"Nobody asked what the women thought": An Analysis of the Relationship between Women and War in British Women’s Poetry of the First World War (1914-1918)
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2019-07-16
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en
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This thesis investigates an aspect of British First World War poetry which has not yet received much scholarly attention, namely the poems written by women. This dissertation takes a closer look at the relationship between women and war as it is represented in women’s Great War poetry. It does this by analysing three topics which are related to gender and war, and which represent a traditional idea on women’s relationship to war. These topics are: the spatial opposition between the male battlefield and the female home front, women’s work and role during wartime, and finally, the role of the mother figure in war. Each one of these topics is analysed in women’s war poetry and the goal of these analyses is to improve our understanding of the relationship in women’s Great War poetry between gender, on the one hand, and nature, nationalism, war, and literature, on the other hand. The main research question in this thesis is whether women's poems confirm or challenge traditional ideas on women and war. This question is explored by using theories on gender and war (Goldstein 2001), gender and space (Spain 1992; Massey 1994), ecofeminism (Ruether 1995), liberal feminism, difference feminism and postmodern feminism.. As its primary material, this thesis mainly uses Catherine Reilly’s anthology Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War (1981), as well as individual poetry collections by female poets such as Vera Brittain, Jessie Pope, and Margaret Sackville. Occasionally, this thesis also analyses poems written by male soldiers in order to demonstrate that there are sometimes clear differences between men and women’s war poems.
This thesis argues that because of the enormous diversity of women’s poetry of the First World War, both positive and negative responses to traditional ideas on women and war can be found. Whereas on the one hand, there are poems which are nationalistic in tone, which construct the home front as an ideal place representing female beauty, kindness and safety, or which describe the mother figure as the ultimate symbol of maternal protection and love, on the other hand, there are poems which challenge conventional ideas on women’s role in wartime. These poems, for instance, contest the idea that only men are allowed to fight or they defy women’s role as supporter of war by containing pacifist ideas in which the war is criticized.
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