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Chapter I: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in Paula Hawkins’

The Girl On The Train

This research is about the motives of murder reflected in Paula Hawkins’s

novel The Girl on the Train. The Girl on the Train is the best seller novel in 2015.

This is an interesting and new novel. The issue about trauma can also appear in

literary works. It is because literature is a mirror of human’s life “…literature mirrors

or expresses life” (Wellek and Warren 90). Therefore, this study is going to analyze a

literary work with traumatic approach.

This novel was written by Paula Hawkins. The Girl on the Train is a complex

novel with several themes including of domestic violence, alcohol, drug abuse and

murder. The main characters are Rachel, Anna Watson, and Megan Hipwell. Rachel is

the protagonist of this story, thirty-two years old and an alcoholic woman. Megan

Hipwell is the woman named by Rachel as Jess. She is Scott’s wife and seemed as the

perfect couple. However, sometimes she feels uncomfortable because her husband is

overprotective. Anna Watson is beautiful and younger than Rachel. In this novel,

Anna Watson is a terrible woman because she makes Rachel and Tom divorced.

Related to the explanation above, The Girl on the Train is one of the most global

bestseller novels that tells about a woman’s mysteries which is related to murder.

Many people lose their life and one of the motives is murder. Murder happens when a

person kills another because they have different motives for it. According to the

United State Bureau of Census in Palermo "murder is social violence and expression

of unbridled hostility outwardly directed and it has increased considerably in the

United States" (206). Murder and suicide are subdivided into several categories, such

as familial, spousal, and extra-familial types. Rosenbaum in Palermo (1994:214)

stated that "in the fact of murder and suicides involving couples are perpetrated by a
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man over 90 %. It means that a woman who kills her couple or her husband is less

likely to commit suicide than a man" (12).

The story is about three women who have their own stories which can be

considered as traumatic. There are own story cannot be separated from one another.

Rachel has spent the last few years stumbling through life in a booze filled depression

ever since her husband left her for another woman. Anna is the woman that Tom,

Rachel’s ex-husband, cheated on Rachel. Megan is the woman whom Tom had an

affair with when he was married to Anna. So, all those three women in the novel

experience traumatic events.

Furthermore, The Girl On The Train received mostly positive reviews from

critics and audiences alike. Kirkus Reviews praised the novel with a starred review

and honoured it as one of the best books of 2015, writing that “even the most astute

readers will be in for a shock as Hawkins slowly unspools the facts, exposing the

harsh realities of love and obsession’s inescapable links to violence.”

(Goodreads.com). Based on discussion above, the researcher is interested in

discussing the trauma experienced by Megan in The Girl On The Train. Specifically,

the researcher is interested to know the effects of trauma and how it acted out as a

PTSD.The researcher chooses this issue because the message this novel delivers.

The term 'trauma' refers to an unpleasant emotional experience with a variable

and more or less permanent effect upon mind and the personality of individual

suffering. It is a psychological problem seen in a patient who is the victims of rape,

domestic violence, sexual harassment, abductions, terror and violence, etc. It becomes

problematic because of its repeated nature. Traumatic patient will have recurring

events of violence, thus making their lives, a living hell. They will lose the pace of

life and normalcy. They remain void of feeling and often become mad. Some may
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even lose their memory and human sensibility. It is an action shown by the abnormal

mind to the body and provides a method of interpretation of disorder, distress and

destruction aroused by the psychological repression. It shows the direct relation in

abnormal phenomena. The abnormality is mostly psychic but is manifested in the

physicality which becomes more uncommon and stressful.

Trauma theory, another discourse along with modern perspectives of the

unrepresentable, of the event or object destabilizes language and demands a

vocabulary and syntax in some sense incommensurable with what went before. Its

thrust, as a metaphor of unpredictability, lies on its fruitful enigmatic survival of

problems and destruction. It exposes not only a phase of destruction but an enigma of

survivals, a metaphor of existence.

Traumatic experiences existed in some literary works before a long time but

the few decades have been a period in which 'trauma' as an object of inquiry has

moved beyond the parameters of clinical study to become a preoccupation, if not a

fetish, among literary and cultural critics. Since 'trauma' being a part of

psychoanalysis, the society for the Humanities and Social Sciences, is concerned with

the present and discusses work on trauma and its association with psychoanalysis.

Now, a unique and realist discourse, 'trauma' studies' has become a part of study into

its own area. The idea of trauma allows for an interpretation of cultural symptoms-- of

the growth, wounds and scars on social body, and its compulsive repeated actions. It

fulfills the requirement of study about how events in the past return to haunt the

present. Theory of trauma intersects with other critical aspects crossing the limits of

the certain discourses. The traumatic symptoms are not only somatic, nonlinguistic

phenomena; they occur also in language.

Relating to the Medic, The American Heritage College Dictionary defines

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trauma as "a serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident, "

Various stress-related disorders may result from the trauma experience, e.g., Post

Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, phobia attention, hyperactivity disorder,

anxiety disorders, somatization disorder, attachment disorders, and conduct disorder,

dissociative reactions, eating disturbances, and substance abuse. Trauma effects may

also be evidences as:

Multiple personalities, paranoia, anger, and sleep problems; tendencies

towards suicidality, irritability, mood swings, and odd rituals;

difficulty trusting people and difficult relationships; and general

despair, aimlessness, and hopelessness [. . .] trauma includes "certain

forms of maliciously perpetrated violence, war experiences, industrial

accidents, and natural disasters". (Root 229)

Recently, however, the study of trauma has expanded to include a more diverge group

of trauma experiences and syndromes, such as: the battered women syndrome, the

rape-trauma syndrome, the post sexual abuse syndrome, and the battered child

syndrome.

The critics such as Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman turn from work

on the undecidability of interpretation in literature to publish work on Holocaust

memory and witness in the early 1990s. Cathy Caruth signalled that trauma as the

limit of knowledge is a continuation of the Yale Project. In its most general definition,

trauma describes an overwhelming experience of "sudden or catastrophic events, in

which the responses to the event occurs in the after delayed and controlled repetitive

occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena" (181). When traumatic

experience takes place, the mind and body are found in numbed state. In such

situation Post Traumatic Stress Disorder takes place.

