Classical Monuments of the First World War
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GENDERING DEATH AND RENEWAL: CLASSICAL MONUMENTS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR ANA CARDEN-COYNE lassical motifs have a long and coalition between the classical and C triumphant heritage in war modern in war monuments is pertinent monuments and memorials. In the to understanding the impact of war and aftermath of the First World War, the ongoing search for healing through memorial designers appeared to return cultural practices. In contrast to the to the tropes and symbols of classicism catharsis of much war art and literature, in their search for appropriate forms to what Jay Winter refers to as ‘the commemorate the war dead. On the one apocalyptic imagination’, classical hand, classicism reflected the language memorials attempted to act as an antidote and ideals of imperialist imagination, so to the trauma of war.2 I use this phrase deeply enmeshed within Victorian and not just to recall the reciprocity between Edwardian thinking. Conversely, the monuments, bereaved and damaged utopic potential of classical harmony and individuals, and mourning communities, simplicity lent a different kind of but in order to suggest the role of ritualised significance to the personal, commemorative architecture as an social and political process that is alternative body to that killed, injured or commemoration. Arguably, this latter disabled by war, and thus also to suggest shift was an outcome of the scale and type the ‘performative’ aspect of gender in its of injuries that human bodies incurred in use of figuration. Although this idea of this first global, mechanised and mass gender as performed is usually reserved form of warfare. Investigating the for real people, if we consider embodied meaning of memorial embodiment an underlying principle in architecture, this essay considers the war monuments then this analytical gendered meaning of war and recovery structure may also be useful.3 as it appeared in some key war Classicism convened a powerful monuments of the postwar period. language of the noble, ideal and spiritual, Classical monuments of the First but most of all the supremely corporeal. World War narrated war and peace. In Circumventing the horrors of the recent doing so, classicism was not revived in past, the body was reinvented through purely literal or mimetic ways. Executed architectural forms. These memorials with a range of traditional and innovative enacted a form of rehabilitation in the approaches, postwar classicism projected corporeal sense, providing a vision of something of the experience of mass wholeness and restoration that displaced warfare and its entanglement with the body violated by war. The cor- modernity.1 This essay argues that the poreality of classical war monuments lent 40 ANA CARDEN-COYNE Gendering Death and Renewal itself to a profoundly gendered passage to heroic immortality occurs representation of death as masculine and when he ‘dies young and stays pretty’. beautiful, and the renewal of life in What the ancients referred to as ‘beautiful peacetime, as feminine and maternal. The death’ (kalos thanatos), invoked the ideals relationship between war and peace, of noble sacrifice bound up with the death and renewal, was comparable to beauty of youthful masculinity, which the gendering of space. The notion of a was mythologised into a culture of the partnership was crucial here. The warrior hero.5 Given that the love architectural body was set as a between men is the highest in the companion to bodily memories of war. Homeric warrior tradition, it is not too Since classicism performed a technique surprising that men experience the beauty of distancing, by evoking timelessness, of death because it binds them together, universality, longevity, it presented an it affirms the gender of death and the alternative version of time to that of the beauty of a masculinity cut short in its immediate traumatic past. It helped to prime, in the pursuit of fame, glory and create an alternative memory of war, eternal youth. which, as Pierre Nora has powerfully There are some remarkable argued, encouraged collective amnesia or convergences with the way the dead were a displacement of memory.4 It should not, heroised after the First World War. however, be reduced to a mere political Ambrose Pratt, for instance, replayed process of reconstruction, or a collusion Homeric heroism in his interpretation of to forget. Rather, classical symbolism the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance became an associate to war, providing an and the role of the Anzacs in the war. Like image of peace that was a partner to war. the ‘gallant hosts of Troy’, he wrote, the War, then, was not diminished, but rather Anzacs went to war ‘not in lust of naturalised as part of a universal cycle, conquest or in hope of gain, but to rectify sitting comfortably alongside the image a wrong, to vindicate outraged justice, to and political meaning of peace. The