Session 3: Collateral Damage
3rd Global Conference
Saturday 19th September – Monday 21st September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
The Horror of the Nurses: Stillbirth and Shell-shock in H.D.’s Asphodel
Elizabeth Brunton
Department of English, Queen Mary University, Ireland
The life-threatening and gendered activities of war and childbirth have been linked in literature since Greek tragedy. The modernist writer H.D. develops this parallel in her novel Asphodel, when she draws on the First World War language of shell-shock in describing the experience of stillbirth. I will demonstrate in this paper how H.D.’s novel depicts a character ‘shell-shocked’ through her traumatic experience of birth. This is achieved through the symptoms experienced – nightmares, flashbacks and anxiety – but most importantly through connections in the root causes; in particular the twinned experiences of fear, horror and terror.
Fear is at the heart of literature on shell-shock, whether medical texts or personal accounts. Horror is encountered less in the medical writing of the day due its implications for the ethics of war. From personal accounts, however, it is evident that the sights, sounds and smells of the trenches impacted heavily on the mental state of the soldiers. Combined with witnessing the fragility of life and the randomness of its destruction, trench warfare created an encounter with terror and horror that is indubitable. Psychologists realised, however, that these experiences were not exclusive to war; in describing traumatic neurosis the comparison with the railway crash was frequently invoked. Asphodel’s protagonist Hermione experiences her stillbirth during a zeppelin raid in 1915. In witnessing the death of her child and being fearful for her own, she uses the setting of the war to highlight an underlying comparison. In speaking of “an abyss of unimaginable terror, the pain, the disappointment, the utter horror of the [stillbirth]”, she ties together her own situation and that of the shell-shocked soldier. The paper will draw on both the shell-shock literature of its day and recent psychological sources to show H.D.’s analogy as not only valid, but predicting later trends in the psychology of trauma.
‘Bullet-holes for eyes’: The Lingering Image of Horror in a 1920s Murder
Jo Chipperfield
University of Sydney, Australia
In the small hours of a September morning in 1927, PC George Gutteridge was shot dead in the quiet Essex village he patrolled. The ‘motor-bandits’ responsible finished the dying man off with a bullet to each eye, fired at close range. Their act was dismissed at the time as evidence of an erroneous belief in the superstition that the retina can retain the last image seen before death, and used by the press of the day as nothing more than salacious filler, an index to the villains’ barbarism and low intellect. As the first case to use ballistics evidence to bring a conviction in an English court, the Gutteridge murder was considered one of the country’s greatest criminal cases in the first half of the twentieth century. Today it has only local notoriety and limited fame in the annals of forensic science, yet the shooting of the eyes remains and has become the cornerstone of most narratives published on the murder.
My paper will explore the peculiar tenacity of this detail through an analysis of early experiments in retinal imagery and the significance of eye mutilation as a horror motif. I will argue that the visceral/visual symbology of the eye, as both witness to horror (and the horror of its own destruction) and an object of horror (when intact and watching or when blinded/mutilated) is key to this crime story. I will also suggest that the lack of explanation from the perpetrators themselves adds a level of mystery and uncertainty to a story which is otherwise perceived as neatly resolved through scientific and rational enquiry, and maintains abjection in an almost-forgotten crime over 80 years old.
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