Nesting in English Fields : Bird Narratives and the Re- Imagining of Post-War Britain
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Nesting in English fields : bird narratives and the re- imagining of post-war Britain DOBSON, Joanna Available from Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/18745/ This document is the author deposited version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. Published version DOBSON, Joanna (2017). Nesting in English fields : bird narratives and the re- imagining of post-war Britain. Masters, Sheffield Hallam University. Copyright and re-use policy See http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive http://shura.shu.ac.uk ‘Nesting in English Fields’ Bird narratives and the re-imagining of post-war Britain Joanna Dobson A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Sheffield Hallam University for the degree of MA in English by Research October 2017 Acknowledgements First and foremost, my thanks are due to Sheffield Hallam University for awarding me a fee waiver for the MA in English by Research. Without it, I would not have been able to undertake this work. Dr Harriet Tarlo has been an outstanding Director of Studies: expert, rigorous and always encouraging and good-humoured. I am also very grateful to my second supervisor, Professor Chris Hopkins, for his unfailing helpfulness and encyclopaedic knowledge of the period I was researching. Dr Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce’s enthusiastic leadership of the course, and also her understanding when I encountered not one but two crises with my elderly parents, were much appreciated. My father, Chris Wilson, died just as I was starting work on this project. I am so grateful to him, and to my mother, Jane Wilson, for instilling in me an early love of books, birds and birdwatching. 2 ‘Nesting in English Fields’ Bird narratives and the re-imagining of post-war Britain Abstract This thesis explores what a reading of bird narratives from the mid-twentieth century reveals about contemporary anxieties around human identity. Starting from the assumption that people often use animals to say things they cannot otherwise articulate, it investigates whether readings that foreground the representation of the more-than-human world in both familiar and unfamiliar texts can shed new light on a period of British history that was characterised by radical social change. The texts are examined using insights from historical contextualisation, ecocriticism and animal studies. The period is known as one in which previous ideas about human identity were being destabilised by new thinking around issues such as gender, race and sexuality. However, my readings show all the texts examined to be dominated by a single, overarching question, namely whether humans are capable of creating and sustaining a world worth living in. In The Awl Birds by J.K. Stanford (1949) and Adventure Lit Their Star by Kenneth Allsop (1949) the answer is yes, but this positive response is premised on two very different constructions of national identity and of the type of country that Britain should become after the Second World War. In the 1960s texts, The Peregrine by J.A. Baker (1967) and A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines (1968), the answer is an unequivocal no. My readings demonstrate a close connection between the pessimism of these books and the profound changes in agriculture that were underway during the period. This research is important in demonstrating how readings that foreground the more-than-human world can offer new insights into both the texts under discussion and also the culture in which those texts were produced. In addition, in the current era of anthropogenic ecological crisis, they add to our understanding of what lies behind the way that humans interact with the more-than- human world. Without such an understanding, efforts to solve the crisis are unlikely to succeed. 3 Contents Page Acknowledgements 2 Abstract 3 Introduction 5 PART ONE: The Awl Birds and Adventure Lit Their Star Introduction to Part One 18 Chapter one: Avocet 25 Chapter two: Little Ringed Plover 36 PART TWO: The Peregrine and A Kestrel for a Knave Introduction to Part Two 46 Chapter three: Peregrine 49 Chapter four: Kestrel 60 Conclusion 74 4 Introduction This research project investigates how readings of bird narratives from the mid-twentieth century can shed light on contemporary anxieties around human identity. It takes critical frameworks from the present day and applies them retrospectively to texts that have historically been neglected or interpreted only narrowly. By combining insights from ecocriticism and animal studies with historical contextualisation of the texts, it demonstrates that readings that foreground the representation of the more-than-human world can yield new insights about both the texts themselves and the culture in which they were produced. Beginnings The project began with two sparrows. Towards the end of my undergraduate studies, I read Mrs Dalloway for the first time and was arrested by an image of the shell-shocked Septimus Smith in Regent’s Park: A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death (Woolf 2000, p21). Later I discovered that Woolf had written in a memoir how she herself, during a period of severe mental distress, believed that the birds in the garden outside her sick room were singing in Greek choruses (Dalgarno 2001, p33). I was intrigued by the idea that a deeply traumatised subject might find meaning in birdsong, and also that the birdsong might be understood in terms of a language that is at the same time one of the shaping forces of Western culture and also a common trope for what is incomprehensible. Birds enter our lives so frequently that we often hardly notice them, but this fragment of text hinted that if we would only pay them proper attention, they might open a way to uncover a multiplicity of hidden meanings, both cultural and personal. For example, in the context of Mrs Dalloway as a whole, these sparrows offer a radical alternative to the culture that the novel critiques, challenging both its constructions of madness and also its refusal to confront the crisis of representation brought about by the First World War. In the same year that I read Mrs Dalloway, Jonathan Cape published Helen Macdonald’s phenomenally successful H is for Hawk (2014), in which Macdonald describes how training a 5 goshawk helped her come to terms with the death of her father. Here again, someone for whom the world no longer made sense was able to find meaning in birds. This struck a deep chord. My childhood and early adulthood were dominated by the death of my younger brother in a road accident when he was seven, an event that my sister and I were forbidden to talk about. Unsurprisingly, this meant the family didn’t talk about very much at all. The one time when we did become relatively communicative was when we went out birdwatching. We were members of the RSPB and had several holidays visiting reserves in pursuit of rare species: marsh harriers, red kites, avocets and Dartford warblers drew us like magnets to different parts of the country. Reading Woolf and Macdonald, with their suggestions that birds might help humans negotiate unspeakable experiences, led to some interesting questions. Why were these holidays so successful when the rest of our lives was so miserable? What were we really looking for? I began to wonder whether there was something in the rarity of these birds, their status as almost-extinct species, hovering on the brink between life and death, that compelled us to seek them out. Did the reserves offer a safe space to confront, albeit subconsciously, fears about endings, loss and death? Did the time spent in hides, watching birds move so effortlessly and enviably between sky, land and water, give us a temporary sense of freedom from an earthbound existence that had become, at times, almost intolerable? My suspicions that birds could be more significant than I realised were confirmed in an article by Macdonald. ‘Nest of Spies’ (2013) discusses a book by Maxwell Knight, an MI5 handler who was the inspiration for James Bond’s controller, M. Ostensibly, The Cuckoo in the House (1955) is the story of how Knight raised a cuckoo chick in his own home. However, Macdonald also finds in it ‘a fascinating and troubling fable about the meanings we give to animals, and a book that unwittingly revealed all sorts of strange collisions and collusions between natural history and national history in post-war Britain’ (Macdonald 2013, no pagination). Cuckoos are an important English cultural marker, their arrival each year being recorded in The Times, and also an emblem of duplicity, due to their habit of laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. ‘The enemy within,’ she writes. ‘Knight, naturalist and counter-subversion specialist, was, of course desperate to own one’ (Macdonald 2013, no pagination). She goes on to draw parallels between the cuckoo’s secretive sex life and Knight’s clandestine homosexuality, and uses contemporary writing on natural history to reinforce her claim that ‘we can — and do — use animals as our proxies; we use them to speak for us, to say things that we cannot otherwise articulate’ (Macdonald 2013, no pagination). 6 This analysis made me want to seek out other bird narratives to see whether they might also be saying things that were difficult to articulate, and whether the birds might be vehicles for exploring issues that for whatever reason could not be confronted directly.