Note, first of all, that these passages are marked heavily by ellipses. In the first-person narrative dramatic monologue or soliloquy, the ellipses indicate self-interruption and the repression of even more rage than is on the page. Not So Quiet . . . is punctuated by these elliptical absences throughout. The text looks like letters received and sent during wartime, stamped and opened by the censor with marked-out passages (read by other eyes). The reader is reading as much silence as text, constantly filling in the blanks, supplying the left-out words, decoding the coded wartime message. The ellipses, like the censor’s black lines crossing out sentences, sometimes blacking out paragraphs, indicate Helen’s self-censorship, but also the utter lack of truthful communication possible in war. Partial messages, missent and misread, propaganda, rumor, lies, the reports of spies, secret codes—these are the messages of war. Not So Quiet . . . , because of its multiple authorship in its imitation of Remarque and its pseudonymous rendering of Winifred Young’s diaries in fictional form, is a particularly rich document in which to examine gender and war issues in World War I England. The punctuation asks the reader to read between the lines, to guess at the unsaid and the unsayable. The reading experience is a reproduction of the ambulance driver’s route, swerving to avoid obstacles and holes, zig-zagging with Helen Z. Smith. Passages from letters, bits of remembered newspaper articles, phrases like “Our Splendid Women” are rendered in italics, further marking the text as an intertext with all the other cultural productions of war, as well as Remarque’s novel. We seem to read secretly, behind the editorial blackout curtain of censorship in conspiracy with Helen Zenna Smith. Her textual practice is a version of the Kristevan “semiotic,” those human noises excluded from “symbolic” discourse, marking a repression, which marks another repression. This opens the novel to deconstructive feminism and other modes of contemporary critical discourse.
But it is interesting to note that Evadne Price’s writing practice here is not the feminine “writing the body” of Helene Cixous and some French feminist theory. It is not in the least erotic. The words on the page, so full of stops and starts and diacritical messages in italic and so many sentences framed as questions and requiring an answer from the reader are a textual version of La Zone Interdite, fragmented like the bodies that litter this forbidden territory with arms and legs and headless trunks. The body of the text is “not whole”; it is a war casualty. The diacritical marks make the text look like noise. It crackles across the page. The rapt reader also feels drowned by noise, the noise in Helen’s head and the battle noises around her. This is a remarkable literary achievement and clearly related to Evadne Price’s brilliance as a reporter. She reproduces the minefield of the forbidden zone as a dotted landscape on the body of the text, setting up disquieting relations between text and white space on the book’s pages, the sight of which invades the reader’s ears as well as her eyes. Our eye contact with the fragmented text makes us feel the disorientation of the body at war, and it activates the reading “ear” as if a silent newsreel suddenly connected with its sound track, but faded in and out, as such reports continue to do, keeping the viewer on edge about the physical safety of the reporter.26
The content of the quoted passages is also significant. The Commandant is the Phallic Mother, the whistle her phallus, the very voice of violence and war. In the male masquerade that is required of the young women who shoulder these abhorrent wartime duties, Helen’s hatred is directed exactly onto the object the Propaganda Office has chosen for its posters, the fearful huge matriarch who points the way to the Front, the enormous maternal nurse who cradles the wounded. She is the Home Front, the Mother Country, the one who gives birth and also kills. It would never do to blame the old men who make war, the kings and kaisers and their counsellors. The Commandant’s whistle is, of course, a convenient disguise for the male voice of nationalist authority, the patriarchs in whose interest the war is fought. When Helen figures war as an invasion of her ears, the phallic mother is the rapist. She is the one who is “not so quiet,” the literal disturber of the peace. She is War.
The repression of the male authority figures and displacement of their roles as killers onto the militant and militaristic mother figure is a precise reading of the cultural needs of the warmongers, and Helen Zenna Smith constructs a plot in which the bad mother is the villain. Edwards recognizes the real enemy, “the politicians”; “the men are failures,” women should “refuse to bring children into the world to be maimed and murdered,” “let the people who make the wars fight them.” (55) As Angela Ingram so carefully and wittily demonstrates in “Un/Reproductions,” the ideology of war insists on a primitive call to women to construct themselves socially as mothers first and then argues that the war is being fought to protect those mothers and, by extension, that it is their fault that men are dying.