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Sigmund Freud, a critic and explorer of trauma as a form of psychoanalysis,

studies dynamics of trauma, repression and symptom formations as a matter of

hysteria. Freud held that an overpowering event, unacceptable to consciousness, can

be forgotten and yet return in the form of somatic symptoms of compulsive repetitive

behaviors. In this regard, critic James Berger writes on concerning matter of Hysteria

and neurotic symptoms:

This initial theory of trauma and symptom become problematic for

Freud when he concluded that neurotic symptoms were more often the

result of repressed drives and desires than of traumatic events. Freud

return to the theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a work

which originated in his treatment of World War I combat veterans who

suffered from repeated nightmares and other symptoms of their

wartime experiences. (570)

The traumatic event and its aftermath again become central to psychoanalysis.

Further, the theory of trauma for Freud becomes the account for the historical

development of entire culture. And he develops the elaboration of the concept of

'latency' Berger defines the term as "a memory of traumatic events which can be lost

over time but then regained in a symptomatic form when triggered by some similar

events" (3).

Symptoms of hysteria among middle and upper class women prompted the

first extended study into trauma. Freud also had an announcement at his revelation

that 'at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of

premature sexual experience.' Freud's study does not escape from the sexual trauma,

though his research focuses upon psychoanalysis, sex and instinctive impulses. The

exploration on sexual trauma is widely seen in the present literary phenomena. The
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trauma victims are somewhat the victims of the sexual trauma, because of the severity

and nature of trauma, however, the survivors evoke the defense coping mechanism of

denial of repression in which the memories are avoided or forgotten and, and under

ordinary circumstances, not accessible to cognition.

The events and the usual representation of these events have in large part

shaped contemporary modes of viewing the world. The world develops according to

the upcoming challenges and the changes. The trauma, based upon Freudian

interpretation of mind, is somehow developed by the inner psyche of mankind. The

result of trauma has become as a tool of literary and cultural analysis. According to

Freud, the trauma analysis pays the closest attention to the representational means

through which an event is remembered and yet retains the importance of the event

itself, the thing that did not happen. James Berger provides the reason for its

popularity by saying:

The successions of Die Hards, Terminators, and Robocops, as well as

Nightmares on Elm street, disease and epidemic films and now the

return of the "classic" disaster films and of twisters and turbulence and

the repeated sequence of mini apocalypses within each films; at "real

life" cop shows: and at the news itself, that never exhausted source of

pure horror. (571)

Thus, these days there are horror-inspiring representation of violence and disaster in

books, films and TV serials which have interested the critics who have felt the great

need to study trauma theory because these events leave a great mental shock in

readers and viewers.

The trauma theory has aroused a vivid interest among the cultural and literary

theorists. Cathy Caruth similarly explores the priniciples of trauma and its narrative
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history. In the book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Caruth

sketches the theory of trauma as instigator of historical narrative through an analysis

of Moses and Monotheism; describes the intersections of traumatic narratives in the

Alain Resnais film Hiroshima; outlines a theory of reference as the imprint of

catastrophic face in a discussion of de Man and ends with a reading of Lacan's gloss

of Freud's interpretation of the dream of the burning child (a sequence of

interpretation that itself highlights issues of traumatic transmission), in which she

proposes testimony as providing an ethical relation to trauma.

Caruth presents her arguments on pain and language, the relation between its

narrative, historical and ethical dimension. She becomes the critique of Paul de Man

as well as defense of decompanion methods of interpretation. For Caruth trauma as it

first occurs is incomprehensible as "the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in

its belatedness, in its refused to be simply located" (8). Then the narrative of trauma

becomes delayed history and its aftermath with not a immediate understanding. In

relation the de Manian theory of language, Caruth argues and proceed to a quite

difficult discussion of how events befall authors, how language falls short of perpetual

reality while producing reference through this fall and how reference ultimately

"registers, in language, the impact of an events" (74). In this discussion Caruth seems

to point out the author oriented trauma reflected on a text. Trauma either writer's own

experiences of 'repressed' reflects on text or the historical narratives which shapes the

hunging methodological trend in writing. Though, it becomes literary symptom,

unconscious inevitable imprints of events on text in the form of verbal ticks to tropes.

Hence, Caruth makes a comment on de Manian interpretation that blurs at the end into

an implied apology for de Man's who is unable to describe the implications of

wartime writings.
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The impact of major traumatic events is never identical to any two people and

those trauma manifests where political and psychological forces fuse. On this point

Deborah M. Horvitz cites Cathy Caruth, who has written extensively on

psychoanalysis and trauma theories, states:

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is

because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex

relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is, indeed at the

specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect with the

language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic

experience precisely meet. (5)

In the field of literary studies, trauma theory has come not as a surprise. As Cathy

Caruth points out in her introduction to Trauma Exploration in Memory, the issue of

trauma has triggered a "fundamental disruption in our received modes of

understanding and of cure, and a challenge to our very comprehension of what

constitutes pathology" (335). Now, the phenomenon of trauma has seemed all-

inclusive Trauma can be defined from two approaches: First, Psychoanalytic-

formalistic approach, and second, Cultural approach.

Unlike the psychoanalytic-formalistic approach, cultural approach examines

the undercurrents of the distorted testimonies by contextualizing it in the network

cultural-politics. It is that sense trauma brings home the limitations of our

understanding and at the same time it dislocates the so-called traditional disciplinary

boundaries leading us "to rethink our notions of experiences and of communication"

(334). In a person's telling of traumas" what remains to be said is the disaster [. . .]

ruins of words, demise of “(qtd. in Ryan Lamothe 543) for both the speaker and

listener. The ruin of words, this sense of being defeated by the disaster is embedded,
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paradoxically, in the very act of speaking. It is the catastrophe of trauma that

undercuts our attempts to organize and communicate experience through our stories,

theories, and models.

