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

Non-Resolution of Oedipus Complex in Antonia White’s Autobiographical Novels

Since Freud's inception of the Oedipus complex, it has gone through some modifications, including an assertion that a female is not only biologically inferior to her male counterpart, but socially, ethically and emotionally inferior, too. A stable feature, though, is that the little girl assumes that she once possessed a penis that her mother then took away. In other words, the little girl believes she has been physically castrated. Freud does not divulge what the little girl thinks the mother has done with the newly removed penis, but if the little girl did have one, its removal would be psychologically damaging and relations between mother and daughter equally damaged. This psychic trauma occurs in what Freud has coined the pre-Oedipal phase, which lays the foundation for the turbulent processes of identification, attachment, and ego development.

The little girl's unconscious objective is to enter the Oedipus complex proper and reclaim the penis. She eagerly redirects her attention away from her mother and towards her father in the hope that he will give her the penis she desires. The little girl identifies with her mother as a rival for the penis but needs to come to terms with the fact that her mother has also been castrated.

Freud’s castration complex idea is developed more fully in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940). At the onset of the Oedipus complex, the little girl sees that the little boy has a penis and assumes that she has already been castrated, but she is now resentful about this and seeks some kind of compensation for her loss:

The daughter, under the influence of her envy for the penis, cannot forgive her mother for having sent her into the world so insufficiently equipped. In her resentment over this she gives up her mother and puts someone else in her place as the object of her love—her father. If one has lost a love-object, the most obvious reaction is to identify oneself with it, to replace it from within, as it were, by identification.... Identification with her mother can take the place of attachment to her mother. (62)

In this tangled web of desire and revenge, a problematic Oedipal narrative pervades White’s autobiographical novels, which I shall proceed to illustrate against the backdrop of her personal writings.

White’s relationship with her parents displays ambivalent tendencies that form an interesting parallel with Freud’s Oedipus complex theory. For example, White frequently draws her mother Christine as a flaky character in her personal writings and autobiographical novels. White’s disdain for and feeling of superiority over her mother are evident, and she makes it clear that she is more highly regarded in her father’s eyes than her mother. In As Once in May, White recollects that

The prouder I grew of my father, who could not have been a more presentable parent, the more embarrassing I found her refusal to look or behave like other people’s mothers. Even as a small child I was critical of her and realised that many other women, besides my grandmother, were critical of her too. All these women who adored my father thought that my mother was unworthy of him and pitied him for having married a capricious, affected, extravagant woman with no sense of wifely duty. (259)

How White is able to fathom such criticism with keen observation at her young age is puzzling. What seems probable is that White is using this description as an opportunity to air how she felt about her mother for much of her life. There is a tinge of bitterness that comes through in this description, as White replaces her feelings of loss with descriptions that suggest she is in control of her mother’s presence in her life.

White’s father was a central figure in her life, and her mother was often either absent or in the way. White recalls a memory in her childhood when her mother brought back a plush black poodle from a trip to Paris that White named Mister Dash. In her delight, White recalls that she was ‘too overwhelmed’ to thank her mother as she was more preoccupied with kissing her new stuffed animal. Her mother asked, ‘“Aren’t you going to kiss Mummy too? Haven’t you missed her all these weeks she’s been away?” I had not even noticed her absence, but I gave her a kiss of passionate gratitude. At that moment I truly loved her. But not as much as the black poodle’ (232).

Similarly, when Nanda’s parents come to visit Lippington, Mrs. Grey is an embarrassment due to her ignorance of the necessary decorum at the convent; she ruins what was supposed to be a perfect curtsey by Nanda and laments the loss of Nanda’s beautiful hairdo: ‘Nanda felt herself turn scarlet…. She had been long enough at Lippington to know that personal vanity was the most contemptible of all sins’ (38). In contrast, upon Mr. Grey complimenting Nanda on her curtsey, she notices him give her ‘his rather rare smile and Nanda began to thaw into a human being. She was very fond of her father’ (39).

There is a strong Oedipal component overtly expressed in White’s first autobiographical novel, Frost in May. During Nanda’s stay with her father during the Christmas holidays prior to beginning her fifth Lent term at Lippington, the following scenario is presented to the reader:

During these three weeks, Nanda and her father lived in a state of blissful companionship. Mrs. Grey was away at Bournemouth recovering from one of her mysterious indispositions…. To her great delight, her father had begun to treat her as a grown-up person. He dressed for dinner in her honour, asked her permission before he lit his pipe, and bought her pink carnations on the great gala nights when they dined out at a restaurant. (172-173)

In the absence of her mother, Nanda has her father all to herself. In a scene of potential romance, ‘Mr. Grey remarks, “Once upon a time I used to wish I had a son. But a daughter’s a much better thing to have.” He did not look at Nanda, but she saw that his hands were shaking so that it took even more matches than usual to get the pipe going again’ (177). Following this declaration of affection, ‘Mr. Grey holds [Nanda] for longer than usual as she kissed him good night, smoothing back her hair from her forehead, and looking into her eyes’ (179). This Oedipal scene is short-lived, with bitter disappointment on Mr. Grey’s side and a deeper sense of rejection on Nanda’s as a result of her writing a romantic novel that is discovered and frowned upon by the nuns. Nanda includes a scene in which her heroine receives a kiss of ‘burning passion’ for which Nanda is severely reprimanded by her father (202). The novel, which describes the heroine’s flirtations with admirers, marks a particularly traumatic moment in White’s life because the experience mirrors her own: it was the ‘childhood shock which paralyzed me emotionally’ (qtd. in Strauss-Noll 133).

