Encoded Enclosures: the Wartime Novels of Stella Benson

Abstract

In her 1990 survey of British women’s First World War writing, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness, Claire Tylee announces her intention of identifying the ‘women’s myth’ of the Great War — a myth notably excluded from standard literary surveys of the period. Written partly as a corrective to Paul Fussell’s influential The Great War and Modern Memory, Tylee’s work is part of a recent attempt by feminist critics and historians to extend the traditional definitions of war to accommodate female experience. As Margaret Higonnet points out, war itself is a highly gendered concept; ‘commonplace definitions of war draw a gendered boundary’ between ‘battlefield’ and ‘home front’, ‘combatant’ and ‘non-combatant’ (’Cassandra’, 145–6). As war changes, the military must continually redefine the combat zone as ‘wherever “women” are not’ (Enloe, 15). Focusing on female war experience leads to an awareness of war as less firmly bounded in both space and time than conventional historiography would have it; for women, as Cynthia Enloe has argued, war is less a circumscribed physical event bounded by treaties than an ideological, economic and psychological struggle experienced over an extended period of time (cited in Higonnet, ‘Helix’, 46). ‘We must move beyond the exceptional, marked event, which takes place on a specifically militarized front or in public or institutionally defined areas/ states Higonnet, ‘to include the private domain and the landscape of the mind’ (46).