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

Rise of the Feminist Movement on Sexual Abuse

Since the period in which White was writing, there have been waves of feminist writings that demand a voice to be heard about the damaging psychological effects of father-daughter incest. In what feminists perceive to be a dominating and suppressive patriarchal framework, they argue for individual expression to emerge and fight against the inadmission of incest. From the 1940s onward, theories relating to Freud’s Oedipus complex developed into increasing interest in a child’s acting out his or her Oedipal desires, particularly with regard to girls acting out in some professionals’ attempts to exonerate fathers who were perceived as having been seduced by their daughters and giving in to the seduction. As Rachel Devlin observes in her article, ‘“Acting Out the Oedipal Wish”: Father-Daughter Incest and the Sexuality of Adolescent Girls in the United States, 1941-1965’ (2005), Ernest Jones, for example, suggests that, due to a father playing a part in his daughter’s ‘acting out’, which ‘was set in motion by conflicts with her mother in combination with the mobilisation of her Oedipal desires with the onset of puberty’, his role in the incestuous act is insignificant (618).⁶⁴ Jones firmly places the onus of blame on the daughter’s shoulders that can be internalized by her. This can have a devastating impact on a child, for example, the inability to speak about the abuse out of feelings of guilt and shame for being responsible for the seduction. For example, according to feminist trauma theorist, Florence Rush, in her book The Best-Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children (1980), a child who has been abused may feel that she is responsible because there is either something wrong with her or because she does not know that this form of ‘love’ is unacceptable until later on in life, thus unwittingly partaking in her father’s seduction.

In her book, Rush describes a case she had encountered during her time as a social worker in the 1960s that speaks to this concern. Twelve-year-old Annie had been in a two-year incestuous relationship with her father. When Rush told Annie that she knew about the relationship, Annie avoided talking about it. The supervising psychiatrist to whom Rush reported the information declared that Annie could not talk about the relationship because ‘she’s too guilty and ashamed’ (100). Rush proceeds to recount the psychiatrist’s position on father-daughter seduction: ‘it was her deep, unconscious, incestuous wish for her father that made her feel guilty’ (100). When Rush began working with Annie, her father had just been sent to jail for robbery, not incest (100). Rush also states that she was categorically advised not to talk to Annie about Annie’s incestuous relationship with her father because it would exacerbate Annie’s feelings of guilt and shame and, according to the treatment center at which Rush worked, rightly so (100).

Evidenced by Rush’s experience working on Annie’s case, the incest taboo has become entrenched in society, but in a way that deviates from Freud’s original theory in two ways. Freud’s premise that the child needs to be taught that her family members are sexually out of bounds for the progress of civilization has shifted to a) a need to protect the child from the painful acknowledgement of her own Oedipal desires that are now fully integrated into the conscious, as evidenced by her acting out, and b) to let play out the self-punishment that the child is already inflicting on herself by having these feelings of guilt.

Contrarily, as Ellen Bass and Laura Davis observe in their book, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Sexual Abuse (1988/2008), the blame should never fall on the child:

Even if a sixteen-year-old girl walks into her living room naked and throws herself on her father, he is still not justified in touching her sexually. A responsible father would say, ‘There seems to be a problem here.’ He would tell her to put clothes on; he’d discuss it with her, get professional help if necessary. Regardless of age or circumstances, there is never an excuse for sexual abuse. It is absolutely the responsibility of adults not to be sexual with children. (124)

This scenario, although presented to show the role of the ideal father, highlights the problem of allocating blame for sexual abuse. In Bass and Davis’s suggestion that the girl’s father should engage in this type of dialogue with his daughter, they are illustrating that he may not be the sexual aggressor and that his daughter may be acting out Oedipal desires. However, a normal sixteen-year-old girl would not behave in this way. The fact that she behaves in this sexual manner suggests that her frame of reference in terms of sexual boundaries has been violated in some way, but by whom is difficult to prove. This is an interesting turn of events, considering Freud also completely renounced his theory of repression in relation to girls’ experiences of incest, partly for the same reasons.

