4. A Diary without Dates, p. 5.
5. The Forbidden Zone, p. 142. See also Susan Millar Williams’s “Mary Borden’s Experimental Fiction: Female Sexuality and the Language of War,” presented at the 1987 MLA session on Women’s Writing in World War I, which argues that Borden portrays war as a seductive rapist, airplanes and motor lorries as rakish, teasing “creatures of pleasure” even as they are the bearers of death.
6. The Forbidden Zone, p. 60.
7. Nancy Huston. “The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 119–136. For recent studies of the history and literature, see Margaret Higonnet (and Jane Jensen, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Weitz). Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Squier. Arms and the Woman: War, Gender and Literary Representation, (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Note the work of a group of scholars working on the World War I archives at the University of Tulsa. The Tulsa group includes Jan Calloway, Claire Culleton, George Otte, Linda Palumbo, Susan Millar Williams, and Angela Ingram. They presented their work at the 1987 MLA meeting. Claire Culleton’s study of the popular representations of women munitions workers in England in World War I was presented at the International Feminist meeting in Dublin in 1987 and appears in Women’s Studies International Forum 11, #2, 1988, 109–116. Angela Ingram’s essay on the banning of women’s writing, “‘Unutterable Putrefaction’ and ‘Foul Stuff’: Two Obscene Novels of the 1920s” appears in Women’s Studies International Forum 9, #4, 1986, 341–354. Her “Un/Reproductions: States of Banishment in Some English Novels after the Great War” appears in Women’s Writing in Exile, ed. M. L. Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Claire Tylee’s “Maleness Run Riot—The Great War and Women’s Resistance to Militarism” appears in Women’s Studies International Forum 11, #3, 1988, 199–210. Tylee’s essay takes issue with a provocative article by Sandra Gilbert, which presents the basic thesis of her new three-volume study (with Susan Gubar), No Man’s Land (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); the original essay is called “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women and the Great War,” SIGNS 8: 422–450, reprinted in Behind the Lines. Claire Tylee’s rebuttal of Gilbert’s thesis (that British women were empowered, psychologically, economically, and erotically) by World War I, is an important corrective to misleading arguments and quotations taken out of context. Gilbert’s argument is also interrogated by the Tulsa group, in Laura Mayhall’s “The Indescribable Barrier: English Women and the Effect of the First World War” (unpublished, and my “The Asylums of Antaeus; Women, War and Madness: Is There a Feminist Fetishism?” in Feminism and Critical Theory: The Differences Within, ed. Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1988), pp. 49–81. Another version of “Asylums” appears in Harold Veeser’s The New Historicism (New York: Methuen, 1988). See Joanne Glasgow’s review of Gilbert and Gubar’s first volume in New Directions for Women, Jan./Feb., 1988, p. 16; and Susan Stanford Friedman’s review in The Women’s Review of Books, July, 1988. Gilbert’s “sex war” construct is a limited paradigm, which succeeds in reinforcing the male canon because women writers of the period are only quoted to support the claim that they hated men. This technique appears to be a “feminist” version of the New Historicism, searching texts for evidence to support the argument rather than letting the history emerge with as much force as the literature. “The battle of the sexes” paradigm was outlined many years ago in Samuel Hynes’s The Edwardian Turn of Mind, based on an argument made by historian George Dangerfield in The Strange Death of Liberal England, which, in turn, was taken directly from Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Suffragette Movement. For an analysis of the rhetoric and ideology provided by Sylvia Pankhurst to future historians, see my essay in Suffrage and the Pankhursts (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988).
