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

A Crisis of Self-Expression in White’s Autobiographical Fiction

White’s engaging exploration into her madness in her autobiographical fiction is particularly intriguing to me because it is not documented at any great length in her diaries. Not only did White have the courage to make public an experience that exposed her unbalanced mind, she also attempted to document a very dark period in her history and remain true to her experience. Nonetheless, documenting psychosis is fraught with difficulties. While readers are presented with vivid snapshots of White’s experiences with madness, given the ambiguous implications of the autobiographical fiction genre, to what extent can her creative texts be perceived as true reflections of actual traumatic experiences in her history? This is a question about the nature of autobiography, in general, that occupies literary scholars and psychoanalysts alike, which I address in Chapter Two.

Given the genre in which White is writing, which blends fiction with non-fiction, questions of ambiguity will arise. Ambiguity is created by a reader’s uncertainty about those aspects of the novel that have been introduced by the author out of a desire to appeal to aesthetic values and those aspects related to complex underlying issues of authenticity that may stem from an author’s potentially confused memories or sense of identity; this is particularly true for authors like White, who suffered from mental illness. By writing her autobiographical fiction, White sought to find a balance between writing a personal testimony of her traumatic experiences and appealing to literary aesthetic values. Aesthetic values are often achieved in creative texts by the author’s use of literary devices, such as metaphor, which produces embellished descriptions that are not literally true, even if the author purports that these descriptions reflect a particular truth, as White does.

Authenticity of experience⁸ is a subject that is very common in discussions on autobiographical narratives, of which autobiographical fiction as a sub-genre is placed. For my purpose of situating White’s autobiographical fiction in context during the time in which she was writing, I primarily focus on Lejeune’s text, On Autobiography (1989), as he delves more deeply into the form of the autobiographical novel in a way that is closely aligned with the role of the author posed by critics during the time in which White was writing; this serves to place my analysis of White’s autobiographical fiction in historical context. However, by way of comparison, I also draw on works by, for example, James Olney, who advocates for writing about experience to trump a focus on form, and Elizabeth W. Bruss, who observes the personal and public objectives of producing autobiographical narratives, in general, against ever-shifting cultural expectations.

Lejeune draws clear parameters that define the autobiographical novel, which are based on a premise that autobiography should be depicted in a retrospective narrative prose that tells the story of one’s life, particularly the story of one’s personality. According to Lejeune, the autobiographical novel fulfils a ‘fictional pact’ as opposed to an ‘autobiographical pact’ because, either implicitly or explicitly, a clear link cannot be established by name between author, narrator and protagonist. There is, essentially, a mutual understanding between author and reader that the reader should not expect to hear the truth (Lejeune 13-15). Although Lejeune does address potential opportunities for readers’ interpretative strategies, as well as ‘new strategies of writing’ (124), due to the ambiguous nature of the autobiographical novel, Lejeune’s work is fundamentally grounded in concrete definitions that ignore abstract notions of personality, particularly in relation to ruptures in personality.

Given Lejeune’s definitions, I place his guidelines into historical perspective and address a controversy between literary scholars with regard to authorial intention and the autobiographical subject. For example, in The Personal Heresy (1939), humanist scholar E. M. W. Tillyard believes that readers should be aware of the subjective relationship between author and protagonist. By way of contrast, in the same text, C. S. Lewis argues in favor of there being an objective relationship between author and protagonist. This debate is continued in the work of T. S. Eliot, W. K. Wimsatt, and Monroe C. Beardsley, among others. I argue for a space to be carved for White’s autobiographical fiction to be taken seriously as creative works that aspire to both an authentic expression of a divided personality and aesthetic values. That being said, by also appealing to aesthetic values, White removes the authorial ‘I’, thus making it harder for her autobiographical fiction to be read as a testimony of her life. Fortunately, White’s diaries provide ample auxiliary support, but these only go some way to authenticating any possible trauma she experienced.

