Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering.

414 Pages·2010·2.142 MB·English

by  Marie-Luise Kohlke, Christian Gutleben

Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma
The Politics of Bearing After-Witness
to Nineteenth-Century Suffering
Neo-Victorian Series
The Neo-Victorian Series aims to analyse the complex revival, re-vision
and recycling of the long nineteenth century in the cultural imaginary.
This contemporary phenomenon will be examined in its diverse British
and worldwide, postcolonial and neo-colonial contexts, as well as its
manifold forms, including literature, the arts, film, television, and
virtual media. To assess such simultaneous artistic regeneration and
retrogressive innovation and to tackle the ethical debate and ideological
consequences of these re-appropriations will constitute the main
challenges of this series.
Series Editors
Marie-Luise Kohlke
Christian Gutleben
Volume 1
Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma
The Politics of Bearing After-Witness
to Nineteenth-Century Suffering
Edited by
Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Cover image and design: © Marie-Luise Kohlke
Central image features a model of the clipper Cutty Sark.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
“ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3230-9
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3231-6
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Printed in the Netherlands
Contents

Introduction: Bearing After-Witness to the Nineteenth Century 1
Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben

PART I Poethics and Existential Extremity:
Crises of Faith, Identity, and Sexuality

1. Postmodernism Revisited: The Ethical Drive of
Postmodern Trauma in Neo-Victorian Fiction 37
Christian Gutleben and Julian Wolfreys

2. Trauma by Proxy in the “Age of Testimony”:
Paradoxes of Darwinism in the Neo-Victorian Novel 73
Georges Letissier

3. Apes and Grandfathers: Traumas of Apostasy and Exclusion
in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and
Graham Swift’s Ever After 99
Catherine Pesso-Miquel

4. ‘Perfectly innocent, natural, playful’:
Incest in Neo-Victorian Women’s Writing 133
Mark Llewellyn

PART II History’s Victims and Victors:
Crises of Truth and Memory

5. The Neo-Victorian Nation at Home and Abroad:
Charles Dickens and Traumatic Rewriting 163
Dianne F. Sadoff
6. Photography, Trauma and the Politics of War
in Beryl Bainbridge’s Master Georgie 191
Vanessa Guignery

7. The Neo-Victorian Frame of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas:
Temporal and Traumatic Reverberations 217
Celia Wallhead and Marie-Luise Kohlke

8. Australia’s ‘Other’ History Wars: Trauma and the Work
of Cultural Memory in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River 253
Kate Mitchell

PART III Contesting Colonialism:
Crises of Nationhood, Empire and Afterimages

9. Famine, Femininity, Family: Rememory and Reconciliation
in Nuala O’Faolain’s My Dream of You 285
Ann Heilmann

10. Unmanning Exoticism: The Breakdown
of Christian Manliness in The Book of the Heathen 311
Elisabeth Wesseling

11. Turmoil, Trauma and Mourning
in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool 339
Elodie Rousselot

12. Tipoo’s Tiger on the Loose: Neo-Victorian
Witness-Bearing and the Trauma of the Indian Mutiny 367
Marie-Luise Kohlke

Contributors 399

Index 403
Introduction:
Bearing After-Witness to the Nineteenth Century

Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben

Abstract:
Increasingly, the nineteenth century has become a significant locus of investigations
into historical trauma, in terms of the retrospective analysis of actual catastrophic
events and their long term after-effects, as well as their fictional re-experience and
belated ‘working through’ in literature. The neo-Victorian phenomenon both reflects
and contributes to crucial developments in trauma discourse and cultural memory,
both at national and global levels, constructing competing versions of the past that
continue to inform the present. Crucially, the neo-Victorian also problematises the
politicisation and appropriation of trauma and resulting ethical dilemmas vis-à-vis the
suffering other, especially relating to the notion of trauma’s unrepresentability and the
figurative language used to convey the central paradox of the unspeakable.

Keywords: cultural memory, ethics, memory politics, neo-Victorian, the other,
trauma, unrepresentability, violence, witness.

