Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction

Abstract

Jill Matus explores shock in Victorian fiction and psychology with startling results that reconfigure the history of trauma theory. Central to Victorian thinking about consciousness and emotion, shock is a concept that challenged earlier ideas about the relationship between mind and body. Although the new materialist psychology of the mid-nineteenth century made possible the very concept of a wound to the psyche - the recognition, for example, that those who escaped physically unscathed from train crashes or other overwhelming experiences might still have been injured in some significant way - it was Victorian fiction, with its complex explorations of the inner life of the individual and accounts of upheavals in personal identity, that most fully articulated the idea of the haunted, possessed and traumatized subject. This wide-ranging book reshapes our understanding of Victorian theories of mind and memory and reveals the relevance of nineteenth-century culture to contemporary theories of trauma.

Dickens, Victorian Mental Sciences and Mnemonic Errancy

“…Matus shows that in 'The Signalman' the literary possibilities of the ghost story, combined with Dickens's attentiveness to the unconscious manifestations of the mind, enabled him 'to articulate more about the relations of memory to cataclysmic event than was available to him in the current discourse on psychic shock', thus anticipating later psychological theorizations on traumatic experience. 63 Dickens thus demonstrates that the evaluation of memory does not depend on the dream of perfect mastery over -via the elimination ofits disturbing aspects. Rather, his treatment of memory shows that, as Vrettos argues, the analysis of the scientific context provides us with an important means to overcome the tendency to view some of Dickens's characters as 'isolated bundles of eccentricity in a larger Victorian trajectory toward the complex psychological rendering of interior life'.…”

“…8 While accepting Matus's thesis that the equation of Victorian disturbing memory with traumatic experience is a projection of the contemporary interest in trauma, my emphasis will be on the exploration of the cultural construction of memory as possibly disturbing and deviant, and on the invention of the disremembering self as a suitable object of scientific discourse.…”

“Ciudad de papel Zig-Zag”: Chilenizando la frontera norte, Arica 1910-1930

“…Asimismo, sus avisos publicitarios mostraban "personas elegantes y en un espacio confortable; es gente distinguida y de buen gusto" 50 . Además, durante el período del salitre, el salario promedio de un jornal de salitrero era de 5,50 pesos en 1909 51 , lo cual hacía que el acceso a la revista fuera limitado, ya que el precio de esta era un medio peso. Por lo cual, los estratos socioeconómicos bajos tenían escasas posibilidades de acceder a ella.…”

The Psychology of Reading and the Victorian Novel

“…Since the publication of Bourne Taylor and Shuttleworth’s anthology of Victorian psychological writings, Embodied Selves (1998), and Rick Rylance’s Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850‐1880 (2000), psychology and its relationship to the fiction of the time has become a deep and well‐traversed field within Victorian Studies. Articles in this journal by Rachel Ablow, Peter Logan, Jill Matus, and Anne Stiles survey several of the field’s branches, including, respectively, affect studies, literature and medicine, theories of the unconscious, and neurology.…”