From a Freudian perspective, the following explanation may be given. In ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924), Freud writes,

[The Oedipus complex] succumbs to repression … and is followed by the latency period. It has not yet become clear, however, what it is that brings about its destruction. Analyses seem to show that it is the experience of painful disappointments. The little girl likes to regard herself as what her father loves above all else; but the time comes when she has to endure a harsh punishment from him and she is cast out of her fool’s paradise. (173)

In other words, upon a young woman becoming aware of her sexuality upon the onset of puberty, her sexual desires are strengthened. While Freud is not sure how these sexual desires are quashed, he suspects that it may have something to do with the father essentially enforcing the incest barrier. However, after Nanda is cast out of her paradise, her sexual obsession with her father increases in subsequent autobiographical novels accompanied by the continuous desire to seek his approval.¹³

Critics have interpreted White’s writing of her own novel at the convent as a pivotal moment that sparked writer’s block. In her essay, ‘Antonia White and the Subversion of Literary Impotence at Hayford Hall’ (2005), as a result of equating writing with sin, Sandra Jeffery observes that ‘Susan Kolodny, [in her analysis of] writer’s block, suggests that certain content may be resisted because of an association with traumatic experiences. An attempt to commit a creative work to paper triggers a repressed memory that is met with a defence mechanism in the form of resistance, which in White’s case was her writer’s block’ (Jeffery 82).

Utilising Kleinian theory, Jeffery turns to the dialogue between Kolodny and Maria Bergmann to illustrate how ‘the aggressive feelings we originally had toward important others, but felt we had to protect them from in order to preserve our relationship to them, may “get displaced or projected … leading to work paralysis or destruction of the product”’ (82). Jeffery concludes that White, under pressure not to defile her father’s good name, which would necessarily be exposed in her writing, leads her to writer’s block (82). These sentiments echo Jeanne Flood’s observation in her essay, ‘The Autobiographical Novels of Antonia White’ (1983): ‘Nanda in a work of the imagination has revealed herself to [Mr. Grey] as corrupted by sexuality’ (Flood 135). Similarly, in her article ‘Antonia White: Portrait of the Artist as a Dutiful Daughter’ (1991), Ellen Cronan Rose makes a striking connection between a scribbling incident, her writing a lewd novel, and how her father reacted by spanking her. In response to Nanda’s reaction to the novel, ‘If he had stripped her naked and beaten her, she would not have felt more utterly humiliated’ (White 217), Cronan Rose observes that both writing and writer’s block are connected with ‘defiance, compounded by incestuous desire and Oedipal seduction’ (247). As if in response to these observations, in her essay, ‘Site Also of Angst and Spiritual Search’ (2005), Sandra Chait claims that White’s ‘sexuality offended [her father], and he attempted to control her every action, her every thought, even to the point of causing her mental breakdown under the stress to express herself honestly, and therefore sexually too, in writing’ (156).

It is certainly true that writing that fateful novel at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and her father’s reaction to it scarred White, which would explain why she did not write other than in the private domain of her diaries for nearly twenty years. When she returns to writing, she is haunted by her father in such a potent way that her experience with writing is associated with one of the most private acts. In an Analysis diary entry dated 1 June 1936, just three years after Frost in May is published and another 15-month stint in psychoanalytic treatment, White writes,

Am no longer interested in face cream … almost indifferent to clothes. Have become greedy again…. Hate my fat; do nothing about it. Hate wholesome food … Carroll says … That I will not write a masterpiece because other people would ‘devour’ it…. I am just as anxious and embarrassed when anyone asks ‘are you writing anything now? As when my mother or anyone in authority asked if I had been to the lavatory. (75)

Later, in an Analysis diary entry dated 27 April, 1938, gripped with writer’s block, she associates her writing more closely with the act of defecation: ‘The act of defaecation is important, pleasurable and highly satisfying to me. I can admit this to Carroll without any shame. Now, if I really think of my work as faeces, why does the act of writing cause me such distress and misery? Obviously if I really thought writing was shitting, I should be ashamed to admit I enjoyed it, even to myself (129-130). Feelings of guilt, I add, are carried into Beyond the Glass at the solicitor’s office to take care of the marriage annulment with Archie. Mr. Ramsden comments on her having ‘some literary ability’ to which Clara replies ‘Whoever told you that nonsense?’ later apologising because ‘I always seem to be rude when people mention writing. Guilt, I suppose’ (75). For White, the act of writing is fused with deeply embedded psychological issues made manifest in her love object relations, which are symbolised in progressive acts of consumption, devouring, and defecation that are reinforced in psychoanalytic treatment and which contribute to her psychological angst.

White’s writing is, essentially, an act of sadomasochism, as her feelings about it demonstrate. She associates her writing with defecation that is both a good and bad thing. She also makes a comparison between her writing and delivering a male child. The act of defecation, it seems, is a form of birth. On the one hand, writing autobiographically, White’s power stems from her father’s desire for a son, which is so strong that he tries to fashion White into that son rather than as an act of gender equality. Perhaps caught in a net of Oedipal desire that is displaced onto her creation of Frost in May, White attempts to navigate away from her femininity, which she believes is at the core of her sexual transgression. In a diary entry dated 25 June, 1938, White confesses that in some way, ‘I suppose I want a book in some funny way to be a male child, something powerful, able to fertilise other people. I can understand the extraordinary satisfaction of producing a son. A woman has not a penis but she can produce a being with a real penis’ (139). Of course, this terminology is further evidence of the great impact that Freudian psychoanalytic treatment had on White.

When White returns to writing, it is with gusto, with three consecutive autobiographical novels that are extensively critical of her mother and obsessed with her father. Many episodes in these autobiographical novels revolve around Oedipal conflicts between Nanda (to become Clara in the next novel, The Lost Traveller) and her father, Mr. Grey (to become Claude Batchelor). A central feature of these subsequent novels is Clara’s complex sexual relationships with other men that she unconsciously allows her father to frustrate, but which also lead to psychotic episodes. In these circumstances, Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex as stemming solely from a child’s incestuous desires becomes unstable.

