More than a War Correspondent: Edith Wharton’s chronicles about French civilians in the Great War and the beginning of citizen journalism (original) (raw)
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American Poetry and the First World War
2018
Edith Wharton, best known to most readers as the author of novels exploring the world of upper-class New York City in works such as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, experienced the First World War both intensively and extensively. Wharton did not have a casual interest in the war as an event, nor did she take the attitude of an onlooker at a massive catastrophe; rather, she was engaged by and in the war as a partisan in what she saw as a conflict between the bastion of civilization, France, and a nation inimical to that civilization, Germany. "France and civilization," Hazel Hutchison writes, "seemed indivisible, and Wharton was ready to defend both" (). This partisanship in the cause of France characterizes Wharton's writing during these years, writing that covers a variety of literary forms, and this variety of forms indicates the extensive nature of Wharton's experience of the war as a writer: Wharton produced poetry, fiction, and journalism, and edited an anthology centered on the war. The fictional narratives spring in part from Wharton's attempt to explore and depict the emotional, experiential aspects of the war, which in turn are based on her direct experience of living in France during wartime. Wharton's journalism is based on her familiarity with France, and especially with France during wartime. The anthology Wharton edited, The Book of the Homeless, emerged out of Wharton's efforts to assist Belgian refugees that found their way to Paris following the German invasion of . While Wharton was not a combatant, the war engaged her attention at least as fully as it did that of other American writers, including those who served in the military or the volunteer ambulance units. But if Wharton's war writing is less familiar than is The House of Mirth, it is not altogether different. As Wai-Chee Dimock notes about that novel,
Journal of University of Garmian, 2019
This paper tries to explore the representation of the First World War and its lingering effects on the life of people in two different modern short stories. The stories are written by different modern writers: The first story is entitled Soldier's Home. It is written in1924 by a male American writer Ernest Hemingway who witnessed several great wars such as World War I and World War II. The Second short story is entitled The Fly. It is written in 1922 by a female writer from New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield who lost her brother in World War I. The study compares the after effect of war on characters in these two different short stories. It focuses on how the war shapes the life of characters even after it ends. It shows how different characters struggle to cope with the trauma, stress and psychological pressure inflicted on them due to the violent experience of war. It also shows how war plays a destructive role in the life of combatants and non-combatant. The study sums up that both writers represent the horror and dark side of war and its destructive power on postwar generation through the brutal effects on the life of characters. Article Info
New Identities in the War Literature of Hemingway Detailed study of The Sun Also Rises
This paper examines how Ernest Hemingway challenges the emotionally restrictive nature of our stereotypical expectations of manhood in the context of the war experience. The analysis centers on creating a feminist critical space that affirms the male desire for feminine influence. Hemingway creates male characters who seek freedom from the insistence that they always be brave, strong, un-emotive, and otherwise manly, and freedom from the fear that such a failure to perform as expected will not signify that they are less than men. These characters usually are fighting with themselves, as they struggle with how to bear suffering and still perform as men. Hemingway creates characters who find out that to live and die well; a man should avail himself to the feminine, and be sensitive to love. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway provides a story in which the hero of the story, Jake Barnes, changes significantly between the beginning of the story and the end. He acquires the courage to love, risking his authenticity in the process. This paper uncovers Hemingway attempts to alter traditional masculinity by urging the reader to imagine other expressions of masculinity and femininity, and to accept male characters whose thoughts and actions defy expectations for masculine performance.
The Second World War: American writing
Kate McLoughlin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to British and American War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009, 212-225., 2009
Stories of war display essential cultural concepts, expectations, and self-images more prominently than other kinds of literature. In the extreme situation of war, society demands that its (mostly young) citizens risk their lives for the common good. So conflict becomes the occasion for questioning the validity of those individual and collective values and concepts of self and other in whose name one might die prematurely―especially at moments when victory is uncertain. Thus, the literature of war brings forth models of a nation’s (or a people’s) “storifying of experience:” acts of “literary sense-making”i (or the lack of it) performed in response to problems of national or group importance. In an essay on British literature about the First World War, Paul Fussell discusses “cultural paradigms,” defining them as “the systems of convention and anticipation that determine which of the objective phenomena of experience will be registered by the individual―what we ‘make of things,’ and how we fit them into the conceptual frames our culture has taught us to consider important.”ii Together with the personal experience and individual vision of the author, and the powerful influence of literary convention,iii these cultural paradigms establish specific symbol-systems that provide the conceptual framework for “fictional responses”iv to particular historical situations―situations that, effectively, require the suspension of norms crucial in peaceful societies and sanctify the use of collective violence. If these symbol-systems have sufficient explanatory power, their models of literary sense-making persist as established conventions even in the face of political and historical change.
