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

Memory and Identity

In her recent essay on Dorothy Allison’s autobiographical novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, in which Ruth Anne’s sexual abuse by her stepfather, Glen, parallels Allison’s own experience of sexual abuse by her stepfather, Leigh Gilmore asks a very important question: ‘Where does autobiography end and fiction begin in an autobiographical novel?’ (45). With regard to trauma narratives in particular, a larger question is posed by Gilmore: ‘what is real and what is imagined in the representation of self and trauma’ (46). Writing with autobiographical elements creates a lot of obstacles, not just in terms of self-representation but how the reader should judge the success of the work and on what terms. For White, this is a difficult task, given her history of mental illness and psychotic episodes where her accuracy of account is subject to scrutiny. It is a tricky situation because the nature of autobiographical fiction is the literary counterpart to psychological trauma: it is a recreated narrative that will have many truths but also many distortions in it because that is also the nature of trauma and how one is able to respond consciously to it. Where the truth ends and the fiction begins depends on the severity of the trauma.

Lejeune observes that the problem of authenticity is knotted together with memory and identity. In his chapter ‘Autobiography in the Third Person’ in On Autobiography (1989), to demonstrate how autobiographers can be actors, too, Lejeune makes reference to an exercise that Bertolt Brecht required of his actors. Brecht would have them invert their roles from the first person to the third person and act from a retrospective perspective. The aim of this exercise was to ‘encourage distancing’ and help his actors ‘express their problems of identity and at the same time to captivate their readers’ (31). In a discussion on how to interpret the ‘I’ when an author refers to himself or herself in the third person, ‘the erasing of enunciation’ becomes ‘a fact of enunciation’ (32). In terms of autobiographical fiction, however, ‘utterance itself would be taken in the perspective of a phantasmatic pact (“this has meaning in relation to me, but is not I”)’ (32-33). This form invites what Lejeune calls ‘ambiguous reading’ (32) that can cause problems of identity for the reader (33). Coupled with Lejeune’s statement that autobiography proper is depicted in a retrospective narrative prose that tells the story of one’s life, particularly the story of one’s personality, I raise the following question: what does it mean to write about a fractured personality? How does the reader, in turn, interpret a fractured personality that makes its presence felt in an alter ego? In Trauma and Recovery (1997), Judith Herman makes a poignant observation that speaks to inherent barriers to authenticating traumatic narratives:

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner which undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognised, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. (1)

While there may be confused memories and, hence, problems of authenticating those memories, White’s autobiographical novels function as narratives that speak to this dialectic. On the one hand, as illustrated in Chapter One, although a connection between psychosis and sexual trauma cannot be proven conclusively, there is the possibility of real sexual trauma as a result of sexual abuse made secret within the confines of an Oedipal narrative. On the other hand, White’s autobiographical novels provide a testimony to White’s traumatic experiences. Writing in the third person functions to distance White to a certain extent from the authorial ‘I’ following deeply traumatic experiences that are difficult to address personally.

Infused in White’s writings is a preoccupation with death mingled with sexual angst. In a diary entry dated 7 July, 1949, White recalls experiencing a return of psychosis in the summer of 1948: ‘I am not sure when during this summer I had the severest of all crises, during which D. said she could do nothing but wait and warned the caretaker here that I might have an accident. I think I was in considerable danger during this summer. There were times when I really was not normal: I was in semi-cataleptic states’ (214). Just a month later on 4 August, 1949, White seems to get to the root of her psychological angst: ‘It really [is] time I grasped that my parents were dead and that I have no longer got to imitate them, defy them or obey them…. My father can’t judge me any more … That menacing eye literally does not exist any more and never will’ (216). However, a few years later in a diary entry dated 4 November, 1952, White recollects having a particularly disturbing and yet enlightening dream about her father:

On the night of All Saints, I had an extraordinary dream. / I saw a man like my father looking out of the window of a friend’s house. Then I went into the house and it was my father. We embraced with such love and relief. I was so happy to see him and I said so. Then I told him how for years I had dreamt he was not dead … I still could not realize that he had not died. I kept saying ‘But I saw you buried.’ He said that he had had the plague and that it was always done in such circumstances. The person was buried and then secretly exhumed … All he had to do was to give himself injections. By now I really was convinced. There was a young doctor with him, very modern … / … I was so happy, so relieved. I would not be lonely any more … I longed for us to get home here and be quiet together […] I began to wake up. As I did so, I was aware of a very faint sexual tremor. / The dream had been so vivid that it was the most terrible disappointment to find it was only a dream … yet the happiness of the dream … or rather a sense of peace, a sense that something … had changed persisted … I suppose it means I have truly ‘forgiven’ my father. (251-252; emphasis in original)

