M. A. Newton Sexual Trauma, Psychosis, and Betrayal in Antonia White’s
Yüklə 0,51 Mb.
|
- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- (Auto)Biographical Information on Antonia White
- Conflicting Psychoanalytical Theories of Sexual Trauma
M. A. Newton Sexual Trauma, Psychosis, and Betrayal in Antonia White’s Autobiographical Fiction: A Critical Examination of the Freudian Perspective Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) 2014 Sexual Trauma, Psychosis, and Betrayal in Antonia White’s Autobiographical Fiction: A Critical Examination of the Freudian Perspective Marcia Anne Newton
Acknowledgements I am truly indebted and grateful to my primary supervisor, Professor Glenys Parry, whose comments and advice in all aspects of my thesis from content and structure to clarity and style have been of immense value. She reinforced the necessary attention needed to rigorous research and scholarship. This thesis would not be in the shape it is without her guidance. I owe sincere thanks to my supervisor, Dr. Michael Szollosy, who inspired me to take pride in my research and who shared many delightful conversations over the years on psychoanalysis, literature, and beyond. I would like to show my deepest thanks and gratitude to my colleagues at The College of Saint Rose, Dr. Catherine Cavanaugh and Dr. Bruce Johnston, whose expertise in literary theory, modernism, life writing theories, and religious studies proved extremely helpful as readers of my thesis. I’d also like to thank Dr. Paul Stasi at SUNY Albany for his invaluable feedback as my ideas were initially taking shape. I owe sincere thanks to my editor, Margaret Wentworth, who gave constructive editing suggestions. Lastly, I’d like to thank my husband, Court Newton, who dedicated many painstaking hours poring over my thesis from a layman’s perspective; in so doing, he helped clarify complex points. Abstract In Catholic writer Antonia White’s series of autobiographical novels, Frost in May, The Lost Traveller, The Sugar House, and Beyond the Glass, readers are presented with a Freudian Oedipal drama that sends the main protagonist spiraling into psychosis and then back into her father’s arms upon recovery. This trajectory draws a parallel with White’s history. Literary critics and biographers on White have suggested that she was a victim of father-daughter incest. My aim in this thesis, however, is not to prove that White was a victim of sexual abuse. I seek to illustrate the limitations and possibilities of validating sexual trauma in autobiographical fiction using White’s diaries as scaffolding for this examination. This thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter One is an analysis of a problematic Oedipal drama in White’s autobiographical fiction that leads to a proposed theoretical conundrum in psychoanalytical concepts of sexual trauma and psychosis. Chapter Two is a study of the form and theory of the autobiographical novel and the author-protagonist relationship. Also, at the intersection of psychoanalytic and literary theoretical paradigms, I explore the extent to which White’s metaphorical descriptions of psychosis generate a coherent depiction of self and lived traumatic experience within the confines of an Oedipal narrative. In so doing, I propose a space be carved for White’s experiences to be taken seriously as authentic expressions of trauma. Chapter Three explores larger socio-cultural patriarchal attitudes of women’s sexuality in which I draw parallels between Freud’s construction of the incest barrier and religious notions of female sexuality. In Chapter Four I juxtapose literary and clinical writings of contemporary trends on sexual trauma, memory, and betrayal to illustrate the shifts in focus and yet subtle presence of Freud’s Oedipus complex theory in Western society today. Introduction 7 1. Freud’s Oedipus Complex and Conflicting Psychoanalytic
Conclusion 190 Afterword 197 Formerly, the man of science often made merry of the naiveté of the novelist-poet who, when puzzled for an ending, simply made his hero mad, and now to our shame we have to acknowledge that it was not the scholars but the naïve poets who were right. Psycho-analysis showed us that an individual who finds no way out of his mental conflict takes refuge in a neurosis or psychosis. – Sándor Ferenczi1 We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment. - Rebecca Solnit2 Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear…. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence – Dorothy Allison3 Introduction
Antonia White was born on 31 March, 1899, the only child to Cecil Botting and Christine White. Cecil was head of the Classics Department at St. Paul’s School, London, and a strict disciplinarian. Christine hoped that her daughter would be christened Cynthia, but her father decided upon Eirene, a Greek spelling of the more common name Irene. In As Once in May (1993)—White’s only attempt at a major non-fiction autobiography—she reflects upon how her father did not get the son he had hoped for but had, nonetheless, fostered high intellectual hopes for her. He believed that an archaic spelling of her name would mirror his ambitions of her following in his footsteps. A reason for his choice in the spelling stemmed from his belief that his daughter would not get married but enter the education profession as a tutor or Classics mistress at Cambridge University where he studied as an undergraduate. Cecil