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

Sexual Transgression, Confession, and a Transformation of Desire

The combination of religious and paternal restraints imposed upon Nanda lead her to revisualise herself in the production of a novel.⁵⁴ On a superficial level, her motivation for creating the novel corresponds to a young girl’s efforts to transform her characters’ desires from Wildean hedonists to Catholic spiritual beings. The characters are certainly provocative. Nanda depicts a heroine with ‘geranium red lips and hair of finest spun gold and huge limpid violet eyes … and a “tiny tip-tilted nose”’ (201). Interestingly, Nanda’s physiognomy is not given in Frost in May but this rather feminine image bears a striking resemblance to White’s own, which further suggests that Nanda’s heroine is modelled on White herself. Besides a giddy and frivolous time spent at balls flirting with admirers, Nanda’s heroine has an ambivalent attraction to the hero; she is both repulsed by and attracted to an ugly character with ‘penetrating eyes’ who practices black magic, writes poetry, takes drugs, and wears elaborate silk dressing gowns (202). The hero is destined to end up in a Trappist monastery, but prior to Nanda writing in this momentous event, the novel is discovered by the nuns and Nanda is expelled.

A heroine receiving ‘a kiss of burning passion on her scarlet mouth’ in the arms of an admirer during a waltz is hardly wicked enough to warrant such responses from Nanda's father and the nuns, but this episode marks a turning point in Nanda's life. Her relationships with her father, with God, and also with her own sense of identity were never to be the same again. Nanda's parents are called in on her fifteenth birthday and the contents of the novel are revealed to her father, prompting his disgust with a declaration of regret that Nanda had not been born a boy: ‘if a young girl's mind is such a sink of filth and impurity, I wish to God that I had never had a daughter’ (216). Just like White was unable to do nineteen years earlier, Nanda is not given the opportunity to explain that her novel is unfinished, and that her objective is to ‘make her characters as wicked as possible in order that their conversion might be the more spectacular’ (202). Perhaps in anger at Nanda for ignoring a basic Catholic tenet in which ‘even the heathens admit that perfect happiness cannot be attained by the enjoyment of earthly things’, her father no longer wants her to call him ‘daddy’ (Lochemes 8). In this one agonising moment, Nanda is rejected by the person she both fears and idealises more than anyone else. The nuns inform her a short while after this traumatic scene that they have noticed a ‘hard little core of self-will and self-love ... that needs to be broken completely and re-set before it can be at one with God's will’ (219).

In an exploration of White’s relationship with the nuns at Lippington, Julietta Benson suggests in ‘“Varieties of “Dis-Belief”: Antonia White and the Discourses of Faith and Scepticism’ (1993) that ‘Lippington discipline … inspires an affectionate loyalty whilst at the same time it establishes a value structure, conferring meaning upon individual acts of obedience and disobedience’ (287). Indeed, this may be one explanation in support of the convent’s perspective, which is, I add, further supported by the doctrine of ‘The End and Purpose of Man’s Existence’ in Catholic pedagogy to serve God and ensure man’s ‘salvation and happiness’ in that life hereafter (Lochemes 8). However, from a psychological perspective, Nanda’s creation of the novel mirrors White’s experiences at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where White’s own partially completed novel is discovered by the nuns and perceived by her father as an act of spiritual treachery against the Catholic Church. A close analogy would be that similar to Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden for their transgressions against God with the daunting prospect of eternal damnation,⁵⁵ Nanda’s expulsion is an example that reinforces what the nuns are taught in Catholic instruction: ‘the pupil is not an ideal man, but ignorant, inclined to evil, morally weak, and filled with low desires’ (9).

Given that Nanda’s act of sexual transgression that is projected into her heroine mirrors White’s transgression, White may have been familiar with how this event would be interpreted by the nuns. In Catholic pedagogy, it is clear to whom the blame is attached in terms of sexual transgression specifically, although redemption is possible in successful childbearing should she amend her ways; as expressed in The Holy Bible, ‘Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach,⁵⁶ nor to use authority over the man: but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed; then Eve. And Adam was not seduced; but the woman being seduced, was in the transgression. Yet she shall be saved through childbearing; if she continue in faith, and love, and sanctification, with sobriety’ (‘Douay-Rheims Bible’, 1 Timothy 2:11-14). Interestingly, similar to Freud’s premise that underlies his Oedipus complex theory, Catholic doctrine also recognises that as a result of original sin, a child’s moral powers are not yet developed, acknowledging that rewards and punishments are necessary, particularly in childhood ‘when sensual nature predominates’ (Lochemes 33).

