M. A. Newton Sexual Trauma, Psychosis, and Betrayal in Antonia White’s

Maternal Betrayal

In my reading of Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle cannot be read without paying attention to the dual nature of pleasure and unpleasure with regard to the sexual instincts and how they are connected to the life and death instincts. Initially, Freud is conflicted about how traumatic neuroses can occur outside a sexual framework. On the one hand, Freud makes it very clear in relation to dreams, for example, that ‘it is impossible to classify as wish-fulfilments the dreams … which occur in traumatic neuroses, or the dreams during psycho-analyses which bring to memory the psychical traumas of childhood. They arise, rather, in obedience to the compulsion to repeat’ (61). On the other hand, he states that a traumatic haunting is often manifested through symptoms of the body, which is the classic notion of hysteria as a trauma that is connected to the Oedipus complex: ‘These reproductions, which emerge with such unwished-for exactitude, always have as their subject some portion of infantile sexual life―of the Oedipus complex’ (39). Later, in An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940), a work posthumously published after Freud’s death, he again draws the readers’ attention to how the attraction/repulsion principle, which is a key feature of the pleasure/unpleasure symbiotic relationship, results in a paradox: love, for example, is both aggressive and intimate and, of equal importance, is tied to an earlier childhood memory (6). The ambivalent nature of how White’s relationships with her parents and with, for example, the Catholic Church are conveyed in her autobiographical fiction naturally speaks to this Freudian paradox, as illustrated in Chapter Three.

However, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the compulsion to repeat with regard to repressed memories does not come from the unconscious, but from the ego. That being said, the unconscious is the destination of the ego’s desire to repress the memory. It is the ego that represses a traumatic memory because of its need to avoid unpleasure (40-41). Given Freud’s view that a repressed memory in the unconscious will always be transformed or displaced in some form—which, of course, throws into question how truth is generated—the subject cannot ever revisit the earlier traumatic event, even partially in nightmares, as Caruth suggests. Freud writes, ‘anyone who accepts it as something self-evident that their dreams should put them back at night into the situation that caused them to fall ill has misunderstood the nature of dreams’ (31). According to Freud, dreams either acquiesce to his notions on the subject of wish-fulfilment (which he confesses is not always the case, as aforementioned) or expose ‘the masochistic trends of the ego’ (31). It may be more apt to say sadomasochistic trend of the ego that readers also witness in Tancred’s wound upon Clorinda.

It is what Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as an unconscious ‘passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality’ as someone whose ‘active behaviour’ follows the same course (45). It is a scenario that is analogous to the example he gives of the young child at play whose fort-da game, in which he throws a reel of cotton over the end of the cot and then pulls it back into view, symbolises not just the child’s mother going away and the need for her return that, unconsciously, causes the child to perpetuate feeling abandoned, but his impulse to take revenge on his mother for going away: ‘All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself’ (35).

In Radical Modernism and Sexuality: Freud/Reich/D. H. Lawrence and Beyond (2005), David Seelow observes that in the fort-da game, ‘although the child may be avenging himself on the mother by sending her away, the game’s deeper significance suggests the child’s desire to merge with the mother. The game, on this level, symbolizes a regressive trend apparent even at the age of one-and-a-half’ (42). It is this type of regression to an earlier state that anticipates Otto Rank’s theories on the subject. In his book, The Trauma of Birth (1929), Rank seeks to illustrate how the ‘nucleus of the Unconscious’ of mankind’s psychic development is the biological experience of birth and attempts to surmount the trauma of that experience (xxiii-xxiv). His investigation into the trauma of birth began with a realisation that if patients resisted the libido transference associated with the Oedipus complex, this was due to a ‘fixation on the mother’ (4). Although pre-Oedipal attachments of this nature do not break new ground in terms of Freud’s investigation into infantile fixations and the rebirth phantasy at the end of analyses, Rank takes his readers back to the mother’s womb and primal fixations on the mother.

It is in Freud’s example, moreover, where the words ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ are acutely conveyed. ‘Beyond’ does not equate to a theory that puts aside sexual instincts in place of others, i.e., life and death instincts. The word beyond refers to the inclusion of unpleasure in his analysis that is, in my view, just a rewording of his earlier theories on the nature of dreams in relation to sexual anxiety. Exemplified in Freud’s fort-da example is the idea of betrayal that is also unconsciously illustrated in Tasso’s story. However, Freud does not articulate either example as testifying to real parental betrayal. Moreover, Freud does not focus on in the fort-da game example is how betrayed the child felt upon being abandoned by his mother that is a significant consideration in relation to not just White’s autobiographical fiction, in which there is a sexual obsession with the father but in more contemporary autobiographical fiction and memoirs, too.