was confident that not many men would be interested in marrying such an ambitious woman who would threaten typical male-dominated roles as heads of institutions (White 188). White never taught at Cambridge, although she was to teach briefly at a couple of schools and later take a post as a writer-in-residence at St. Mary's College, Indiana. She also did get married—four times—but all her marriages ended disastrously. Entering womanhood against the backdrop of World War I had adverse effects on White’s relationship with her father. Cecil was emotionally devastated by the war; he would hear of many of his past students’ deaths. Unable to cope with their deaths, he kept photographs that he made into beautiful albums, often expressing his regret that it was not his life taken by war instead of theirs. His students’ deaths created, or perhaps renewed, a sense of profound guilt that was to plague the relationship with his daughter. His attachment to past students, coupled with his newfound devotion to Catholicism that favoured religious conformity over the individuality of the self, suffocated White as she became a victim to her father's sacrosanct conventionality and intense desire for a son. Cecil converted to Catholicism when White was seven years old. Six months after Cecil converted, he sent White to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, Surrey. As documented in her autobiography, As Once in May, White recalls that, although the experience was not an unhappy one for the most part, the nuns were intent on eradicating what they perceived to be a ‘dangerous independence of mind’ (155). White was groomed to anticipate a world outside the convent walls ‘with its Satan-set traps of heresy, free thought and easy morals, and the whole object of our education was to arm against its snares’ (155). Vanity was strictly monitored and found to be abhorrent, and yet it was White’s vanity that would deeply affect the relationship with her father. White’s time at the convent was a pivotal moment in the young convert’s relationship with her father, a time of feeling extreme disappointment on his side and extreme rejection on hers. White began writing her first novel whilst in residence at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. It was her only non-autobiographical novel about a young adult’s flirtations with a hedonist admirer, but on her fifteenth birthday was discovered by the nuns. Brought before the nuns and her parents, White did not get a chance to explain the ‘magnificent conversions I had arranged for the later chapters; I was accused of perversity, corruption and indecency’ (‘A Child of the Five Wounds’ 161). White’s father was so disgusted with the novel’s contents that it resulted in emotional estrangement from his daughter. This traumatic event in White's life affected her so profoundly that she could not put pen to paper for nearly twenty years. It was only after her father’s death that she felt the need to revisit this traumatic event in her first in a sequence of autobiographical novels, Frost in May (1933). By self-admission, White’s vanity inspired her to write Frost in May. Vanity was a trait that friends and family would remember above all others; it was also a trait she shared with her mother, Christine. White’s mother never behaved in a way that typifies a good mother, one who nurtures her child in a way that produces a socially responsible human being. In Antonia White: A Life (2000), White’s biographer Jane Dunn observes that, when White was a young girl, she and her mother seemed to behave more like peers by playing games and giggling. Christine neglected to be a responsible mother in favour of identifying and competing with her daughter instead (Dunn 20). Towards the end of her life, Christine became preoccupied with her own beauty, but to her daughter, it reeked of artificiality. In a diary entry dated 15 August, 1937, White’s condescending pity for her mother’s situation is evident, and yet also feels frighteningly familiar: A visit to my mother is always upsetting. For a few minutes one establishes a contact, then she is back in her endless repetition fantasies. The house grows dirtier and dirtier and she with it. An open sore on her neck, drifts of powder, her cheap clothes crushed and soiled, her hair bright, soft and curly as a young girl’s. Her nails half eaten away, patched with nail varnish. The terrible sense of sweet decay. I am sorry for her life, yet exasperated. She is perfectly happy in her dreams of loves. She talks of nothing but sex. With a giggle she tells me, in veiled language, that she masturbates. I felt the seeds of something very much like her in me and am horrified. (101)
