Shock, memory and the unconscious in Victorian fiction

Abstract

Jill L. Matus, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp.x + 254. Hardback £62.00, isbn 978-0- 521-76024-9. Paperback £18.99, isbn 978-0-521-31025-3.In introducing Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890 in 1998, Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth claimed that there had been little work done on the close connections between Victorian narrative and the wider concerns of the emerging materialist science of self. Since then, the reciprocal relationship between nineteenth-century fiction and 'mental physiology' has become a particularly rich field for scholars of Victorian literature and culture. Following the groundbreaking work of Bourne Taylor and Shuttleworth, a number of other significant monographs have appeared by such scholars as Nicholas Dames and Anne Stiles. Jill L. Matus's perceptive and wideranging book, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction, which has now been released in paperback by Cambridge University Press, provides a further insightful contribution to this flourishing field. It takes the experience of 'shock' or 'psychic injury' as its subject, analysing this phenomenon in a number of psychological works as well as in important examples of the period's prose fiction. In a series of interlinked individual case studies, Matus explores writing by Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot and Stevenson in detail alongside the work of significant figures from the world of mental science, including William Carpenter, Alexander Bain and E.S. Dallas. This approach is a suitably interdisciplinary one, but with an interesting twist; as Matus asserts, her 'book aims to explore in particular the participation of fictive narrative in what has been assumed to be the province of emergent psychology and memory science' (p.9). Matus, as a result, makes fascinating close readings of literary texts a central part of her project here, allowing her to argue convincingly that Victorian fiction does not only 'follow' or 'reflect' medical science, but in some cases helps shape it (p.12).The book's first chapter, 'Historicizing Trauma', provides a firm historical and theoretical basis for the in-depth analysis that follows. As Matus explains, another aim of Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction is to reveal 'a genealogy of trauma that reaches back into the mid-nineteenth century' (p.43). Her book therefore not only deepens our understanding of the Victorian novel; it also contributes to recent discussions of the application of trauma theory to literature. In analysing Victorian texts in the light of pre-Freudian ideas about trauma and the 'wounded psyche', Matus is able to reveal 'the historical contingency of trauma theory' (p.183). What is most important in nineteenth-century psychological and fictional accounts of trauma is not 'memory loss and dysfunction', as in twentieth-century instances, but rather the influence of contemporary 'theories of emotion and states of consciousness' (p.183).These themes are considered in further detail in Matus's second chapter on Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, part of which has already appeared in different form in her Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (2007). Wittily labelling the text 'a condition-of-consciousness novel' (p.62), she provides a rich account of the narrative's interest in 'the effect of very powerful feelings on psychic functioning' (p.61). Beginning with the novel's notoriously high death toll, she analyses how the novel's significant events, like the upheaval of the Hales from Helstone, the strike scene and psychically-disturbing proposals of marriage, 'produce emotional upheaval and provoke a response of shock and pain' (p.63). She notes intriguingly that 'the experience of and response to powerful emotion is not conventionally gendered in this novel' (p.63), affecting John Thornton as much as Margaret Hale. Matus also shows, with particularly effective use of textual evidence, how Gaskell 'draws heavily on the language of dream and trance' in order to portray such traumatic experiences (p. …