Trauma Narratives and Herstory

S. Andermahr, S. Pellicer-Ortin, S. Andermahr, S. Pellicer-Ortin, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137268358
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Featuring contributions from a wide array of international scholars, the book explores the variety of representational strategies used to depict female traumatic experiences in texts by or about women, and in so doing articulates the complex relation between trauma, gender and signification.

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Trauma Narratives and Herstory

Sonya Andermahr and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín

Introduction

This book has been prompted by the contemporary interest in Trauma Studies, a field that has become increasingly significant in critical discourse since its appearance in the 1990s. Following the ‘ethical turn’ in the criticism of the 1980s, Trauma Studies emerged in the United States in the 1990s as an important critical trend. According to Roger Luckhurst, this was the period ‘when various lines of inquiry converged to make trauma a privileged critical category’ (2006, p. 497). From that moment onwards trauma theory has addressed both public and private questions that are pertinent for psychology, philosophy, ethics and aesthetics, and it combines resources from a number of critical schools, including Freudian psychoanalysis, feminism, New Historicism and deconstruction (Onega, 2009, p. 196). Going back to its origins, contemporary critics associated with Yale University in the 1990s, such as Cathy Caruth, Geoffrey Hartman and Shoshana Felman, attempted to adapt medical ideas on psychic traumatic processes to the analysis of narrative texts, thus launching Trauma Studies. Already in 1995, Hartman argued that ‘there is something very contemporary about Trauma Studies reflecting our sense that violence is coming ever nearer, like a storm – a storm that may have already moved into the core of our being’ (in Luckhurst, 2006, p. 503). In one of his subsequent articles ‘Trauma within the Limits of Literature’ (2003), Hartman explained that the main purpose of this discipline was to uncover the traumatic traces in the textual elements of literary works since, according to him, the effects of traumatic processes can be recognised in the narrative mechanisms employed in many different genres. Consequently, many trauma critics have attempted to define these particular narrative techniques; Ronald Granofsky (1995), Dominick LaCapra (2001), Laurie Vickroy (2002) and Anne Whitehead (2004) are only some of the scholars who have studied the diversity of narrative techniques that facilitate the textual representation of trauma. For instance, Laurie Vickroy defines trauma narratives as narratives that ‘go beyond presenting trauma as subject matter or in characterisation; they also incorporate the rhythms, processes, and uncertainties of trauma within the consciousness and structures of these works’ (2002, p. xiv). She identifies the formal features common to these so-called trauma narratives as, inter alia, ‘fragmentation’ (p. 24), ‘dissociation’ of the characters’ identities (p. 28), the capacity to produce ‘metaphors’ (p. 31), ‘static images’ (p. 32), and ‘dialogical conceptions of witnessing’ (p. 175). This type of analysis has been extended not only to literary practices but also to other cultural productions and artistic forms such as films, TV series, autobiographical and testimonial works, painting and photography (Luckhurst, 2008), since it can be argued that the so-called “trauma paradigm” or “trauma culture” (Luckhurst, 2003) has become an integral part of contemporary society requiring new tools to grasp its meanings and implications.

In keeping with this, another area of development since the birth of Trauma Studies is the study of the psychological aspect of trauma in those social groups that have been affected by traumatic events of such magnitude as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and other armed conflicts, or the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001. More recently, analysis has been extended to more individual forms of trauma, produced by marginalisation, racial or sexual abuse. As Sun et al. have argued: ‘It is a commonplace to think of literature as something that gives expression to the voiceless or to that which could not make itself heard before’ (2007, p. 1). Indeed, literary and cultural texts have increasingly become privileged spaces for the representation of individual and collective traumas in our contemporary age, arguably providing a means of transforming traumatic memories into narrative memories. Trauma Studies has lent weight to such cultural analyses, and its importance in the critical field has grown year on year since its origins.

Trauma Studies has highlighted the fact that art in its different manifestations has frequently been used as a healing device by writers, minorities and society in general, either because of the things that are explicitly said or because of the way in which it draws attention to what has been silenced (Auerbach, 1989; Frank, 1995; Freyd, 1996; Gilmore, 2001; Bloom, 2010). The awareness that art is capable of representing pain and suffering in a conscious or an unconscious way requires a new conception of representation, which can take into consideration the traumatic elements embedded in cultural texts and practices. Trauma Studies works from the premise that narrative and storytelling can contribute to the healing of a traumatised individual or group. Basic concepts like Freud and Breuer’s ‘talking cure’ (1893); Pierre Janet’s distinction between traumatic memory and ordinary narrative memory (1901, pp. 278–365) or Carl Jung’s (1959) certainty that the healing of trauma only begins when the traumatised person is able to transform traumatic events into a logical and coherent narrative are traditional examples of the view that the main step for the recovery of trauma is to verbalise the experience of suffering. Geoffrey Hartman equates the function of literature to that of the talking cure (2003, p. 259), while Suzette A. Henke has coined the term ‘scriptotherapy’ to name:

The process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic re-enactment. … Autobiography could so effectively mimic the scene of psychoanalysis that life-writing might provide a therapeutic alternative for victims of severe anxiety and, more seriously, of post-traumatic stress disorder. (1998, pp. xii–xiii)

One of the main goals of ‘writing through’ a traumatic experience would be, then, to articulate an unbearable psychic wound that the subject or group is not able to communicate or exteriorise, that is to say, what cannot be spoken may be at least represented and mediated through cultural practices.

