Introduction
Following traumatic events in history, literary texts can help depict the nature of human experience, memory, and survival in a powerful way. This essay explores how two important novels – The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, confront the issue of trauma through trauma theory. In the work of writers like Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, trauma theory describes how literature can depict the disjuncture and unspeakability of traumatic experience (Caruth 4; LaCapra 1-2). In particular, this paper will examine how Cunningham’s postmodern work and its dialogue with Woolf’s modernist predecessor portray the intricate relationship between individual and collective trauma. The Hours follows the three women, Clarissa Vaughan, Laura Brown, and, most interestingly, Virginia Woolf, whose lives are propelled by their understanding of loss, mental illness, and societal roles. Responding to (and indeed, conversing with) Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Cunningham’s novel explores the intricate relationship his characters hold with the pressures of performativity, the destructibility of the self, and the possibility of healing in the face of trauma. Through the lens of trauma-informed reading, this paper argues that Cunningham and Woolf offer a complex understanding of how trauma can restrain and empower the human experience.
Trauma, Performance, and the Fragile Self in The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway
Another common thread in The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway is the pressure to act and maintain ‘the outrageous mask’ of propriety that Woolf refers to. This anxiety and pressure to perform, as the scholar Lamszus points out, ‘haunts’ Cunningham’s three protagonists, ‘who all have to cope with the discrepancy between the public and the private self’ (195); it is also what Woolf does in Mrs. Dalloway, as she guides her protagonist – the upper-class housewife Clarissa Dalloway through the ‘London that daily reappeared; all streets, all cabs’ of her present life, grappling with her ongoing social status while also trying to reconcile it to the psychological toll and trauma of her past.
For the characters in these novels, the urge to act becomes a response to the overwhelming nature of their traumatic experiences. As Dominick LaCapra puts it in his essay ‘Becoming Unconscious’ (2001), trauma is often ‘associated with an ${\color{black} ‘a disruption of identity and the ${\color{black} experience of the self’}}$ (1-2). In both Cunningham and Woolf, characters battered by trauma seem compelled to create an identity that feels coherent and legible to the world in order to cope with the trauma-induced disintegration of the self. Clarissa Vaughan’s long preparations for her party in The Hours reflect her need to maintain a façade of order and normality, even as she grapples with losing her lover, Richard. In Mrs. Dalloway, the titular character’s elaborate efforts to get ready for her party mirror her project of repression in which she tries to banish her past self with its traumatic romance and unstable friend, Septimus Warren Smith.
However, in this regard, the imperative to perform is a means to an end for them. By directing all their energies toward perpetuating a particular facade, they can disguise and cover up complex forms of psychic fragmentation for a time. However, in the process, they also create the conditions of alienation and psychic disconnection that feed into this separation from the self. As the scholar Karen DeMeester has shown, in her close reading of Mrs Dalloway, it is the public-facing ‘Clarissa’ who becomes increasingly aware of the ‘reality of this split between her public and private selves .’Woolf’s protagonist concludes that she has ‘never governed the faintest fiber of her being. Despite her outward composure, her Pandora’s box of inner sensations remained firmly shut’ [650]. It is the same despair we find in Cunningham’s Clarissa Vaughan, who, despite her efforts to ‘show,’ is ultimately haunted by a fear of ‘not feeling entirely in control of her life.
The ultimately tenuous nature of the self is also illustrated by the characters’ experiences of mental illness. In both novels, mental health issues are acutely felt and also connected to the central trauma of the protagonist’s past. Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway is suffering from shell shock and suicidal tendencies after his service in the war and is persecuted by an unreliable internal voice that repeatedly reproaches him for being a coward. Meanwhile, Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife in The Hours, is suffering from depression and feels cut adrift from her life and family. These depictions of mental illness arising from trauma serve to highlight the tenuousness of the self and demonstrate the characters’ inability to align their ideal public image with their private selves fully.
Moreover, like the men of her war generation, Clarissa (especially when Woolf is attempting to portray her life through the visual medium of painted pictures) is stifled by the pressures to perform in conformity with expectations of class, gender, and the social and marital circle in which she finds herself. Similarly, although to a lesser extent in Woolf’s novel, Laura Brown in The Hours is crushed by her domestic role and the pressures of her era (1950s America) on women to fit into stultifying social roles that might be familiar but are stressful and inhibit fuller expression. Both novels reveal characters whose capacity to recover has been pre-emptively damaged or undermined by the culture in which they are enmeshed. Thus, social forces and gender expectations serve to deepen the power of the trauma while also limiting a character’s capacity to be up to the task of fully expressing a sense of self.
