'I am expected to say something. I know not what' (Vivanti 1918, 146): silence and working through in rape narratives of the First World War. (3rd July 2019) - Read, Philippa
ABSTRACT: This article contributes to scholarly debates about sexual violence in the First World War, providing a psychoanalytic reading of silence as a topos in wartime narratives that portray the rape and resulting pregnancies of French and Belgian women. It locates the hegemonic silencing of women in a wartime debate that mainly took place in France and was concerned with the 'child of the enemy' and its mother. In the light of this particular historical context, the focus turns to a psychoanalytical re-examination of rape narratives. The work unpicks fore-drawn conclusions about these war stories being merely propagandist responses to news of enemy barbarism, linking traditional psychoanalysis with the specific function of the 'non-dit' first as a fictional, psychodynamic response to the experience of rape. Second, and driving the analysis forward further still, it shows that the ineffable in some narratives aberrantly brings to light the need for the articulation of memory, because re-finding their voice ultimately enables female characters to overcome their trauma.