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Looking closely at both case histories of shell shock and Modernist
novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, Wyatt
Bonikowski shows how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and
the symptoms of war trauma were transformed by the literary
imagination. Situating his study with respect to Freud's concept of
the death drive, Bonikowski reads the repetitive symptoms of
shell-shocked soldiers as a resistance to representation and
narrative. In making this resistance part of their narratives,
Ford, West, and Woolf broaden our understanding of the traumatic
effects of war, exploring the possibility of a connection between
the trauma of war and the trauma of sexuality. Parade's End, The
Return of the Soldier, and Mrs. Dalloway are all structured around
the relationship between the soldier who returns from war and the
women who receive him, but these novels offer no prospect for the
healing effects of the union between men and women. Instead, the
novels underscore the divisions within the home and the self,
drawing on the traumatic effects of shell shock to explore the link
between the public events of history and the intimate traumas of
the relations between self and other.
Looking closely at both case histories of shell shock and Modernist
novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, Wyatt
Bonikowski shows how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and
the symptoms of war trauma were transformed by the literary
imagination. Situating his study with respect to Freud's concept of
the death drive, Bonikowski reads the repetitive symptoms of
shell-shocked soldiers as a resistance to representation and
narrative. In making this resistance part of their narratives,
Ford, West, and Woolf broaden our understanding of the traumatic
effects of war, exploring the possibility of a connection between
the trauma of war and the trauma of sexuality. Parade's End, The
Return of the Soldier, and Mrs. Dalloway are all structured around
the relationship between the soldier who returns from war and the
women who receive him, but these novels offer no prospect for the
healing effects of the union between men and women. Instead, the
novels underscore the divisions within the home and the self,
drawing on the traumatic effects of shell shock to explore the link
between the public events of history and the intimate traumas of
the relations between self and other.
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