But Helen’s war is fought with the Commandant, known as “Mrs. Bitch,” who “would have made a good wife for Napoleon.” She can’t understand how Mrs. Bitch could be a mother: “No woman who has suffered the pangs of childbirth could have so little understanding of pain in other women’s daughters.” (49) She is a “hungry vulture” who loves “bossing the show”; “Why is it that women in authority almost invariably fall victims to megalomania?” she asks. This cultural and social displacement of the drive for power onto the mother rather than the father and women’s internalization of it as enacted in this fiction may be a clue to the problem of why humanity is unable to stop war. The portrait of the Commandant recalls, of course, Mrs. Breakspeare, “the very maternal general” of The Well of Loneliness.
Not So Quiet . . . is subtitled “Stepdaughters of War.” In this drama, which problematizes the relation of the family to martial values, war is not the father but the mother, and not a real mother, but a wicked stepmother. The stepdaughter is a Cinderella of the battlefront, sweeping up the ashes and cinders, the blood and vomit of her wounded prince. But no fairy godmother comes to rescue her. Bello transvests into Bella, ferocious goddess of war. We might call the “stepdaughter” of war Bellona, as Evadne Price chronicles the transformation of her heroine from “Helen” to “Nell” to “Nello.” Virginia Woolf obviously recalls the figure of the stepdaughter of war in a footnote in Three Guineas: “Englishwomen were much criticized for using force in the battle for the franchise” she writes in 1938.
The vote indeed was given to women largely because of the help they gave to Englishmen in using force in that war. . . . This raises the difficult question whether those who did not aid in the prosecution of the war, but did what they could to hinder the prosecution of the war, ought to use the vote to which they are entitled chiefly because others “aided in the prosecution of the war”? That they are stepdaughters, not full daughters, of England, is shown by the fact that they change nationality on marriage. A woman, whether or not she helped to beat the Germans, becomes a German if she marries a German. Her political views must then be entirely reversed, and her filial piety transferred.27
Woolf’s logic exposes the ideological reversals by which patriarchy and militarism manipulate women in wartime as ruthlessly as does Evadne Price’s anti-logical narrative.
There are only two figurative passages in this novel. One is the description of “an ancient tree that never buds into leaf nor yet rots,” which is called the “Witch’s Hand” for its gnarled trunk that looks like a gigantic palm and “five malformed branches that stretch like fingers into the valley below,”(114) where Helen and her companions drive the dead in their ambulances to the military cemetery. The Witch’s Hand is evil, sinister, greedy, demanding, never denied. Helen and the men struggle with the coffins in the mud. The snow, a “white glove that has so graciously hidden” the “claw-like and avaricious” hand, has disappeared, leaving the tree to grab ghoulishly at the dead. “It reaches down evilly, the claws snatching at us as we stand defenceless, as though to squeeze the youth from us until we are dry and lifeless” (119). The Witch’s Hand is part of the enormous ideological
effort of the novel to mask the paternity of war and its complicity with patriarchy and to blame the mothers. In a massive reversal of reality Helen Zenna Smith makes the life-giving body of the mother the source of death and war in the same way that the insidious propaganda campaign enacted a popular transformation of the bombs of the munitions factories into breasts and wombs as Claire Culleton documents in the popular culture of the period. (Evadne Price is supposed to have worked for the War Ministry during the war, where doubtless such brilliant propagandistic tricks were hatched. There might be a connection with her astrology columns after all. Not So Quiet . . . could be read as the propagandist’s star turn, if it did not so forcefully turn the reader against the war.)