Traumatic past, experienced in the literary text itself plays the role to prove the

traumatic representation and reference, and how it becomes text and how a wound

transforms into a voice. A Popular critic, Geoffery Hartman, focusing on the

deconstructive rereading of romantic literature started to turn his interest to the

‘remembrance and representation’ of the Holocaust in early 1990s. Defining the

Trauma Study in the arts and literature, Hartman, in Trauma Within the Limits of

Literature explores the relation of “psychic wounds and signification” (257). The

structure of psychic wounding of ‘trauma’ in its physical connotation has a bearing on

the second of the “pressure and relief of a determining yet deeply occluded

experience” (257).

Moreover, Trauma theory, which focuses on acting out or working through

trauma has its own issue and it can not be explained with in its limited territory for it

is interconnected "with specific ethical and socio-cultural tension" (257). This arises

from an awareness of persistence of violence in a culture that no longer condones the

marital virtues of war. After Nazism, and totalitarianism generally, yearning for the

arts of peace has never been greater. But continuous ethic conflict, genocidal

episodes, and irrational and bloody event, reported as the main staple of the news, set

up an intolerable contrast between that yearning and intractable. As a matter of fact,

the trans-historical awareness of the incidence of trauma-personal or collective should

make is realize the extent of human suffering.

Trauma stretches from psychic life to public history, reading materials that can

include romantic poetry, psychiatric histories, sexual abuse, memoirs, testimonies,

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documentaries, the symptoms, silences, omissions and so many others in national

histories. Trauma theory can be understood as a place where different critical

approaches converge. In a way, it is a product of another of those periodic crises

about the function of criticism in society.

Hartman had effectively translated his long critical career into variations on

the study of trauma. If trauma marks the disjunction between the event and the forever

belated, incomplete understanding of the event, then, Hartman argued, this war at the

heart of Romantic Poetry. Figurative language is a form of ‘perpetual troping’ around

a primary experience that can never be captured. Whether it is Coleridge’s Ancient

Mariner compulsively repeating his tale, or William Blake’s private and cryptic

mythology, or Wordsworth’s account, in The Prelude, of how poetic subjectivity is

created through wounding events. Hartman regards trauma theory as a key expository

device. Hartman had always emphasized that “poetic discourse induced a proliferation

of meanings; trauma was now the motivating nature of the negative that provokes

symbolic language” (Berger 540).

The burden on imagination is motivated by the fact that many families were

decimated in the Holocaust, so that the injury suffered becomes an injury to memory

itself, to the very possibility of recollection. The act of remembrance, especially by

the immediate descendents, turns in a vacuum as it tries to recover individual details

about the life and death of those who disappeared. The internal other in this ‘compact

void’ is here rarely, into the presence of imaginary figures, interlocutors summoned

from the void and who must assume a convincing identity, that ‘ solidity of,

specification’ which alone satisfies, according to Henry James, a modern realism.

The wound words cause is generic in the sense that discourse as such, whether

private or public, literary or philosophic, consolidates the difference between words

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and things. This perspective differs from discourse analysis like Foucault’s, which

concentrates on the link between “power and established professional idioms” (263).

It does not challenge the relevance of discourse analysis.

In order to get a deeper understanding in analyzing the effects of the traumatic

event, the writer uses Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which is known as PTSD.

According to Scoot & Stradling, " the incident of PTSD in general population is

approximately the same as that of schizophrenia, affecting about percent of the

population at any one time." ( Scoot & Stradling 1). The cause of PTSD is the

stressor, which in this case is the traumatic event, and it can happen in several ways.

The first is an event posing a serious threat to one's life or physical integrity. For

example, a soldier who is almost killed by the enemy on the battlefield will have

trauma about his past. The Second, an event which presents the possibility of a serious

threat to one's loved ones. For example, someone who witnesses that his mother or

father die in an accident (Scoot & Stradling 1). Scoot & Stradling explain that there

are five criteria to be met for a diagnosis of PTSD. The first one is, the client must

have witnessed or experienced a serious threat or their life or physical wellbeing.

Second, the client must have experienced the event in some way. Third, the client

must persistently avoid stimuli associated with the trauma or experience a numbing of

general responsiveness. Fourth, the client must have experienced persistent symptoms

of increased arousal. In this study, this criterion consists of three indicators. The first

one is the difficulty of falling asleep. The second is irritability or outburst of anger. It

is an inability to control the emotion so it has become unbalanced. The person will

easily get angry toward another person. The third is hyper vigilance. This causes the

unusual increase of the person's alertness. Fifth, symptoms must have lasted at least a

month. Each of those criteria may be met in a number of ways.

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Furthermore, Scoot & Stradling explain more about the components of PTSD.

It has symptoms which are closely related one to another. In a PTSD, the traumatic

experience which is the stressor will lead to an intrusive imagery or feeling of re-

experiencing the trauma. This situation causes the person to give a reaction toward

this uncomfortable feeling. The avoidance of situation may become the result of this

condition which also may serve again as the trigger for the intrusive imagery. The

connection between intrusive imagery and avoidance behavior can lead to disordered

arousal. For example, a woman who had the traumatic experience with a car accident

because she was hit by another car while she was driving may be troubled by intrusive

flashbacks of the accident. In her effort to reduce flashbacks she may avoid driving a

car or even to get in a car. This behavior was stated as avoidance behavior and it

indeed served to reduce the intrusive imagery of the accident. However, if she was

unexpectedly or accidentally put in a condition where she had to get into a car or drive

in a car, the intrusive imagery would be increased and may be led into disordered

arousal which might be reduced again by avoidance behavior. This model component

is the most major of PTSD (Scoot & Stradling 5).

Scoot & Stradling stated that "different people react to objectively similar

situation differently." (8). For example, student A will react to a failure of an exam

with disappointment while student B becomes motivated. This condition makes the

components of PTSD develop. It depends on the efficacy of the individual's coping

response, where maladaptive or negative coping responses fuel the feedback loop,

while adaptive or positive coping responses may break the cycle and enable an exit

from the loop. The girl who experiences a car accident will develop the maladaptive

coping response. For example, if she always avoids driving in a car and she prefers to

get into other vehicles, the symptoms of her PTSD will persist. However, if her
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coping strategy is the adaptive strategy where she tries to engage her trauma. For

example, if she tries to overcome her fear and try to drive in a car, she may break the

symptoms of her PTSD (Scoot & Strading 8).

