Narrating Trauma: Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders, by Gretchen Braun

Abstract

In The Way of the World (1987), Franco Moretti identifies the bildungsroman as “the ‘symbolic form’ of modernity,” one that allows a culture both to register the new and revolutionary aspect of an emergent European sociohistorical reality and to function as a vehicle of its legitimation.1 The modernity to which the bildungsroman responded, though, brought in its wake an array of tensions and hardships. Industrial capitalism, increased urbanization, and new opportunities for economic advancement were shadowed by the specter of affliction, marginalization, failure, and disillusionment. As Gretchen Braun notes, “Even as an increasingly literate populace eagerly consumed stories of self-actualization [as emblematized in the bildungsroman], many individuals whose gender and class limited their agency must surely have struggled to fully identify with the heroes of triumphant fictional accounts of individual success and community integration” (3). What forms of narrative embodiment, she wonders, might have been available to those unaccommodatable within the normative and teleological impetus of the bildungsroman, which she identifies as one of the two preeminent literary genres in the period? (The other is the marriage plot, the bourgeois feminine equivalent of the “male ambition plot” that is the bildungsroman.)Advances in the sciences of the mind, Braun proposes, generated new understandings of psychic disorder or injury and new vocabularies of diagnosis—“nerves,” “nervous exhaustion,” “neurasthenia,” “hysteria,” and “rail shock”—that enabled the relatively sympathetic representation of those outside the ambit of the normative or progressive life trajectory of the bildungsroman or the marriage plot. A lucid summary of the study of the mental sciences in a transatlantic context over the course of the century, which forms the core of the first chapter, underlines that the research on nervous disorders was available to physicians as well as to educated laypersons, including novelists. We know, for instance, that George Eliot was familiar with the prevailing scholarship on the mental sciences, which she incorporated into her fiction. The same was true for Thomas Hardy. It is this traffic between the realm of the mental sciences and that of the novel, suggests Braun, that permits the fictional integration of those who exist “on the margins of Victorian social legibility” (10). Such a claim is on the whole engaging and persuasive. But it is also worth noting that the bildungsroman, which the texts showcased in the monograph supposedly confront or resist, is less a self-evident or coherent genre than a convenient critical fiction binding together an extremely heterogeneous array of novels. As in the case of the marriage plot, genre is less a set of definitions than a series of ongoing arguments and recalibrations.The marginalized protagonists of Victorian fiction that Narrating Trauma takes as the objects of its analysis are of two kinds: “the traumatized and transgressive heroine” and the “self-unmade man” (14). Braun is careful to distinguish these subjects from characters who might be designated as “mad” or “disabled” in that their nervous sufferings or incapacities do not override their other roles as workers, wives, lovers, or parents. Nor are they social or medical outcasts or regarded as dangerous or delusional in the middle-class worlds in which they are situated. Rather, they occupy a position of vexed proximity with those who comfortably inhabit bourgeois economic and cultural privilege. Their nervous disorders are regarded as a form of nerve damage or nervous exhaustion induced by the pressures of modern civilization. Men and women alike were presumed to be susceptible to nervous dysfunction, though unsurprisingly women were generally seen as more vulnerable to disorders of the nerves.Braun describes these protagonists, who have suffered psychic injury, as traumatized, though her definition of trauma diverges in important ways from that which prevails in trauma theory in the contemporary humanities. This trauma theory, she avers, has focused significantly on singular and shattering traumatic events and, in the case of Cathy Caruth, on trauma as an implicitly universal, transhistorical phenomenon. Braun favors a more historicized gloss on trauma and one that has some overlaps with the more expansive understanding of trauma in our contemporary moment, though Victorian trauma, she is careful to insist, is not simply a precursor of PTSD. She focuses on the unsensational and insidious slow violence that is more structural than individual in origin, rooted in the stresses of the socioeconomic environment, and best captured in Lauren Berlant’s notion of “crisis ordinariness.”Four chapters—on withholding and disclosure in Villette; the post-wedding plot in the novellas of Emily Jolly; shock, accident, and financial reversals in Wilkie Collins and George Eliot; and male neurasthenia among the working-class protagonists of Dickens and Hardy—flesh out the claims of the introduction and the theoretical chapter on trauma.Of these, the one on Brontë’s rebarbative novel is a tour de force. Writing against the confessional and clarifying grain of texts like David Copperfield and Jane Eyre, the author of Villette presents Lucy Snowe’s story as marked by narrative breaks and refusals, repetitions, concealments, obfuscations, oscillations, and displacements. This, Braun submits, should be understood in the light of Caruth’s insights about the subjective