‘The impotence of sympathy’: touch and trauma in the memoirs of the First World War nurses

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 M. A. Brown, 'Diary', Imperial War Museum, London, 88/7/1; Hereafter abbreviated to IWM. 2 Arthur Marwick, Women at War 1914–1918 (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 168. 3 E. M. Spearing, From Cambridge to Camiers (Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1917), p. 59. 4 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933; London: Virago, 1978), p. 176. 5 Brittain, Testament, pp. 211, 216. 6 Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle', in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, 24 Vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), Vol. XVIII, p. 29 (hereafter SE). 7 Some major works which address the issue of touch and human subjectivity are Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962); Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971); Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). Also see Gabriel Josipovici, Touch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), and Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion, 2004). 8 Freud, 'Infantile sexuality', SE, Vol. VII, pp. 181–2. 9 Prominent examples include David Trotter, Cooking With Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-century Art and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2003). 10 Connor, Skin, p. 9. 11 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984), trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C.Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. Stephen Bann (London: Faber, 1993); Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 12 Quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary. 13 Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 5. Laplanche has argued that it is difficult to trace the transposition of this medicosurgical notion into psychology and psychiatry, and underlines the continuing role of 'histological damage, and, ultimately, intracellular damage': Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 129–30. As Leys notes, the description accords with the modern neurobiological definition of PTSD (p. 19). 14 Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle', pp. 29, 27; emphasis added. See also Leys, Trauma, pp. 18–40. 15 See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing, Psychoanalysis and History (London, MD: Routledge, 1992), and Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). These two books have opened up the field of trauma studies. Mary Jacobus however touches upon the somatic while discussing trauma in Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 124–62. 16 Wilfred Owen, Collected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 429, 580. In the first quotation, the two words are underlined in the original. 17 Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge (eds), Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends (London: Little, Brown & Co, 1998), pp. 179–80; Irene Rathbone, We That Were Young (1932; New York: The Feminist Press, 1989), p. 197. 18 Critics such as Jane Marcus, Claire Tylee, Margaret Higonnet, Sharon Ouditt and Trudi Tate have pioneered the field of women and the First World War. See Jane Marcus, 'Corpus/corps/corpse: writing the body in/at war', Afterword, Helen Zenna Smith, Not So Quiet…Stepdaughters of War (New York: The Feminist Press, 1989); Claire M.Tylee, The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914–64 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London: Routledge, 1994); Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Angela Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Margaret Higonnet, Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of War (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2001), and 'Authenticity and art in trauma narratives of World War I', Modernism/Modernity, 9:1 (January 2002). Both Tate and Higonnet have powerfully drawn attention to the trauma of non-combatants, both men and women, including nurses. 19 Elaine Scarry, The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 5, 4. 20 Bagnold, A Diary Without Dates (1918; London: Virago, 1979), p. 88; Hereafter abbreviated to Bagnold, DWD. 21 Flora Sandes, An English Woman-Sergeant in the Serbian Army (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916), pp. 161–2; C. E. Tisdall, 'Memoirs of the London Ambulance Column, 1914–18 by a V.A.D.', IWM, 92/22/1, p. 30. 22 Owen, 'Dulce et decorum est', in The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), p. 117. 23 Ruth S. Farnam, A Nation at Bay (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co, 1918), p. 18. 24 Leslie Smith, Four Years Out Of Life (London: Allan, 1931), p. 65. 25 Katherine Hodges North, 'Diary: a driver at the front', IWM, 92/22/1, p. 186. 26 Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Richard D. Altick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), Book IX, p. 458. 27 Mary Britnieva, One Woman's Story (London: Arthur Barker, 1934), p. 36. 28 Women's Work Collection, IWM, BRCS25.8. 29 Quoted in Lyn Macdonald, Roses on No Man's Land (Basingstoke: Papermac, 1980), p. 169. 30 Jane Marcus has written brilliantly on the bodily degradation of the female ambulance drivers in 'Corpus/corps/corpse'. 