This thesis discusses the experience and the aftermath of the First World War and the way it problemitised ostensibly secure masculinities and femininities, and family relationships, as depicted by some Commonwealth women authors over three generations. With a particular focus on the character of the psychologically wounded returned soldier, I contend that the authors' depictions of the home-front aftermath of the First World War challenge the dominant constructions of gender which existed at the time of the war, and that such subversions have a specific relationship to each author's historical and social positionality. I analyse why the returned soldiers are represented in the manner that they are and the significance of this representation in the trajectory of women's writing. Some of the novels are set during the First World War, while others take place many years after the Armistice. The novels are discussed chronologically and grouped according to the period at which the texts were written. In all the novels, the characters' notions of their identities and their world are challenged to various degrees. The home fronts where struggles continue are in New Zealand, Australia, Southern Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe), and Britain. The female authors studied in this thesis write about the pervasive condition that was named shellshock, its manifestations and its rippling domestic effects, as symptomatic of patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist systems in crisis. The first chapter addresses the representation of returned soldiers in novels by first-generation First World War authors, those writing at the time of the war and in the years immediately following. Rose Macaulay's Non-Combatants and Others (1916), Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) are read as war novels that highlight and critique the association between shellshock and the exhibition of "unmanly" behaviour; the effect that expectations of manliness had on those soldiers who were victims of shellshock; and how the past and present trauma experienced by the returned soldiers is filtered, perceived, and absorbed by the female characters in the novels. The narrative point of view is most-often female and this consequently facilitates my discussion of how women characters perceive men's bodies in trauma. Non-Combatants and Others is the centre of the chapter's discussion as it poignantly depicts the extent of the social malaise that the First World War highlighted. The second chapter considers tense and traumatic pasts in the autobiographies and autobiographical fiction of Doris Lessing and Janet Frame, both of whom were daughters of First World War returned soldiers. In this chapter I suggest that their fathers' war service and the trauma both men sustained shaped each author's understanding and consequent depiction of war's inexorable infiltration of the domestic sphere. In considering each author's depiction of the war, I explore how its presence crystallised pre-existing gender conflict. Both authors spent their formative years, the 1920s and 30s, in households seething with resentment and financial hardship and shadowed by grief. I propose that, in writing autobiographical fiction-Lessing's Martha Quest (1952) and Alfred and Emily (2008), and Frame's Towards Another Summer (written in 1963 and published posthumously in 2007)-both engaged in a therapeutic act. In doing so, each author re-imagined her father's history and its bearing on her life as a means of mitigating her own trauma as a daughter of violence. Chapter three is a comparative reading of the returned soldier and war-wounded characters in the eleven novels Frame published during her lifetime. In considering these characters and the significance of their presence in her work, I suggest that Frame's writing is haunted by the emotional debris of war. In creating returned soldier characters, Frame wrote against the glorification of war-which served to reinforce notions of the triumph of imperialism, and was endemic in Britain and its former dominions-and also about the "sex war" that had taken place since much earlier times in the patriarchal family. The final chapter of the thesis explores contemporary representations of returned First World War soldiers in Pat Barker's Another World (1998), Life Class (2007), and Toby's Room (2012)-three of Barker's war novels in which the narrative point of view moves between women and men and combatants and non-combatants-and Brenda Walker's The Wing of Night (2005). The shell-shocked soldiers of Barker and Walker are characters that represent their authors' contemporary knowledge of, and perspectives on, the interplay between expectations about gender roles and war-induced psychological trauma. This study highlights how the novels imagine and articulate the haunting significance of the returned First World War soldier characters' trauma in the lives of other characters, and in the light of what each author suggests about the way the First World War produced a heightened sense of the problematics of conventional masculinities and femininities. Declaration by author This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis. I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my research higher degree candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award. I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the General Award Rules of The University of Queensland, immediately made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968.