White’s relationship with her two daughters continued the pattern of maternal neglect that White experienced in her childhood. Susan and Lyndall’s childhood was one of abandonment and cruelty. In Now to My Mother (1985), Susan describes how her nurse (nanny) administered frequent spankings and took one of the daughters out of the nursery whilst leaving the other in it, sometimes for hours at a time. In her desperate need for maternal attention, Susan habitually and ferociously sucked her thumb. Susan recalls how her nurse tried many different things to stop Susan from sucking her thumb, from tying the ‘offending member in a cotton bag’ to coating it in ‘bitter aloes’ (47). Nothing worked. Susan’s mother, in the meantime, was nowhere to be found. When she was around, Susan needed an invite to see her (49). In Nothing to Forgive (1988), Lyndall also describes White as a neglectful mother who did not seem to know who her daughter was ‘because you ignored me in babyhood, terrorised me in childhood, and slighted me in adolescence’ (3). There is a pattern in which history repeats itself. In White's inability to overcome dysfunction in her relationship with her mother, her past is tragically reenacted in her relationships with her daughters. A traumatic experience during Christine’s marriage to Cecil may have led to or increased existing levels of depression that could have been a contributing factor to her inability to nurture her daughter. Cecil was desperate for a son, but before having his daughter, Christine delivered three stillborn daughters. Perhaps in reaction to how her previous pregnancies turned out, Christine told her daughter that in labor, ‘you go down to the gates of Hell’ (Dunn 18). In her memoir, Nothing to Forgive, White’s younger daughter Lyndall Hopkinson explains how ‘three months before my mother was born, around Christmas time, Christine had tried to kill herself. Cecil had come home very drunk after a convivial evening with his old Cambridge friends and had done something which so distressed his wife that she had taken an overdose’ (Hopkinson 22). Lyndall claims not to know why Christine took an overdose. However, in old age, Christine repeatedly told White it was because Cecil had raped her in a drunken state (Dunn 17). White revisited her mother's story time and time again in an attempt to understand her own neuroses with childbirth (18). Like her mother’s marriage to Cecil, White’s marriages were fraught with sexual difficulties. Her first marriage was perhaps the most traumatic. On 28 April, 1921, she married Reginald (Reggie) Green-Wilkinson, an alcoholic (63). Just over a year into the marriage, they went through a two-year annulment process due to non-consummation. White blamed herself for her failed marriage. The Sugar House (1952) provides a detailed semi-autobiographical account of White’s marriage to Reggie, in which Clara, her fictional self, tells Archie (Reggie), ‘I don’t deserve to be loved.… I really believe I’m a kind of monster. Not a real person at all’ (White 174). White notes, in a diary entry dated 27 August, 1938, that not long after the annulment she had a mental breakdown, one that had been brewing since a year before she married Reggie (149). On 17 November, 1922, twenty-three-year-old Antonia White was admitted into a mental institution, Bethlem Royal Hospital. She was discharged nine months later. White’s engaging exploration into her madness is documented in her autobiographical short story, ‘The House of Clouds’ (1928), and her final completed autobiographical novel, Beyond the Glass (1954). In these narratives, White’s alter-egos, Helen and Clara, respectively, are haunted by psychotic delusions and hallucinations that infiltrate their waking lives. At the core of Clara’s delusions, in particular, are allusions to a father who seems to be a barrier to her engaging in healthy romantic relationships with possible suitors. This barrier suggests deep Oedipal ties between father and daughter. Literary critics suggest that Antonia White was sexually abused by her father. For instance, in ‘Antonia White and the Subversion of Literary Impotence at Hayford Hall’ (2005), Jeffery writes, The suggestion that White may have been a victim of sexual abuse in childhood has been discussed by Mary Lynn Broe and Elizabeth Podnieks, and the possibility is not discounted by White’s own daughter, Susan Chitty…. Podnieks’s proposal that it was the abuse that caused … writer’s block can be reinforced by the fact that when attempting to write her autobiography, White could not progress her text beyond the age of four years. (81)
Nowhere in White’s literature does she categorically state that sexual abuse occurred, although she alludes to it in very subtle terms. There is one statement, but it is steeped in ambiguity. During White’s years spent in Freudian analysis with Dennis Carroll, she writes the following diary entry dated 28 June, 1938: ‘I couldn’t have had intercourse with [my father] … because presumably apart from morals … he didn’t want it’ (Diaries 1926-1957 140). It is difficult to interpret this statement. Could White be saying, it just was not possible, despite my wanting to; or, it could not really have happened, despite my thinking it might have? Readers will never know for sure. Still, what is worthy of mention is Chitty's explanation on the subject. In the Introduction to White's second volume of diaries, Antonia White: Diaries 1958-1979 (1992), Chitty observes how White's dreams may provide a clue to the possibility that White was sexually abused: ‘During her three periods of psychoanalysis (with Dr. Carroll, Dorothy Kingsmill and Dr. Ploye), the dreams become exceptionally vivid. Most vivid of all was a dream ... in which she was ritually raped by her father and actually felt him penetrate her. It is hard not to suspect that Cecil may have, even if only to a small degree, sexually abused Antonia as a child.... It is known that his wife was frigid’ (9). That being said, a wife’s frigidity does not necessarily mean that the husband is going to seek sexual relations with his daughter; and without a confession from the perpetrator, proving sexual abuse occurred is extremely