Through readings of contemporary medical accounts of shell shock alongside Dorothy L. Sayers’ (1893--1957) popular detective novels, this essay argues that through the character of Peter Wimsey, a veteran of the World War I and a survivor of shell shock, Sayers not only participates in the creation of a new kind of male literary protagonist, distinguished by his vulnerability rather than virility, but also intervenes in a contemporary debate about the place of a shell-shocked soldier in post-war society. While the medical literature aligned the doctor, detective, and policeman against the soldier, shell shock victim, and criminal, Sayers exposes and revises the implied alignment of shell shock and criminality, using shell shock as the pre-condition for the creation of an empathic, flawed, and profoundly modern detective in a traumatized and diminished post-war England. Ariela Freedman is an Associate Professor at the Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, Montreal. In 2009 she spent a semester as a Visiting Professor and Halbert Fellow in the English Department of Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She is the author of Death, Men and Modernism (Routledge 2003) and has published articles on modernism, the First World War, and comics in Modernism/modernity, JJQ, Literature Compass, Joyce Studies Annual, and other journals and edited collections. She currently holds a SSHRC Grant for a project titled “Charlotte Salomon, Comics and the Representation of Pain,” and her work on Salomon has appeared in Criticism and the anthology Graphic Details: Jewish Women's Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (McFarland 2014). updated on March 16, 2015 |
|
|
|
