The Gender Politics of Trauma during the Great War in Mrs. Dalloway, The Return of the Soldier and Sunset Song

Abstract

Traumatic disorders during the Great War were heavily gendered in regards to their diagnosis and treatment. Psychiatrists made a clear distinction between the traumatic experiences of women, known as ‘hysteria’, and the traumatic neurosis of soldiers, which
was popularly known as ‘shell shock’. The aim of this article is to study how gender politics influence the experience of trauma in three modernist novels: Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf), The Return of the Soldier (Rebecca West) and Sunset Song (Lewis Grassic Gibbon). In the exploration of the parallelisms and differences between shell shock in soldiers and the traumatic experiences of women in the domestic sphere in these novels, I argue that these experiences were not only marked by the expectations of appropriate behaviour according to the rigid gender roles of the period, but that they were triggered and accentuated by the
burden of these expectations on the psyche of individual men and women.