A STUDY of ROSE MACAULAY's PACIFIST NOVELS by SEONAE HA
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"TO SEIZE FRAGMENTS OF TRUTH": A STUDY OF ROSE MACAULAY'S PACIFIST NOVELS By SEONAE HA-BIRDSONG Bachelor of Arts Kyungpook National University Taegu, South Korea 1981 Master of Arts Kyungpook National University Taegu, South Korea 1983 Submitted to the Faculty of the GradU:ate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December, 1995 "TO SEIZE FRAGMENTS OF TRUTH": A STUDY OF ROSE MACAULAY'S PACIFIST NOVELS Thesis Approved: #liwr Oh V7'6 rt,,_- C ~ Dean of the Graduate College 11 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deepest appreciation to Dr. Elizabeth Grubgeld for being an outstanding advisor. She not only gave me inspiration, encouragement, and guidance but also helped me to have access to a number of materials for this study. I must extend my gratitude to my other committee members, Dr. Edward Walkiewicz, Dr. Linda Leavell, and Dr. Santiago Garcia for their guidance. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Leavell for her class on feminist studies which helped me to understand women's literature. I dedicate my dissertation to my mother, Gyl-Yun Cho, who has been supportive for all these years and for whom my completion of this degree has the greatest meaning. My thanks also go to H. Young Kim for her friendship and tremendous help and to Dale McLaughlin, who always gave me encouraging words. Finally, I express my special appreciation to my husband, Jeffrey Birdsong, who has been a strong supporter and best friend. I also extend my warm thanks to his parents, Art and Donna Birdsong, for their support. lll TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page INTRODUCTION ......................................................... ;..................................................... 1 I. ESSAYS ......................................................................................................................... 24 II. POTTERISM ................................................................................................................. 49 Potterism ................................................................................................................ 53 The Potterish Literature ......................................................................................... 58 Macaulay's Writings on War ................................................................................. 78 ill. NON-COMBATANTS AND OTHERS ...................................................................... 92 A Distinctive Pacifist Novel .................................................................................. 94 Alix: A Daughter ................................................................................................. 108 Daphne: A Mother ............................................................................................... 127 Rose: A Writer ..................................................................................................... 138 IV. AND NO MAN'S WIT ............................................................................................. 148 "A Convinced Pacifist" or "A Neutral?" ............................................................. 153 Politics ................................................................................................................. 166 Art ........................................................................................................................ 195 V. THE WORLD MY WILDERNESS ........................................................................... 210 A Pacifist in the Time of World War II ............................................................... 215 Barbarism ............................................................................................................. 219 Civilization .......................................................................................................... 240 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................ 257 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................ 265 iv 1 INTRODUCTION In Rose Macaulay's life time, 1881 to 1958, England was officially engaged in three wars-the Boer War and two World Wars-and informally involved in the Spanish Civil War because of its citizens' voluntary participation. The Boer War, which lasted between 1899 and 1902, does not seem to have affected the young Macaulay, for there is no writing before 1906 in which she revealed her views of the war. However, the impact of the two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War on Macaulay can be inferred from her various writings. The First World War, especially, had a crucial effect on her as a woman writer. In 1914 Rose Macaulay was thirty-two years old. She had published seven novels and one collection of poems before the outbreak of the First World War. The war disturbed Macaulay tremendously as it did a great number of writers. It also led her to an awareness of gender identity. The majority of her novels published after World War I demonstrate that Macaulay was preoccupied with issues related to war. Among those issues are the impact of war on non-combatants as well as combatants, the gender division with respect to war, the relation between war and literature, and war's effect on civilization. All the issues reflect her pacifist beliefs. Macaulay's pacifism, however, has not been fully appreciated because it is presented in a way that not many readers would comprehend. In her novels, Macaulay avoided directly voicing her opinion on peace. Moreover, she did not agree with the women pacifists of the early twentieth century who argued that men were warlike, while women were peace-oriented. Thus her writings led 2 the readers of the time to question her pacifist views. The misunderstanding of Macaulay's pacifist stand, to a certain degree, still continues. My study explores Macaulay's pacifism as embodied in the novels that particularly concentrate on the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. The novels are Non-Combatants and Others (1916), And No Man's Wit (1940), and The World My Wilderness (1950). I shall examine how Macaulay's ideas o.f war literature shape the way in which pacifism is presented in her novels. I shall also consider how those ideas are connected with the gender identity which Macaulay, as a woman writer, has to face in dealing with the issue of war. Before discussing characteristics of Macaulay's pacifist writings, this study goes over her political activities as a pacifist, which partly explain why Macaulay has been neglected as a pacifist writer. In general, Macaulay is considered to be a strong advocate of peace in the 1930s before the Second World War. Because of her active role as a pacifist and her numerous anti-war comments and essays, such as "Aping the Barbarians" in Let Us Honor Peace (1937) and An Open Letter to a Non-Pacifist (1937) for the Peace Pledge Union, her pacifist stance of the late 1930s was unquestionable. During this time Macaulay, as a co compiler with Daniel George Bunting, also worked on an anthology of anti-war literature, All in a Maze ( 1938). Macaulay's pacifist activities of the 1930s were mainly in support of the Peace Pledge Union, which was founded in 1936 by Dick Sheppard, an Anglican clergyman. Macaulay was one of its thirty-six sponsors-alongside other writers such as Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, Bertrand Russell, and Vera Brittain-from June 1936 to March 1938, the time when she resigned her sponsorship. In the opinion of Martin Ceadel, despite her distinctive activities, Macaulay did not adhere to her pacifist beliefs long at all. In his 1980 study of pacifism in England between the two World Wars, Ceadel 3 says that Macaulay, after resigning from the Peace Pledge Union, "remained a pacifist until the summer of 1940," the time of the Nazis' breakthrough (215). Macaulay may have changed her strong opposition to war in general after witnessing the impact of Nazism. In a letter to her sister on 6 June 1940, she expressed her concern about many friends of hers who were on the Nazi black-list and described a dreadful situation which was generated by the Nazis: "Some people have schemes for taking the identity cards from corpses after raids and assuming new names, but I fear the Gestapo will be up to that."1 By this time Macaulay was very much afraid that the Nazis would invade London. Nevertheless, her abomination of the Nazis did not in any way make her give up her opposition to war. Her novel of World War II, The World My Wilderness, and her letters demonstrate that her belief in pacifism never died out. Ceadel' s argument about Macaulay's short-term pacifism is solely based on her political activities. It does not consider those writings of Macaulay's which embody her pacifist views after the Second World War. Thus it comes short of understanding Macaulay's pacifism, which is carried through in her various writings. While Ceadel denies that Macaulay remained a pacifist after World War II, Mary Agnes Hamilton, who was Macaulay's contemporary and a well-known peace activist and writer, disputes that she was a pacifist before 1930s. Hamilton confirms that Macaulay was a pacifist in the 1930s. In her memoir, Remembering My Good Friends (1944), Hamilton states: "Rose was not a pacifist, but she became an ardent follower of Dick Sheppard's in the 30's, and was stirred to the soul, like so many, by the war in Spain" (139). According to Hamilton,