It is a common characteristic of the literature of this war to figure the Home Front as a phallic mother, especially in the homoerotic poetry of the lost brother. But Helen Zenna Smith doubles the “Terrible Mother” with a classic pair of belligerents who outdo even Woolf’s Lady Bruton and Lady Bradshaw in matriarchal militarism—her mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. The two matrons, competing with one another over who can recruit more young men and how many of their own they can sacrifice for the war, make a grotesque twin-headed statue of Bella-Bello, capitalism, imperialism, and jingoism shoring up their flag-waving patriotism. War will always exist “as long as we breed women like my mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington”(90). The dialogic structure of the novel is most apparent in the use of the letters from her mother and her aunt in fragments separated by ellipses. Helen dramatizes the letters in her head as reading them enrages her. She creates their voices, mocks and mimics them (Mother “has seventeen more recruits than Mrs. Evans-Mawnington up to date”). The Front becomes a theatre of war where Helen acts out all the roles. The letters are dialogized into short plays with stage directions, indications of “Curtain,” as the war itself is imagined as scenes in a drama whose most important aspect is that it will end. Helen hallucinates that her mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington join her on her nightly ambulance run:
Oh, come with me, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. Let me show you the exhibits straight from the battlefield. This will be something original to tell your committees, while they knit their endless miles of khaki scarves, . . . something to spout from the platform at your recruiting meetings. Come with me. Stand just there.(90)
See the stretcher-bearers lifting the trays one by one, slotting them deftly into my ambulance. Out of the way quickly, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington—lift your silken skirts aside . . . a man is spewing blood, the moving has upset him, finished him. . . . He will die on the way to hospital if he doesn’t die before the ambulance is loaded. (91)
See the man they are fitting into the bottom slot. He is coughing badly. No, not pneumonia. Not tuberculosis. Nothing so picturesque. Gently, gently, stretcher-bearers . . . he is about done. He is coughing up clots of pinky-green filth. Only his lungs, Mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington. He is coughing well tonight. That is gas. You’ve heard of gas, haven’t you? It burns and shrivels the lungs to . . . to the mess you see on the ambulance floor there. He’s about the age of Bertie, Mother. . . . The son you are so eager to send out to the trenches, in case Mrs. Evans-Mawnington scores over you at the next recruiting meeting. . . . “I have given my only son.”
Cough, cough, little fair-haired boy. Perhaps somewhere your mother is thinking of you . . . boasting of the life she has so nobly given . . . the life you thought was your own, but which is hers to squander as she thinks fit.(92–93)
Such brutal writing might be understandable in the description of the enemy, but it is clear that for these young women the real enemy is Mother. When we compare this murderous prose with the gentle, pacifist tone of All Quiet on the Western Front, we can make the argument that, because of the gender reversals demanded by war, Erich Maria Remarque has produced a woman’s novel and Helen Zenna Smith a man’s novel. The subject positions of the experience of the writers, not their gender, produce different forms of écriture feminine and écriture masculine. Remarque and Price are important as war novelists because, more than other writers, they have marked their prose and their narratives with the profound experience of gender reversal and the battle to recover the lost gendered subject position which was the real experience of male and female bodies in World War I.
The gloved and ungloved (mailed fist?) hand formed by the bent tree, which Smith calls the Witch’s Hand, seems a deliberate answer to the exquisite flowering cherry tree in All Quiet on the Western Front, which so overpowers Detering, a man in Paul’s company, that he deserts out of a desperate desire for home. Home is a death-dealing monster to the British woman, an orchard full of promise to the German peasant. When Paul kills a Frenchman in hand-to-hand combat, he is overcome with remorse, reads his identity card, sees the photo of wife and child, and vows to replace him—he becomes a writer; the dead man was a printer, Gerard Duval, compositor.
Helen’s experience of the enemy, when for her the real enemy is the wicked stepmother (her own mother, the Commandant, England as her mother country), is a puzzled woman’s experience of the male gaze when the German POWs assess her body parts. (She is puzzled because part of her masculine role as a driver is to be the gazer, not the object of men’s gaze.) Paul’s knowledge of the patriarchal authority that makes war fills him with sorrow and pity. He is feminized and civilized by the humiliations and submissions required by the army, whereas Helen is brutalized and numbed. Paul and his friends play schoolboy pranks on their officer and keep their difference and distance from authoritarian values. Much as Helen, Tosh, and their companions hate Mrs. Bitch, they become her, or junior versions of her matriarchal militarism, when they scapegoat, torture, and expel the lesbian in their midst.
