Narrating Trauma

Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders

Gretchen Braun

• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780814258323
  9780814214848
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814282090
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Neurasthenia, rail shock, hysteria. In Narrating Trauma, Gretchen Braun traces the nineteenth-century prehistory of those mental and physical responses that we now classify as post-traumatic stress and explores their influence on the Victorian novel. Engaging dialogues between both present-day and nineteenth-century mental science and literature, Braun examines novels that show the development of the mental dysfunction known as nervous disorder, positing that it was understood not as a failure of reason but instead as an organically based, crippling disjunction between the individual mind and its social context—with sufferers inhabiting spaces between sanity and madness. Spanning from the early Victorian period to the fin de siècle and encompassing realist, Gothic, sentimental, and sensation fiction, Narrating Trauma studies trauma across works of fiction by Charlotte Brontë, Emily Jolly, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. In doing so, Braun brings both nineteenth-century science and current theories of trauma to bear on the narrative patterns that develop around mentally disordered women and men feminized by nervous disorder, creating a framework for novelistic critique of modern lifestyles, stressors, and institutions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION Nervous Disorder, Narrative Disorder, and Perspectives from the Margins
• CHAPTER 1 Contemporary Trauma Studies and Nineteenth-Century Nerves
• CHAPTER 2 “Dim as a Wheel Fast Spun” Repetition and Instability of Memory in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
• CHAPTER 3 “I Have a Choice” Emily Jolly Reframes Women’s Agency
• CHAPTER 4 Wilkie Collins and George Eliot Confront Accidents of Modernity
• CHAPTER 5 Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and the “Self-Unmade” Man
• CONCLUSION Expanding Our Frame
• Works Cited
• Index