In a juxtaposition of literary and psychoanalytic writings on psychosis, I go on to discuss problems of self-expression in White’s metaphorical (poetic) descriptions of psychosis with regard to a specific traumatising event in her life, her incarceration. Again, ambiguity may arise in the reader’s attempt to make connections between the author’s account of her traumatic experience and the accuracy of that recollection, especially if the language is steeped in metaphor. From a psychoanalytical perspective, for example, in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses 1955-1956 (1993), Jacques Lacan purports that it is impossible to authenticate narratives of psychosis. In a development of Freud’s ideas on misrecognition, Lacan suggests that psychotic narratives lack a coherent transfer of metaphorical language from the unconscious to the conscious and, therefore, the experience of psychosis described in the author’s intended form will not be understood by readers. In my reading of Lacan, he is stating that psychotic narratives lack value. Using Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) to support his case, Lacan ignores Schreber’s attempts to grapple with sexual and spiritual preservation and suicidal tendencies through the agency of his alter egos; these are similarities Schreber shares with White’s alter egos, Helen and Clara.

Lacan’s ideas are typically situated in the post-structuralist movement. Post-structuralists rejected their predecessors’ focus on the literary scientific analysis of texts in an attempt to prove that, due to endless signifiers, meaning cannot be determined. In other words, each word can evoke a number of variant meanings, thus producing ambiguity.⁹ In a similar vein to Lacan’s thinking, post-structuralist literary critic Paul de Man later seeks to reduce the visual recollection of experiences to a linguistic structure. In his article, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’ (1979), de Man suggests that visual recollections captured linguistically have no value because past experiences cannot be restored just as they were. It is the same complaint he had with the Romantics. Similarly, it is also a concern that Lejeune expresses in his analysis on the relationship between author, narrator, and protagonist.

While there is certainly some merit in the arguments presented at the intersection of literary and psychoanalytic scholars, White’s testimony of her psychosis in her autobiographical fiction should be respected as a viable mode of self-expression in its raw portrayal of a fractured identity. White’s belief in her metaphorical descriptions of psychosis bearing a resemblance to objective reality would certainly be subject to scrutiny. Nonetheless, it is also important for me as an empathic reader to be willing to listen to White’s experiences as she related to them—regardless of ambiguity—as well as learning how the threat of mental, emotional, and spiritual annihilation shaped her personality and sense of being.¹⁰

Alongside an examination of her diaries, White attempts to gain some kind of agency through her protagonist within the confines of a complex Oedipal narrative. Freud’s views on female sexuality align themselves with larger socio-cultural patriarchal attitudes about women as morally inferior to their male counterparts, which is particularly evident in some orthodox religions in the first half of the twentieth century, for example, Catholicism.¹¹ As a one-time lapsed Catholic herself, White would have felt this attitude most poignantly. Spiritual angst was a strong motif in Beyond the Glass, and yet this motif comes through most strongly in her first autobiographical novel, Frost in May. It is a narrative that, in many ways, encompasses the full weight of White’s troubled (pre)Oedipal relationships with her parents, with Catholicism, and with how she perceives herself as a sexual woman ‒ to which I turn my attention in Chapter Three.

Socio-Cultural Notions of Female Sexuality

In Chapter Three, a central question is posed: how can readers navigate an autobiographical novel like Frost in May that seems to paradoxically testify to and against the suppression of female sexuality? As shown in the previous chapter, White was not just a woman compelled to document her troubled relationships and traumatic experiences. She was also a writer who was well aware of the need to write according to literary aesthetic values. Developing literary trends on the relationship between author, narrator, and protagonist or author and reader in the twentieth century is part of a larger literary discussion on how literature best represents the social milieu. The modernist movement, for example, created a rupture in the socio-cultural framework by asserting the body in literature through transgressive modes of sexual expression in defiance of oppressive patriarchal authorities. This movement had a profound influence on White. However, she found herself torn between being an aspiring modernist artist and a devout Catholic in the 1930s, a time when to be both seemed incompatible. On the one hand, White aspires toward a literary modernist mindset advocating for female sexual liberation as a war waged on suppressed sexuality in a dominant Catholic culture. On the other hand, as a lapsed Catholic, she desperately wanted to be received back into the arms of the church. As a result of this dilemma, White’s sense of self-as-artist is lurched into creative and psychological conflict.