*****

1. The Ages of Trauma Then and Now
Although trauma studies as an academic discipline or, more
accurately, a strand of cultural and memory studies indebted to
psychoanalytical, poststructuralist, and postcolonial, as well as literary
theory, only came fully into its own in the 1990s, its origins and
antecedents stretch back much further than the twentieth-century limit
events that promoted the theoretical interest in trauma as the defining
condition of modernity and present-day subjectivity, as well as a
transhistorical phenomenon. Long before World War I, the Holocaust,
Hiroshima, and the Vietnam War, nineteenth-century artists and
scientists had speculated about altered states of consciousness, split
selves, and disturbed psyches produced by situations of existential
2 Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben
_____________________________________________________________________
crisis and extremity. These disrupted states of being complicated
notions of the autonomous Cartesian subject founded on reason and
self-knowledge by conversely highlighting the mind’s vulnerability to
life’s varied shocks and its radical fragility and self-estrangement
when confronted with bodily suffering and the threat of extinction.
From the study of hysteria to ‘railway spine’ to neurasthenia and the
US Civil War disorder of ‘soldier’s heart’ (also known as Da Costa’s
syndrome) prefiguring the later concept of shellshock, the
pathological private self, its existence disrupted by symptomatic
obsessions, ritualistic repetitions, and inexplicable aberrations,
became as much a focus of interest as the rational public self, the
standard bearer of enlightened political, economic, and intellectual
progress that supposedly undergirded nineteenth-century social reform
and nation and empire building. In a sense, the nineteenth-century
hysteric or otherwise disturbed and decentred personality, the object
of scientific investigation and analysis, stands as the harbinger of the
omnipresent traumatised and (self-)alienated subject of postmodernity
– a subject radically ‘othered’ and ‘other’ even to itself.
To some extent the cradle, then, of contemporary trauma
studies and notions of subjectivity, the nineteenth century has become
a prominent focal point for literary investigations into and fictional re-
enactments of historical trauma from contemporary perspectives. The
double temporal consciousness typical of the emergent subgenre of
historical fiction commonly referred to as the neo-Victorian novel
lends itself especially well to such explorations.1 For it could be said
to mimic the double temporality of traumatic consciousness, whereby
the subject occupies, at one and the same time, both the interminable
present moment of the catastrophe which, continuously re-lived,
refuses to be relegated to the past, and the post-traumatic present that
seems to come after but is paradoxically coterminous. This is not so

1 In some novels, this consciousness is rendered explicit either by the juxtaposition of
dual plot-lines set in the nineteenth century and the present day, or linguistic markers,
such as paratext (especially epigraphs and footnotes), deliberate anachronism, and
metafictional or authorial interventions. In others, the duality remains implicit,
inscribed more circuitously at the linguistic or structural level, dependent on readers’
registration of divergences between nineteenth-century and current word usage, as in
the case of a term such as ‘queer’, or their recognition of revisionist uses of
intertextuality that highlight ideological blind spots (for example in relation to race or
gender) in canonical nineteenth-century works.
Introduction: Bearing After-Witness to the Nineteenth Century 3
_____________________________________________________________________
much “an erasure of temporality”, as Rosemary Gates Winslow
suggests, rendering thought “without-time-ness” (Winslow 2004:
630), but more a superimposition of conflicting temporalities, in
which consciousness operates simultaneously within multiple
incompatible time-zones of being. As such, the neo-Victorian novel –
used in this collection in a generic sense of literature re-imagining and
engaging the nineteenth century in global terms, not necessarily
confined to only British or Britain’s colonial contexts – may function
as a belated abreaction or ‘working-through’ of nineteenth-century
traumas, as well as those of our own times, albeit more obliquely.
Frequently, neo-Victorian fiction highlights interconnections between
acts of aggravated historical violence and their long-term cultural and
political aftershocks still resonating well into the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Yet it also plays out more insidious personal
kinds of trauma linked to individual crises (of personal identity,
family, belief, and inheritance) as much as collective catastrophe. In
many cases these narratives too resonate uncannily with contemporary
concerns, as evident in today’s keen interest in – and ready market for
– confessional literature of abject pain and suffering, for instance on
the themes of child and sexual abuse. Neo-Victorian literature thus
both reflects and actively contributes to the prevailing present-day
trauma discourse operating at personal and public, individual and
collective, national and global levels, as myriad past and present
traumas jostle and compete for our attention.
Whereas the disturbed nineteenth-century psyche constituted
the exception, however, the traumatised subject now assumes the
position of the contemporary norm. It functions as a veritable
paradigm of modern subjectivity in the context of our so-called
‘trauma culture’, as all individuals become (at least in potentia) ‘lost’
and traumatised others-to-themselves. Far from being an isolated
diagnosis, then, Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw’s assertion that
“[i]f every age has its symptoms, ours appears to be the age of
trauma” finds numerous echoes in other contemporary analyses
(Miller and Tougaw 2002: 1).2 Trying to explain the origins of this

2 In his thorough and useful synthesis of works on trauma, Roger Luckhurst quotes
several theorists who hold trauma to be “responsive to and constitutive of
‘modernity’” (Micale and Lerner 2001: 10, qtd. Luckhurst 2008: 20) and who
consider that “the modern subject has become inseparable from the categories of
shock and trauma” (Seltzer 1997: 18, qtd. Luckhurst 2008: 20). Luckhurst himself