Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewNarrating Trauma: Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders. Gretchen Braun. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Pp vii+222.Taten ShirleyTaten ShirleyFaulkner University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the introduction of Narrating Trauma: Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders, Gretchen Braun makes two assertions: readers will better understand Victorian literature if they comprehend how people described pain and illness in the nineteenth century, and our current understanding of psychic illness can be informed by Victorian beliefs about the emerging field of psychology (1). What were called “nervous disorders” in the nineteenth century now have several different psychological diagnoses today (2). Braun goes on to argue that many of these stress disorders were caused or at least exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution, increased urbanization, and, ultimately, “socioeconomic marginality” (3, 7). Yet she points out that despite the fact that both men and women suffered from stress disorders, there are a disproportionate amount of what Braun terms “nervously disordered” female characters in Victorian literature (5–6), which accounts for why she only has one chapter focusing on male literary characters and their psychological struggle. In this introduction, Braun lays out the scope of her study well, making it clear she is only examining “characters adjacent to, but not comfortably situated within, conventional middle-class economic and cultural privilege,” especially the protagonists, even though she acknowledges these are not the only cases of psychologically disordered people in the Victorian Age (10). She also distinguishes the characters she examines in this book as traumatized, a category distinct from “mad” or “disabled” (14).In the first chapter, Braun brings the nineteenth-century conception of psychological injuries into the conversation of modern trauma studies. She emphasizes that in modern trauma studies, psychic injuries are largely treated as the consequence of being victimized by someone in particular (21). What follows is a lengthy literature review of modern trauma studies that is not necessarily helpful for the rest of the book’s discussion. But after this section, Braun details what nervous disorders meant in the nineteenth century, beginning with what it did not mean, which offers a useful clarification for the ideas of nervous disorder and psychic injury throughout the remainder of the book.Chapter 2 examines Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) in order to analyze how a traumatized heroine, in this case Lucy Snowe, can develop outside of the marriage plot. Lucy is a character who has undoubtedly experienced trauma, as she has no family and is forced to flee her home country to find work. She proves to be an unreliable narrator, from which Braun draws an intriguing implication, noting that her “omissions and evasions within story … follow from her alternating impulses to withhold and share her experience of pain and longing” (43). Yet Braun posits a pessimistic view of Lucy at the novel’s close, maintaining, “Villette provides no validating closure to the attention it has lavished on Lucy Snowe for five hundred pages, at least not in the terms novel readers have learned to expect: no wedding, no substantial inheritance, no significant public achievement” (42). Despite the fact that Lucy undoubtedly faces further trauma when she loses M. Paul, she is arguably still happy at the novel’s close because of the independence she gains from running her own school, which some might consider a “significant public achievement.”In the third chapter, Braun outlines two heroines’ development within a marriage plot, exploring novellas by Emily Jolly, A Wife’s Story (1875) and Witch-Hampton Hall (1864). Jolly’s heroines experience psychic injury because of “thwarted desires” (82) and use art as a catharsis but often also in a more practical sense to earn an income (83). In A Wife’s Story, Annie Warden has “hysteric episodes” that begin after she is married (84). While most Victorian understandings of women’s nervous disorders attributed them to biologically being female and the reproductive experience as a whole, Braun makes an intriguing point that “Annie’s hysteria originates … through the stifling of her intellect within conventional patriarchal marriage” (85). In Witch-Hampton Hall, Lady Ana’s trauma is that she is raped and then forced to remain silent on the event (85). In this way, Braun argues that Jolly’s literature highlights how women’s marital trauma comes from a lack of agency rather than the fact of being female.The fourth chapter turns to the modern world, and how the Industrial Revolution and its rapid changes intensified psychological pressure in the nineteenth century. As evidence, Braun explores Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1864) and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), which both consider how to be an ethical and healthy woman in a contemporary world (119). This chapter veers a bit from the overall theme, relying on the shock or discomfort that could come from fast-paced technological innovation rather than actual psychic injury like the other chapters. In the section on rail travel, for instance, Braun explains health concerns with rail travel in general for several pages without really bringing in No Name or Daniel Deronda, presumably to segue into discussing travel in the novels in the next section, only to focus more on the sensational response of the characters in No Name rather than travel.The final chapter focuses on the male psychic injury experience, specifically examining Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1894). Here Braun examines the pressure put on men to rise to the challenge of economic prosperity and the ability to change one’s own fortune and the physical and psychological toll that failure takes on them. Because of their “nervous temperaments” (166), both Pip and Jude’s stories “entail repetition without progression” (163).Interestingly, Braun concludes by commenting on the health crisis occurring while she was writing, the COVID-19 pandemic and the psychological effects it has had on our society. Her opening and final paragraphs of the last chapter succinctly and effectively remind the reader of the argument and pull together the overall idea of how these psychic injuries informed many heroines and heroes throughout Victorian literature. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724815 Views: 16Total views on this site HistoryPublished online March 14, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.