Out of all the autobiographical novels, The Lost Traveller perhaps displays the most intense Oedipal relations between Clara and her father Claude Batchelor. As a tidy follow-up to Frost in May, Claude’s authoritarianism continues, and his wife Isabel is marginalised and treated with polite contempt. Isabel Batchelor is introduced in a way that describes her like one of the decorations in the house Clara and her family lived in on 18 Valetta Road, West Kensington: ‘If the blinds of Number 18 had not been drawn, its curtains would have appeared perfectly correct except for those of the top floor bedroom. These were of pink satin and people who disapproved of Claude Batchelor’s wife saw in them one more proof of her extravagance and oddness’ (3). This sense of vanity annoys Nanda, but it is something that perhaps struck a chord with White. Christine was known to be vain; for example, she would take the housekeeping money or from her daughter’s allowance to buy herself something pretty (Dunn 10).

Claude is tolerant of his wife, and his attraction to her is like one would find in the pink satin curtains: ‘From his boyhood to this day his natural preference had always been for golden-haired women; plump, good-tempered and insipidly pretty. Yet the moment he had set eyes, twenty years ago, on a sallow, brown-haired girl whose beauty was only one degree removed from ugliness he had been fascinated, and fascinated he remained’ (White 5). This description is very revealing. In just two sentences, White tells the reader that her father prefers women who look like Clara and that her mother’s beauty pales in comparison. At the beginning of the novel, given Claude’s view of his wife, a woman for whom he feels ‘resentful tenderness’, White has set the stage for there being no competition for Claude’s affection (5).

Clara’s father, however, is known for his insensitive nature, and this becomes painfully apparent in the early part of the narrative after his father’s funeral at Paget’s Fold. Whilst defending her father against cousin Horace’s playful and yet subtly jeering remarks in reference to teaching, Clara finds herself in an embarrassing situation at the dinner table: ‘Suddenly Clara lost all control of herself. “You’re always sneering at my father,” she burst out, her cheeks flaming’ (70). Unfortunately, Clara’s father does not take too kindly to a young woman defending him and chastises her, demanding she apologise. Clara refuses and leaves the room to lick her wounds in the orchard. Clara thinks about how she would never have stood up for her mother: ‘The scene in the churchyard came back to her. She thought jealousy, “I love him much more than she does”’ (71).

It is also at Paget's Fold where Clara and her father enter into a fight after he observes her first kiss with her cousin Blaze Hoadley. When Blaze leaves, her father appears in a rage that seems to choke him: ‘His face was distorted; his eyes narrowed as if the flesh round them was swelling and silting them up’ (77). Clara tries to exonerate Blaze by defending his innocence, but this attempt backfires on her. She finds that her actions confirm her father's poor perception of her: ^‘“Ah,” he gloated. “There at least we have the truth. A young man doesn't ... unless he is a scoundrel ... if the girl doesn't lead him on. I've no right to blame Blaze Hoadley. You were fair game.... I thought you were an innocent child. Do you expect me to be pleased to find you are nothing of the kind?”’ (77).

In ‘The Autobiographical Novels of Antonia White’ (1986), Jeanne Flood suggests that ‘Claude's anger is motivated by his own forbidden desire. His demand that Clara be innocent expresses a deep demand that she belong sexually to him’ (137). This is certainly a complex situation that reveals an aporia¹⁴ in a reading of Freud’s early development of his Oedipus complex theory: Freud suggests that a little girl’s unconscious incestuous desires are unconsciously initiated by her father but curbed by his super-ego; this idea is in contrast to evidence that the father’s role is to enforce the incest barrier in light of his daughter’s unconscious sexual desires for him that he does not initiate.

Freud suggests that it is natural for a father to gravitate towards his daughter, which he illustrates in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in the context of his observations of childhood sexuality. Freud makes two observations about childhood sexuality: that it exists much earlier than society supposes and that unconscious processes of rivalry and possession activate moral conditioning. Freud’s rationale for his latter observation, in particular, first combats a societal view based on history’s cycle of the despotic father who ‘frantically holds on to whatever of the sadly antiquated potestas patris still remains in the society of to-day’ and the daughter’s desire for sexual freedom that the mother notices at a time when she must renounce her own sexual desires (253). At a time when parents also show their own partiality for ‘sexual selection’, i.e., when fathers gravitate towards and indulge their daughters and mothers do the same towards their sons, a child’s sense of competition for the opposite-sexed parent strengthens (253). A case in point that Freud uses is a three-year-old girl who proclaims, ‘Now mother can go away; then father must marry me and I shall be his wife’ (253).

In the Paget’s Fold scene between Clara and her father, there is also a hint of uncertainty in Claude’s voice that reflects Freud's act of prohibition of incestuous desire. Freud does not deny that a child’s incestuous feelings may be triggered by her father’s sexual preference, but it is Claude's guilt, or super-ego, that prevents him from acting upon his desire. In his reference to primitive men in Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud comments that ‘in their unconscious there is nothing they would like more than to violate [the taboo of incest], but they are [consciously] afraid to do so; they are afraid precisely because they would like to, and the fear is stronger than the desire’ (41). It is a viewpoint that extends into his analysis of modern man.¹⁵

Flood is partially correct in her statement about Claude. It seems that Freud’s super-ego comes to the rescue, unlike Clara’s super-ego, evidenced in her emotional conflict. On a line between appropriate and inappropriate sexual verbiage, Freud’s view on father-daughter incest prohibition becomes, for Clara, a test of courage that is poignantly shown in her relationship with her father. When Claude bellows at Clara after Blaze Hoadley leaves the scene, Clara is humiliated by her father's harsh verbal attack, and yet something within her feels a strange sense of triumph: ‘Had he beaten her, the original Clara could not have felt more humiliated. But someone else ... was it the girl in the glass? ... had the strangest sense of triumph’ (White 78). In ‘Loving Subjects: Narratives of Female Desire’ (2002), Doreen D'Cruz finds, in a similar vein to Flood, that, in a situation like this, what one witnesses is ‘the daughter's resistance to paternal seduction’ (13). A mirror motif emerges in defiance of the Oedipal situation in which Clara finds herself, but it is unfamiliar to her. Although this may be true, it is true only up to a point because Clara's guilt is that she does in fact respond to her father's forbidden incestuous desires by way of seeking approval.

