1. introduction main part

British Modernism and the Great War

In The Death of a Hero (1929), Richard Aldington juxtaposes the anarchy of the war against the anarchy of personal relations and life early in the twentieth century England. Aldington satirizes the frivolous society of England before the war and sees in the war a logical outcome to such social decay. In fact, the war itself is given one section of the novel, and the first two are given to the social milieu of the war, what is before it, and what is after it. It is also significant that we learn about the “hero’s” death in the beginning of the novel as we see how his family and wife and mistress react to his death in the distant French trenches. The bohemianism and complacency of pre-war middle-class life constituted the climate that would victimize him and damage his life in the same way the war did. Aldington, as Bernard Bergonzi (1980) argues and as the ironic title of his novel hints at, undertakes “a savage debunking of the whole concept of heroism” (p. 182). His unheroic hero was robbed of masculinity by both social hypocrisy and war action. His novel is set against “an atmosphere of stifling Victorian respectability” (p. 183). The young generation was unprepared for adult relations and sexual freedom by repressed, hypocritical, and morally loose parents. And the young generation was equally fickle.
The young women between whom George Winterbourne is torn forget him and take other lovers once he is drafted in France. When he is back for training, they are bored with his constant talk about the war. He has been cut off from life and war became his only reality, the only thing he knows. They go out with other men, and he leaves back to the front feeling inadequate, ill-suited. He is then censured by his colonel for the faults of cowardly, untrained men. He feels he cannot go on with life. Once George Winterbourne dies, his name is mentioned briefly, and ironically, in a list under the title “Killed in Action” (p. 3). His secular mother shed tears which “were not very natural” (p. 6) and had “very little belief in the value of prayer in practical affairs” (p. 7). The hypocrisy of his mother’s feelings is not different from those of Elizabeth, his wife, who is ready to receive his state and other “military effects” (p. 13). He and Elizabeth had believed that “freedom, complete freedom, was the only solution” for marriage problems (p. 17). As soon as he leaves for military training, Elizabeth and Fanny are already “absorbed in other ‘affairs’” (p. 20). George’s home and front lives unmanned him, and the narrator himself feels implicated in the communal guilt: “The death of a hero! What mockery, what bloody cant. What sickening putrid cant. George’s death is a symbol to me of the whole sickening bloody waste of it, the damnable stupid waste and torture of it. You have’s seen how George’s own people – the makers of his body, the women who held his body to theirs—were affected by his death. The Army did its bit, but how could the Army individually mourn a million ‘heroes’? How could the little bit of Army which knew George mourn him?” (p. 28). While George was an insignificant victim of the war machine, he was also betrayed by people at home and even long before the war began.
The Victorian England of 1890 that produced George is “morally buried in great foggy wrappings of hypocrisy and prosperity and cheapness” (p. 33). His father married because his mother was “a dominating old bitch who destroyed his initiative and courage” (p. 34). George’s mother, on the other hand, had had many lovers and married what she took to be a rich husband, a man who “continued to play at being ‘rich’ on his honeymoon” (p. 48). Such a private family background of impotence and selfishness makes him unfit for the more chaotic and public war atmosphere. The narrative, then, oscillates between the private plight of individuals and the public war action. At the front, “[t]he very apparatus of killing revolted him, took on a sort of sinister deadness” (p. 250). He sees some new drafts one morning and feels a strange feeling of intimacy with these men as he is repulsed by the fickle women at home: “For the first time since the declaration of War, Winterbourne felt almost happy. These men were men. There was something intensely masculine about them, something very pure and immensely friendly and stimulating” (p. 263). When women are a negative influence and a distraction and men at home are lacking in vitality, male intimacy with other soldiers becomes an avenue of hope and escape. George thinks to himself: “I swear you’re better than the women and half-men, and by God, I swear I’II die with you rather than live in a world without you” (p. 264). He admires the “manhood and comradeship” of these men whether German or allied (p. 269). The typical anti-war message is clear when the enemies of these men are not each other but “the fools who had sent them to kill each other instead of help each other” (p. 269). The false ideals and corrupt leadership associated with the war are attacked and common humanity is celebrated (p. 269).
