This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from Explore Bristol Research, http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk Author: Gildersleeve, Jessica Title: Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma General rights Access to the thesis is subject to the Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International Public License. A copy of this may be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode This license sets out your rights and the restrictions that apply to your access to the thesis so it is important you read this before proceeding. Take down policy Some pages of this thesis may have been removed for copyright restrictions prior to having it been deposited in Explore Bristol Research. However, if you have discovered material within the thesis that you consider to be unlawful e.g. breaches of copyright (either yours or that of a third party) or any other law, including but not limited to those relating to patent, trademark, confidentiality, data protection, obscenity, defamation, libel, then please contact [email protected] and include the following information in your message: •Your contact details •Bibliographic details for the item, including a URL •An outline nature of the complaint Your claim will be investigated and, where appropriate, the item in question will be removed from public view as soon as possible. Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma By JessicaGildersleeve Supervised by Professor Andrew Bennett University of Bristol, 2009 A dissertation submitted to the University of Bristol in accordance with the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts, Department of English, November 2009 79,929 words ý_r: .". E` , fyrr , - . ý-. \_ 'r . iii Abstract This thesis explores Elizabeth Bowen's fiction as an extension and a disturbance of existing models of trauma theory. It investigates the writing of trauma in Bowen's novels and a selection of her short fiction, with particular emphasis on how such writing elucidates the operation of memory and secrets in literature. This analysis of Bowen's fiction as a representation of trauma finds that her work simultaneously anticipates and complicates deconstructive and psychoanalytic models of trauma, as well as trauma's disruptive properties in reading and writing narrative. While some critics have recognized the significance of memory and the past for Bowen's writing, the ways in which these incorporate and are inflected by ideas about trauma and about narrative have not been explored. By addressing Bowen's work in terms of its relation to trauma theory, this single-author study seeks to fill a gap in existing criticism on Bowen, as well as to develop wider discussion of the nature of trauma in and as literature. Deconstructive and psychoanalytic readings of Bowen's fiction alongside the theoretical material of, in particular, Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Sigmund Freud, reveal the ways in which these novels and short stories think through the psychological, narratological, and linguistic implications of trauma. The project arises at the intersection of Bowen studies, contemporary trauma studies, and critical theory, to propose a new way of reading Bowen's fiction, and further illumination of the writing of trauma. The thesis attempts to shed new light on Bowen's writing as well as on her critical reception, and contributes to the current body of work on trauma theory in narrative. V Dedication & Acknowledgements I would like to extend my gratitude to all members of the Department of English at the University of Bristol, formal and informal conversations with whom helped to shape the ideas expressed in this thesis. In particular, I am indebted to the guidance of my supervisor, Professor Andrew Bennett, who has had a profound effect on my thinking, research, and teaching. Finally, I could not have undertaken this work without the continued support of my parents, who first taught me to love books. vii Author's Declaration I declare that the work in this dissertation was carried out in accordancewith the requirementsof the University of Bristol's Regulations and Code of Practice for ResearchDegree Programmes.The work is original, except where indicated by specific referencein the text, and no part of the dissertationhas been submitted for any other academic award. Any views expressedin the dissertation are those of the author. DATE: 22 "t"Io Table of Contents 111 Abstract Dedication & Acknowledgements V Author's Declaration vii Introduction `We Must Live How We Can' 1 1 Wound The Hotel and To the North 23 2 Supplement The Last September 53 3 Remains Friends and Relations and The House in Paris 72 q Death Sleep The Death of the Heart 101 5 Safe Wartime Short Fiction 120 6 Unknown The Heat of the Day 147 7 Post A World of Love 175 8 Crypt The Little Girls 192 9 However Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes 220 Postscript 242 Bibliography 249 Introduction `We Must Live How We Can' I cannot really have felt you were dead, I think, because one doesn't go on talking and talking to any one of them: more one goes on hearing what they said, piecing and repiecing it together to try and make out something know. There they had not time to say - possibly even had not had time to still must be something that matters that one has forgotten, forgotten because at the time one did not realize how much it did matter. Yet most is, if it is be of all there is something one has got to forget - that to possible to live. The more wars there are, I suppose, the more we shall learn how to be survivors. ' To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any casefrom the other at the edge of life. [... ] The time of the `learning to live, ' a time without tutelary present, would amount to this, to which the exordium is leading us: to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the 2 companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. I begin this examination of the writing of trauma with these insistences upon survival, on learning to live, learning how to survive. For it is survival by which the writing of trauma is circumscribed, and to which it testifies, not only in terms of those who live, who remain to be haunted, but in the persistentpresence of the dead who demand to be heard. Furthermore, writing itself constitutes a form of survival: a form of bearing witness, of immortalization, and of encryption. In thesepassages from the work of Elizabeth Bowen and of JacquesDerrida, whose thinking about life and death, trauma and survival, reading and writing, shapes this thesis, emphasis is placed upon learning (how) to live with and live after ' Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1949; repr. New York: Anchor, 2002), p. 358. Hereafter cited parenthetically as HD. 2 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New Kamuf International, trans. by Peggy (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. xviii. Z Introduction trauma - on survival itself, as Cathy Caruth suggests, as a crisis. The present study attempts to do justice to the strangeness of Bowen's writing, and to Bowen's assertion that, `[i]n a sense, it is fiction's business to be strange', in its concern with the ways in which writing itself lives with, integrates (or fails to integrate), and represents trauma, that psychological wounding caused by an event so extreme that it cannot be immediately assimilated, and is thus, paradoxically, 4 only first experiencedin its repetition, and as a function of its forgetting. Seeking to move beyond what Anne Whitehead describes as the `paradox or contradiction' of trauma narratives - that is, `if trauma comprises an event or experience which overwhelms the individual and resists language or representation, how then can it be in fiction? is in narrativized ' - this thesis concerned with the ways which 5 writing survives trauma and works towards its ethical representation. As in Leigh Gilmore's work on the writing of trauma, this thesis explores language `asserted as that which can realize trauma even as it is theorized as that which fails in the face of trauma'. 6 Indeed, a remarkable (and hitherto overlooked) recurrence in Bowen's fiction and non-fiction is an imperative to `live how one can'; to live, perhaps, 3 Cathy Caruth, `Introduction' to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 3-12 (p. 9). 4 Elizabeth Bowen, `Outrageous Ladies' [1949-63], in People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen, ed. by Allan Hepburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 379-83 (p. 379). For a discussion of the belatedness and inaccessibility of trauma, see Caruth, who argues that `[t]he historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all' (Introduction to Trauma, p. 8). 3 Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 3. See also Domick LaCapra, who argues that `[w]riting trauma is a metaphor in that writing indicates some distance from trauma (even when the experience of writing is itself intimately bound up with trauma), and there is no such thing as writing trauma itself if only because trauma, while at times related to particular events, cannot be localized in terms of a discrete, dated experience' (Writing History, Writing Trauma, Parallax (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p.