difficult. Conflicting Psychoanalytical Theories of Sexual Trauma It is not my aim in this thesis to prove that White was a victim of father-daughter incest. Through a psychoanalytic lens, one aim is to examine the limitations and possibilities of validating sexual abuse in her history in an examination of her autobiographical fiction, against the backdrop of her diaries and critics’ observations. What emerges in this examination are conflicting psychoanalytical positions on sexual trauma that shed light on theoretical problems in an analysis of sexual trauma. A central question arises, which I will address in Chapter One: through a psychoanalytic lens, is White’s autobiographical fiction a viable avenue for the unconscious documentation of sexual trauma? In reply, I find myself, to some extent, answering in the affirmative. It is not because I can prove that White engaged in incestuous relations with her father; it is because a Freudian approach to sexual trauma restricts the possibility of other conclusions to be drawn from a psychoanalytic perspective. Prior to the development of Freud’s Oedipus complex, Freud wrote two monumental works, Studies on Hysteria (1895) and ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896). In ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, Freud describes the devastating impact sexual abuse has on a child’s mental and emotional development. He makes the claim that patients who suffer from hysteria may do so as a result of an earlier sexually traumatic experience in childhood by persons who are ‘debauched’ and ‘impotent’ (214). What Freud plainly states is that because the relationship between victim and aggressor is founded on love, it is a seductive means used by the aggressor that enables the sexual relationship to develop. In Freud’s earlier work, Studies on Hysteria, however, although Freud and Breuer do not effectively elaborate upon the cases themselves, they arrive at what they believe to be satisfactory conclusions on sexual abuse cases with regard to their female patients. They make it clear that it is not uncommon for females to experience sexual excitation during an assault because they have a particular sexual disposition for it. In contrast with a case of a twelve-year-old boy who was sexually assaulted in a public bathroom but who was able to intellectualise his hysterical symptoms that followed the assault, a seventeen-year-old woman had been brutally assaulted by a man on a staircase in the dark. Breuer inserts into his story that the young woman had been ‘sexually excited’ by these brutal assaults and ‘(Here we have the factor of disposition)’ (256). In other words, it is in-built in her psycho-sexual constitution. This derogatory view progresses into more definite references to a woman’s low moral fortitude throughout Freud’s career. It seems to me that the seed of the Oedipus complex had already been sown before Freud’s seduction theory; this may explain one reason why the seduction theory was short-lived. A more overt reason given later was that there were just too many cases coming forward of incestuous sexual abuse that they could not possibly be true. With regard to the Oedipus complex, Freud’s interpretation of sexual trauma pertains to a child’s natural psycho-sexual development that is fraught with sexual difficulties as the child navigates the Oedipus complex. This theory goes through a series of modifications, but a staple feature and underlying premise of the Oedipus complex is that the little boy experiences castration anxiety until he learns to take pride in his manhood (although he simultaneously has a residue of an erotic fixation on women). The little girl’s psycho-sexual development is different: she has already been castrated by her mother and experiences penis envy until she is able to bear a child as a symbolic offering to her father. The ultimate aim for the child, upon entering adolescence and a revival of Oedipal wishes, is to internalise social norms via mechanisms of guilt and thus proceed into healthy, constructive relations with significant love objects that will replace the original Oedipal ones. In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated 27 October, 1897, Freud confidently asserts that the Oedipus complex derives from the premise that ‘conscience is [a child’s] unconscious sense of guilt’ (273). Freud's publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) is a pivotal work that develops his premise in association with wishful thinking and dream fulfillment, at the source of which is often sexual anxiety: ‘To express the matter boldly, it is as though a sexual preference becomes active at an early period, as though the boy regards his father as a rival in love, as though the girl takes the same attitude toward her mother—a rival by getting rid of whom he or she cannot but profit’ (252). Passage through the Oedipus complex is not without its complications. Failure to resolve the Oedipus complex in the latency period,4 Freud proposes, could lead to hysteria, or in severe cases, psychosis.5 In the latter instance, the ego has not been able to cope with guilt associated with unconscious sexual wishes and therefore represses this guilt by splitting off part of itself into the unconscious. Of interest to me with regard to Freud’s Oedipus complex theory is that Antonia White’s autobiographical novels lend themselves, in part, to a Freudian interpretation of sexual