Traumatic cosmopolitanism: Eleanor Dark and the world at war

Traumatic cosmopolitanism: Eleanor Dark and the world at war

This essay argues that women writers working during and prior to the Second World War produced works which might be identified as examples of ‘traumatic cosmopolitanism’ – that is, a cosmopolitanism forged through the shared experience of trauma. In narrativising their shared, global traumatic experience, and in particular, the experience of being a writer during this time, wartime women writers effectively construct a community of (thinking about and writing about) suffering which moves beyond the national discourses of jingoism and ignorance that can perpetuate trauma and violence. With a focus on Eleanor Dark’s wartime novel The Little Company (1945), this essay suggests that Australian women writers of the Second World War are at the vanguard of such ethical projects for the ways in which they challenge the lapse into nationalist dichotomous discourses of war, and considers the dual sense of psychological threat and the ethical responsibility of the writer which is figured in such works.

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