Virginia Woolf’s Authorial Agency-2

20 Chapter One: Reading Woolf as L’écriture Féminine Before demonstrating how the writing of ​Mrs. Dalloway ​ helped Woolf make sense of her own numerous traumatic experiences, I must first turn to A ​ Room of One’s Own ​ to illustrate her feminist convictions and highlight the essay’s connection to the subversive practice of l’écriture féminine. Within ​A Room of One’s Own, ​ Woolf uses her polyvocal, non-linear narrative style to illustrate how highly intelligent women throughout history have been unable to amass a literary canon as extensive as that of male writers due to the expectation that they dedicate the majority of their time and energy to preserving the home and having children. Even if women are miraculously able to gather enough time to write, Woolf argues that the structure of the traditional sentence has been entirely produced by men “out of their own needs for their own uses,” and in result, is ill-suited for their adoption.51 According to Woolf, even the most talented of writers have inadvertently made such prose into “clumsy weapons” in their hands, and asserts that “the resources of the English language would be much put to the stretch, and whole flights of words would need to wing their way illegitimately into existence before a woman could say 51 ​Virginia Woolf, ​A Room of One’s Own​, (New York, Harcourt, 1989), 77. 21 what happens when she goes into a room.”52 Arguments such as this one demonstrate Woolf’s belief that traditionally masculine sentence structures greatly limit the potential of female literature, and that women must seek a more innovative manner of writing if they wish to communicate their experiences to the world. Due to the empowering nature of this argument, as well as her unique style of writing, I believe a compelling connection can be made between Woolf’s fiction and the work of French feminist theorists ​Hélène ​Cixous and Julia Kristeva in regards to their belief that women can write themselves into existence through the practice of l’écriture féminine, despite being traditionally excluded from the linguistic symbolic order. Throughout the pages of her 1975 essay “The Newly Born Woman,” Cixous illuminates the manner in which language binaries have historically placed women in inferior positions to men, and argues that the sole condition behind such a logocentric system is “women’s abasement” at the hands of the patriarchy.53 Within this hegemonic system, women are silenced by their inherent lack of masculinity, and Cixous writes that it is onto this silence that men project their sexually-driven desires. In response to being written out of the symbolic order, Cixous introduces the practice of l’écriture féminine as a third, ever-shifting element in the male/female binary and a way in which women can release themselves from such oppressive hierarchies by taking advantage of the very traits, such as their shared feminine sexuality, that elect them as outsiders. Through l’écriture féminine, women can write in a manner that falls outside the boundaries of anything known by man, and in turn destabilize the hegemonic order while gaining their own unprecedented form of linguistic authority. Woolf, ​A Room of One’s Own​, 91. ​ élène ​Cixous and Catherine Cl​ément​,​ A Newly Born Woman, ​(Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 2008), H 350. 52 53 22 In a brilliant illustration of how women throughout history been excluded from the symbolic order of language, Woolf imagines an alternate universe in which William Shakespeare had an equally talented sister, insisting that “any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would have certainly gone crazed,” as she eventually did when she committed suicide.54 It is evident that Woolf uses the figure of Shakespeare's silent sister, whose prodigious work never reached the public eye, as a masterful allegory for the abasement of female authors at the hands of the patriarchy. However, it is critical to note that while Cixous romanticizes the woman’s body as a site of patriarchal liberation, her idea of feminist texts being those that “strive in the direction of difference” and “revel in the open ended textuality” of conveying the female experience, Woolf is quite vocal in her distaste of the manner in which female authors attempt to emulate masculine prose.55 Woolf asserts that the proper way a woman should write is “as a woman who had forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages [are] full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself.” In other words, Woolf argues that writers must avoid the reductive pitfall of a single-sex point of view in order to produce compelling work. Due to this innate philosophical difference, it would be irresponsible to designate Woolf as a harbinger of the “grand arrivée” of French feminist philosophy, as her belief in androgynous writing idealizes upholding mind over body in a manner that Cixous’s belief in a revolutionary “writing of the body” does not. Yet, despite Woolf’s impassioned support of androgyny, this thesis argues that her illustrious oeuvre can still be read through the theoretical lens of l’écriture féminine, as it would be reductive to conflate her belief in the importance of writing beyond a single-sex point of view with her position as a marginalized figure in the symbolic order. In fact, some French feminists 54 55 Woolf, ​A Room of One’s Own, ​29. ​Toril Moi, ​Sexual/textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, (​ New York, Routledge, 2001), 106. 