Through a Freudian lens, the scene involving Nanda’s flirtations with her admirers corresponds to an unconscious representation of what necessitates Nanda’s passage into and through the Oedipus complex: she sexually pines after her father ‒ a pining that is displaced onto God by a devout woman ‒ in an unconscious effort to recover the lost penis that has been taken away by her mother (the nuns). This Oedipal fantasy scene is pushed through normalising processes via punishment from the internalised super-ego; after all, Nanda is reprimanded for her treacherous act of writing such sexually degrading material.

In The Sugar House, White was to revisit this traumatic episode in her life: ‘The nuns had confiscated the beginning of a novel she had been writing in secret. They had given her no chance to explain that she had made her characters behave as badly as possible in those opening chapters because she meant to convert them all sensationally in the last. Without telling her, they had sent the manuscript to her father and even threatened to expel her’ (162). His face ‘was so thunderous that she had stopped dead; her knees trembling so much that she could not take another step…. The things he had said to her that day had been so terrible that there was a blank in her mind about the end of the interview…. Neither of them had ever mentioned it since’ (162). As Freud states in relation to the little girl, which can equally apply to Nanda, she is cast ‘out of her fool’s paradise’ (‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ 173).

In a letter to Peter Thorpe dated 20 January, 1941, in The Hound and the Falcon, White is still haunted psychologically by this event as she questions what she perceives to be an hypocritical basis for the Catholic Church’s rules on sex. She writes,

I remember when I was about 14 living through months of terror because I thought I must have committed some appalling crime and was being turned into an animal for a punishment. I thought what was happening to me happened to no one else and I was full of shame and misery. I think the Church’s rules about sex are probably all right (though very difficult to practice) but I hate the usual expression of them. There is so much more in sex than ‘bestial appetite’ and surely people should be taught to accept their human nature, understand it and deal with it rather than to treat it as a hideous phenomenon…. By all means, let’s say we’re weak, liable to corruption, full of faults, but to hate one’s whole nature is to hate the work of God. Of course we must try to get rid of our egotism and keep low and be sorry for our sins, but this bitter condemnation of those very impulses which have led us to God seems to me hypocritical and false. I want to love God and not to hate myself but gradually become detached from and indifferent to myself. (65-66; emphasis in original)

Whilst the discovery of White’s own novel is a traumatic event for her (a point to which I shall return in more detail), I would like to first propose that it is no accident that the novel remains unfinished in Frost in May because it reflects White’s assertion of the right to express herself sexually and autonomously in her writing in a culture in which sexuality is suppressed. Of course, Nanda’s heroine is placed in a situation that is suggestive of a degree of sexual excitation being provoked; this is interesting considering abstinence from sexual relations outside marriage is a key Catholic tenet, and yet it may be this biological reference to sexuality that serves to emancipate White politically in her right to write sexually and therefore autonomously in her work as an aspiring modernist. As White was to do in finding a balance between appealing to aesthetics whilst writing autobiographically, which I addressed in Chapter Two, she also attempts to find a balance between modernist aims of female sexual liberation and her sense of identity in a Catholic culture. This is no easy feat. As it transpires, White’s anxiety only increases.

Modernism emerged in defiance of what David Seelow describes in his book Radical Modernism and Sexuality: Freud/Reich/D. H. Lawrence and Beyond (2005), as a period in which Victorian moralistic ideals on sexuality equated to a sexual perversion⁵⁷ and a time where ‘women are the objects of massive sexual repression and are exiled from sexual pleasure’ (19). During the modernist sexual rebellion, dancers disrobed themselves of traditional forms of expression found in ballet and vaudeville for more experimental forms in less-clad attire;⁵⁸ and flappers enlightened society to what legs looked like below the knee, and the allure of wearing an abundance of make-up and having casual sex after a night of consuming alcohol. Writers, too, like James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, inserted the body into literature using sexually provocative language in defiance of legal authorities.⁵⁹ In Wyndham Lewis’s study of sexuality in Time and Western Man (1927), he remarks how ‘every licence where “sex” is concerned has been invested with the halo of an awful and thrilling lawlessness’ (27). It is a sentiment that aptly describes this revelatory modernist movement to which White aspires.

