Hello again!
I hope the new year has been going well for everyone so far. In our ASTU 100 class this semester, we have been discussing the themes of war and trauma and how all our past experiences, unfulfilled desires shape and guide the happenings of our everyday lives. We have also been talking about PTSD after World War I. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or “Shell-shock” as it was called then, is a psychological disorder that results from going through a traumatic experience that has a profound impact on a person’s emotional state. The symptoms of this disorder are loss of sleep, panic attacks, anxiety, numbness, flashbacks, disassociation (or a feeling of being disconnected from oneself and reality), and disturbed emotional state which can debilitate daily functioning. After World War I, many soldiers who fought in the wars became victims to PTSD. However, this was not considered a real disorder due to the lack of general awareness and scientific evidence about this during those times. Often, the PTSD patients were labelled as “malingerers” who were just faking it, or it was assumed that it was “all in their heads”.
In our class, we have explored the theme of post-war PTSD by reading two different texts: Big Two-Hearted River, a short story by Ernest Hemingway, and Mrs. Dalloway, a novel by Virginia Woolf. Both these works feature different writing styles and portray PTSD victims in a different way, which definitely influenced how connected I felt to the characters.
In Big Two-Hearted River, Hemingway portrays PTSD through the main character, Nick. Nick has just returned from the war and finds himself overwhelmed by even the tiniest things, such as the joy of catching a fish. We are told the story of Nick through a third-person narrative, which means, that we are never in Nick’s head. Because of this, I had a harder time connecting with Nick as a character. It was like watching Nick have those experiences but not being able to “see” the emotions. For me, it is easier to connect with characters if their thoughts and emotions are essentially “in my face”, preferably through a first-person perspective. Hemingway’s story also focuses on only one character as it follows how he copes with the aftermath if the war and the emotional ruin it has brought him. One thing that I found really interesting in this story was that the war was never actually mentioned explicitly. Hemingway left it entirely to the reader to figure out that Nick had indeed fought in and returned from war. As we learned in class, this is called the “Iceberg Theory” in which “the elephant” in the story or its main theme is not made explicitly clear. It is an analogy to how only a small part of an iceberg is usually above water, while the rest is hidden from view. While it made the story more engaging and intriguing to me, again, it made it harder for me to essentially feel Nick’s emotions.
On the other hand, Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway features the story of a woman called Clarissa as she goes about her day, planning a party. Woolf explores the aftermath of the war through multiple characters, but primarily through a PTSD patient, Septimus. For me, it was much easier to feel what Septimus was going through because Woolf essentially laid out everything that goes through his head in detail. Although Woolf also uses a third-person narrative, she employs Free Indirect Speech to do so, which means that the perspective constantly weaves in and out of a character’s thoughts. Even though initially, it made it harder for me to figure out when I was in a character’s head and when I was outside it, it made me develop a greater sensitivity to the nuances of this novel. I appreciated this writing style because it allowed me to experience the novel both as a reader and as the characters themselves. Therefore, Septimus’ emotions and thoughts were more “in my face” than Nick’s. In the end, Septimus commits suicide. I appreciate the fact that Woolf included this brutal scene in the book because this sends a strong message that this is could be a reality for people with mental illness when they are not given proper treatment and care and this, in fact, continues to remain a huge issue even in contemporary times. I also liked that she described this suicide as more of a way for Septimus to escape his existence of trauma and distorted reality and not as a cowardly act, which is a widespread notion about suicide. Therefore, this novel spoke more to me than Hemingway’s short story.
Also, completely unrelated side note: I was pleasantly blown away by how explicit Woolf was about Clarissa’s bisexuality. Going into the book, knowing that it was written in an era when LGBT communities were extremely marginalized, I was not expecting bisexuality to be a theme in this book. So I think that Virginia Woolf made some really strong statements against the then-prevalent social norms through this book, which I find really cool!