In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess on September 21, 1897, Freud makes a startling revelation that, due to inconclusive evidence in his cases of hysteria, he can no longer sustain his seduction theory: ‘… in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse—the realisation of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, with precisely the same conditions prevailing in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable’ (264). I would like to draw your attention to the phrase ‘not excluding my own’. Freud is stating in no uncertain terms that his own father had been branded a pervert. This claim is obviously unacceptable to Freud, a claim that reveals in Freud’s mind two completely incompatible ideas that may have contributed to his fervent denials of the reality of incestuous abuse.

In ‘Freud on Sexual Trauma: An Historical Review of Seduction and Betrayal’ (1986), Elaine Westerlund suggests that a turning point in Freud’s renouncement of his seduction theory was related to Freud’s inability to complete his own self-analysis with respect to accusations of sexual abuse directed at his own father by some of Freud’s siblings. Westerlund suspects that although Freud does not consider himself one of these victims, evidence suggests that the contrary may be true: ‘the acknowledgement of a theoretical error, however shameful to Freud, would surely have been less so than an acknowledgement of his father’s guilt. Indeed, whatever affects have been associated with finding himself in error, they would certainly have been less painful than those associated with the knowledge of his own sexual abuse by his father’ (303).

Whilst it cannot be concluded that Freud was sexually abused by his father, he does provide what I perceive to be an attempt at wit by declaring in a letter dated October 3, 1897, that he was abused but by ‘an ugly, elderly, but clever woman … his nursemaid’ (268).⁶⁵ Westerlund suggests that to circumnavigate around concealing the true aggressor of sexual abuse is to assign to it a person of lesser significance ‘in the patriarchal society’, and one ‘whose morals could be brought into question’ (303). She proceeds, and rightly so, to describe that Freud’s writings often depict women committing sexual offenses to children in the guise of caretakers—an area that is central to feminist writing—to highlight patriarchal values. She observes that ‘Freud’s ideas after he adopted the Oedipal theory, in which reports of seduction for the most part could be attributed to fantasy, were certainly more in keeping with the patriarchal values of Vienna. Victorian men were not discouraged from the practice of forbidden sex as long as scandal was avoided’ (306). Indeed, it has been brought to light (Masson, Roazen, Hale),⁶⁶ that some of Freud’s colleagues acted inappropriately with patients (Sandor Ferenczi)⁶⁷ and at times with children (Ernest Jones), not excluding one’s own children (Wilhelm Fliess).⁶⁸ For example, Westerlund concludes that ‘information previously presented offers little to dispel the notion that … Freud was more concerned with discretion than he was with opposing immoral or illegal sexual practices’ (306).

Father-daughter incest is incredibly damaging for the victim, but are some feminists being too aggressive in their assertions? Has the topic of incest become a platform for a larger feminist socio-political statement? Janice Doane and Devon Hodges make an interesting observation that speaks to these questions. In their article, ‘It’s about Patriarchal Power: White Feminists Speak Out’ (2009), they ask, ‘individual transgression is at the heart of the understanding of incest as a sexual act, but who is the transgressor?’ (47). Doane and Hodges revisit feminists’ claims of ‘the despotism of patriarchal power’, citing Herman and Hirschman, for example, who refer to father-daughter incest as ‘“a paradigm of female sexual victimisation” within a radically unequal patriarchal society’ (qtd. in Doane and Hodges 47). Doane and Hodges argue in opposition to the feminists’ position that seems to attack all men in their ‘personal is political’ campaign. According to Doane and Hodges, feminists shift their attention from the familial incestuous experience to one in which daughters adopt an incestuous way of life by marrying men like their fathers with greater stature in age, height, wealth, and power. Doane and Hodges state, and perhaps rightly so, that in a home environment where the father functions as both provider and carer, ‘not all fathers have the same power; not all daughters are equally powerless; not all gendered power inequalities within the family result in incest’ (49). Doane and Hodges make a valuable assertion that complicates this delicate discussion of father-daughter incest.

Nevertheless, the feminist presence in the 1980s, in particular, was enormously influential in a positive way. To bust the incest taboo and awaken society to the devastating psychological impact of sexual abuse, feminists—were themselves inspired by acclaimed autobiographical novels like Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which address incest. The feminist movement brought works like these to the public’s attention, which inspired other women to come forward about their incestuous experiences. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was an explosion of autobiographical novels and memoirs that courageously dealt with the topic of incest, such as Sylvia Fraser’s My Father’s House (1987), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1993), among many others.

