Parents and Children in the Mid-Victorian Novel: Traumatic Encounters and the Formation of Family

359 Pages·2020·2.703 MB·English

by  Madeleine Wood

Parents and Children in
the Mid-Victorian Novel
Traumatic Encounters and
the Formation of Family
Madeleine Wood
Parents and Children in the Mid-Victorian Novel
Madeleine Wood
Parents and Children
in the Mid-Victorian
Novel
Traumatic Encounters and the Formation of Family
Madeleine Wood
Children’s Services
NSPCC
London, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-45468-5 ISBN 978-3-030-45469-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45469-2
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For my Dad
Preface
[…] when some of our fellows were wounded in India, they came home
bringing bullets inside them. They did not talk of them, and they were stout
and hearty, and looked as well, perhaps, as you or I; but every change in the
weather, however slight, every variation of the atmosphere, however trifling,
broughtbacktheoldagonyoftheirwoundsassharpasevertheyhadfeltiton
the battle-field. I’ve had my wound, Bob; I carry the bullet still, and I shall
carry it into my coffin.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), 1:98.
Explaining his torment and grief on hearing news of his wife’s death,
GeorgeTalboyspresentsRobertAudleywithametaphor:thepainthathe
feelsislikeawarwound;itrecurs,invisiblypushinghimtowardsaprede-
terminedfate.Thisfatestructuresthenovel:thesensationalactionhinges
on George’s disappearance and the revelation that his wife Lucy, now
married to another man, tried to murder him. Through George, Mary
Elizabeth Braddon formulates psychological trauma with startling speci-
ficity,clarityandeloquence;andyetatthepointofwriting,psychological
trauma was not found in the medical lexicon.
This study explores trauma in a dual time frame: the mid-Victorian
period and the later emergence of psychoanalysis. I argue that the
mid-Victorian novel anticipates later psychoanalytic concepts of trauma,
thereby exceeding the parameters of contemporary medical discourse.
This is not simply a comparative reading: I argue it is the historical
conditions of the mid-century period that lead to this new literary
vii
viii PREFACE
emphasisandpavethewayfortheemergenceofpsychoanalysisinVienna
at the fin de siècle. In arguing this, it is precisely metaphors such as
GeorgeTalboys’sthatareatstake.Thenovelistsexaminedhereconstruct
complex narrative and thematic structures: traumatisation is represented
through symbolic patterning and recurring scenes, inseparable from mid-
Victorian narrative discourse, mimesis and the development of experi-
mental realisms. Traumatic Encounters is not a chronological account of
therelationshipbetweenFreudianpsychoanalysisandliterature;Iexplore
the narrative modes of novel and case history in order to shed light on
nineteenth-century representations of family.
∗ ∗ ∗
I interpret the medical category of trauma as a historical construction,
rather than as a transhistorical truth; however, this observation does not
lessen the psychological import of traumatic experience, nor indeed its
individual and cultural realities. Nevertheless, one of the fundamental
problems with the category of trauma as it has evolved in the late
twentieth-andearlytwenty-firstcenturiesistheassumptionthatsomehow
we all know what a traumatic event is. The mid-twentieth century bore
witness to Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: devastation on a seem-
inglyunprecedentedscale.Philosophers,psychologistsandhistorianshave
rightly focused on the threat posed to memory and subjectivity when
threatened by total nullification, with the debate circling around testi-
mony and bearing witness. However, this discussion cuts in different
directions:ontheonehand,philosophersexaminethepossibilityofbeing
inthemodernworld;ontheother,cliniciansexaminememoryasaneuro-
biologicalprocess.Whilenotingtheimportanceofthelatter,thememory
debatesarenotthefocusofthisproject.Although,asBesselvanderKolk
argues in Psychological Trauma (1987), there may be particular events
that have specific neurobiological consequences for the way in which we
process memory, it would be unwise to adopt such an universalising and
ahistoricalmodel.1 Thefactthat,todate,neuroscientificstudiesstillshow
thatsometraumascanberecalled,whileotherscannot,illustratesthefalse
1Van der Kolk’s diagnostic approach leads him to assert ‘closer examination makes it