When Clara does resist Claude’s paternal seduction, her resistance has a tendency to break down. Only a short while after the Blaze Hoadley scene, Claude takes Clara out to the opera, and then to a restaurant. It is at the restaurant where a highly suggestive conversation takes place between Clara and her father:

‘I can't believe that you were anything but good ever,’ she said sincerely.

‘Can't you, my dear? Perhaps it's a fortunate illusion.’ He seemed about to say something more then stopped. Instead he looked at her intently for a moment and then sighed: ‘Ah, Clara.’

‘What is it, Daddy?’

‘Nothing. I was toying with a wild notion I sometimes have.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Well, now and then, I try to fancy how it would be if you and I were not father and daughter.’

She took it up eagerly.

‘Oh, I've often thought that too.’

His eyes grew bright.

‘Have you? That's remarkably interesting.’

‘Of course I don't mean I want anyone else for a father. But just that now and then ...’

‘We could forget,’ he nodded. ‘Exactly. Sometimes the idea is so vivid to me that it is almost like a memory. We meet, you and I, in a lonely tower. I don't know why a tower. And by some spell, we have forgotten our identities.’ (113)

This scene is indeed suggestive of Clara having an Oedipal desire for her father; it is a desire, moreover, that acquiesces to Freud's view of a father’s sexual desires in relation to the incest taboo, which accentuates the aporia. Clara's words, then, reinforce problematic Oedipal notions in her identification with a role that her mother should fulfill. Going to the opera and a restaurant, for example, is a pastime that usually a husband and wife would do together. At a critical point in the conversation, Clara is about to elaborate upon what I infer to be a relationship between herself and her father that is sexual in nature, but she does not finish her sentence. Here, Clara’s and her father’s identities are fused as they engage in what seems to be a telepathic exchange. The fact that Clara is unable to finish her sentence is suggestive of Claude's recognition of Clara's Oedipal motivation and weak super-ego. At this climactic moment, the reader is locked out of the conversation, which now borders on sexual impropriety. Should, for example, a kiss have been exchanged, it is a moment that would probably leave the reader at a loss as to how to interpret it from a Freudian perspective, other than White acting out her own Oedipal wishes through an alter ego. This moment eerily echoes Nanda’s heroine’s flirtations with an admirer in her previous autobiographical novel, Frost in May, in which she experiences a kiss of ‘burning passion’ for which she is severely reprimanded by her father (202).

What is particularly striking to me is how the scene in the restaurant draws an interesting parallel with White’s personal descriptions of time spent with her father. White would treasure those moments when her mother was excluded from the party of two, a time when she would have her father all to herself. In As Once in May, White reflects on the little excursions her father and she would take, particularly when it was to share cream trifles in sworn secrecy:

It was a great joy to discover that he reveled in cream cakes as much as I did. How human, how approachable, how utterly charming he was, devouring Appenrodts’ superb confections, with his blue eyes shining, his cheeks very pink and little flecks of cream dotting his moustache! I felt I had never loved him so much…. ‘I daren’t indulge in it in front of your mother,’ he confided in me. ‘She tells me I’m getting too fat as it is. You won’t give me away when we get home, will you, Eirene?’ I shook my head ecstatically. That was my crowning bliss, the thought that he and I were sharing something highly pleasurable from which my mother was excluded. (275)

These excursions were few and far between. As a child, White would often pretend that she had a cupboard inside her body where she would store up as much loving attention as she could from her father. From a Freudian perspective, however, White may have been taking revenge on her mother—her original love object—for denying her the penis; thus, she uses her father as a tool to provoke her mother's jealousy.

It was only after her mother's death that White apprehended a more stalwart and devoted side to her mother's character and the complex nature of the Oedipal relationship in her family unit. In a diary entry dated 1 March, 1939, White describes her father’s treatment of the women in his life in a way that is either true or reveals her own wishful thinking: ‘He treated his wife like a child, his daughter like a wife’ (162). In relation to an aporia being revealed in Freud’s Oedipus complex, there seems to be a snag for which Freud may have an answer: It is difficult to ascertain if White’s comment here is true or if it further supports her Oedipal fantasy of identifying with her mother in a desire to take her place as her father’s wife. It is a problem, moreover, in terms of validating the possibility that White was a victim of father-daughter incest.

As a lead-in to the possibility that White was a victim of sexual abuse, I would like to first provide some background on her parents’ relationship because it may offer some indication as to her father’s sexual needs. The relationship between White's parents was fraught with sexual difficulties and disillusionment. As a child, Christine Botting was neglected by her parents. As an adult, she was very childlike, daunted by what the future held for her as a woman and ill-equipped for life as a mother. Tragically, Christine suffered through agonising labor only to give birth to stillborn babies, all of them girls (Dunn 19). She once commented to White that in labor, which White mentions in The Lost Traveller, ‘you go down to the gates of hell’ (101).¹⁶ Christine was traumatised by pregnancy and labor and subsequently showed little maternal fondness towards her daughter, which included the decision not to breastfeed her.

Christine's sexual relationship with Cecil was also far from fruitful. According to White's biographer, Jane Dunn, Cecil would often come home drunk and force himself upon his wife. Many more pregnancies after White's birth resulted from episodes of submission as Christine would constantly yield to Cecil's demands that she provide him with the son that White, herself, should have been (Dunn 17-18). No siblings arrived.

Perhaps as a result of her mother’s inability to produce a male child, White's relationship with her mother became onerous. Christine's inability to produce a sibling for White produced contempt. White was desperate for a little brother, knowing that it was one of her father’s deepest wishes. She began to resent her mother and turn towards her father, perhaps in hopes of giving him a ‘penis child’. Later, White would make an important revelation that was to define her innermost turmoil. She recognised that her family's dynamics were dysfunctional due to the fact that they never seemed to be united as a family of three. In a diary entry dated 5 June, 1938, White observes how there was always one person left out in ‘a conspiracy of twos’ (135). This situation is a driving force in the autobiographical novels and a situation in which White herself was all too familiar.

