Women's Writing of the First World War

Emma Liggins, Elizabeth Nolan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138599451
• eBook ISBN: 9780429939495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The First World War was a transformative experience for women, facilitating their entry into new spaces and alternative spheres of activity, both on the home front and on the edges of danger zones in Europe and beyond. The centenary of the conflict is an appropriate moment to reassess what we choose to remember about women's roles and responsibilities in this period and how women recorded their experiences. It is timely to (re)consider the narratives of women's involvement not only as nurses, VADs and mourning mothers, but as pacifist campaigners, poets, war correspondents and contributors to developing genres of war writing.

This interdisciplinary volume examines women's representations of wartime experience across a wide range of genres, including modernist fiction, ghost stories, utopia, poetry, life-writing and journalism. Contributors provide fresh perspectives on women's written responses to the conflict, exploring women's war work, constructions of femininity and the maternal in wartime, and the relationship between feminism, suffrage and pacifism. The volume reinforces the importance of the retrieval of women's wartime experience, urging us to rethink what we choose to commemorate and widening the presence of women in the expanding canon of war writing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing.

Outsider Positions: Negotiating Gender, Nationality and Memory in the War Writing of Enid Bagnold

Angela K. Smith

Abstract

In 1918, Enid Bagnold published A Diary Without Dates, a revealing book that kept few secrets about life in a wartime hospital. Bagnold’s book has helped the construction of the mythology of disillusionment that has clouded memory of the First World War for a century. In 1920, Bagnold published The Happy Foreigner, a novel that is much less easy to categorize. As her protagonist, Fanny, drives across the derelict battlefields of France, she reflects on the ways in which those battlefields may be recalled in later cultural memory. However, there is a curious optimism in Fanny that is quite at odds with these later constructions of disillusionment. France in 1919 is a melting pot of different people, military and civilian, men and women, representing many different nations as the first understandings of memory crystallize. This essay explores Bagnold’s two war books in terms of the ways in which she negotiates gender and nationality. What does it mean to be a woman in a hospital? How do different nationalities interact in the post-war landscape, questioning these myths of disillusionment before they are even constructed? By considering these outsider positions, the author argues that Bagnold’s role in helping to shape the memory of the First World War is far more complex than it might at first appear.

Women’s war writing and memory

In this essay, I will explore the ways in which the outsider positions of gender and nationality can enhance our contemporary understanding of the First World War. By focusing specifically on the war writings of Enid Bagnold, built around the experience of women and infused with multiple different voices, I will argue that there are other ways of remembering—alternate dimensions to cultural memory that do not conform to the grand narratives of the war. One hundred years after its outbreak, the ways in which we remember the First World War are still significantly shaped by the literature of the period. Dominant in this myth-making were the writers of the trenches—Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and others—ensuring that the images of trench warfare have come to embody the war in cultural memory.¹ Rosa Maria Bracco suggests that “[t]he predominant memory of most narratives of disillusion is the burden of extreme suffering of one generation”.² However, for decades, feminist scholars have been arguing against the exclusivity of this memory,³ broadening our perspectives of the war to include the experience of others—non-combatants and women. But arguably, even where they have succeeded in bringing women into the public view, again most commonly through their literary texts, these women have often been seen to contribute to the overall accepted, predominantly negative understanding of the war. That is the myth of disillusionment which originates in the trenches and then filters out to colour our impressions of the whole of post-war society.

The most acclaimed women writers of the First World War—those who have perhaps had the biggest impact on centenary commemorations, such as Vera Brittain—are often interpreted as integral contributors to the construction of this myth. Others, such as Mary Borden, Irene Rathbone and Enid Bagnold, although less well known, are equally influential. Their tales of the trauma of wartime nursing and loss appear to tessellate perfectly with the accounts of their male contemporaries, feeding a cultural memory that determines to construct the war and its legacy in negative terms. Christine Hallett has recently addressed this, arguing that the Voluntary Aid Detachment member (VAD), in particular,

[…] becomes the stereotypical victim-heroine, whose courage enables her to “stick” to her duties, whose kindness and humanity makes her the patients’ favourite “nurse”, and whose intelligence permits her, finally to offer a truly reflective account of her experiences. She is, in fact, the female counterpart of those brave young men, the “Lions led by Donkeys”, who marched across no-man’s-land to almost-certain destruction on the orders of foolish and callous officers.⁴

