Vera Brittain and Madeleine Clemenceau Jacquemaire’S Interwar Nurse Memoirs

Myth, Countermyth and the Politics of Memory: Vera Brittain and Madeleine Clemenceau Jacquemaire’s Interwar Nurse Memoirs Alison Fell University of Leeds Synergies Royaume-Uni Royaume-Uni Summary: This article examines the interwar memoirs written by two First-World-War nurses: Testament of Youth (1933) by British VAD Vera Brittain, and Les Hommes de bonne volonté (1919) by Madeleine Clemenceau 11-22 pp. Jacquemaire, daughter of the French prime minister and Red Cross nurse. It et explores the ways in which these authors challenge the dominant stereotypes Irlande (both positive and negative) of the nurse prevalent during the war, before outlining the alternative images – or countermyths – that they construct in n° 4 their own autobiographical writings. It argues that both authors make use of their nursing experiences as a means of endowing themselves with veteran - 2011 status, thereby allowing them access to the almost exclusively male genre of war writing that gained in popularity during the interwar years. The article concludes that because of the double status of these women, who were both active participants in and passive witnesses to the war, their narratives remain necessarily ambiguous. This reflects more generally the uncomfortable position – between combatant and non-combatant status – in which many female war workers found themselves. Keywords: war, nurse, Brittain, Clemenceau Jacquemaire, interwar, memoir Résumé : Cet article examine les mémoires de l’entre-deux-guerres écrits par deux infirmières de la Première Guerre mondiale : Testament of Youth (1933) de Vera Brittain, VAD (infirmière bénévole) britannique et Les Hommes de bonne volonté (1919) de Madeleine Clemenceau Jacquemaire, fille du premier ministre français et infirmière de la Croix-Rouge. Il explore la façon dont ces auteures contestent les stéréotypes dominants (positifs et négatifs) de l’infirmière répandus pendant la guerre, avant d’exposer les images alternatives – ou les contre-mythes – qu’elles construisent dans leurs propres écrits autobiographiques. Il suggère que les deux auteures exploitent leurs expériences en tant qu’infirmières pour leur donner le statut d’ancien combattant(e), ce qui leur permet d’avoir accès au genre presque exclusivement masculin de l’écriture de guerre, genre qui est devenu de plus en plus populaire dans l’entre-deux-guerres. L’article conclut que grâce au statut double de ces femmes, qui étaient à la fois les participantes actives dans et les témoins passifs de la guerre, leurs récits restent nécessairement ambigus, ce qui reflète plus largement la position inconfortable – entre combattant et non-combattant – dans laquelle beaucoup des femmes qui ont travaillé dans la guerre se sont trouvées. Mots-clés : guerre, infirmière, Brittain, Clemenceau Jacquemaire, l’entre-deux-guerres, mémoire 11 Synergies Royaume-Uni et Irlande n° 4 - 2011 pp. 11-22 Alison Fell As Gail Braybon reminds us, “women’s wartime history was, and often still is, overlaid with myth” (Braybon, 2003: 88), and this is especially true in the case of First-World-War nursing. Often responsible for women’s initial recruitment into the profession, popular wartime myths of nursing – both positive and negative – were also the blueprint against which they were obliged to define themselves in their later writings. In this article, I consider Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) alongside a 1919 fictionalised memoir produced by Madeleine Clemenceau Jacquemaire, the daughter of the French Prime Minister, entitled Les Hommes de bonne volonté.1 Despite significant differences between these two memoirs and the contexts in which they were written, they share common ground. Both women, who nursed for extended periods throughout the war, were highly literate, would-be novelists, were socially well-connected and became increasingly politicised. One of the aims of both their memoirs is to debunk common myths about women’s wartime roles in order to bolster the status of their own texts as “authentic” war narratives. Although the memoirs do not provide us with straightforward historical testimony from which we can extrapolate a generalised experience of military nursing, writing about nursing during the interwar period clearly provided Brittain and Clemenceau Jacquemaire with, on the one hand, a legitimised public voice and, on the other, an opportunity to deal through the process of writing with unresolved private ethical and personal crises brought about by the war. It is not my intention in this article, therefore, to contrast the “realities” of individual women’s experiences with myths and countermyths of nursing produced in propaganda and popular culture. Rather, I wish to explore the ways in which Brittain and Clemenceau Jacquemaire responded to and made use of such myths as a means of entering the predominantly male world of political war memoirs in the interwar period. Writing about nursing, in other words, not only gave them the opportunity to come to terms with their traumatic experiences, but