KNOWING THEIR PLACE: WOMEN’S WRITING IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — In an examination of literature from World War I, a University of Arkansas researcher asserts that writings from the home front reveal how women coped with the multiple pressures of war, domesticity and pre-assigned social roles. Unfortunately, the place of women’s stories in the literary canon has long been usurped by battlefield tales of camaraderie and courage.

"Everyone knows the master narrative of the war: the manly experience on the front, the struggle to survive and the disillusionment of seeing friends killed. The soldier’s narrative gets privilege. It always has," said Debra Cohen, visiting assistant professor of English.

But in a new book titled "Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War Fiction," Cohen argues that the literary history of the war remains incomplete until women’s stories are considered. Her book attempts to do just that, exploring the work of female authors who wrote exclusively from the home front during the years of World War I.

Published this month by Northeastern University Press, "Remapping the Home Front" examines the fiction of Violet Hunt, Rose Macaulay, Stella Benson and Rebecca West. From Benson’s diversions into magic and fantasy to Hunt’s evocation of a wartime literary salon, the stories these women wrote during the war differed in style and tone. But Cohen finds a common element in the fiction that reveals much about the way British women experienced and endured the war.

Even as the predictable tensions of war took their toll on women, a host of social pressures added weight to their emotional and psychological burdens, Cohen said. Just as the women’s suffrage movement began to focus national attention on women’s rights and women’s issues, the onset of World War I demanded that women divert their energies to domestic and patriotic duties. A barrage of propaganda assigned them the roles they must play in wartime society.

"Women set aside the interests and issues they’d been fighting for to contribute to the war effort. But all they could do was fill one of the roles temptingly offered by the propaganda machine," Cohen said. "Be a mother and breed more soldiers. Convince the men to fight. Work in a factory or on the land. These were their only socially-acceptable options."

But at the same time that propaganda recruited women into these socially-sanctioned roles, it underscored the inadequacy of their contributions in comparison to the ultimate sacrifice that men were making on the frontlines. The need women felt to escape these pressures, their feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy, surfaced in their fiction, Cohen said.

The novels of Hunt, Macaulay, Benson and West all feature characters who, in response to the pressures of war society, retreat to inner spaces and imaginary worlds. They construct physical, psychological and emotional enclosures from which they can observe the war and its effects on the real world without allowing it to shape — or distort — their identities.

"It’s a means of removing oneself from the influence of propaganda, of social manipulation," Cohen explained. "These characters create a sheltered space in which the various pressures of government, of social approbation and peers are somehow negated so that within the space, they can maintain their own definitions of themselves as citizens."

Cohen implies that by writing such characters, Hunt, Macaulay, Benson and West created a similar imaginative space for themselves — one in which they could express their reactions to the war and their feelings about society while protecting themselves with the guise of fiction.

But even as these imaginative spaces must collapse with the completion of each novel, the fictional characters within the novels experience a similar collapse. For example, Cohen’s book describes how, in Benson’s "This is the End," facts of the real world — particularly the death of a beloved brother — eventually penetrate the main character’s secret space and draw her out of it.

Similarly, in "Non-Combatants and Others," Macaulay closes her novel by transferring her protagonist, Alix, from the reclusive realm of denial to the "refuge" of real institutions — namely the Church of England and the pacifist movement. Even though Alix chooses an ideology of peace in reaction to the war, the ending implies that her real protest — her retreat from propaganda and social expectations — could not be maintained.

Such endings illustrate women’s inability to escape the war, despite their isolation from the fighting and the deeper emotional and psychological isolation they constructed around themselves. The novels represent what women in the midst of World War I came to realize — that safety and self-determination themselves were, in wartime, ultimately fictive.

Cohen believes that studying home front literature allows a different wartime story to emerge, one that can be added to the battlefield narratives to create a more comprehensive literary history. Like men’s fiction from the trenches, women’s home-front fiction represents what Cohen calls "compositions in crisis" — literature written under constraints that not only affect the circumstances of their production but also affect the form of their narrative.

"In that sense, women’s war literature is similar to men’s. But the constraints that acted on home front fiction were altogether different," Cohen said. "Home front literature was subject not only to a whole different set of material circumstances — like government regulations, censorship, paper shortages — but also to a different set of psychological constraints."

Over the past twenty years, other critics have begun to examine women’s war literature, but much of that scholarship has focused on narratives written by women who visited the front such as nurses and journalists. In addition, Cohen believes that some critics have cast too wide a net, examining women’s fiction written after the war alongside literature written in the midst of it. While such studies can be enlightening, Cohen asserts that narratives written during the war present a more immediate portrayal of women’s war experience, a portrayal unsullied by retrospection.

"There are some great World War I novels written after the war was over. But those works, even the ones written by women, have already subsumed the master narrative, the battlefield-oriented history of the war," Cohen said. "It’s in literature written during the war that you get the clearest picture of what women actually experienced and of how they interpreted and coped with that experience."