This is also performed by their characters and themes – both novels present us with returning soldier figures (Septimus Smith and Clifford Chatterley), and display their trauma and the difficult relationship with their wives (Rezia Smith and Connie Chatterley), who were also traumatized to some extent. Irony plays an essential role in this respect: it not only relieves the gloomy post-war mood, but also allows them to keep a distance from the horrors they are writing about, besides permitting them to criticize a post-war society which in many respects seems to be acting as though the war never happened. I will therefore show how Woolf and Lawrence’s style and narrative strategies helped them express the trauma of their post-war society. Sanja Bahun’s paradoxical concept of ‘countermourning’, a mourning that refuses to mourn, will serve as a guide to my arguments regarding both novels and their writing of trauma. This appears in the writing of the period, and specifically in Mrs Dalloway and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the focus of this dissertation. A collective repression of trauma, as an attempt to forget the horrors of the war and to move on, constituted the basis for the Roaring Twenties. This dissertation aims to show how the trauma created by the First World War, in both returning soldiers and civilians, was so great that no one knew how to mourn the tragedy, which outlasted the Armistice.
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