The first incident that caused trauma in this novel is Ben’s accident. Ben is

Megan’s older brother. “He died due to the accident and his skull crushed beneath the

wheels of an articulated lorry” (24). Meanwhile, A10 is a major road in England. It is

known as Great Cambridge Road or Old North Road in certain sections. The road is

prone to traffic congestion, in particular because of the many junctions with local

roads. The traffic congestion may cause heavy traffic jam and frustrated drivers. This

condition is highly possible to cause Ben’s accident. Megan is deeply affected by her

brother’s death. She even thinks that his death is the trigger of everything that

happens in her life. After the accident she says:

I miss him every day. More than anyone, I think. He’s the big hole in

my life, in the middle of my soul. Or maybe he was just the beginning

of it. I don’t know. I don’t even know whether all this is really about

Ben, or whether it’s about everything that happened after that, and

everything that’s happened since. (24)

The quote above tells about Megan’s feeling about her brother. She feels like

losing Ben is the thing that causes her problem. Megan is the only one in her family

who loses Ben deeply. As the one of last sister that he has, Ben really gives Megan

attention and protection especially from the men. Automatically, Megan has deep

sadness because she never expected that her brother die, moreover she saw by herself

how the tragic accident happened. From what she experienced, she gets the trauma

and stress disorder from the accident. She further evokes:

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I think about that time when we went on a family holiday to Santa

Margherita in the Easter school holidays. I’d just turned fifteen and I

met this guy on the beach, much older than I was—thirties, probably,

possibly even early forties-and he invited me to go sailing the next day.

Ben was with me and he was invited, too, but-ever the protective big

brother—he said we shouldn’t go because he didn’t trust the guy, he

thought he was a sleazy creep. Which, of course, he was. But I was

furious, because when were we ever going to get the chance to sail

around the Ligurian Sea on some bloke’s private yacht? Ben told me

we’d have lots of opportunities like that, that our lives would be full of

adventure. In the end we didn’t go, and that summer Ben lost control

of his motorbike on the A, and he and I never got to go sailing. (49-50)

From that quotation, Megan describes how her brother Ben protects her from

the man who will take her to the beach because he did not believe him. The quote

expresses Megan’s thought of remembering she and her brother will never do the trip

plan because of the accident. How much Ben’s accident is affecting Megan is

expressed by the online article that Rachel, one of the female characters in the novel,

reads on the train she always takes every morning: Born Megan Mills in Rochester in

1983, she moved with her parents to King’s Lynn in Norfolk when she was ten. She

was a bright child, very outgoing,a talented artist and singer. A quote from a school

friend says she was “a good laugh, very pretty and quite wild" (67). Her wildness

seems to have been exacerbated by the death of her brother, Ben, to whom she was

very close. He was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was nineteen and she

fifteen. She ran away from home three days after his funeral. She was arrested twice.

Once for theft and once for soliciting. Her relationship with her parents, the Mail
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informs her, broken down completely. Both her parents died a few years ago, without

ever being reconciled with their daughter. Rachel said, "Reading this, I feel

desperately sad for Megan. I realize that perhaps, after all, she isn’t so different from

me. She’s isolated and lonely, too" (71). The news article reports that Megan is a

popular person at that time because her profession as an entertainer. However, she

becomes a very different person after Ben died. She ran away from home, got arrested

twice, thus, broke her relationship with her family. The second incident that caused

Megan’s trauma is the death of her baby because of her carelessness. It becomes a

traumatic event experienced by Megan because it presents the possibility of a serious

threat to one's loved ones, in this case the death of her baby. Her carelessness that

causes her baby died makes her seriously distressed after her brother’s death. It is

because she feels guilty that she can not really protect her baby:

… I close my eyes, and it doesn’t take me long to get back there, back

to the bathroom. It’s weird, because I’ve spent so long trying not to

think about it, about those days, those nights, but now I can close my

eyes and it’s almost instant, like falling asleep, right into the middle of

a dream.(165)

The cause of her trauma is her carelessness. On the quote above, she retells the time

she tried to relax her body by bathing up with her baby leaning on her chest. Her time

relaxing made herself too comfortable until she did not realize that she was falling

asleep with her baby still leaning on her chest. She says:

It was dark and very cold. I wasn’t in the bath any longer. “I don’t

know exactly what happened. I remember waking up, I remember

knowing that something was wrong, and then the next thing I know

Mac was home. He was calling me. I could hear him downstairs,
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shouting my name, but I couldn’t move. I was sitting on the floor in the

bathroom, she was in my arms. The rain was hammering down, the

beams in the roof creaking. I was so cold. Mac came up the stairs, still

calling out to me. He came to the doorway and turned on the light.” I

can feel it now, the light searing my retinas, everything stark and

white, horrifying. (165)

The quote above tells about what happen to the baby when Megan accidentally

fell asleep. Megan has realized that her baby has been under water when she wake up.

She could not move from bath up because she felt blank, chaotic, and did not know

what she must to do because she saw the condition her baby was not breathing and

cold. The death of her baby that affects Megan’s condition a lot. When she married

with Scott, she cannot bear the possibility of having baby. The condition becomes

worse because Scott wants to have baby with her. The writer realizes that a traumatic

experience in the past will take effect in someone’s present life. The main effect of

Megan’s traumatic experience is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which has

symptoms such as intrusive imagery, avoiding stimuli, and increased arousal. This

criteria consists of three indicators. The first one is difficulty to sleep. The second is

irritability or outburst of anger. It is inability to control the emotion so it becomes

unbalanced. The person will easily get angry towards another person. The third is

hyper vigilance. The main symptom of PTSD is experiencing an involuntary return of

traumatic events in the form of dreams or intrusive shadows, which penetrates into

consciousness suddenly flashback. This is often triggered by things that remind the

sufferer of a traumatic event that has ever been experienced. Signs of increased

arousal come in the form of severe anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and poor

concentration. The first symptom which is experienced by Megan is having difficulty

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to sleep knowing as insomnia, “ … I’ve been up for hours; I can’t sleep. I haven’t

slept in days. I hate this, hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain

going round, tick, tick, tick, tick. I itch all over. I want to shave my head" (24).