Life Writing, Fiction and Modernism in British Narratives of the First World War
The RUSI Journal, 2014
For decades, Britain's cultural memory of the First World War has been dominated by poetry, the principal literary interpretation of the war taught in schools throughout the country. This poetry, argues Max Saunders, is often autobiographic and complements the memoirs that many writers penned in trying to express their experiences of the conflict -showing a complex and fluid relationship between autobiography and narrative. What is largely marginalised in British cultural memory is the novel; yet it is perhaps in this literary form, and in the work of Ford Madox Ford above all, that the most innovative interpretation of the conflict can be found.
The Post-War, Wounded, Soldier Flâneur in the novels of Ernest Hemingway Hemingway’s service with the American Red Cross during the First World War was pivotal not only because of the “raw source material” it provided him as a writer, but also because his observations of warfare, combat, and casualties, together with being wounded in the line of duty, influenced the kind of writer he would become and his authorial decision to write several novels from the point of view of shrewdly observant wounded soldier and veteran protagonists. According to James McGrath Morris, Hemingway and fellow expatriate writer John Dos Passos “had confronted hardships and danger to a lesser degree than the soldiers, but they had also been afforded a greater view than that seen from the trenches….six years after the end of the conflict, [they] burned to put on paper what they had seen and experienced. The Great War was over, but not for them. Not yet.” I agree with Morris that Hemingway “sought to describe the desolate [post-WWI] world with honest clarity,” and will add in this paper that his observations, experiences, and wounding as an ambulance driver, as recorded in his letters and reflected in the observations and experiences of the soldier and veteran protagonists of his major novels, were pivotal in establishing the existence of a 20th-century flâneur. I can’s stress enough the significance of the injuries Hemingway sustained to his legs and feet as an ambulance driver, injuries that temporarily affected his ability to walk. From a letter dated August 18, 1918, written from his hospital in Milano and addressed “Dear Folks,” the convalescent young Hemingway writes: “’The 227 wounds…. didn’t hurt a bit at the time…. my feet felt like I had rubber boots full of water on. Hot water…. The machine gun bullet just felt like a sharp smack on my leg with an icy snow ball...my pants looked like somebody had made current jelly in them and then punched holes to let the pulp out…. So we took off my trousers and the old limbs were still there, but gee they were a mess… both knees shots through and my right shoe punctured two big places.” (176-77). Later in same letter: “The Italian Surgeon…. assures me that I will be able to walk as well as ever.…. I’ll have to learn to walk again” (Selected Letters 177-178). Hemingway learns to walk again and does the majority of that walking in the streets of Paris after moving to Europe to work as a journalist and write fiction. His experience as an ambulance driver, followed by his work as a journalist and war correspondent, honed his critical eye in ways that made him what Kronenberger refers to as a “‘synthetic observer’” (quoted in Williams, 35), while living, writing, and walking as an expatriate in Montparnasse allowed him to participate in post-war vestiges of flånerie similar to that of 19th -century artist-flâneurs like Charles Baudelaire. As Hemingway’s experience shows, the post-war wounded flâneur, despite and perhaps because of suffering physical or psychological wounding, walks and observes and records—with a different kind of detachment than his predecessor—the modern spectacle of war that destroyed the cities that had produced the flâneur in the first place.
Troping shell-shock: The anti- sublime in American and British women’s Great War narratives
Transatlantic Shell Shock: British and American Literatures of World War I Trauma, 2019
American author and volunteer nurse Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929), British poet Edith Sitwell’s I Live Under a Black Sun (1937), and British-Australian writer Evadne Price’s Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War (1930) narrate Great War shell shock through dialogical descriptions that contest one of the most prevalent Great War tropes: the sublimity and unnarratability of war trauma. Borden’s narrative was written as a creative testimony of her contribution in the war as a head nurse and consists of sketches and poems; Sitwell’s novel is a political allegory that satirizes Jonathan Swift’s life if it were set during the Great War; and Price’s novel is a reworking of ambulance driver Winifred Youngs’s Great War diaries. A comparison between these American and British narratives of the Great War reveals that Borden, Price, and Sitwell employ similar tropes to represent shell shock, namely the pastoral and the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Not only does this tropological representation provide alternative views to the role of women in the Great War, both at the front and at home, but, importantly, pastoral and carnivalesque elements construct a picture of anti-sublimity. Quotidian, automatic, and repetitive elements cancel out the ineffability, immeasurability, and transcendence of traditional war representation, contributing to an understanding of shell shock in narrative terms, and to a measuring of trauma in terms of human scale.