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Shocks of the Past: Attending to Childhood Trauma in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse Patricia Jewell, Smith College In her autobiographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf reflects on the most vivid memories of her childhood. In the process, she realizes that “many of these exceptional moments brought with them a peculiar horror and a physical collapse; they seemed dominant; [herself] passive” (Woolf 72). Her young, fictional characters frequently experience similar moments of passivity in the face of horror. Traumatic episodes mar childhood memories in Woolf’s memoirs and novels. Woolf scholars acknowledge this pattern in her memoirs, but they tend to steer away from the horror that the fictional children in her novels endure—perhaps because it would be too easy to slip into the trap of imposing Woolf’s personal narratives onto her fiction. For the purposes of my argument, I do read Woolf’s own childhood history alongside her fictional narratives of early trauma, but instead of consigning her fiction to the realm of veiled autobiography, I argue that the parallels in Woolf’s memoirs and her fiction share a fixation on how we act out and work through childhood trauma later on in life. By putting these moments into words, Woolf demonstrates a rather adult capacity to diminish the shock of childhood trauma through articulation. Instead of romanticizing childhood, Woolf exposes its darker sides with the wisdom of a retrospective narrator. She foregrounds premonitions of death, feelings of fear, and harbingers of inevitable horror among the distractingly wholesome activities of childhood. In my texts of interest, Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse, children repeatedly fall victim to intensely unpleasant emotional experiences. Many of these episodes bear notable resemblances to Woolf’s own childhood memories, but I do not simply want to read Woolf’s biography onto her fiction. To do so would be an injustice to the larger interests of her work. Rather, I draw these connections to illuminate how Woolf reenacts (as much in her fiction as her autobiographical work) the retrospective impulse to make sense of seemingly senseless childhood horror from an adult perspective.