Cunningham’s novel, in particular, shows how this pressure to perform can travel from generation to generation and between cultures. Clarissa Vaughan’s desire to maintain a facade of respectability in the face of her private grief mirrors Clarissa Dalloway’s attempts to maintain decorum and a sense of normalcy. And then there is Virginia Woolf, herself as sensitive and fragile as Clarissa Dalloway, also mentally ill, overwhelmed by horror about the past, dogged by the same ghosts that haunt Clarissa Jackson. Both the ghosts and the novel coursed through the promiscuous blood of her body, infecting entire generations of women who came after her.
Trauma, Collective Memory, and the Possibility of Resilience
The novels also traverse the complex circuitry of trauma as it impacts an individual life and how it reverberates over generations and into collective memory. Woolf situates her Blitz-era novel against the backdrop of the post-Great War trauma for British society. At the same time, Cunningham loops together the fates of three women imbricated with the legacy of Woolf’s novel.
The interaction between individual and collective trauma is most apparent in Mrs Dalloway’s shell-shocked veteran, Septimus Warren Smith. In addition to representing individual trauma, Septimus dramatizes the ‘collective trauma’ of the First World War experienced by soldiers and civilians alike. His fractured, stream-of-consciousness narration, which juxtaposes lucid and disorienting interjections, captures the fragmentation of identity and memory that can characterize collective trauma or a collective response to mass trauma, which becomes broadcast into many individuals’ consciousness. Septimus’s story and the act of suicide that closes his narrative comment on the social burden of trauma and the resources available to traumatized individuals.
It is a topic that permeates The Hours’ discussion of how the distance between an event that happened in the past and the other life that it impacts via trauma. Cunningham’s novel carefully stitches together the experiences of three women – Clarissa Vaughan, Laura Brown, and Virginia Woolf – whose lives collided and are connected through Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway by reflecting on that work and by imagining Virginia Woolf’s life in relationship to Mrs Dalloway. Woolf’s narrative becomes a living extension of the trauma of her life. It provides an alternative framework for the relationship between E M Forster and her husband while also gesturing towards the trauma that underlies Clarissa Vaughan’s experience in the 1950s and Laura Brown’s experience in 1999. Just as the tragedy of Septima Warburg looms over Woolf’s novel, Mrs Dalloway, and the suicide of Clarissa Vaughan in The Hours, all of these women are eventually linked through the experience of reading. The references to Woolf’s life and work are simultaneous. Woolf exists in our present, which Mrs Dalloway’s narrative shapes, echoes, and ultimately reshapes through these women’s relationship with her words. Real-life events continue to gather resonance, just as fiction reshapes the traces and expectations of lived experience.
In fact, for all of their persistent, ambivalent attention to the trauma they evoke, The Hours and Mrs Dalloway neither pity nor condemn the possibility of post-traumatic growth and resilience. While they describe trauma as searing and catastrophic, the truths of human flourishing are to be found in the stories Clarissa tells and the parties she gives, not to mention the various ways in which her connections to others (whether it is her brilliance, her behavioral patterns or the shared love of Purcell) provide her with relief, joy, and meaning, maybe those of human life even in the rawest conditions of its intensity. Similarly, the Hours characters’ capacity to live in memory, to connect with others in their pain and grief, to create again in their trauma-tangled lives, and to see themselves in the legacy of a person who shared that ordeal reveals the potential for extraordinary resilience they might pursue in their literature, their lives and their loves.
In particular, the work of trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra makes clear how these literary articulations of trauma relate to more enormous theoretical ideas. Caruth’s idea of ‘unclaimed experience,’ i.e., her claim that trauma is unreconcilable and incapable of being assimilated, finds uncanny expression in the fractured, disjointed narratives of The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway (Caruth 4); LaCapra’s insistence on the need to ‘work through’ versus ‘act out’ the traumatic event is echoed in the characters’ piecemeal, tentative movements towards resilience and self-acceptance. (In LaCapra’s words, ‘working through consists in acts of remembering, mourning, and the development of an embodied ethical sense of responsibility toward oneself and others,’ and not in ‘acting out.’)