equally provided them, as writers and political actors, with a platform and an audience, positioning them within a broader community of witnesses to war. Myths of nursing The nurse – and especially the voluntary nurse – was promoted as the ultimate model of patriotic female identity during the First World War in all belligerent nations. It was a role that appealed to women keen to seek an acceptable female equivalent to mass male mobilisation, and that, at least on the surface, satisfied the demand for a suitably “feminine” wartime occupation. As well as being essential for the functioning of both military and civilian hospitals, the wartime nurse was taken up as an ideal by diverse political and ideological groups. In France, the success of the nurse as an iconic figure is partly due to the way in which it succeeds in uniting both Catholic and Republican ideologies of French womanhood, symbolically embodying the Union sacrée.2 She is at once a modern Marianne and a timeless Virgin Mary, at the forefront of a righteous military struggle yet incarnating an idealised vision of chaste and virtuous femininity to which every French woman was encouraged to aspire. Similarly, in Britain, the image of the “lady nurse”, first created by the myth of Florence Nightingale’s “Lady of the Lamp”, was effectively instrumentalised in the First World War, producing the icon of a devoted and virginal nurse, an image that was further enhanced by the hagiographic propaganda that followed the execution of British nurse Edith Cavell in 1915.3 While drawing on the Victorian values that associated femininity with self-abnegation and a maternal desire to care for others, however, the British recruitment material for VAD nurses in particular was also class-based, constructing a model recruit as a modern young woman who possessed 12 Myth, Countermyth and the Politics of Memory: Vera Brittain and Madeleine Clemenceau Jacquemaire’s Interwar Nurse Memoirs “character and breeding” (Ouditt, 1994: 20). Thus, VAD recruitment posters, as was the case with many of the images used in French recruitment material, contained “an amalgam of both emancipatory and traditional elements” (Donner, 1997: 688) designed to appeal to their target audience. Inevitably, as increasing numbers of women donned the uniform and began caring for patients, the myth of the “white angel” (the nickname most often used in France) failed to survive the war untarnished. In both nations, middle-class volunteers were accused of entering the profession for less-than-noble reasons – usually the glamour of the uniform and the lure of potential husbands among the doctors and patients – and more damning visions of nurses as sexual temptresses or sadists were occasionally evoked. Some of the nurses who published memoirs and fictionalised accounts of their experiences during and after the war also flagged up the gap between the gendered ideal and the harsh realities of wartime nursing. Indeed, it has been these Anglo-American, more hard- hitting narratives – by Ellen La Motte, Mary Borden and Enid Bagnold4 as well as Vera Brittain – which, complementing as they do other influential pacifist representations of the war, have become the most discussed nurse memoirs. (In France, it should be noted, one rarely finds such out-and-out pacifist attacks on the war in nurse memoirs published either before or after the Armistice, one of the reasons perhaps why they remain little known and out-of-print).5 In her discussion of the myths that have functioned as the foundation of Britain’s war story, Braybon points to the centrality of Vera Brittain’s memoirs (Braybon, 2003: 8). Although to some extent she had an atypical experience, Brittain has become shorthand for women’s experiences of the war more generally. Her first volume of autobiography, Testament of Youth, was republished in paperback by Virago in 1978 and swiftly became a bestseller, assisted by its adaptation into a BBC drama series in 1979.6 Indeed, her story continues to attract attention, having been the subject of a recent BBC docudrama7, and is to be made into a feature film.8 Its ongoing influence can also be seen in the fact that, as Dan Todman notes: “In two thirds of the novels [about the war] produced in the period from 1978 to 1998, the principal activity for the main female characters was nursing, usually in France as a VAD” (Todman, 2005: 183). The fact that the “rediscovery” of Brittain’s text in the 1970s coincided with the second-wave feminist movement is equally significant. Although the war narrative in Testament of Youth is a bleak pacifist tale of loss, horror and disillusionment, what was often retained and reproduced in the popular fiction that followed in its wake was an exciting tale of female empowerment in which the war brought about a watershed for women – an interpretation of the war that has been attacked by historians but which lives on in popular culture. In France, too, the First-World-War nurse has remained an essential ingredient of many portrayals of the conflict since the 1970s.

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