In navigating complex feelings for significant others in White’s life, writing autobiographical fiction served two aims: 1) the nature of autobiographical fiction representing the dual facets of attachment (autobiographical elements) and detachment (writing in the third person), correspond to White’s own ambivalent feelings towards her mother; and 2) serves as a method of healing by White portraying her mother as less significant in her life than her father, going so far as to write her out of some of her autobiographical fiction altogether.

White’s sexual obsession with her father—in and out of dream—in which her mother is absent, is the strongest indication of White having felt betrayed because it is to her she wants to develop the strongest emotional union with against a man who may not have physically raped White, but certainly did so on an emotional level, as demonstrated in the previous three chapters. In Freudian theory, it is the child who, driven by instinctive Oedipal impulses, betrays the mother in her turn to the desire for an eroticised relationship with her father for which she will then, and necessarily so, seek punishment: not just on account of how she behaved with her father but how she behaved against her mother. It is a theory that Alice Miller describes in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child (1981) as ‘poisonous pedagogy’ in which victims of abuse ‘for the sake of survival … will usually make beloved attachment figures seem better than they are and never denigrate them’ (111).⁷⁰ In relation to the abuser, this is certainly the case. It is quite often, however, a different matter with regard to the mother.

White felt deeply betrayed by her mother. Christine lost her mother when she was just two-and-a-half months old, so she did not have any maternal influence or model from which to acquire nurturing maternal tendencies. Her father had been raised in a Masonic orphanage and did not display any paternal instincts; rather, he saw his children as a commodity, selling two of Christine’s siblings off as governesses, plus herself, to employers overseas (Dunn 14). While living and working in Austria as a governess, Christine had prided herself on being able to remain slim amidst the mountainous riches of food that reflected in many physiques. Dunn suggests that Christine may have had an eating disorder: ‘powerless and fearful of that powerlessness, she may have exerted her will over the one thing in her power – herself and her body’ (18). To find herself pregnant after marrying Cecil Botting was catastrophic for Christine. One could well imagine how she might have compared the roundness of the woman’s growing belly to the bellies of well-fed middle-class people all around her. Indeed, Christine White was known to be vain; she would take the housekeeping money or from her daughter’s allowance to buy herself something pretty (Dunn 10).

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. White and her mother seemed to behave more like peers, playing games, giggling, and neglecting to be a responsible mother in favour of identifying and competing with her daughter instead (20). These strong narcissistic tendencies displayed by Christine can also be seen in White herself. Far from having a pre-Oedipal attachment to her mother, it seemed that this opportunity was not even available to her. Essentially, she had no mother, but a woman who also acted like a child, unwilling to grow up and grow old. This was to last right into her old age, as Christine became more theatrical and increasingly convinced of her own beauty. She also suffered from debilitating depression (21).

White’s relationship with her two daughters continued the pattern of maternal neglect that White experienced in her childhood. In her memoir, Now To My Mother (1985), White’s first daughter Susan Chitty recalls how a friend of her mother’s, Joan Robertson, remembered visiting White in hospital after she had given birth to her. A particular statement stayed with Susan: ‘Your mother looked down at you as if you were going to bite her’ (32). Susan displayed intense ambivalence towards her mother, which is particularly evident in her memoir. She recalls an early childhood memory around the age of four of how she would rather be a horse than be herself and would play at being a horse (44). At age nine, Susan confessed to a dream she had that she was particularly proud of: ‘I told her [mummy] how in bed at night I was an ill-treated horse, forced to drag heavy loads up a hill. I was beaten until finally my driver thrust a spiked club up my bottom’ (106). When White asked whether or not this experience was frightening, Susan replied, ‘Yes. But it’s lovely’ (106; emphasis in original). This memory eerily resonates with White’s accounts during her descriptions of psychosis in Beyond the Glass and a diary entry dated 21 April, 1938. Like her mother and grandmother, Susan suffered from depression. She attempted suicide during her first year at Oxford.

Susan’s childhood, like her mother’s, was one of neglect and cruelty. Susan's 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. Susan’s mother, in the meantime, was nowhere to be found. When she was around, Susan needed an invite to see her (49). 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.

In Nothing to Forgive, Lyndall also describes White as a neglectful mother who did not seem to know who her daughter was ‘because you ignored me in babyhood, terrorized 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.

Lyndall, as well as Susan, attempted to understand why her mother was so neglectful. Lyndall recalls how a pointed statement by her mother had touched a nerve: ‘But it was only when I read the blunt statement “I always resented the birth of my second child” that I realised I had been sentenced to rejection by my mother in her womb’ (15). White admits in a diary entry for her psychoanalyst, Dennis Carroll, on 11 September, 1937, that she ‘literally retained [her] second child and was ill for long after’ because the thought of giving birth was so terrible that ‘I would rather let the child die inside me and die of bloodpoisoning than face it’ (109). It is the same rejection that White had felt by her mother. However, this statement is made in bad taste, with a lack of empathy towards what White’s mother had to endure in childbirth, which further serves to emphasise White's feelings of hostility towards her mother.