Megan’s sleep difficulty disturbs her very much. She even wants to cut her hair

because of that. In other occasion, she even feels like there are invisible bugs

disturbing her sleep. "I can’t sleep in this heat. Invisible bugs crawl over my skin, I

have a rash on my chest, I can’t get comfortable. And Scott seems to radiate warmth;

lying next to him is like lying next to a fire. I can’t get far enough away from him and

find myself clinging to the edge of the bed, sheets thrown back. It’s intolerable"

(129).The quote above tells what Megan feels when she has insomnia. She even feels

that Scott makes her uncomfortable therefore she cannot sleep. Megan’s insomnia is

also affirmed by her husband. Scott affirms that his wife is having “trouble sleeping”

and that “it started last year some time” although he “[doesn’t] remember when

exactly” (98). Patients experience insomnia because the previous activities bring

themselves under pressure to imagine something that makes them feel back the

trauma and burden of the discomfort of his response because of the shadow of trauma.

The reason for the difficulty of sleeping that Megan experienced was due to her

household problems. She feels that she has disappointed her husband who wants the

presence of a child but Megan cannot fulfill her husband's desire due to her trauma

with a baby,“. . . [Tom] wanted to have a child. Megan kept saying she wasn’t ready

yet. … “It’s one of the things . . . [they] argued about it sometimes” (125).

Although Megan is trying to deal with her trauma, but it is still difficult to

want a child. Day to day Megan is incessantly getting urged from her husband to have

a child. Megan has felt the uneasiness of pushing her husband. Finally she felt

haunted by guilt for always making her husband feel unhappy. The conflict with her
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husband is not only about of having a child, but also about having feeling for her

psychiatrist. It disturbed her mind too. She realized and thought that she had given her

husband a disappointment, but she added another suffering. She likes her own

psychiatrist, named Kamal Abdic, because of his tender nature that eventually made

Megan interested to approach him. Not only interested in ordinary, Megan became a

woman who begged attention to Kamal. So, when she feels agitated and chaotic she

prefers going to Kamal instead of her husband. She asserts:

I’m sitting on the sofa in his living room, a glass of wine in my hand.

… He comes in from the kitchen and sits at my side, comfortably

close. If I could, I would come here every day, just for an hour or two.

I’d just sit here and drink wine, feel his hand brush against mine …I

lean back a little against him, against his warm body. He lets me. (165)

In that condition, Megan could not really control herself. Moreover she could

not overcome the very thing that will endanger her household. She does anything to

make herself comfortable. When she feels uneasy, she does not try to make herself

comfortable with her husband. Instead, she expects others to calm her down no matter

what the circumstances are. When she was near her husband, she insisted on making

herself comfortable but she did not feel any comfort before she got her wish. Making

herself comforted by others does not make Megan really feel comfortable and secure.

Precisely her feelings of worry were becoming more and more increased. The feeling

of worry brought her even more depressed and anxious.She explains:

I feel as though we’re having a fight already, even though the fight’s

only in my imagination. And in my head, thoughts go round and round

and round. I feel like I’m suffocating. All I know is that a few months

ago I was feeling better, and now I can’t think and I can’t sleep and I
 19

can’t draw and the urge to run is becoming overwhelming. At night

when I lie awake I can hear it, quiet but unrelenting, undeniable: a

whisper in my head, Slip away. When I close my eyes, my head is

filled with images of past and future lives. (163)

From the statement above, Megan's condition was not secure. Her response led

her to feel she had made a big mistake. She felt a fight although she experienced the

feeling herself. It makes difficult to her to calm down. The situation makes Megan

seeks more comfort to Kamal in an unprofessional way. Kamal refuses her because it

is “not appropriate”. He cannot “let-things get this far” with Megan because he could

lose his job as a psychiatrist "(108).

However, Megan cannot take Kamal’s refusal. She becomes angry and yells at

him. In the end she forces herself to him by kissing him “on the mouth”. She “[bits]

his lower lip as hard as [she] could; [she] could taste his blood in [her] mouth. He

pushed [her] away”(108). Megan’s affair with someone else is not only having feeling

for Kamal, but also having affair with Tom. Tom is Rachel’s ex-husband who is now

becomes Anna’s husband.

The room is dark, the air close, and sweet with the smell of us. We’re

at the Swan again, in the room under the eaves. It’s different, though,

because he’s still here, watching me. “Where do you want to go?” he

asks me. “A house on the beach on the Costa de la Luz,” I tell him. He

smiles. “What will we do?” I laugh. “You mean apart from this?” His

fingers are tracing slowly over my belly. “Apart from this.” “We’ll

open a café, show art, learn to surf.” He kisses me on the tip of my hip

bone. “What about Thailand?” he says. I wrinkle my nose. “Too many

gap-year kids. Sicily,” I say. “The Egadi islands. We’ll open a beach
 20

bar, go fishing . . .” He laughs again and then moves his body up over

mine and kisses me. “Irresistible,” he mumbles. “You’re irresistible.

(77)

The quote above is when Megan and Tom having affair. The phrase “We’re at

the Swan again” proves that have done that more than one time. At first, there is not

any clue that the man with Megan is Tom. However, at the last part of the novel, Tom

confesses that he used to go to Swan with Megan to have affair, “…Megan was so . . .

well, she was available. At first, it was over at her place, he says. But she was so

paranoid about Scott finding out. So we started meeting at the Swan" (229). The

statement is Tom’s that explain the way they used to have affair. The phrase “she was

so paranoid about Scott finding out” proves that the woman who has affair with Tom

is Megan, because she is Scott’s wife. The PTSD symptom response is not only

caused by how much the patient gets pressure because of trauma or body fatigue due

to her activities, but it could be also the response experienced by the patient when she

did activities on her limbs about things or objects related to her traumatic experienced,

for example she will feel her hands suddenly shaking just by only holding sharp

objects.