In recent decades, contemporary literature and art have become increasingly interested in the potential of trauma narratives to disclose silenced accounts of history, experiment with the ways in which trauma can be represented, and attempt to deal with these experiences of human suffering. As Laurence J. Kirmayer et al. argue, trauma has become “a narrative theme in explanations of individual and social suffering” (2007, p. 1). It is within this frame of reference that the rise of Trauma Studies must be contextualised (Whitehead, 2004, p. 4; Luckhurst, 2008, p. 62), since from the 1980s, many of these notions, which were previously present only in psychological, medical and psychoanalytical discourses, flooded into the social, political, and cultural domains. Nowadays, the public at large is familiar with concepts that originate in the field of Trauma Studies, and terms such as trauma, therapy or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder appear everyday in our newspapers and are incorporated in our daily vocabulary. As Luckhurst explains, by the late 1980s “the concept of trauma … began to escape narrow professional discourses and diffuse into wider culture” (2008, p. 76). During the last three decades society has observed the voicing of events that had been repressed at the individual and collective levels. Genocides of such magnitude as the Holocaust, Cambodia and the Gulag have been increasingly ‘put into discourse’ in the public sphere together with many other abuses, violent acts and crimes endured by minority groups around the world. The study of individual trauma fostered by psychoanalytical practices has developed into cultural and collective notions of trauma; the early interest in the formation of memories in the individual mind has yielded to theories on the configuration of collective memories; the original methods of healing have morphed into a wide range of therapies, and questions about the possibility of narrating traumatic events have taken the lead in the critical sphere. So much so that contemporary thinkers have considered that a new trauma paradigm is being established in western societies, with all the dangers of the politicisation, trivialisation and manipulation of trauma that it implies.

Increasingly, a plethora of trauma narratives by representatives of previously marginalised social groups have come to the fore. In particular, according to Laurie Vickroy, recent literary studies have focused on women’s writing as well as Jewish writing (2002, p. 20). Moreover, the psychologists Laura S. Brown (1995) and Maria P. Root (1992) have emphasised the importance of the interplay between internal and external factors in the construction of gender and trauma, an interplay that can be analysed in cultural productions such as textual and artistic representations of women’s lives and experiences at different moments of history. Their feminist analysis of trauma has tried to ‘look beyond the public and male experiences of trauma to the private, secret experiences that women encounter in the interpersonal realm’ (1995, p. 102) and so, by ‘illuminating the realities of women’s lives, [it] turns a spotlight on the subtle manifestations of trauma’ (p. 108). In fact, it can be argued that, by entering both the ‘private’ and more visible worlds of female experiences of trauma and suffering, the variety of representations of the female traumas of war, discrimination, bereavement, or sexual abuse make evident the existence of trauma in orthodox versions of history, which had been silenced on the grounds of lack of reliability and objectivity. In this way, artists and critics attempt to modify the patriarchal, racial and other hegemonic ideas deeply rooted in society (Brown, 1995, p. 111). A feminist approach to trauma enables the recognition that trauma is also a gender differentiated field, which challenges conceived notions of the sociocultural realm.

In this context, we identify a critical need to address the gender specificity of trauma, not least because women are increasingly making use of aesthetic tools to voice their traumatic versions of history. To this end, this book explores what Geoffrey Hartman calls ‘the relation between psychic wounds and signification’ (2003, p. 257) in a variety of cultural texts by or about women. The essays analyse variously how memory, history, collective and individual identities may be worked through by means of the artistic representation of suffering. The book demonstrates both how herstories bear witness to and speak out about traumatic experience and how storytelling and representational processes of suffering and pain contribute to the subject’s survival and the ‘healing of hidden wounds’. The term herstory, after which we named the International Conference ‘Trauma Narratives and Herstory’ (held at the School of Arts, University of Northampton, 12–13 November 2010) that inspired this collection of essays, has been recently applied to the analysis of feminist novels by some scholars like Julia Tofantšuk, (whose work also appears in this volume). Tofantšuk plays on the difference between history and herstory (2007, p. 59) in order to distinguish between patriarchal and feminist viewpoints on history. This distinction will be utilised as a means of defining the textual, filmic and graphic representations of female histories of trauma in the works under analysis in this collection, since all of them disclose complementary and contradictory notions of herstories in order to challenge official versions of patriarchal history.

This collection of essays is therefore aimed at developing the interconnections between two critical fields that have not been closely related so far, Feminist/Women’s Studies and Trauma Studies. Thus, in its specific focus on women, the volume addresses an underrepresented and underresearched aspect of Trauma Studies and provides a multiperspectival, multicultural and interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenon of trauma. One of the main principles that underpins the entire collection is the commitment to the power of storytelling to turn traumatic memories into narrative memories, which may function as ‘strategies for survival’ both at the individual and collective level. As a whole, Trauma Narratives and Herstory demonstrates a commitment to the transformative power of art, and its capacity to challenge the socio-ideological structures which underlie patriarchal societies, and establish communal bonds between the communities that have suffered forms of marginalisation and abuse and the rest of the society.

