Re - reading of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper through Trauma Theory

Abstract

The present paper aims at to study the work of Woolf and Gilman in the light of
trauma theory. It mainly focuses on the interpretation of the characters i.e. Mrs. Dalloway and
Septimus Smith fromMrs Dalloway and an unnamed narrator from the Yellow Wallpaper.
The 20th century was a cradle of suffering, pain, dissolution, fear and depression due to the
two World Wars. During that age there were many theories comes into existence such as
feminism, nihilism, psychoanalysis, trauma theory, existentialism, etc. The situation after
post-wars was very different, people tried to lead a normal, smooth and simple life but some
people couldn’t come out from the memories of wars and some feel loneliness in the crowd.
As a result they felt severe depression which is the beginning of traumatic experience;
consequently this theme became the part of literary genres. Though Virginia Woolf and
Charlotte Perkins Gilman were the prominent leading figures of feminine writings but one
can find some aspects of traumatic experience in their writings. Thus the aim of the present
paper is to evaluate the situation of the select characters through trauma theory