In Frost in May, White depicts a young and romantic convert called Nanda Grey who resides and is educated at Lippington Convent between the ages of nine and fourteen. During her time at Lippington, Nanda tries to behave in a way a good Catholic should, but she feels subjected to a series of seemingly hypocritical rules and futile punishments from both the nuns at the convent and her father, Mr. Grey. However, her protagonist’s creation of a salacious novel, which mirrors White’s own experiences at the Convent of the Sacred Heart where White’s own partially completed novel is perceived by the nuns and, unforgivably so, by her father as an act of spiritual treachery against the Catholic Church, results in her dismissal from the convent. In analogous terms, Nanda’s perception of her sexuality in Frost in May as being inherently corrupt draws an interesting parallel with religio-cultural portrayals of women that stem from woman’s first transgression that led to Adam’s seduction and the fall of man.

This conflict is exacerbated by a complex underlying (pre)Oedipal narrative. On the one hand, a Freudian Oedipus complex is present, but it is enmeshed with prevailing pre-Oedipal identification problems unveiled in motifs of food and maternity. These pre-Oedipal problems stem from Nanda’s ambivalent feelings for her mother that, in Freudian terms, demonstrate the strongest symptoms of sexual trauma. According to Freud, sexual difficulties may arise when, for example, the female caregiver unwittingly arouses the young child sexually when taking care of his or her hygienic needs and when breastfeeding. Freud suggests that women are the root cause of a child’s difficult sexual maturation as a result of real sexual arousal, albeit unconsciously initiated. In ‘Femininity’ (1933), Freud recalls that early period in his study of infantile sexual traumas that caused him ‘many distressing hours’. He believed that the phantasy of sexual seduction in the Oedipus complex proper could be found in the girl’s pre-Oedipal history in part due to her mother arousing ‘pleasurable sensations in her genitals’ (149-150). Furthermore, Freud places much emphasis on the necessary antagonistic role of the breast as a contributing factor to a child’s sexual trauma and developing anxiety, which also places the mother as the source of sexual arousal in the child in the auto-erotic phase of her psycho-sexual development.

With regard to spiritual betrayal, writing autobiographically White portrays her father, Cecil Botting, as a man who fostered his daughter’s fears of damnation because of guilt in relation to his own corrupt sexuality and fears of damnation, which is projected onto White’s protagonist. This projection, which is supported in Freud’s Oedipus complex with its focus on childhood sexuality, exacerbates White’s construction of her self-as-artist as a woman suffering from spiritual angst and mental illness.

Whilst the discovery of her novel is a traumatic event for White, I propose that it is no accident that it remains unfinished in Frost in May because it reflects White’s own assertion of the right to express herself sexually and autonomously in her writing in a culture in which sexual expression is suppressed. Nanda’s relationship with her father and the nuns at Lippington—authoritative figures who symbolically manufacture Nanda according to a higher moral imperative—illustrate parallels between key Catholic tenets on sexuality and Freud’s Oedipus complex theory. This parallel exposes a complex relationship between psychoanalytic and religio-cultural notions of regulation, sacrifice, and punishment that have been internalised by White and projected into Nanda. Although the novel is unfinished and Nanda had planned to convert her characters into faithful, law-abiding subjects under God’s jurisdiction, it is discovered prior to this momentous event. Nanda is subsequently punished and cast out of her Garden of Eden. This punishment lays the groundwork for her to learn from her transgression and transform her desire according to a higher moral imperative as a woman who proceeds to her socio-religious conforming role in subservience to male authority. An interesting parallel is also drawn with Freud’s construction of the Oedipus complex as an incest barrier in a larger religio-cultural context to tame female sexuality.

This conclusion has wider implications in terms of White’s construction of her self-as-artist in larger socio-cultural terms that also raises issues in relation to the suppression of the voices of victims of sexual abuse. Freud’s Oedipus complex goes through a series of modifications pertaining to his views on penis envy and a woman’s moral fortitude. A fundamental premise that underscores Freud’s Oedipus complex is that it aligns itself with larger socio-cultural ideals about moral sexual human conduct. As early as in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud asserts that ‘Respect for this barrier is essentially a cultural demand made by society. Society must defend itself against the danger that the interests which it needs for the establishment of higher social units may be swallowed up by the family’ (128). In other words, passage through the Oedipus complex is essential ‘for the progress of civilization’ (128).