White makes a modernist gesture in her deliberate denouncement of silencing sexual expression that doubles as an attempt at female sexual liberation in her longing to find a balance between art and religion, thus breaking through the boundaries of a Catholic patriarchal discourse on sexuality. In a letter to Peter Thorpe dated 18 April, 1941, in the Hound and the Falcon, White states: ‘I can in my heart renounce neither religion nor art: I can only try and combine the two in some mixture that suits a mixed nature’ (118). Frost in May illustrates, however, the tension between White’s modernist aspirations and yet her own need to fit into the religious culture that brings her sense of self into creative and psychological conflict, which is projected into her protagonist. As aforementioned, Nanda describes a highly provocative scene between her heroine and admirers, coming to a climax with a moment when ‘the heroine’s other admirer, after having “swooned with her in the languid ecstasies of a waltz” took her out on the balcony and “pressed a kiss of burning passion on her scarlet mouth, a kiss which had some of the reckless intoxication of the music that throbbed out from the Hungarian band they could hear in the distance”’ (202).

On an intellectual level, the patriarchal restraints imposed upon Nanda lead her to revisualise herself sexually in her imagination, as described in the writing of her transgressive novel. In a way, although White has a flirtation with modernism herself, it is fleeting because her ties with her religion ultimately triumph over her modernist aspirations. In The Hound and the Falcon, White observes, ‘I am keenly aware of my own egotism, vanity, impatience and self-indulgence. And I do not mean to give up the practice of religion because that religion seems full of anomalies and repulsive elements.… I can only say that I want to accept what is, however repugnant and painful, as opposed to what I would like to be, however delightful’ (73; emphasis in original).

White wants to balance religion and aesthetics, but her feelings run much deeper than a superficial acceptance of her limitations as an artist: ‘I am tormented sometimes by miseries and scruples and by the awful old fear that it is all my fault if I can’t see … that I am fundamentally perverted’ (qtd. in Maitland xi, HF). For White, this sense of inherent perversion can only lead her in one direction: ‘None of us likes to dwell on the doctrine of hell and yet there is, for us, some fearful inevitability in it’ (qtd. in Maitland xi, HF). White expresses this sentiment most poignantly in a letter to Peter Thorpe dated 8 February, 1941, in which she equates being female with being defective:

It is a profound truth that makes Eve the Channel of the fall and the Church’s defects may be due to her femaleness. A woman is more corruptible, I believe, than a man because of the slower rhythm of her life, as still water breeds scum. And haven’t you often noticed, in men, that it is their female side that betrays and corrupts them? It is not for nothing that in no religion is God imagined as female. (HF 86)

In Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anais Nin (2000), Elizabeth Podnieks makes an important observation: ‘It seems that White had identified herself with this original mother by accepting some inherited responsibility for “the fall”. More specifically, she seems to have been connecting Eve’s sin with the sin of her writing’ (219). It was not until meeting Benedicta de Bezer that White convinced herself on a conscious level that she was not guilty. Having an unbecoming nature alone did not suffice to provide White with a Guilty verdict (Podnieks 219). Podnieks views the ‘Not Guilty’ verdict as White ‘writing beyond the ending of perhaps the greatest patriarchal narrative in history, replacing it with a modernist ending in which women may empower themselves to “name and control”, as Jardine suggests, their own presence in religious and cultural discourses’ (219). Moreover, Podnieks has positive hopes for White: She suggests that White’s diaries illustrate the modernist mindset in its aesthetic application of generating fragments that cohesively work into a unified whole, sliding into a space that ‘reaches out to other women’ (173). To some extent, this view is reinforced in Broe’s sentiment. Broe observes the tension between writing about one’s trauma to regain some control over it in defiance of Freud’s renouncement of his seduction theory. She suggests that incest can be associated

with perhaps the most brutal form of exile imposed on a woman – exile within her family and from her own body by her abuser…. Narratives of these abuses may be considered modernist in that incest survivors transform their textual spaces into metaphoric bodies, of which they may assume or regain control. In so doing, women challenge Freud, who initially formulated a ‘seduction theory’ in a belief that incest was real, but who later abandoned it in favour of incest as fantasy. (93-94)

I find these views a little problematic. Whilst White inserts the body into her literature, it is not to challenge Freud. And, although I agree that White was writing sexually to find a space that reaches out to other women, it is not through her diaries that she achieves this but in her autobiographical fiction. In The Sugar House, White recalls that her expulsion from the convent was such a traumatic event for her that it impacted her writing except for a little black notebook: ‘Though it contained much that might make her reasonably feel guilty, was exempt from the blight, simply because it was secret’ (163). Here, White is making a reference to her diaries. They were written in secret and were not published until after her death. With regard to feelings of guilt, White can acknowledge a ‘not guilty’ verdict in relation to her writing, but she also needs to acknowledge that ‘Somehow, the unconscious has to accept the “NOT GUILTY” verdict’ (4 Aug. 1949; my emphasis).