sustain liberty and to safeguard the basic classical metaphor was highly useful in principles of civilisation’.6 Such the production of a companionate memory heroisation far exceeded acknow- that accompanied the embodied ledgement of the survivors, except structures of monuments. I want to perhaps in Australia where returned suggest that this production of both war soldiers often received recognition along and peace was something of a social, with the dead. 7 The recording of political and aesthetic marriage, and as individuals’ names upon war memorials such was profoundly gendered. The was an ancient Greek practice of attribut- gendering of this embodiment occurs in ing fame in a permanent object of the image of War as masculine and the demarcation. This was not just a image of Peace as feminine. First, in democratic gesture, but also a way of numerous images of the male body as a aggrandising the individual soldier’s sleeping model of the ‘beautiful death’ commitment to the collective, through his accomplished in by war heroes. Second, own death. Modern war memorials, in the use of an ideal and allegorical body, however, described every soldier’s name especially in the form of a Nike or Winged reflecting the nature of mass warfare and Victory. mass death, but also the democratizing In the Homeric songs a warrior’s of the very concept of noble heroism. The 41 Humanities Research Vol. 10 No. 2, 2003 postwar importance, then, of the material dead’ which was placed on many object in contributing to the soldier’s memorials. His respect for the classical renown was a significant development of tradition reflected older visions of war the warrior myth and the Homeric and death. Classical monuments replaced principle of fame accorded to those who the brutalised and mutilated with a heroic achieved a ‘beautiful death’. treatment of bodily beauty, and tied it to The idea of the ‘beautiful death’ was a myth of serenity so important for expressed in modern images of dead peacetime and recovery. soldiers, whom appeared to be sleeping. In his design for the original London The restful repose was designed to cenotaph, Lutyens was said to have cushion the reality of death for mourning synthesized ‘classical virtues’ with the families. George Lambert’s sculpture for ‘local idiom’. Whilst he ‘took pure form, the St Mary’s Cathedral Memorial in Syd- moulded it in the subtlest proportion and ney, for example, is no dead young set in geometrical relation’, the perfect soldier, as the title Recumbent Figure (1930) formulation of this approach appeared in implies.8 Rather he lies sleeping, silent the war monument as none other.10 The and noble. Adapted to Christian modern cenotaph was an empty tomb. It purposes, the ‘beautiful death’ is pro- did not contain bodies. At the same time, jected from polished bronze surfaces, and it represented the male body by the hero literally shines in demonstration resonating closely with the corporeal of his warrior status. In other effigies of context that produced it. A cenotaph, in the ‘beautiful death’, such as the one sense, attempts to avoid any ‘recumbent figure’ on the Southampton relationship to the very human flesh it Memorial (1920, by Edwin Lutyens), the memorialises.11 When cenotaphs dead body is perched high above so that incorporated coffins or dead bodies, as the sleeping soldier is obscured. His face Lutyens did at Southampton or and body may never be seen, but his fame Manchester, they were perched at the (and those of the eighteen hundred names very top, well out of reach of human gaze. inscribed onto the pylon) shall be the Even then, the cloth of the greatcoat reward for the ‘beautiful death’. Similarly carved from stone usually covered their at Rochdale, Lutyens’ recumbent figure bodies and tin hats often covered men’s served the purpose of allowing the viewer faces. That men’s bodies were killed in to ‘appreciate the beauty of the upper war was not a visual reality that the portion on which it rests’. In other words, architect or sculptor wished to remember the figure was not an end in itself, but in stone. However, on many levels, rather a device to connect the beauty of especially the ceremonial, the relationship the structure to the memory of the male between bodies and war was impossible body. This proved a powerful device to to erase. Soldiers referred to ‘resting mourning communities. When Lutyens places’ with an irony that noted the was thinking about appropriate discrepancy between the reality and architectural forms, his mind turned to representation of death. As one German ‘the abstract shape and intrinsic beauty’ soldier remarked: of classicism.9 Men who ‘fell’ in war should be memorialized for their beauty The battlefield is really a huge cemetery and glory, summed up in Lutyens … [with] innumerable little white crosses invention of the phrase ‘the glorious everywhere … And then you can read in 42 ANA CARDEN-COYNE Gendering Death and Renewal the paper ‘Peacefully they rest’ … And appeared to be much less glamorous.