On the surface, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina is successful in its depiction of dramatising the bitter effects of impotency for women in the face of extreme adversity. In the opening pages, Allison presents an illiterate, drunken family fumbling through medical document procedures as they attempt to legitimise Ruth Anne’s arrival. After making a hash of her birth certificate and getting her mother, Anney, irate, Granny justifies the blunder: ‘The child is proof enough. An’t no stamp on her nobody can see’ (Allison 3). In defiance of the hospital’s need to uphold the name of the father, in the only way she knows how to emotionally support her children, Granny shuts out everybody that she does not care about. Although Granny’s attitude is one that appears admirable in that she doesn’t care what other people think, what becomes evident is the crippling impact of an inadequate matriarchal role model whose misplaced pride threatens to keep her family uneducated, drunk, and in the gutters of society. Generational ignorance is then perpetuated from the matriarch of the family that filters down through her children and spreads its fingers outward, touching and infecting the lives of those who come into contact with them. It is a prime example of how ignorance is a characteristic of illiterate, simple folk who have not much else to do but drink away their lives.

With all the strength she can muster, Anney outwardly fights against the stigma that has been attached to her. She openly hates to be referred to as white trash and ‘hated the memory of every day she’d ever spent bent over other people’s peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground’ (3). However, inwardly, Anney is impotent to change her circumstance and hands down the stigma to her daughter, Ruth Anne, who then feels the full weight of her mother’s impotence through her stepfather’s own feelings of impotence.

As Deborah M. Horvitz observes in Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in American Women’s Fiction (2000), ‘Ruth Anne, victimised by systematic sadism in the form of poverty, is physically and socially deteriorating from hunger, beatings, and humiliation because of her family’s “low” class status. Contextualised by and inextricably linked with these “external” traumas are “internal”, personal, and domestic ones: … Ruth Anne is raped and repeatedly beaten by her stepfather’ (39-40). Daddy Glen’s impotence is most poignantly demonstrated in the following scene: ‘Every time he couldn’t pay the bills, every time mama was too tired too tired to flatter or tease him out of his moods, Daddy Glen’s eyes would turn to me, and my blood would turn to ice’ (233). The final beating came soon after this statement when Ruth Anne does not hear Glen calling out to her. In a fit of rage for what he interpreted to be insolence, he drags Ruth Anne to the bathroom:

I stood, looking up at Daddy Glen, my back straight and my hands curled into fists at my sides. His features were rigid, his neck bright red. He kept one hand on me while he pulled his belt out of its loops with the other. ‘Don’t you say a word,’ he hissed at me. ‘Don’t you dare.’ / No, I thought. I won’t, not a scream, nothing this time…. He was raging, spitting, the blows hitting the wall as often as they hit me. Beyond the door, Mama was screaming. Daddy Glen was grunting. I hated him. I hated him. The belt went up and came down. Fire along my thighs. Pain…. I would not scream. I would not, would not, would not scream. (234)

Despite the courageous act of speaking about sexual abuse, not all reviews are favourable. In their essay, ‘The Incest Survivor Memoir’ (2009), Janice Doane and Devon Hodges note how, for many cynics of sexual abuse, middle-class incest survivor narratives seem too formulaic:

The author―a woman in distress over her contemporary dilemmas―suffers from flashbacks and bodily symptoms that she cannot explain. Operating like a detective, with the assistance of a supportive therapist, she begins to understand the forgotten origin of these symptoms―incest. Then, through a process of reconstruction, she discovers that her father was an evil perpetrator and she a silenced victim. (100)

This distrustful view includes a critique of Betsy Petersen’s memoir. In a New York Times review of incest narratives, Carol Tavris declares that ‘Betsy Petersen seems to have completely shut out “the world outside my skin,” and ultimately this is the problem and appeal of the survivor narrative. It places responsibility for the common problems in women’s lives on a single clear villain, someone safely in the woman’s past’ (qtd. in Doane and Hodges 101). Doane and Hodges, quite rightly, point out how the sexual perpetrator in incest survivor narratives is rarely perceived as just a villain. It is more likely that the victim has ambivalent feelings for her abuser, ‘by the daughter’s respect for and anger at her father—and her sense of guilt as well as her feelings of victimisation’ (102). However, these considerations are often lost in a fog of scepticism about the occurrence of the abuse itself, whereby the after effects of sexual trauma are often ignored.

