We cannot assume that it was easy for this newly transformed feminist consciousness, on the collective level, to give up the struggle for freedom, despite the alacrity with which Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter, Christabel, the militant suffrage leaders, began to harrass conscientious objectors, or the fact that many women did identify with the ethic of self-sacrifice and produced books urging nursing and ambulance driving as opportunities for the full expression of the female need to suffer. But Rebecca West and other (especially left wing) feminist theorists had already punched holes before the war in the idea of self-sacrifice as natural to women, and there is no reason to suppose that these brilliant deflations of the reigning ideology were so easily forgotten. And yet, even feminists “forgot.” One agrees with Rebecca West’s assessment of May Sinclair’s Journal of Impressions in Belgium as “one of the few books of permanent value produced by the war.” It should be read as a companion volume to Not So Quiet . . . . But her novel, The Romantic, mocks the unmanly man as viciously as scandalized old ladies wrote to the papers about “She-men” in uniforms.
Certainly F. Tennyson Jesse’s The Sword of Deborah (1919) is sheer propaganda for recruiting V.A.D.s and W.A.A.C.s: “How could we bear to do nothing when the men are doing the most wonderful thing in the world?” And Charlotte Redhead in May Sinclair’s The Romantic (1920) seems to support Sandra Gilbert’s thesis that women rose at the expense of man’s fall when she rejects John Conway, her lover, because of his cowardice (and her own fearlessness) as they drive field ambulances in Belgium. It seems just as logical to suppose that women who had fought in the streets to protect and demand votes for women should be ready for action at the Front. Obviously, war values dispensed horrifying shame to men who were deemed cowards. Early in the war Rose Macaulay wrote “Oh, it’s you that have the luck, out there in the blood and muck/. . . . In a trench you are sitting, while I am knitting/A hopeless sock that never gets done.”10
But May Sinclair in The Romantic created a realistically revengeful portrait of the weak male from the point of view of the strong female. Why did gender distinctions keep her from action? Charlotte’s psychoanalyst condemns Conway. A more human analysis would allow more room for men lacking in the brutal, aggressive qualities required for war:
Conway was an out and out degenerate. He couldn’t help that. He suffered from some physical disability. It went through everything. It made him so that he couldn’t live a man’s life. He was afraid to enter a profession. He was afraid of women . . . the balance had to be righted somehow. His whole life must have been a struggle to right it. Unconscious, of course. Instinctive. His platonics were just a glorifying of his disability. All that romancing was a gorgeous transformation of his funk . . . so that his very lying was a sort of truth. I mean it was part of the whole desperate effort after completion. He jumped at everything that helped him to get compensation, to get power. He jumped at your feeling for him because it gave him power. He sucked manhood out of you. He sucked it out of everything—out of blood and wound.11
There it is. In wartime, the impotent male is a vampire. The language of popular psychology joins the discourse of martial valor—degenerate, disability, funk, jumped, sucked—to condemn those who don’t fit the most polarized gender categories. Men must be potent. Women must be maternal. Sinclair’s voicing of the popular fear of male weakness in war also reveals the unspoken truth that men were just as terrified of war as women. Virginia Woolf valorizes the impotent suicidal Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. And Sylvia Townsend Warner brilliantly mocks the enforced rigidity of wartime sex roles in her splendid poem, “Cottage Mantleshelf,” which celebrates the “uncomely” portrait of “young Osbert who died at the war,” a “nancy boy” with enormous ears, whose “beseeching swagger” endears him to the reader. The poem is an English “red and black” tribute to a victim of the ideology, “Keep the home fires burning.”12
Joan Scott’s introductory essay in Behind the Lines is the most sophisticated guide to date to a methodology for feminist historiography in the service of a cultural critique. She warns against facile reversals of established theories, the projection of present concerns onto the past, and the simple search for heroines. Women’s literature of World War I runs the gamut from patriotic propaganda to pacifist protest. For all those who jeered at conscientious objectors and handed them white feathers, there were also the founders of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Artistic standards will have to acknowledge the greatness of “Cottage Mantleshelf” as well as much other writing by women about the war, now that patriotism no longer dictates that the combatant’s writing is superior to that of the noncombatant. We need to examine the war ministries’ posters and propaganda images of men and women for all the countries involved in the war, to contextualize German and French writing with British fiction and the autobiographies of American volunteer nurses.
