THE DEATH and BIRTH of a HERO: the Search for Heroism in British World War One Literature
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THE DEATH AND BIRTH OF A HERO: The Search for Heroism in British World War One Literature Cristina Pividori Ph.D. Thesis supervised by Professor Andrew Monnickendam Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 2012 Acknowledgments I am heartily thankful to my supervisor, Professor Andrew Monnickendam, who has supported me throughout this thesis with his patience and knowledge while giving me the space to develop my own ideas. One simply could not wish for a better supervisor. I would also like to express my thanks to Professor Debra Kelly of the Group for War and Culture Studies for her generosity in allowing me to spend time at the University of Westminster while developing my research and for her kind and constructive encouragement. Many thanks, too, go to Professor Jay Winter for his insightful, witty remarks. I also owe my gratitude to Dr Jessica Meyer, Dr Santanu Das and the International Society for First World War Studies for patiently replying to my enquiries. For access to World War One original documents, published items and digital resources, I would like to thank the staff of the Humanities Reading Room at the British Library and Mr. Roderick Suddaby and his staff, of the Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum. This research project would not have been possible without the financial support of Generalitat de Catalunya (AGAUR, grants FI-DGR 2007-2010 B-00639 and BE- DGR 2010 A-00870), and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (grants DCB2005-0181 and TME2009-00547). I am also grateful to my friend Fiona Kelso for her help in proof-reading and for her enthusiastic support. Finally, I owe my deepest gratitude to my husband for his understanding, encouragement and selfless patience from the very beginning. Formatting and Illustrations This thesis has been written in general agreement with the guidelines established by the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (Fifth Edition), except for the placing of notes and illustrations, which are situated on the same page where direct references are made. Contents Introduction ............................................................................................ 2 Research Questions ............................................................................................ 4 Methodology and Approach ................................................................................. 6 Overview of Chapters ......................................................................................... 7 Chapter I: Nineteenth-Century War Heroics: The Victorian Hero Myth .. 16 I.1. Imperialism, Propaganda and the Victorian Hero ............................................ 16 I.2. Moulding the Subaltern Hero’s Mind: The Public-school Ethos .......................... 30 I.3. The Boer War: Heroic Anxieties ................................................................... 52 Chapter II: The Anti-heroic and the Ghost Myth .................................... 75 II.1. The Eclipse of the Victorian Hero Myth ......................................................... 76 I.2. Recognised and Unrecognised Forms of Conscientious Objection ...................... 81 I.3. A World at War: “The War to End All Wars” ................................................. 103 II.4. The Vicissitudes of Representing Modern War: Myth as Reality ..................... 110 II.5. The Ghost Myth: The Death of the Hero? ................................................... 113 Chapter III: The Great War in Words .................................................. 123 III.1.The Victorian Hero Refuses to Die ............................................................. 124 III.2. Ghost Myth Literature ............................................................................ 135 III.2.1. Ghost Myth Poetry ........................................................................... 135 III.2.2. Ghost Myth Prose ............................................................................ 142 III.3. The War-Books Controversy .................................................................... 160 III.4. Establishing the Ghost-Myth Canon .......................................................... 163 III.5. Reasserting the Heroic Ideal ................................................................... 166 Chapter IV: Searching for the Heroic Self in Times of Crisis ................ 170 IV.1. Male Bonding as Heroic Virtue: Comrades, Friends and Lovers ..................... 170 IV.1.1. From Gilgamesh to the Great War ...................................................... 176 IV.1.2. The Happy Battalion ......................................................................... 186 IV.1.3. The Alienation of Institutionalised Comradeship ................................... 201 IV.1.4. Recovering Humanity through Friendship ............................................ 208 IV.1.5. Greater Love ................................................................................... 219 IV.1.5.1. Homophobia, Homoeroticism and Desire ....................................... 219 IV.1.5.2. All Men’s Land: The Homoerotic Pastoral/Elegy .............................. 238 IV.2. The Hero and the Other .......................................................................... 248 IV.2.1 Deserters, Malingerers and Cowards .................................................... 250 IV.2.2. The Enemy with a Thousand Faces ..................................................... 258 IV.3. Death and Birth of the Hero: Reconstructing Heroic Masculinity ................... 268 IV.3.1. The Liminal Hero: Between Manliness and Masculinity .......................... 269 IV.3.1. Other Men, Other Heroisms ............................................................... 276 Conclusions ......................................................................................... 284 Specific Findings for each Chapter .................................................................... 284 General Conclusions ....................................................................................... 308 Suggestions for Further Work .......................................................................... 311 Works Cited ........................................................................................ 318 Introduction Introduction In these days I was very happy. This was Life, and if one was occasionally frightened out of one’s wits, a sudden fright never did a young man any harm [...]. To lie breathless in the German wire with a storming party of volunteers, armed with clubs and made invisible in the darkness by having our faces blacked was a splendid adventure [...]. (Carrington, A Subaltern’s War 26) The grossly mismanaged First World War, into which I plunged as soon as I left school, gave us infantryman so convenient a measuring-stick for discomfort, grief, pain, fear and horror, that nothing since has greatly daunted us. But it also brought new meanings of courage, patience, loyalty and greatness of spirit; incommunicable, we found, to later times. (Introduction, Graves 1) He closed his eyes and had a vision of men advancing under a rain of shells. They had seemed so toy-like, so trivial and ineffective when opposed to that overwhelming wrath, and yet they had moved mechanically as though they were hypnotized or fascinated by some superior will [...]. It had seemed impossible to relate that petty, commonplace, unheroic figure, in ill fitting khaki and a helmet like the barber’s basin with which Don Quixote made shift on his adventure, to the moral and spiritual conflict, almost 1 superhuman in its agony, within him. (Manning 10) My thesis focuses on the representation of heroic masculinity in the literature of the Great War. In this introduction first I will present my research questions, methodology and approach; then I will describe the chapters that structure the thesis. In order to develop my arguments I examine the narratives written by British soldiers who served in the Great War. Among those who were in the trenches, I have only selected the writings of the group of men whose voices are still heard today. They are regarded as the canonical ‘war poets’ and they wrote the story of the Great War that came to be known as the ‘truth.’ Most of them came from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds; many had been to public schools and served as officers at the front. They are Richard Aldington, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley and Edward Thomas. Because of their social and cultural similarities and their comparable 1 The quotations above are a sample of the complicated and contradictory nature of soldiers’ responses to the Great War and illustrate the core of my thesis. 2 Introduction approach to war and heroism, I have also included the writings of C.E. Montague, Charles Carrington, Ford Madox Ford, A.P. Herbert, Max Plowman, Guy Chapman, Gerard Brenan, Frederic Manning, Wyndham Lewis and Henry Williamson.2 Taking as a point of departure Marcus’ notion of autobiography as “a site of struggle” (9), I examine the autobiographical narratives written by the war poets as essentially unstable, hybrid and transgressive texts, “on the borders between art and life, inner self and outer world, fiction and history” (Marcus 12). By focusing on the narration of real war experiences, it is possible to explore the peculiarly rich texture that flows when representations of heroic