White draws a complex relationship between mother and daughter in her autobiographical novels, in which descriptions of neglect, rejection, and revenge are in abundance. As White is nearing death, spending the last moments of her life battling her demons between tears, Lyndall makes an insightful statement that speaks to a life haunted by a contradictory nature and plagued by her traumatic experience at the convent. In tears herself, Lyndall remembers how she

could not assuage her [mother’s] present agony and fear; nor annihilate her past struggles against devastating depression, anxiety and loneliness; not attenuate her dread of what the eternal future held for a Catholic guilty of many sins. I cried for what had been, for what had not been and for what might have been: for the mental suffering her almighty ego had inflicted on herself and others, particularly on her two children. (4) In Chapter 3

White knew that she had been an incompetent mother and certainly felt that she had been a failure as a daughter, but she could not change. In December 1979, towards the end of her life and becoming increasingly fuddled, she feels very isolated: ‘Oh, I want my family close…. If only someone could come in and offer a crumb of consolation! But they don’t’ (Diaries II, 319). The last entry that Susan writes as editor of White’s diaries is ‘Antonia White died on 10 April 1980’ (319). The fact that this diary does not end on a positive note is very telling of the deeply-rooted feelings of betrayal that had been passed down from mother to daughter.

John Bowlby’s work sheds clearer light on mother-child separation than Freudian theory can ever achieve because, instead of viewing childhood sexuality through an examination of adult neuroses thus moving backwards into childhood, Bowlby starts at the other end. In Attachment and Loss (1982), Bowlby observes that when a child is separated from its mother, he or she goes through a grieving process that is not recognised as such:

During the phase of despair, which succeeds protest, the child's preoccupation with his missing mother is still evident, though his behaviour suggests increasing hopelessness. The active physical movements diminish or come to an end, and he may cry monotonously or intermittently. He is withdrawn and inactive, makes no demands on people in the environment, and appears to be in a state of deep mourning. This is a quiet stage, and sometimes, clearly erroneously, is presumed to indicate a diminution of distress. Because the child shows more interest in his surroundings, the phase of detachment which sooner or later succeeds protest and despair is often welcomed as a sign of recovery. The child no longer rejects the nurses; he accepts their care and the food and toys they bring, and may even smile and be sociable. To some this change seems satisfactory. When his mother visits, however, it can be seen that all is not well, for there is a striking absence of the behaviour characteristic of the strong attachment normal at this age. So far from greeting his mother he may seem hardly to know her; so far from clinging to her he may remain remote and apathetic; instead of tears there is a listless turning away. He seems to have lost all interest in her. (45-46)

For example, in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, a novel that drew upon Allison’s own experience with father-daughter incest (Allison, par. 5), Ruth Anne’s mother hands her off to her Aunt Raylene in order to continue her life with Daddy Glen, the man who beat and sexually abused her daughter. Something inside Ruth Anne dies: ‘I looked back, saw her face pale and drawn, her eyes red-rimmed, her lips trembling. I wanted to tell her lies, tell her that I had never doubted her, that nothing could make any difference to my love for her, but I couldn’t. I had lost my mama. She was a stranger, and I was so old my insides had turned to dust and stone’ (306).

Contemporary clinical literature on trauma has increasingly recognised how betrayal in a child’s early developmental stages plays such a large part in later mental illness, which is a factor in an analysis of White’s psychological plight. In his article, ‘The Recovered Memory Controversy – A New Perspective’ (2008), Graham Gorman cites the abandonment of the mother as the sole cause of repressed memories that are later recovered. Gorman found in a study of 404 subjects that included subjects who experienced recovered traumatic memories and their mothers, in order to corroborate the memories. Gorman proposes that in early childhood, a child’s perceived abandonment by his or her mother ‘forebodes extinction and ensures a traumatic memory trace’ (25). Whilst there is certainly a case for motherly abandonment, Gorman’s method of hypno-regression would be subject to scrutiny, given the controversy dating back to Charcot, Janet, and Freud, which Freud recounts in Studies on Hysteria (1895). In a particular study in which 42 subjects of childhood sexual abuse recovered memories, all of them recalled during regression that the worst part of it was the acknowledgement of maternal abandonment: ‘Mother, you cannot love me or you would not have let this happen to me’ (26; emphasis in original). Trauma, however, was typically below age one, including in the womb. However, of interest, is a case Gorman provides of a thirty-two-year-old woman who had a conscious recollection of being abused, but under hypnosis recovered memories of feeling pleasure by the attention she was receiving from her father, which was ‘compensating for the lack of attention she perceived that mother gave her. The girl felt great guilt over this and could not retain this feeling in consciousness’ (29).