Women who volunteered for war work produced written records of their experiences in the years that followed the war which have been interpreted to endorse all the accepted suffering and sacrifice of the war. Borden’s 1928 collection of fragments and stories, The Forbidden Zone, recreates moments of suffering in front-line hospitals that continue to shock due to the linguistic power and modernist detachment of her prose. Ellen La Motte’s earlier Back-wash of War (1916) is similarly powerful. Rathbone’s 1932 novel We That Were Young represents the varied experiences of a group of young women, their hope and future prospects as a consequence of the war, and project this loss onto the following decade. But I wish to argue here that some women’s writing does not fit comfortably into this mythology. In particular, the war writing of Enid Bagnold, while engaging head-on with the suffering and trauma, also explores alternative aspects of the experience of both the war and its immediate legacy. Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith have argued that “what culture remembers and what it chooses to forget are intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony, and thus with gender”.⁵ Our cultural memory has absorbed much of what Bagnold has to say about life in a wartime hospital, particularly where it fits in with the established myths of male experience. However, Bagnold’s interpretation of women’s experience and racial interaction in her war books contributes to a very different strand of memory, allowing us to explore the legacy of the war in a fresh light. I will explore Bagnold’s two war books in terms of the ways in which she negotiates gender and nationality. What does it mean to be a woman in a hospital or on the abandoned battlefields of France? How do different nationalities, the winners and the losers, interact in the post-war landscape, questioning these myths of disillusionment before they are even constructed? By considering these outsider positions, I shall argue that Bagnold’s role in helping to shape our memory of the First World War is far more complex than it might at first appear.

In 1918, Enid Bagnold was dismissed from her position as a VAD at the Royal Herbert Hospital, Woolwich, following the publication of her A Diary Without Dates, a revealing book that kept few secrets about life in the wartime hospital. It was based on her own experiences as a VAD and, in its pages, Bagnold addresses many of the traumas of hospital life for the male patients, as well as for the women who surround them. Although Bagnold’s book has contributed to the construction of the mythology of disillusionment that dominates memory of the war for us a century on, there are glimpses of a different kind of spirit in Bagnold’s writing that refuses to comply absolutely with the myth. Her negativity operates to produce a clear picture of the war, but it is also one that suggests mechanisms for dealing with the trauma. In late 1918, Bagnold went to France as a member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) to drive for the French army. This experience formed the basis of her second war book, The Happy Foreigner—a novel that appears to be much less easy to categorize. As her protagonist, Fanny, drives across the derelict battlefields of France, she does reflect on the ways in which those battlefields would be recalled in later cultural memory. However, there is a curious optimism in Fanny that is quite at odds with these later constructions of disillusionment. On the one hand, as a woman in what remains a man’s world, she represents a gendered outsider, refusing to comply with any real stereotypes. At the same time, France in 1919 is a melting pot of different people, military and civilian, men and women, representing many different nations as the first understandings of memory crystallize. As Santanu Das has noted: “The war also resulted in an unprecedented range of interracial and cross-cultural encounters, experiences and intimacies”.⁶ And Claire Buck argues that “Bagnold uses Fanny’s encounters with racialized others as she drives across the Western Front to situate Europe as a geopolitical space in need of reimagining”.⁷ Many outsiders coming together without the buffer of war begin to ask questions about the ways in which memory will develop.

In recent years, some historians of the First World War and its legacy have begun to make a strong case in opposition to the dominant myth of disillusionment. Adrian Gregory has argued that “[t]he Armistice on 11 November 1918 was greeted with joy. The end of the war was far more genuinely popular than its beginning”, refuting the notion of a shattered community unable to see an optimistic future.⁸ He goes on to argue that the culture of disillusionment built on a shared experience of loss, which dominates our understanding of the post-war world, does not accurately reflect society:

Depictions of Britain in the 1920s as a traumatized society with a shattered sense of itself, should be understood for what they are: constructions to cover up a much more complex social reality of winners and losers, continuities and changes.⁹

Janet S. K. Watson concurs: “The history of the war was being recast through the power of memory, and critics selectively identified the texts at the center of the debate. This story of disillusionment was created retrospectively”.¹⁰ This is a view shared by Gary Sheffield, who argues that while the literatures of war in the post-war world present the anguished veteran, they did not actually reflect the real experience of the population:

Thus we have a paradox. Clearly the intellectual and literary climate of the late twenties and early thirties was largely one of disenchantment with the First World War. Equally clearly, for large numbers of Britons disenchantment was at best skin deep, and some did not share this view at all.¹¹

Bagnold’s war books, which predate the boom in war literature by nearly a decade, begin to suggest this ambiguity. Alongside the trauma, there is hope. Woven through the hardship is liberation, particularly for the woman who is prepared to take the opportunities presented to her. As Watson notes: “For many women, as well as many men, the war was a transformative experience that shaped their self-identities for the rest of their lives”.¹²

Liberation in A Diary Without Dates

A Diary Without Dates has attracted a lot of critical attention, not least because Bagnold adopts a rather experimental narrative style and structure, adapting many tropes of modernist writing to allow her to articulate the unspeakable side of hospital life.¹³ It is quite literally a diary without dates, shaped around the changing seasons as the protagonist (Bagnold) progresses in her work at the Woolwich hospital. She begins her work as a VAD “outside the glass doors”, wrapped in the domestic work of the hospital. Later she moves “inside the glass doors” to carry out the menial work on the officers’ ward. Finally, she is moved to a ward for ordinary soldiers to work with “the boys”. As she moves through the hospital, always on the lowest rung of the hierarchical ladder, she exposes the impact of class segregation, the stoic suffering of the wounded and the inability of even the trained nurses to deal with the pressure of army-hospital life. Her dismissal from the hospital in itself emphasizes the perceived negative impact of the book on the morale of a nation after four years of war.

While all these aspects of the book do contribute to the legacy of disillusionment, there are other elements of the narrative that, like Bagnold herself, refuse to conform. Perhaps most prominent is the way that Bagnold explores gender. The complexities of interpreting gender in the First World War, particularly in relation to nurses, have been explored in detail elsewhere.¹⁴ As Janet Lee has put it: “femininity must be recognized as a contested site of meaning”.¹⁵ Indeed, this is exactly what Bagnold does in her war writing, starting in 1918 with nurses. Here, to be a woman can mean uniformity: “a slim white figure in white approaches, dwarfed by the smoky distance; her nun-like cap floating, her scarlet cape, the ‘cape of pride’, slipped round her shoulders”.¹⁶ The professional nurses with whom Bagnold works are “unsexed” by their position, detached from an emotional response that would be crushing if acknowledged, and protected by the language of euphemism: “The sister came out and told me she thought he was ‘not up to much’. I think she means he is dying” (7). Their appearance is designed to reinforce the façade of steely professionalism, thus enabling them to function when faced with the continual stream of horrific wounds. Gender becomes almost obsolete beneath the structures of these coping mechanisms:

The hospital—a sort of monotone, a place of whispers and wheels moving on rubber tyres, long corridors, and strangely unsexed women moving in them. Unsexed not in any real sense, but the white clothes, the hidden hair, the stern white collar just above the chin, give them an air of school-girlishness, an air and a look women don’t wear in the world. They seem unexpectant. (31)

The hospital, embodied by the women who populate it, is set apart from the senses. It is “monotone”, without variation of sound, and silent, apart from the swishing of the “rubber tyres” of the trolleys and whispered voices, refuting the anguished voices of the injured soldiers. It is monochrome, black and white, refusing to acknowledge the vivid reds, blues, greens and yellows of the wounded body. All the individual characteristics of the women are hidden from view, giving them a protective anonymity and infantilizing them as though to devolve responsibility for the suffering around them. They are without sex, without gender, otherworldly, expecting nothi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Outsider Positions: Negotiating Gender, Nationality and Memory in the War Writing of Enid Bagnold
• 2 Queering the Home Front: Subversive Temporalities and Sexualities in Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected and Bryher’s Two Selves
• 3 Women’s Poetry in First World War Anthologies and Two Collections of 1916
• 4 “The Cataclysm We All Remember”: Haunting and Spectral Trauma in the First World War Supernatural Stories of H. D. Everett
• 5 “I had a Baby, I Mean I didn’t, in an Air Raid”: War and Stillbirth in H. D.’s Asphodel
• 6 The Responsibility of Women: Women’s Anti-War Writing in the Press, 1914–16
• 7 A Lack of Engagement? The Containment of War in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Forerunner
• 8 Women and the “War Machine” in the Desert Romances of E. M. Hull and Rosita Forbes
• Index