derangements that drive the nonreferential character of traumatic recall. Besides, Lucy’s story frustrates the usual readerly desires for romantic and professional consummation: “Lucy attains only survival, not flourishing” (58). This focus on a plain, poor heroine who is destined for solitude and obscurity is indeed remarkable, as this monograph underlines. However, if we are to see Lucy as the emblematic “traumatized and transgressive heroine,” I wish that we had a clearer sense of what, precisely, constitutes transgression. What kind of a dialectic obtains between trauma and transgression? Is transgression characterological in nature, as it generally seems to be for Braun, or narratological? Or both? It would be useful to have a gloss on this term of the kind that is furnished for trauma.Jolly’s novellas, with their tales of trauma and recovery, commence at the point where most marriage plots conclude. They are dramas of “female self-development after the desired marriage has been achieved . . . or permanently foreclosed,” and they feature the unusual “first-person perspective of a woman whose extreme and disruptive psychic episodes are branded ‘madness’” (82, 86). They illustrate how female characters’ mental disorders stem from the financial pressure to marry, marriage to intellectual inferiors, lack of intellectual and aesthetic fulfilment, and misplaced shame about their sexual past. Through a careful reading of A Wife’s Story and Witch-Hampton Hall, Braun establishes the ways in which Jolly pushes against cultural and medical commonplaces about women’s susceptibility to mental instability.A chapter on No Name and Daniel Deronda speaks to the ways in which new technologies of travel and new forms of financial speculation animate sensational fictional worlds in which female characters’ exposure to risk, shock, and accident heightens their existing gendered vulnerabilities. In this chapter, Braun provides a detailed description of the place of railway travel and rail accidents in the discourses of nineteenth-century public health and popular culture. For her, train travel and the railway accident function as potent and condensed emblems of the unpredictability of worlds and bodies rapidly remade by industrial modernity and finance capital, though their link to the novels seems fairly tenuous. (There is a single, off-stage rail accident in No Name.) Braun is more persuasive in her delineation of a world broadly shaped by volatility and risk, rather than by rail shock as such. The chapter features a superb analysis of the ways in which Gwendolen Harleth is embedded in a world of “recreational gambling, financial speculation, and the marriage market, which all entail chance, sudden change, and profiting from another’s loss” (147); this includes a deft reading of her fateful encounter with Lydia Glasher. Such a world severely constrains the possibility of female agency, even of relatively calculating and opportunistic ones like Gwendolen and Margaret Vanstone. In a novelistic world in which the somewhat disadvantaged Daniel Deronda can find his place—and an exalted, quasi-messianic one at that—within a patriarchal social framework, Gwendolen’s increasing self-knowledge can show her only “how small is her place in the world” (141).For Braun, it is not only (bourgeois) women characters who suffer trauma. If the marriage plot cannot accommodate the likes of Lucy Snowe, Gwendolen Harleth, or Margaret Vanstone, Great Expectations and Jude the Obscure, with their male working-class protagonists, “both engage the English bildungsroman tradition in order to subvert its primary goal: the meaningful social integration of the protagonist, solidifying his choice of the ‘right’ values and priorities” (164). Male ambition in these novels goes awry and manifests itself as neurasthenia, a nervous disorder usually associated with the high pressure and competitiveness of modern life for professional men in the Global North. (There was also an explicitly racialized version of neurasthenia, familiar from the work of Kipling and Conrad, which was designated clinically as “tropical neurasthenia.” It afflicted large numbers of white men in the tropics and was triggered by racial isolation as well as distance from rather than proximity to modern environments.) Hardy’s summary of his novel as “the tragedy of unfulfilled aims” applies equally to Great Expectations, in which the male ambition plot fails to find a hospitable reception in “a cultural moment that could not productively channel the economic and intellectual desires it ignited in a changing class of working men” (199).2All these chapters provide ballast for Braun’s claim that the narrative literature of the Victorian period, especially that which showcases frustration and disappointment, is immeasurably enriched by an awareness of their dialectic with the contemporaneous mental sciences. Her premise that trauma is a cultural formation honors the specificities of a Victorian understanding of psychic makeup, pain and injury, and moral responsibility. At the same time she takes note of the ways in which these specificities might add historical density to an early twenty-first-century understanding of psychic trauma. Her characterization, in her conclusion, of the COVID-19 pandemic as both a medical-somatic and a psychic crisis—one that underlines insidious and inarticulable forms of injury—brings home in a pointed way the enduring utility of a Victorian prehistory of trauma. Scholars of Victorian fiction and of trauma studies are bound to profit from the insights of Braun’s admirable monograph.