"Nothing Can Happen Nowhere": Trauma and Place in Elizabeth Bowen's Writing

Abstract

Following the spatial turn in trauma studies, this thesis combines trauma theory with a theory of place to study Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), and her unique way of representing trauma, namely, through depiction of the geographical places of traumatic experience. There is an inseparable relationship between trauma and place in Bowen's writing. Her emphasis on place stems from her ambivalence about her own hybrid Anglo-Irish identity, giving rise to a traumatic sense of dispossession and dislocation, and from constant movement as a result of historical events (Anglo-Irish War and two world wars) and personal trauma (the early deaths of her parents). Previous scholarship on place in Bowen's writing mainly centres on her "addiction to personification", observing that the houses and objects are personified and act like living characters while characters are objectified and inactive as if they are held hostages by the place (Bennett, Royle, and Watson 1994, Ellmann 2003, Wurtz 2010, Cammack 2017). More recently, some critics have sought to explore the historical and political meanings connoted through the representation of houses in Bowen's fiction (D'hoker 2012, Tivnan 2015, White 2016). Little attention has been paid to the relationship between trauma and place in Bowen's writing (Lytovka 2016).

This thesis explores how Bowen represents trauma through presenting politics and histories of place. I argue that the denied or repressed personal and historical experience is instead projected into place, so that places lose their homely character and become both unsettled and unsettling. In Bowen's writing, characters are traumatized not only by the historical experience of war, but also by the social forces of modernization which dramatically shatter the traditional familial ideology signified by the houses. Thus, they become numb and inactive. These forces take shape in places, as cities and landscapes that have been devastatingly transformed by the wars are dramatically changed by urbanization and industrialization. I identify three ways in which place functions to represent trauma in Bowen's writing. First, place is a shelter constructed and maintained by the characters to practice their policy of "not noticing" the traumatic history taking place around them. Secondly, place unveils the historical and social contexts of trauma, including the waning of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the force of modernization, and two world wars. Thirdly, place enacts the effect of trauma: it becomes a living character playing an active and even traumatizing role in reminding, haunting, and unsettling its dwellers. In this way, place becomes an agent of trauma, refusing to be under the psychological control of its inhabitants while forcibly reminding them of the forces behind their trauma. I suggest that Bowen's use of "personification", her "projection" of not only emotional states but even psychic agency onto places, houses and rooms, is not merely a "literary motif" but actually a kind of ontological claim about the role of place in psychological experience. Through the evocative description of place, Bowen presents trauma not merely as a psychological or pathological phenomenon, but as something with specific socio-political, cultural and historical implications. I show that bringing place into interaction with trauma provides a better understanding of the theme of homelessness, dislocation and the ambivalent sense of belonging in Bowen's fiction. Show more