White never divulges what she needs to forgive her father for, but a few weeks later she writes, ‘Now that my dream seems to show that I really have forgiven and accepted my father, shouldn’t I consider the corollary that my father has forgiven me? What about the “suspect” elements in the dream? Fear … about my novels. Slightly wrong love … the sexual element. A touch obviously of wanting the father as a husband’ (253; emphasis in original). From a Freudian perspective, White’s dream marks a distortion of repressed memories into consciousness that informs the content of her autobiographical novels in relation to her father. It is a theory he describes in ‘Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva’ (1907). This essay explores the main protagonist Norbert’s desires for a sculptural artifact, Gradiva, who unconsciously represents his repressed but anxiety-ridden desires for his childhood love, Zoë. This essay also marks the first detailed account of repressed memories and their distortion into consciousness in relation to the creative impulse.

With regard to the creative work, in particular, Freud explores the distinguishing features of manifest and latent content³⁸ in dreams and how they connect to repressed sexual desires. He suggests that, due to an inherent feeling of guilt, the subject experiences anxiety: ‘The mark of something repressed is precisely that in spite of its intensity it is unable to enter consciousness’ (48). When phantasies do enter consciousness, it is as a result of the ego’s resistance to confront the experience associated with the memory that has been repressed. Freud points out that the phantasies, or ‘precursors of delusions … are substitutes for and derivatives of repressed memories which a resistance will not allow to enter consciousness unaltered, but which can purchase the possibility of becoming conscious by taking account, by means of changes and distortions, of the resistance’s censorship’ (58). I would like to stress that Freud's reference to psychosis in this instance is with regard to the manifestation of a delusion that makes its appearance in the creative work itself. Norbert’s desires for a sculptural artifact, Gradiva, is an unconscious manifestation of his repressed, anxiety-ridden desire for his childhood love Zoë, who, in turn, reflects Jensen’s own sublimated erotic desire for someone in his life that is expressed in the act of creating a literary product.

This idea is modified a year later in ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’ (1908). Freud adds that creative writers’ creations are not only products of fantasy but can be distinctly distinguished from reality and are now a substitute for their play in childhood (484). The difference between children at play and adults who fantasise, however, is that adults are ashamed of their fantasies and attempt to hide them. Most importantly, it is only unhappy persons who fantasize as a result of unsatisfied wishes. The fantasy itself is ‘the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality…. These wishes are either related to ambition (primarily related to younger men) and eroticism (primarily related to younger women). The more powerful the fantasy, the more likely is the onset of neurosis or psychosis … fantasies being the immediate mental precursors of … distressing symptoms’ (485). According to Freud, the ego, moreover, is divided between three time consortiums: the past, present, and future, in which the wish, analogous to the memory of an experience in childhood, ‘finds its fulfillment in the creative work’ (487). One cannot fail to notice that Freud’s modifications of wish-fulfilment are gender-biased. With Freud’s new insights, Jensen’s wishes are ambition-related in his unconscious pursuit of his love object as a successful aim in itself, whereas White’s wishes are attributed to her need to be desired by the love object. Both scenarios pertain to, I might add, what drives little boys and girls on their respective Oedipal journeys.

Freud asserts that because a creative writer feels ashamed of his innermost fantasies and feels we may become repulsed by them, he hides his fantasies in technique, in what Freud refers to as ‘ars poetica’ (153). Effectively, ‘the writer softens the character of his egoistic daydreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal―that is, aesthetic―yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his fantasies’ (153).³⁹ In other words, readers can become seduced by the aesthetic nature of a work that conceals the artist’s true intentions, albeit unconscious ones, for the most part. Interestingly, at face value, there does appear to be a strong analogy between the creative work and White’s sublimation of erotic desires. In a diary entry dated 6 January, 1935, she writes, ‘The essences of situations one can only perceive in one’s own experience, but, having perceived them clearly, one can embody them in another form. “Truth” in fiction depends on this…. Possibly the first part should be entirely devoted to getting him. I am sick to death of E[irene] and her convent education. Let that rest. I want him. His life is finished: can be examined. I will not be afraid of him any more. It is a pure accident that we were father and child. I have a right to look at him, yes, sexually too’ (35). In a diary entry dated 12 May, 1941, she expresses her ambivalent feelings for her father in his death: ‘I think I could now talk to him without fear, even naturally and with pleasure. Yet even now I do very occasionally dream that he is alive and wake with fear. This dream is, I think, always connected with the fear of his discovering me in the sexual act’ (174).
Psychosis and Agency of Alter Ego