I don’t say anything, but I can’t help wondering whether it is, because

if I close my eyes I can conjure up the feeling that comes to me when

I’m on the edge of sleep, which jolts me back into wakefulness. It’s the

feeling of being alone in a dark house, listening for her cries, waiting

to hear Mac’s footfall on the wooden floors downstairs and knowing

that they’re never going to come. (154)

Megan felt things bother her mind when she closed her eyes. The response of

the body automatically frightened her trauma back to her mind at time she closed her
 21

eyes, and brought her back to her past or flashbacks on past events, burn of events,

and related objects when she got her baby dead. "It's the feeling of being alone in a

dark house, listening for her cries, waiting to hear." In this sentence, she senses the

presence of her baby and her former husband in her imagination but he felt as if it

were in reality. "Feeling of being alone in the dark house" is to show the location at

the time of the dark, cold and lonely incident. "Listening for her cries" expresses what

she feels as if listening to her baby there and is crying when she is in conflict with her

husband. "Waiting to hear Mac's footfall on the wooden floors downstairs", this quote

shows at a time when she had been awakened by the sound of footprints passing

through the wood that Megan woke from falling asleep with her baby and awakened

to the shock of seeing her baby which has been rigid and lifeless. The accident is

leaving the trauma and fear so very deep. It is because of her carelessness that makes

her baby's life floated by itself. She utters:

I can still feel it,’ I tell him. ‘At night, I can still feel it. It’s the thing I

dread, the thing that keeps me awake: the feeling of being alone in that

house. I was so frightened – too frightened to go to sleep. I’d just walk

around those dark rooms and I’d hear her crying, I’d smell her skin. I

saw things. I’d wake in the night and be sure that there was someone

else – something else – in the house with me. I thought I was going

mad. I thought I was going to die. I thought that maybe I would just

stay there, and that one day someone would find me. At least that way

I wouldn’t have left her. (115)

In this quote, Megan shows her panic condition, an excessive fear that makes her feel

the presence of her baby beside her body, listening to her crying and smelling her. In

her mind, if she can go back in time she hopes to meet her baby in different
 22

circumstances. She feels she has to pay for her baby's events so that she is looking

forward to seeing her again and promise to really looking after her.

The other symptoms of PTSD are experiencing of significant emotional, the

frequency of emotional changes rapidly, easy to be offended and easy to calm down.

Sometimes patients also experience severe anxiety that she could not control herself.

PTSD’s symptoms that affect Megan’s emotional state arise due to her excessive

anxiety. When she finds herself feeling lonely, she could not control herself when she

had a fight with her husband. The body's responses of patients who have experienced

traumatic event are not only biological but also psychological. The psychological

body's response is experienced by Megan when she met the family of the baby that

she babysits. The meeting arises her anxiety and makes her confused of what she

should do when she meet them. She has decided to retire from her profession as a

nanny for Watson’s family, because she wants to try to change in another way to stop

her trauma, but Megan always feels anxious and worried every time she is asked to

care for their baby. “I can feel butterflies now, I’m starting to get nervous. I’m afraid

of bumping into the Watsons, because it’s always awkward when I see them; it’s

patently obvious that I don’t have a new job, that I lied because I didn’t want to carry

on working for them" (34). The quotation "I can feel butterflies now, I'm starting to

get nervous." shows Megan's condition in anxious state through her body's turbulent

response and feeling nervous. "I'm afraid of bumping into the Watsons, because it's

always awkward when I see them" Megan was worried, her anxiety is not felt

temporary but comes every time she goes outside. She is afraid to accidentally meet

the Watsons.

Megan’s emotional changes are not only meeting someone who is the cause

for her trauma to arise, but also to people nearby, for example Megan is against her
 23

own husband and her psychiatrist. Family conflicts experienced by Megan did not

make her wary or intend to avoid her husband because of her who has betrayed her

husband.

Scott’s just called to say he has to work late, which is not the news I

wanted to hear. I’m feeling edgy, have been all day. Can’t keep still. I

need him to come home and calm me down, and now it’s going to be

hours before he gets here and my brain is going to keep racing round

and round and round and I know I’ve got a sleepless night coming.

(34)

One of emotional changes is excessive anxiety. In this quote, Megan’s anxiety

arises because she experienced loneliness. Feelings of loneliness can bring Megan the

uncomfortable feeling that eventually could suddenly make her undergo repeated

trauma. As Scoot & Striding explain about component of PTSD symptoms. The

traumatic experience which is the stressor will lead to an intrusive imagery or feeling

of re-experiencing the trauma. This situation causes the person to give reaction toward

this uncomfortable feeling."

Megan experiences discomfort because of the other reaction on her

psychiatrist. This reaction makes Megan’s emotional state become very uncontrolled.

Because of their very close relationship, the attitude is so out of bounds. There is no

sense of shyness and they no longer concerned with the status that should be a patient

and a psychiatrist. So it is convenient to show her feelings even though it is cruel

circumstances. “ ‘Megan.’ Every time he said my name he made it worse. He got to

his feet and circled the desk, walking away from me. He stood in the middle of the

room. She reports:

 24

Come on,’ he said, his voice businesslike – brusque, even. ‘Sit down.’

I followed him into the middle of the room, put one hand on his waist,

the other against his chest. He held me by my wrists and moved away

from me. ‘Don’t, Megan. You can’t . . . we can’t . . .’ He turned away.

‘Kamal,’ I said, my voice catching. I hated the sound of it. ‘Please.’

‘This . . . here. It’s not appropriate. It’s normal, believe me, but . . .’ I

told him then that I wanted to be with him. ‘It’s transference, Megan,’

he said. ‘It happens from time to time. It happens to me, too. I really

should have introduced this topic last time. I’m sorry.’ I wanted to

scream then. He made it sound so banal, so bloodless, and so common.

(136)

The reaction of anger experienced by her sensitivity culminates as the

quotation above is not only indicated by speech but also through attitude. The

quotation "I put him into the middle of the room, put one hand on his waist, the other

against his chest. He held me by my wrists and moved away from me "indicates she

also reacts through her attitude which keeps following her psychiatrist. Her anxiety

shows bad assessment "Every time he said my name he made it worse". Another

cause is Megan cannot get what she wanted to do, because she felt unable to tell her

wish. Megan cannot accept it and eventually she felt very angry shows angry tone "I

wanted to scream then " (170).

