Readings of trauma and madness in Hemingway, H.D., and Fitzgerald

This project explores how Modernist fiction narratives represent trauma, considering first, the struggle (commonly identified in psychology literature) between the need to speak about one's trauma and the equally powerful impulse to keep silent. Male representations of trauma differ noticeably from those of women, revealing social restrictions on both groups and offering an opportunity to explore the conditions under which characters both suffered trauma and retold it. Another, more overt and perhaps more common, indicator of trauma is madness. Furthering the debate between critics who read female madness as a resistance to patriarchy and those who read it as a site of further powerlessness, this examination presents a new category: that of the male representation of female insanity. This project presents instances of female insanity exacerbated by sexual and creative conflicts between men and women