Given the critics’ views expressed here, whilst White’s sexuality is perceived as empowering, her case appears uncertain in her need to belong to the very culture she rejects, which expresses itself in a perception of her female sexuality for what it is: a sin against God’s decree for the purpose of it then becoming morally useful as a lesson on sexual abstinence. White’s sin, in other words, is inscribed in a patriarchal discourse, but it is one that also contributes to her creative and psychological plights. In a letter written to Peter Thorpe on 2 June, 1941, she voices her spiritual anguish directed at God:

If you damn me, I accept it. I wanted to find the truth. If I cannot take it in the only form you prescribe it, then damned I must be and I won’t complain. But if you want me to see what I don’t see, however much I strain my eyes, you must either do something about my eyesight or convince me if I’ve committed the sin against the Holy Ghost in which case I’m damned already. (130)

As a ‘fallen woman’ in the eyes of God and her more direct paternal authoritative figure, her father, White’s failure to express herself sexually in her writing, coupled with her preoccupation with religious Catholic tenets on sexuality, serve to hamper her creative expression that had haunted her since the age of fifteen. White is torn between reason and the ability to reconcile her disillusionment with her religion and transcend it to form a real relationship with God, which draws parallels with the relationship with her father. In her essay, ‘A Passionate and Troubled History: Antonia White and Her Father’ (2000), Therese Strauss-Noll notes the sexual metaphors in White’s recollection of this event in her life. As Strauss-Noll observes, White recalls that ‘My impulse to write a novel began in the year following the beginning of menstruation. My father, as it were, killed the child. He thought of it as having been conceived in sin’ (qtd. in Strauss-Noll 133).

White’s feminine role as the weaker sex cannot be averted because, whilst asserting her sexuality in Frost in May, for example, she has perpetuated the stereotypical vision of Eve’s daughters as giddy, frivolous, and men’s seducers by the Church. The reality of the situation is that writing nearly twenty years after her time at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, White is forced back into her feminine role as the scarlet woman in The Lost Traveller in an attempt to seek the love from her father that she had lost in Frost in May. It is through White’s sexuality that she becomes attractive to and valued by men, but due to her inability to separate sexuality from male power, something that she wants to possess and which becomes manifest in her heroine’s transgression in Frost in May, Nanda’s heroine may not recognise her enemy for who he is, a cunning seducer who hides his corrupt sexuality behind a focus on feminine virtue.

In contrast, White presents a different side to Claude Batchelor (formerly Mr. Grey in Frost in May) and his relationship with religion in The Lost Traveller:

His mind was satisfied but his heart remained cold. He felt nothing that could be called a religious impulse; no craving for God, no awakening of faith…. One Sunday evening he went alone to Benediction in the French church in Soho. Although he now knew its meaning, the service no longer impressed him as it had done in his Cambridge days. Usually insensitive to details, he was annoyed by the perfunctory movements of the fat, blue-jowled priest who gabbled the Latin in a strong Marseilles accent’ (22).

What follows is an interesting scenario.⁶⁰ Whilst in church, fidgeting with his rosary, Claude is distracted by a ‘sallow, sullenly handsome’ girl who has the looks of Isabel. After she removes her ‘white kid gloves’, Claude suddenly felt, ‘without warning, the demons of his imagination leap on her, stripping her, using her with a cold brutality of lust’ (23). The girl, as if seeing into Claude's mind, shifts further away. Her potential knowledge of his debased thoughts leave him under an enormous burden of guilt:

For the first time in his life, he seemed to grasp the meaning of evil. He was conscious of something corrupt in the depths of his nature; something at once frigid, impure and violent.... He felt as if he were isolated from every human contact; locked in a dark cell that was both icy and suffocating. (23)
As illustrated in this scene, Claude initially deludes himself into believing that the sexual desire is also mutual, indicative in the girl’s removal of her glove that is like a veil being removed to expose the mutuality of sexual desire in Claude's unconscious. Fortunately for Claude, when he comes to awareness, he is aware of an unearthly presence and the words ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’ light up in his mind (23). He knew at that moment that ‘Christ was the key that could unlock his prison of frozen isolation and the key was his for a single act of faith’ (23). In this scene, Catholicism functions as a barrier to sexual excitation and evil abusive impulses, and God is internalised as Claude’s super-ego. Religion can certainly be a mighty prophylactic.

