THE SHAPE OF HISTORY: LITERARY FORM AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR by MEGHAN LAU A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of Marianne DeKoven and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2010 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Shape of History: Literary Form and the First World War By MEGHAN LAU Dissertation Director: Marianne DeKoven This dissertation argues that the literature of the First World War takes account of the epistemological crisis affecting historiographic discourse in the early twentieth century through experiments with literary form. Despite a lack of temporal distance, First World War writers understood themselves as witnesses to a crucial event and conceived of their work as both literature and history. These aspirations, however, were complicated by the fact that the writing of history in the early years of the twentieth century took place in the shadow of the crisis of historicism, the late-nineteenth-century debate between positivist (or objective) and relativist (or subjective) conceptions of historical knowledge. First World War literature reflects a complex historical sensibility that is always aware of the problematic nature of historical writing. The first part of my dissertation, which considers war novels and autobiographies, proposes that the crisis in historicism, intensified by the war, propelled a search for forms that legitimize subjective and partial historical representations of the war. The first chapter considers Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, R.H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy, Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. ii Dalloway, and argues that the manipulation of perspective in the novel emphasizes the partial and subjective quality of both fictional and emerging historical representations of the war. The second chapter proposes that the autobiographical writing of the First World War adopts a failed conversion narrative that makes visible the difficulty of narrating personal and national history simultaneously. The latter two chapters of the dissertation explore works that renovate traditional literary forms to accommodate historiographic uncertainty. Thus, the third chapter evaluates the revisions of the implicit historical framework of allegory, whether Christian or cyclical, in Vernon Lee’s closet drama Satan the Waster, David Jones’s long poem In Parenthesis, and ee cummings’s The Enormous Room. The final chapter traces the emergence of a self-conscious strain in Louis Napoleon Parker’s wartime pageantry that eventually manifests itself in Noël Coward’s Cavalcade and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts. In each of these instances, formal innovation, whether distinctly modern or visibly indebted to literary tradition, enables the writing of history. iii Dedication For Bobby iv Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been written without the tremendous support and guidance that I received from my dissertation committee. As my director, Marianne DeKoven sustained this project from start to finish with her intelligence, generosity, unflagging enthusiasm and sage advice. Carolyn Williams, a superb teacher, introduced me to new ways of thinking about form and genre. Kate Flint shared her vast knowledge with me and read my work with great care and; I thank her for sending my thinking in new directions. The Department of English provided me with the opportunity to participate in a series of dissertation seminars. For their close reading of the early drafts of Chapter 4, I am grateful to the members of the spring 2008 dissertation writing seminar and, in particular, to Richard Miller, for bringing the group together. I wrote a first draft of Chapter 3 through the summer 2008 Mellon Dissertation Workshop; many thanks to Jonah Siegel and the other Mellon fellows for their valuable comments on the different stages of this work and, above all, the camaraderie. Michael McKeon and the participants in the fall 2008 Mellon Dissertation Seminar on Problems in Historical Interpretation helped me to think about the historical dimensions of my project with rigour and renewed clarity. Special thanks are due to Paul Yeoh, not only for his friendship, but for his careful reading of my work in all its many guises as I formulated and reformulated my ideas. This dissertation is immeasurably richer for the stimulating conversations I have had over the past eight years on the subjects of the First World War, modernism, and historiography. Susan Mann’s remarkable seminar on women’s history of the First v World War at McGill University in 2002 first piqued my interest in the subject of the First World War, while Sarah Cole’s course on twentieth-century war literature at Columbia University in 2005 introduced me to remarkable works of war writing. It was in conversation with Carol Smith in preparation for my orals that I developed the seeds of this dissertation; for sharing my enthusiasm for the literature of the First World War, I am most grateful to her. For thought-provoking conversations on a range of topics, I thank Elin Diamond, Alex Feldman, and Mark Salber Phillips. For their assistance in all matters and their constant encouragement, thanks are due to Courtney Borack, Eileen Faherty, and Cheryl Robinson. Kevin Mulcahy at the Alexander Library provided guidance and generously supported the purchase of research materials. Librarians and archivists at the British Library, the Birmingham Central Library, Columbia University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, the Imperial War Museum, and the William Ready Division of Special Collections at McMaster University were unfailingly helpful. I would also like to express my gratitude to David Miller and Jay Barksdale at the New York Public Library for access to the Wertheim Study, a wonderful place to write a dissertation. I had the good fortune of receiving generous funding throughout my graduate work. The Mellon Foundation supported me at several points in my research: a summer research grant in 2005 allowed me to travel to McMaster University to explore the Vera Brittain Archive, while Mellon fellowships gave me the opportunity to participate in the dissertation writing seminars in the summer and fall of 2008 and a Dissertation Completion Fellowship permitted me to devote my time to finishing my dissertation in 2009-10. The Daniel Francis Howard Travel Fellowship funded a crucial month of vi archival research at the British Library and Imperial War Museum in the fall of 2007. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the support of a four-year doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My friends and my family offered me encouragement and much-needed diversion throughout the writing of my dissertation. Above all, I would like to thank Bobby Sampson, who read countless drafts and made endless cups of tea, for his support of all my endeavours. This is for him. vii Table of Contents Abstract of the Dissertation ii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents viii List of illustrations ix Introduction: The Writer as Historian 1 Chapter 1: Historiography, Perspective, and the First World War Novel 33 Chapter 2: Autobiographies of War and Narratives of Conversion 103 Chapter 3: Figures of History: Allegory in the Literature of the First World War 165 Chapter 4: Performing History: Forms of Distance in the Wartime Pageant 208 Coda: The First World War Remembered 268 Appendix 273 Works Cited 275 Curriculum Vita 291 viii List of illustrations Figure 1: The Ballet of the Nations, page 3 273 Figure 2: The Ballet of the Nations, page 4 274 ix 1 Introduction: The Writer as Historian Between 1918 and 1933, Vera Brittain recounted her experience of the First World War in at least five different forms. The thousands of letters Brittain wrote during the war and the many volumes of her diary were initially transformed into a novel in 1919, which went through two drafts. 1 In 1924, she submitted an abridged compilation of diary entries to a competition. It was only in 1929 that she began to write an autobiography that would also tell the story of her generation. That work, Testament of Youth, was published in 1933. To summarize the genesis of Testament of Youth in this fashion does not do justice to Brittain’s endless search for a form. But what it does suggest is the extent of her struggle to find the appropriate literary mode for the writing and publication of her story. Her experience was not unique. Like Brittain, Robert Graves initially wrote his war story as a novel, only to rewrite it as autobiography in Good-bye to All That (1929). Vernon Lee was sufficiently dissatisfied with The Ballet of the Nations, a short illustrated, allegorical narrative that she published in 1915, that she transformed the text into a play and surrounded the new work, in turn, with hundreds of pages of notes. The revised text was published in 1920 as Satan the Waster. Finally, the artist David Jones began what would become the long poem In Parenthesis (1937) as a series of illustrations with text, but eventually discarded the illustrations entirely, transforming himself in this process from a visual artist to a poet. There are, of course, many such tales of writers searching for years for an adequate form for the telling of a particular story. But in each of the above cases, the 1 Brittain’s diary, letters, and manuscripts for the novel, titled first The Pawn of Fate and then Folly’s Vineyard and the edited diary are held in the William Ready Division of Special Collections at McMaster University. 2 story to be told was the story of the First World War. An intense awareness of watching history unfold and, more often than not, participating in history pervades the literature of the First World War.