Trauma and ordinary objects in Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett

Abstract

In this chapter, Yoshiki Tajiri focuses on the connection between trauma and everyday life: a traumatised subject needs to come to terms with everyday life and can find ordinary objects in it unexpectedly significant. By discussing such aspects of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, this chapter will illuminate the ways in which trauma and ordinary life are correlated rather than opposed. It also demonstrates that trauma theory and everyday life studies can stimulate each other: trauma is far from an everyday phenomenon, but it can shed light on the nature of everyday life after calamities of modernity as in the cases of Woolf and Beckett; conversely, there may be ways of enriching trauma studies by incorporating reflections on everyday life.