Bergsonian Blend: Subjective Temporality within Modernist Aesthetics of Mental Illness

Henri Bergson was a modernist French philosopher who wrote extensively on the topic of the lived experience of time, which he called durée, or duration. His contemporary, Sigmund Freud, was developing psychoanalytic theory in a growing field of psychological study, which serves as a prominent ancestor to modern psychiatry and current psychoanalytical literary studies. Fiction writers of the 1900s absorbed the zeitgeist of melded chronology and consciousness, interweaving themes of time and trauma in their works. Utilizing Henri Bergson’s durée as a philosophical framework, I examine the moralization of time-consciousness in connection with mental illness and investigate representations of disturbed temporality in literary depictions of hallucinations, trauma, depression, and anxiety within three modernist short stories and three modernist novels: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters.