Narrating Trauma: Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders

by Gretchen Braun

Overview

Neurasthenia, rail shock, hysteria. In Narrating Trauma, Gretchen Braun traces the nineteenth-century prehistory of those mental and physical responses that we now classify as post-traumatic stress and explores their influence on the Victorian novel. Engaging dialogues between both present-day and nineteenth-century mental science and literature, Braun examines novels that show the development of the mental dysfunction known as nervous disorder, positing that it was understood not as a failure of reason but instead as an organically based, crippling disjunction between the individual mind and its social context—with sufferers inhabiting spaces between sanity and madness. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814282090
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	06/16/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	238
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Gretchen Braun is Associate Professor in the English department and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Furman University.

Read an Excerpt

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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

Narrating Trauma displays admirable clarity and a thorough grasp of relevant scientific and literary criticism. ... It is an important intervention in the field due to the urgent questions it raises about trauma and what we stand to gain by rethinking the concept.” —Anne Stiles, Nineteenth-Century Literature


“Braun provides a fascinating glimpse into the Victorian prehistory of trauma. By reading Victorian novels through the lens of trauma studies, Braun offers a fresh perspective on some well-studied books and opens up discussions about under-researched texts.” —Sarah Frühwirth, Victoriographies


“Scholars of Victorian fiction and of trauma studies are bound to profit from the insights of Braun’s admirable monograph.” —Parama Roy, Victorians Institute Journal


“With Narrating Trauma, Braun delivers a rich and absorbing foray into novelists’ adoptions of Victorian psychology and neurology ... Braun’s insights into how trauma shifts narratives’ temporal logic, as when the burdens of unresolved past trauma foreclose positive futurity, will likely prove fruitful to subsequent scholars.” —Doreen Thierauf, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies


“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

From the Publisher