One of the most moving scenes in All Quiet on the Western Front is a tender and comic story of Lewandowski’s Polish wife’s visit to the hospital. He hasn’t seen her for two years and is almost recovered from a severe abdominal wound. The men on the ward insist that the little woman with the black mantilla get into bed with her husband. They stand guard, hold the baby and play cards so the couple can make love, “like one big family,” and then eat sausage with the “sweating and beaming” Lewandowski. Having been feminized by the trenches, the men experience an almost communal desire to be reinvested in the social roles of husband and father, rather than killer or shivering victim (264–268). This is a story of what we now think of as “female” behavior. It is interesting to compare the men’s struggle to return to male life-giving rather than death-dealing roles in a man’s novel with Rebecca West’s portrait of Chris Baldry regressing to a youthful self due to shell shock before he became a husband and father in The Return of the Soldier. His name, Bal/dry, clues the reader to a kind of pacifism of the body, the refusal to engender. This is also why the psychiatrists are so enraged with Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. His body has become a pacifist and refuses to sleep with Rezia and give her the child she wants.
In Not So Quiet . . . Helen’s one night stand with Robin when she returns to England seems to spring from her acquired “masculinity,” to be an act done out of fear of loss of sexual identity. But it is clear that the fear of a lesbian in the women’s barracks comes from a deeper fear of the pacifist body. It is not so much deviance that frightens them as the body that enacts its pacifism by refusing to bear children. The “carnivalesque” in this scene is a dreadful ritualized eating and speech-making ceremony, which ends, like some tribal ritual, by expelling the scapegoat. The carnivalesque in Remarque’s novel enacts bonding by erasing shame. The battlefield has no privileged toilet of one’s own. Both novels are mired in the body, as their narrators’ own bodies are mired in muddy battlefields. The communal latrines in All Quiet on the Western Front relax the boundaries between the men, and they become as close as women. Their bodies, humiliated in evacuation and emission, are weak and humanized. The woman ambulance drivers are also deep in others’ excrement, but suffer more from invasion by fleas. They become
brutalized and individualized, acting out their own hatred of authority by sacrificing one of their members rather than sticking together.28
There is an extraordinary scene at the opening of Not So Quiet . . . when the gallant heroine Tosh cuts her gorgeous red hair and burns the fleas and lice. This sordid ritual scene with its descriptions of filth and food that resembles shit does not unite the women but separates the sadistic Tosh, burning one louse at a time, as the “heroine,” different from the other girls who don’t dare to cut their hair for fear it would “put the helmet on the womanliness” they desperately need to maintain. It is only because she is an aristocrat that Tosh doesn’t fear being “unsexed” by short hair. “Unsexed? Me? With the breasts of a nursing mother?” (17) Tosh winks to Bertina Farmer (called The B.F. for Bloody Fool).
The scene emphasizes the class distinctions among the women: Tosh, The B.F., The Bug, Skinny, Etta Potato (Etta Potter), and Smithy, the narrator. The class distinctions are erased for the German soldiers, but since the women are in a volunteer outfit, they range in class from being, like Tosh, the niece of an earl, to upper-middle-class debutantes like The B.F., daughters of government administrators, like Skinny, whose father is important in the War Office, to Nell, whose father made jam and then settled in Wimbledon Common—“We sheltered young women who smilingly stumbled from the chintz-covered drawing-rooms of the suburbs straight into hell”(165). Tosh calls them mes petits harlots; she’s their leader and spokesperson. She even compiles a war alphabet for them: “B for Bastard—obsolete term meaning war-baby. . . . I for Illegitimate—(see B). . . . V for Virgin—a term of reproach” (160). Tosh’s alphabet inscribes the complicity of motherhood and war. She is, in reality, a budding “Mrs. Bitch,” a candidate for the role of Helen’s mother or Mrs. Evans-Mawnington, the British matriarch in the making. She both writes and embodies the gender reversal of women at war. Helen thinks that the War Office sends only upper-class girls to the Front because they will obey a code of honor and remain silent and stiff-upper-lipped about the horror. But their “voice” is Tosh’s noisy swaggering fearlessness, a voice in training to blow the Commandant’s whistle:
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