Modernist Women Writers and War: Trauma and the Female Body in Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein

Afterword

137 Afterword my definitions of trauma (“founding trauma”) and “identity politics,” and I tried to keep in mind his important exhortation that a poststructuralist can and should make distinctions (distinctions do not necessarily reinforce binary oppositions) instead of insisting on relativism or reductive thinking when discussing traumatic responses. During revisions of this project I omitted Caruth’s work. The incorporation of her psychoanalytic, Freudian perspective would have sent this project in a different direction. Instead, I chose to supplement LaCapra’s poststructuralist trauma studies approach with Judith Butler’s feminist, poststructuralist treatment of bodies in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Butler’s concepts influenced my thinking from the very beginning of this project, and so her work was indispensable to me. The current project also draws upon Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World; my understanding of war rhetoric and the political and material consequences of war for human bodies is derived solely from Scarry. The literature I discuss in the preceding chapters demonstrates her notions that war rhetoric “unmakes” soldiers just as war injuries “unmake” combatant and noncombatant bodies by emptying them of civilization. The soldier is transformed into a killer, perverting his socialized impulses to abide by law and act peacefully, and the injured person, especially if killed, is unable to gesture to or enact civilizing behaviors because the body has been damaged. This project is indebted to concepts from trauma studies scholars of different academic backgrounds, and the literature I focus on herein demonstrates both the applicability and usefulness of an interdisciplinary trauma studies approach to literature. Because I am interested in using concepts from a number of theorists who ordinarily are not put into conversation with one another in a single study, refining the theoretical framework was perhaps the most challenging aspect of this project. I discovered that what it really needed—and what I really wanted to say—was that poststructuralism could exist in a kind of hybridized and harmonious relationship with embodiment theories, provided that the terms are carefully defined and the ways in which the theories intersect are clarified as needed. Elizabeth Grosz argues for a synthesis of the interior (consciousness) and the exterior (corporeality), and she sees embodiment as incorporating this synthesis in conjunction 138 moder nist women wr iters and war with lived experience. Thus, I built upon and refined Grosz’s understanding of embodiment when I introduced and combined LaCapra’s notions of trauma, Butler’s notions of gender and performance, and Scarry’s notions of war as a discursively covert business of injury that results in the unmaking of civilization. The definitions I have formulated from the work of these theorists can be found in the introduction. Another discovery I made early on, while researching the individual authors and texts, was the extent to which women in war, especially women’s responses to and representations of war and trauma, had been neglected. Works such as H.D.’s Bid Me to Live and Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds, for instance, are currently out of print, and the published scholarship on most of the selected works in this project is thus far either sparse or limited in the discussions of war and trauma. The study began to take the shape of a recovery project, with the revisionist aspect (women creating space in patriarchal war narrative and reconfiguring it) following as the project developed. From the beginning I had also planned to write about depictions of women’s bodies. After working as a grant writer in the administrative office of a domestic violence shelter, I developed an awareness of the cultural inscriptions that plague female bodies and the often culturally unintelligible responses by victims to sexual or physical trauma. I finally settled on the world wars as the impetus for female responses to trauma-producing events that would take into account female bodies. Because I was interested in approaching my project from a feminist perspective, I viewed war as a fitting subject in that it was a masculinist project that my selected female authors engaged with and revised in their own poetry and prose to varying degrees and for slightly different purposes. The project evolved and changed from my initial conception of it; it became more about how the writers represented the gender politics of war and trauma than an examination of how the selected authors suffered and witnessed, although...