Abstract
Written in the early years of a new world war, Orwell’s essay on wartime patriotism evokes the image of an earlier conflict specifically in terms of gender. For Orwell, and other writers of his generation, the First World War was an important point of reference for the construction of their identity as men who had not fought. For them, the First World War was an arena in which the masculinity of those who had participated in it was defined, an experience that set them apart as a generation.2 War experience was something that five million British men had gained which Orwell and his contemporaries, because of their age, had not, and which separated those who had it from the rest of British society because of what they had seen, heard, smelt, tasted and, above all, felt in the course of four years of warfare.
But the dead men had their revenge after all. As the war fell back into the past, my particular generation, those who had been ‘just too young’, became conscious of the vastness of the experience they had missed. You felt yourself a little less than a man, because you had missed it.1
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Notes
George Orwell (1970) ‘My Country, Right or Left’ in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. I (London: Penguin Books), p. 589.
Samuel Hynes (1976) The Auden Generation (London: The Bodley Head), pp. 17–21.
Stefan Dudink et al. (2004) ‘Editors’ Preface’ in Stefan Dudink et al. (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. xii.
Leo Braudy (2003) From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), p. xvi.
Samuel Hynes (1997) The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Penguin Books), p. 5.
Nicoletta F. Gullace (2002) ‘The Blood of Our Sons’: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 101–115.
For a discussion of tensions between heroic and domestic masculinities at the turn of the century, see John Tosh (1999) A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press), Chapter 8.
Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, pp. 1–2; Paul Fussell (1975) The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. ix.
Sandra M. Gilbert (1987) ‘Soldiers’ Heart: Literary men, literary women, and the Great War’ in Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al. (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 207.
Siegfried Sassoon (1979) ‘The Glory of Women’ in Jon Silken (ed.) The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (London: Penguin Books), p. 132;
Richard Aldington (1929) Death of a Hero (London: Chatto and Windus).
J. M. Winter (1985) The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan Education Ltd.), pp. 10–18;
Samuel Hynes (1991) A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum), pp. 11–17.
See also Tracey Hill (ed.) (1997), Decadence and Danger: Writing, History and the Fin de Siécle (Bath: Sulis Press);
Frank Mort (1987) Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral Politics in England Since 1830 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul)
and Daniel Pick (1989) Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Janet S. K. Watson (2004) Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 29–41;
Susan Kingsley Kent (1993) Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 72–73; ‘Introduction’ in Higonnet et al., Behind the Lines, pp. 4–6.
Kingsley Kent, Making Peace; Gail Braybon (1981) Women Workers and the First World War (London: Routledge);
Deborah Thom (1998) Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers).
Susan R. Grayzel (1999) Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press);
Janis Lomas (2000) ‘“Delicate Duties”: Issues of class and respectability in government policy towards wives and widows of British soldiers in the era of the Great War’, Women’s History Review, 9:1, 123–147;
Susan Pedersen (1993) Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 79–137.
Claire M. Tylee (1988) ‘“Maleness run riot”: The great war and women’s resistance to militarism’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 11:3, 199–210.
Eric J. Leed, (1979) No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 4.
Deborah Cohen (2001) The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany 1914–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 127;
Seth Koven (1994) ‘Remembering and Dismemberment: crippled children, wounded soldiers and the Great War in Great Britain’, American Historical Review, 99:4, 1167–1202.
Helen B. McCartney (2005) Citizen Soldiers: The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 90–103;
David Englander (1994) ‘Soldiering and Identity: reflections on the Great War’, War in History, 1:3, 304.
Leed, No Man’s Land, pp. 163–186; Elaine Showalter (1987) The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago), pp. 176–178;
Alison Light (1991) Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge), p. 7. The symbolism is perhaps most evident in the portrayal of shell-shocked soldiers in contemporary novels such as Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991–1995).
Martin Green (1980) Deeds of Adventure, Dreams of Empire (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), pp. 31–35;
Michael Paris (2000) Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion Books), pp. 54–58;
John MacKenzie (1992) ‘Introduction: popular imperialism and the military’ in John MacKenzie (ed.) Popular Imperialism and the Military, 1850–1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 1;
Graham Dawson (1994) Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge), pp. 120–128, 167–168;
Max Jones (2003) The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Sacrifice (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 245–251.
Gullace, ‘Blood of Our Sons’, p. 49; Keith Surridge (2001) ‘More than a great poster: Lord Kitchener and the image of the military hero’, Historical Research, 74:185, 308–309.
Michael Paris (2000) ‘Boys’ Books and the Great War’, History Today, 50:11, 49.
Rosa Maria Bracco (1993) Merchants of Hope: Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg), pp. 196–199.
Dawson, Soldier Heroes, p. 1. The durability of the figure of the soldier hero in other European cultures has been discussed by George Mosse (1996) The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 181–183.
Michael Adams (1990) The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 29;
Keith McClelland (1991) ‘Masculinity and the “Representative Artisan” in Britain, 1850–80’ in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge), pp. 82–85.
John Tosh (1994) ‘What Should Historians Do With Masculinity? Reflections on nineteenth-century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 38, 185.
Wally Seccombe (1986) ‘Patriarchy Stabilized: the construction of the male breadwinner norm in nineteenth-century Britain’, Social History 2:1 (January 1986), 54.
Joanna Bourke (1996) Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books), pp. 167–170; Tosh, A Man’s Place, p. 196; Winter, The Great War and the British People, pp. 250–253; Light, Forever England, p. 8.
Dennis Winter (1979) Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin Books), p. 16.
Dan Todman (2005) The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon), p. xiv;
Michael Roper (2005) ‘Between manliness and masculinity: the “war generation” and the psychology of fear in Britain, 1914–1970’, Journal of British Studies, 44:2, 345.
Sharon Ouditt (1994) Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London: Routledge), p. 3.
Jane Potter (2005) Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press); Light, Forever England.
Angela K. Smith (2000) The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 19.
Santanu Das (2005) Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 5.
Rachel Duffett (2008) ‘A War Unimagined: Food, Memory and the Rank and File Soldier’ in Jessica Meyer (ed.), British Popular Culture and the First World War (Leiden: Brill), pp. 47–70.
Claire M. Tylee (1990) The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914–1964 (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 15–16.
McCartney, Citizen Soldiers; Keith Grieves (ed.) (2004) Sussex and the First World War (Lewes: Sussex Record Society).
The concept of ‘sites of memory’ was initially defined by Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992), although it has been expanded on considerably by First World War historians.
See, for example, Jay Winter (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 10.
Millman, ‘In the Shadows of War’; Martin Middlebrook (1971) The First Day of the Somme (London: Allen Lane);
Martin Middlebrook (1978) The Kaiser’s Battle (London: Allen Lane).
Michael Roper (2000) ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: the psychic and social construction of memory in personal narratives of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal, 50, 183–184.
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© 2009 Jessica Meyer
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Meyer, J. (2009). Introduction. In: Men of War. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30542-7_1
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