The effort to expand the literary canon is greatly aided by publishers such as The Feminist Press and Virago Press in reprinting lost texts. The reprinting of Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, a feminist dystopia from the thirties, for example, allows for fresh and interesting ways to read George Orwell’s classic 1984 and to view Nazi ideology from the perspective of its misogyny, a neglected area since historians have concentrated particularly on anti-Semitism. While I intend here to propose a reading of Helen Zenna Smith’s Not So Quiet . . . in conjunction with Erich Maria Remarque’s classic All Quiet on the Western Front, on which it was based, a more thorough examination of the issues raised would have to take into account the French and Belgian women’s experiences of invasion and bombardment. Dorothy Canfield’s Home Fires in France (1919), a collection of short stories, might be analyzed, as well as Colette’s wartime newspaper articles.
Women’s history asks that we look not only at war texts but at those particular fictions where suffrage and war overlap and intermix. There are some excellent examples: Cecily Hamilton’s William, An Englishman, May Sinclair’s The Tree of Heaven, and Ford Maddox Ford’s Some Do Not and No More Parades, the Tietjens novels, which tell the same events from different characters’ viewpoints, wonderfully deconstructing the meanings of feminism, patriotism, marriage, war, religion, and all the social issues of the period. These novels are perhaps the best literary representations of all the issues under discussion here. Ford himself seems to have been anything but an admirable character, but his brilliant modernist fictional techniques, in particular the undermining of narrative authority, schooling his readers in the unreliability of all narratives, evoke the instability of an age of conflicting values more powerfully than the more valorized work of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. In addition, these novels, like Irene Rathbone’s We That Were Young, allow the reader to escape from the standard historical confines of wartime and peacetime. Rathbone’s later They Call It Peace (1936) in fact deconstructs this convenient historical fiction, showing that the government continued to wage war against women and the working class “between the wars.”
William, An Englishman is another story. Cecily Hamilton had certainly earned her credentials as an active suffragette and had written plays and polemics for the cause. Yet its “feminism” is disturbing, despite the fact that it won the Femina Prize in 1919. “Neither William nor Griselda had ever entertained the idea of a European War; it was not entertained by any of their friends or their pamphlets.” William and Griselda are socialists and activists in the suffrage campaign. He, a clerk, inherits a small amount of money from his mother and throws himself into political action and public speaking, “a ferment of protestation and grievance.” Griselda, a suburban suffragette, is attracted to him because of the pleasure they share in denouncing the enemies of their cause. Hamilton’s ruthless satire of political activists is amusing, for we all know the type—“cocksure, contemptuous, intolerant, self-sacrificing after the manner of their kind.” Their punishment for not knowing the war has begun when they go off to honeymoon in Belgium is a little excessive. Moved to l
eave their woodland retreat because Griselda “missed the weekly temper into which she worked herself in sympathy with her weekly Suffragette,” they are devastated by seeing the Germans shoot innocent villagers. She is raped and he is put in a work camp. Escaping to find her again, William is horrified by her silence; then, melodramatically, “she died very quietly in the straw at the bottom of the cart.”
Hamilton rather overdoes the death of Griselda as “real” suffering compared to her previous choice to hunger strike and be forcibly fed in Holloway Gaol for the cause of suffrage. The newly patriotic William is rejected by the British Army and dies unheroically in a bombing raid. This novel is a shameless example of the ideological repression of both socialism and feminism that was one of the major social achievements of World War I. Certainly in England, the war was a stunning setback to the struggle for liberty at home. Arthur Marwick’s The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (Norton, 1970) is the honorable exception to histories of the war that ignore “the forbidden zone” of the class struggle and the repression of women. His Women at War (Fontana, 1977), along with Gail Braybon’s Women Workers in the First World War (Croom Helm, 1981) and Anne Wiltsher’s Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (Pandora, 1986), have trespassed quite firmly on the forbidden zone of World War I history. For other examples of how quickly the European intellectuals rallied around their respective flags, see Roland N. Stromberg’s Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (The Regents Press of Kansas, 1982), though he doesn’t include women among the “intellectuals.”