8. See The Young Rebecca West: 1911–1917, ed. Jane Marcus (New York: Viking, 1978). The most useful feminist history of English women’s struggle is Martha Vicinus’s Independent Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Other contemporary socialist feminist theory is to be found in Cecily Hamilton’s Marriage as a Trade (1909). Cecily Hamilton in Life Errant (London: J.M. Dent, 1935) regarded birth control as the most important woman’s issue, arguing that there would be no advances for women “except under a system of voluntary motherhood” (p. 65). Her rebellion was directed against “the dependence implied in the idea of ‘destined’ marriage, ‘destined’ motherhood—the identification of success with marriage, of failure with spinsterhood, the artificial concentration of the hopes of girlhood on sexual attraction and maternity.” Nicola Beauman in A Very Great Profession: The Women’s Novel 1914–1939 (London: Virago, 1983) regards Hamilton’s William, An Englishman (1919) as the best of the women’s novels about World War I, “a masterpiece,” “incomparable,” though her praise enforces an ideological design in the text which prefers a privatized “feminism” to the collective political action of the suffragettes. See also the chapter on the impact of the war on the Suffrage Movement in Sandra Holton’s Feminism and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Holton argues that this “was not a time of dormancy, defeatism, or depression among suffragists” (p. 116). They “remained intact” by organizing relief work.
9. The Young Rebecca West, p. 392.
10. Rose Macaulay’s “Many Sisters to Many Brothers” is reprinted in Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War, ed. Judith Kazantis and Catherine Reilly (London: Virago, 1981). On Rose Macaulay see Jeanette Passty, Eros and Androgyny: The Legacy of Rose Macaulay (Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988). F. Tennyson Jesse’s The Sword of Deborah was published by Heinemann in 1919. May Sinclair’s The Romantic (London: Collin, 1920) is as much a novel about psychoanalysis as it is about the war. Katherine Mansfield despised its “cheap psychoanalysis,” “turning life into a case.” Rebecca West’s review of Sinclair’s report on Belgium describes the effectiveness of the writing as due to its narrative as a record of “humiliations” and praises her “gallant humiliated book.” Does that experience of humiliation relate to her humiliation of the “unmanly” man in the novel?
11. The Romantic, p. 245.
12. Sylvia Townsend Warner. Collected Poems, ed. Claire Harman (New York: Viking, 1982), pp. 21–22.
13. Frances Balfour (Lady). Dr. Elsie Inglis (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), p. 144. See also May Wedderburn Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices (Roundwood Press, 1976) and Cecily Hamilton’s Life Errant (London: J.M. Dent, 1935), p. 98. Claire Tylee also cites Mrs. St. Clair Stobart’s The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere (London: Hodder, 1916), whose memoir was a release from the anger, “cursing in my heart,” she felt as a pacifist, easily transferring her feminism to “votes for life, justice for humankind” after the horrors she had seen in the Women’s Convoy Corps, which she headed in the Balkan War, and in hospital units in Antwerp, Cherbourg, and Serbia.
14. The Tree of Heaven (New York: Macmillan, 1918), p. 104.
15. See “Asylums of Antaeus” for a discussion of these ideas.
16. New York: Putnam’s, 1916, reprinted 1934. For the banning of books during the war, see Angela Ingram’s “Un/Reproductions,” cited above.
17. The Backwash of War, p. 10.
18. Quoted in Roland N. Stromberg’s Redemption by War: Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence, Kans.: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1982), p. 235.
19. Gertrude Stein. Paris France (New York: Liveright, 1970), p. 38.
20. Evadne Price died in Australia in 1985. These autobiographical materials were supplied to Virago Press by Kenneth Attiwill. She married him in 1929 but told him little of her past except that she had been born of English parents off the coast of New South Wales in 1901. When her father died she went on stage
to support herself. She was understudy to Dorothy Dix in The Bird of Paradise and played Princess Angelica in The Rose and the Ring. In 1918 she began work as a journalist with a column in The Sunday Chronicle, which also published Rebecca West and George Bernard Shaw, called “As a Woman Sees It.” From there she went to The Sunday Chronicle and The Daily Sketch and began to write for serialization in Novel Magazine in the late 1920s the Jane Turpin children’s books, which were very popular.
21. Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig, Women and Children First: The Fiction of the Two World Wars (London: Victor Gollancz, 1978).
22. Quoted in Kenneth Attiwill’s notes.
23. The concepts of “carnival,” “heteroglossia,” and “dialogism” I use here were developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his Rabelais and The Dialogic Imagination. Gender was not a serious category for Bakhtin, but a feminist revision of his theories is useful, particularly for the intertextual reading of All Quiet on the Western Front and Not So Quiet . . . , which is my project here, as well as for the carnivalistic aspects of eating, bleeding, defecating, and vomiting in the bodily experience of war which characterize the two texts.
24. Page numbers in the text refer to the Albert E. Marriott edition of Not So Quiet . . . , London, 1930, and reprinted here by The Feminist Press, p. 30.
25. I am using the Fawcett/Crest edition of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929), trans. A. W. Wheen. The passages on silence are on pp. 120–121: “the soundless apparitions that speak to me.” For a similar procession of silent maimed men, see p. 163 of Not So Quiet . . . .
26. Cadogan and Craig write in Women and Children First “the method is blunt, brutal and ferociously expository. Subjective indignation has a corrosive effect, however, and the pile-up of disasters tends toward farce” p. 42. They find the series of novels “strangely crude and offensive in tone,” “a violent, unconsidered reaction to an extreme social condition.” Helen’s husband Roy commits suicide in the sequel, and she is blamed for it. Women of the Aftermath deals with the problem of joblessness after the war and the anger of the excluded women. However, Arnold Bennett reviewed Not So Quiet . . . in The Evening Standard: “Documentary detail about the war is still thousands of miles from being completed. One might have assumed that everything had been said about the Front—until Miss Helen Zenna Smith published her affrighting book . . . which portrays minutely the daily existence of women—chaffeurs and other women workers just behind the Front. This work too may well become a prime source for historians. I am glad I read it. But no war book has appalled me more . . .”; Arnold Bennett: The Evening Standard Years. ‘Books and Persons’ 1926–1931, ed. and with intro. by Andrew Mylett (London: Chatto and Windus/Archon, 1974). My thanks to Angela Ingram for this reference as well as her invaluable help on all aspects of this essay.
27. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1939), p. 148.
28. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the bowels are the most important part of the body, as in Bakhtinian carnivalesque. There are lavatory jokes in Not So Quiet . . . , but they are not so blatant. The macabre humor of war novels in relation to gender is also worth study. It is clear that Remarque’s novel changed the subject of war fictions roughly from epic invocations of individual heroism to initiation into brotherhood, and this influence can be felt in Catch-22 and M.A.S.H.
29. Margaret Higonnet, “Civil Wars and Sexual Territories,” paper delivered at the Second International Dubrovnik Conference on Feminist Theory, May, 1988 and included in Arms and the Woman.
30. For further discussion of The Well of Loneliness (Garden City, N.Y.: Blue Ribbon Books, 1928), see Angela Ingram’s “ ‘Unutterable Putrefaction’ and ‘Foul Stuff’,” and “Narration as Lesbian Seduction in A Room of One’s Own,” in my Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.) See also the scene in The Well of Loneliness in which the “general” cautions Stephen about her “emotional friendship” with Mary Llewellyn (pp. 330–331).
31. My thanks to Angela Ingram for pointing out the references to Toupie Lowther. The quotations are from Michael Baker, Our Three Selves (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985), p. 125. The Hackett-Lowther papers are in the Imperial War Museum and deserve further study.
32. Lovat Dickson, Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness: A Sapphic Chronicle (New York: Scribners, 1975).
33. Virginia Woolf, “The Niece of an Earl,” in the Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1932), pp. 193–197.
34. Quoted in Susan Millar Williams, “Mary Borden’s Experimental Fiction.”
35. Behind the Lines, p. 119.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HELEN ZENNA SMITH is the pseudonym of Evadne Price (1896–1985), who wrote several more novels about the character Smith.
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