Marrying the gendered body: Trauma and the making of history in 'Clarissa'

Postmodernism and psychoanalysis both claim that the body plays a constitutive role in the making of history. Postmodernism argues that the body is constituted from discursive forces outside the subject's control. However, the discursive body retains agency through the discursive iteration of historical events. Psychoanalysis concludes that the body is constituted from traumatic forces that are internalized. Once internalized, the psychical body gains agency through the repetition of these traumas. In postmodernism, the body is both the discursive effect of history as well as its agent. In psychoanalysis, the body is an effect of trauma, but history is more than something that happens to the body. Rather, the body and history are produced simultaneously through the mechanism of trauma; trauma is both what produces the body as a representable object and what sets in motion the historicity of time. In addition, history is the repetition of trauma. Traumatic repetition disrupts the notions of metaphysics and teleology, concepts that still hamper postmodern thinking. Finally, according to psychoanalysis, the patient can change history if it can alter its relation to trauma. Psychoanalysis offers a more nuanced explanation for how changes in history take place, as well as what we understand by history, because it examines the psychical energy of trauma that operates history. One such trauma is the loss of the mother that is formative of gendered bodily identity. The gendered body has agency to alter history as a consequence of its mourning of the mother. English marriage history is, at least in part, a consequence of the repetition of trauma. Eighteenth-century England witnessed a simultaneous change in masculine gender and marriage. Trauma explains how different performances of gender produced changes in the marital narrative. In Samuel Richardson's Clarissa; Or, The History of a Young Lady (1747--48), Robert Lovelace changes his performance of gender (from libertine to husband) in relation to the traumatic loss of his mother. Clarissa exemplifies the relation between concrete cultural history and the psychical domain. The psychical domain plays a constitutive role in the making of history; there are other laws besides discursive forces that mobilize historical change.