31 Borden, The Forbidden Zone (London: William Heinemann, 1929), p. 60; hereafter abbreviated to FZ. 32 Margaret Postgate Cole, 'Praematuri', in Catherine Reilly (ed.), The Virago Book of Women's War Poetry and Verse (London: Virago, 1997), p. 22. 33 Borden, FZ, p. 60. 34 Higonnet, 'Authenticity and art', p. 95. 35 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 36 Borden, FZ, p. 151. Claire Tylee also argues for Brittain's war trauma in 'Maleness run riot', Women's Studies International Forum, 11: 3, (1988), pp. 199–210. 37 Brittain, Testament, p. 458. 38 Sandor Ferenczi, 'Trauma and splitting of the personality', in The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont, and trans. Michael Balint and Nicola Jackson (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 202. 39 Brittain, Testament, 484; Rathbone, We That Were Young, p. 238. 40 'Neurasthenia and shell shock', The Lancet, 18 March 1916, p. 627. See also Fredk W. Mott, War Neuroses and Shell Shock (London: Oxford University Press, 1919). 41 The Lancet, 4 September 1915, p. 553. 42 'War shock in the civilian', The Lancet, 4 March, 4 September 1916, p. 522; 'Shell shock in Cows', The Lancet, 2 February 1918, pp. 187–8. 43 F. W. Mott, 'The effects of high explosives upon the central nervous system', published in three instalments (12 and 26 February, 11 March), The Lancet, 1916, pp. 331–8, 441–9, 545–53. 44 'Neurasthenia and shell shock', The Lancet, 18 March, 1916, 627. See Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000); Paul Frederick, Lerner. Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithacm NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 45 Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle', p. 12. 46 Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle', p. 31. 47 Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle', pp. 12, 18. 48 Dori Laub, 'Bearing witness or the vicissitudes of listening', in Brittain, Testimony, pp. 57, 64; Caruth (ed.), Trauma, pp. 153–4. 49 Katherine Hodges North, 'Diary', p. 24. Mary Jacobus notes how trauma narratives are bound to be belated 'both in telling and its meaning retrospective' (Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, p. 134) 50 Some of the other women I have mentioned – Farnam, Rathbone and La Motte – are exciting writers and fruitful for my purpose, but a detailed discussion is not possible here due to constraints of space. For illuminating discussions of Rathbone and La Motte, see Marcus' 'Afterword' to Rathbone, We That Were Young, and Higonnet's introduction to Nurses at the Front, respectively. 51 Brittain, Chronicle of Youth: Great War Diary 1913–1917, ed. Alan Bishop (1981; London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 148; hereafter abbreviated to Chronicle. In Testament (1933), the incident is remembered differently: 'With sudden vehemence he pressed it [hand] against his lips, and kept it there until the train stopped' (p. 123). See also Deborah Gorham, Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000). 52 Chronicle, pp. 222, 216. 53 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), p. 197. 54 Brittain, Testament, pp. 216, 222. 55 Chronicle, p. 322. 56 Brittain, Testament, p. 273. 57 D. W. Winnicott, 'Creativity and its origins', Playing and Reality (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 78. 58 Brittain, Testament, p. 243. 59 Brittain, Testament, pp. 287, 244. 60 Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (Harmondswoth: Penguin, 1990), p. 189. 61 Virginia Woolf, quoted in Anne Sebba, Enid Bagnold: The Authorised Biography (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1986), p. 61; hereafter abbreviated to Sebba. 62 Bagnold, DWD, pp. 122–3. 63 The passage is quoted by David Mitchell in his pioneering book, Women on the Warpath: The Story of the Women of the First World War (1966), by Claire Tylee in The Great War and Women's Consciousness (1990) as well as in the two recent anthologies: Agnes Cardinal's Women's Writing on the First World War (2000) and Angela Smith's Women's Writing of the First World War: An Anthology (2000). 64 Lesley Smith, Four Years Out of Life (London: Allan, 1931), p. 65. 65 Borden, FZ, p. 147. For details about the hospital unit Borden set up, see Higonnet's introduction to Nurses at the Front; also see Tylee, Women's Conciousness, pp. 98–101; and Asiela Friedman, 'Mary Borden's Forbidden Zone', Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 9:2, 108–24. 66 Borden, FZ, p. 147. For details about the hospital unit Borden set up, see Higonnet's introduction to Nurses at the Front; also see Tylee, Women's Conciousness, pp. 98–101; and Asiela Friedman, 'Mary Borden's Forbidden Zone', Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 9:2, p. 119–20. 67 Elizabeth Haldene, The British Nurse in Peace and War (London: John Murray, 1923), p. 3. 68 Borden, FZ, p. 64. 69 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Priciple, SE, Vol. XVIII, p. 18. 70 Bagnold, FZ, p. 22. 71 Rathbone, We That Were Young, p. 201. 72 Felman and Laub, Testimony, pp. 109–10. 73 Albert Camus, Actuelles I, pp. 188, 191, Oeuvres complètes d'Albert Camus, Vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard and Club de L'Honnête Homme, 1983), quoted in Felman, Testimony, p. 108.

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