ADVERTIMENT. Lʼaccés als continguts dʼaquesta tesi queda condicionat a lʼacceptació de les condicions dʼús establertes per la següent llicència Creative Commons: http://cat.creativecommons.org/?page_id=184 ADVERTENCIA. El acceso a los contenidos de esta tesis queda condicionado a la aceptación de las condiciones de uso establecidas por la siguiente licencia Creative Commons: http://es.creativecommons.org/blog/licencias/ WARNING. The access to the contents of this doctoral thesis it is limited to the acceptance of the use conditions set by the following Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en A Literary Reading of Olivia Manning’s World War II Trilogies: War Narration, Place and End of Empire, and Gender Roles in The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy. Carmen Andrés Oliver Ph.D. thesis supervised by Professor Andrew Monnickendam Ph.D. programme in English Studies Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona September 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Andrew Monnickendam for being a constant source of knowledge and advice, and for the detailed guidance he has provided me from the beginning of this thesis. I am particularly grateful for his support, patience, and for his dedication to this project throughout the years. I would also like to thank the English Department at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona for giving me a pre-doctoral grant that allowed me to expand on my research while acquiring teaching experience at an undergraduate level. My thanks, too, go to the members of the department, who have always been encouraging and helpful. I would also like to express my gratitude to Simon Edwards of Roehampton University in London for accepting me as a visiting doctoral student for three months in 2013. My stay in Roehampton allowed me to carry out an important part of my research which shapes many of the arguments set out in this thesis. At a more personal level, I would like to express my gratitude to my dad, my mum, Antonio, and the rest of my family for their unconditional love and belief in me. My thanks too to Maria Rosa and Angelica for being an inspiration and for making this experience so much nicer, and also to Sara, Mar, Lydia and the rest of my close friends for their endless support and encouragement. Also, a thank you note for Magdalena, Lola and Christina, with whom I have shared part of this process. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Albert for his unfailing support and understanding, which has been and is truly essential for me. September 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS A NOTE ON SPELLING AND FORMATTING .................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................... 3 1.1. WHO IS OLIVIA MANNING? .................................................................................................3 1.2. CRITICAL RECEPTION ..........................................................................................................5 1.3. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING ......................................................................................12 1.4. OUTLINE OF THE DISSERTATION ...................................................................................17 CHAPTER 2: NARRATION OF WAR: THE FIGURE OF THE WITNESS ................ 21 2.1. WAR’S RESISTANCE TO LITERARY REPRESENTATION ..........................................22 2.2. WAR AS A WAR REPORTER ...............................................................................................26 2.3. ARTICULATE WAR NARRATOR .......................................................................................30 2.3.1. THE COMIC TRADITION .................................................................................................30 2.3.2. AUTHORITATIVENESS AND CREDIBILITY ...............................................................43 2.3.3. THE FIGURE OF THE FICTIONAL WITNESS ...............................................................47 2.4. CONCLUSIONS .......................................................................................................................63 CHAPTER 3: “A GLOBAL WAR. A WAR OF GLOBE-TROTTERS. A TRAVELER’S WAR”: THE BALKAN AND LEVANT COUNTRIES IN OLIVIA MANNING’S FORTUNES OF WAR ............................................................................................................ 67 3.1. TRAVEL BOOKS AND WAR BOOKS .................................................................................67 3.2. STEREOTYPE VS WAR-SHAPED REALISM: MANNING’S ROMANIA, GREECE AND EGYPT ....................................................................................................................................79 3.2.1. ROMANIA ..........................................................................................................................83 3.2.2. GREECE ..............................................................................................................................90 3.2.3. EGYPT .................................................................................................................................94 3.3. THE ‘OTHER’ IN MANNING’S SECOND WORLD WAR TRILOGIES ......................101 3.3.1. THE JEWS IN MANNING’S BUCHAREST ...................................................................101 3.3.2. COLONIZED OTHERS IN THE BALKAN TRILOGY AND THE LEVANT TRILOGY ..108 3.3.2.1. ROMANIAN WOMEN, BEGGARS AND PEASANTS IN THE BALKAN TRILOGY .......... 116 3.4. CONCLUSIONS .....................................................................................................................120 CHAPTER 4: WAR AND GENDER IN MANNING’S TRILOGIES ............................ 123 4.1. WAR AND THE BATTLE OF SEXES ................................................................................124 4.2. WAR MARRIAGES ...............................................................................................................126 4.3. PUBLIC AND DOMESTIC DUTIES ...................................................................................128 4.3.1. SEXUALITY IN MANNING’S TRILOGIES ..................................................................130 4.3.2. MARRIAGE AND HOME IN FORTUNES OF WAR ....................................................135 4.3.3. MOTHERHOOD IN MANNING’S WORLD WAR II NOVELS ...................................139 4.3.3.1. BOY SOLDIERS ...................................................................................................................... 144 4.4. NO GENDER ROLE REVERSAL IN MANNING’S TRILOGIES ..................................147 4.5. CONCLUSIONS .....................................................................................................................154 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS .......................................................................................... 159 5.1. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................159 5.2. FURTHER RESEARCH ........................................................................................................163 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................... 165 A NOTE ON SPELLING AND FORMATTING This thesis has been written in British spelling all throughout the main text, but I have maintained the original spelling in quotations. Similarly, I use the form Romania (the variant most generally accepted nowadays) rather than Rumania (as used in Olivia Manning’s novels). Minor discrepancies in spelling between the main body of the text and the quoted material are unavoidable in such cases. I have written this thesis in general accordance with the guidelines established by the MLA Handbook (8th edition). For this reason, Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy is shortened to BT and The Levant Trilogy to LT in in-text citations. Likewise, Phyllis Lassner’s British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of their Own is shortened to British Women Writers and her Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire to Colonial Strangers. And correspondingly, Paul Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars appears as Abroad in in-text citations, his The Great War and Modern Memory as Great War and his Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War as Wartime. 1 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1. WHO IS OLIVIA MANNING? Olivia Manning was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1908. She was the daughter of Olivia Morrow and Oliver Manning, and she had a brother, Oliver. Her father having served in the Royal Navy since his youth and her brother having died on active service in 1941, she was in close contact with the military world ever since her earliest childhood. Manning always had an interest in the arts and in literature: she learnt to read when she was only four years old and she frequently visited the local library in Portsmouth, and then, when she was sixteen, she became a student at the Portsmouth School of Art. Some years later she moved to London, where she could approach the literary business. She spent all her life surrounded by people who enjoyed art and literature. For one thing, her father was very imaginative and would always make up stories for her and her brother. Besides he was very fond of theatre. For another thing, her mother would read books aloud to her when she was a child,