Richard Kluft makes a good observation in his article, ‘Ramifications of Incest’ (2011), which is how betrayal trauma is a situation that ‘encompasses the unique hurt associated with violation by those who have a basic obligation and duty to protect and nurture and extends to those who refuse to believe or help the victim, adding to the victim’s traumatisation. The threat to attachment needs is so profound that the victim may be impelled to disavow the betrayal that he or she has experienced’ (par. 16). Betrayal can also lead to ‘traumatic bonding’ in which negative attention associated with the abuse, like beatings, humiliation, and threats can perversely translate in the victim’s mind as a form of caring (par. 17).

As described by Jennifer Freyd and Pamela Birrell in their book, Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Fooled (2013), a fundamental feature of betrayal is fear of losing trust in authoritative figures, which they define as ‘betrayal blindness’ (95). It is ‘based on an extreme need to keep some aspect of a situation intact, whether maintaining a marriage, keeping a family together, or holding onto one’s position in a community. If the marriage, the family, or the community appears necessary for survival, remaining blind to the betrayal is a survival strategy’ which can be achieved through ‘both internal and social processes’ but can also ‘prove toxic to the mind, the body, relationships, and society’ (95).
Writing Autobiographical Fiction towards Healing

According to Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery (1997), ‘The core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others. Recovery, therefore, is based upon the empowerment of the survivor and the creation of new connections. Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation’ (133). It is in these new connections, Herman argues, that a new foundation of trust can be built. I suggest that White’s autobiographical fiction served to help her work through deeply-rooted feelings of betrayal that she examined within the context of her relationships with her parents. Although White was betrayed in very different ways by her parents—by her father in psycho-sexual terms and by her mother’s inability to be a good mother—White’s feelings of betrayal were overtly targeted in many ways at her mother.

In Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (2000), Suzette Henke explores life writing as a form of scriptotherapy:

The primary goal of therapy is ‘to put the story, including its imagery, into words’ (Trauma 177). If Herman’s analysis is correct, then a major impetus behind autobiographical literature in general, and women’s life-writing in particular, may be the articulation of a haunting and debilitating emotional crisis that, for the author, borders on the unspeakable. What cannot be uttered might at least be written―cloaked in the mask of fiction or sanctioned by the protective space of iteration that separates the author/narrator from the protagonist/character she or he creates and from the anonymous reader/auditor she or he envisages. (xix)

In White’s case, her autobiographical fiction is a place for her to revisit and work through complex issues of betrayal she had with both her parents as a form of self-expression that, whilst immensely stressful at times and never really fully surmounted, may have been the best type of therapy she sought that prevented her from taking her life.

But, more importantly, writing autobiographical fiction is about writing in one’s voice, even if that voice is marred by an array of complex emotions in an unhealthy relationship. Readers become witnesses to those voices. In Introducing Narrative Psychology: Self, Trauma and the Construction of Meaning (2000), Michele L. Crossley observes that ‘We often experience the narratives told by people who have suffered various illnesses and traumas as gripping, emotive and powerful. The power of such stories, according to Frank (1995: 48), derives from the implicit link we make between the “truth” of a story and the suffering attending the telling of that story’ (110). For example, in an interview with Mort Zuckerman on 13 September, 1995, Dorothy Allison talks of how other’s impotence is turned inward: ‘We’re raised to make everyone else’s lives easier, if it’s only by example of how easily we destroy ourselves” (‘Charlie Rose’). To Ruth Anne, it came easily to turn Glen’s hatred of his own self-loathing upon herself: “‘You think you’re so special,” he’d jeered. “Act like you piss rose water and honey.” … I rolled over and pushed my face underwater. I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry…. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid’ (209).

Deborah M. Horvitz suggests that metaphorically reenacting trauma in narrative offers the victim a means to healing that serves, as a political statement in itself, to voice a trauma that has been silenced. She argues, ‘Not until the victim encounters and translates her “unspeakable” tragedy into “her” story can she envision a future devoid of violence’ (40). In her reflective essay, ‘History is a Weapon: A Question of Class’ (2008), Dorothy Allison seems to speak to this possible future:

The need to make my world believable to people who have never experienced it is part of why I write fiction. I know that some things must be felt to be understood, that despair, for example, can never be adequately analysed; it must be lived. But if I can write a story that so draws the reader in that she imagines herself like my characters, feels their sense of fear and uncertainty, their hopes and terrors, then I have come closer to knowing myself as real, important as the very people I have always watched with awe. (par. 4)