Whilst I applaud the connection that Freud makes between author and protagonist, the reader is led down a particular path of interpretation that reveals anxiety-ridden Oedipal desires. As illustrated, in Freudian terms, White’s Oedipal desires would be hidden behind a veneer of fear that symbolizes her anxiety. However, what if this fear, I ask, has real substance? When Clara declines into madness in Beyond the Glass, it is an episode that White claims to be an exact documentary of her experiences in an asylum. Jane Dunn makes the following observation that speaks to White’s need to examine her illness: ‘with the evidence of her Bethlem medical records, it is possible to appreciate just how brilliantly [White] maintained, within her fiction, an extraordinary connection to the literal truth. It was as if she was both in the belly of the beast and also detached, observing the processes of her madness and the treatment meted out to her from a distant perspective’ (80). In a diary entry dated 18 June, 1938, White recalls, ‘the most striking thing about madness, painful and terrifying as it was[,] was the sense of continued intensity of experience. I was often agonised, miserable and terrified, but I was never bored’ (136). White’s last thread of connection to the real world made way for the madness that both repelled and yet attracted her: ‘Once I was right in the power of the beast and it was terrible and wonderful’ (qtd. in Dunn 80).

In writing autobiographically, Dunn suggests that White attempts to make sense of her experiences, ‘sealed in her own pandemonium’ and ‘deemed a risk to herself and others’ (79). White had a profound impact on people in her life. David Gascoyne, for example, visited White after he returned from Spain in 1937 and found that ‘her suicidal tendency is so marked that she can’t take out an insurance policy on her life’ (qtd. in Chitty 94). Chitty herself also recalls White feeling suicidal after the publication of The Sugar House (166). These suicidal tendencies that pervade much of White’s life are dramatized in her psychotic content.

Echoing an earlier scene in ‘The House of Clouds’ in which Helen is visited by a priest and doctor, the first in anticipation of a possible death and the second in anticipation of a possible life,⁴⁰ in Beyond the Glass, Clara’s thoughts become increasingly disorientated, and a father figure starts to prefigure strongly. One especially disturbing scene is when Clara revisits the appearance of her father in a monk’s habit, and this time, unlike in ‘The House of Clouds,’ it is clear to whom the protagonist is referring. Although Clara’s father is wearing a monk’s habit—not his regular attire—Clara is at first able to digest this perception without inquiry. She asks ‘Why are you here, Daddy?’ (203). When Claude responds, Clara does not recognise his voice nor his face, and she concludes that he is an evil spirit disguised as her father: ‘He was going to try to kiss her. If this devil kissed her, she was lost for ever. She would never see Richard again…. She whirled her arms and shrieked ‘Don’t touch me…. Don’t touch me…. I won’t marry you…. I belong to Richard’’ (203). On a conscious level—and after a near fatal ending to her life—Clara’s hallucinations can be seen initially as a safe haven as she wards off the prospect of spiritually and mentally dying. There is, seemingly, the real threat of her subsequently finding herself in the devil’s grasp.

Images of death are dominant features in White’s descriptions of psychosis. In ‘The House of Clouds’, Helen’s mind becomes foggy, and she soon descends deeper into an alternate reality where her dreams become reality. Perhaps months or years into the future, she oscillates between the loss and return of her identity as a human being. It is an experience she expresses with clarity:

For years she was not even a human being; she was a horse. Ridden almost to death, beaten till she fell, she lay at last on the straw in her stable and waited for death. They buried her as she lay on her side, with outstretched head and legs. A child came and sowed turquoises round the outline of her body in the ground, and she rose up again as a horse of magic with a golden mane, and galloped across the sky. Again she woke on the mattress in her cell. (52)

Helen’s perception of herself is unsettling. The metaphorical content described in the aforementioned passages convey a preoccupation with flight and death that corresponds to White’s suicidal tendencies during times of despair. And yet, in this particular description, death also seems romanticized in a glorious flight of gold and speed shattered by the mundane description of being awoken within a drab and confined space. Presented with a poignant demonstration of White’s suffering alter ego, she relives the same horrors from one text to another. In Beyond the Glass, Clara’s descent is fast and furious. She is at times a child, a horse, a mouse, a salmon, a flower, and occasionally she is a human being, although not an ordinary human being

but Lord of the World. Whatever she ordered came about. The walls of her prison turned to crystal. Beyond them was a garden full of larches and apple-trees, with peacocks strutting on the lawns. One of them had a blue jay’s feather in its beak. She turned that peacock into a beautiful young man and the others into children lovelier than dreams. Then she tested her powers by ordering destruction. She changed the garden into a sea and summoned up a storm that blew great ships out of their courses as if they were paper boats. Only herself she could not command. (215)

What is intriguing to me about White’s descriptive passages in her autobiographical fiction is that they combine both the visual and the text in which the tension between love and hate, recognition and non-recognition seem to be driving forces. However, if we were to analyse these dramatic descriptive passages purely based on the authenticity of recollection, we may meet with some resistance, particularly given the psychotic nature of the content. On a superficial level, readers are presented with a scenario in which White is writing about a traumatic experience in a language that is evidently poetic that serves to help her relate to her experience and, indeed, for readers to visualise her experience. Writing creatively, however, is an issue that Paul de Man, Lejeune, and from a psychoanalytic perspective, Jacques Lacan, address in relation to the unreliability of capturing a past experience.

In ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ (1979), de Man suggests that writing autobiography is an impossible achievement because ‘the specular moment is not primarily a situation or event that can be located in history, but that it is the manifestation, on the level of a referent, of a linguistic structure’ (922). This linguistic structure, according to de Man, replaces lived experience as something belonging to the past that is now dead but has been revived in language through the mechanisms of prosopopeia, what de Man describes as ‘the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name … is made as intelligible and memorable as a face’ (926). For de Man, moreover,

As soon as we understand the rhetorical function of prosopopeia as positing voice or face by means of language, we also understand that what we are deprived of is not life but the shape and the sense of a world accessible only in the privative way of understanding. Death is a misplaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause. (930)

Similarly, in an attempt to engage with his own autobiographical writing, Lejeune states that he can tolerate ‘indetermination’ but not ‘ambiguity’, which he illustrates with the Triple Self-Portrait by Norman Rockwell (134). The problem that concerns Lejeune is how Rockwell is able to paint a portrait that shows him painting a portrait of himself with his back to the audience. He describes this moment as a ‘pedagogical and humorous exercise on the theme of the self-portrait … the self-portrait and the “painter’s studio”. And what we see here is both exactly what the painter cannot see and what the onlooker of the self-portrait imagines’ (112; emphasis in original). Lejeune concludes that Rockwell’s self-portrait is only an impression because we see him seeing himself as artist and painter.

Indeed, ideas of perception are challenged on a literal level, and it is true that the viewer cannot secure the resemblance between the painter and his portrait, but this is also a problem with a concrete interpretation. Both de Man and Lejeune speak to an age-old Platonic view on mimesis and in so doing miss the point about self-representation on a deeper psychological level. Whether or not perception is a distortion of the truth as perceived by others, this should not negate the truth of perception as White perceives it. As in Rockwell’s self-portrait, White is asking the reader to go beyond the superficial gaze to how she perceives herself through a conversation between author and protagonist or alter ego through the language of psychosis, in which her experiences are translated into visual images. After all, memory itself is revived in our capturing images of the past, whether they are snapshots or scenes replayed in our minds. These are images that White attempts to capture in metaphorical language in her autobiographical fiction; this act, moreover, invites the reader to witness a recasting of White’s personality in her alter egos in an attempt to form some cohesion of identity against the backdrop of a psychotic traumatic experience. As Olney eloquently describes in Metaphors of Self, by focusing on emotional experiences, ‘Metaphor is essentially a way of knowing … through which we stamp our own image on the face of nature’ (31). The problem for literary thinkers and psychoanalysts alike, however, is to determine the image that is being stamped.

In ‘Screen Memories’ (1899), Freud addresses how a traumatic experience is commonly screened by a memory that appears inconsequential at the time the experience occurred:

Two psychical forces are concerned in bringing about memories of this sort. One of these forces takes the importance of the experience as a motive for seeking to remember it, while the other―a resistance―tries to prevent any such preference from being shown. These two opposing forces do not cancel each other out, nor does one of them (whether with or without loss to itself) overpower the other. Instead, a compromise is brought about, somewhat on the analogy of the resultant in a parallelogram of forces. And the compromise is this. What is recorded as a mnemic image is not the relevant experience itself―in this respect the resistance gets its way; what is recorded is another psychical element closely associated with the objectionable one…. The result of the conflict is therefore that, instead of the mnemic image which would have been justified by the original event, another is produced which has been to some degree associatively displaced from the former one…. the substituted memory will necessarily lack those important elements and will in consequence most probably strike us as trivial. (306-07)

Whilst Freud addresses the complex return of memory as a mnemic image, he does not go into great depth in relation to the language of psychosis, which is an area that Lacan articulates on Freud’s behalf in the language of linguistics to illustrate the unreliability of narrating psychosis.⁴¹ Addressing psychotic language in The Psychoses 1955-1956: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III, Lacan writes, ‘It’s classically said that in psychosis the unconscious is at the surface, conscious … the unconscious is a language⁴² [in Freudian terms]. Its being articulated doesn’t imply its recognition, though…. If it’s ever possible for someone to speak in a language that he is totally ignorant of, we can say that the psychotic subject is ignorant of the language he speaks. Is this a satisfactory metaphor? Certainly not’ (11-12). In Lacanian terms, the question is how a psychotic language that is essentially unconscious language finds its way into the real, appearing as it does in a distorted fashion. He goes on to pose an interesting question: ‘what is the connection in this discourse between the subject who speaks in these voices and the subject who reports these things to us as meaningful?’ (123).