The book draws together international scholars to examine the representation of female trauma in contemporary literature and culture. Focusing on texts by or about women, it explores the diversity of representational strategies used to depict traumatic experiences, and articulates the complex relation between trauma, gender and signification. It encompasses a wide range of traumatic experiences, treating narratives of maternal and familial loss, incest, rape and sexual assault, murder, torture, racial discrimination and injustice, migration and dislocation, and the Holocaust. The authors and texts examined are from diverse countries of origin, which include Canada, Cuba, Korea, China, Japan, South Africa, the UK, and the USA, thus reinforcing the heterogeneous and plural approach that the collection tries to pursue. Moreover, the essays represent a plurality of critical perspectives and methodologies including narratology, psychoanalysis, textual analysis, feminist theory, and film theory; and explore a range of critical concepts in addition to trauma including memory, history, identity, the transmission of stories, melancholia, religion, and justice. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to trauma, the contributors analyse a range of genres including fictional texts, autobiography, graphic novels and film. The writers, designers and filmmakers discussed include Alice Walker, Eva Figes, Cristina García, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Dorothy Allison, Kim Edwards, Diane Noomin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Keisuke Kinoshita and Jang Soen-u among others. Demonstrating a rich plurality of perspectives, the volume sheds light on the power of art to enable minority subjects to come to terms with loss and trauma.

Part I, ‘Trauma as Dislocation in Female Narratives’, explores the range of literary figures, narrative techniques, motifs and aesthetic forms that have enabled women writers to represent their traumatic experiences in fictional and semi-autobiographical forms. In particular, it examines the central proposition of trauma theory that trauma entails the rupture or dislocation of linear narrative. From the terrible experience of losing a child (in women’s middlebrow trauma fiction); the difficult experiences that lie behind the diasporic movements from the Dominican Republic and Cuba to the USA (in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban and Loida Martiza Pérez’s Geographies of Home) and the intrinsic difficulty of defining female identity within the oppressive patriarchal structures (in the works of Eva Figes, Doris Lessing, Emma Tennant and Fay Weldon); to the transmission of the traumatic memories of the Holocaust to the next female generations (Eva Figes’s Tales of Innocence and Experience); all the texts in this section try to give voice to traumatic experiences endured by minority groups of women throughout history, having recourse to a wealth of narrative strategies. The authors examine variously the use of spatial metaphors of dislocation (Simone A. Aguiar), middlebrow fictional genres such as the crime thriller and the family saga (Sonya Andermahr), the trope of the female split self (Olga Glebova), and fairy-tales and well-known myths (Julia Tofantšuk) as appropriate strategies to allow the female traumatised subject to be heard at the level of discourse. Further, the articles in this section may be viewed in dialogue with the other sections of the book, since the connection between Aguiar’s view of diaspora could be contrasted to that of Ho Ming Yit, in the case of Asian American women, and that of Croisille and Rué when approaching the racial identity of African American women.

Part II, ‘Trauma Narratives and Female Survival Strategies’, examines the ways in which literature can be an adequate tool not only to transmit women’s traumatic stories but also to contribute to the individual and collective healing of traumatic wounds. The authors in this section explore a range of female narratives, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Alice Munro’s ‘Vandals’, in order to analyse how writing can become a survival tool both for the women represented in the narratives and for their readership. Recent decades have witnessed an increasing interest in the healing power of narratives and testimonies, in what Suzette A. Henke has described as the process of ‘scriptotherapy’. These three articles show that the female victims of abuse can find a mechanism to liberate their painful memories through the act of storytelling and the transmission of their experiences to the rest of the society, as happens in Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina according to Mélanie Grué. On other occasions, it is the act of writing that enables the oppressed woman, not only because of her sex but also due to her race, to regain a more stable sense of identity and become an active subject in the public sphere, as is shown in Valerie Croisille’s analysis of The Color Purple. And sometimes what is written is not the only means to access the meanings of trauma; the silences and gaps in the narration can provide readers with an insight into the traumatic experience, as Corinne Bigot exemplifies in her analysis of Munro’s ‘Vandals’. Here, we observe another connection between the emphasis Bigot puts on the formal characteristics of this work that exemplify its status as a trauma narrative and the formal features addressed in other essays in the collection such as specific film techniques (Leporda, Ashman), or the comic’s panel analysed by Lightman in the final section.

Part III, ‘The Rewriting of History in Trauma Herstories’, focuses on the potential of literature to re-write and challenge official versions of history, in this case, from the perspective of women. The five works analysed in this section are good illustrations of the narrative power to deconstruct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• 1 Trauma Narratives and Herstory
• Part I Trauma as Dislocation in Female Narratives
• Part II Trauma Narratives and Female Survival Strategies
• Part III The Rewriting of History in Trauma Herstories
• Part IV Trauma and Herstory in Visual Cultures
• Index