Shellshock

It seems to have taken me four decades of reading, to come on a startling realisation midway through this novel, exactly why I so value the imaginative, innovative, skillfully crafted writing styles when reading novels, above the pedestrian and prosaic communications, even if the latter may well have some very interesting and important messages and stories to convey. In reading yet more of Shreve’s delightfully gentle prose which shows rather than tells, which gestures rather than insists, it is brought home to me how only via writing styles which are genuinely creative and uncliched, can I have experiences (via reading) that are not my own, which are actually often very far removed from my Self, to share (and even be immersed) in a completely different psyche and make up (mental and emotional), which can only be accessed through the wonderfully imagined and particular arrangement of words – which my own mind certainly would never have constructed. In running one’s mind along such differently crafted sentence constructs (carrying with them such novel ideas and different sets of morals and values and priorities and assumptions), one is taken out of one’s own skin, and temporarily enabled access into another. It is a double gift from storytellers who have the capacity and skill to offer this additional level of experience. The prosaic writing, by comparison, which is not lifted above the plodding and everyday, may well offer new thoughts and knowledges, but they are still via the reader’s own existent channels of thinking and feeling; they do not – cannot – so effectively take the reader out of themselves.  

Perhaps the subject of the novel’s narrative aided me in this simple – yet to me, still slightly startling – realisation. The protagonist is one Stella Bain, later revealed to be Etna Bliss. We meet her first in France, 1916, where she is recovering consciousness, and finds herself in a field hospital, surrounded by war. Apart from minor physical injuries, she seems largely unscathed, except for a complete memory loss. She cannot remember her own name, let alone anything else about herself. (It is worth noting Stella Bain and Etna Bliss are anagrams of each other, which Stella observes herself, which is another insight into the remarkable subconscious mind of our protagonist.) Hence the title of the novel – that this protagonist, who turns out to be a most remarkable woman in many ways, and remarkably gifted as well as strong in character – has two lives, as two different women, temporarily as Stella Bain while she struggles with shell shock, or what is more popularly known now as PTSD, where memory loss, particularly temporary memory loss, is a common side effect. 

That however, was not well known in the early 20^th century, and the diagnosis of being shell shocked tells against our heroine – for that she is, more than just a protagonist, she is definitely a heroine, in conventional war terms (such as bravery, saving lives on battlefields, etc) as well as in her domestic life, surviving rape and stigmatisation and fighting for custody of her children. In a letter for court proceedings, Stella’s doctor in London describes her as

a woman of exceptionally strong character, stamina and determination. She is graceful in her bearings and in her interactions with others. In addition, I believe she has a great capacity for love.

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By this late stage in the novel, although this may come across as telling rather than showing, the first 200 plus pages have shown all this so definitely, that it comes as a relief to the reader to have Dr Bridges sum it up for a sceptical court which does not know Stella as we do, by that stage, and may be misjudging her fitness to parent her children. 

Interestingly, that character reference would also fit many of Shreve’s other best protagonists in her other novels; Shreve so often depicts remarkable women, not necessarily remarkable in terms of class or wealth or beauty or even intelligence, but remarkable for their resilience, fearlessness in loving, and strength of character. They also have one more feature in common – a certain elegance, of mind and being, which is also translated to a certain elegance of body and bearing. 

There is a romance in this narrative, but it very much takes the backseat, with front stage being devoted to the experience of PTSD as well as gender issues of that day and time (the geographical location where the gender issues are played out are mostly in New Hampshire, USA, Stella Bain’s home, although the war scenes are in France and UK). It is a time where marital rape is not yet recognised, and it is apparently only newly a legal right for married women to independently own property. It is also a time when women’s moral characters are judged – and rather severely – before she is regarded as fit to be a parent – which includes any love affairs she may have had in the past, her own religious practices and performances, etc.  

It is not just the PTSD suffered after having seen horrific sights on the battlefront which is an interesting feature of this story – we later learn that Etna first fled the US after being attacked and raped by her husband, in a mental state which she herself may not have recognised as a nervous breakdown – running from her old life and throwing herself into voluntary nursing work on the battle front across the Atlantic, effectively, becoming Stella. The story comes full circle when during the time of her memory loss, she unexpectedly, and purely in a chance meeting, hears someone call out her real name – and her memory, which had been returning only in frustrating little slivers previously, suddenly returns to her in full. What is really interesting is the commonalities between the two women, or two lives; whether she knows herself or not, Stella/Etna behaves always with tremendous courage, self-sacrifice, decisiveness, and personal decorum. It is extremely heartening to know that even when our memories may be stripped away, it is possible that for some, the strongest threads of our personalities hold true. Stella may not have remembered she was married, or a mother, or anything else, but she retained all her skills (such as her pronounced skills as an artist) and she retained her essential Self.  

One of Shreve’s very readable novels, along with Testimony and Fortune’s Rocks.