Together, then, our panel examines female travel and trauma in Middle Eastern folk tales, the quintessential (and longest) eighteenth-century English novel, and first novel written in English by a Mexican-American author. Scholarship has not yet examined female trauma in Arabian Nights’ Entertainments or Who Would've Thought It?. Scholarship by Victor Lams, Stephanie Insley Hershinow, and Daniel J. Crumbo discusses trauma in Clarissa, though no authors do so through the lenses of shame or mobility. Each panelist will speak for 15-17 minutes, thus allowing more than the 15 required minutes for unstructured discussion.
April Fuller’s paper examines gendered trauma associated with the passage of time. She considers the English translation of the anonymous Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (English language edition, 1721), in which violence against women serves as the underlying framework of stories: Scheherazade performs each night to entertain and reform the sultan Schahriar through storytelling in order to prevent him from murdering (more) women. First, Scheherazade must “expose herself voluntarily to be his wife, knowing the fatal destiny of the many sultanesses before her” (882). Then, she is required to work for 1,001 nights to remove his “fatal prejudice against all women” and sweeten “the violence of temper,” all under the threat of death.
Even with his “great esteem” for the work done by Scheherazade, it is the sultan who must “forgive her” and end his own barbaric law. Scheherazade “throws herself at his feet” and remains his wife despite his “unjust resentment,” thus remaining entrapped in his possession. At the end, though it may appear that she escaped from him wrath, violence is still embedded in his language, reinforced by the long passage of time. Traumatizing violence is never truly gone—only temporarily abated.
While Scheherazade’s storytelling is a means of self-preservation, Fuller’s paper will consider how Scheherazade’s narratives pervert or manipulate wonder, thus ironically making her stories cautionary tales against wonder itself. Adam Smith in “The History of Astronomy” argues that wonder diminishes as habit is established. Why, then, does Schahriar not lose interest when Scheherazade’s stories and patterns become repetitious? Fuller will argue that part of his intrigue (and ours) lies in a ‘perverted wonder,’ a supplement for the sultan’s violent behavior which, at any given point, verges on traumatic, erotic, and hubristic.
Fuller sees the frame story functioning as a microscope: as readers are funneled deeper into these nested stories, they experience a magnification of human behavior. This paper will trace the evolution of traumatizing violence into perverted wonder as it changes across stories. How do the third-level stories, like those of the calendars, depict wonder differently from the first- and second-level stories? What gets magnified, and why? Fuller will argue that these perverted wonders become more apparent the deeper we delve into the Scheherazade’s traumatic frame story.
Kristin Distel’s paper shifts the panel into geographic space, examining the way in which London’s streets and the exposure associated with them heighten the role of traumatic shame in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). Shortly after Clarissa’s sudden departure from the family home, she receives a letter from her sister, Arabella, in which Arabella tells her, “For it is wished you may be seen a beggar along London streets.” In eighteenth-century parlance, Arabella asserts that in the estimation of her family, Clarissa is the equivalent of a prostitute; her statement further situates streets as sites of sexualized shame—a traumatizing and deeply gendered emotion.
In defining the complex concept of shame, Sandra Bartky writes, “Shame is sometimes a reaction to real loss, to loss of face, this occasioned by the disclosure to oneself or to others of defects in the self that may come suddenly and horribly to light” (3). Distel’s paper will suggest that situating Arabella as the author of the aforementioned letter epitomizes the way in which women in this novel fail to protect each other and indeed sometimes subject one another to shame, especially shame that marks eighteenth-century London streets.
Distel’s paper will further consider the ways that the novel sexualizes the concept of the street, noting that the word “street” does not appear in the book until after Clarissa has fled Harlowe Place. Because Clarissa removed herself from the panoptical space of her father’s home, she is now subject to the dangers inherent to public life and the exposure associated with streets. Significantly, Lovelace, Clarissa’s rapist, is the first character in the novel to use the word “street.” Thus, the concept and place of the “street” is immediately coded as dangerous, traumatizing, and sexualized.
Finally, Aaron Babcock’s paper addresses María Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would've Thought It? (1872) with particular attention paid to its heroine, Lola Medina, and her migration to New England from the American Southwest in the wake of the Mexican-American War. Lola's internal migration to New England—which is also a form of traumatizing colonial migration—has consistently been critically understood by critics as predicting the thematic concerns of later works of Chicano/a writers.
Babcock’s paper, however, argues that it is also important to read the text and its heroine as engaging the moral imagination of the Reconstruction United States to redefine the boundaries of citizenship along a spectrum that is inclusive of not only recently emancipated Black Americans, but also of other non-white populations violently and traumatically brought into the borders of the United States.