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The Rhythm of Trauma

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The Rhythm of Trauma Faculty of Arts and Philosophy Giel Vanthournout The Rhythm of Trauma Prison trauma in selected poems of Bobby Sands, Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron: a comparative analysis. Supervisor: prof. dr. Stef Craps Master dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in English-Dutch” Academic year 2013-2014 Acknowledgements So many books, so little time. Frank Zappa Thanks to Koenraad Claes for introducing me to the prison poetry of Bobby Sands over a year ago; Prison Poems will most likely never cease to intrigue me. Thanks to Stef Craps for the guidance and valuable feedback, which has been a great and appreciated help. I would also like to thank Toby Smethurst for the equally profitable feedback, which included interesting references to war poetry. Special thanks to Mathias Rosseel for informing me about the art of Egon Schiele, a small though cherished contribution to this thesis. Special thanks to my friends, parents and girlfriend for patiently listening while I was rambling on about prison trauma and psychological research. It is greatly appreciated, and I hope I am forgiven. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………........... 2 2. Bobby Sands ….…………………………………………………………………………...4 2.1. Context of imprisonment and writing ..………………………….……….………. 4 2.2. Prison trauma in Bobby Sands’s Prison Poems…………….…………..……….... 6 2.2.1. Trauma causes and consequences…………………………………………….. 6 2.2.2. Attempting to relieve trauma: life rafts in prison……………………………. 27 3. Oscar Wilde.………………………………………………………………..……………34 3.1. Context of imprisonment and writing.……….…………….……….…………….34 3.2. Prison trauma in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’….……………… 36 3.2.1. Perception of the prison trauma of the other…………………………….……36 3.2.2. Individual and collective trauma……………………………………..……….39 3.2.3. Bobby Sands and Oscar Wilde: kindred poets with kindred poetics?..............56 4. Lord Byron ……………………………………………………………………………...59 4.1. A different perspective of prison trauma: Byron’s motivation behind ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’………………………………………………………………………...59 4.2. Prison trauma in Lord Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’………….…….………61 4.3. Prison trauma as a vessel for Byron’s Romantic poetics? …….............................72 5. Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………76 6. Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………......80 7. Appendix……………………………………………………………................................85 Number of words: 27126 2 1. Introduction “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” - Nelson Mandela This statement by Nelson Mandela concerning his imprisonment rose to international fame and recognition from the very second it was uttered. After roughly 27 years of incarceration for being a direct threat to the apartheid regime, Mandela had experienced some, if not all, of the predicaments that involved being a South-African prisoner (Sampson 223-225). Hence, he never ceased to emphasize the problem of poor imprisonment during his later career (Sampson 231). Considering this individual testimony is one of the many, it does not exactly come as a surprise that prisoners worldwide have difficulties in processing the divergent horrors they face in jail. Prison and academic reports, for example, frequently mention mental instability, trauma disorders or even suicides as direct consequences of incarceration.1 When daily life in prison becomes too depleting on physical or mental levels, inmates quite logically seek for a way to relieve this enduring stress. Luckily not all of them took such dramatic steps and found a different way of expressing their inner dysphoria; writing. Literary works constituted during or after imprisonment not only contain interesting commentary on the atrocities and maltreatment in some facilities, they also provide an insightful view into the often burdened psyche of the writer. As a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, poetry can debatably reflect these traumatic experiences on an even deeper level than prose (Wordsworth 18). This thesis will therefore provide a thorough analysis of the prison trauma and its manifestation in some poetry, more specifically in the work of three poets who differ on the scale of time and social circumstances. First of all, the poetry that Irish Republican 1 This statement is based on my personal lecture of psychological trauma studies for this thesis. For further information concerning these works, see: 6. Cited Works, p. 80-84. 