23 have adopted a moderated theory of l’écriture féminine more conducive to Woolf’s experience, in which they illustrate how any writer, regardless of sex, can engage in linguistic subversion of the traditional male sentence structure and gain linguistic authority. In a similar manner to Woolf, Kristeva believes that recurring stylistic eccentricities exist in all women’s writing, but she is adamant that one shouldn’t uphold a “truly feminine specificity” when such similarities could result from any “socio-cultural marginality” or even a “certain structure (for instance hysteric) which the present market favours and selects among the totality of feminine potentiality.”56 Although Cixous remains adamant in her support of an inherently feminine practice of writing, Kristeva notes the essentializing danger of relying too heavily upon the female body as marker of experience — especially considering that anyone can identify as female and face similar levels of oppression under the stringent standards of hegemonic society. She further addresses how female writers have been alienated from the linguistic order and reduced to silenced, abject beings, writing: In women's writing, language seems to be seen from a foreign land; is it seen from the point of view of an asymbolic, spastic body? Virginia Woolf describes suspended states, subtle sensations and, above all, colours-green, blue-, but she does not dissect language as Joyce does. Estranged from language, women are visionaries, dancers who suffer as they speak.57 Although Woolf is indeed “estranged from language” due to her status as a female trauma survivor, Kristeva highlights how she can implement “ruptures, blank spaces, and holes” in her writing to express her traumatic experiences to the world in a manner unsuppressed by the ​Julia Kristeva, ​Polylogue, ​(Paris, Seuil, 2008), 496. ​Julia Kristeva, “Oscillation between power and denial,” ​New french feminisms: an anthology,​ (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1981), 166. 56 57 24 hegemonic powers that be.58 Woolf’s adept decision, to textually represent her memories of trauma using disjointed sentences and a stream of consciousness narrative style, ultimately allows her to give voice to the once “unspeakable” subject of her sexual abuse. Thus, Kristeva’s sentiments — especially her belief that a subject’s philosophical position, rather than sex, determines his or her potential for linguistic subversion — further illustrate how it is not only possible, but imperative, to view Woolf’s unique style through the lens of l’écriture féminine even though she so openly advocated for women to adopt androgyny in their writing. In ​Sexual textual politics​, scholar Toril Moi turns to renowned post-structuralist theorist Jacques Derrida in her argument of why Woolf’s refusal to uphold female writing is indicative of her transcendence of the linguistic hierarchies that have oppressed female writers for so long.59 Throughout his work, Derrida calls for readers to trouble traditional binaries, like “male” and “female,” to show that such terms are nothing more than random, metonymic figures given meaning by patriarchal society seeking to create gendered power discrepancies.60 In other words, he argues that terms in a system of language derive signification solely from their relation to one another — for example, “femininity” would mean nothing to a society without a shared understanding of what traits constitute “masculinity” — and women have always been defined by their inherent “lack” of hegemonic traits. Thus, it is through her clarion call for an androgynous form of writing that Woolf refuses to perpetuate such problematic binaries, or what Cixous call the “Phallocentric Performing Theater” of male dominance.61 In fact, Moi argues that Woolf “seems to practice what we might now call a ‘deconstructive’ type of writing, one that engages with and thereby exposes the duplicitous nature of discourse” in her urgency to highlight ​Kristeva, “Oscillation between power and denial,” 165. ​Toril Moi, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Feminist readings of Woolf,” ​Sexual textual politics: feminist literary theory,​ (London, Routledge, 2001), 15. 60 Lucy Hartley, “Derrida,” (English 390 lecture, Ann Arbor, January 2018). 