Discerning the Self: Reviewing Karen DeMeester's "Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway"

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Modern & Postmodern Fictions
Alice Wei
Prof. Cecilia Liu


Discerning the Self: Reviewing Karen DeMeester’s “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway”

One of the essential motifs in Mrs. Dalloway is discerning the subjectivity in the process of initiation. Both of the leading characters—Clarissa and Septimus—being the center in the novel quest for self-recognition and the essence of life in different ways. In the approach of psychoanalysis, Septimus as the inner self of Clarissa reminds her painful memory embedded in her mind. In the aspect of social institution, Septimus and Clarissa encounter the formidable rule that one’s subjectivity is constructed by society. In light of knowing the self, this review attempts to illuminate the neglect of DeMeester’s discourse on the relation of trauma and recovery entrapped in the psychoanalysis in his “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.”


Reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in the approach of psychoanalysis, DeMeester in his essay makes Woolf’s narrative form identical to the psychological effects of trauma and gives paradoxical discourse of recovery based on trauma. He focuses the mentalities of human beings when they encounter a catastrophe. With modern fiction as fiction of trauma is concerned, DeMeester connects the style of Woolf’s narrative in her novels and the psychological phase of men struggling from trauma. The fragmentation of consciousness of trauma victims coherent to Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narrative form that reveals life is disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight of mankind is hidden under the consciousness. This kind of unstable, flickering experience mirrors the chronological and spatial confusion of trauma victims. In perception of time, they always mingle the past and future with the present. Their closed system of subjective consciousness undoubtedly is similar to the perception of space made in Woolf’s novels.

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DeMeester, in addition, takes Clarissa and Septimus as examples to investigate the relation of trauma and recovery. He considers a paradoxical thinking that the psychological effects of trauma come to be the way of recovery. Clarissa and Septimus as trauma victims are repressed by past memories and society. The past memory to Septimus becomes the force of repression which haunts him and hampers him to communicate with others. As a trauma victim, Septimus does not get recovery from the loss in the battlefield due to his lack of identity in this society. Clarissa is not a trauma victim but a ...

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