Modernist and Postmodernist’s Appropriation of Traumatic Memory for Spiritual Liberation in Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” and Angela Carter’s “Nights at the Circus”

Modernist and Postmodernist’s Appropriation of Traumatic Memory for Spiritual Liberation in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

Both modernist and postmodernist writers recognize the “human memory” as a crucial, cognitive phenomena in shaping one’s character and life.  Because the human mind traverses time and history by means of memory – connecting past, present, and future into a sequential continuity – one’s dysfunctional/distorted memory can disrupt one’s historicity and psychological soundness.  Both Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (the modern text) and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (the postmodern text) explore characters whose memories become dysfunctional due to traumatic past experiences.  For instance, in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus’s uncontrollable mental replay of his horrid war experience leads to his ultimate corporeal demise.  On the other hand, in Nights at the Circus, Mignon’s atypical, refractive short-term memory due to severe traumatic experience acts as a buffer that enables her to reconstruct her previously debased identity into an honorable one.  Thus, due to debilitating war memory, if Septimus chooses suicide to liberate his spirit from the oppressive modern world, Mignon from the postmodern world gains her spiritual redemption by not only defying the very source of her painful memory (the patriarchal abuse and exploitation of her sexuality), but also by overtly espousing lesbianism.

Woolf depicts Septimus as a victim of modern-warfare indoctrinations.  Lamont, in her essay “Moving Tropes: New Modernist travels with Virginia Woolf,” informs that “Mrs. Dalloway is set in London, in 1923, a time of incredible flux and change for the city, brought about largely by the newly ended First World War” (Lamont 165).  Lamont’s turbulent depiction of postwar London, in part, can be microcosmically represented by one man of this city, Septimus, who suffers posttraumatic war syndrome.  Before the war, Septimus was an aspiring poet with an astute mental faculty.  He was also patriotic and “was one of the first to volunteer” as a soldier to fight for his country (Woolf 86).  However, he returns home disillusioned and labeled as a lunatic.  Still, irrespective of how society defines him, Septimus is not exactly insane.  He is what Woolf would diagnose as a victim of modernist’s misleading, militant ideology – a soldier who had witnessed human evil firsthand on the battlefield, and thus become disoriented and mistrustful of the human world. 

Whereas Septimus suffers from cognitive breakdown due to his convoluted war memories, Mignon, on the other hand, in her Carter-created postmodern world, is protected by her deflective short-term memory, minimizing the effects of patriarchal abuse in her life.  Like Septimus, who is deserted by the society as a lunatic, Mignon, an orphan in a patriarchal society, is marginalized and victimized because of her sex and class. She, for example, encounters numerous and potentially debilitating experiences, all instigated by the men in her life: The murder of her mother by her father and her father’s accidental death while trying to cover up his crime; her ensuing orphaned, homeless life as a street thief; an unanticipated separation with her younger sister who “she never s[ees]…again” (131); habitual beatings from her husband who had once thrown her out “half-naked on to the Russian winter streets” (127); and the physical and mental exploitations by her spiritualist employer and the male customers at the bar she worked, to bring up a few.  However, Mignon’s memory is a “peculiar and selective organ,” which represses traumatic events (144).  In other words, her memory of the tragic past, unlike Septimus, does not involuntarily replay the horror on its own.  In fact, it is so well kept that her “smile contain[s] her entire history and [is] scarcely to be borne” (144, emphasis added).  Mignon’s memory actively constricts her past tragedy into “an exceedingly short memory, which alone save[s] her from desolation” (141).   

If Mignon is physically pounded by the men in her life, Septimus is mentally enthralled by his participation in the patriarchal warfare.  As a war veteran, Septimus’s memory, unlike Mignon’s, involuntarily perpetuates in the past.  His mind revisits and lingers in a time of war, where he hears and sees Evans (his inseparable companion) and himself still in combat.  In Septimus’s delusional mind, “The word ‘time’ split its husk” and becomes “an immortal ode to Time!  He s[ings].  Evans answer[s] from behind the tree…There they wait…till the War [i]s over, and now the dead, now Evans himself…A man in grey [i]s actually walking towards [hi]m.  It [i]s Evans”(70).  His memory is indiscriminate to time and space, transfixed in one moment of his friend’s death for which he blames himself.  His future thus becomes forever eclipsed by his mental inability to completely return from the past (from the war) to the present. 