Like Hamilton’s William, An Englishman, the insularity of the ordinary English folk is also the point of H. G. Wells’s Mr. Britling Sees It Through, but suffrage again becomes the scapegoat in May Sinclair’s The Tree of Heaven (1917). Frances and Anthony refuse to face up to the Boer War, but they and their children eventually reject suffrage and pacifism and movements for political justice at home for an almost evangelical devotion to “the Great War of Redemption.” All the authors cited here (male and female) were active in the suffrage campaign. Their fiction is the field on which we may see a great ideological battle fought, where the struggle for sexual freedom becomes “silly” and the leaders, like the Pankhursts, are called proto-fascists as the war mentality condones militarism, nationalism, and patriotism. On the pages of these obscure novels we see how quickly the intellectuals come to the aid of their country, embracing violence and war as a mystical cleansing, rejecting the feminist, pacifist, and socialist reforms needed at home to agree to internationalist slaughter of a whole generation in the name of democracy. Stromberg documents the ideology of destruction as spiritual and idealistic renewal. The authoritarian nature of the ideological powers to which this generation submitted is then displaced onto a critique of authoritarianism within the suffrage movement (perhaps out of guilt for their joy in war (?) and abandonment of the struggle for real social change at home).
This is not to argue that there was not some justice in the earlier claim by Mrs. Charlotte Despard and the Women’s Freedom League that the Women’s Social and Political Union (W.S.P.U.) was an autocratic paramilitary organization. In many ways it was. But those young women who had pledged total commitment to the suffrage cause and obedience to its leaders, who had learned to speak in public, to defy their families and the law to march in the streets, who had been attacked by hecklers and ruffians, gone on hunger strikes in prison, and been forcibly fed were the perfect recruits for war work. They were disciplined and self-controlled. It has always seemed to me very curious that historians do not mention the suffrage campaign as the training ground for ambulance drivers and V.A.D. nurses in World War I. Bravery, physical courage, chivalry, group solidarity, strategic planning, honor—women learned these skills in the streets and gaols of London, the first “forbidden zone” they entered. The spiritual and sacramental aspects of the suffrage movement as a “holy war” were exploited by idealist figurations of the war as a purge of bourgeois materialism.
Then again, historians also neglect to mention that the work of these women—glamorous heroines to younger generations—was for a long time rejected by the British government. “My good lady, go home and sit still” was what the War Office told the distinguished Dr. Elsie Inglis when she offered them a fully staffed medical unit with women doctors and nurses!13 The French government hired her to take this staff to Serbia. Cecily Hamilton remarked in her autobiography that the British were so opposed to hospitals run by women that all the women’s hospital units were employed by the Allies, France and Russia, and operated in France, in the Balkans, and in Russia. These fully trained groups of women doctors and nurses were far less popular than volunteer upper-class girls who could be shown in uniform in the picture papers, glamorous, pretty, and clearly unprofessional. The “Balkanization” of British women doctors and nurses in Serbia and Russia may be seen as part of the larger historical repression of the Eastern Front in favor of the story of Western Europe in histories of the war. The Eastern Front is the female “other” of World War I history. Where all is really quiet is on the Eastern Front, perhaps because attention to the other Front would mean attention to the other back—that is, the background of capitalism and imperialism and colonialism that were behind the curtain of the European theatre of war. This is echoed in Mrs. Dalloway when Lady Bruton espouses the cause of the Armenians and, fearing that she will not be taken seriously as a woman, convinces Richard Dalloway and other important men to help her frame her letter to the London Times.
