“The One Dependable Thing in a World of Strife, Ruin, Chaos”: Writing Trauma, Writing Self

Abstract

Both Woolf and Rhys produced, late in life, unfinished autobiographical accounts of the genesis and uses of writing in their lives. Significantly, both foregrounded the trauma of maternal absence in shaping their approach both to reading and to writing. Hence it is possible to see in their work the ways in which the relationship to the mother helped fashion what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas terms an “aesthetics of being.” Even more importantly, it is possible to chart the ways in which that aesthetics of being impact not only choices about plot, but representational form and pattern: Woolf accords her mother a principle of order and control that became key to her aesthetic of the “interrupted moment,” to use Lucio Ruotolo’s phrase; Rhys found her mother rejecting, dangerous, and punitive—a source of emotional pain so deep that it arguably haunted her for her entire life. Rhys’s extraordinary emphasis on style and form serves as a kind of “anodyne”—her favorite word, she repeatedly said—a way to dull the pain and make what might otherwise be unbearable bearable, to make the “unlovely stuff” “lovely” through work on the material. Form, in other words, becomes crucial in ordering and patterning the “unlovely” content.¹