writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

2
Trauma theory in literary and critical studies have shifted attention from the etiology of
traumatic hysteria as introduced by Sigmund Freud in the nineteenth‐century, to its effect on
consciousness and sensibilities, especially on those of the listener/reader.
3
See Cathy Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), as well as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, (Testimony:
Crisis in Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, (New York: Routledge, 1992). The
literary theories of trauma that Felman and Daub formulate arise out of their study of the
holocaust survivors narratives; like Caruth, they examine many different genres like film, diaries,
and art, and using their own personal reactions as receivers of testimony, they suggest a radically
novel approach to the healing of trauma.
4
Freud calls this expression “abreaction”(German abreagirt), a catharsis offered by the
medium of language. In 1922, he took his research further in his book Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, where he examined psychic trauma as a punctual incursion on the mind, which having
“disassociated” consciousness from itself, installs an unprocessed memory‐trace that returns
unbidden, as delayed effect, in an effort to digest this previously unclaimed experience (this has
affinities with melancholia and masochism). 2 nd edition, trans. C.J.M.Hubback (London: The
International Psychoanalytical Press, 1922).
5
In Caruth’s words, “the wound of the mind—the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self
and the world—is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an
event that is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not
available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and
repetitive actions of the survivor.” Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4.
6
See Geoffrey Hartman, “Wordsworth Revisited” for how particular spots of time are always
attached to very specific landscapes, both of which are recalled vividly by the poet often many
years later. The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),
3‐17.
7
The literary theories of trauma that Felman and Daub formulate arise out of their study of
the holocaust survivors narratives; like Caruth, they examine many different genres like film,
diaries, and art, and using their own personal reactions as receivers of testimony, they suggest a
radically novel approach to the healing of trauma in their work, Testimony: Crisis in Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, (New York: Routledge, 1992).
8
See Newman, Subjects in Display (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 24‐45.
9
Refer to Jacques Lacan’s "The Split between the Eye and the Gaze,"(1964). In Lacan’s study
of the gaze, where the subject and the Other are in a dialectic relationship through the power of
vision or gaze with the help of the screen as the locus of mediation, the subject’s self‐image is
destabilized or split when it perceives itself as the object of the gaze. The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan. (New York: Norton 1978), 67‐78.
10
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (2 nd Ed. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000) suggest that Bertha was the daemonic double of the suppressed female
subject that seemingly arises as a response to Jane’s suffering incurred at the hands of a
repressive patriarchy. This marginalization of the British imperial project in the West Indies and of
the ‘monster’ from the colonies that destabilizes the domestic, Victorian text is problematic and
has provoked many third‐world feminist readings of which the most noteworthy is from Gayatri
C. Spivak, who in her essay, “Three Women Texts and the Critique of Imperialism” in Critical
Inquiry Vol.12 Autumn (1985) 243‐261 raises the troubling possibility of exclusion and
essentialism inherent in Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis.
11
The provocative theories of Nicolas Abraham and Maria have generated new ideas for
reading the realm of submerged desires and their notions of the “crypt” and the “intergenerational
phantom” have provided readers with a new diagram for comprehending the
architecture of the psyche in The Shell and the Kernel, Vol 1, trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1994). Refer to the intergenerational phantom, which is not the
873