White’s bold assertion of female sexuality is inscribed within a socio-cultural framework that functions within the parameters of both Catholic and psychoanalytic patriarchal discourses through mechanisms of condemnation and confession. I propose that there is a parallel between the Oedipus complex as a vehicle for the transformation of desire and the natures of condemnation and confession in patriarchal religio-cultural terms towards the same aim. Women confess their own perverse sexual phantasies, at the root of which is maternal seduction, in order to then learn valuable moral lessons from them in the hands of a larger patriarchal authority.

Contemporary Trends on Sexual Trauma, Memory, and Betrayal

Whilst it is not my aim in this thesis to prove that father-daughter incest occurred in White’s history, debates today largely revolve around why it is that aim cannot be achieved. At the core of Freud’s renouncement of his seduction theory was non-belief in his patients’ claims of sexual abuse that he largely attributed to sexual phantasies. With regard to women, in particular, his view reflected the lower value he placed on women compared to their male counterparts biologically, socially, and morally. In contrast, Ferenczi believed his patients’ claims. In White’s case, her own descent into psychosis against a backdrop of a complicated and highly charged psycho-sexual relationship with her father may actually serve to evidence father-daughter incest but it cannot be proven. What came out of this initial investigation into sexual trauma, however, is how differently sexual trauma is interpreted in psychoanalytic theory. These differences of interpretation lay a foundation upon which many contemporary theories on sexual trauma rest; in many ways, these theories speak to either Freud’s or Ferenczi’s original claims.

Freud’s views on sexual trauma generated a variety of paradigmatic approaches to interpretation. There has been, for instance, a lot of scientific mainstream psychology and psychiatric research alongside feminist trauma studies into the damaging effects of childhood sexual abuse. Perhaps more forcefully, feminists came on the scene in the 1980s with examples of recovered memory cases in therapy and exposed the detrimental impact Freud’s Oedipus complex theory had on perpetuating gender inequality that they argued was based on society’s patriarchal need to ensure women’s subjugation to their male counterparts. Leading figures in the feminist movement are Judith Lewis Herman and Florence Rush. Herman, for example, paved the way in her book, Father-Daughter Incest, (1981) for father-daughter incest to be understood not as ‘an aberration but rather a common and predictable abuse of patriarchal power’ (219). In other words, women’s bodies became the method of subjugation that led to their adopting an incestuous way of life in how they perceived their roles in society: to marry men just like their fathers who would tower over them in wealth, stature, and authority. While Feminists took a somewhat aggressive political approach against men, which at times seemed to target all men, they did advocate for voices of victims of sexual abuse; feminists placed a spotlight on father-daughter incest and the need for victims’ voices to be heard after spending many years unable to talk about the experiences or as a result of ‘repressed’ memories that haunt victims symptomatically, for example, through psychosis, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD),¹² extreme anxiety, and an inability to develop trusting relations with others. Aggressively giving victims of father-daughter incest voices, feminists’ claims led to a new market of autobiographical novels and memoirs that cast the authors in the dual roles of victim and survivor as they navigate the emotional quagmire in which incest has placed them.

Cathy Caruth is perhaps one of the most cited trauma theorists on memory in literary studies. She shifts focus away from the speculative area of sexual abuse validation to what extent memory survives any traumatic event and is then later narrated in an attempt to speak the ‘unspeakable’. As her theoretical model, Caruth primarily juxtaposes psychoanalysts’ writings, namely Freud, Lacan, and Onno van der Hart, with literary and political theorists. My interest, in particular, is in Caruth’s use of Freud’s work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), to support her claims in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996). She utilises Freud’s ideas on repetition-compulsion as scaffolding to support her argument that, for example, traumatic flashbacks function as haunting voices that cry out from a second wounding, which serve to defy and bear witness to the original trauma. It is a situation Caruth also posits in the therapeutic transference situation.

