to the Trauma Thesis 195 Mrs Dalloway and Eudaimonia 196 vi Trauma as Liberation in The Return of the Soldier 213 Through Struggles to the Stars in Soldier’s Pay 231 Trauma and Agency in As I Lay Dying 242 Conclusion 256 CONCLUSION 259 REFERENCE LIST 267 VITA 282 vii PREFACE The contemporary discourse of trauma is well developed in scholarship and in popular culture. Few readers are unfamiliar with accounts of trauma as experienced in warfare or in daily life. As its popularity has grown, however, this discourse has become simplistic. Today it reduces a complex experience to a limited narrative, both widening the scope of what is considered to constitute trauma and narrowing the range of outcomes of traumatic experience. In my work I call this discourse the “trauma thesis.” According to the trauma thesis, many different events, incidents, or processes may cause psychological trauma, but they all produce a single result in the form of a damaged, debilitated, or devastated psyche unable to express or heal itself. This dominant narrative began taking shape after 1980 when Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was included in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The influence of the DSM, now in its fifth edition, reaches far beyond medicine. Today, the DSM affects representations and interpretations of trauma in novels, film, and popular culture. Even though the basis and determinations of the trauma thesis are a matter of dispute and debate in psychology, the thesis pervades literary criticism, newspaper headlines, and references to trauma in many media. By exploring trauma, its effects, and its representations in a variety of texts emerging from World War I (WWI), World War II (WWII), and the period between the wars, I propose to test the trauma thesis. I examine some of the best-known novels from 1 2 both wars, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line, as well as some overlooked novels, including William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay and William March’s Company K, to show a wide range of outcomes resulting from traumatic experience. I regard the trauma thesis as a limiting device for analyzing fiction about traumatic events and their consequences. There is a significant body of work, I aim to show, that rejects the basis of this thesis. I have chosen the primary texts for this project from among hundreds of possible works using three criteria. First, by choosing both veteran and civilian authors, I attempt an even-handed exploration of traumas within the context of combat and in civilian spheres. Second, I have chosen texts by male and female authors in order to examine the relationship between gender and representations of trauma. These choices correspond to the divide between soldier and civilian, though they are not necessarily commensurate. Third, I prioritize authors who attempted multiple narrative representations of trauma. By comparing two novels by Virginia Woolf and two by William Faulkner, I explore the complexity of their experiences with trauma and the development of their representations. I include both American and British perspectives and one German point of view. All Quiet on the Western Front, by the German novelist Remarque, could not be omitted since it is easily the most influential novel about war in the twentieth century. Female authors include Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, and Woolf. Chapter one seeks to offset the simplifying effect of the trauma thesis. I draw on archival and primary source research to explore how trauma has been conceptualized since the late nineteenth century as a medical discourse and to examine its relationship to wartime traumas of soldiers and civilians. I distinguish the variety of terms used to 3 express psychological trauma, since what we now think of as PTSD has been known variously as neurasthenia, shell shock, soldier’s heart, battle fatigue, and commotion. I argue that the ways in which psychoanalysts and psychologists understand and write about trauma has a significant influence on authors and filmmakers. However, I show that this relationship is not one-sided. Rather, the representation of trauma in literature and film shapes public and medical understandings of the phenomenon. In each chapter, I examine the circulation of influence between literature and the medical discourse of trauma, and I argue against the commonplace assumptions that trauma necessarily debilitates or silences and that art is inadequate for representing trauma. Chapters two and three focus on three novels by military veterans: Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), March’s Company K (1933), and Jones’s The Thin Red Line (1962). In chapter two, I examine the relationship between the experience of combat and the public reception of works by veteran authors. In chapter three, I show how each author imagines and represents the effects of trauma on soldiers in complex ways. In chapter four, I compare Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) and Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) to show how both of these texts set on the home front during WWI search for and make meaning from the war.

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