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HISTORICIZING TRAUMA: THE GENEALOGY OF PSYCHIC SHOCK IN DANIEL DERONDA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2008

Jill L. Matus
Jill L. Matus*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

In the penultimate book ofDaniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth appears in a state of physical and mental shock after the drowning of her detested husband. Exposed to an increasingly popularized discourse of trauma, today's readers would have little trouble in identifying and labeling Gwendolen as a traumatized subject, suffering from a variety of typical symptoms in the aftermath of her terrible experience. She is fixated on the “dead face” of Grandcourt in the water, hallucinating it everywhere. Later, she complains that she “can't sleep much” and that “[t]hings repeat themselves in me so. They come back – they will all come back” (659; ch. 65). Disoriented in the present, she seems to return repeatedly to the past, the line between her interior world and the external world growing increasingly tenuous: “She unconsciously left intervals in her retrospect, not clearly distinguishing between what she said, and what she had only an inward vision of” (594; ch. 56). In her conversation with Daniel Deronda, she is described as being silent for a moment or two, “as if her memory had lost itself in a web where each mesh drew all the rest” (592; ch. 56). Deronda wonders whether she “was she seeing the whole event – her own acts included – through an exaggerating medium of excitement and horror.” (591; ch. 56).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 59 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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