61 ​Cixous, ​The Newly Born Woman, ​85 58 59 25 the manner in which male voices dominate literature.62 Through her careful manipulation of the “sportive, sensual nature of language,” she is able to repudiate the views of those who view men as all-powerful arbiters of linguistic meaning and call for a new method of literary analysis altogether. Within the pages of “​Born from the Head: Reading Woolf via Kristeva,” scholar Miglena Nikolchina further highlights the problematic nature of such binaries by illustrating how blatant gender stereotypes fuel the two conceptions of madness most prevalent in society. She uses the example of how “mad” men, like Shakespeare’s King Lear, are most often described in terms such as as “mad and wise,” while their wives and daughters are diminishingly viewed as “mad and pitiful.”63 To explain this discrepancy, Nikolchina argues that scholars will often glorify male madness as the marker of a brilliant mind, while “mad” wives and daughters are reduced to nothing more than worthless figures “imprisoned in [their] own insanity, locked in a tireless limbo without any exit beyond.”64 Woolf exemplifies this phenomenon within her diary, writing that whenever she was in the midst of a severe depressive episode, it felt as if all “character & idiosyncrasy as Virginia Woolf completely sunk out.”65 Thus, it becomes impossible to detach the feminist subject matter and modern style of ​A Room of One’s Own ​ from its author’s position as “silent sister” within the symbolic order, defined solely by her gendered difference to able-minded male writers. Based upon Poole’s description of Woolf’s oppression by powerful authority figures in her life, as well as her own family members’ descriptions of her “madness,” it follows that her unique literary style should be read through the lens of l’écriture féminine — a subversive practice described by scholar Elaine Showalter as one that “[undermines] the Moi, ​Sexual/textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, ​9. Miglena Nikolchina, “Born from the head: Reading Woolf via Kristeva”, ​Diacritics, ​(Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1991), 34. 64 Nikolchina, 34. 65 ​Virginia Woolf, ​The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3​, (New York, Mariner books, 1981), 103. 62 63 26 linguistic, syntactical, and metaphysical conventions of Western narrative,” ultimately helping the traumatized artist achieve a sense of self unification, and eventually, liberation.66 In the same manner that l’écriture féminine calls for the use of textual ruptures, gaps, and silences to destabilize conventional Western narratives, a new form of subversive narrative has emerged over the past couple of years — one that stems from the inherent speechlessness a trauma survivor faces when trying to communicate his or her fractured memories to a unified world. This practice, deemed scriptotherapy by scholar Suzette Henke, refers to how reproducing memories of a traumatic event in narrative form “seems to affect an abreaction or catharsis that restores to the trauma survivor a sense of agency or control.”67 Over the course of the next two chapters, this thesis will explore both the theoretical implications of scriptotherapy, and how, in the same manner as the practice of l’écriture féminine, it advocates for the use of unconventional textual practices to represent experiences that have been traditionally silenced by patriarchal society. I will further evaluate the clinical aspect of how these novels allowed Woolf to engage in scriptotherapy, making sense of her own experiences and reinstating the integral union between her body and mind that had been disrupted by her sexual abuse.68 ​Ultimately, this thesis will look to these contemporary developments in feminist trauma scholarship to explain how the predominant critical discourse surrounding Woolf, especially the overly prescriptive arguments of Poole and Trombley, can be moderated through a trauma-informed reading of her work. Chapter Two: Tracing the Evolution of Literary Trauma Theory In her experimental short story “The Evening Party,” a work containing a number of stylistic elements that later reappear in ​Mrs. Dalloway​, Woolf describes a conversation in which Elaine Showalter, “Virginia Woolf and the flight into androgyny,” in ​A Literature of their Own: British Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, ​(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998​), ​9. 67 Henke, 15. 68 ​Reina van der wiel, “Writing the body: Trauma, Woolf, Winterson”, ​Literary Aesthetics of Trauma​, (London, Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). 