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Winifred Holtby The 'Gospel of Detachment': Remembrance, Exile, and Engagement in Women's Lives and Writing in England Between the Wars. Daragh D. Catherine Russell Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Daihousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada 1998 O Copyright by Daragh D. Catherine Russell, 1998 National Library Bibiioaièque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Aaquisitions et 51biiiraphicSeMces senrices bibliographiques 395 welbgton Street 395, Ne we)nngtm OttawaON K1AW OttawaON K1AW Canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une Licence non exclusive licence dowing the exciusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distriiute or sell reproduire, prêter, distri'buer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de micdche/nlm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format élecironique. The author retams ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts f?om it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. Canada This thesis is dedicated to Florence Olden Haggarty (1914--), and to the memory of Blanche Gosse Russell (191 7-1 986). Table of Contents Abstract Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Noncombatants and Survivors. 2 Testaments of a Generation? Women's War Memoirs and the Problem of Authority. 3 'Detached Cornmitment': Ferninism, Tirne And Tide, and Winifred Holtby. 4 'And on Whose Side are You?': Storm Jameson, Stevie Smith, and the Politicised Literature of the 1930s 5 Conclusion Bibliography ABSTRACT Politics and literary culture in Britain between the wars (1919 - 1939) were deeply informed by the impact of the Great War, yet relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship of women to the war. It has been generally accepted that the experience of war had a profoundly aiienating effect upon the men of the war generation; convenely, the non-experience of war resulted in the engagement of women with the damaged post-war world. This thesis is concerned with examining certain texts by four female British writen: Vera Brittain. Winifred Holtby, Stom Jameson, and Stevie Smith, in an attempt to discern how middle class women remembered the war, and how their ambiguous relationship to it informed their writing and social conscience. Literary texts are of use as an historical tool not only because they reveal how feminine experience was informed by the accidents of history, but also because they help to shape cultural and social formation and change. Chapter 1, the introduction, discusses the development of academic and emotional considerations of the First World War by describing its cultural implications in Bntain, particularly in relation to modernism and the role of women. The inability of women to fully participate in the experience of warfare led to the development of a uniquely female literary and political voice. By exercising their detachment from the war, they were able to articulate a criticism of culture and society with the insight of the observer rather than the participant. closely uniting the personal with the political. Chapter 2 compares two war memoin, by Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson, in an attempt to examine how women approached the problem of writing subjective accounts of the war, and the consciousness of their ambiguous authority in so doing. Both texts are resonant with the emotional power of the Great War's 'lost generation' of young men, and provide insight into the process of how we have mernorialised the war itself. Chapter 3 examines the fiction and journalism of Winifred Holtby in the context of the feminist weekly Tirne And Tide, a paper with which she was closely connected throughout her prolific career and short life. The paper itself provides a locus for investigation of the changing nature of feminism in the intewar period. Holtby's work exemplifies the 'gospel of detachment', i.e. the challenge she believed the war had posed to women, yet the persona1 conflict inherent in her work reflects the complications of that challenge for poiitics and feminism. Chapter 4 looks at the politicised literature of the 1930s and the rise of Fascisrn through the work of Storm Jameson and Stevie Smith. Both authors refiect a passionate anti-Fascism in their indiament of 'the power of crueity', yet make use of radically different forms to approach their subject, linking the use of language with engagement in the shifting social and cultural forces of the period. Each woman made use of their detachment from the experience of war in a manner which allows for a subtle and uniquely discursive approach to questions of gender and politics discussed here. Acknowledgments I am foremost grateful to Dr. Stephen Brooke, who first encouraged my interest in the use of literary texts as an historical tool. and without whose unflagging support in the face of migraines. appendicitis and other un-natural disasters I may well have thrown in the towel at the eleventh hour. Thanks are also due to the Faculty of Graduate Studies. Dalhousie University, for the award of a research development grant. and to the British Museum's Colindale Newspaper Library in London, for permission to view the archives of Time And Ede; to Jennifer Dickinson for her kind permission to use her unpublished dissertation Women Novelists and War (1980). and to her husband. Dr. Harry Dickinson of the University of Edinburgh. who informed me of his wife's work. photocopied. and mailed me the relevant chapters. To Michael Pick. Mary Evans MacLachlan, and Brenda and Neville Russell, who have taught me how to approach this project with patience and zeal, my love and thanks. vii -1 - Introduction: Noncombatants and Survivors Her's is not an agreeable book; it is one not likely to be popular wrth a public which finds heroism more congenial than justice; but it is a point of view which demands consideration. If the creed of the combatant cannot face this gospel of detachment, stated as it is stated here with force, dignity and satire, then it must declare itself defeated. - Winifred Holtby, The Gospel of Detachment', Time and Tide, June 1 7,1930 Basil never spoke of the trenches, but I Saw them always... - Stevie Smith, A Soldier Dear to Us It has become cliché, when discussing the First World War, to speak in ternis of watenheds. For many historians the war remains the defining moment of twentieth century British culture and society. Even if it was not a cataclysm, it served to escalate and metamorphose forces of change already present in 1914, forces which challenged the values, mores, and security of the Victorian period. By the time of the Armistice there was undeniably a gulf, real or imagined, separating the golden summer of August 1914 from the grey winds of November 1918. Modris Eksteins, describing the fervour of excitement that possessed the cities of Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and London in the days surrounding the declaration of war, explains the imaginative significance of the 'guns of August' thus: The days of that summer were long and full of sunshine; the nights were mild and moonlit. That it was a beautiful and unforgettable season is part of the lore of that summer of 1914, part of its poignancy and mystique. Yet it is not to evoke Sun and spas, sailing regattas and somnolent afternoons - important as such imagery is for that sense of that summer before the storm - ...it is very simply because the fine days and nights of that July and August encouraged Europeans to venture out of their homes and display their emotions and prejudices in public, in the streets and squares of their cities and towns. 1 Eksteins goes on to speculate that events might have occurred very differently had the surnmer been cold and damp: that the jingoism displayed by the crowds during the moment of crisis helped to push "the political and military leadership of Europe toward confrontationn.* This sense of calrn before the storm, and the passionate response to the potential conflict were experienced en masse in England. Yet such sentiments hardly appeared in a vacuum; there were many shadows in the Edwardian afternoon which were encroaching upon public sensibility long before the Serbian 'provocationf of international mobilisation. The pathos and nostalgia of Philip Larkin's phrase 'Never such innocence again' is an eloquent description not only of one of the prevailing 'myths' of the Great War, that of the loss of innocence, but also of the huge divide that was perceived as separating pre- and post-war culture and society in Britain. Yet the nature of that change was nothing if not complicated and qualified; nowhere is this better illustrated than by the 1 Modris Eksteins, Rites of S~rina:The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Aae (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989). pp. 55-6. Philip LaMn, 'MCMXIV, quoted in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Mem~ry(London: Univerçity of Oxford Press, 1975), p. 19. deeply ambivalent status of English women at the end of the war. I begin in November 1918 for two reasons. It is a date significant not simply because it marked the Armistice. but also because earlier that year the Representation of the People Act had granted wornen over thirty the right to vote in national elections. Further, this date allows one to set up a demarcation between pre- and post-war culture before discussing female experience of the war itself.
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