Authenticity and art in trauma narratives of World War I

Modernism - Modernity

Volumn 9, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 91-107

  Higonnet, Margaret R ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT   (United States)

^b HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36248989472     PISSN: 10716068     EISSN: 10806601     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2002.0009     Document Type: Review

References (79)

1. Nicholas Abraham, "Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud's Metapsychology," trans. Nicholas Rand, Critical Inquiry 13 (Winter 1987): 287-92. "What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others ... the burial of an unspeakable fact within the loved one" (288, emphasis in original)
2. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 84
3. Most notably, Modris Eksteins has argued, in Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), that wartime destructiveness can be linked to the birth of an abstract aesthetic and the political modernism of Nazi culture
4. Margaret Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (New York: Berg, 2000), 5
5. See, for example, Annette Becker, ed., Journaux de combattants et de civils de la France du Nord dans la Grande Guerre (Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1998)
6. Helen Zenna Smith, Not So Quiet ... Stepdaughters of War, ed. Jane Marcus (1930; New York: Feminist Press, 1989)
7. Margaret R. Higonnet, ed. Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001)
8. Dori Laub, "Bearing Witness," in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57; hereafter abbreviated TCW
9. Eric Leed's "Fateful Memories: Industrialized War and Traumatic Neuroses," George Mosse's "Shell-shock as a Social Disease," and Jay Winter's "Shell-Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War" may be found in Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000); hereafter abbreviated JCH
10. Elaine Showalter made this claim in a talk presented at "The Comparative History of Shell-Shock" conference in Pérenne, July 1998: "The particular symptoms of war neurosis are drawn from a repertoire of illness and symptoms which is culturally shaped."
11. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)
12. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990)
13. and The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Allen Lane, 1997)
14. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," 84
15. Proceedings of a 1998 conference on shell shock were selectively published (with variants) in "Choc traumatique et histoire culturelle," a special issue of 14-18, 3 (2000)
16. and in JCH 35, no. 1 (2000)
17. Mosse, "Shell-shock as a Social Disease": 101-8
18. see analogous findings by Doris Kaufmann, "Science as Cultural Practice: Psychiatry in the First World War and Weimar Germany," JCH 34, no. 1 (1999): 125-55
19. also see Paul Lerner's "Psychiatry and Casualties of War in Germany, 1914-18," and Joanna Bourke's "Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of 'Shell-shocked' Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914-39," in JCH 35, no. 1 (2000)
20. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady (New York: Random House, 1985), 171; hereafter abbreviated FM
21. Also see Sandra M. Gilbert, "Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War," in Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989)
22. and Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); hereafter abbreviated DM
23. Denis Winter, Death's Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Allen Lane, 1978), 137
24. See, for example, Dr. Charles S. Myers, Shell Shock in France 1914-18, Based on a War Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 41
25. and W. H. R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-neuroses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 216-7
26. Robert Gaupp, "Hysterie und Kriegsdienst," Münchener Medizinische Wochenzeitschrift (1915): 361
27. cited by Kaufmann, "Science as Cultural Practice": 129
28. Also see G. Elliot Smith and T. H. Pear, Shell Shock and Its Lesson (London: Longman Green, 1919), 2
29. Annette Becker studies the depression experienced by prisoners of war in Oubliés de la Grande Guerre, Humanitaire et culture de guerre, populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris: Noesis, 1998)
30. Trudi Tate, Modernism, History, and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 5, 19; hereafter abbreviated MH. These examples of transferred haunting might better be considered under Abraham's concept of the ventriloquistic "phantom," in "Notes on the Phantom," 289-90. Tate rejects a focus limited to women's writing, in reaction to previous studies of men alone
31. Qtd. in Winter, Death's Men, 133
32. Norman Fenton, Shell Shock and Its Aftermath (Saint Louis, Mo.: Mosby, 1926), 150; hereafter abbreviated SSA
33. Maurice Dide, Les émotions et la guerre: réactions des individus et des collectivités dans le conflit moderne (Paris: Alcan, 1918), 24
34. also see Jean Lépine, Troubles mentaux de guerre (Paris: Masson 1917)
35. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious, 215-6
