Traumatic Reverberations: Victorian Narratives of Trauma Culture

Abstract

Post- nineteenth-century modernity has been described as a “trauma culture” because the time period has experienced both widespread, collective catastrophes, such as the two World Wars and the Holocaust, as well as more insidious forms of trauma that affect our everyday lives, including historical legacies and present occurrences of slavery, imperialism, and racism. More recently, the growing number of testimonials by women detailing their traumatic experiences of sexual violence and rape, highlighted by the #MeToo movement, have brought more awareness toward the traumatizing effects of our heteropatriarchal society. Yet despite their astonishing number, our culture often fails to accept the validity of these claims and recognize this female trauma as legitimate. Because of trauma’s inherent connection with narrative, literary scholars have made significant contributions in the quest to better understand the complexities of trauma and its multiplicities. However, these investigations have been overwhelmingly attracted to literary modernism, claiming that the experimentalist modernist form, full of elusions, gaps, and unconventional narrative structures, best replicate the real-world experiences of trauma and can provide access for narrating the otherwise unknowable. This thesis challenges the privileged connection between trauma and modernism, both in terms of form and time period, arguing instead that nineteenth-century literary texts and culture can better elucidate our present ideations of female trauma. In the Victorian era, trauma was theorized as inherently female; to be female was to be automatically traumatized. Consequently, what resulted was a paradoxical existence where the female is always and yet never traumatized, her continuous traumatized state marking any trauma as natural and thus illegitimate. Our present conceptions of female trauma, I argue, are directly influenced by this understanding, thereby explaining why it is both ubiquitous and yet rarely recognized as such. Indeed, it is precisely the assumed traumatized status of the female body that intimately connects our contemporary trauma culture with the nineteenth century. Following arguments made by literary trauma scholars that literary texts can help us better understand trauma itself, I place what I believe is a pertinent contemporary female trauma narrative, Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, into conversation with three novels either written during the nineteenth century or strategically utilizing its culture, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, all of which focus on female trauma. By illustrating the complex connections between the two, I ultimately argue that Victorian culture and its literary texts can provide us with new strategies for reconceptualizing trauma that women experienced in the past and for acknowledging, accepting, and addressing trauma that women experience in the present.