According to Lacan, based on Freud’s ideas on misrecognition, psychotic language is by its very nature symptomatic of paranoia because it comprises delusions and hallucinations. Probably one of the most famous cases of paranoia⁴³ is Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) and his delusional belief that it was his duty to restore humanity to an Edenic state of existence, which could only be achieved by his transformation into a woman (8). In this new gender role, Schreber believes that the transcendental nature of his visions ‘cannot be expressed in human language; they exceed human understanding’ because he is closer to a divine understanding of God’s wishes for the world (16). The fact that he can only communicate in ‘images and similes’ supports Schreber’s belief in his privileged status as being closer than any other human being to ‘divine revelation’ (16).

Although White does not lay claim to a divine relationship with God, a similarity her text shares with Schreber’s is that they both provide detailed and fascinating descriptions of their delusions and hallucinations that are a grappling with physical and spiritual self-preservation against a human plot to destroy them in some way. For Schreber, specifically, the plot is to transform his male body into a female one for the purpose of ‘sexual misuse’ by a person assigned by Professor Flechsig (63). In order not to suffer this form of sexual degradation, his inner voices encourage him that ‘it was my duty to die of hunger and in this way to sacrifice myself to God’ (64).

Schreber’s descriptions are interesting in themselves, but a particularly striking feature is what he says about them in his role as omniscient author: ‘I am fully aware how fantastic all this must sound to other people; and I therefore do not go so far as to assert that all I have recounted was objective reality; I only relate the impressions retained as recollections in my memory’ (78). He goes on to recount certain hallucinations he had that seemed outside of his control:

I remember that during the night I frequently sat on the floor of my bedroom, clad only in a shirt … having left the bed following some inner impulse. My hands, which I set firmly on the floor behind my back, were perceptibly lifted up at times by bearlike shapes (black bears); other ‘black bears’, both greater and smaller, I saw sitting around me with glowing eyes. My bedclothes formed themselves into so-called ‘white bears’. (79)

And yet, Schreber also admits that he is able at times to will hallucinations into a parallel existence with his normal surroundings. The visualisation of objects, both animate and inanimate, is the essence of reproduction, where the real is placed side by side with the imaginary, even if what is real for Schreber is evidently still a delusion, as in his picturing to delude the rays.:

Another interesting phenomenon connected with the ray-communication―the real cause of compulsive thinking―is the so-called ‘picturing’.… Perhaps nobody but myself, not even science, knows that man retains all recollections in his memory, by virtue of lasting impressions on his nerves, as pictures in his head. Because my inner nervous system is illuminated by rays, these pictures can be voluntarily reproduced; this in fact is the nature of ‘picturing’.… I can for example let it rain or let lightning strike…. I can also let a house go up in smoke under the window of my flat, etc. All this naturally only in my imagination, but in a manner that the rays get the impression that these objects and phenomena really exist. I can also ‘picture’ myself in a different place, for instance while playing the piano I see myself at the same time standing in front of a mirror in the adjoining room in female attire; when I am lying in bed at night I can give myself and the rays the impression that my body has female breasts and a female sexual organ. (210-211)

According to Lacan in The Psychoses 1955-1956: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III, who examines the relationship between the symbolic and the real to figure out to whom the ego speaks inside the subject, he concludes that ‘the subject speaks to himself with his ego…. The moment the hallucination appears in the real, that is, accompanied by the sense of reality, which is the elementary phenomenon’s basic feature, the subject literally speaks with his ego, and it’s as if a third party, his lining, were speaking and commenting on his activity’ (14; emphasis in original). The overriding point that Lacan makes is that for the psychotic subject, like Schreber, the real is the Other⁴⁴ that speaks for the part of the ego that has been split off or, ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the Other’ (112).

Lacan questions Schreber’s account of his delusions as one that is

incommunicable … the principle that in unconscious matters the relation of the subject to the symbolic is fundamental. This principle requires that we abandon the idea, implicit in many systems, that what the subject puts into words is an improper and always distorted enunciation of a lived experience that would be some irreducible reality…. There is, according to Blondel, something so original and irreducible in the lived experience of the delusional subject that when he expresses himself he gives us something that can only be misleading. All we can do is renounce any idea of ever penetrating this impenetrable lived experience. (118)

In other words, Lacan suggests that psychotic narratives lack a coherent transfer of metaphorical language from the unconscious to the conscious and, therefore, lived experience in the author’s intended form will not be understood by readers. I interpret this statement to mean that psychotic narratives lack value if coherent meaning cannot be generated from a lived psychotic experience. Using Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) to support his case, however, Lacan ignores Schreber’s attempts to grapple with sexual and spiritual preservation⁴⁵ and suicidal tendencies through the agency of his alter egos; these are similarities he shares with White’s alter egos, Helen and Clara.