In her article, ‘“Misery Loves Company”: Sexual Trauma, Psychoanalysis and the Market for Misery’ (2012), Victoria Bates refers to memoirs launched since feminist trauma theorists placed a stronger spotlight on sexual abuse, particularly father-daughter incest, as ‘misery memoirs’. One of Bates’s objectives is to draw readers’ attention to the potential for hoaxes in this genre. Similarly, in ‘Witness Or False Witness?: Metrics Of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, And The Ethic Of Verification In First-Person Testimony’ (2012), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson suggest that writing from even a first person perspective invites ‘suspicious reading’ after a slew of hoaxes were uncovered of writers claiming that their memoirs were authentic (590). There are always going to be people who will capitalise on other’s misfortunes. On the one hand, Bates’s use of the adjective ‘misery’ is negative and condescending. She is perpetuating a stigma against writing narratives of incest as a form of self-expression and, perhaps for many, as a tool for healing. On the other hand, she does make an important observation, which is that, oftentimes, the focus of the incestuous narrative is not on the incident of sexual trauma but on the figure of the ‘traumatised female’ and how sexual trauma fits into a larger life narrative (63). However, incest narratives have become a popular genre precisely because there is a ‘traumatised female’ behind the incestuous experience that appeals to an empathetic audience, which may include victims of sexual abuse trying to understand their own suffering. In the UK, memoirs of child sexual abuse account for 30% of non-fiction paperback sales (64) that were deemed by some as ‘pornography of suffering’ and by others as examples of inspiration and redemption (64) and a ‘triumph over adversity’ (65). Bates does not deny any of these claims. According to Nielsen BookScan in the US, which tracks up to 70% of book sales, just between the years 2004 and 2008, sales of memoirs increased by more than 400% (qtd. in Showalter, par. 4).

Narratives persist to meet market demand that also perpetuates a way of understanding child sexual abuse that may not mirror clinical viewpoints, particularly with regard to recovered memories (65). A case in point is Sylvia Fraser’s memoir, My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing (1987). Fraser describes her experiences of father-daughter incest in the formative years of her life. After suffering from amnesia for forty years, Fraser claims that she started to recover memories of her traumatic past from her toddler years to seventh grade through an analysis of her dreams and then hypnotherapy. For example, in the following dream, Fraser recalls how

I lie naked on my daddy’s bed, clinging to the covers. His sweat drips on me. I don’t like his wet-ums. His wet-ums splashes me. The scroll on my daddy’s headboard looks like my mother’s lips, scolding: ‘Don’t ever let me dirty dirty catch you!’ I try to count my pennies but my mind gets frightened and goes away like when the big boys at Beechnut playground push you too high on a swing and you scream to get down. I’m afraid to complain because Daddy won’t love me won’t love me love me. (10; emphasis in original)

The young Sylvia does attempt to stop her father from abusing her by threatening to tell her mother. To this outburst, her father displays his patriarchal authority by threatening Sylvia with consequences should she reveal his sexual assaults, including confiscation of her toys, sending her off to an orphanage, and gassing her most prized possession, her cat Smoky (11-12). Sylvia reaches a point when the acts of incest become too overwhelming:

When the conflict caused by my sexual relationship with my father became too acute to bear, I created a secret accomplice for my daddy by splitting my personality in two. Thus, somewhere around the age of seven, I acquired another self with memories and experiences separate from mine, whose existence was unknown to me. My loss of memory was retroactive. I did not remember my daddy ever having touched me sexually. (15)