66 27 a partygoer looks down at her hands and proclaims, “I am astonished that I should use this wonderful composition of flesh and nerves to write about the abuse of life… Come to think of it, literature is the record of our discontent.”69 Of course it is no question that Woolf herself, who dealt with the deaths of three beloved family members while suffering from rampant sexual abuse at the hands of her step brothers, was any stranger to such abuses of life. In the words of scholar Christa​ Schönfelder, this scene illustrates how the​ ​“literary imagination, with its ability to fictionalize and symbolize” can provide a platform for “experiences that appear to defy understanding and verbalization, that concern existential dimensions of the human condition — especially threatening experiences of vulnerability or morality — [to] be explored from multiple perspectives.”70 Despite trauma survivors’ critical need for such a platform of communication, scholarship regarding the connection between literature and trauma representation has only begun to increase over the few decades — a change that was sparked by the 1980 inclusion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.71 In fact, the first book-length publication to grapple with such issues in Woolf’s work, Patricia Moran’s ​Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma, w ​ as published as recently as 2007. Despite the novelty of the field, modern feminist scholars have already begun to trouble initial trauma scholarship by ​highlighting how society’s gendered understanding of trauma, in regards to its traditional ties to violent warfare, has silenced female voices and devalued their experiences. Rather than perpetuating patriarchal standards regarding what constitutes legitimate trauma, these scholars call for an increased study of sexual assault and childhood abuse in order to balance male-dominated trauma narratives with the perspectives ​Virginia Woolf, “The Evening Party,” ​Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf, ​(Hastings, Delphi Classics, 2014), 93. 70 ​Christa S ​ chönfelder, Wounds and Words:childhood and family trauma in romantic and postmodern fiction,​ (Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag, 2014), 24. 71 ​Roger Luckhurst, ​The Trauma Question, ​(Hoboken, Taylor and Francis, 2013), 1. 69 28 of those who have been traditionally marginalized by society. ​Although ​Mater notes that “from [Woolf’s] first book, you can see her interest in discontinuities,” such textual discontinuities map critical sites of trauma that, until recently, have been left mostly untouched by scholars.​ In light of this absence of scholarship,​ over the course of the next two chapters, this thesis ​will use a combination of contemporary feminist trauma scholarship, clinical studies regarding the ability of scriptotherapy to mitigate the effects of PTSD, and close readings of ​Mrs. Dalloway ​to illuminate areas in which academics, such as Poole, may​ ​have undervalued the restorative potential of ​Woolf’s trauma writing. This thesis situates trauma as its analytical focal point partly because Woolf was born into the late nineteenth century, a time period where the tumultuous nature of World War I and rapid social and technological change produced a marked increase in scholarly interest on the subject, as well as a feeling of pervasive cultural trauma caused by a fracturing of national identity. Although historians have reached a consensus that it would be irresponsible to highlight one “comprehensive” history of trauma — as doing so would propose the existence of a “single, uniform, trans-historically valid concept” across widely diverse cultures — Western scholars point to the 1860’s expansion of the national railroad as an indicator of when society began to view trauma as a mental rather than solely physical affliction.72 This conceptual shift in understanding was further propagated by the hospitalization of “mad” patients inside deteriorating asylums across the country, where those suffering from mental and physical disorders were confined through the use of barbaric restraints and treated as nothing more than animals.73 Yet, the perception of trauma most familiar to Woolf would have undoubtedly been that of the shell-shocked soldier of the Great War, who Lockhurst deems “one of the most iconic ​Luckhurst, ​The Trauma Question,​ 36. “​Diseases of the Mind: Highlights of American Psychiatry through 1900,” U.S. National Library of Medicine, accessed February 10, 2019, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/diseases/early.html. 72 73 29 trauma victims of the 20th century.”74 Throughout World War I, soldiers fighting on the front lines dealt with various neurological symptoms, ranging from tremors to pounding headaches and amnesia, that were initially thought to be the result of exposure to exploding shells.75 As these symptoms persisted beyond the scope of available medical treatment, journalists on the ground began reporting how these soldiers suffered from afflictions of the “wounded mind,” just as serious and impactful as any physical wounds.76 “Shell shock” grew to be such an immense problem that the British Army appointed psychologist Charles Myers in 1914 to conduct research on its troops