Caruth’s conceptualization of trauma as an ‘unclaimed experience’ also speaks to the dissolution of the self in the two works and the characters’ struggles to articulate their traumatic pasts. Both novels unfold in the stream-of-consciousness style; their episodic chronology and shifting voices and perspectives echo trauma’s slippery, fragmenting shock. Just as Septimus Warren Smith’s fractured subjectivity in Mrs. Dalloway dramatizes how the inconceivable horrors of war have split his sense of self and fractured his capacity to describe his experiences, the alternating narratives of Clarissa Vaughan, Laura Brown, and Virginia Woolf in The Hours suggest how language itself is ill-equipped to articulate the trauma of their histories.
Nonetheless, both Woolf and Cunningham imply the possibility of resilience and ‘working through’ trauma, as LaCapra identifies it. However embedded in artificial communication patterns, Clarissa Dalloway’s party will serve as a vehicle for connection, empathy, and the renewal of living associations. The characters in The Hours, through ‘relation’ to one another and their respective extensions of creativity and engagement with Woolf’s legacy (perhaps most powerfully, the survival of Mrs Dalloway itself), will manifest purpose within the aftermath of the disordering of their daily lives. These moments of making do, tentative perhaps, frail, and fragile, counterpoint the sense of fracture and loss that both works cycle relentlessly.
Nevertheless, these insights are given broader depth by the elaboration of other theorists working on trauma, such as the psychiatrists Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, whose work on the ‘intrusive past’ and how traumatic memories inform the project of the self (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 425-454) begin to account for the characters’ struggles with their sense of self in terms of dissonance, fragmentation, and a lack of integrative capacity. The Hour is a novel that repeatedly re-examines its characters as they are racked by intrusive thoughts about the past that linger in ways that resist integration. However, a similar oscillation exists in Mrs Dalloway.
Conclusion
To conclude, this trauma-theory-informed reading of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway reveals the subtleties of literary engagement with traumatic experience. Both novels explore the workings of performativity in lives, the precariousness of the self, and the repetitions of trauma – individual and collective – while also opening up for their characters, in small ways, elements of resilience via moments of connectedness and meaning-making as the traumatic disruption and disorientation take hold. Thinking through these two canonical works of literature with a trauma lens, this paper has shown how a trauma-informed reading can hold unique, illuminating insights. When The Hours and Mrs Dalloway interact with the theories of trauma studies, the works offer valuable perspectives about the human condition, the role of art and storytelling, and how we can harness our resilience in the face of trauma. Viewing these two novels through the lens of trauma theory thus marked a kind of homecoming for the showcase of literature’s ability to engage with what could be the most challenging experiences of our lives, manifested in the novels’ estranging syntax, the protagonists’ issues with performativity and identity, and the protagonists’ linkages between individual and communal trauma. However, what of this look forward, Cunningham’s and Woolf’s concern with the possibility of resilience and post-traumatic growth? Trauma theory has been criticized precisely for foreclosing on this possibility with its focus on repetition, and as such, offers a particularly apt lens through which to interpret the novels that deal with historical wounds, even if these novels point to the possibility of a meaningful human response in the face of trauma. After all, as David Levithan and Martha Southgate – themselves authors of trauma novels – have affirmed in interviews with Levine, literature shaping his theory of repetition is meant to remain transformative. As such, this paper has hoped to show that a trauma-informed approach to literary criticism not only results in a sensitive reading of these writers’ motives, methods, and subjects but also contributes a more facilitative, whole-health view of how trauma, memory and the human spirit emerge in their work: in other words, deeper insights are possible when there is a meaningful dialogue between the theoretical armory of trauma studies and the lived embodiment of literary and artistic works.
Works Cited
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. Picador, 1998.
DeMeester, Karen. “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 44 no. 3, 1998, p. 649–673. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.1998.0062.
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing history, writing trauma. JHU Press, 2014. https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=VeQRBAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=LaCapra,+Dominick.+Writing+History,+Writing+Trauma.+Johns+Hopkins+UP,+2001.&ots=kiMFyFDSaj&sig=DmNvAtGjxtJk5bA7GF4OSlgehKk&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=LaCapra%2C%20Dominick.%20Writing%20History%2C%20Writing%20Trauma.%20Johns%20Hopkins%20UP%2C%202001.&f=false
Lamszus, E. “Artistic Anxiety and the Pressure to Perform in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.” Humanities Bulletin, vol. 2, no. 2, Nov. 2019, pp. 194–06, https://journals.lapub.co.uk/index.php/HB/article/view/1254.
Van der Kolk, B. A., and Onno van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” American Imago, vol. 48, no. 4, 1991, pp. 425–54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26303922. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt, 1981.
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