"Sailing in Paper Boats" Sexual Trauma, Psychosis, and a Critical Examination of the Freudian Metaphor in Antonia White's Autobiographical Fiction.

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger project on Catholic writer Antonia White’s series of autobiographical novels, Frost in May, The Lost Traveller, and The Sugar House, in which readers are presented with a Freudian Oedipal drama that reaches a dramatic climax in the last autobiographical novel in the series, Beyond the Glass, where the main protagonist spirals into psychosis. A central question addressed is whether or not White’s autobiographical fiction is an unconscious projection of sexual trauma from her own history. Psychoanalytically speaking, the answer depends upon whether one subscribes to Freudian or Ferenczian perspectives. The paper also addresses the question of whether White’s accounts of psychosis in her autobiographical fiction are real and meaningful descriptions of lived traumatic experiences. Jacques Lacan asserts that it is impossible to authenticate narratives of psychosis and for readers to draw any meaningful value from them because they lack a coherent transfer of metaphorical language from the unconscious to the conscious in the pursuit of truth of a lived experience. He uses Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness to support his case, a text in which Schreber confesses to only being able to communicate his experiences in similes and metaphors; therefore, he claims his experiences cannot be understood. I argue that Lacan does not give due credit to Schreber’s attempts to grapple with spiritual and sexual preservation in the throes of delusion through the agency of his alter egos. These alter egos are the other “self,” a deluded self that offers, paradoxically, truth to emotional experience of a man’s ego in crisis. Schreber shares these pursuits with White’s alter egos in her autobiographical fiction, “The House of Clouds” and Beyond the Glass. In an analysis of White’s texts as recollections of her personal history, I highlight how White’s experiences shape her testimony in its raw portrayal of an identity in crisis.