The idea of a woman’s sexual value in Catholicism is closely tied to Freud’s thoughts on incest prohibition in modern Western men and their ongoing struggle to separate love from desire. As expressed in Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud makes it clear that with regard to the nature of incestuous desires in fathers, ‘in their unconscious there is nothing they would like more than to violate [the taboo of incest], but they are afraid to do so; they are afraid precisely because they would like to, and the fear is stronger than the desire’ (31).⁶¹ This is a highly revealing statement that illustrates the repression of incestuous desires in primitive men, and yet their ambivalence towards the taboo, because in order for there to be an ‘obsessional prohibition’, there must have been a time when the practice of incest was made a taboo, ‘perhaps merely as a result of tradition transmitted through parental and social authority’ (31). Freud attributes this ambivalence to the taboo as a conflict between an unconscious desire but a very conscious fear that emerges in the way fear emerges in neurotics and in religion, even if that fear has no tangible foundation, except the inclination towards the ‘prohibited action’, which remains in the unconscious.

The relationship between Nanda and her father in Frost in May is certainly sexually charged. On a deeper level, then, perhaps Nanda’s transgressive act is White’s way of unconsciously exposing her father’s sin; moreover, because Nanda’s characters do not reach the stage of conversion, she is effectively denying her father religious agency; and yet this transgressive act is punished. Nanda’s sin, Nanda’s perversity even, with which White identifies, is brought to the surface whilst simultaneously concealing her father’s sin. The fact that Nanda allows her transgressive act to be punished suggests that she is not only protecting her father but doing so due to deeply-embedded feelings of guilt.

Despite Freud’s perspective, when White wrote this scene, it was after a long period as a lapsed Catholic. By the early 1940s, and after a long discussion with her letter correspondent, Peter Thorpe, in The Hound and the Falcon, White was starting to build a new relationship with her estranged religion. So, why would she include a scene like this in a novel that already has strong Oedipal tones? Is this scene a veil for Cecil Botting’s incestuous desires for his daughter? After all, the young girl in the church had the ‘looks of Isabel’.⁶²

According to Dunn’s account, Cecil Botting was attracted to the Catholic Church because it symbolised something ‘exotic’ with ‘theatrical rituals’ that made him feel that he would be joining a ‘spiritual aristocracy’ to compensate for his lower-class background (Dunn 36): ‘The sensuous, hedonistic side of him, so long suppressed beneath his ferocious capacity for hard work and filial responsibility’ saw an outlet in the Catholic Church (35-6). As Dunn observes, perhaps White fictionalises how she perceived her father’s epiphany in The Lost Traveller: ‘He was conscious of something corrupt in the depths of his nature; something at once frigid, impure and violent’ (qtd. in Dunn 36).

Cecil’s introduction to the Catholic religion was instigated by Nevinson de Courcy (Toby), a friend from the Cambridge days (Dunn 36). It has been suggested that Toby and Cecil may have had some form of homosexual love, although there is no evidence to suggest that they engaged in a sexual relationship. Sandra Chait observes that for Cecil Botting ‘sex and religion were anathema to each other’ (154). It could be that Cecil’s relationship with Nevinson drove him to Catholicism, but readers cannot know for sure. What readers are made privy to is that ‘White implies that he saw it as salvation for whatever “sins” he bore on his conscience’ (Chait 155).

A fundamental premise that underpins Freud’s Oedipus complex is that it aligns itself with larger socio-cultural ideals about moral human conduct as it pertains to the incest barrier. At the heart of Freud’s theory on the incest taboo is an antagonism between one’s instinctual life and one’s cultural considerations. In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated 31 May, 1897, Freud confidently asserts that he ‘shall very soon uncover the source of morality’ (249) right before disclosing a dream in which he had ‘overaffectionate feelings’ for his daughter Mathilde. He concludes that the dream ‘shows the fulfillment of my wish to catch a Pater as the originator of neurosis’ (249; emphasis in original). Of course, Freud renounces this statement upon his creation of the Oedipus complex. Under the ‘Definition of “Holy”’ in this draft, Freud writes, ‘The horror of incest (something impious) is based on the fact that, as a result of communal sexual life (even in childhood), the members of a family remain together permanently and become incapable of joining with strangers’ (252). Interestingly, Freud does not conclude that incest is immoral, which would be a reasonable conclusion to make in cultural terms, but instead focuses on the social implications of incest as ‘anti-social—civilization consists in this progressive renunciation’ (252).

