Mock heroics and no man's lands: Trauma, masculinity, and nation in Alfred Lord Tennyson and Pat Barker

In Tennyson's "The Princess" and "In Memoriam", as well as in Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, trauma is represented through the figure of sexual difference. Masculinity is treated as emerging through various processes of wounding, both psychic and physical. In these texts the language of trauma is itself bound up with the language of sexual difference; the wounds, gaps and failures of speech that are symptomatic of trauma are rhetorically aligned with femininity. These failures and successes of masculinity are in turn imbricated with differing visions of the British nation.;This thesis reads the aforementioned texts, tracking their implicit understandings of trauma and gender. Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework, it identifies two major types of response to trauma in these texts, hysteria and melancholy. Melancholy functions as the condition of success for a dominant vision of masculinity in these texts, whereas hysteria signifies masculinity's failures. Hysteria and melancholy are then read as elaborating models of national identification in the texts in question. Both hysteria and melancholy are read as essential to the structures of masculinity and nation. These readings attend to both the plots, and the formal strategies utilized by Barker and Tennyson. Each author is seen to be negotiating between the modes of hysteria and melancholy. This negotiation is read as an effect of unconscious forces in the work of Tennyson. In the work of Barker it is interpreted as being a conscious ethical challenge.