Narrating Trauma: Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders
Autor Gretchen Braunen Paperback – 7 ian 2024
Spanning from the early Victorian period to the fin de siècle and encompassing realist, Gothic, sentimental, and sensation fiction, Narrating Trauma studies trauma across works of fiction by Charlotte Brontë, Emily Jolly, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. In doing so, Braun brings both nineteenth-century science and current theories of trauma to bear on the narrative patterns that develop around mentally disordered women and men feminized by nervous disorder, creating a framework for novelistic critique of modern lifestyles, stressors, and institutions.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814258323
ISBN-10: 0814258328
Pagini: 238
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814258328
Pagini: 238
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Bold and timely, Narrating Trauma offers new ways of thinking about the past and present as critical reflections on each other, forging an inspiring way of combining historicism with the use of modern theory.” —Andrew Mangham, author of The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy
“Braun’s adeptly constructed dialogue between trauma studies and narrative theory within Victorian literature is situated soundly amongst the work of prominent scholars and moves Victorian studies toward new understandings of nineteenth-century medical discourse and the representation of women.” —Molly Youngkin, author of Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman’s Press on the Development of the Novel
“Braun’s adeptly constructed dialogue between trauma studies and narrative theory within Victorian literature is situated soundly amongst the work of prominent scholars and moves Victorian studies toward new understandings of nineteenth-century medical discourse and the representation of women.” —Molly Youngkin, author of Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman’s Press on the Development of the Novel
Notă biografică
Gretchen Braun is Associate Professor in the English department and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Furman University.
Extras
It is no coincidence that while both female and male examples of the nervously disordered protagonist can be found in Victorian novels, women predominate. Medical concern for men’s “nerves” was commonplace, despite the prominence of feminine hysteria in our cultural memory. But in the literary imaginary, female characters were noticeably likelier than male to display so-called nervous susceptibility. Similarly, cross-disciplinary feminist scholarship on the nineteenth century has long since demonstrated how frequently “madness” and social disorder were coded feminine in artistic and cultural representations: particularly Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (1979), Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1980), and Lynda Nead’s Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988). My study departs the path of this foundational work in distinguishing nervous disorder, a borderline ailment between reason and unreason, from the more debilitating forms of psychosis that commonly precipitated institutionalization or required constant familial monitoring. A question arises: If Victorian doctors feared for the nerves of men and women both, why did female protagonists so markedly outstrip male in novelistic representations of nervous illness?
...
Nervous disorder speaks to inevitable hazards attendant on modernization. This malady produces fragility and extreme emotionality, qualities Victorians coded feminine. In contrast, the bildungsroman expresses the modern potential for self-definition. It is linked to disciplined vitality and the spirit of exploration, which Victorians coded masculine. The protagonist I term “the traumatized and transgressive heroine” is prevented from direct self-assertion not only by the emotionally shattering force of her loss or threat, but also by her socially peripheral position. Therefore, unlike more conventional protagonists, she cannot follow an even path toward maturity. She must instead take a circuitous, halting route toward social participation and psychic unity. She seeks an empathetic interlocutor (both within the novel’s imagined world and in the reader) to provide social validation for her emotional life. Yet she recoils from scrutiny, aware that her social marginality might become total exclusion if her negative emotions (such as grief and anger) become too disruptive of community standards. As a result, the story of her developing psyche cannot follow the steady progression toward satisfying closure that typifies both the marriage plot and the nineteenth-century bildungsroman. Her narrative is instead characterized by the repetitions, omissions, and evasions common to psychic trauma. The related male plot I discuss as the story of the “self-unmade man” results when masculine ambition, the driving force of the traditional bildungsroman, is pathologized and turns back on itself. In the mid-to-late Victorian articulation of neurasthenia, excessive masculine ambition was feared to degenerate into its opposite, feminized submission and indecision. A neurasthenic male protagonist produces a narrative that, rather than building toward mature social integration, loops back to its origins without meaningful psychological or economic progress.
...
Nervous disorder speaks to inevitable hazards attendant on modernization. This malady produces fragility and extreme emotionality, qualities Victorians coded feminine. In contrast, the bildungsroman expresses the modern potential for self-definition. It is linked to disciplined vitality and the spirit of exploration, which Victorians coded masculine. The protagonist I term “the traumatized and transgressive heroine” is prevented from direct self-assertion not only by the emotionally shattering force of her loss or threat, but also by her socially peripheral position. Therefore, unlike more conventional protagonists, she cannot follow an even path toward maturity. She must instead take a circuitous, halting route toward social participation and psychic unity. She seeks an empathetic interlocutor (both within the novel’s imagined world and in the reader) to provide social validation for her emotional life. Yet she recoils from scrutiny, aware that her social marginality might become total exclusion if her negative emotions (such as grief and anger) become too disruptive of community standards. As a result, the story of her developing psyche cannot follow the steady progression toward satisfying closure that typifies both the marriage plot and the nineteenth-century bildungsroman. Her narrative is instead characterized by the repetitions, omissions, and evasions common to psychic trauma. The related male plot I discuss as the story of the “self-unmade man” results when masculine ambition, the driving force of the traditional bildungsroman, is pathologized and turns back on itself. In the mid-to-late Victorian articulation of neurasthenia, excessive masculine ambition was feared to degenerate into its opposite, feminized submission and indecision. A neurasthenic male protagonist produces a narrative that, rather than building toward mature social integration, loops back to its origins without meaningful psychological or economic progress.
Cuprins
Introduction Nervous Disorder, Narrative Disorder, and Perspectives from the Margins
Chapter 1 Contemporary Trauma Studies and Nineteenth-Century Nerves
Chapter 2 “Dim as a Wheel Fast Spun”: Repetition and Instability of Memory in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
Chapter 3 “I Have a Choice”: Emily Jolly Reframes Women’s Agency
Chapter 4 Wilkie Collins and George Eliot Confront Accidents of Modernity
Chapter 5 Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and the “Self-Unmade” Man
Conclusion Expanding Our Frame
Bibliography
Index
Chapter 1 Contemporary Trauma Studies and Nineteenth-Century Nerves
Chapter 2 “Dim as a Wheel Fast Spun”: Repetition and Instability of Memory in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
Chapter 3 “I Have a Choice”: Emily Jolly Reframes Women’s Agency
Chapter 4 Wilkie Collins and George Eliot Confront Accidents of Modernity
Chapter 5 Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and the “Self-Unmade” Man
Conclusion Expanding Our Frame
Bibliography
Index
Descriere
Draws on current theories of trauma to examine the prehistory of those psychic and somatic responses to trauma now known as PTSD and their influence on Victorian fiction.