3 Army member Bobby Sands composed during his hunger strike in Maze prison will be analyzed with a focus on its manifestation of traumatic experiences. This includes a discussion of thematic elements, motifs, poetic techniques and everything else in the poetry that is significant for trauma analysis. Consequently, Oscar Wilde’s lengthy poem ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and Lord Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ will be tackled using the same working method. Although Byron’s poem focuses on the reflections of a prisoner in his isolated environment, Byron has never been a prisoner himself. This lack of personal incarceration experience should, however, not be regarded as a disadvantage, since it contributes to three divergent angles on imprisonment in this analysis: Bobby Sands: the prisoner who never left prison and wrote his poetry on site, Oscar Wilde: the prisoner who did leave prison and wrote his poem shortly afterwards, and Lord Byron: the freeman who composes a poem on imprisonment. Therefore, it is safe to say that these three accounts of prison trauma will only enrich the findings of the analysis and provide a broader picture of the poetic approach on the subject in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Moreover, my thesis will ultimately try to obtain this broader picture by also comparing these three poetic testimonies mutually. In order to ensure an accurate and candid analysis, the conclusions in the poetry analysis are supported by apt academic psychological research on trauma theory and incarceration. Since literary studies often are complex by their range of divergent interpretations, an interdisciplinary research that involves reputed psychological work will without a doubt obtain a clearer picture in the psycho-analysis of the poetry, and will therefore also contribute to more convincing conclusions. To facilitate the accessibility of this paper and in order to provide extra context for certain statements on excerpts, all major poems that are discussed in the analysis can also be found in appendix.2 2 See: 7. Appendix, p. 85. 4 2. Bobby Sands 2.1. Context of imprisonment and writing Bobby Sands was born in 1954 and grew up as a young Catholic in Rathcoole, a Newtownnabbey neighborhood in Northern Ireland. While in the other parts of the island the birth of the new republic nursed mutual peace among the population, the unrest in the North did not cease to exist. Starting from the late sixties with the Bogside riots in Derry, the three decades that followed were characterized by chaos in Northern Ireland: the Troubles were born (Whyte).3 The omnipresent dichotomy between loyalist Northern Irishmen, mostly Protestants in favour of maintaining the strong bond with the United Kingdom and Catholic nationalists striving for equal social rights and the union with the Irish Republic, determined the course of his life. Sands and his relatives were often confronted with intimidation and violence from the Protestant camp. In his youth, two men attacked him with a knife and later on his family was forced to move after threats by the Ulster Defence Force, or UDA, a Northern Irish loyalist paramilitary force (Hanke 19). After this series of incidents, Sands slowly began to consider the law-enforcing authorities an enemy of the Catholics. Like many others in the Catholic community, he expressed a need for self-defence against the threats that endangered his life and the lives of Catholics in Ireland every day. Since everything else he had tried before had been to no avail, he decided to join the Provisional IRA as a volunteer in his adolescence (Sands 5-11). After actively participating in IRA operations, Sands was arrested for the first time in 1972, when the authorities discovered four handguns in the house in which he lived. Shortly after his release in 1976, he contributed to social improvement in his neighbourhood. His social engagement involved community work, establishing a taxi service for his housing estate, publishing his personal republican newsletter Liberty, and hosting cultural and social evenings (Beresford 44). Nonetheless Bobby Sands also 3 A picture of the Bogside riots during The Troubles is included in appendix: p. 113, image 1. 5 maintained his connections with the IRA, and was arrested again and subsequently sentenced to fourteen years for the possession of an illegal firearm after a bomb attack (Hanke 21). Confined within the prison walls, the environment where he would spend the rest of his days, he started writing the poetry that would eventually constitute Prison Poems. Prison Poems was published in 1981, shortly after Bobby Sands’s death in the same year. All of the poetry it contains was written during his H-Block imprisonment in the Maze, and most of it had never been published before.4 Sands had, however, appeared in Republican News with a few of these poems under the pen name Marcella -a reference to his sister’s name (Sands 7). The poetry is written from a prisoner’s point of
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