Although White coveted her father’s attention, he was capable of extreme cruelty towards her. He was a harsh disciplinarian who would beat her into obedience, which reinforced his role as master of the house. There is one occasion that is particularly disturbing: White recollects an incident when she was just four years old. She purposefully scribbled on the walls in her father's study and then blatantly lied about it, even though she was aware that her father knew the truth. As punishment, her father made her bend over between a spare desk and a bookcase with a ruler in his hand: ‘Turn round, and bend over that desk. I'm going to take down your knickers and beat you with it’ (245) According to White's account in As Once in May, although her father looked very angry, she noticed ‘he was wearing a curious one-sided smile’ (245). White does not recollect entirely what happened that day; nonetheless, she exonerated her father from this crime.

The spanking incident has fueled debate over whether White was sexually abused by her father. In Daily Modernism (2000), Elizabeth Podnieks suggests that ‘White [was] probably [a] victim of incest’ (93). In a similar vein in ‘My Art Belongs to Daddy’, Mary Lynn Broe suggests that fictional events, such as Claude’s seduction of Clara’s friend, Patsy, in The Lost Traveller serve to ‘explain things in daddy’ (qtd. in Broe 44; Broe’s emphasis). Neither Broe nor White develop upon this statement, but it is worth investigating the scene between Claude and Patsy to hear what needs to be explained.¹⁷

Shortly after Clara's evening out with her father, she takes a position as governess to a ten-year-old boy, Charles, at Maryhall. During her employment, she meets her future husband, Archie; Clara, Archie, and Charles play war games together. During one of these games, an unfortunate incident occurs: Charles jumps off a high wall, pretending to be a soldier like Archie, and breaks his neck.¹⁸ Fortunately his death is instantaneous. As a result of Charles's death, Clara goes into shock and spends many anguished days and sleepless nights filled with self-reproaches.

When Claude hears of the dreadful news, his reaction echoes the disgrace he suffered after he learned about Nanda's novel and the incident between Clara and Blaze Hoadley at Paget's Fold. When Patsy visits Claude to plead Clara's innocence in the circumstances surrounding Charles's death, Claude's feelings of anger at his daughter are transferred onto Patsy:

‘please, oh please don't be angry with her. She's so afraid you will be. She keeps saying it was her fault. But I'm sure it wasn't.’

‘I'm afraid I disagree.’ ...

‘The shock must have done something to her brain. She's got the most dreadful ideas. That she's disgraced you ...’

‘She has disgraced us all. ...

No doubt you mean well, Patricia. I should have had more respect for Clara if she hadn't sent you to get around me.’

... I came of my own accord ... I never dreamt ... you were always so kind.’

‘You flatter me,’ he said with a savage smile. He stood over her with his hands in his pockets glaring down at her. (275)

As with Clara, Claude is able to take command of the situation, asserting his masculinity as he glowers over Patsy. However, Claude believes that Patsy's motivation for the visit is to use her girlish charms on him. What emerges during this outburst are Claude's ambivalent feelings of love pitted against his need to induce fear.

This is an emotional state that Claude seems to possess; for example, on a previous occasion, the narrator describes Patsy as a ‘dark eyed, ivory beauty’, and, in passing, comments on how ‘Claude frowned a good deal over Patsy's appearance, though he privately found it attractive’ (163). Although Patsy's intentions are sexually innocent, Claude is excited at the prospect of having his way with a young woman who is pleading for his sense of compassion. In a disturbing scene that symbolises his unconscious conflicts of interest, Claude quizzes Patsy on her knowledge of boys who have been killed in war and then proceeds to seduce her:

‘Young men you know ... friends of yours ... have been killed, have they Patsy?’

‘Yes, several.’

Again he considered her. When he spoke again his voice was low, almost confiding-

‘You said just now that you liked men. Evidently men like you, too. Are you kind to them ... the boys who go out there?’

Nervous again, but in a different way, she drew herself further into the chair and asked:

‘What do you mean?’

He said, still more softly:

‘You know very well what I mean. Or do you think I am too old to understand or ... or ...’

Suddenly he swooped down and grasped one of her silken ankles, muttering in a thick voice:

‘You're made to attract, aren't you? Made to make people forget?’ ...

Please don't – please.’

‘You're not frightened of me now, are you, Patsy?’

He pulled her fur coat open and kissed her neck, almost groaning:

‘So white, so soft.’ (277-278)

Fortunately for Patsy, Claude is interrupted by the sound of Isabel returning home and is able to escape, but not before she notices his face convulse as he says ‘my wife’, thus replacing Patsy's feeling of repulsion with pity, in the belief that she understands why Claude made a sexual pass at her (278). Patsy makes a revealing statement: ‘I understand. I do understand. I won’t remember’, at which point he kisses her shoe in what seems to be blind passion (278).

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud observes that when children are chosen as sexual objects, ‘it is only exceptionally that children are the exclusive sexual objects.... They usually come to play that part when someone who is cowardly or has become impotent adopts them as a substitute, or when an urgent instinct ... cannot at the moment get possession of any more appropriate subject’ (148). This statement specifically addresses those children who are subjected to the incestuous act but can equally apply to a child outside of the family who is used as a surrogate. White’s intention for including the Patsy scene is puzzling. It could be, as Broe suggests, a way for White to talk about her father seducing her. If so, then it is an event that in real life she has kept secret. Today, society is more aware that victims of sexual abuse, and who remember the abuse, may still refuse to talk openly about it. (I will develop this discussion in my examination of contemporary trends of trauma in Chapter Four.) In contrast, White’s biographer Jane Dunn admits that White’s relationship with her father was ‘unhealthily close’ but she is also adamant that there was no hint of sexual impropriety on Cecil’s part. Dunn claims that White would have mentioned it; after all, she was very candid about her sexual sadomasochistic fantasies, whippings, and masturbatory habits (214-215). Dunn does suggest, however, that Cecil demonstrated a ‘repressed sexuality’ that emerged in romantic gestures that ‘inflamed Antonia's natural daughterly desire for her father into a complex of Electra-esque¹⁹ proportions’ (217). However, because White does not make a direct claim of sexual abuse herself, proving that sexual impropriety occurred is not possible, even though her relationship with her father does seem to correspond to a problematic Freudian Oedipal drama that is reenacted in her autobiographical novels.