36. See Jay Winter, "Shell Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War," 9-10
37. Léonie Godfrey Souvenirs d'ambulance et de captivité (Noyon à Holzminden) (Paris: l'éclair, 1917), 5. Emphases in original; my ellipsis
38. Ellen N. La Motte, The Backwash of War (New York: Putnam, 1916)
39. M. Eydoux-Démians, In a French Hospital: Notes of a Nurse (London: Fisher Unwin, 1915), 127
40. Sita Meyer Camperio, Luci ed hombre di eroi (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1932), 8. Cited by Beth Tarini in "Mother of 'La Patria': The Role of the Corpo delle Infermiere Volontiere Italiana della Croce Rossa during the First World War" (Harvard University)
41. Camperio, Luci, 9. Cited by Tarini
42. Tarini, "Mother of 'La Patria'."
43. Lady Kennard, A Roumanian Diary, 1915, 1916, 1917 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1918), 56-9; hereafter abbreviated RD. My ellipsis
44. M. Boulaye, Croix et cocarde (Paris: Plon, 1919), 335
45. Elfriede Schulz, in Frontschwestern: Ein deutsches Ehrenbuch, ed. Elfriede von Pflug-Harttung, Deutsche Tat im Weltkrieg, 1914/1918, vol. 21 (Berlin: Bernard & Graefe, 1936), 117, 111
46. Maria Naepflin, Fortgerungen, durchgedrungen bis zum Kleinod hin (Meiningen: Loeptien Komm., 1922), 113-5
47. A. L. Walker, "Experiences at a Base Hospital," The Women at Work Collection, B. R. C. reel 25, 1/12, Imperial War Museum, London, microfilm. My ellipsis
48. Anna M. Cameron, letter of 26 August 1915, The Women at Work Collection, B. R. C. reel 25, 4/3
49. Mary Britnieva, One Woman's Story (New York: Alfred King, 1934), 35
50. Cameron, letter of 19 November 1915, The Women at Work Collection, B. R. C. reel 25, 4/10
51. Lucia Garelli, A noi donne ... (per il fronte interno) (Milan: Capitan Fracassa, 1917), 88
52. Madeleine Clemenceau Jacquemaire, Les hommes de bonne volonté (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1919), 265-6
53. Pierre La Mazière, L'H. C. F., L'hôpital chirurgical flottant, Dardanelles - Moudros - Athènes - Salonique (Paris: 1919), 70
54. Lydiia Zakharova, "Diary of a Red Cross Sister in the Front Lines," trans. Cynthia Simmons, in Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (New York: Penguin Plume, 1999), 185; hereafter abbreviated "DRC."
55. Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, "The Man Whose Heart They Could See," trans. Dayana Stetco, in Higonnet, Lines of Fire, 359
56. Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 1929, 1030
57. Hemingway's comment on Willa Cather is cited in Sharon O'Brien, "Combat Envy and Survivor Guilt: Willa Cather's 'Manly Battle Yarn,'" in Arms and the Woman: Gender and Literary Representation, ed. Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 186
58. Saturday Review of Literature 26 July 1930, 7
59. See Higonnet, "Introduction," in Nurses at the Front, xxxiv
60. and "Telling Trauma: Women and World War I," in Savoirs et littérature, ed. Jean Bessiere (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2001). Forthcoming
61. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 7
62. Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 329
63. Hynes, The Soldiers' Tale, xii
64. Hynes, A War Imagined, 353, 158
65. Robert Graves, But It Still Goes On (New York: J. Cape and H. Smith, 1931), 33
66. Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 97
67. See the discussion of "deteriorated" words in Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), 61-2
68. Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), 187
69. Annette Becker, "The Avant-garde, Madness and the Great War," JCH 35, no. 1 (2000): 71. As Becker notes, other Surrealists such as Louis Aragon were also orderlies or doctors; the German expressionist painter Max Beckmann, an orderly on the western front, collapsed under the strain of the war in 1917
70. André Breton, Entretiens 1913-1952 (1952; Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 37
71. Jane Marcus, "Afterword: The Nurse's Text: Acting Out an Anaesthetic Aesthetic," in Irene Rathbone, We That Were Young (New York: Feminist Press, 1989), 476
72. Jane Marcus, "Afterword: Corpus / Corps / Corpse: Writing the Body In/At War," in Evadne Price, Not So Quiet, 260-1; hereafter abbreviated "CCC."
73. Claire Tylee, The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914-64 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990), 194
74. Fenton, Shell Shock, 156. Allen J. Christophers argues plausibly that diagnoses of "soldier's heart," or "hyperaesthesia of the chest," spread where doctors took the syndrome seriously. See "The Epidemic of Heart Disease amongst British Soldiers," War and Society 15, no. 1 (1997): 70-1
75. See Bourke, "Effeminacy": 63
76. Kaufmann, "Science as a Cultural Practice," 125-55
77. Lerner, "Psychiatry and Casualties of War": 26
78. and Sophie Delaporte, "Le discours médical sur les blessures et les maladies pendant le premier conflit mondial" (Ph.D. diss., Université de Picardie Jules Verne, 1998)
79. Felman and Laub, Testimony, xiii. Note that one of Felman's prime examples is the fictional narrator of Camus's Plague, a doctor who bears witness to the disaster