44 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
a distinctly inaccessible quality, restricting the reader’s ability to gain
a deeper intimacy with the character. This form of mental foreclo-
sure is crystallized in the muteness Stern progressively suffers upon
arriving in England. On the train to London, she rues her inability
to respond to attempts at conversation by a young woman sitting in
her compartment and avoids looking at the other passengers, stat-
ing that “their eyes pollute my confidence” (p. 189). Thereafter, she
resigns herself to the fate of being “unable to function” in society, not
least because, as she puts it, “I do not talk” (pp. 191–197). This char-
acteristic chimes with the observations made by Michel Foucault in
his seminal study of mental illness in Europe. Foucault contends
that insanity has been closely associated with literal and metaphori-
cal silence for a number of centuries, with the “broken dialogue” of
the suffering human seen as testimony to his “madness.”^45 I n d e e d ,
many European doctors writing at the time at which Stern’s narra-
tive is set knew that trauma victims often lose the will or ability to
communicate with others. Writing in a report for the allies in 1946,
the psychiatrist J ü rg Zutt proclaimed that the “human falls silent in
his agony [... ] surrendering to their inevitable wretched destiny.”^46
For Stef Craps, the reason “Eva reverts to silence [... ] is to keep her
inner reality inviolate from the world,” an analysis that certainly
appears to tally with the psychological bifurcation I describe above.^47
It is also an interpretation that allows a clear connection to be drawn
between the defensive self-compartmentalization she employs in the
camp, where she “decides to put Eva away [... ] some place for safe-
keeping,” and its escalation into chronic schizophrenia (p. 165).
The emergence of her alter ego, whom she describes as “the other
girl,” who wears “a jagged slash of lipstick around her mouth, red
like blood” and shadows her every move, can also be considered the
result of, among other things, a suppressed sexual consciousness, pos-
sibly caused by events related to her ordeal in the camp (p. 197). The
somewhat unpalatable suggestion that Eva might have participated in
sexual liaisons with her jailers in exchange for preferential treatment
gains credibility when we hear Stern explain why she warmed to
Gerry’s character: “He never asked me, did you survive in the camp
because you slept with a man? (Others asked this question but not
Gerry)” (p. 194). Reading along these lines, it could be interpreted