Like Schreber’s account, White’s metaphorical descriptions of her psychosis do speak to a tension between writing as both autobiographical authorial subject and alter ego, which problematises writing autobiographical fiction that is driven by memory. One could argue, as Robert Smith does, that ‘as soon as language becomes an issue … any last footing “the autobiographical subject” may have had gives way’ (qtd. in Anderson 14). However, it is the focus on the linguistic nature of language that also becomes highly restrictive through a Lacanian psychoanalytic lens. The reader is left with the impression that the author is producing artificial constructs of personality and experience that have no bearing on reality. Similarly, from a literary perspective, when emotion is evoked within the structure of the poem that does not come from the artists themselves—particularly evident in formalist theory—what is left for the reader is essentially an artificial construct that has meaning but no depth in relation to an authentic experience. Any prospect of a referential authorial ‘I’ is eradicated as an illusion in place of a self-contained literary aesthetic that is analogous to looking at a pretty face and commenting on the external facial expressions it makes.

Nonetheless, it cannot be ignored that a problematic self-representation of traumatic experiences through an alter ego, regardless of whether that testimony is written in the first or third person or from a conscious or unconscious perspective, is still a concern today, particularly if that testimony deviates from a plain language into a more creative metaphorical one. As Anne Cubilié recently observes,

‘Approaches to collecting, analysing, and performing testimony all rely on the “knowability,” if not transparency, of what is being said: plain language conveying “the truth” of horrific experience is one of the authenticating aspects of testimonial in whatever form.’ When those witnessing to experiences of extremity and atrocity incorporate metaphorical language, or organize the narrative through ready-made plots of quest, conversion, or collective empowerment, or stage scenes in dialogue, or reflect too often on the process of composing the testimony itself, readers become ‘uncomfortable’ to the degree that ‘these literary devices seem to contravene and destabilize the authenticity of the bodily experience being recounted through the embodied vehicles of text and speech.’ Literary rhetoric, the craft of shaping a story, can make readers suspicious about the ‘authentic’ expression of pain. (qtd. in Smith and Watson 598)
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt also observes a similar problem in a recent review of Kathryn Harrison’s memoir, The Kiss. He wonders if ‘a memoir can ring too artistic for truth’ (qtd. in Eakin 153). In response to these statements, I ask: How does one describe pain in plain language, particularly when this pain is situated in a memory of a past event that may have become distorted in consciousness?

In ‘How Can I Speak of Madness? Narrative and Identity in Memoirs of ‘Mental Illness’’ (2004), Brendan Stone draws attention to the limitations and possibilities of reading madness in autobiographical narratives. He argues how one cannot recodify a narrative of chaos, i.e., madness into a ‘coherent plot’ because it is essentially unspeakable, which Schreber himself supports (49). According to Stone, the question that is the foundation upon which many questions rest is this: How unspeakable is trauma? If it is speakable, is it then only fiction? Furthermore, Stone asks the following questions: ‘If we do narrate the limit-experience, won’t this narration transform trauma into something which it was, and is, not – something governed by order, sense, reason, and progression? Would not such a narrative be a false story, a story which is dissonant with the self’s distress?’ (50). In answer to these questions, Stone sees the possibilities in narrating the self’s distress as a way to foster ‘an openness to the unforeseen, and … emergent and anarchic energies’ (52; emphasis in original). He refers to Slater’s work Spasm and the idea that ‘‘invention’ … can ‘get to the heart of things,’ while metaphor can gesture towards ‘the silence behind the story … through it we can propel silence into sound’’ (qtd. in Stone 53).

Stone makes an important observation that writing one’s distress dispenses with the need to reproduce faithfully an experience based on a rationalised depiction of truth to experience in a recognisable language because the act of writing is in itself a path towards ‘selfhood’ (54). In her article, ‘Strand by Strand: Untying the Knots of Mental and Physical Illness in the Correspondence and Diaries of Antonia White and Emily Holmes Coleman’ (2009), Sherah Wells suggests that through writing, White’s protagonist Clara can ‘reconstruct her subjectivity by (re)learning her identity and how to read and write. Her recovery [from psychosis] is indicated by her ability to write a letter to her father’ (46). In the example given here, the focus is on White’s ability to craft a subjective space in her writing that is projected onto her protagonist. However, for me, the situation is a bit more tenuous. For White, writing illustrates a struggle she has relating to her traumatic experiences that ultimately signifies a tension between aspiring to a selfhood described by Stone and being enveloped in a complex Oedipal narrative that evidences her ambivalent feelings for her father.
Writing autobiographically, White transforms her psychotic experiences from a purely external perception by others to a description of her inner psyche and the horrors of experience contained therein that provides a sense of self. For example, a sample medical record dated 20 March, 1923, states that ‘Patient is much more demented. She has regressed considerably. She has to be tube fed entirely now. She secretes enormous amounts of saliva. Does not speak at all now. Occasionally smiles in a dull sort of way. Stuporous condition. Mouth has much improved’ (qtd. in Dunn 82). The record describes what’s going on with White from a purely biological basis. In contrast, in Beyond the Glass, White’s poetic language takes the reader into an imaginary place beyond mere reportage of symptoms in White’s medical records. The following statements provide an interesting comparison between White’s diary entries and descriptions of psychosis in Beyond the Glass. On 6 May, 1935, White writes:

Bad nightmare last night. How cleverly the asylum nightmares keep up to date … This time I was an old woman, knowing I was mad, trying to plead with the nurses, explaining to them that things which looked quite normal and harmless to them were terrifying to me. They seemed to listen attentively, almost sympathetically, but in the end they giggled, behaved like nurses, and dragged me to the thing. The wire machine and the clippers … I had forgotten that strange [dream] months ago which ended (I was grown up) lying naked on the pavement, mad and knowing myself to be mad, yet peaceful and the little street boys looking at me and touching me, curious and rather frightened, saying ‘She’s a sleazy lady’ … (48)

Similarly, in Beyond the Glass, three old women appear before Clara and tell her, ‘You cannot sleep unless you die’ (215). Clara allows herself to be taken ‘to a beach and fettered … down on some stones, just under the bows of a huge ship that was about to be launched…. It passed, slowly, right over her body. She felt every bone crack; felt the intolerable weight on her shoulders, felt her skull split like a shell. But she could sleep now. She was free from the burden of having to will’ (215-216).

At face value, this metaphorical description is not literally true. In other words, White cannot authenticate it: A ship did not literally pass over White’s body. And yet, if one compares White’s diary entry with her poetic interpretation of it, what underpins these descriptions is White’s need to convey a traumatic experience in a manner that both best expresses her psychological state of mind and moves the reader. The image of a ship rolling over Clara’s body so that she might die releases White from life in a safe place where, paradoxically, she cannot be hurt – in a psychotic state. It is perhaps a majestic interpretation of her struggle with suicidal tendencies that are projected into her autobiographical fiction.

As illustrated in this section, the relationship between the authorial and narrative ‘I’ is a complex one. With regard to White’s autobiographical fiction, which has its limitations, i.e., the risk of ambiguity in the reader’s attempt to make sense of the author-protagonist relationship, making connections between the author’s representation of self through traumatic experiences seems to rupture in the very act of cohesion; this is due to the reader’s inability to fix an absolute linguistic meaning to the experience. White seeks to strike a balance between conveying a psychologically traumatic experience and doing so through literary aesthetic means.

Ever since White's father reprimands her for writing what he considered to be such a baleful novel—an experience reproduced in Frost in May—writing creatively has been a problem for White until after her father’s death. More significantly, White’s autobiographical fiction about a protagonist in crisis is a recasting of a fractured personality who offers testimony to a traumatic experience that had a profound impact on White’s personality and life. This testimony should be respected as a viable mode of self-expression that should not be subject to scrutiny that over-emphasises the problems of ambiguity, which pervade literary theories and criticism.

This chapter has been driven by three primary intertwining threads of inquiry with regard to White’s life and autobiographical fiction: 1) the relationship between author and protagonist; 2) questions of ambiguity and how to resolve these questions in metaphorical descriptions of psychotic episodes; and 3) how to gain some kind of agency within the confines of an Oedipal narrative. On the one hand, against the backdrop of literary rules and regulations about how to read and interpret genres like autobiographical fiction—a criticism that has its growth in twentieth century literary criticism and theories that seek to eradicate the notion, it seems, of ambiguity—the loss is felt perhaps most strongly by the reader. The reader’s ability to make a connection with writers like White, who are grappling with how to express creatively their traumatic experiences in the face of what they often perceive to be the threat of real mental, emotional, and spiritual annihilation, becomes severely restricted. Readers must embrace the ambiguous nature of psychotic narratives as evidence of both a safe haven in which some authors like White find themselves and as a place that is symptomatic of traumatic struggles with equally traumatic experiences in their histories.

On the other hand, in context of Freud’s Oedipus complex theory, a neurotic’s descent into psychosis has no bearing on reality. In other words, a real mental illness derived from anxiety is connected to unfulfilled but unconscious incestuous sexual desires whose punishment is enforced by the stronger male super-ego. In White’s protagonist’s case, at least, punishment meted out by her father for her Oedipal desires does not have the desired social outcome. This is due, in part, to incongruous aspects of Freud’s understanding of where incestuous desires originate: the parent or the child. Either way, Freud’s derogatory views of women become evident in his perception of their desire for erotic attachments and an inability to exercise the super-ego without paternal direction.

