Feminist Experience in World War I: A Selected Study of War Poets and their Poetical Innovations (original) (raw)
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The War and the Gender divide: Examining Women’s Poetry of the First World War Era
The Creative Launcher
World War I poetry generally tends to take into consideration only the works of male writers such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, male poets who had been in the line of duty themselves. However, what is largely ignored is the vast body of women’s writing of the era. This blind ignorance, even with the existence of published anthologies is due to the prevailing notion that war is largely a man’s business. Little existing documentation of women’s contribution in various serving units during the Great War also contributes to the ignorance. They served as nurses, drivers and a wide variety of other roles on the battle front. The women who remained at home showed immense courage in handling the situation. Some were involved in knitting, some in solving the food crisis. Others entered the munitions factories to serve the country. This paper aims to bring to light the crucial role that these women played during the Great War. This paper will examine how women battled sexism and the ...
Women’s Poetry of the First World War
Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2013
This thesis seeks to study women's poetic response to the First World War a hitherto neglected area of the literature inspired by the war. It attempts to retrieve from oblivion the experience of the muted half of society as rendered in verse and document as far as possible the full range of the poetic impact the war made upon female sensibility. It is thematic in structure and concentrates upon the more recurrent of attitudes and beliefs which surface in women's war writings. The thematic structure was adopted to cover as wide a range as possible of the ways the historical experience could be met and interpreted in literature. This study takes into account the work of the established writers of the period as well as the amateur versifiers who made war their subject. The purpose of this study has been to suggest the variety of literary responses to the First World War by those who, at great cost, produce the primal munition of war-men-with which their destinies are inextricably ,linked. As part of a response to a particular historical event, the literary interpretation of which has conditioned modern war consciousness, women's war poetry is not without relevance for it adds a new dimension to the established canon of war literature and correspondingly a new vista to understanding the truth of war. CONTENTS I received from the staff of the Language and Literature Department, Birmingham Reference Library, the Department of Printed Books, Imperial War Museum and the British Library. I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Muhamed Ahmed Khan and Professor Amtal Hayee Khan for financing my course of study at the University of Warwick. (iii) sex rather than another, it holds that anyone affected by war is entitled to comment upon it. It also believes that a war poetry which does not include the depth and range of female reaction cannot claim to tell the truth of war since it ignores the response of those who, at great cost, produce the primal munition of war-men-with which their destinies are inextricably linked. This study tries to throw a light on the writings of women who lived through one of the most extreme of modern situations and strives towards a representative view of what it was like to be living at this time of crisis and struggle. Modern definitions of war poetry allow room for women's writing on war. Julian Symons describes war poetry as 'quite simply the poetry, comic or tragic, cynical or heroic, joyful, embittered or disillusioned, of people affected by the reality of war'; 10 for Richard Eberhart 'the writing of war poetry is not limited to the technical fighters • • • The spectators, the contemplator, the opposer of war have their hours with the enemy no less than uniformed combatants'; 11 to M. Van Wyk Smith 'war poetry is not only verse written by men who are or have been under fire ••• it is also the work of observers at home as much as that of soldiers at the 12 Front' • Vera Brittain, who saw war service as a VAD both at home and at the Front, records in Testament of Youth (1933), her reminiscences of the war years: 'all through the War poetry was the only ,form of literature that I could. ,13 read for comfort, and the only kind that I ever attempted to wr1te • It would not be irrelevant to mention that Testament of Youth was partly inspired as a corrective to the distorted male portrayal of women. Stung by their injustice to women, whom she believed 'weren't all, as these men make them out to be, only suffering wives and mothers, or callous This liberation of the spirit heralded by war is manifest at its most romantic in Anna Bunston De Bary's "Youth Calls to Youth"; in it she captures the romantic exultation and excitement of war: Youth calls to youth: Come, for new verdure The earth is adorning, Come, it is springtime Life's at the morning, Come, come and die. Youth calls to youth: Come, see a pageant, Death and hell blended, Red blood a-flowing,-Youth loves to be splendid, Come, come and die. Youth calls to youth: Let others grow aged Doubting their duty, Clearer our course is, Swift, full of beauty, 13 Come, come and die. The particular context in which De Bary has used the phrase 