in an attempt to gain insight into the peculiar phenomenon. After observing the behavior of numerous soldiers and collecting pertinent medical data, Myers concluded that such symptoms were indeed caused by “repressed” trauma and could most effectively be healed through “cognitive and affective reintegration.”77 However, this report was ridiculed by the general public, who believed that the afflicted soldiers were neither mentally or physically strong enough to be serving on the front lines. Embittered by his experience, Myers requested to be transferred back to England and did not publish his research until 1940 when Britain once again went to war. Despite the army’s initial doubt, Myers’s recommended treatment practices were broadly adopted during World War II, and continue to be used in the care of traumatized soldiers today. Due to Myers’s groundbreaking research, the experiences of those who served in World Wars I and II, as well as those who returned from the war to wander the streets of London, cloaked in disillusion, have become the predominant lens through which trauma is studied. Furthermore, the fragmented nature of the narratives used to relay these stories has become a hallmark of modernist literature, ​Luckhurst, p. 86. ​Caroline Alexander, “World War I: 100 Years Later,” Smithsonian, accessed February 25, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-shock-of-war-55376701/. 76 ​Luckhurst, p. 89. 77 ​Dr. Edgar Jones, “Shell shocked,” American Psychological Association, accessed January 10, 2019, https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/06/shell-shocked. 74 75 30 now deemed “the literature of trauma” for its ability to give form and representation to an abstract mental condition.78 Due to the predominance of these types of war narratives, modern feminist scholars have begun to question the overly-masculine conceptions of trauma so popular in contemporary culture, while simultaneously foregrounding non-hegemonic experiences in their work. In her 2016 essay “Narrating Gender and Trauma: An Introduction,” scholar Beatriz Caballero Rodríguez points to the finalizing power of patriarchal discourse in her examination of how existing research fails to depict trauma as an inherently gendered experience.79 By writing and disseminating more diverse trauma narratives, such as those regarding domestic violence and sexual assault, Rodríguez argues women can assume agency over the representation of their lived experiences and write themselves into existence in a world which has tried to erase them. This practice, of creating a narrative from one’s traumatic experience, can be traced to the 1990’s and a group of scholars at Yale, consisting of Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Geoffrey Hartman, who used Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction as means of confronting trauma’s essential “paradox” of communication. Although ambiguous in nature, they described this paradox as the “incommensurability and the impossibility of language and representation in relation to trauma, on the one hand, and the desperate need for a means of expression on the other.”80 In other words, the Yale scholars grappled with the idea that while survivors must express their trauma in order to heal, it is impossible for them to convey their incohesive, fractured memories of trauma through traditional systems of language. This paradox can be further tied to the theoretical movement of l’écriture féminine, as the Yale scholars also ​Karen DeMeester, “Trauma and Recovery in Mrs. Dalloway,” ​MFS Modern Fiction Studies,​ (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 649. 79 ​Beatriz Caballero ​Rodríguez, “Narrating Gender and Trauma: an Introduction,” ​Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, ​(Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2016). 80 Reina van der Wiel, ​Literary Aesthetics of Trauma: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson, (​ London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2. 78 31 highlighted how the patriarchal hegemony has silenced marginalized groups through its power of determining what constitutes legitimate linguistic expression. For, a​s trauma theorist Roger Luckhurst notes, “the trauma aesthetic is uncompromisingly avant-garde: experimental, fragmented, refusing the consolations of beautiful form, and suspicious of familiar representational and narrative conventions.” The pioneering contributions of the Yale group are critical to my argument due to their consolidation of numerous disciplines into one multi-faceted approach to reading textual gaps and narrative discontinuities as evidencing ​trauma.81 ​As Ahmed Amara notes in “Virginia Woolf and the Poetics of Narrative Trauma,” Caruth’s “original and groundbreaking contribution lies in the ways in which she integrates neurobiological, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary insights into a comprehensive