In the throes of an Oedipus complex, Clara’s desire for her father is also predicated upon his desire for a son. To recapitulate, according to Freud in ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’, passage out of the Oedipus complex results in the little girl’s desire to bear her father a child, which is eventually abandoned because of his strong super-ego. Due to the girl’s weak super-ego, the desire to procreate continues into womanhood but is redirected: ‘The two wishes—to possess a penis and a child—remain powerfully cathected in the unconscious and help to prepare the female creature for her later sex role’ (179). In Freudian terms, her weak super-ego acts as the catalyst in her desire to procreate: ^‘She slips – along the line of a symbolic equation, one might say—from the penis to a baby. Her Oedipus complex culminates in a desire, which is long retained, to receive a baby from her father as a gift—to bear him a child. One has an impression that the Oedipus complex is then gradually given up because this wish is never fulfilled’ (179).

Freud has the ‘impression’ that the Oedipus complex is discarded by girls, but there are theoretical problems when taking into consideration his castration complex model. In ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’ (1925), Freud states that, in contrast to a boy’s Oedipal desires being blasted due to a fear of castration, this fear is not present in girls because the castration has already occurred. Freud observes that the girl’s castration turns into penis envy, which leads to her wish for a child, or as Freud terms it, ‘a penis-child’ (256).²⁰ Coupled with the little girl’s jealousy of her mother, whom the little girl perceives to be her father’s primary love object, the little girl seeks to usurp her mother’s position. What is particularly striking about Freud’s views at this point in his modification of the Oedipus complex is that the premise for his theory revolves around his low opinion of the emotional and ethical restraints of women:

I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men. ... they show less sense of justice than men.... They are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life ... they are more often influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility – all these would be amply accounted for by the modification in the formation of their super-ego. (257)

This is certainly an ambiguous statement to make that can be interpreted as a girl’s inability to navigate the Oedipus complex proper as effectively as boys. This, in turn, can cause problems for the father whose job it is to ensure that the girl’s Oedipal desires are not brought to fruition and thus can pass from the phallic phase to the genital phase with little to no complications.

Clara attempts to bear her father a son through marriage, and yet Clara's attraction to future suitors often reveals them as being impotent. This produces a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, as will be demonstrated, Clara's impotent suitors renew her Oedipal ties to her father because he seems more virile in comparison. On the other hand, Clara’s desire to produce a son for her father may stem from his own feelings of impotence that are projected onto her. After all, he was unable to produce a son himself in his marriage to Isabel, which mirrors the situation in his real counterpart’s history. When Clara and Archie marry in The Sugar House (1952), their marriage is never consummated, due to Archie's impotence, which draws a parallel with White’s first marriage to Reginald Green-Wilkinson (Reggie). ²¹ What is most striking about Archie's physical impotence is that it stems from White's sense of self as a mutilated man. In a diary entry dated 30 November, 1937, White’s psychoanalyst, Dennis Carroll, observed that she was attracted to men who were impotent or homosexual. White notes how she

cannot help noticing that my affairs nearly always run the same course: a violent beginning on one side or the other: reluctance on one side or the other; sexual intercourse in which one or the other is frightened, frigid, or disappointed; a period during which I consciously or compulsively knot all the strings and try to provoke disaster; disaster which brings acute humiliation, sadness, sense of excitement, almost triumph ... / And it is very clear that a great part of my unconscious preoccupation is with the idea of myself as a mutilated man. (114)

This outcome is contrary to Freud's belief that a girl's early deterrence from sexual activity will lead to a healthy object-love. However, this rather depends on whether the man is impotent or not; after all, in Freudian terms, what can a girl do with a defective phallus except have it serve as a reminder of her own impotence as inferior to her male counterpart? On their marriage night in The Sugar House, Clara smells ‘the fumes of whisky’ on Archie’s breath and listens to his acknowledgement of his impotence made barely audible in a whisper: ‘“Clara … darling Clara,” he whispered. “Didn’t mean … Couldn’t …” The whisper became inaudible. He gave a grunting sigh, like a man in pain. The next moment he was fast asleep’ (126). This scene is followed by Clara having a disturbing dream:

She dreamt that her father came and rapped impatiently at the door, exactly as he had done while she was dressing for her wedding. Just as she was going to call him, she realised with horror that she was in bed with Archie. Overcome with shame and guilt, she crouched under the sheets, silent. The knocking grew more imperative; it sounded threatening. Then she remembered with relief that Archie was her husband. Her father had no right to be angry. She called nervously, ‘Come in, Daddy,’ and, in the effort of doing so, woke up. Someone was indeed knocking at the door, but softly and discreetly. (127)

It was the maid. What is particularly intriguing about this scene is its similarity to another sexually traumatic event in White’s life. Dunn makes reference to White’s first sexual encounter at her parents’ house with a man named Jim Dougal. White had been discharged from Bethlem Royal Hospital just six months earlier. Dougal was divorced and had captivated White with his charm and adventurous personality. He also impressed upon her sympathetic nature with a limp that he claimed to have incurred during the war. White’s attraction to Dougal increased due to his mutilated body because it reflected her own sense of mutilation.

One evening, Dougal stayed late talking to her father after she retired to bed. White was unaware that her father had invited Dougal to stay the night, until he slipped into her bedroom dressed in her father's robe and seduced her. White offered no signs of protest nor resistance. Dougal disappeared the next day leaving behind a legacy: White was pregnant. Unfortunately for White, so was Dougal’s wife. Dougal had lied about being divorced; in fact, his wife was about to deliver a baby. White's pregnancy was terminated with her father's financial help. Although a converted Catholic, White observes how her father was able to absolve himself from committing mortal sin by ‘shifting all the blame firmly on his daughter’s shoulders’ (Dunn 91).

