Screened Trauma: World War II, Dead(ly) Women, and Wilson's Hetty Dorval (original) (raw)

2012, Mosaic: an Interdisciplinary Journal

H etty Dorval, Ethel Wilson's short first-published novel, has sparked some impassioned and sharply oppositional critical opinions, focused wholly on the title character. The narrative, told from the perspective of the adolescent Frankie (Frances) Burnaby, who becomes enthralled with the beautiful and mysterious Hetty Dorval, follows the restless moves of the eponymous character to and from the small town of Lytton in the interior of British Columbia to Vancouver, London, and, finally, to Vienna just before the outbreak of World War II. In all these places, Hetty appears determined "not [to] have [her] life complicated" by emotional attachments and responsibilities for others (24), 1 and her single-minded pursuit of her own interests is at the core of the critical controversy about the novel. The dominant view, posited primarily (though not exclusively) by male critics, regards Hetty "almost unanimously," as David Stouck sums up, "as a negative presence in something like an allegory of good and evil, wherein an adolescent child is being tempted away from the values of her family and community by a mysterious woman's glamorous representation of beauty, Ethel Wilson's first novel, Hetty Dorval, is generally regarded as a story of the triumph of good over attractive, female evil. This essay analyzes the novel as a "screen" or "cover" for underlying anxieties in order to examine the unconscious linkages between cultural concepts of (maternal) femininity and death.