As Freud develops his ideas on incest, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he asserts that ‘Respect for this barrier is essentially a cultural demand made by society. Society must defend itself against the danger that the interests which it needs for the establishment of higher social units may be swallowed up by the family’ (128). Put more plainly, passage through the Oedipus complex is essential ‘for the progress of civilization’ (128). His stance on sexual morality is similar to the one he observes in ‘“Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’ (1908) as being ‘sanctioned by religion’ (39). In this same essay, Freud explains, as he does in numerous essays, that reproduction itself comes about from a child’s psycho-sexual development, which starts with the sexual instincts and auto-eroticism in infancy, which, not being conducive to the needs of reproduction, become sublimated in ‘cultural activities’ that serve to suppress ‘perverse elements of sexual excitation’ (39-40; emphasis in original). One brand of pervert is one ‘in whom an infantile fixation to a preliminary sexual aim has prevented the primacy of the reproductive function from being established’ (41). He writes,

Where the sexual instinct is fairly intense, but perverse, [one possible outcome] … is that … under the influence of education and social demands, a suppression of the perverse instincts is indeed achieved, but it is a kind of suppression which is really no suppression at all. It can be better described as a suppression that has failed. The inhibited sexual instincts are, it is true, no longer expressed as such―and this constitutes the success of the process―but they find expression in other ways, which are quite as injurious to the subject and make him quite as useless for society as satisfaction of the suppressed instincts in an unmodified form would have done. (42-43)

Here, Freud’s basic point seems to be that if men were not held to such high cultural expectations (women do not have these expectations), they would be less inclined to become, for example, sexual perverts, which is how White has come to perceive herself in religio-cultural terms.

At the heart of Freud’s theory on the incest taboo is an antagonism between one’s instinctual life and one’s cultural considerations. For example, in the ‘Editor’s Note’ preceding ‘“Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’ (1908), James Strachey draws our attention to ‘Draft N’ attached to a memorandum Freud sent to Fliess on May 31, 1897. In this draft, Freud writes, ‘incest is anti-social and civilization [interchangeable with the word culture] consists in a progressive renunciation of it’ (180). Strachey explains that this current essay effectively summarises the antagonism prevalent between one’s instinctual life and one’s culture in the subject matter under discussion in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.⁶³

Locheme describes the function of Confession according to Catholic doctrine as thus: ‘Gerson, the celebrated chancellor of the University of Paris, writes, “A means only possessed by the Christian religion to guide children upon the path that leads to Christ, is confession”’ (qtd. in Lochemes 54). It is a means to a ‘reconciliation’ with God through the processes of committing sin, acknowledging that sin, feeling guilt, and then being forgiven for feeling that guilt (54). Self-denial is normal (54). However, given White’s depiction of Clara’s father’s temptation in church, it seems as if she feels the need to shift attention away from her crime to her father’s. The nature of Catholic confession, however, is a forgiving one: ‘That reconciling of man to God is the purpose of Confession. When we sin, we deprive ourselves of God’s grace. And by doing so, we make it even easier to sin some more. The only way out of this downward cycle is to acknowledge our sins, to repent of them, and to ask God’s forgiveness. Then, in the Sacrament of Confession, grace can be restored to our souls, and we can once again resist sin.’ (Richert, par. 4).

Ironically, in The Future of an Illusion, Freud writes,

It is doubtful whether men were in general happier at a time when religious doctrines held unrestricted sway; more moral they certainly were not. They have always known how to externalise the precepts of religion and thus to nullify their intentions. The priests, whose duty it was to ensure obedience to religion, met them half-way in this. God’s kindness must lay a retraining hand on His justice. One sinned, and then one made a sacrifice or did penance and then one was free to sin once more. (220)



According to Freud, this is a good thing because it continually establishes human weakness in the face of God’s greatness. In analogous terms, from a Freudian perspective in relation to sexuality, he writes that there are

Two origins of the sense of guilt: one arising from fear of an authority, and the other, later on, arising from fear of the super-ego. The first insists upon a renunciation of instinctual satisfactions; the second, as well as doing this, presses for punishment, since the continuance of the forbidden wishes cannot be concealed from the super-ego—the demands of conscience—is to be understood. It is simply a continuation of the severity of the external authority, to which it has succeeded and which it has in part replaced. (319-320)
A ‘renunciation’ is no less than a desire to transform, which is a platform upon which Freudian psychoanalytic treatment itself is posited. At this juncture, it is important to reconsider an important question raised in the Introduction because, on the one hand, White aspires to a literary modernist attempt at female sexual liberation as a war waged on suppressed sexuality in a dominant Catholic culture. On the other hand, readers may simultaneously be witness to a discourse that could easily be passed off as a confession at the intersection of religious and Freudian ideals on female sexuality: How can readers navigate an autobiographical novel like Frost in May that seems to testify to and yet testify against, paradoxically, the suppression of female sexuality?

Nanda’s sexual corruption is in line with larger moral ideals on sexuality at the intersection of socio-cultural ideals and Freud’s Oedipus complex. In White reimagining her own sexual transgression and by putting it into discourse with its subsequent punishment, what follows is a transformation of her own desire. Her writing a transgressive novel, therefore, as it was for Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit, was an act that was expected, found out, and subsequently punished. White’s return to the earlier traumatic event and vocalising it serves as a confession that can lead to forgiveness, something perhaps that White had denied for so long in redirected antagonism toward the Catholic Church.

It is not until 1940 that White begins to move towards a calmer relationship with religion and, in particular, the Catholic Church. During 1940 and 1941, White engages in a lengthy and intense correspondence with Peter Thorpe, a married and previously lapsed Catholic who had now returned to the bosom of the Catholic Church. In later life, still identified with her first protagonist, referring to herself in a letter to Peter Thorpe dated 11 Dec., 1940, as the ‘grown up “Nanda”’ (15). In The Hound and the Falcon, White writes:

I begin to have what I never had in childhood, when we automatically went to Communion every day, a hunger for the Blessed Sacrament. And I begin to see dimly the connection between accepted suffering and internal peace, joy and light, the cross and the resurrection not successive, but simultaneous. I understand now words of St. Bonaventure which I repeated automatically for years: ‘Transfix me with the most joyous and healthful wound of Thy love.’ (‘7 February 1941’, 81)

What is particularly striking to me are the words ‘Transfix me with the most joyous and healthful wound of Thy love’ because it is a statement that resonates with White in relation to her relationship with her father, whose conversion was so dramatic that I have to wonder if there was not some underlying guilt for which he was over-compensating and projected onto White. In a letter to Cyril Connolly in April, 1942, White makes an important soul-searching statement:

The psychologists would presumably say that Catholicism was one of the factors in my life with which I had failed to come to terms, as I had failed to come to terms with money, sex, and writing. Obviously the Catholic Church would be very much mixed up for me with my father, who was directly responsible for my becoming a Catholic in the first place. Analysis convinced me without any shadow of doubt that my ambivalent attitude of unconscious love and hate towards him was one of the prime factors of my neurosis. Therefore I would naturally project into my attitude towards the Church, particularly such a very authoritative Church, the same mixture of love and hate, submissiveness and rebellion. In rebelling against him, I would naturally rebel against the Church too, and also feel guilty about it. (160)

Much of White’s writing was preoccupied with navigating feelings of guilt that are internalised socio-cultural influences. However, at the source of White’s guilt is the feeling of having betrayed her father. White’s creation of Frost in May is an attempt at a confession for having betrayed her parents, which mixes religious and psychoanalytic influences on her life, particularly with regard to her perception of herself sexually through her writing. These feelings of betrayal intersect with White’s own deep-rooted feelings of betrayal in maternal terms that become manifest in White’s relations with the nuns.

Would White have written Frost in May in the way she did had she not been highly influenced by Freudian theory and her own psychoanalytic treatments? Whilst I cannot prove this is so, the tensions and nuances between two seemingly different paradigms like Catholicism and Freudian theory intersected in White’s literary landscape, which illuminated how these areas impacted her sense of self. Reading Frost in May alongside her diaries revealed not only the spiritual anguish that White projected into her protagonist, but how female sexuality was deployed and harnessed for women like White who were torn between advocating for female sexual liberation but riddled with the opposite notion of women as fundamentally sexually immoral: a deeply-rooted sin going back to Eve in the Garden of Eden. Interestingly, while Freud often mocked religious principles, it is ironic that his own Oedipus complex theory’s principles drew such a close resemblance to Catholicism, which is indicative of the influence of socio-cultural factors that made their way into his thinking.

