A century after her death, Edith Cavell has many faces: some physicalâcarved out of marble or stone; others portraitsâmade in pencil, watercolour, or oils. Some are realistic, others highly stylised, still others totally imaginary. Some were drawn or sculpted with the intention of recapturing an accurate likeness of Edith Cavell; others were intended as external representations of what the artist believed to be her interior features: her character, her motivations, her transcendent qualities. But the most powerful faces of Edith Cavell were neither carved from rock nor painted on canvas. They were created in narrative form: mindâs eye images, emerging out of carefully constructed stories. Through these stories, Edith Cavell has been handed down through the generations since her death as a fragmentary figureâmore a crowd than an individual. Although one of the aims of this book is to offer a reintegrated portrait of Edith Cavell, its otherâmore importantâgoal is to examine and analyse the multitude of âEdith Cavellsâ that have emerged in approximately 100 years since her death. I hope to set these against the contexts and circumstances of their times in order to offer a better understanding of how these âcultural afterlivesâ of Edith Cavell emerged.
In a book this size, it is impossible to examine every commemoration and representation of Edith Cavellâliterally thousands of such representations exist. My focus is, therefore, primarily on the ways in which Cavell was remembered, commemorated, and memorialised in her home country, Britain, although a few prominent and significant overseas commemorations are also consideredâparticularly in Cavellâs adopted homeland of Belgium, and in Britainâs self-governing Dominions.
In his Theatres of Memory, Raphael Samuel equated history with memory.1 His perspective has been criticised by some professional historians, who baulk at any failure on the part of the historian to distance himself or herself from the material evidence. Yet, othersâparticularly self-confessed âpublic historiansââopenly embrace Samuelâs approach.2 In examining the way Edith Cavell has been handed down through generations of narrators, both professional and amateur, this book draws on the idea of âpublic historyâ as a rigorous engagement between historical analysis and collective memory. It explores the ways in which individual memories come under public ownership through the processes of âremembranceâ, only then to be transformed and hardened into a single dominant narrative which becomes the focus for public acts of âcommemorationâ and âmemorialisationâ. It also considers the ways in which, in Edith Cavellâs case, these processes were advanced both through deliberate manipulation by organisations such as the British War Propaganda Bureau and, more organically, through the receptiveness of British and Dominion citizens to a âwhitewashedâ image of Cavell as national heroine.
The processes of storytelling are at the heart of this analysis. Very few forms of cultural exchange are as powerful as personal stories. Yet storytelling is a fragile medium, highly susceptible to deliberate distortion and propagandising. The commemoration of Edith Cavell is a series of overlapping stories, some more closely related to the historical evidence than others. The examination of inaccuracies within the narratives themselves is perhaps less important than the analysis of the possible reasons behind them.
The earliest remembrances of Edith Cavell were introduced to the public consciousness by a series of carefully composed statements from the British Foreign Office, purportedly intended to establish the âfactsâ of her case: she was a British nurse who enabled her countrymen to escape from occupied Belgium; for this she was executed in spite of the protestations of neutral diplomats. Existing at the same time as these stark official statements were Cavellâs own writings and the memories of her family, friends, and professional colleagues; but these were, for the time being, almost invisibleâher own voice rendered inaudible. In these personal remembrances, Cavell was both a ânurse who did her dutyâ and a human being who, because she was outraged by the German invasion of Belgium in August 1914, was willingly drawn into resistance activities.
Following Cavellâs death, the official statements of the British government rapidly coalesced with a number of newspaper stories of doubtful provenance to produce a monolithic image of a patriotic âmartyrâ who died for her own countryâBritain. And within a few years this image had hardened into that of a ânational heroineâ, who was somehow both victim and victor.
Of all national heroines in modern civilisations, Edith Cavell is probably the subject of more biographies than almost any other. A number of these âCavell biographiesâ claim to be serious texts based on rigorous research; others are more avowedly imaginative or novelistic writings inspired by Cavellâs life. Both types can offer some insight into the ways in which Cavellâs story has entered into the cultural psyche of Britishâand more generally Westernâsocieties. One of the earliest of the more serious biographies, Adolphe Hoehlingâs Edith Cavell, based its claim to veracity on the use of a number of conversations with individuals who had known Cavell personally. But Hoehlingâs text is an acknowledged polemicâa biography with an explicit message. On its frontispiece, the author dedicated the book to âthe many women who have given their lives in this twentieth century that freedom might liveâ.3 At times, the tone of Hoehlingâs text is somewhat overwrought, and he often appears more interested to present a poetic than an accurate portrait.
Later biographers Archibald Clark-Kennedy and Rowland Ryder offered less partial and more deliberately dispassionate portrayals, though both relied heavily on witness testimony provided in response to newspaper advertisements.4 Much more recently, Diana Souhami offered a twenty-first-century portrait of Cavell: an image of a tragic heroine whose early life forged the character traits that would both rob her of her life and win her enduring fame.5
Very few authors have chosen to step back from Cavellâs own life and focus on the impact of her death. One very notable exception is Katie Pickles, who offers a detailed analysis of the worldâs reaction to Cavellâs death through the lenses of gender and transnational history. In the introduction to her book, Pickles indicates her intention of ârevealing and interpreting the sonic boom of empathy and outrage for Cavell and mapping and analysing the resulting commemoration of herâ.6 This comment is revealing of Picklesâ perspective on the processes that translated what was known about Cavellâs life and death into a kaleidoscope of consequencesâintended and unintended. What is most striking about Picklesâ perspective is the extent to which she sees the worldâs reaction to Cavellâs execution (and the consequences of that reaction) almost as a natural process, perhaps minimising the role of deliberate propaganda and myth-making in the construction of Cavellâs public identity.
In this book I focus on the ways in which Edith Cavellâs story was distorted and analyse the reasons for those distortions. I focus on the writings of biographers, and on the press handling of Cavellâs story rather than on mapping the memorialisation of her death. I also, as mentioned earlier, focus more on the British reaction to Cavellâs death than on the significance of commemorations in other countriesâalthough the latter are referred to, and the relationships between the British and Belgian nursing professions are examined more closely.
Edith Cavell and Her Legend is, thus, less a gender and postcolonial history than a cultural history of the ways in which professional organisations, the press, and individuals preserved, translated, distorted, and transmitted a series of narratives based on evidence that was highly open to interpretation. It focuses on two areas of tension: first, the difference between the evidence for Cavellâs highly complex character and motivations, and the simplicity of the âCavell Legendâ that emerged; and, second, the conflict between attempts to commemorate her life and workâparticularly within the nursing professionâand a desire to focus on the manner of her death and thus transform her into a âheroineâ and âmartyrâ whose execution could be of value to the nation state.
Ultimately, then, this book traces two long processes: one through which Cavellâs family, biographers, and nursing organisations attempted to remember her as a complex human being who experienced conflicting demands and desires, but who, ultimately, wished to be remembered as a nurse and patriot; and another, through which the state, powerful organisations, and the press deliberately selected, distorted, and embellished evidence relating to her trial and execution. In this way, it aims to cast light on the conflict inherent in two distinct processes of remembering, and, hence, to offer insight into the nature of commemorationâand of memory itself.
Footnotes
1
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, Revised Edition (London: Verso, 2012, first published 1994), 8.
2
Pedro Ramos Pinto and Bertrand Taithe, âDoing history in public? Historians in the age of impactâ, In: Pedro Ramos Pinto and Bertrand Taithe, The Impact of History? Histories at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (London, Routledge, 2015), 2; Jerome de Groot, Consuming History: Histor...