clearthatthehumanresponsetooverwhelminganduncontrollablelifeeventsisremarkably
consistent’ (1987, 2). According to van der Kolk and van der Hart (1995), a trauma is
‘a frightening event outside of ordinary human experience’ (172) which disrupts the
operation of ‘ordinary memory’ (ibid., 162): ‘Memories and feelings connected with the
PREFACE ix
dichotomy that underpins much of twentieth-century trauma studies in
which memory is opposed to fantasy and the event is opposed to subjec-
tive experience. The complex nexus of psychological experience remains
unaccounted for.2
Sigmund Freud developed the concept of psychical reality to try and
negotiatetheseproblems,broughttolightinhisearlypsychoanalyticcases
in the 1890s. Throughout his case histories, we see the ongoing tension
betweenexternalandinteriorreality.Fantasybridgesthis:byarguingthat
the memory process involves psychological investment, Freud highlights
theinseparabilityoffantasyandsubjectivity.Psychicalrealitymeans‘every-
thing in the psyche that takes on the force of reality for the subject’;
‘Phantasies, even if they are not based on real events, now come to have
the same pathogenic effect [as memory] for the subject’ (Laplanche and
Pontalis1988,363).Fantasy,though,whetherconsciousorunconscious,
is not simply opposed to empirical reality: it is the mode in which we
engage (or indeed perhaps attempt to disengage) with our reality.
For Freud, psychological symptoms emerge in response to the outside
world, through phantasmatic investment. Crucially, this does not negate
the possible reality of traumatic events. Looking at Studies on Hysteria,
we see that trauma is not just extraordinary and horrific, it is also the
quotidian.Akiss,misplacedandunwanted,leadstoareprimandthatplays
on Lucy R’s mind unconsciously; the unexpected sight of her dead sister
in her coffin haunts Frau Emmy von N. Freud does not separate these
trauma are forgotten and return as intrusive recollections, feeling states (such as over-
whelming anxiety and panic unwarranted by current experience), fugues, delusions, states
ofdepersonalization,andfinallyinbehavioralreenactments’(vanderKolk1987,185).Van
derKolk(2005)laterdevelopedhisconceptof‘developmentaltrauma’,differentiatingthis
from post-traumatic stress disorder. Developmental trauma is by definition ‘interpersonal’
and involves the child’s ‘care-giving system’ (402): it is a trauma presented through a
relationship, possibly involving ‘maltreatment’ (ibid.) This idea of trauma is much closer
to what we see in the Victorian novels; however, van der Kolk does not consider the
child’s process of meaning making, fantasy or symbolisation in any detail.
2Some strands of social work theory have considered the relationship between the
traumatic event/series of events and the meaning attributed to the event by the subject.
Nancy Boyd Webb presents a ‘tripartite assessment’ model which comprises, ‘Nature of
the traumatic event’, ‘factors in the support system/recovery environment’ and ‘factors
affecting individual response’ (Boyd Webb 2015, 25). Boyd Webb cites Anna Freud’s
comments on the ‘specific meaning’ of traumatic events (7). However, ‘meaning’ is a
sub-themeinBoydWebb’stripartiteassessment,ratherthanadeterminingfactorinitself,
and fantasy is not theorised within her discussion.
x PREFACE
normal, but painful moments, from the sexual abuse seen in Kathari-
na’s case; in so doing, he reminds us that each individual experience of
traumatisation requires in-depth reading.
Freud reads trauma as a temporal and spatial structure: as a series of
scenes. Each secondary or auxiliary scene relates symbolically in some
way to the primal scene: the trauma is reframed, replayed. The sceno-
graphicmodellikewiseunderpinsFreud’sanalysesoffantasyinessayssuch
as ‘Screen Memories’ (1899); ‘Childhood Memories and Screen Memo-
ries’ (1901); ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’ (1907); ‘Cre-
ative Writers and Daydreaming’ (1908) and ‘A Child is Being Beaten’
(1915). John Fletcher’s important book Freud and the Scene of Trauma
(2013) explores the placement of trauma in Freud’s thought in intricate
detail, constructing a nuanced critique. Fletcher argues ‘that it is Freud’s
mappingoftraumaasascene,theelaborationofascenography oftrauma,
that is central to both his clinical interpretation of his patients’ symp-
toms and his construction of successive theoretical models and concepts
to explain the power of such scenes in his patients’ lives’ (xiii).
