Modernism and Trouble of Mind

IF YOU’RE IN search of a word whose ordinary use encodes the sorts of complexities in subject-object relations that modernism probed with fervour, you could do worse than light on troubled. When applied to a person as a modifier itself unmodified, troubled expresses anxiety, anguish, internal unsettlement: ‘She’s a troubled soul’; ‘They’ve always been troubled’. In conjunction with the preposition by, on the other hand, troubled indicates a negative judgement applied by the observing subject to someone or something else: ‘I’m troubled by your behaviour’; ‘We’re troubled by the safety record of this factory’. On the one hand, the troubled subject; on the other, trouble about the object. The feeling promised by the construction troubled by can be merely rhetorical, as when a disciplinarian tells the reprobate about to be punished ‘I’m troubled by your behaviour’ without experiencing much consternation herself. But troubled by doesn’t always point to a privileged stance of distance and control; it can also be an expression of real torment generated in the observer by what’s observed. That I’m troubled by your situation may in fact render me troubled if the anxiety goes deep enough.

A little reflection reveals that troubled and troubled by can in truth relate to each other in at least three different ways. First, there’s the case in which trouble in the subject mirrors or parallels trouble in the object. Louisa Gradgrind of Hard Times is a troubled person, and the reader is invited to consider how her subjective disaffection comments on the conditions of Coketown, where she lives. Second, there’s the case already mentioned, in which trouble about the object leads the subject to feel troubled. In North and South, to take a second example from a Victorian novel, Margaret Hale’s relative composure is unsettled when she confronts labour conditions in the industrial north. Third, there’s a relation that’s something like the reverse of the one just named, in which someone who’s troubled for whatever personal reasons either projects her troubles on to the world or finds relief from them in working to remedy the troubles of others.