War trauma in women’s First World War poetry and autobiographical writing
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Date
2022
Authors
Hanley, Edel
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Publisher
University College Cork
Published Version
Abstract
Near-contemporaries, H.D. and Vera Brittain are both major women writers of the twentieth
century who engage with war in their poetry and in prose yet have seldom been considered
comparatively. In bringing them together, this thesis questions the binary that too often still
applies in literary canons between Georgian and modernist modes, and between First World
War writing and modernism. H.D. and Brittain contest the conventional criteria for inclusion
in the First World War canon, and, in H.D.’s case, the Second World War canon. Women
have been excluded from canonical First World War scholarship like Paul Fussell’s The
Great War and Modern Memory (1975) due to their civilian status, and H.D. is doubly
excluded from the critical canon, as Fussell constructs it, as a woman and as an experimental
writer.
Expansions of First World War literary scholarship post-Fussell have not fully
bridged the divide between First World War and modernist writing, a rule proved by
significant exceptions to it such as Vincent Sherry’s The Great War and the Language of
Modernism (2007). However, women and civilian writers are now included in the literary
history of the First World War. This thesis argues that women writers of opposing camps, and
who are rarely examined together, adopt and adapt both Georgian tropes and experimental
techniques to articulate war. It examines the poetry of mourning and loss in women’s war
writing, considering the ways in which women delineate the lived experience of bereavement.
This thesis thus crosses the divide between modernist and Georgian war writing in pointing
out the similarities between women writing in different idioms.
This research examines the ways in which war trauma inflects H.D.’s poetry and
prose, prompting her rewriting of classical myths to address women’s subjectivity and her own wartime losses. Brittain’s poetry and autobiographical writing is discussed in
comparison with that of H.D. and this thesis argues that Brittain deploys modernist and
Georgian tropes to represent prolonged war trauma. Women writers use a range of genres and
idioms to articulate war: H.D. makes use of poetry in Imagist and epic modes from Sea
Garden (1916) to Trilogy (1946), and novel/autobiography in her war novels, Asphodel
(1921) and Bid Me to Live (1960), while Brittain draws on experimental techniques in the
poems of Because You Died (1934), memoir in Testament of Youth (1933), diary in Chronicle
of Youth (1981), and letter/correspondence in Letters from a Lost Generation (1999). Brittain
had served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in England, Malta, and France and this
thesis explores nurses’ status as civilians and first-hand witnesses to battle, again challenging
the binary between (male) combatants and (female) non-combatants, while also exploring the
ways in which nurse writers use modernist strategies to reveal that women’s war writing
exceeds and resists, as well as utilising, traditional modes of representation.
Description
Keywords
First World War , War trauma , Modernism , Women's writing , 20th century poetry , Autobiography
Citation
Hanley, E. 2022. War trauma in women’s First World War poetry and autobiographical writing. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.