Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (review)

At a time when claims for emotional damage echo through our law courts and the antics of celebrities appear designed to trivialise the very notion of trauma, it is instructive to note that it was that explicit engine of modernity, the stream train, that first brought together lawyers, insurance companies, and medics in the nineteenth century, as a new diagnosis of "railway shock" came into being (86). The fact that railway companies were initially only held liable for physical injuries opened the way for the development of theories of psychological injury. Jill L. Matus builds on earlier work on railway shock to offer a fine reading of Charles Dickens's story "The Signalman" (1866), which, together with The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), she places in the broader context of theories of memories and their aftermath. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction makes a major contribution to the growing body of literature on the interrelations of nineteenth-century psychology and the novel. In addition to the one on Dickens, it offers insightful chapters on North and South (1855), which is treated as a "condition of consciousness" novel (61), and psychic shock in George Eliot's "The Lifted Veil" (1859) and Daniel Deronda (1876), concluding with an analysis of dissociation and multiple selves in, perhaps inevitably, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). As the foregoing list suggests, the texts explored are canonical, and it is to Matus's credit that with so much written on these works she can still produce readings that are fresh and interesting, although—as with virtually all critical works—there are gaps and omissions, alternate paths that might have been taken.

Matus explores the ways in which many of her literary texts used the gothic language of haunting to articulate forms of unconscious experience and internal conflict. Her own text has in a sense its own double, being haunted by an alternate work that would have had a far snappier title, "Trauma in Victorian Fiction." Her adoption of the lengthier, more cumbersome form results from her decision to consider Victorian culture's treatment of emotional shock on its own terms and not according to ahistoric post-Freudian concepts of trauma. At issue is the theoretical model employed by Cathy Caruth and others, which emphasises "unprocessed memory as the key element of trauma" (60), a formulation about which Matus is perhaps rightly sceptical. Instead, she turns to a complex network of ideas regarding emotions, memory, and the unconscious that she sees as better explaining psychic shock in the Victorian period. At the heart of her work is the excitement generated by the new science of physiological psychology developed by Alexander Bain, William Carpenter, G. H. Lewes, and others, which brought into close union the workings of body and mind, generating new understandings of unconscious processes and the physiological impact of emotions. The text offers a welcome corrective to Ian Hacking's otherwise magisterial volume, Rewriting the Soul (1995). As Matus notes, in focusing on Jean-Martin Charcot and his formulations of trauma and multiple personality disorder, Hacking ignores the extensive sciences of memory to be found in English psychological discourse at that time. Matus opens up what she sees as a richer history in which emotions, memory, and the unconscious are closely interwoven. The text, however, remains to some degree trapped by the model it wishes to refute, returning constantly to the idea of trauma, whether to suggest, as in her analysis of Daniel Deronda, that the novel and surrounding discourse "helped to produce the way we understand trauma today" or to argue in conclusion that Victorian culture did not produce a fully formulated theory of trauma since it "neither wanted nor needed it" (143, 186).

This preoccupation with trauma produces its own limitations. Matus notes that her focus is on ideas of emotional aftermath in ordinary, rather than pathologized, states of...