PART I -- Trauma Theory -- Readings of Resistance in Hemingway's Trauma Fiction -- Domestic Trauma in H.D.'s HERmione -- PART II -- Madness in Modern Literature -- Readings of Gender and Madness in Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees and The Garden of Eden -- Infidelity and Madness in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night -- Production of the Body and Omission of Madness in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz -- Creating a Language of Rebellion -- Madness in H.D.'s HERmione -- Conclusion
Summary
Sarah Anderson explores how Modernist fiction narratives by Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.D., and Zelda Fitzgerald analyze the struggle between the need to speak about one's trauma and the equally powerful impulse to keep silent. Representations of traumatized men differ noticeably from those of women, revealing social restrictions on both groups, offering an opportunity to explore the conditions under which characters both suffered trauma and retold it. 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
