Remembering Lot’s Wife/Lot’s Wife Remembering: Trauma, Witness, and Representation in Cleanness

Abstract

Cleanness is not only a work of biblical didacticism but also a sustained meditation on trauma, a poem whose consideration of several biblical cataclysms reveals a robust engagement with loss and the concomitant issues of traumatic witness and representation. It is, moreover, a poem that reveals both the necessity and danger of witnessing by turning its gaze upon the bodies of the dead and upon the suffering of the doomed and the living. Drawing from recent work on trauma by Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys, and others, as well as from scholarship on Cleanness itself, this essay shows how the figures of witness within the poem advance its central didactic argument even as they imply a subversive counter-narrative of mourning and loss that frustrates the poem’s Christological agenda. It also speculates that Cleanness offers a literary witness to the fourteenth-century plague pandemic now commonly known as the Black Death, reading the poem’s repetitions and obsessive focus on the traumatic scene both as symptomatic of a response to that trauma and as paradigmatic for how the poem mediates the interactions among traumatic event, human witness, and memorial representation.