Aldington juxtaposes against the sterility of George’s home life the bitter reality of war action. As in traditional war novels, brutal realism is used to convey anti-war sentiments: “It was like living in the graveyard of the world—dead trees, dead houses, dead mines, dead villages, dead men” (p. 280). In the war section, we hear about and see the cold, rats, diarrhea, German prisoners, skeletons, helmets, rusty rifles, shell-holes, cut trees, debris, and decaying corpses. The section is also colored by other references to the humiliations of trench warfare: lice, excrement, tear-gas, muddy trenches, the roar of guns, rumors about the brutality of Germans, etc. George once tramples unconsciously a dead German corpse (p. 317). Men badly wounded and groaning, mutilated corpses, and chance killing and survival are all depicted, not simply to document trench warfare but rather to highlight the emotional deterioration of the protagonist: “Winterbourne began to feel as if he had made a pact with the Devil, so that other men were always being killed in his stead” (p. 354). Precisely put, Winterbourne “endured a triple strain—that of his personal life, that of exasperation with Army routine, and that of battle” (p. 301). The personal is thus constantly juxtaposed against the public event of the war.
At the front, Winterbourne suffers from “the torment of frost and cold; now came the torments of mud, of gas, of incessant artillery, of fatigue, and lack of sleep” (p. 310). At night, he struggles against big rats jumping on his body (p. 343). But when he is on leave, things are no better; he is still alienated from others and even unable to paint as he used to do or resume his normal life. War memories continue to haunt him at home. His love life on these leaves is a failure. The women he knows have affairs and do not understand him. He returns to the front as an officer, and he is in charge of a company. He is sad at their young age and inexperience: “He felt it was monstrous to send these school-looking boys into the line without a proper stiffening of more experienced men” (p. 379). Shells fall on a cemetery and dig up graves and remnants (p. 381), and he loses friends in action. He also loses men in his company and has trouble with intolerant superiors. The interplay between the private and the public logically leads to the end. “All the decay and death of battle fields entered his blood and seemed to poison him” (p. 386). At the end of the war and in November of 1918, the German are losing and retreating. Just before a big counterattack, he tries to write letters to Elizabeth and Fanny but is unable to think (p. 390). He is despairing and gloomy. He stands up during a German machine-gun attack in which many of his men are killed and is himself killed: “Something seemed to break in Winterbourne’s head. He felt he was going mad, and sprang to his feet. The line of bullets smashed across his chest like a savage steel whip. The universe exploded darkly into oblivion” (p. 392). He dies repulsed by the hypocrisy of his home life, fake relations, bohemianism, and lies. The horrors of the front combined with his personal problems led to his suicide, and the narrator tells his story because he feels he is also to blame for George’s suicide. After all, the narrator is part of the society that produced George; the narrative becomes an elegy for the soul of the dead George from a survivor who “needs the atonement of his written account” (Willis, Jr., 1999, p. 479). Briefly put, although this novel records war action and incorporates social realism in the process, it contextualizes George’s suffering and death within the larger social corruption of Victorian morals and upbringing to the extent that his final death is a suicide driven by his inability to come to terms with both the horrors of the trench as well as his home life. The war setting in the novel highlights the moral and spiritual bankruptcy in the characters' lives.
Virginia Woolf similarly records the catastrophic impact of war on human life and human relations. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf revisits the war indirectly within a project documenting the changes brought by war and modernity. In between “The Window” and “The Lighthouse” sections, she inserts a short, hurried chapter entitled “Time Passes.” This chapter covers a ten-year time span and is dominated by loss, rupture, change, darkness, and decay. The time that passes covers the war years and brings about the shift from the stable Victorian and Edwardian lives to the world of change and loss of the 1920s. The war is rendered as a break in continuity, a disruption of life and a dislocating experience. Hence, the fragmentation of experience characteristic of modernism and the impact of the war are interwoven and rendered aesthetically as an abrupt chapter that fragments the continuity of the narrative.
But war in the novel is never a direct experience. We incidentally hear about the damage it does to human life and nature. Allyson Booth (1996) rightly argues that in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse war “is reported by an ambiguous narrator lodged in an empty house; the reporter relies on no witness, details no wound, and elicits no response. War here is the sound of hammers dulled on felt, the vibration of tumblers in a cupboard, the thud of something falling” (p. 3). War is often experienced vicariously as part of the cosmic confusion and disorder that haunt this section. The deserted house of the Ramsay family endures the passage of time and its destructive effects. The house that was once full of life and social gatherings now suffers from natural loss and decay just like the distant battlefields: “The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths” (p. 131). The sudden death of Mrs. Ramsay then signals the death of conventional certainties of an earlier era like family life, optimism, and benevolence. Her ghost haunts the deserted house, and the deserted house becomes an objective correlative for the expression of emotions of loss, lament and change brought by the passage of time and war.The deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, her son, and her daughter are reported in brackets in this section to indicate their suddenness and insignificance in the larger scheme of things like time and war. In the case of Mrs. Ramsay, this is what we encounter: “[Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]” (p. 131). The empty, silent house gets dusty and mouldy with moth in the clothes left. Mrs. McNab, the cleaning woman, struggles to bring it to order, for women, it seems, struggle to put things in order unlike men who brought all the war destruction. Then we know parenthetically about another death: “[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said. They said nobody deserved happiness more.]” (p. 134). Immediately after this we encounter Andrew Ramsay’s death in battlefield, again parenthetically: “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]” (p. 135). The war is distant yet its effects are strongly felt everywhere in this section. Death in war is rendered in an aside just like natural death and death in childbirth. The fact that we have been prepared for this war death through the death and decay ravaging the house and the changes brought by the passage of time juxtaposes the domestic against the political.
