Karen Odden: Trains and Trauma

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Today I'm delighted to introduce debut historical mystery writer Karen Odden. She's the author of A LADY IN THE SMOKE: A VICTORIAN MYSTERY:

Following a humiliating fourth Season in London, Lady Elizabeth Fraser is on her way back to her ancestral country estate when her train careens off the rails and bursts into flames. Though she is injured, she manages to drag herself and her unconscious mother out of the wreckage, and amid the chaos that ensues, a brilliant young railway surgeon saves her mother’s life. Elizabeth feels an immediate connection with Paul Wilcox—though society would never deem a medical man eligible for the daughter of an earl.

After Paul reveals that the train wreck was no accident, and the inspector who tried to prevent it dies under mysterious circumstances, Elizabeth undertakes a dangerous investigation of her own that leads back to her family’s buried secrets. The more she learns, the more she must risk. Not only are her dowry and her reputation at stake; Paul’s very life hangs in the balance when he is arrested for manslaughter. As the trial draws near, and Parliament prepares for a vote that will change the course of the nation, Elizabeth uncovers a conspiracy that has been years in the making. But time is running out for her to see justice done.

Today Karen's visiting Jungle Reds to talk about Victorians, railway accidents, and trauma. As someone who writes about war and PTSD (before it was even diagnosed or named that) I found this piece fascinating. Welcome, Karen!

KAREN ODDEN: When I first began researching railways over a decade ago, my interest was actually in trauma. I’d been reading Oppenheim and Freud, whose late-1800s treatises began to describe traumatic neurosis. But as I read, I found myself thinking, OK, these guys are clever, but surely the notion of “trauma” didn’t spring into their heads out of nowhere. As I began to read histories of trauma and PTSD (a diagnosis officially accepted in 1980), I realized that to some extent, trauma began with the accounts of Victorian railway disasters.

One of the most famous accounts came from Charles Dickens, who survived a horrifying crash in 1865. He crawled out of his toppled railway car, dragging his mistress Ellen Ternan, her mother, and his manuscript for Our Mutual Friend behind him. He spent several hours ministering to other victims, serving them brandy from his hat. Then, he walked home. But in the days following, he had ringing in his ears; he had nightmares; and his hands shook so badly he couldn’t sign his usual flourish. By the 1860s, some medical men attributed these symptoms to “railway spine” or “concussion of the spine.” But most admitted they didn’t really understand it.

Intrigued by all this, I headed off to the London libraries to see if I could find other accounts. Little did I know. I found hundreds of newspaper articles, poems, sensation novels, parliamentary papers, cartoons, pamphlets, and medical treatises. Clearly, Victorians had a lot of anxiety about railway accidents! What I began to notice, though, was how many accounts hinted at how the experience was beyond words: “This railway disaster is simply too terrible to describe”; “the horror of it defies all description.” 

On the other hand, there were often strange overlaps or excesses in the accounts. For example, this illustration from a medical textbook is of a spine, but it’s drawn in a way that suggests a railway track too; thus, one illustration suggests both the cause of the injury and the injury itself. With a jolt, I realized that these failures of language and excesses of meaning were akin to the unspeakability and profusion of symptoms that we now associate with trauma and PTSD.

What began to interest me—after I recovered from the painful dissertation process—was how creative writers since the late 1800s have experimented with different literary elements to represent trauma.

One modern example is Tender is the Night. Beginning in 1925 and drawing on his experience of his wife Zelda’s mental illness, Fitzgerald wrote this story about a psychoanalyst Dick Diver and his former patient/wife Nicole, who suffers from mental illness brought about by the (arguably) traumatizing experience of being molested by her father. Significantly, in the first version, the novel contains three sections: the troubled present; a jump to the past (when Dick treated Nicole); and a return to the present. Perhaps not surprisingly, his critics didn’t like the “novel” structure. After Fitzgerald’s death, his friend Malcolm Cowley revised it so the story became chronological. But I think part of the power and discomfort that the original novel generates comes from the ruptures. 

Jump forward to after WWII, when the symptoms of “shell shock” (a post-WWI diagnosis) were well known. One of my favorite J.D. Salinger’s stories, “For Esme—with Love and Squalor” (1948) concerns a WWII soldier who meets a precocious young girl in an English tearoom before he leaves for the front. He survives five campaigns, but afterward he suffers from nervous tics; he can’t sleep or eat; he smokes incessantly; he has chewed his nails down until they bleed. Halfway through the story, there is a gap of white space, followed by:

            This is the squalid … part of the story. I’m still around, but from here on … I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.   

            It was about ten-thirty at night in Gaufurt, Bavaria, several weeks after V-E Day. Staff Sergeant X was in his room on the second floor of the civilian home in which he and nine other American soldiers had been quartered, even before the armistice.

The shift from first-person to third-person, the white space, and the meta-comment about the “disguise” suggest that by this point, conventions existed for representing the trauma of war, and people could begin to acknowledge war’s effects on those who survived it.

Now for the twenty-first century. I just read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel “Fun Home,” which demands a constant, even jarring switch back and forth between words and pictures. As I read, I felt in some way that the constant switching made me feel the unease of shuffling between two realities: the pain of knowing a frightening truth about a father and the desire not to know it.

What I love about literature is that it evolves. Maybe, as Christopher Booker once wrote, there are really only seven plots; I don’t know. But the ways stories are told changes over time. The flashback that breaks Tender is the Night doesn’t seem so “novel” any more. We’ve all seen the wry type of “meta” that Salinger uses in “Esme.” But what keeps literature vital is that writers are continually experimenting with form and structure and language, daring to stretch the bounds for representing human experience.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Thank you, Karen! Reds and lovely readers, we all read lots of mysteries and thrillers. Many of them deal with murder in an intellectual way (Sherlock Holmes, for example), yet others let their protagonists take the brunt of what they have witnessed and experienced. Who's your favorite character who's experienced a profound change in life/personality/outlook due to trauma? Who's your favorite character who seems to remain perpetually trauma-free? Please tell us in the comments!

Karen Odden's interest in the Victorian era and specifically railway crashes goes back to her New York University doctoral dissertation, which explored how the medical, parliamentary, and literary representations of railway disasters helped to create a discourse out of which Freud and others fashioned their ideas of “trauma.”

Karen has served as an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and taught classes in English language and literature at New York University and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She has contributed essays and chapters to books and journals, including Studies in the Novel, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation; and she has written introductions for Barnes and Noble’s Classics Series editions of books by Dickens and  Trollope. Prior to receiving her Ph.D. in English, she worked as an Editorial Assistant at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and McGraw-Hill, as a Media Buyer for Christie’s Auction House in New York, and as a bartender at the airport in Rochester, where she learned how to stop being shy. She is a member of SCBWI and Mystery Writers of America; and she currently serves as an Assistant Editor for the academic journal, Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP).

Karen currently resides in Scottsdale, Arizona with her husband, her two children, and her ridiculously cute beagle, Rosy.