After the abortion, the nurses told White that she would have given birth to a little boy. White’s response to this news is ambivalent. In an unpublished diary entry dated 15 March, 1949, she writes, ‘I did not seem to feel guilt about having had an abortion but just human sorrow because I had killed my little boy’ (91). Echoing Freud’s observation on a girl’s obsession with providing her father with a child, White’s desire for a son was a symbolic way to form a union with her father: ‘I can understand the extraordinary satisfaction of producing a son. A woman has not a penis but she can produce a being with a real penis’ (qtd. in Dunn 117). This scene, up to a point, offers White the opportunity to be at one symbolically with her father because, alternatively, the fact that she denies her father the right as grandfather to a baby boy is also indicative of the emotional turmoil she is experiencing in an attempt to separate the idea of her father as an authoritative parental figure and lover: she denies her father the one thing he truly wants, the one thing that she cannot physically give him – a son.

The circumstances in which White was seduced by Dougal suggest that she was blurring the boundaries between her father being a parent and lover, which captures the emotional conflict that she seems to be continually experiencing. Although it was Dougal in White's room that night, he was dressed in her father's robe. If Dougal was not in White’s father’s robe, would she have given herself to him so readily? Dunn asks, ‘Was this a psychologically safe way for her to fulfil her dream of incestuous love for her father?’ (217). Although Dunn concludes that White was driven by ‘intellectual curiosity’ rather than Oedipal ‘erotic impulses,’ she then refers to an intriguing confession by White in an unpublished diary: ‘Ten years later she described a dream in extraordinarily precise detail, in which she was ritually raped by her father. Antonia was unflinching about the sexual content, sensual but matter-of-fact in her description of the pressure of his penis and the mixture of terror and desire in her’ (219).

As illustrated, White’s relationship with her father is described with a particularly strong emphasis on sexual desires that filter into her autobiographical fiction as an Oedipal narrative. And yet, as also illustrated, Freud’s development of his Oedipus complex theory is problematic because, while it may be plausible for a child to favor one parent over the other and thus engage in Oedipal fantasies, his theory is severely restricted by his assumption that the male’s super-ego in matters of sexuality are stronger than his female counterpart’s. And yet, as will be illustrated, it is the aforementioned mixture of terror and desire that comes through most strongly in accounts of White’s descent into psychosis in her autobiographical fiction that raises questions about whether White herself was driven by Oedipal desires that led to her submitting herself to this kind of sexual traumata or if her psychosis is a defence mechanism against acknowledgement of real sexual abuse.

In The Sugar House, it is evident that Clara is starting to unravel mentally. She is in a marriage with an impotent man who serves as an image of her own impotence that, in turn, leads to a questioning of her sanity and sense of self:

The more she was alone, the more she became conscious of her own emptiness. Sometimes she even doubted whether she existed at all. Once this sense of non-existence was so acute that she ran up from the basement to the sitting-room full of mirrors almost expecting to find nothing reflected in them. But her face stared back at her anxiously from various angles ... [and] there was a vacancy in her expression that frightened her. She found herself addressing her reflection as she used to do when she was a child. ‘Really, my dear,’ she said severely, ‘You look as if you weren't in your right mind.’ (154)

From a Freudian perspective, signs of mental deterioration illustrate that Clara’s passage through the Oedipus complex has failed. It is a scenario with which White herself is also all too familiar. On 17 November, 1922, shortly after her own marriage to Reggie Wilkinson-Green falls apart and the marriage is annulled, twenty-three-year-old Antonia White is admitted into a mental asylum, Bethlem Royal Hospital. She is released nine months later. Upon admission, there are two categories for boarders: ‘voluntary’ and ‘certified’. Not yet officially divorced from Reggie, Mrs. Eirene Green-Wilkinson is admitted under the category, ‘certified’ (79). White’s engaging exploration into her own illness is extensively documented in her autobiographical short story, ‘The House of Clouds’, and in her final in a sequence of autobiographical novels, Beyond the Glass. In this autobiographical fiction, White’s alter egos, Helen and Clara, respectively, are haunted by delusions and hallucinations that infiltrate their waking lives.

White first documents her descent into psychosis in her autobiographical short story, ‘The House of Clouds’, in which references to water, fog, and sleep deprivation are recurring motifs. The story opens with the dramatic line, ‘The night before, Helen had tried to drown herself. She did not know why for she had been perfectly happy’ (45). After feeling tired during a dinner party, Helen walks outside to get some fresh air ‘out through the gate into the passage that led to the Thames. She wasn’t very clear what happened next. She remembered that Robert had carried her back to Dorothy’s room’ (45). Helen’s recollection of arriving at Dorothy’s house is ‘after walking for miles in the fog’, and when she’s in Dorothy’s bed, she cannot sleep and frequently wanders to the window to look out over the ‘foggy courtyard’ (46).

During Helen’s foggy moments, she begins to suffer from paranoid delusions and hallucinations. In ‘The House of Clouds’, Helen could not eat but eventually only accepts bread and salt: ‘She was insistent about the salt, because salt keeps away evil spirits …’ (45), and her hallucinations start with the arrival of a ghost of a priest who had just died ‘at that very moment in India’ (46-7). Often, Helen finds herself in a frightening place where images of religion, medicine, and war combine. For example, a priest and doctor come to Helen’s bed, the first in anticipation of a possible death and the second in anticipation of a possible life. In ‘The House of Clouds’, however, it is unclear if the father that comes into the room is a priest or Helen’s own father. As he approaches Helen ‘in a brown habit, like a monk … to kiss her … a real physical dislike of him choked her, and she pushed him away’ (47).