While Septimus’s unresolved memory that is transfixed in the past is both anachronistic and disruptive to his present existence, Mignon’s co-mingling of the past and present through theatrical staging as the dead for the spiritualist employer positively reconstructs the site of the past tragic memory.  For instance, when Mignon is “impersonat[ing] the dead” for the spiritualist and his clients, she is forced to reckon the photograph of herself in the act as a resembling image of her dead mother (138).  Upon seeing the photograph, Mignon’s usually repressed subconscious memory surfaces; “she [is] troubled.  For the face that sw[ims] out of the acid emerge[s] to her out of her memory in the same way. ‘Mother…’” (138, emphasis added).  Nonetheless, unlike Septimus, Mignon refuses to dwell in the past.  She laughs it off, as if it is a game, “How she giggle[s]!  It ha[s] never been anything more than a game to her” (139).  Because Mignon’s refractive mind refuses to introspect and analyze deeply like Septimus’s, each repetitive death-scene she plays – where her mind must re-associate the death of her mother (the past) – conversely produces a positive, psychological effect; it shatters her conscious/unconscious memory, thereby enabling an implantation of a new positive reality.  For example, to Mignon’s deflective mental faculty, “acting,” which is a “pretense of reality,” histrionically and psychologically re-presents and replaces the horrific reality of the past as a “pretense” – a mere mental fabrication.  Thus, symbolically and literally, Mignon’s dramaturgical revisitations of the past not only blur the very origin of her traumatic past, but more significantly, mitigate and reconstruct the very source of the harmful past memory.       

Unlike Mignon, who actively mitigates her past hurtful memories through creative means, Septimus internalizes the patriarchal tyranny imposed by his erroneous, un-empathetic doctors; he chooses suicide to sever himself from the modern world.  Septimus is confounded by Dr. Homes and Bradshaw’s scientific arrogance and misdiagnosis of his postwar symptoms.  Septimus disrespectfully epithets the doctors as “Like that sort of thing” (149), because, to him, they are the epitome of evil in “human nature” (140).  They represent the modern world that misappropriates divine omnipotence through science, eviscerating the mortal vitality of someone like Septimus.  “Holmes is on us,” Septimus would say, for “Dr. Holmes…stands for something horrible to him. ‘Human nature,’ he call[s] him” (140).  Septimus also has mental visions; he sees that “he [is] drowned” by forces unknown (140).  Septimus decides to materialize this vision of drowning (his suicide), because he believes that death is better than surrendering his soul to the modern cold-hearted scientists, who plot to lock him up in a mental institute.  When Dr. Holmes arrives, Septimus quickly weighs the two options of life or death for the last time, “He d[oes] not want to die.  Life [i]s good.  The sun hot…[but] what d[o] they [patriarchal authorities] want?…Holmes [i]s at the door. ‘I’ll give it you!’…and fl[ings] himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings” (149).  Unlike Mignon, Septimus’s dysfunctional recollective faculty fails to reconfigure negative cognitive perceptions – the ills of modernity represented by the doctors.

While Septimus chooses death to liberate his spirit from the oppressive modern world, Mignon joins with the princess in love, creating a new social order for the women of postmodernism.  If Septimus is an insane, marginalized modern man, Mignon is an orphan forsaken by her postmodern society.  Mignon’s men in the past have exploited her female sexuality without genuine love.  However, in this Cartersonian world, she is able to invert the patriarchal tradition of female sexual-objectification.  By joining the princess in love, she revalorizes her commoditized value as a sexual object into an eminent human being, loved unconditionally by the princess.  Fevvers comments on her transformation, “Can this truly be the same ragged child who came to me for charity those few short weeks ago? …‘Love, true love has utterly transformed her’” (276).  Thus, unlike the stoic Septimus who pursues his vision of death rather than choosing the love of his wife, Mignon envisions love and claims life over death.  Quintessentially, however, it is “the redaction of her life-drama” stored in her memory that frees her mind from the horrors of the past, enabling her to ultimately transcend into a respected and beloved womanhood with the princess.

While Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway glorifies and sympathizes Septimus’s stoic decision to die in order to escape from the harsh modern world, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, by showcasing Mignon’s resilience against patriarchal abuse, intuits the post-modernist’s fight against societal oppression by choosing life, not death.  As a modernist, Septimus is engrossed in incessant introspections over Evans’s death and his doubts about the power figures in the modern world, his fragmented mind forever in abeyance in utter isolation without panacea.  In contrast, Mignon’s postmodernist mentality goes further than introspection or questioning authority.  Her selective and reconstructive cognizance not only extrapolates the poisonous episodes from her history, but also, by overtly espousing lesbianism, creates a new feminist order in patriarchal society.    

