A "pre-traumatic stress syndrome": trauma and war in Elizabeth Bowen's *The Last September* and *The Heat of the Day*

The article situates modernist literature within a context of unprecedented catastrophes and argues that trauma theory—especially the Freudian, post-traumatic model—has often framed interpretations of modernist writing. It challenges this prevailing view by proposing that Elizabeth Bowen’s depictions of wartime psyche in The Last September (1929) and The Heat of the Day (1949) exemplify a pre-traumatic mode, where anticipation and anxiety before violence cause psychic injury. Positioning Bowen at the intersection of modernist and postcolonial concerns, the paper argues that her Anglo-Irish background and World War II experiences converge, and that her representations of Anglo-Ireland’s decline and wartime London are mutually illuminating, thereby broadening our understanding of modernist trauma beyond aftermath to anticipation.

The paper surveys scholarship that aligns modernist literature with trauma and mourning (e.g., Baer 2007; Rae 2007), emphasizing the dominance of Freudian, post-traumatic models elaborated by Freud and later by Caruth. It then introduces Paul K. Saint-Amour’s "pre-traumatic stress syndrome" from Tense Future, which foregrounds anticipation and the psychic impact of an oncoming catastrophe. Saint-Amour’s framework is positioned between Freud’s past-oriented model (belatedness, latency, repetition) and Minkowski’s future-oriented psychology of expectation and anxious anticipation. Freud’s distinctions among anxiety, fear, and fright are reviewed, noting his view of anxiety as protective against trauma, while Minkowski treats expectation as inherently anguishing and traumatizing. The article synthesizes these perspectives, following Saint-Amour’s mediation between repressed past and anticipated future, and brings in related concepts such as prophecy, prolepsis, and bukimi (ominous premonition reported in Hiroshima accounts) to theorize pre-war or interwar psychic states. The literature on Bowen’s modernism/postcolonialism is also referenced (Jameson; Wurtz), alongside studies of wartime modernism and trauma to situate the contribution.

The study employs qualitative literary analysis grounded in trauma theory. It adopts Saint-Amour’s conceptual model of "pre-traumatic stress syndrome" as an analytic lens and undertakes close readings of Bowen’s The Last September and The Heat of the Day. The method involves: (1) theoretical framing through Freud, Caruth, Minkowski, and Saint-Amour to articulate a pre-traumatic paradigm; (2) textual analysis of scenes, motifs, temporality, and character psychology (e.g., denial, anxiety, dissociation, narrative nonlinearity) that register anticipatory trauma; (3) intertextual and contextual linkage between Anglo-Irish Big House culture and wartime London to trace continuities in dispossession and anticipation; and (4) application of bukimi to Bowen’s autobiographical paratexts and fictional premonitions to evidence anticipatory structures.

- The Last September depicts a pre-traumatic Anglo-Irish psyche characterized by denial and anxious anticipation before the Big Houses are burned. The community’s policy of "not-noticing" political upheaval (e.g., parties and tennis overshadowing raids) functions as both denial and a source of vulnerability, exacerbating later trauma. Specific moments include Lois’s misreading of an Irish gunman as a ghost, the Naylor household’s trivialization of threats (e.g., returned stolen watch), and Sir Richard’s dream of transforming into a Black and Tan—signaling identity anxiety and anticipatory dread. The novel ends with speechless paralysis at the conflagration, aligning with pre-traumatic symptoms culminating in catastrophe. - Bowen’s autobiographical reflections suggest premonitory bukimi about Bowen’s Court burning—an imagined anticipation more "real" to her than lived events—mapped onto Danielstown’s destruction, reinforcing the pre-traumatic frame. - The Heat of the Day captures a "war-climate" in which Londoners live between memory of past raids and fear of imminent ones. Anticipation operates as weaponized temporality: day/night cycles arch over "strain"; fatigue and fear of dying unknown permeate daily life. Characters display dissociation and normalization of violence (e.g., Stella and Harrison carrying on through gunfire; only the neighbor’s cat visibly reacts), indicating adaptation to repeated anticipatory stress. - Traumatic temporality manifests via disrupted chronology and retrospective reconstruction: reversals in narrative order (1942 to 1940; postmortem to inquest), Stella’s non-linear testimony, and her compulsion to "re-read backwards" reflect difficulty integrating experience. Time is destabilized (stopped clocks, unsynchronized watches), aligning with Stolorow’s account of traumatic temporality. - Anticipatory bukimi is retrospectively amplified in Stella’s flashbacks (premonitory sense of Robert’s death; the omnipresent threat of unexploded bombs), illustrating how expectation itself inflicts psychic damage in the present. - Across both novels, Bowen’s representation of trauma foregrounds anticipatory forces and anxiety as comparably injurious to realized violence, thereby expanding trauma studies beyond post-event frameworks.

The findings demonstrate that Bowen’s wartime and Anglo-Irish fictions articulate trauma as a condition generated in the shadow of impending catastrophe, not solely in its aftermath. This addresses the research question by showing that modernist trauma can be pre-traumatic: characters exhibit denial, anxiety, dissociation, and temporal dislocation before or between violent events. The analysis corroborates Saint-Amour’s mediation of Freudian belatedness and Minkowskian anticipation: Bowen’s texts show both the return of repressed pasts and the wounding force of future-oriented expectation. This reframing is significant for modernist studies, as it links colonial decline (Anglo-Irish dispossession) to WWII home-front psychologies, and for trauma studies, by theorizing anticipation, preparation, and expectation as media of psychic injury. The pre-traumatic paradigm explains formal features (nonlinearity, suspended endings) and character behaviors (not-noticing, routinizing violence) as adaptive yet traumatizing responses to perceived inescapable futures.

The essay argues that Bowen’s representations of wartime psyche in The Last September and The Heat of the Day exemplify pre-traumatic stress: traumatic symptoms and conditions (denial, repression, anxiety, dissociation, temporal disruption, bukimi) arise before or in anticipation of violent events. In The Last September, the Anglo-Irish experience pre-trauma prior to the burning of Big Houses; in The Heat of the Day, characters are more affected by the threat of future raids than by those already endured. By shifting attention from post-event belatedness to anticipatory injury, the study expands trauma studies within modernist literature and offers a framework relevant to understanding later and contemporary catastrophes. It suggests that re-examining modernist trauma through pre-trauma can inform analyses of later collective crises (e.g., epidemics, genocides, terrorism) and invites further research into anticipatory structures across modernist and postwar texts.