So why should any of this be of relevance to the mid-Victorian novel?
Something specific happens in this historical moment: we see a psycho-
logical and narratological model emerge in which cross-generational
relationships are presented as formative and traumatising for the protag-
onists. Each of the novels investigated in this study hinges upon (usually
multiple) traumatic and familial events, which become the source of
character, plot and desirousness. The ‘trauma’ is not something that
lies outside of the self; it is formative for the protagonist’s subjectivity.
Nearly fifty years before the introduction of trauma as a psychological
category at the fin de siècle, authors show their protagonists coming into
being in a state of psychological damage. The—extended and frequently
non-biological—parent-child relationship operates as a prism through
which the novelists explore the wider social forces that play upon the
protagonists. This is not simply a device. The mid-Victorian novelists
extend contemporary medical and philosophical understanding by repre-
senting the psychological dynamism of the parent-child relationship.
Moreover, this relationship is consistently shown to be in the process of
being extended, disrupted, deferred or cancelled out. There is nothing
static or nuclear about the families we see in the mid-Victorian novel.
Literarycriticshavenotbeenslowtoanalysethepsychologicaldimen-
sions of the Victorian novel. In Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in
VictorianFiction,JillMatusdrawsanimportantlinkbetweenprototypical
PREFACE xi
theoriesoftraumaandVictorianliterature,placinghertextualreadingsin
the context of contemporary theories of shock. Her research builds upon
theinfluentialworkofSallyShuttleworthandJennyBourneTaylor,both
ofwhomcreateimportantinterdisciplinaryreadingsofVictorianfictionin
relation to contemporary psychological discourses. Matus’s authoritative
work presents an account of the development of psychological and mate-
rialisttheoriesofthemindfromtheearlynineteenthcenturyonwards.In
linewithShuttleworthandTaylor,Matusdescribespsychologyasa‘newly
forming discipline’ at the mid-century (Matus 2009, 26).
The Victorian idea of shock mediates between the concept of moral
insanity and fin-de-siècle theories of hysteria and trauma. Matus charts
the uneven development of shock through the work of nineteenth-
century materialists including William Carpenter, Henry Maudsley and
Herbert Spencer. She examines physiological discourses surrounding the
nervous system: altered states of consciousness or split consciousness,
memory and belatedness. Her study shows that literary authors were
active in theorising the relation between body and mind. In her anal-
ysis of Dickens’s short story ‘The Signalman’, Matus writes, ‘If he lost
his voice in the Staplehurst accident, he found it later in articulating,
in this story of ghostly clairvoyance and hindsight, the characteristics
of trauma barely broached in the medical discourse of nervous shock
during the 1860s’ (104). Like Matus, I argue that mid-nineteenth-
century literary texts formed, as well as reflected, new ways of thinking
about the mind; however, unlike Matus, I argue that the representation
of trauma and psychological belatedness emerges specifically through the
mid-Victorian novel’s representation of the bourgeois home, and within
a cross-generational schema. In Chapter 3, I argue that Dickens’s aware-
ness of traumatic psychological experience predates his railway accident
in 1865, and can be charted back to his writing of the mid-late 1840s:
Dombey and Son and the ‘autobiographical fragment’.
As Matus rightly argues, the ‘The term “trauma” emerged in the late
nineteenth century when the label for a physical wound came to be asso-
ciated with a mental state. A precondition of that shift was that the mind
hadtobeconceivedofasphysical,materialandphysiological—andthere-
forevulnerable—likethebody’(7).3 Examiningthetechnologicalcontext
3Itistheideaofthemind’svulnerabilitytowoundingthatunderpinsGeorgeTalboys’s
metaphor, with which I opened. Braddon self-consciously places her narrative in the
context of an alienating Victorian modernity (II.6, 205), and while Lady Audley’s Secret