Works Cited

Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Lamont, Elizabeth Clea. “Moving Tropes: New Modernist travels with Virginia Woolf.”   Journal of Comparative poetics (2001): 161- 184.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: A Harvest Book, 1981.

Women’s Spatial Mobility under Patriarchy In Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” and Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea”

 

Women’s Spatial Mobility under Patriarchy

In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

        Virginia Woolf, in “A Room of One’s Own,” speculates that “if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had…Shakespeare’s genius” (39), but not given an artistic arena to channel out her creative energy, then, she would have died on some winter’s night, and found “buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses…stop” (39). In other words, Woolf is claiming that women’s “room of their own,” and more abstractly, “a space of their own,” is directly reflective of how they fare psychologically, intellectually, and even physically.  Succinctly, she is implying, figuratively and literally, that if a woman is not allowed a space to intellectually grow and physically move about, she will wither and die.  In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, “a space of women’s own” – which, from here-on-after, for the purpose of this essay, will be called “spatial mobility” – reflects the level of freedom and independence the female protagonists are allowed under patriarchy.  In Jane Eyre, the fact that the protagonist, Jane, is an orphan works to her advantage because she has no patriarchal allegiances that restrict her from maneuvering her various spaces, different dwellings, to enhance her self-preservation and independence.  On the other hand, in Wide Sargasso Sea, the fact that the protagonist, Antoinette, has numerous patriarchal authorities (Mr. Cosway, Mr. Mason, Richard Mason, Daniel Cosway, Sandi Cosway, and Rochester) who, in one way or another, restrict, malign, and stifle her spatial mobility, forestalls her self-preservation and independence.  Thus, while absence or escape from patriarchal authority allows spatial mobility that preserves Jane, too much of its presence – too many controlling men – confines Antoinette into a fixed space that kills her.

        For Jane, albeit, moving from one home to another causes tremendous amount of anxiety and insecurity, each spatial movement, nevertheless, leads her to a higher level of independence.  Her first spatial movement to Mr./Mrs. Reed’s home provides her the basic shelter, food, and protection from the harsh world.  Her second movement to Lowood Institution not only satiates her yearnings to be literate, but more importantly, equips her with employable skills that enable her to be self-sufficient.  Her third relocation to Thornfield as a governess had required a permission from a guardian, which she gains effortlessly due to the absence of paternal authority in her life; in place of her deceased uncle, her aunt, Mrs. Reed, permits “that ‘[Jane] might do as [she] pleased, [for] she had long relinquished all interference in [Jane’s] affairs’” (76).  Her fourth movement, a flight to St. John’s abode proves to be quintessential in her life; it not only frees her from Rochester – a potentially threatening, patriarchal authority – but more significantly, links her to a loving and admirable extended family, which one of whom (her uncle) makes her a wealthy woman, a turning point in her life that cements her self-preservation and independence.  In fact, her final movement, a return to Rochester in Ferdean, is, in effect, a cardinal moment in her life where she makes an important pronouncement of her independence.  This final movement is profound, not only because it frees her from St. John – another potentially abusive, patriarchal authority – but because it is a choice that she deliberately makes, as Jane informs Rochester as “an independent woman” (370).  Bewildered by her new aura and claims to independence, Rochester asks for explanation: “‘Independent! What do you mean, Jane?’” (370)  Jane gives him a stunning answer that not only informs him that she now has money of her own, but her subtle word play also implicates that she intends to keep and manage her own money: “‘Quite rich, sir…If you won’t let me live with you, I can build a house of my own close up to your door, and you may come and sit in my parlour when you want company of an evening’” (370, emphasis added).  Indeed, for Jane, each “spatial movement” dramatically enhances and fortifies her self-preservation and independence. 

