| In this work I explore how some Victorian novels use trauma metaphorically. They borrow the form of sudden assault and its psychological aftermath to express the chronic pain of ostracism. They develop healing fantasies that progress through revenge and compensation to miraculous but qualified recovery. Because aspects of the core pain are unspeakable, the novels give it "silent treatment" through the mute language of images.;I begin the project with an interdisciplinary overview of theories of trauma and narrative, drawing on clinical as well as literary studies about the strategies by which people attempt to narrate unspeakable pain. Then I turn to celebrated novels that open with symbolic assaults. Such novels' narrative strategies replicate post-traumatic cognition, amplifying their vociferous protests against constrictive conditions with structural demonstrations of their effects. The hallmark doubled characters and uncanny coincidences reflect binaristic object relations and displaced emotions, the fragmented perceptions of the trauma victim. The narrators, caught between conflicting urges to reveal and to conceal painful experiences, often misinterpret textual images.;To clarify how such narrative strategies reflect post-traumatic cognition and how patterns of imagery can reflect reworkings of the catalytic traumatic event, I develop close readings of three great fictional autobiographies in terms of trauma theory. Jane Eyre designs Jane and Bertha not simply as doubles but aspects of the same self that were catastrophically sundered and deformed in a symbolic traumatic injury. Great Expectations' catalytic assault dramatizes a criminal inversion of the normative moral order in which parents nourish and nurture their children. The novel then tests the consequences of unlimited compensation and revenge. The protagonist struggles with guilt over parricidal rage, although it is displaced and justified. The Woman in White explores the consequences of a marginalized male's accommodation to gender conventions by imagining the attainment of idealized normalcy as a gauntlet of traumatic shocks. The fate of the eponymous woman, a haunting bride, expresses fears about losing identity and freedom in marriage. My three analyses intend to demonstrate that reading canonical texts in terms of trauma theory can enrich and sometimes overturn standard interpretations. |