Due to prevailing notions of Freud’s Oedipus complex at the time in which she was writing, mechanisms of condemnation, guilt, and confession based on the gravity of betrayal against authoritative figures served to transform their patients’ sexual desires for the larger socio-cultural good. This method is not dissimilar to those employed by the Catholic Church for the purpose of moral improvement, based on the initial sexual betrayal by Adam and Eve. Unfortunately, White identified with Eve in conscious and unconscious terms and struggled to navigate her female sexuality between three influential forces in her life: her father, her psychoanalysts, and the Church.

As aforementioned in other places and in this chapter, I allude to the possibility of paternal sexual impropriety. In this chapter, it has been raised that Cecil’s new-found religious devotion actually betrays deep-rooted feelings of guilt about possessing incestuous desires. Whilst it has not been my aim to validate sexual abuse in White’s autobiographical fiction, questions of how to authenticate recollections of trauma in general dominate contemporary trends today. It is to these questions that I shall turn my attention in the next chapter.

Beyond these questions, I shift my attention from a discussion on memory to betrayal. I shift from the Freudian idea of childhood betrayal to parents’ betrayal of the child because in White’s situation, whether or not she experienced sexual abuse, her life and way she interacted with others was overcast by the deeply traumatising impact of feeling betrayed. The strongest betrayal of all was by White’s mother for severe maternal neglect, which White attempts to work through in her autobiographical fiction.

Contemporary Trends on Sexual Trauma and Memory in

Clinical Practice and Trauma Theory: A Comparative Study

Rise of the Feminist Movement on Sexual Abuse in Literature ‒ Trauma and the ‘Unspeakable’ in Literary Studies ‒ Maternal Betrayal

Writing Autobiographical Fiction towards Healing
The aim of this chapter is threefold: 1) to show how far trends in contemporary thinking about sexual trauma have developed or deviated from Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. In this section, I shall also draw out the significance of those trends at the intersection of socio-political considerations; 2) to discuss similar trends and significances in literary studies; and 3) based on my findings, to provide a new perspective on the representation of sexual trauma in autobiographical fiction that revolves around ideas on betrayal and the potential healing benefits of writing.

Due to limitations in proving that White suffered father-daughter incest, as illustrated in the previous chapters, it has not been my aim in this thesis to prove that she was a victim of sexual abuse. However, today, debates still revolve around why it is that aim cannot be achieved. These debates, from a variety of paradigms, cover the same ground as those expressed by Freud and Ferenczi. For example, there are studies that address the psychological impact of childhood sexual abuse in both mainstream psychological and psychiatric literature to feminists’ trauma studies; these studies speak to Ferenczi’s views on psychosis as a defence mechanism against conscious knowledge of abuse that may have been repressed. As a result of feminists’ efforts, in particular (e.g., Herman, 1987, 2000; Rush 1981; Westerlund, 1986; Bass and Davis, 2008), victims of sexual trauma found a public voice in a new market of trauma studies, autobiographical novels, and memoirs.

Cathy Caruth, a revered trauma theorist on memory in literary studies, takes the focus away from the surface discussion of sexual abuse validation to a deeper and perhaps more far-reaching exploration into memory itself. Her research seeks to discover to what extent memory survives any traumatic event and is then later narrated in an attempt to speak the ‘unspeakable’. She utilises Freud’s idea of repetition-compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) as scaffolding to support her claim in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), for example, of a rupture between the original traumatic event in which, as a defence mechanism, part of the knowledge has been relegated to the unconscious, to how traumatic flashbacks function as haunting voices that cry out from a second wound, which serve to defy and bear witness to an original trauma that cannot be grasped completely in the past or in the present.

As a result of my reading of Caruth’s ideas of trauma speaking from a wound, alongside Freud’s theory of repetition-compulsion, I modify Caruth’s position to illustrate how both White’s protagonists and readers serve to defy and bear witness to White’s original traumatic event at the root of which is maternal betrayal. Using Freud’s fort-da example as an analogy that shifts attention from a child’s betrayal to maternal betrayal, many episodes of White’s negative portrayals of her mother and the need to create distance from her in her autobiographical fiction go beyond the confines of the (pre)Oedipal narrative. For White, writing is not just bound up with her sexual obsession for her father; it also becomes an act of revenge for maternal neglect that, in a way, also helps her to cope with deeply rooted feelings of betrayal.