'come and die' is interesting. Rupert Brooke, while on training, wrote in a letter to John Drinkwater, who had as yet not joined up: 'Come and die. It'll 14 be great fun'. De Bary's poem has caught the idealistic euphoria intrinsic to Grenfell's "Into Battle". The first stanza, too, is reminiscent of the opening stanza of Grenfell's poem. Though both poems celebrate war, "Youth Calls to Youth", does not rise above being an exercise in propaganda; a fact evident in the last stanza. The salubrious nature of war can be depicted in different ways. Ethel Talbot Scheffauer in, "The Four Ages", regards war as an antidote for a sick and suffering society; war has come 'To surgeon the sick world' laid low by the 'age of gold' which had 'bound the ••• world with chains,.15 The belief that war gets rid of the dross and brings into eminence the finer. qualities in man appears in many poems. Janet Begbie in an untitled piece, commends war for helping people shake off 42 wended / Across his window when the war was ended'. Emily Orr in "A Recruit from the Slums" explains the slum dweller's desire to defend a country which has done nothing for him thus: 'We thought life cruel, and England cold; But our bones were made from the English mould, And when all is said, she's our mother old 43 And we creep to her breast at the end'. Elizabeth Chandler Forman in her poem, "The Three Lads", rising above the narrow confines of nationality, sees the German, Russian and English drawing inspiration from the same source; they, she shows, all go to war firm in the righteousness of their country's cause. 44 Forman ridicules war nationalism and lays bare the international nature of deceptions perpetrated by propagandists. Women are subjected to a fervid rhetoric which makes unjust demands on them: Send your husbands, send your brothers, send your sons, your friends, s~Ad all And do not say if they return not, 'We have sent them to their death" •••• You have saved them from dishonour though their lives you could not save. 'All quiet on the Western Front'-and yet We keep untiring watch beside our guns, The while Death hounds us down in tireless hunt. We know will be Yet that some of us, with stern face set, among the morrow's silent ones. 58
GENDER CONFLICT AND FIRST WORLD WAR POETRY
NEW ACADEMIA: An International Journal of English Language, Literature and Literary Theory, 2020
The corpus of the First World War poetry is predominantly masculine in its extent, being preoccupied with the experiences of the participants in the war, namely the male soldiers, and limited to poems by canonical war poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen and others. The First World War, however, has been one of the most transmogrifying experiences for the entire human civilization in general. It marked the end of an era of optimism and aspiration and ushered in an age of overt cynicism and desperation for all members of society, irrespective of their age, class, or gender. Following this, the paper intends to consider women war poets of the First World War of the likes of Helen Hamilton, Alexandra Grantham, and Ruth Comfort Mitchell among others, with an intention to contend that the testimonies of women's perceptions of war are as socially pertinent as the narratives produced by their male counterparts, provides a more nuanced picture of the war experiences and plays a prominent role in contradicting the misogynistic approach of the male poets whose poems often relegated women to the position of passive and at times imprudent beings who were unable to apprehend the magnanimity and atrociousness of war.
Rhetoric in Women's War Poetry
Rhetoric of modern literature has perceived immense turns since World War I, including the blurred space between literary genres and elimination of the distinctive elements of each genre as an enclosed literary entity. This paper deals with modern movements of poetry concurrent to the break of World War I, such as Imagism, an Anglo-American movement and Acmeism, a Russian movement. Through a scrupulous study of Hilda Doolittle's and Anna Akhmatova's poetry, rhetoric of war poetry is demonstrated comprising narratives, cinematic devises and myths interwoven with verses.
Margaret Postgate Cole's Poetry of the First World War
The First World War marks an inevitable transformation in the traditional gender roles of women from being passive domestic sustainers of the family into active contributors in social life as voluntary nurses, ambulance drivers, and factory workers. Nevertheless, women's poetic contributions to literary representations of war continue to be precariously neglected till the publication of Catherine Reilly's Scars Upon my Heart in 1981, a war anthology of seventy-nine women poets. Margaret Postgate Cole (1893-1980) is among these women war poets who provide a distinguished feminine insight into the experience of war, different from the male perspective. Far from displaying an amateurishly sentimental and romanticized engagement with war, Margaret Postgate Cole shows a great artistic aptitude in unmasking the conniving ideological roots of war that are reinforced by the patriarchal authorities. Cole, in her poetry, concentrates on the unjustifiable ideology of war, preying on innocent young soldiers. The aim of this article, therefore, is to analyze Cole's poetry of the First World War to demonstrate her profound awareness of the meaninglessness of the war that is promulgated by the rulers and decision makers.
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.
