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Book
ReviewWomen
Experiencing WarWomen's autobiography: war and trauma, Victoria Stewart, 2003.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan; ISBN 1403903069, 204 pp., £47.50 cloth
SAGE Publications, Inc.2005DOI: 10.1177/09675507050130020504
Peter G.Coleman
University of Southampton
Victoria
Stewart's engagingly written book is a welcome addition to the growing literature
on the long-term effects of war trauma on people's
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lives.
It deals specifically with the neglected subject of women's experience of
war through comparing and contrasting the accounts of some well- known and
not so well-known women writers. Because they have been for the most part
non-combatants, women's experience of war has not received the same attention
as that of men. Moreover the `all or nothing' nature of medical diagnosis
has meant that the category of PTSD (post- traumatic stress disorder), although
increasingly used, has not been applied to the chronic distress and disturbance
felt by women civilians under bombardment, occupation and waiting in suspense
for news of family members on military service, not to mention the effects
of pro- longed imprisonment and torture. Yet, clearly, the effects on women's
lives of this prolonged suffering are long lasting. PTSD is a relatively new
term – one that only entered psychiatric classification after the US
war against Vietnam – although it refers to a phenomenon that has been
rec- ognized at least since the ancient Greeks. In the First World War the
common expression for it was `shell shock', but it was poorly understood and
even more poorly treated. Women's experience of duress, powerless- ness and
incarceration during wartime has taken even longer to achieve the recognition
it deserves. Victoria Stewart's book examines in succession the writings of
the following: Victoria Brittain, for whom the experiences of loss in the
Great War acted as a catalyst for her pacifist activities in the years leading
up to and through the Second World War; Virginia Woolf, whose creative life
was also affected in major ways by the First World War and who committed suicide
in 1941, partly it seems in response to her distress at the destruction she
now saw being wreaked on a wider scale by the Second World War; Anne Frank,
the young Dutch girl in hiding, who became the most famous diarist of the
Holocaust of European Jews; and Charlotte Delbo, who wrote the autobiographical
trilogy Auschwitz and after. Stewart ends her book with a consideration of
the writings of three daugh- ters of separate Holocaust survivors. Although
their experience of trauma is second hand, consideration of their work leads
to further important ques- tions about the transmission of trauma between
generations and the nature of memorialization. All the texts are closely examined
and acute observa- tions made about each author. Stewart demonstrates the
superficiality of regarding autobiographical writing as a process in which
the self is healed from the disturbance it has suffered. This model makes
a number of false assumptions, including most importantly that a coherent
subjectivity exists prior to the disturbance or even if it does that its retrieval
is desirable. For none of the women discussed in this book does writing have
this simple restorative character. Indeed an analysis of these authors leads
Stewart to question not only such approaches to autobiography but also `socially
and culturally established forms of mourning and memorialization' (p. 170).
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The
complexity of the issues is well illustrated by contrasting the first two
writers discussed. Brittain and Woolf knew each other's work. The latter regarded
the former's Testament of Youth as `a very good book of its sort. The new
sort, the hard anguished sort, that the young write; that I could never write'
(cited p. 58). Virginia Woolf's aesthetic of war was quite different. For
Vera Brittain, Woolf's suicide was `a deliberate protest against the sorry
situation to which war has brought literature and its exponents'. But, as
Stewart makes clear, to regard Woolf's death, as Brittain did, `as more meaningful
than her writings could ever be' is to fail to properly appreciate Woolf's
response to war in her writings. The impact was less direct than in the case
of Brittain, but certainly as profound. She predicted that the second war
would involve a repetition and intensifica- tion of what had already been
endured. For her the first and second wars were part of the same continuing
conflict. She could be scathing of men's responses to war, even to the disregard
for his family that her nephew showed in volunteering to serve as an ambulance
driver for the civil war in Spain. To go to war to preserve civilization revealed
the violent basis of that civilization. At the same time she was aware of
other forms of mas- culine attitudes, as in the portrayal of the shell-shocked
Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway. Vera Brittain's diaries and novels have been
the subject of intensive psychobiographical analysis most notably by Abigail
Stewart and col- leagues at the University of Michigan. These analyses demonstrate
the profound identity crisis into which the deaths of her fiancée, brother
and other close friends in the first war led Brittain. She abandoned her studies
at Oxford and became a nurse. But she was able to reconstruct, mainly because
she never lost, the image of these men as heroic. Separating out the nobility
of the ideals from such a dehumanizing conflict was not possible for Woolf.
Her verdict on western civilization could not have been more damning: `Nor
is it strange that the foundation of European civilisation should be the “Iliad”.
For in a sense hardly any Europeans have ever been civilised, the Greeks least
of all' (cited p. 66). Brittain did believe in writing as a means of catharsis,
but the close analysis of her writings that both Stewarts provide show the
never-ending struggle with her sense of self that war had brought her. Brittain
herself creates in her fictional work examples of more effective means of
closure and moving on from loss. The substantial introductory chapter to the
book provides a most inter- esting discussion of the term `trauma' in relation
to autobiography. Victoria Stewart reinforces Cathy Caruth's definition of
trauma as that which `is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully
known' (cited p. 9). This book succeeds in its objective of presenting how
these very different women wrote about how their lives had been changed by
the
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trauma
of war. Its major conclusion that reuniting the past and present selves is
not achievable in any simple way is important for those engaged in therapeutic
work as well as for literary theorists to consider.