“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past,” says the Walter Benjamin quotation from Illuminations that serves as the epigraph to this new collection of essays from editors Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards. Yet there is little nostalgia to be found among the fourteen chapters (in two main sections) and the afterword that follow. The subject is trauma—a wound or rupture that disorients—both early modern and modern, and the authors look back not to celebrate ancient glories reborn in the Renaissance or recovered in the Reformation, but to confront past catastrophes (both natural and human) in the hope of coming to terms with still-present cultural wounds. Though these writers do not entirely ignore past peace and prosperity, they tend on the whole to treat the Atlantic World throughout the “long seventeenth century” (1598–1715) primarily as a zone for circulating and sowing disaster.
And yet, it is the editors’ hope that these many blasts from the past will propel us forward now, in our own perilous cultural moment, to hear and appreciate anew the voices, past and present, of those who have experienced “visceral, disruptive, and continuing personal pain” (24), and in some measure purge that pain, as well as the persistent cultural patterns that inflict it. In short, the authors advocate a kind of chronological therapy through scholarship, revisiting some of the transatlantic West's primal scenes and, instead of screaming, attending very closely. The editors believe that the emerging interdisciplinarity of “trauma studies,” born out of the modern behavioral and social sciences, can now be applied to early modern literature and history in ways that not only will transform our study of past imaginations and events, but also inform these modern methods themselves.
What counts as trauma? The editors and authors carefully tread the line between treating the past as a radically different country and treating it as smoothly continuous with the present. They even are aware—though in my view insufficiently so—of contemporary trauma inflation, which blurs the boundaries between literal wounds, psychic pain, and perceived microaggressions. Most of the contributors are wary of projecting our own post-industrial sense of fragile vulnerability onto previous ages—ages before meat counters and funeral parlors—when even in peacetime most people witnessed and handled animal and human death regularly, without widespread mental collapse. And yet, these scholars rightly observe, any era that inflicted and suffered the epic concussions of colonial expansion, developing racialized slavery, and intractable religious warfare must have produced lasting traumatic repercussions.
After the editorial introduction, the chapters in the first half of the collection, “Reframing Modern Trauma,” both use and problematize modern trauma theory as an interpretative framework for understanding a chronological succession of instances: ecological disaster in sixteenth-century France, rape trauma in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, trauma in women's seventeenth-century English conversion writing, ciphered messages in wartime, maimed soldiers’ petitions, a master's guilty sympathy for a melancholy slave, and the “chronic loss” of a biracial woman on the colonial frontier. The collection's second half, “Recognizing Early Modern Trauma,” applies trauma theory to “decipher” certain difficult texts and events: narratives of the dispossessed Irish, stories of “loyal slaves,” sexual failure in Behn's “The Disappointment” and Oroonoko, the origins of Jacobitism in the Glorious Revolution, retellings of Orestes’s matricide, PTSD in Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, and tableaux vivants in Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. All of the entries bring bright specificity to their claims, the chapters on ciphering and Defoe particularly so.
Significantly, an afterword by Melinda Rabb argues that the traumas of the “long seventeenth century” contribute to that flourishing eighteenth-century genre, satire; for it took the acidic genius of Swift to apply the ancient trauma theories of Deuteronomy and Job to events of the recent past, speaking into the unspeakable. Perhaps the editors have another collection in mind, moving beyond irony to affirmation and hope.
