Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin

Transcription

1 AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows and the Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway s Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur

2 Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative By Heather J. Hicks Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles By Kenneth Lincoln Elizabeth Spencer s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production By Catherine Seltzer New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut Edited by David Simmons Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech By Dianne L. Chambers The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero : Gender, Action, and Emotion By Denise Mary MacNeil Norman Mailer s Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest Edited by John Whalen-Bridge Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction By Christopher Kocela Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American Voices and American Identities By Mary Jane Hurst Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature By Erin Mercer Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-Fashioning By Timothy W. Galow Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary By Georgina Colby Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction: Counterhistory By Marni Gauthier Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction By Alison Graham-Bertolini Queer Commodities: Contemporary US Fiction, Consumer Capitalism, and Gay and Lesbian Subcultures By Guy Davidson Reading Vietnam Amid the War on Terror By Ty Hawkins American Authorship and Autobiographical Narrative: Mailer, Wideman, Eggers By Jonathan D Amore Readings of Trauma, Madness, and the Body By Sarah Wood Anderson

3 Readings of Trauma, Madness, and the Body Sarah Wood Anderson

4 READINGS OF TRAUMA, MADNESS, AND THE BODY Copyright Sarah Wood Anderson, All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anderson, Sarah Wood. Readings of trauma, madness and the body / Sarah Wood Anderson. p. cm. (American literature readings in the twenty-first century) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Modernism (Literature) United States. 2. American fiction 20th century History and criticism. 3. Psychic trauma in literature. 4. Mental illness in literature. I. Title. PS228.M63A dc A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October

5 For my family Dave, William, Maxwell Don, Gayla and Leigh Wood, and Doug Anderson

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7 Contents Acknowledgments ix Part I Introduction to Part I: Trauma Theory 1 1 Readings of Resistance in Hemingway s Trauma Fiction 15 2 Domestic Trauma in H.D. s HERmione 35 Part II Introduction to Part II: Madness in Modern Literature 57 3 Readings of Gender and Madness in Hemingway s Across the River and into the Trees and The Garden of Eden 69 4 Infidelity and Madness in Fitzgerald s Tender is the Night 85 5 Production of the Body and Omission of Madness in Zelda Fitzgerald s Save Me the Waltz Creating a Language of Rebellion: Madness in H.D. s HERmione 149 Conclusion 161 Notes 171 Bibliography 189 Index 203

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9 Acknowledgments It is a pleasure to thank those who have encouraged my enthusiasm for critical thinking and the written word. The faculty at Chatham Hall taught me to love learning and their support has continued throughout the years. Ann Beal s and William Black s love of literature is inescapable and I think of them every time I write. Stephen Cushman at the University of Virginia provided my first introduction to Hemingway, and his lectures replay vividly in my mind still. My graduate study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was guided by Linda Wagner-Martin, Joe Flora, Fred Hobson, and William Harmon, and I am grateful for their time and devotion to graduate students. The support of my friends, including Mary Raschko, Doug Freeman, Sarah Clere, Tim Galow, Bond Thompson, Al Miller, Camille and David Bernstein, Lindsey Greene, Sapna Shenoy, and Erin Reilly, have helped to sustain my belief in the merits of my academic endeavors. The faculty of the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has welcomed me gladly, and I am thankful to the exceptional students I have the pleasure to teach. I also wish to thank the editorial staff at Palgrave for their efforts in seeing this book to publication. My family, especially my parents, Don and Gayla Wood, and my sister, Leigh, have sustained and encouraged me. From answering my childhood questions with more questions, to supporting me through UVA, to babysitting my children while I wrote, and moving to Wisconsin, they have given endless emotional support. I also write with fond memories of my late grandparents, Clarence and Pearl Wood and Sam Royall. Doug Anderson has provided love and limitless generosity, secondhand books, and shelves upon which to house them. Wonderful friends and neighbors in Wisconsin gave continual support and confidence I am privileged to share the beauty of everyday life with them. My husband, Dave, has shown me what dedication is, bolstering my spirits throughout this journey and helping me achieve my goals. Throughout the writing of this book, my pregnancies and

10 x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS my mothering of William and Maxwell have remained my proudest creative achievements. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Linda Wagner-Martin, whose seminar so many years ago drew me to all the authors discussed in Readings of Trauma, Madness, and the Body. For that alone I would be forever in her debt; she has also guided and encouraged me through all the years since, and her faith in my ability to complete this project at times surpassed my own. She has been a true mentor.