Although, Jane, an orphan, out of necessity moves from one shelter to another, “moving” or “going away” is imperceptible for Antoinette, whose family is deeply-rooted in her home town with a lineage of patriarchs, from her birth father to step-father, her half-brothers to a step-brother.  In terms of spatial mobility, Antoinette exhibits timid and stagnant mentality when she comments about her mother’s importunate pleadings to Mr. Mason to move away from their town: “I [also] knew that we were hated – but to go away … for once I agreed with my stepfather.  That was not possible” (19).  Antoinette seems to have been inculcated by patriarchal dogmas of the day about how woman should be – helplessness and immobile, always needing to stay within her boundaries.  The fact that her family estate is so deeply-rooted in her home town doesn’t help either; it seems to make it inconceivable and imprudent for her to even think about relocating herself to a different home or a town – the privilege of “not being an orphan,” a daughter of a prominent man in town. Her birth father, Mr. Cosway, therefore, is Antoinette’s first patriarch that indirectly restricts her spatial mobility.  Mr. Cosway, furthermore, by leaving a legacy as a slave owner, exacerbates Antoinette’s spatial stasis in her home town because his such legacy makes her become the target of malignant assaults from townspeople.  Worse yet, Antoinette’s step-father, Mr. Mason, and his son, Richard Mason, continue the role of a patriarch by engineering Antoinette into a marriage.  This commodification of Antoinette into a marriage with Rochester completely forestalls her independence, let alone any spatial mobility.  Moreover, Antoinette’s half-brothers, as an extended representatives of patriarchy, compounds this situation; both Daniel’s slander and Sandi’s tenderness toward Antoinette fuel up the tension between her and her husband, Rochester.  In fact, these issues become the very reasons that Rochester use to justify his imprisonment of Antoinette in England.  Thus, for Antoinette, each line of patriarchs and its successors in her family, collectively and individually, restrict, malign, and imprison her into a life of hell with no spatial freedom nor mobility.

Among all the patriarchs in Antoinette’s life, the one who holds the ultimate keys to her status, happiness, and freedom, her husband Rochester, cruelly eracinates all human dignity out of her; he treats her with the utmost disrespect, uproots her from her social and cultural familiarities, and imprisons her in his domain – Thornfied, a cell that slowly kills her.  Alarmed by such a plan to uproot Antoinette from her hometown, Antoinette’s surrogate mother, Christophine, exhorts Antoinette to leave him: “Ask him pretty for some of your own money…When you get away, stay away…Better not stay in that old house.  Go from that house, I tell you” (66).  Antoinette, however, is overwhelmed by the patriarchal forces that are seemingly omnipotent and omnipresent in her life, self-rendering her escape to freedom unfathomable; she gives in all too easily and feebly:

He would never give me any money to go away and he would be furious if I asked him…Even if I got away (and how?) he would force me back.  So would Richard.  So would everybody else.  Running away from him, from this island, is the lie.  What reason could I give for going and who would believe [or support] me? (68)

When Christophine pleads Rochester for money, so that she and Antoinette can go away to Martinique and “[t]hen to other places” (95), Rochester, not only denies Antoinette any spatial mobility by not returning a portion of her money, he also psychologically eliminates “the only space of her own” – her home – by having an affair with her servant: “Do you know what you’ve done to me?  It’s not the girl, not the girl.  But I loved this place and you have made it into a place I hate.  I used to think that if everything else went out of my life I would still have this, and now you have spoilt it” (88).  In fact, Rochester is so obsessed with the idea of controlling Antoinette that he exclaims in silence: “She said she loved this place.  This is the last she’ll see of it…I’ll take her in my arms, my lunatic.  She’s mad but mine, mine. What will I care for gods or devils or for Fate itself.  If she smiles or weeps or both.  For me” (99).  Thus, Rochester, Antoinette’s husband, who bears the highest moral obligation to love and protect her, betrays her most utterly, and becomes the ultimate culprit to her gradual death, psychologically and physically. Engineered, thwarted, and crumpled by various patriarchal figures in her life, most repulsively yet decisively, by her husband Rochester, Antoinette, unlike Jane, each “spatial movement” she undertakes pulls her downhill, undermining her self-preservation and independence.  

Both in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, the protagonists’ free movements from space to space, or even having such a constant space that she can call “a space of her own,” is directly linked to whether or not a patriarch is present or absent in her life.  For Jane, in Jane Eyre, absence or escape from patriarchal authority enables her to use spatial mobility as one of her means to enhance and fortify her self-preservation and independence.  For Antoinette, in Wide Sargasso Sea, however, too much patriarchal presence – too many controlling men – ultimately kills her. 

Works Cited

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Norton & company, Inc: New York, 2001.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Norton & Company, Inc: New York, 1999.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own.” The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature. (2001): 16-72.