approach to trauma.”82 ​Although its trademark stylistic elements can make it difficult to discern any apparent meaning from a trauma narrative, Caruth explains in Unclaimed Experience t​ hat such literature provides an ideal platform for exploring this exact relationship between “knowing and not knowing,” one that sits at the crux of Woolf’s unique writing style and that I will continue to explore over the course of this thesis.83 Furthermore, Caruth believes that “trauma is not locatable in [a] simple and original event in an individual's past” — a statement I uphold in my work, as I believe it is impossible for modern readers to discern the extent of the impact certain events had over Woolf’s life.84 Instead, I will strive to illuminate the various locations in Woolf’s texts where she works to represent her memories of trauma, yet refrain from deeming certain events to be more influential than others over her life and work. By working in this manner, I seek to avoid contributing to the iconization of Woolf — 81 82 83 ​Amara,​ ​“Virginia Woolf and the Poetics of Trauma Narrative,”​ 21. ​Amara,​ 2 ​ 1. Amara, 12. ​Cathy Caruth, ​Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, (​ Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 4. 84 32 a phenomenon which has rendered her “a powerful and powerfully contested cultural icon, whose name, face and authority are persistently claimed or disclaimed in debates about arts, politics, sexuality, gender…” rather than a complex human being with a diverse array of views and ideas.85 Caruth’s understanding, fueled by post-structuralist philosophy on the inherent “gap of knowing” in trauma writing, provides a critical foundation for a number of observations I will make over the course of this work. Yet, her theories are only applicable to a certain extent due to her overly ambiguous definition of trauma, in which she paints a picture of a world where everyone, victims and perpetrators alike, share a mutual “history of trauma” caused by immeasurable cultural factors.86 Schönfelder argues that Caruth’s understanding reduces trauma to nothing more than a “cultural trope,” a one-size fits all definition that, in turn, is haphazardly applied to entire groups of people. Instead, Schönfelder asserts that modern trauma scholars must work to “re-evaluate” and “reconceptualize” a working definition of literary trauma — ultimately unweaving a “tangled object” that needs to be clearly defined before any further progress is made in the field.87 I will use Schönfelder’s definition of trauma, in which she positions herself in between the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder’s rigid medical definition and Caruth’s overly inclusive understanding of the cultural analogy, over the course of my analysis — ultimately considering trauma to mean any “profoundly distressing, painful, or shocking experience that affects the individual so deeply as to cause a disruption in, injury to, or breach within the structures of the mind and the psyche and that, as a result, may ​Brenda Silver, ​Virginia Woolf Icon, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000),​ 3. ​Cathy Caruth, ​Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History,​ 18. 87 S ​ chönfelder, 20. 85 86 33 have a persistent impact on an individual, especially regarding his or her relation to identity, memory, and the social environment.”88 As noted in chapter two, trauma theorists, in the name of troubling hegemonic power structures, have begun to turn from studying war veterans such as Septimus to analyzing the more “familiar” trauma undergone by female survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse.89 Geoffrey Hartman addresses this new form of radicalism, writing, “It is especially through its concern with the marginal and repressed, with silenced or forgotten histories, that trauma writing tends to be profoundly political, often giving a voice to the oppressed and calling attention to wounds that have been hidden under the grand narratives of history and experimentations as far as the seminal works of postmodern fiction.”90 Hartman further departs from Caruth’s argument on the inherent unfathomability of trauma in acknowledging that “[l]iterary verbalization... still remains a basis for making the wound perceivable and the silence audible” and that writers have discovered various ways to depict trauma in a manner that both acknowledges its challenges of representation, while simultaneously strengthening reader understanding.91 Although he was part of the more conservative Yale school of trauma study, Hartman undoubtedly set the theoretical stage for modern scholars to highlight the various subversive capabilities of scriptotherapy. In conjunction with viewing the writing of trauma narratives as a culturally subversive process, scholars like Henke, Schönfelder, and Rodriguez have begun upholding the restorative potential of trauma writing with much less apprehension than Caruth and Hartman.92 My analytical approach, as well as that of my contemporaries, departs from Caruth and relies heavily S ​ chönfelder, 20. ​Geoffrey Hartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” ​New Literary History, ​(Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 546. 