These oppositions—Western Front/Eastern Front, manly/womanly, professional/volunteer, patriot/feminist—need to be undone along with others that reinforce them—male/female, killer/coward, martyr/traitor—as we recover the history of women in this period along with the class and gender biases that intersect with them. Looking back, we can see the message in May Sinclair’s 1917 satire on Christabel Pankhurst—the hysterical man-hating Miss Dorothy Blackadder in The Tree of Heaven—as sheer propaganda for the authority of the nation, party, and government that had oppressed women. Dorothy “was afraid of the Feminist Vortex. . . . She was afraid of the herded women. She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the tremor and surge of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the collective soul, the swaying and heaving forward of the many as one.”14 There is nothing like an appeal to individualism and personal freedom to sway the reader. Examine the skillful rhetoric of this passage, as a “feminist” discredits her own movement. The class bias against the masses, human beings in the collective, is unabashed. What else was service in the war but joining a similar “herd,” swirling in a far more destructive “vortex”? It was “women in the collective,” struggling for their own freedom, who were now marked as Public Enemy No. 1. This propaganda was so effective that another ex-suffragette, Amber Blanco White, was able to argue later in the thirties that the suffragettes had actually brought dangerous fascist (read “foreign”) political techniques to “democratic” England. (Blame the victim. Name the freedom-fighter as a fascist. Re-inscribe the mass hysteria of war as individual heroism.)15
From a literary perspective, the reprinting of women’s wartime writing will also allow us to contextualize the canon, reading A Farewell to Arms along with the experience of an American nurse, Ellen La Motte, whose powerful The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Nurse (1916) was banned during the war and not reprinted until 1934.16 La Motte’s prose style stands up to Ernest Hemingway’s, drained of emotion and restrained before the bodies of wounded men:
From the operating room they are brought into the wards, these bandaged heaps from the operating tables, these heaps that once were men. The clean beds of the ward are turned back to receive them, to receive the motionless, bandaged heaps that are lifted, shoved or rolled from the stretchers to the beds.17
We could also read Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero with H. D.’s Bid Me to Live or Irene Rathbone’s We That Were Young (which Aldington supposedly got published), H. G. Wells’s Mr. Britling Sees It Through with Amber Reeves’s Give and Take or E. M. Delafield’s The War Workers, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That with Laura Riding’s A Trojan Ending, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man with Sylvia Thompson’s The Hounds of Spring. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jacob’s Room and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier are already being read as classic feminist anti-war novels. Their distinguishing feature is the insertion of class into the narrative of war and gender. It is the class critique that also distinguishes Helen Zenna Smith’s Not So Quiet . . . from much other women’s war fiction, as a relentlessly realistic document in brutally masculinized prose of what war does to women at the Front. Not only does this brilliant novel overturn the stereotypes of “male” writing and “female” writing by writing from the subject position of the masculinized woman (as Erich Remarque writes from the subject position of the feminized soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front), it unforgettably inscribes better than any other fiction I know the female body in/at war. The hero of A Farewell to Arms (1925) is embarrassed by the words “sacred,” “glorious,” and “sacrifice.” The heroine of Not So Quiet . . . is also driven mad by patriotic words. The corruption of language is war’s first casualty. Hemingway writes “There were many words that you could not stand to hear [italics added] and finally only the names of places had dignity.”18
2. Ears Only
Governments stamp their secret documents “Eyes Only.” I call this section “Ears Only” to mark the experience of war in Not So Quiet . . . as a violation of the ear drums and Helen Zenna Smith’s writing as a bombardment of the reader’s ears in a text pock-marked with ellipses of silence and rushes of noisy belligerent words. Despite Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig’s dismissal of this novel and its sequels as “crude” socialist realism and “emotional melodrama,” the genius of Not So Quiet . . . lies in its unswervingly truthful reportage of a war that was both crude and emotionally melodramatic, its prose style revealing the death of the feminine sentence, or at least exposing the myth that writing comes from gender rather than experience. I mean these remarks about the assault on the ears as a compliment, of course. In Paris France (1940) Gertrude Stein characterized the experience of World War I as “Music in the Air”: “War naturally does make music but certainly this war with really everybody listening to the radio, there is nothing but music.”19
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