The case also brings a sustainable impact. When she could not get her wish

and did not get her way out of the problem, Megan increasingly has uncontrollable

emotion. It is because she has been depressed to find herself in a very uncomfortable

condition.
 25

I pulled away, angry, violently. He tried to hold me, but he couldn’t. I

was yelling at him, telling him I didn’t give a shit about his job. He

was trying to quieten me – worried, I assume, about what the

receptionist thought, what the other patients thought. He grabbed hold

of my shoulders, his thumbs digging into the flesh at the top of my

arms, and told me to calm down, to stop behaving like a child. He

shook me, hard; I thought for a moment he was going to slap my face.

(137)

Megan's statement shows her emotional state of anger and rudeness. Not only that,

she is also childish, immature, and very out of consciousness. From anxiety, excessive

anger sufferers of PTSD symptoms can also feel the emotional impact not directly by

the body. It also happened to Megan. She opens:

My legs are trembling, my knee jerking as though on puppeteer's

string. I get to my feet to stop it. I walk to the kitchen door and back

again, scratching the palms of my hands. ‘We were both so stupid,’ I

tell him. ‘We didn’t really even acknowledge what was happening, we

just carried on. I didn’t go to see a doctor, I didn’t eat the right things

or take supplements. (168)

Megan statement mentioned that she felt chills on her feet and jerked her knees. Parts

of the body have given a sign that the sufferer experiencing excessive anxiety because

the condition of a depressed soul can bring a response to the body.

Excessive alertness or hyper vigilance ( hyper: excessive, excessive, vigilance:

alert, awake, watchful, alert, awake) is an excessive concentration of attention to

external and internal stimuli so that the sufferer looks very tense. Excessive vigilance

is strongly associated with one of the mental disorders of PTSD. Excess vigilance will
 26

occur if an individual has exercised trauma to the activity that the individual will

perform, so that the individual will respond to an over-stimulated stimulus. Whether

consciously or not every individual has the potential to have alertness to any incoming

stimulus, because vigilance exists biologically. "It is just that in excessive vigilance

an individual experiences an excessive sense of receiving a stimulus that is considered

to be dangerous to her or potentially cause problems. Excessive alertness will affect

cognitive, affective, somatic, and behavioral dimensions" (Wilson 13).

Megan’s hyper vigilance arises when she saw something concerning her

trauma. Seeing a child is one of the reason Megan’s trauma. Besides she sees directly

through her sight, another reason that made her uncomfortable and raises the hyper

vigilance is discussion and questions about children. Megan showed these symptoms

Megan showed much through her behavior and feelings by direct or indirect responds.

She says:

It’s almost nine by the time I get back to Blenheim Road and as I turn

the corner I see her, coming towards me, pushing the buggy in front of

her. The child, for once, is silent. She looks at me and nods and gives

me one of those weak smiles, which I don’t return. Usually, I would

pretend to be nice, but this morning I feel real, like myself. I feel high,

almost like I’m tripping, and I could take nice if I tried. (67)

The quote above describes what Megan felt when she met a child. That is one

of the causes that bring out the trauma; she tries to respond kindly, because she tries

to avoid her hospitality towards children. Although she often did it, the response from

experiencing trauma is still exist, that she made herself lost with a sense of awareness.

So she still shows the sense of discomfort every time she sees a child.
 27

PTSD symptoms in the form of hyper vigilance indirectly experienced by

patient can be through the psyche, where the sufferer experiences conflict in his mind

and undergoes a re-experienced trauma. So the easy way that can be done by the

patient is to alienate herself against other people especially some people concerned.

“It actually wasn’t about her child at all, although the fact that the child never stops

whining did make her hard to love. It’s all so much more complicated, but of course I

can’t explain that to her. Anyway, that’s one of the reasons I’ve been shutting myself

away” (20).

Hyper vigilance of an individual experiencing an excessive sense when

receiving the stimulus is considered to be endangering himself or potentially

problematic. One of them is the symptoms of PTSD excessive alertness is a symptom

of PTSD associated with feelings or affective. Affective experienced Megan is

worried about the presumption that she does not yet she did" (wilson 15). “I’m

scared,’ I tell him. ‘What if I do it all wrong again? What if there’s something wrong

with me? What if things go wrong with Scott? What if I end up on my own again? I

don’t know if I can do it, I’m so afraid of being on my own again – I mean, on my

own with a child …"(154). The quotation above shows Megan’s feelings. She feels

anxious, fearful, unsure and not confident in what she will do. Her fear made her feel

an over vigilance because she worried she will make another mistake in her new life

and disappointed her husband.

The trauma effect experienced by Megan does not only affect herself, but also

affect the people closest to her and the surrounding social environment. Megan

creates bad relationship toward her husband and her psychiatrist. Megan has another

special relationship outside of her marriage that she makes with Rachel’s ex husband

and forcing herself to her psychiatrist. Because of Megan does not accept what her
 28

psychiatrist rejects her to dating, it makes Megan force herself to persuading to date

with her psychiatrist. Therefore, Megan became uncontrolled person make her self

affair to Rachel’s ex husband, Tom. Megan’s condition at that time is very depressed

because her husband demanded Megan to immediately want to have children. So she

really needs a lot of attention that eventually she seeks attention to her psychiatrist

that they culminated in having a very close relationship. She complains:

I can see Jess in her garden, and behind her a man walking out of the

house. He’s carrying something – a mug of coffee, perhaps – and I

look at him and realize that it isn’t Jason. This man is taller, slender,

and darker. He’s a family friend; he’s her brother or Jason’s brother.

He bends down, placing the mugs on the metal table on their patio.