What Sylvia may have experienced is dissociation as theorised by Janet. Chris Brewin and Bernice Andrews describe dissociation well in their article, ‘Recovered Memories of Trauma: Phenomenology and Cognitive Mechanisms’ (1998) as

an altered state of consciousness in which ordinary perceptual, cognitive or motor functioning is impaired…. Sometimes these states are accompanied by flashbacks … ranging from fragmentary sensorimotor experiences to the sensation of vividly reliving a whole past experience in the present. Other dissociative states involve what appears to be a separate personality. Although dissociation does not invariably involve amnesia, lack of memory for events experienced in different states is commonly reported. (951)
Fraser’s account of her experiences as a child is certainly vivid, considering the time lapse between her sexual experiences and the age of retrieval of traumatic memories. It is also emotionally driven by its use of language, which can create an emotional response of horror but unwavering support by her readers. Typically, in clinical material, vivid descriptions that appeal to readers’ sensibilities are missing. Despite the harrowing account of Fraser’s recollection, her memoir was written after her father’s death, after her mother’s death, and after her first husband’s death. There is only one person to corroborate her story, and that is her Aunt Estelle, who had allegedly engaged in illicit sibling incest with Fraser’s father. To what extent should readers believe Fraser’s account, especially since her father is not around to defend himself? This is certainly a complex and problematic area that does not come with any easy truths, particularly in the recollection of trauma.


Trauma and the ‘Unspeakable’ in Literary Studies

When a person experiences any traumatic event, the concept of the word memory becomes challenging, especially if that person has limited or no recollection of the original experience due to not being able to mentally process the event at the time. This is a concern that has been of interest in studies on memory by literary trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, Leigh Gilmore, and Dominick LaCapra, who propose that traumatic memories are repressed and come back to haunt subjects in, for example, intrusive thoughts. In The Limits of Autobiography (2001), Leigh Gilmore states, ‘the endlessness of … trauma is frequently represented as a haunting, in which the present feels stalked by a past that will not stay properly buried; or as dissociation, where the boundary between past and present, dead and living, is overwhelmed by a sense of their interpenetration, mutual incorporation, and simultaneity’ (92).

Similarly, in History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (2004), LaCapra writes,

The event in historical trauma is punctual and datable. It is situated in the past. The experience is not punctual and has an elusive aspect insofar as it relates to a past that has not passed away—a past that intrusively invades the present and may block or obviate possibilities in the future. So-called traumatic memory carries the experience into the present and future in that the events are compulsively relived or reexperienced as if there were no distance or difference between past and present. In traumatic memory the past is not simply history as over and done with. It lives on experientially and haunts or possesses the self or the community (in the case of shared traumatic events) and must be worked through in order for it to be remembered with some degree of conscious control and critical perspective that enables survival. (56)

These similar perspectives mark a new way of thinking about traumatic memories that derives from the work of, in part, Cathy Caruth, who explores how PTSD becomes manifest in a person’s life experience. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), Caruth identifies PTSD as a condition that shapes a survivor’s identity: ‘trauma … does not simply serve as a record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned’ (151). In other words, the traumatic event at the time of its occurrence has not yet been fully integrated into the person’s consciousness. Part of it is automatically relegated to the unconscious. Caruth believes that the part that has not yet been integrated into consciousness does return at a later date by way of intrusive thoughts and flashbacks (152-153). Caruth observes that, paradoxically, the return of intrusive memories amounts to an impossibility of the survivor actively being able to relate to the original traumatic event because there is a schism between the actual event that was not fully known and a return to a past event that can never be fully recovered precisely because it is in the past. As a result, one cannot rely on the accurate recall of the traumatic event (153).

In a shift from the speculative and emotional underpinnings that come with theories that attempt to fuse experiences and memories of sexual abuse, Caruth, in particular, looks at memory from an angle that straddles epistemological and ontological approaches. Caruth’s influences include Freud, whose text, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), takes center stage in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996). Her rationale for using Freud’s text is to illustrate the mechanisms of his theory on how ‘traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimension of suffering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness’ (91-92). I would like to delve more deeply into how Caruth addresses Freudian notions of traumatic repetition, which she brings into contemporary focus through the example Freud supplies in Torquato Tasso’s epic poem, Gerusalemme Liberata (1581).⁶⁹ Whilst my interpretation of Tasso’s poem and why Freud included it in his text deviate from Caruth’s, I find her thoughts on psychic wounds quite illuminating. In turn, this leads me to consider how her idea of a voice being released from a wound can be utilised in autobiographical fiction. In order to draw out my argument, I need to explicate Caruth’s own.

In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Caruth utilises Freud’s text, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to explore the dualistic presence of consciousness and unconsciousness or, as she understands it, the simultaneous presence and absence of knowing in the repetition of a traumatic experience that she illustrates through an interpretation of Freud’s retelling of Tasso’s poem. As the tale goes, Tancred unwittingly slays his beloved Clorinda with a sword in a duel when she is disguised in armour as an enemy knight. Tancred’s infliction of the fatal wound on his beloved Clorinda in the original instance is then repeated after her soul becomes imprisoned in a tree in a magic forest. Tancred is only aware that it is his Clorinda after she cries out. Caruth states that Tancred’s act is ‘not just the unconscious act of the infliction of the injury and its inadvertent and unwished-for repetition, but the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound’ (2). According to Caruth, it is Clorinda’s voice, directed at Tancred, which ‘bears witness to the past he has unwittingly repeated’ (3). Caruth insightfully suggests that ‘just as Tancred does not hear the voice of Clorinda until the second wounding, so trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature―the way it was precisely not known in the first instance―returns to haunt the survivor later on’ (4).

Caruth situates this haunting on an axis of life and death. She asks, ‘is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it? At the core of these stories … is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival’ (7). She concludes that ‘the figure of Tancred addressed by the speaking wound [i.e., Clorinda] constitutes … not only a parable of trauma and its uncanny repetition but, more generally, a parable of psychoanalytic theory itself as it listens to a voice that it cannot fully know but to which it nonetheless bears witness’ (9).

Caruth utilises Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) with his emphasis on repetition compulsion as a model for her investigation into the psychic haunting of dissociative memory tied in with motifs of death. In Caruth’s investigation into Freud’s fort-da game, for example, she suggests that it is not a game of departure and return but merely one of departure. She addresses the larger question of departure in historical experience in relation to Moses and the Jews’ exodus that incorporates Freud’s notions of repetition compulsion to illustrate that the ‘theory of trauma, as a historical experience of a survival exceeding the grasp of the one who survives, engages a notion of history exceeding individual bounds’ (66). In other words, departure is another term for leaving behind a traumatic experience that has not been fully grasped at the time but ensures survival in a future that is also not fully grasped either. Coupled with her interest in posttraumatic stress disorder, which is essentially a disorder of memory, Caruth revisualises concepts attached to repetition compulsion, which Freud had defined as ‘traumatic neurosis’ (BPP 31).

On the one hand, Caruth’s interpretation is very appealing, particularly in relation to the role of the psychoanalyst in the transference situation, who is only privy to a recollected experience that has not been fully grasped by his patient. Likewise, by employing this interpretative strategy in relation to White’s autobiographical fiction, her readers could also function as witnesses to a traumatic Oedipal event that cannot be fully grasped by White but which has survived in her texts. Like Clorinda in the symbolic form of a tree, or a psychoanalyst receiving the psychic blows his patient inflicts in the transference situation, wounds in which White’s own voice is paradoxically trapped and released, her protagonists, too, defy and bear witness to an unclaimed experience. On one symbolic level, this is most evident in White’s documentation of her psychosis, which also bears similarities to Tasso’s story. In my interpretation of Tasso’s story, what I find particularly striking is that Tancred’s repetition of the injurious act is carried out in a magic forest; it is in a phantasmagoric landscape that betrays the memory trace of the original act. Trauma can make its presence felt in this more manageable but no less imaginary landscape that is no less than analogous to the psychotic narrative. Similarly, in White’s autobiographical novel, Beyond the Glass, it could be argued that White’s voice can be located in her alter-egos’ dreams and hallucinations as wounds that cry out in a retelling of her traumatic encounters with psychosis.

On another, deeper, symbolic level, the parable of Tancred’s situation is somewhat problematic. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud writes, ‘The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him and what he cannot remember may be the essential part of it. Thus he acquires no sense of conviction of the correctness of the construction that has been communicated to him. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past’ (39; emphases in original). On the one hand, Caruth’s observations on unclaimed experience in light of Freud’s statement are eloquently explored to illustrate her own argument on memory. On the other hand, Freud’s thinking on sexuality and repression, as opposed to the repression of a traumatic memory that is not sexual, derives from his notion that the repetitive act does not bear resemblance to the original traumatic event because the traumatic event is illusory. It is illusory because of the emphasis Freud places on sexual trauma in his theories, even in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a point to which I shall now turn.