Women's Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance 9781474471701

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WOMEN'S FICTION OFTHE SECOND WORLD WAR

WOMEN'S FICTION OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR Gender, Power and Resistance

Gill Plain

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

For my parents, Prim and Arthur Plain

© Gill Plain, 1996

Transferred to Digital Print 2011 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Linotype Bembo by Hewer Text Composition Services, Edinburgh and Printed and bound in Great Britain bv CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 0661 0

The more wars there are, I suppose, the more we shall learn how to be survivors. Elizabeth Bowen, 'Mysterious Kor'

Contents

Preface 1. Introduction Part One

2. Prelude to War 3. Safety in Sanctity: Dorothy L. Sayers's Marriage of Convenience

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1 33 35 45

4. Faith in a 'Watching Brief': Stevie Smith and the Religion of Fascism 5. 'Breaking the Mould': Virginia Woolf and the Threat of War Part Two

6. Weathering the Storm 7. Violation of a Fiction: Between the Acts and the Myth of 'Our Island History' 8. Constructing the Future Through the Past: Naomi Mitchison's Brave New World 9. From Alienation to Absence: Avoiding the War in The Heat of the Day 10. Conclusion Bibliography Index

68 85 117

119 124 139 166 189 192 202

Priface

Women are not inherently opposed to war, any more than they are congenitally inclined towards sentimentality, nurturance or the colour pink. Rather, they are set in opposition to conflict by the cultural codes and norms of twentieth-century society. Within this patriarchal framework, both women and men have been obliged to survive war - they have been called upon to withstand the imposition of mechanised warfare upon the society in which they live, and they have had to adapt as best they could to the radically altered conditions and terms of reference imposed by an economy of war. My analysis of gendered responses to the Second World War begins, then, not from a belief in the essential pacifism of women writers, but rather from an observation of the complex and contradictory frameworks within which women's wartime identities and roles are constructed. The equation of women with peace and creativity is as old as the association of women with a domestic sphere detached from the politics of public life. Society has long constructed women in opposition to war. Woman has been appropriated as a symbol of peace and domesticity, a repository of the values that must be left at home in the heat ofbattle, and she has constituted the object of battle- a prized possession that must be protected- the struggle for which personalises war aims that are otherwise abstract and distant. In time of war, an abstract notion of woman symbolises the nation under threat. The nation is feminised as an indicator of its vulnerability and its need for protection, in contrast to which the corporeality ofwomen is utilised as a more prosaic symbol of a sexual threat both to the soldier's integrity and to his rights. The female body is used in propaganda as a virginal territory upon which the brutality of the enemy may be inscribed, and in a remarkable paradox the same body is

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Introduction

BUSINESS AS USUAL

In September 1939, with the memories of the First World War only twenty years old, few in Britain could be said to have regained their appetite for conflict. The late 1930s are characterised by a remarkably tentative response to international events from both politicians and public. Organisations new and old adopted pacifism as their creed, and were rewarded by considerable support. The Peace Pledge Union, initiated in 1934, boasted 80,000 members after only one year; while the long-established Women's Co-operative Guild, an organisation of over 87,000 members, proclaimed its beliefs through the wearing of white 'peace' poppit>s on Armistice Day. The League ofNations, meanwhile, seemed to have adopted pacifism by default. After major setbacks over Manchuria and Abyssinia, its response to the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 was an offer of'moral' support (Liddington, 1989: 152-71). This lack of enthusiasm for war which, in Britain, had seen Appeasement preserved long beyond its natural life was reflected in the literature of the early days of conflict. 1 'Where are the war poets?' demanded leader writers to no avail (Calder, 1969: 517). To a certain extent, war poets were redundant. With the myths ofheroism and glory long since exploded, the Second World War had no place for the simple certainties of Brooke or the irony and anger of Owen and Sasso on. Even the creative potential of social and political revolution had been effectively covered by the literary response to the Spanish Civil War. As Angus Calder bluntly states in his brief survey of the wartime literary output, 'In any case, whichever way you felt, Owen or Comford had been there before you, and the war poems had already been written' (1969: 518). Calder's assertion is supported by the bemused voices of established writers. The Second World

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Women's Fiction if the Second World War

attempting to write or articulate the emotions created by the experience (primary or secondary) of conflict, and the comparatively 'passive' search for release through the words or pictures of others - that is through reading or the cinema. This non-verbal or inarticulate passivity is also suggestive of problems of identity stemming from the war's capacity to alienate individuals from language, and in consequence, from themselves. I return later to the implications of these responses to war. Documentary texts of the period thus give the impression that the British response to the literal, metaphorical and geographical 'overkill' of the Second World War was to seek refuge in what Vera Brittain calls 'our national equanimity' (Brittain, 1941: 97). Margery Allingham is more specific: The process of hardening up is imperceptible. After the first effort the mental and spiritual muscles get going on their own. The unbelievable gradually becomes a commonplace. The gas-mask loses its nightmare shape and becomes no more ugly than an umbrella. (Allingham, 1941a: 64) The worse things got, the more traumatic and widespread the destruction, the greater the emphasis on the proverbial 'business as usual' .9 Ultimately, however, 'business as usual' becomes a prime example of the chicken and egg conundrum. It is impossible to judge whether the equanimity of Dover Front Line was born from the observation of 'British Phlegm' or whether 'British Phlegm' itself was boosted by its presentation as such. Calder comments that '"British Phlegm" had its "Finest Hour" in the Blitz, not only because instances of it made useful propaganda for home and foreign consumption, but also because it had the same kind of use for civilians under bombing as for soldiers under fire: one had to "keep merry and bright"' (Calder, 1991: 17-18). This fa