After Fragmentation: Mental Health and Resilience in Modernist Women’s Literature

Abstract

Fragmentary aesthetics offered modernist writers one way to express the era’s discontinuous relationship with the past and the novelty proffered by the innovations of the present. This dissertation examines how the modernist women writers Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Emily Holmes Coleman, and Jean Rhys drew on fragmentation as a narrative and aesthetic strategy in fiction between 1925 and 1939 through their use of ellipses, omissions, and experimental prose, enabling them to portray posttraumatic subjectivity while also critiquing prospects for wellness, recovery, and resilience available to trauma survivors. These writers respond to the prevalence of fragmentary aesthetics during the modernist period and anticipate later demands by feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray to explore a more experimental, bodily form of women’s writing. I also turn to disability studies to contextualize my discussion of fragmented minds and bodies and to explore the implications of imbuing physical and mental forms of disability with metaphorical significance, especially alongside modernist authors’ social commentary about life after the First World War. I examine how Woolf, Larsen, Coleman, and Rhys develop the aesthetic potentialities of the fragment to portray the complicated aftermath of trauma for their characters. In chapters focused on the damaged psyches of WWI veteran Septimus Warren Smith and his wife Lucrezia of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the alienated, ever-wandering Helga Crane of Larsen’s Quicksand, the institutionalized young mother protagonist of Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow, and the dejected, alcoholic Sasha Jansen of Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, I assert that these authors found in fragments an experimental aesthetic and narrative complement to their outright criticism of a world often indifferent to posttraumatic suffering and survival. In these readings, I engage with philosophical and psychiatric responses to the topics of trauma and survival by Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Cathy Caruth, and Bessel van der Kolk. I conclude by analyzing recent works by contemporary women writers including Ottessa Moshfegh and Katherine May to demonstrate how the entangled subjects of trauma, recovery, and resilience continue to animate critiques of gender and wellbeing in the twenty-first century.