Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma

The Notion of Paradigm Shift and the Roles of Science and Literature in the Interpretation of Reality

“…The alarming increase in diseases of the mind at the end of the nineteenth century points to a generalised loss of cognitive cohesion in the western world, evincing the traumatic component in a patriarchal society ruled by the double standard of morality and the ideology of endless progress. Thus, psychoanalysis may be seen as the response given by medicine to the puzzles set by ‘the pathological private self’ now found to be coexisting with ‘the rational public self, the standard bearer of enlightened political, economic, and intellectual progress that supposedly undergirded nineteenth-century social reform and nation and empire building’ 13 . Before this, the proliferation, throughout the Enlightenment period, of the motif of ‘the double’ in the literatures of Britain, Germany and other European countries provides evidence of the prescience of creative writers to detect and represent the psychic dangers of living in a society governed by reason to the exclusion of feelings, emotions and spiritual values.…”