Heat, sun, wind, and weeds all affect the house and the war, symbolized in a sprawling, wild, and hostile nature, echoes in the background. It becomes the collective, disembodied groan of pain experienced by soldiers and civilians alike: “Now and again some glass tinkled in the cupboard as if a giant voice had shrieked so loud in its agony that tumblers stood inside a cupboard vibrated too. Then again silence fell; and then, night after night, and sometimes in plain mid-day when the roses were bright and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed to drop into this silence this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling” (p. 135). The desolate house itself is like a desolate battlefield: “There it had stood all these years without a soul in it. The books and things were mouldy, for, what with the war and help being hard to get, the house had not been cleaned as she [Mrs. McNab] could have wished” (p. 136). The war disrupted not only the cleaning ritual of the house but also the summer vacations in it for a long time. Mrs. McNab thinks: “And once they had been coming, but had put off coming, what with the war, and travel being so difficult these days; they had never come all these years; just sent her the money; but never wrote, never came, and expected to find things as they have left them, ah dear!” (p. 137). Mrs. McNab’s consciousness dominates this section for a while, for she is the hope of rescuing the house from ruin and imposing some order on the chaos of a violent modernity. She thinks about Mrs. Ramsay and her family. She remembers the sudden deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, her daughter, and her son being killed in the war. She sadly considers the ravages of war and surmises that “many families had lost their dearest” and that “every one had lost some one these years” (p. 137). The war, hence, figures prominently through its impact on human life even when its action is over.
While time destroys, it also restores. The gradual post-war awakening begins with Lily Briscoe and Mr. Carmichael returning to the house after “[m]essages of peace breathed from the sea to the shore” (p. 141). With the help of Mrs. Bast, Mrs. McNab restores the house to order. Once war is over, life in the summer house is back, though ultimately changed. Hence, war here is decay and destruction of the war years as felt by those away from the front lines and as echoed in natural violence and decay. Woolf presents a unique feminist vision of the social context of war. As a woman, her focus is not war action in itself but the war as felt and experienced at home, especially in the loss of Victorian womanhood ideals represented by Mrs. Ramsay as the Angel in the House and death within families. Tammy Clewell (2004) highlights a project of mourning Woolf is engaged with and how this “was stimulated by the cataclysmic traumas of the First World War” (p. 198). “In her sustained effort to confront the legacy of the war,” Clewell argues, “Woolf repeatedly sought not to heal wartime wounds, but to keep them open” (p. 198). For Clewell, Woolf refuses to “engage a process of mourning aimed at ‘working through’ despair and grief” (pp. 198-9). For Clewell, Woolf’s project of negative “endless mourning compels us to refuse consolation, sustain grief, and accept responsibility for the difficult task of remembering the catastrophic losses of the twentieth century” (p. 199). Woolf’s apparent pessimism is in tune with the modernist sensibility in the aftermath of the war. It is also true that many writers compulsively returned to the war and repeated its trauma in their works. However, Woolf shows in the figure of the artist Lily Briscoe who returns to the house after the war and completes a painting of Mrs. Ramsay and the figure of the cleaning woman Mrs. McNab an enduring feminist principle and a glimmer of hope within a scheme of change and disorder.