Introduction – Representing, Remembering and Rewriting Women’s Histories of the First World War
British Women’s Histories of the First World War, 2020
As Dan Todman has persuasively argued, in the British popular imagination the First World War is associated with mud, barbed wire, the trenches and the Tommy on the Western Front. 1 Perhaps inevitably, therefore, public commemoration of the war has often been dominated by a focus on the men in the armed forces, who risked or lost their lives for causes that at the time may or may not have seemed heroic, noble or simply unavoidable.
In the beginning, war poetry was all about patriotism, indicating nobleness of war, written mostly by civilians, who had no or little experience of war. But the poetry written by the soldiers painted a totally different picture of war. This paper is concerned with a comparative study of the work of First World War poets, such as Rupert Brooke, Laurence Binyon, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Brooke and Binyon's poetry was concerned with the theme of nationalism and the immortality of soldiers. But, Sassoon and Owen wrote about the horrific experience they witnessed during the war. Through their writing these poets countered and argued against all the noble ideologies related to war; instead, by expressing their true emotions, they depict war as inhumane, war weapons destructive and the lives of soldiers as uncertain.
War-torn Masculinity: Some Women's Fiction of First World War Returned Soldiers
International Journal of Arts and Sciences, 2011
This paper explores how some women have written in recent decades about expectations regarding masculinity, throughout and in the aftermath of the First World War; how male characters falter, attempting to repress their reactions against these expectations, and how their loved ones struggle unsuccessfully to comprehend their suffering. In a reading of Janet Frame's Intensive Care (1970), Brenda Walker's The Wing of Night (2005) and Pat Barker's Life Class (2007), all texts featuring soldiers returning to their native lands of New Zealand, Australia and Britain, this paper illuminates the relevance of reading women's texts in which male characters feature as returned soldiers. These novels are read in tandem with a discussion of masculinity theory that addresses the image of ideal masculinity in the years previous to, during and after the First World War. For the purpose of this paper, the term masculinity refers to the British historian John Tosh's explication of R.W. Connell's hegemonic masculinity; what Tosh refers to as "minimalist hegemonic masculinity" ("Hegemonic Masculinity" 42-3). This term defines hegemonic masculinity "according to the gender norms to which most men subscribe, whether or not they fully enact them" (48). John Horne states that "the importance of gender lies not only in its own subject matter but also in its ability to cast light on other themes of history and on broader historical synthesis" (23). This is my framework for reading this post-First World War women's literature, particularly in relation to texts in which women must cope with men whose masculinity has failed them, who are haunted by the responsibilities their maleness forces upon them.
Crossing No Man’s Land: Bridging the Gender Gap of World War I Through the Works of Vera Brittain
2018
2018 Winner of the James Madison Award for Excellence in Historical Scholarship Vera Brittain wrote in both her memoir and in a letter to her fiancé that, "women get all the dreariness of war and none of its exhilaration." 1 She was just beginning her life as a student at Oxford when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the summer of 1914, and at the time "the war at first seemed" to be "an infuriating personal interruption rather than [the] worldwide catastrophe" that it would eventually become. 2 Brittain soon interrupted her studies at Oxford by becoming a nurse and eventually became a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment for the duration of the war. 3 Although she survived and went on to become a prolific writer, she lost many important people along the way. She was engaged to Roland Leighton in August 1915, but he was killed days before he was due to reunite with her on leave on Christmas Day 1915. She became closer to his school friend, Victor Richardson, and her brother's fellow officer, Geoffrey Thurlow, but Geoffrey was killed in action in April 1917. She received news of Geoffrey's death at the same time that she was informed that Victor was badly wounded and blinded, and he died in June of that same year. Finally, when she sent a poem to her brother, Edward Brittain, in June 1918, he was killed before he had the chance to read it. 4 Throughout her memoir, Testament of Youth, Brittain referenced and utilized excerpts from the letters written between her, Edward, Roland, Victor, and Geoffrey, entries from the diary she kept during the war, and poems written by Roland as well as poems she published in Verses of a V.A.D. Brittain relied heavily on her own diary and letters during the writing process of her memoir, and used her "naïve quotations" from these sources "in order to give some idea of the effect of the war, with its stark disillusionments, its miseries unmitigated by polite disguise, upon the unsophisticated ingénue who grew up just before it broke out." 5 The question, however, that comes to the forefront is not a question of accuracy, but rather a question of integrity. Are there constant themes that bleed over from the source material into the memoir? Or are the themes that are apparent in the diary, letters, and poems transformed as Brittain exercised something she did not have during the time that the source material was written: hindsight?