Trauma as Social Vaccine in Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering

Abstract

This article looks into Scott’s use of trauma as a fictional construct. Despite Scott’s indebtedness to the Scottish Enlightenment Weltanschauung, his descriptions of trauma in Guy Mannering come incredibly close to the distinctions analyzed in trauma studies today. Very sensitive to the elements of absence and loss, Scott mirrors traumatic memory in his narrative strategy as well. Young Bertram and the readers are able to process the traumatic experience into a narrative and recover the lost ‘historical’ narrative only after a long process in which Bertram’s ‘acting out’ memories trigger responses in his former community which help him recover a narrative of the traumatic events. Scott fulfills the task of the ‘historian’ to detraumatize events (White 87). Trauma and the element of absence have a social cause and a deeper ripple. They function as a social vaccine, strengthening the weakened social structure against radical impulses. These impulses are at loggerheads with Scott’s conservative view, which unites Whig principles with a Torry perspective (Trumpener 715). Being at the center of a social imbalance caused by radical measures, trauma can be healed only with the help of the community whose immune mechanisms expel and neutralize the pathological development, of a society in which enlightened official forces cooperate with the marginal social strata and outcasts.