D. H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) also contextualizes the war more directly within cultural decline and social changes. The dark vision of the war is given within the context of the destructive forces of industrialism/mechanization, changed attitudes to the arts, the passing of old England, class prejudice, and lost countryside. In the midst of chaos brought about by the war, cultural degeneration, and industrialism, Lawrence seems to offer human love and healthy sexual relations uncontaminated by industrialism and materialism as the hope. Sir Clifford’s war wounds have left him impotent and on a wheelchair. His young wife, unsatisfied with the marriage, falls for the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors. Clifford’s wounds are symptomatic of modern sterility, cultural hollowness, and weakness of the post-war Britain and his class in particular, the landed aristocrats. When his body is damaged by the war, he becomes more intellectual and money-minded, a writer and an industrialist, with no attachment to the earth he damages in his mining business. The environmental damage and exploitation he does contrast with the vigor and fertility of the sexual relationship between Connie and Mellors and Mellors’s care for the land and animals. Clifford’s estate stands for the over-intellectualism and abstraction of the post-war generation, for emasculated, hollow men as opposed to the pastoral woodland surrounding the estate where sex is part of natural life. Wragby Hall in the English Midlands is a place where petty writers, playwrights, and intellectuals meet and aimlessly discuss life and art. The post-generation is rendered powerless, bitter, isolated, and sterile. It can achieve nothing beyond financial gain or superficial talk. This novel then restates Lawrence’s views on sexuality and modern life, notions elsewhere publicized in his fiction and criticism. Sex is renewal and regeneration, an escape from intellectualism and industrialism. It is neither dirty nor pornographic.
The novel laments the passing of an era and cottage England and the tragedy of the war, and yet affirms life force over death. It begins: “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen” (p. 37). The war has disrupted human relations and the family institution. In the case of Constance Chatterley, the war “had brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live and learn” (p. 37). We immediately know that she married a soldier in 1917 on a leave from the battlefield. They have a honeymoon and he goes back to Flanders “to be shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in bits” (p. 37). He is cured but with “the lower half of his body, from the hips down, paralyzed for ever” (p. 37). This disability made him distant, cold, infantile, and psychologically and physically scarred. Clifford had a brother dead in the war in 1916, and he now knows that he “could never have any children” (p. 37). Their father, hence, dies knowing that his children could not provide an heir for the family line and property. Connie and her sister had already had German lovers they met in their school years who died in the war in 1914. So, the present lives of these characters are intertwined with their past and the impact the war left. War in this novel is more felt in its impact on human relations than seen in its action.
Connie is stifled in her life with a war-crippled husband. She feels that she “had lost touch with the substantial and vital world” in Wragby (p. 55). All she can see is “Clifford and his books, which did not exist . . . which had nothing in them! Void to void” (p. 55). The intellectuals who visit Wragby are enslaved to commercialism and “the bitch-goddess” of success (p. 56). They all, the post-war generation, believed “in the life of the mind” (p. 68). Their intellectualism takes from their belief in life force. They are spiritually empty, restless, abstract, and superficial. This internal void is juxtaposed against another external one, also caused by the war, for in the woods surrounding Wragby, “there was no game; no pheasants. They had been killed off during the war, and the wood had been left unprotected, till now Clifford had got his gamekeeper again” (p. 79). During an outing with Clifford to the woods, Connie notices the damage done to trees and natural life in the lifeless and “forlorn” cut trees forming a clearing: “This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for trench timber. The whole knoll, which rose swiftly on the right of the riding, was denuded and strangely forlorn. On the crown of the knoll where the oaks had stood, now was bareness” (p. 80). She feels the effects of the war everywhere, in the mood of restlessness and unrest around her, in physical and psychological damage: “The bruise was deep, deep, deep . . . the bruise of the false inhuman war. It would take many years for the living blood of the generations to dissolve the vast black clot of bruised blood, deep inside their souls and bodies. And it would need a new hope” (p. 89). As always in Lawrence, the body as a vital force is glorified in this moral wasteland: “Something echoed inside Connie: ‘Give me the democracy of touch, the resurrection of the body!’” (p. 117). While she feels enslaved and yearns for sexual fulfillment, Clifford is lost in his industrial mining business and his books and becomes something like a machine, something “with a hard, efficient shell of an exterior and a pulpy interior, one of the amazing crabs and lobsters of the modern, industrial, and financial world, invertebrates of the crustacean order, with shells of steel, like machines, and inner bodies of soft pulp, Connie herself was completely stranded” (p. 156). He represents the new order of industrialism and mechanization, and in him we see the novel’s critique of modernity: “those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines” (p. 167). Mellors, on the other hand, is the new morality, the restorative vision and glimpse of hope for Lawrence. He is clean and pure, uncorrupted by guilt, greed, or sin, free from shame that is fear, “old physical fear” (p. 312), industrialism, and capitalism. He believes in being “warm-hearted” and especially in “love” (p. 266). Mellors, like Connie, is made lonely with destroyed marriage after the war, as he comes back from military service in India to find his wife with another fellow (p. 261). Connie tells him that the new industrial generation men became “labor-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life” (p. 282). Their fulfilling love is an anti-dote to the sterility of the postwar atmosphere. The damage done by the war to men, to the bodies and psyches, as well as the repercussions of this damage on human relations is what is at issue in Lawrence’s text and what gives the war a social context as a critique of modernity.