A Study Of Trauma In A Journal Of The Plague Year

Daniel Defoe is renowned for his world-classic novel Robinson Crusoe,and studies on him have revolved around it.Nevertheless,inspired by the outbreak of pestilence in Marseilles in the Fall of 1720 and representing the Great Plague of London in 1665,A Journal of the Plague Year has received little scholarly attention.Compared with Robinson Crusoe,the Journal also involves the trilogy of strand-struggle-rescue,yet with bleaker plight.It captures struggles like individual suffering intertwined with collective miseries,religious faith in conflict with natural science,and the dilemma of choosing between self-preservation and the public good.Furthermore,with gruesome accuracy and vivid imagination,Defoe represents the plight of people being stranded in the plague with the anesthetized sense,and the crisis of the whole community where death,disorder,and spectacle of desolation and desperation prevail.From the methodology of trauma studies,this thesis analyses the individual trauma of a plague survivor,H.F.,and the collective trauma of the London society in A Journal of the Plague Year.In doing so,the thesis intends to argue that by portraying the individual and collective experiences of the plague disaster,H.F.assumes the mission of the survivor,witnessing and representing the damages caused by the plague.Specifically,the plague causes individual trauma with symptoms of compulsive repetition.H.F.,the protagonist,is forced to repeatedly roam around the streets,visit the death pit,and retell the screams of women and cries of children.By representing the traumatic experience in a memoir,the unabsorbed traumatic residues are deciphered and the process of working through trauma begins.H.F.tries to explore the cause of the plague,its transmission,and the effective measures to prevent from being infected.Collectively,the widespread plague breeds severe anxiety and fright among people,which undermine the sense of community,and thus gradually dominate London society.Nevertheless,the same traumatized people are also constantly trying to rebuild their community and fight against the disaster together.Viewed as a whole,the descriptions of individual and collective experiences of the plague year demonstrate that H.F.bears the mission of the survivor.By providing testimony and rewriting,H.F.relives the damage brought by the plague.In addition,by depicting H.F.as a plague survivor,Defoe reenacts his own memories of the plague year.Through the voice of H.F.,Defoe reflects on the trauma caused by the plague.Through a detailed textual analysis,this thesis concludes that based on the Great Plague of London in 1665,the mission of the Journal is not to provide a documentary record of the plague year,but focuses on the impact of the plague on the human psyche.Plague trauma urges the survivor to shoulder his mission to represent the individual and the collective trauma.Besides,reenacting trauma is the necessary step to work through trauma.In this process,the traumatized can mourn for the dead and move forward.