Abstract
By the time hostilities broke out in 1914, the cosmopolitan writer and critic Vernon Lee was internationally recognized, and known for her often strident views on the major political and social issues of the period.1 British by birth but resident in Italy, in August of that year Lee was in the process of paying her customary annual visit to England and found herself stranded in Britain for the duration of the war. Soon realizing, like so many others, that the war was not going to come to a swift and amicable conclusion, Lee, a staunch pacifist, began to strengthen her alliances with like-minded British intellectuals. She became an active member of the newly-formed Union of Democratic Control and publicly supported pacifist activities with her pen and her purse.2 The circles in which she moved brought her into contact with other prominent pacifists including Charles Trevelyan, Ramsay MacDonald, Lytton Strachey and the philosopher Bertrand Russell.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Irene Cooper-Willis, ‘Preface’, Vernon Lee’s Letters (London: privately printed, 1937), i–xiv; xiv.
See Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget 1856–1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 206 and Patrick Wright, Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 110.
In the later version of The Ballet of the Nations which appears in Satan the Waster (1920), Lee states that ‘it is the author’s imperative wish that no attempt be made at showing the Dancing of the Nations’ and the text of Satan opens with a note stating that the ‘drama is intended to be read, and especially read out loud, as prose’; see Vernon Lee, Satan the Waster: a Philosophical War Trilogy with Notes and Introduction (New York: John Lane, 1920), 57. All subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically in the text.
Grace Brockington, ‘Performing Pacifism: the Battle between Artist and Author in The Ballet of the Nations’, in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 143–59; 154. Gill Plain likens Satan the Waster to Brechtian epic theatre; see ‘The Shape of Things to Come: the Remarkable Modernity of Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster (1915–1920)’, in Claire Tylee (ed.), Women, the First World War and the Dramatic Imagination: International Essays (1914–1999) (Lewiston, New York, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), 5–21; 14.
Gillian Beer, ‘The Dissidence of Vernon Lee: Satan the Waster and the Will to Believe’, in Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate (eds), Women’s Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 107–31; 110.
Vernon Lee, The Ballet of the Nations: a Present-Day Morality, illustrated by Maxwell Armfield (London: Chatto & Windus, 1915). An online version can be viewed at http://www.archive.org/stream/balletofnationsp00leev, accessed 11 March 2010. All subsequent references to this unpaginated edition will be cited parenthetically in the text as Ballet.
Vernon Lee, Preface to ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’, in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006), 243–8;245.
Francisco Bethencourt, ‘The Auto da Fé: Ritual and Imagery’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): 155–68; 155–6.
Ibid., 156.
Ibid., 158; 160.
Ibid., 158.
See Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 34.
Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ix.
Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: a Literary Biography (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 296.
Vernon Lee, ‘The Sense of Nationality’, The Nation XII (12 October 1912): 96–8; 96. Auguste-Maurice Barrès (1862–1923) was elected to the Chamber of Deputies with the Boulangistes, a party of populist Chauvinists who encouraged anti-German feeling in France. In 1898, he ran (unsuccessfully) as a National Socialist in the city of Nancy using as a platform a manifesto rife with xenophobia and anti-Semitism.
Ibid.
Ibid., 96; 98.
Vernon Lee, ‘Bach’s Christmas Music in England and in Germany’, Jus Suffragii 9/4 (1915): 218.
Eveline Kilian, ‘What Does “Our Country” Mean to me an Outsider? Virginia Woolf, War and Patriotism’, in Barbara Korte and Ralf Schneider (eds), War and the Cultural Construction of Identities in Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 143–62; 143. Gillian Beer suggests that Lee’s Satan may have informed Orlando (1928) and the pageant in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), (‘Dissidence’, 128). Woolf knew Lee well and had both read and edited her work.
Richard A. Horsley, ‘“Love your Enemies” and the Doctrine of Non-Violence’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54/1 (1986): 3–31; 3.
John M. Mecklin, ‘The War and the Dilemma of the Christian Ethic’, American Journal of Theology 23/1 (1919): 14–40; 14.
Shailer Mathews, ‘Religion and War’, Biblical World 52/2 (1918): 163–76; 171–6.
See J.B. Trend, ‘The Dance of the Seises at Seville’, Music & Letters 2/1 (1921): 10–28; 11.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3–4.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2010 Patricia Pulham
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pulham, P. (2010). Violence and the Pacifist Body in Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations. In: Rau, P. (eds) Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289802_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289802_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31198-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28980-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)