Humanities (Apr 2022)
Imagining the Blitz and Its Aftermath: The Narrative Performance of Trauma in Sarah Waters’s <i>The Night Watch</i>
Abstract
Critics agree that Sarah Waters’ fourth novel, The Night Watch (2006), marks a turn in her fiction, away from the farcical tone of her first three neo-Victorian novels and towards an ever-more serious concern with the changes in class structures and gender roles brought about by the fact of war. The novel tells the parallel stories of three women and one man living in various areas of London in the 1940s. Though they have different social status, ideology, and sexual orientation, they share similarly traumatic experiences as, together with war trauma, they harbour individual feelings of loss and/or shame related to their deviance from patriarchal norms. The article seeks to demonstrate that the palimpsestic and backward structure of the novel performs formally the ‘belatedness of trauma’ (Caruth 1995, pp. 4–5), in an attempt to respond aesthetically and ethically to the ‘mnemonic void’ (Freud [1014] 1950) or ‘black hole’ (Pitman and Orr 1990; Bloom 2010; Van der Kolk and McFarlane [1998] 2004) left both in the characters’ traumatised psyches and in our cultural memory of the 1940s by the erased memories of the decade’s non-normative or dissident others.
Keywords