trauma, particularly following a typical castration/penis envy trajectory. In ‘The Autobiographical Novels of Antonia White’ (1983), Jeanne Flood suggests that this trajectory is disrupted in The Lost Traveller by Clara’s father’s own incestuous desires in his inability to release his daughter into another man’s arms. However, Clara’s resistances to his seductions have a way of breaking down, to the point that she fails to navigate the Oedipus complex in womanhood; as a result, she subsequently engages in unhealthy sexual relations with men whose impotence sends her back into her father’s arms. What is revealed, I propose, is an aporia in Freud’s Oedipus Complex theory because he presents contradictory initiations into the Oedipus complex. The little girl enters the Oedipus complex by way of unconscious paternal seduction and, in contrast, as a result of her natural psycho-sexual disposition. During this stressful time, Clara begins to show signs of mental degradation that lead to full-blown psychosis in Beyond the Glass. It could equally be argued, however, that Clara’s psychotic episode corresponds to White’s own experiences with psychosis and may be a defence mechanism against conscious acknowledgement of having been sexually abused herself. I propose an alternative position to Freud’s theory on sexual trauma in the work of Sándor Ferenczi, who was breaking new ground in studies related to sexual trauma. Ferenczi’s important essay, ‘Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child’ (1933) returns to Freud’s ideas on sexual abuse expressed in ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ before Freud had renounced his seduction theory. Contrary to Freud’s theory on non-resolution of the Oedipus complex, Ferenczi argues that psychosis is a defence mechanism that is symptomatic of sexual trauma as a result of real sexual abuse. Ferenczi’s essay was written in response to Freud’s seduction theory, in which Ferenczi addresses the dissociation that can occur in adults if, as children, they were placed in a deeply traumatic situation, such as sexual abuse. He finds that adults who have mastered dissociation will quite easily slip into psychosis as a defence mechanism against conscious acknowledgement of the abuse. He warns of the psychical consequences of repeated sexual offences to the child: ‘if the shocks increase in number during the development of the child, the number and the various kinds of splits in the personality increase too, and soon it becomes extremely difficult to maintain contact without confusion of all the fragments, each of which behaves as a separate personality yet does not know of the existence of the others’ (165). Should Ferenczi’s theory be viable, the reader may be witness to competing psychoanalytic narratives on sexual trauma in White’s history that are depicted in her autobiographical fiction.6 Given Ferenczi's findings and the association between childhood sexual abuse and adult psychosis, it is possible that White’s symptoms of psychosis in later life were linked to an earlier abusive experience. It has been raised in recent studies of psychosis that experiencing sexual abuse can lead to psychosis by way of a defence mechanism against acknowledgement of the abuse (Kilcommons et al. 602; Fisher, par. 4; Thompson et al. 1). That being said, whether White remembered the abuse or not is not really the point, and one has no way of knowing either way. The point is that, given White’s own investment in Freudian psychoanalytic treatment, it is not beyond the realm of possibility to suggest that a Freudian approach to sexual trauma restricts other conclusions to be drawn from a psychoanalytic perspective. Given that Freud’s Oedipus complex theory is aligned with his views on a child’s unconscious psycho-sexual development, White’s descent into psychosis has no bearing on reality. In other words, at the source of her madness is sexual anxiety associated with unfulfilled Oedipal desires, whereby punishment is enforced by the stronger male super-ego. For White’s protagonist, Clara,7 in Beyond the Glass, punishment is meted out by her father for her Oedipal desires, but it does not have the desired social outcome because her recovery from madness results in her return to her father’s arms. In an analysis of Freudian theory itself, this ending reveals incongruous aspects of Freud’s understanding of where incestuous desires originate: the parent or the child. Either way, Freud’s derogatory views of women are also evident in his perception of their desire for erotic attachments and an inability to exercise the super-ego without paternal direction. Nonetheless, this conclusion does raise a larger question about how one validates sexual trauma in autobiographical fiction. How much stock can readers place in White’s accounts of psychosis in her autobiographical fiction—a genre that blurs the lines between reality and fiction and between time and space—as an authentic description of any lived traumatic experience? Ultimately, I shall argue the point that White felt compelled to revisit her psychotic experience in her short story ‘The House of Clouds’ and her final completed autobiographical novel, Beyond the Glass to get a grasp on her own sense of identity, but it is certainly a problematic area, particularly in relation to memory, and one to which I turn my attention in Chapter Two. Yüklə 0,51 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|