He’s a cousin from Australia, staying for a couple of weeks; he’s

Jason’s oldest friend, best man at their wedding. Jess walks towards

him, she puts her hands around his waist and she kisses him, long and

deep. (37)

The quotation above explains that Megan sees a man. The man does not show the

characteristics of Megan's husband. Eventually, she did things she should not do with

other people. “He lay on the bed, watching me as I got dressed. He said:

This can’t happen again, Megan. You know it can’t. We can’t keep

doing this.’ And he was right, I know we can’t. We shouldn’t, we

ought not to, but we will. It won’t be the last time. He won’t say no to

me. I was thinking about it on the way home, and that’s the thing I like

most about it, having power over someone. That’s the intoxicating

thing. (55)
 29

Another quote that shows Megan has forcing herself on her psychiatrist. The

conversation between Megan and her psychiatrist have shown that Megan really

wanted to be close together with her psychiatrist, although the psychiatrist has

realized that this should not be done because Megan status is still married to someone

else but Megan still did not realize that this is wrong, in fact she feels comfortable

being with his psychiatrist:

He shook his head. “You have to understand, Megan, I shouldn’t have

let things get this far. I moved closer to him, put my hands on his hips

and turned him around. He took hold of my arms again, his long

fingers locked around my wrists. ‘I could lose my job,’ he said, and

then I really lost my temper.(137)

The affair had made threats on her psychiatrist. The psychiatrist can lose his

job, because their relationships intertwined so outraged ethics between the patient and

the doctor. However Megan still does not care about it, she still follows her ego to

keep herself comfortable despite being with another man. When she has gained

comfort from her psychiatrist, Megan had forgotten the purpose of which she wants to

heal the trauma she had experienced. But what she experienced was precisely her goal

of seeking comfort to others. So it makes her even more afraid of her husband and can

not deal with whatever problems she gets in her household. The household is

increasingly on the brink of destruction and not in harmony. She reveals:

He’s waiting for me to start, but it’s hard, harder than I thought it was

going to be. I’ve kept this secret for so long – a decade, more than a

third of my life. It’s not that easy, letting go of it. I just know that I

have to start talking. If I don’t do it now, I might never have the

 30

courage to say the words out loud, I might lose them altogether, and

they might stick in my throat and choke me in my sleep. (166)

The statement above illustrates the state of her household is not being in

harmony. Megan did not dare to say anything that would show the way out of her

problem with her husband to get children. Eventually it becomes a bad thing and

brings inconvenience between the two. Especially Megan, who has betrayed her

husband first and add to the burden in the household. What Megan perceived did not

end well. Instead, she gets more conflict in her mind. On the other hand she does not

need her husband because she has betrayed her husband.

The problem was that Megan and her husband had been in bad shape. The

problem even brought into her feelings. Megan felt even more uncomfortable with her

husband. As Megan's statement she felt her body as hot as she was near a fire stove.

To be near her husband did not make her feel the calmness and coolness. The effect of

her traumatic experience, take Megan gets many conflicts with other people and takes

her more struggling to defend the symptoms by Megan’s trauma causes. It is one of

purpose to defend the symptoms, moreover the way adaptation with her trauma. But

her effort takes bad unexpected psychological effect. The branch effect take her as the

woman doing affair with another man, the one is Rachel’s ex husband, Tom. “At first,

it was over at her place,” he says:

But she was so paranoid about Scott finding out. So we started meeting

at the Swan. It was . . . Well, you remember what it was like, don’t

you, Anna? At the beginning, when we used to go to that house on

Cranham Road. You understand.” He glances back over his shoulder at

me and winks. “That’s where Anna and I used to meet, back in the

good old days. He shifts his daughter from one arm to the other,
 31

allowing her to rest against his shoulder. “You think I’m being cruel,

but I’m not. I’m telling the truth. That's what you want, isn’t it, Anna?

You asked me not to lie. (229)

The matter started Tom’s confession to Anna, on their conversation contains

of conflict between Tom and Anna, because Anna find out Tom having affair with

Megan. The case revealed caused Tom’s honesty to Anna that he meeting Scott,

Megan’s husband at Swan. Swan is place Tom and Megan’s doing dating. It give

more evidence that Megan and Tom having affirm when Tom telling about Megan’s

condition and he said “we started meeting at the swan” It give prove that they have

meeting at that place. The room is dark, the air close, and sweet with the smell of us.

The traumatic experience found from Megan’s case causes disadvantages to

her marriage life, having affair with Rachel’s ex-husband and her psychiatrist. The

traumatic experience causes her to have conflict in her mind because her expectation

of her life is different from the reality. The losses of her baby hinders her chance to

achieve her goal of experiencing a happy life with her husband, while losing her

brother makes her got loneliness during survival in her life causes become a conflict

in her mind. Her trauma also creates bad effect in her life. She gets conflict with other

characters. The first result of statement problem has found that Megan experiences

symptoms of PTSD such as intrusive imagery, avoiding stimuli, and increased

arousal. The first criterion is sleep difficulty. Megan's sleep induced response was

caused by her memory of her baby, her conflict over her husband, and her anxiety

about her sense of comfort due to her proximity to her psychiatrist. That three reason

make Megan undergo one of symptoms of PTSD that is insomnia. The second

symptom Megan experiences is unbalanced emotion. She frequently has rapid

emotional changes. Sometimes she was easily offended while some other time she is
 32

and easy to calm down. The change of Megan’s emotional state arises when she finds

herself in loneliness, when she meets the family of the baby and when she fight with

people nearby, her husband and her psychiatrist. The third symptom Megan

experience is hyper vigilance. Megan’s hyper vigilance arises when she sees

something related to her trauma. Seeing a child is one of the causes of Megan’s

trauma, also discussions and questions about children. Megan’s traumatic experience

also causes her to have bad relationship with other. She could not keep her marriage

life in warm condition. She always gets conflict with her husband about to have a

baby. Her husband always demands Megan to have a baby quickly but Megan does

not think she is healthy enough to do that. That condition makes them did not have a

chance to give support each other. Megan cannot be a good wife for her husband

because she was having affair with Rachel ex-husband and forcing herself her

psychiatrist. Megan could not keep the professionalism between psychiatrist and

patient. She just thinks about herself to seek happiness for herself without considering

the impact that the psychiatrist must get that he must lose his job. The second result of

statement problem found on Megan case is she adapts strategy to her trauma. She

does not avoid the things that remind her about her trauma. Instead, she wants to do

the activity that can prevent her trauma. There are three efforts Megan does to deals

with her trauma. The first is becoming a nanny and the second is by fighting her fear

of passing the streets. The third is going to the therapist. Her purpose doing that is to

break her symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and try to adapt with

her reality.
 33

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