Helen’s impulsive and trance-like behaviour anticipates Clara’s descent into psychosis in Beyond the Glass. In this instance, readers are made privy to what happened at the Thames through the rescuer’s narrative. Clara embarks on her journey into the passage towards the Thames and is about to walk unawares into the Thames when Richard exclaims,

‘You little idiot,’ Richard’s furious voice said in her ear. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ He dragged her back till she was out of reach of the water…. ‘If I hadn’t come running after you, you might have been drowned.’ / ‘I’m sorry,’ [Clara] said in the same mild voice. ‘I didn’t go down there deliberately. I just found myself going down it.’ (182)

Shortly into Clara’s courtship with Richard, she notices something that she had not thought of before: ‘Sleep was a sheer waste of time if one were really alive. Night after night she would lie awake, neither restless nor impatient for the next day…. She also began to discover that it was hardly necessary to eat…. She wondered if she ought to tell someone about these remarkable discoveries’ (144). Clara’s courtship with Richard ends soon after she is admitted into Bethlem. Richard finds out from Clara’s father that she is unlikely to recover and Richard subsequently marries a nice Catholic girl (228).

From a Freudian perspective, what may have happened to Clara is a ‘flight into psychosis’ (59).²² This state ‘eludes psychologico-clinical analysis’ as the ego may be wholly or partially detached from reality (59). Given Clara’s Oedipal drama, it may be possible to conclude that due to unacknowledged unconscious sexual desires for her father, she is now in a state of anxiety that then sends her spiraling into psychosis as a result of the non-resolution of the Oedipus complex. As early as 1894 in ‘Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory on Dreams’, Freud writes that, in a state of psychosis, the ‘ego creates, autocratically, a new external and internal world; and … this new world is constructed in accordance with the id’s wishful impulses, and that the motive of this dissociation from the external world is some very serious frustration by reality of a wish – a frustration which seems intolerable. The close affinity of this psychosis to normal dreams is unmistakable’ (151). This theory is modified in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud makes it clear that psychosis corresponds to unpleasurable waking dreams at the root of which is sexual anxiety produced by unconsciously unfulfilled sexual wishes. According to Freud, the key to psychosis is repression and its connection to the revival and suppression of painful memories that, in severe cases, will be consciously and willingly split off by the ego, should it not be able to cope with the anxiety associated with the memories. According to Freud, these traumatic memories bare no connection to reality. For White, however, her very identity is wrapped up in how her writing bears relation to her own sense of reality, which also reveals the contradictory nature of writing as an act of power and impotence.

In a diary entry dated 28 June, 1938, White expresses that when she writes in mirror-writing, she feels a surge of revenge: ‘Yes I will write backhand in spite of my father I WILL WILL WILL. Couldn't even write – filthy dirty beastly old man the way I WANTED TO – Well I will. You'll see. I spit on your corpse. You're dead and I'm alive.... I hope you've been punished. You punished me enough. I've forced myself to be sorry for you and admire you. You've ruined my life’ (140). And yet, just a year-and-a-half later, in a diary entry dated 4 December, 1939, White discovers during analysis ‘that the main cause of my own melancholia and paralysis was ... repressed rage.... What I feel when I begin to write anything is a complete lack of power. My mind seems to go to pieces’ (170).

In contrast, whilst in the asylum in Beyond the Glass, Clara can pick up a pencil and write backwards, as one was wont to do in Looking-Glass Land, and it is perfectly legible to her. And yet, it occurs to her that her father will not be able to understand her because he is on the other side. She picks up the pencil again and with great effort writes the proper way. Her letter reads: ‘Dearest Daddy, / I do not know where I am but I think it is Nazareth Royal Hospital.... Please try and find me. I want so much to see you again.... Perhaps you thought I was dead. I am alive but in a very strange place.... Your loving daughter, / Clara’ (245). Shortly after writing this letter, Claude comes to collect his daughter under the assumption that she has made a full recovery. But is this necessarily the case?

Clara seems to have returned from the void with a sense of self. However, this scene is also indicative of Clara's renewed ties to her father, wedged in the margin of narcissistic and Oedipal desires. She is still ‘alive’ but in a ‘strange place’. I cannot help but wonder if Clara is merely returning to the dark existence she has just left, which is effectively the authoritative patriarchal narrative of the father. Claude proceeds to make a quite fitting observation of Clara's time in the asylum: she was ‘unconscious, mercifully, most of the time’ (271). As it transpires, at the end of Beyond the Glass, upon recovery, White is delivered from her psychosis into her father’s care and protection.

As Beyond the Glass comes to a close, Richard, a possible suitor for Clara, finds out from Clara’s father that Clara is not likely to make a recovery for many years, so he moves on but not before leaving a precious gift, a little red purse that contains a rosary. After Nell gives Clara the purse, Clara finds herself back in the same courtyard before her descent into psychosis with a pulling tension between life and death weighing on her mind:

She stood for a while, clenching her wet eyelids together and clutching the little red purse. Then she became conscious of the faint sluck, sluck of the river. She remembered the narrow stone passage. A quiet, urgent impulse came over her to walk down it; to walk on and on with her eyes shut until it would be impossible to return. But, even more urgently, she felt the small weight pressing against her palm like a detaining hand. She forced herself to open her eyes. For a moment, she was no longer alone in the courtyard. She whispered, knowing that he heard: ‘Richard … I’ll hold on…. Go in peace.’ (285)

In this final scene, what seems to bring Clara back from the brink of disappearance is the one thing that haunted her waking and sleeping states of mind. She lets Richard go and returns to the love she knows, her father. In a diary entry dated 28 July, 1954, White herself was to confess that the idea of having an uncomplicated sexual relationship with a man is what drove her to madness. It is a fusion of sexuality with a combined attraction-repulsion relationship to death, which is symbolised in White’s writing and then distorted in recollection. These distortions, or metaphorical descriptions, illustrate how her traumatic experiences straddle a fine line between selfhood and writing within the confines of a larger patriarchal narrative through the mechanisms of the Oedipus complex.

White’s descent into psychosis raises questions for me about how sexual trauma itself is interpreted through a psychoanalytic lens. On the one hand, Freud’s position on psychosis has a close affinity with the non-resolution of the Oedipus complex. On the other hand, there are other avenues of interpretation, as will be illustrated in an examination of Sándor Ferenczi’s work on psychosis as a possible symptom of sexual trauma.