90 S ​ chönfelder, 16. 91 ​Geoffrey Hartman, “Trauma Within the Limits of Literature,” ​European Journal of English Studies,​ (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003), 250. 92 S ​ chönfelder, 34. 88 89 34 on the premise of an inherent continuity between Virginia’s life and the creation of her work. As a theoretical basis for their arguments, these scholars acknowledge the impossibility of fully separating any “adequate interpretation of a literary work” from the “notions of agency, personhood, cause, and effect” that would undoubtedly influence the creation of the text in question. To illustrate the critical importance of this continuity, Schönfelder highlights Deborah Horvitz’s argument in ​Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in American Women’s Diction, ​in which she discusses how female trauma writing illuminates “the protagonists’ varying capacities to use art, especially narrative, as a method of ‘working through’ or healing from trauma” as a common occurrence. Horvitz disagrees with Caruth’s belief that trauma narratives can inflict violence upon those who read them, arguing that it is the empowering message of such narratives that are instead passed on to readers. She writes: As I hope my study illustrates, power lies in the capacity to find or ​create individual, personal meaning from a traumatized and tortured past. If traumatic events are not repressed, they can be used: victims remember and imagine stories to be repeated and passed on. That is, when the stories of the past are consciously recognized, the cycle of violence can end, because the ​narratives,​ not the sadomasochism or the trauma, are repeated and passed on.93 Many modern scholars share Horvitz’s belief in the restorative potential of trauma writing. Published in 2005, Ann Kaplan’s ​Trauma Culture r​ ails against “Caruth’s insistence on the ‘unspeakability’ and ‘unrepresentability’ of trauma” and instead argues that “telling stories about trauma… may partly achieve a certain ‘working through’ for the victim” as well as “permit[s] a kind of empathetic ‘sharing’ that moves us forward, if only by inches.”94 In ​Traumatic ​Deborah Horvitz, ​Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in American Women's Fiction,​ (New York, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), 134. 94 S ​ chönfelder, 37. 93 35 Possessions,​ Jennifer Griffiths further examines the process of reconstituting one’s self-image after a traumatic incident,​ ​with a specific focus on how survivors can use writing to reunite their bodies and minds. Rodriguez’s 2016 publication is one of the most recent works in this sphere of innovative trauma scholarship, foregrounding the premise that examining trauma’s gendered representation in literature can further help survivors use their own written narratives to surmount feelings of isolation. It is clear these scholars believe that trauma writing and healing are not incompatible, and by aligning myself with their work, I hope to better understand the restorative potential of Woolf’s writing and foreground her authorial agency in the creation of a novel as artful as ​Mrs. Dalloway​. Over the course of the next chapter, I will draw from Schönfelder, as well as her contemporaries, in incorporating clinical studies on the psychological aspects of trauma into my analysis to avoid partaking in dangerous overgeneralizations. As Schönfelder so aptly warns, “if trauma is not connected to specific traumatogenic events and circumstances (i.e., specific experiences at the level of the individual or specific historical events or conditions at the level of the collective) and instead treated as something inherent in the structures of human experience in general, trauma discourse risks losing its power to call for individual and political responsibility and action regarding various wrongs and traumatizing conditions.”95 The concrete limitations of traumatic stress studies help prevent such generalizing discourse, as clinical research is implicitly based upon individual scenarios and experiences rather than homogenizing, overly theoretical structures of analysis. Thus, to appropriately elucidate the connection between literature and healing from trauma, as well as work to shift its meaning from “general cultural condition” to a “multifaceted and complex aspect of human experience,” this thesis will use the multidisciplinary analytical approach, consisting of varying layers of literary analysis and 95 S ​ chönfelder, 37. 36 clinical research, in order to further illuminate the complexity of Woolf’s selfhood and lived experience.96