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, which may also serve to explain White’s projection of spiritual angst in her psychotic descriptions. As a one-time lapsed Catholic herself, White would have felt this attitude most poignantly. Spiritual angst comes through most strongly in her autobiographical novel, Frost in May. Through a psychoanalytic lens, it is to White’s complex relationship negotiating her sexuality with her religion in this autobiographical novel that I turn my attention in the next chapter.

Chapter Three

Paradoxical Notions of Sexual Expression in

Frost in May: A Story of Betrayal

Catholic Pedagogical Practices – Maternal Devouring – Sexual Transgression, Confession, and a Transformation of Desire
Up until this point, I have covered two main areas. In Chapter One I addressed a problematic Oedipal drama in White’s autobiographical fiction that forms an interesting parallel with her history. The focus in that chapter was primarily on reading White’s autobiographical fiction through the most recognised feature of Freud’s Oedipus complex theory, i.e., an Oedipal trajectory driven by penis envy; however, the Oedipus complex was not resolved, which led to White’s flight into psychosis. An analysis of conflicting psychoanalytic interpretations of sexual trauma in relation to psychosis placed a spotlight on complexities associated with validating sexual abuse in White’s history. Given the genre in which White wrote, autobiographical fiction, in Chapter Two I addressed the knotted areas of authenticity, memory, and identity, with a focus on the problematic relationship between author and protagonist and to what extent meaningful value can be drawn from reading White’s account of her psychosis as a viable form of self-expression associated with any lived traumatic experience.

Strongly evidenced in White’s autobiographical fiction is how her protagonist’s aspirations towards selfhood are undercut by a pervasive Freudian Oedipal narrative, which is indicative of White’s psychological angst in relation to her identity as a sexual woman and as a writer. In a development of these points, this chapter is divided into three sections in consideration of how larger socio-cultural forces impacted White’s perception of herself as a sexual woman, most poignantly demonstrated in her autobiographical novel, Frost in May.

The first section of this chapter explores the role of Roman Catholicism in White’s life and literature. Lippington’s spiritual practices serve to instill love and fear of God into Nanda, which is analogous to the relationship that her father Cecil Botting also cultivates. At the root of Lippington’s pedagogical practices is a specific Christian paradigm that subjects Nanda to unpalatable processes of self-regulation and self-sacrifice as a soldier of Christ that serve to establish a male authority in her life. I address White’s main protagonist Nanda’s relationship with her father and the nuns at Lippington—authoritative figures who manufacture Nanda, on a symbolic level, according to a higher moral imperative—to illustrate parallels between key Catholic tenets on sexuality and Freud’s Oedipus complex theory.

On a deeper symbolic level in pre-Oedipal terms, which will be the focus of the second section, the nuns function as Nanda’s replacement love objects who create anxiety for her as she navigates resentful feelings for a mother who is often absent in her life and by whom she feels betrayed as a result of this neglect. In an examination of interconnecting motifs of food and maternity, I highlight Nanda’s consumption of food at the convent as an all-consuming process of symbolic maternal devouring. Freud admits in ‘Femininity’ (1933) that he did not give due credit to the mother-daughter relationship until late in his career, at which time his focus was to demonstrate the strongest symptoms of sexual trauma in that relationship.

Similar to Eve’s transgression against God for her corrupt sexuality, Nanda writes a novel with salacious content that is perceived by her father and the nuns as an act of spiritual betrayal. Nanda is subsequently punished and cast out of her Garden of Eden. Whilst the discovery of her novel is a traumatic event for Nanda, in the third section of this chapter, I propose that it is no accident that it remains unfinished in Frost in May because it mirrors White’s assertion of the right to express herself sexually and autonomously in her writing. Frost in May was published in 1933 at the height of modernism. On the one hand, by writing sex into Frost in May, White seemingly pushes the limits of accepted religious axioms and the privileged status of the intellect in a culture in which sexuality is under scrutiny. On the other hand, from a Freudian perspective, writing the novel serves to push Nanda into the Oedipus complex proper.

Given this scenario, a question that arises for me, which I address in this section, is how can readers navigate reading an autobiographical novel like Frost in May that seems to testify to and yet testify against, paradoxically, the suppression of female sexuality?⁴⁶ There is a tension between White’s modernist aspirations to revisualise herself sexually in her autobiographical fiction and her need to fit into the Catholic religious culture. This brings her sense of self into creative and psychological conflict. This conflict, as will be illustrated in the third section, is exacerbated by an underlying Oedipal narrative that makes its presence felt in paternal seduction. Writing autobiographically, White draws 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 are projected onto White’s protagonist. I shall argue, through Nanda’s moral development, that White’s sexuality is inscribed within the parameters of both Catholic and psychoanalytic patriarchal discourses through mechanisms of condemnation and confession towards the transformation of desire. In other words, Nanda’s confession of perverse sexual phantasies is a vehicle for White to learn valuable moral lessons.