In my interpretation of Freud’s theory of repetition-compulsion, which is driven by instinctual sexual impulses as demonstrated in his fort-da game example, I revisit Beyond the Pleasure Principle to illustrate how both White’s protagonist and readers serve to defy and bear witness to White’s original traumatic event, which is maternal betrayal as a result of neglect. White felt deeply betrayed by her mother because she enabled her husband to control White’s sense of identity so completely as a daughter and as a woman that it led to White’s inability to create truly loving and trusting relationships with other people in her life, namely her daughters.

Given this particular scenario, many episodes of White’s hostile treatment of her mother in her autobiographical fiction that resemble pre-Oedipal difficulties go beyond these Freudian premises. Writing for White in some ways becomes an act of revenge due to deeply rooted feelings of betrayal that go beyond Freudian (pre)Oedipal premises, but also a means to work through these feelings. It is in White’s autobiographical fiction where White airs her hostility towards her mother because, in contrast to diary references to her father that showcase the complexity of their relationship, mention of her mother is scant. This further illustrates the depths to which White’s feelings of betrayal go; it is only in a detached manner, writing in the third person in autobiographical fiction, where White can confront her mother’s failings, and in so doing, paradoxically, create a new connection with her.

Chapter One

Freud’s Oedipus Complex and Conflicting Psychoanalytic Theories of

Sexual Trauma in Relation to Antonia White’s Autobiographical Novels

Non-Resolution of Oedipus Complex in Antonia White’s Autobiographical Novels – Conflicting Psychoanalytic Theories of Sexual Trauma and Psychosis
When Sigmund Freud renounced his seduction theory in favor of the Oedipus complex, it was because he felt he could no longer sustain belief in his patients’ claims that they had been victims of sexual abuse. He argued against these claims on two grounds: 1) that there were just too many cases for them to be true; and 2) that the cases—namely those in which the father was accused of being the sexual perpetrator—were based on fantasies as part of a child’s natural psycho-sexual development. Knowing what we know today about the prevalence of sexual abuse, it may appear odd to hear that, in Freud’s time, the higher the number of cases, the less likely they are true. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, Freud’s incredulity may be understandable, in a way, as was his decision to view his patients’ cases as a more universally applicable unconscious desire. This new development stemmed from his patriarchal stance, a pervasive one among his medical colleagues and society in general at that time, that females are biologically inferior to males. It was a view that he carried into his perception of emotional and ethical female behaviours and the unconscious motivations behind them. This stance set the stage for Freud’s modified position on sexual abuse, which is demonstrated in the Oedipus complex, a theory that goes through a series of modifications in line with his developing views on women. This chapter addresses the lasting damaging impact of Freud’s Oedipus complex theory on victims of sexual abuse: in particular, the limitations attached to validating women’s experiences of sexual abuse in a Freudian theoretical climate in the first half of the twentieth century.

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first section will examine the complexities of Freud’s Oedipus complex theory in relation to an examination of the autobiographical novels of Antonia White, a novelist who may have been a victim of sexual abuse. The second section will set out conflicting psychoanalytic theories of sexual trauma in relation to psychosis. New insights into the relationship between psychosis and sexual trauma may open up avenues into investigating possible incidences of sexual abuse in patients’ histories. These new insights, in turn, may serve to explain White’s deep-rooted psychological angst that is projected into her autobiographical fiction.

The evidence I provide in opposition to Freud’s position does not suggest that at the source of every psychotic patient’s distress is sexual abuse, and this is certainly not my aim. Given these conflicting theories of sexual trauma, my aim is to illustrate that, due to the popularity of Freud’s Oedipus complex theory, severe psychic restrictions were placed on victims of sexual abuse in psychoanalytic treatment during the first half of the twentieth century. Sándor Ferenczi’s position on sexual trauma, for example, does not stand up to scrutiny beside dominant Freudian ideology because possible victims of sexual abuse undergoing Freudian psychoanalytic treatment may have reinvented their memories against the backdrop of a suggested unresolved Oedipal trajectory. White also underwent Freudian psychoanalytic treatment, in part due to her sexual preoccupation with her father, which is why White’s autobiographical fiction follows the same path.