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Between Manliness and Masculinity: The “War Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Michael Roper
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Type
Special Feature on Masculinities
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 343 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2005

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References

1 Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar.

2 Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London, 1987), 172Google Scholar.

3 See especially Showalter's discussion of Rivers's work, in ibid., 184–88.

4 Bogacz, Ted, “War Neurosis and Cultural Change in England, 1914–1922: The Work of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock,’” Journal of Contemporary History 24, no. 2 (1989): 227–56, quote on 246CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See, e.g., Bourke, Joanna, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London, 1996), 115–18Google Scholar, and “Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of ‘Shell-Shocked’ Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914–1939,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000): 57–69, 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Janet Oppenheim, who argues that public reactions to shell shock reiterated earlier perceptions of mental breakdown as a blameworthy failure of will (“Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients and Depression in Victorian England [Oxford, 1991], 152).

6 Mosse, George, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, 1996), 108–12Google Scholar. For a similar argument about the war poets, see Caesar, Adrian, Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets (Manchester, 1993)Google Scholar.

7 Mosse, Image of Man, 112.

8 Frantzen, Allen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar.

9 Shepard, Alexandra, “From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500–1700,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 281–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Some of the concerns of this project are discussed in Roper, Michael, “Maternal Relations: Moral Manliness and Emotional Survival in Letters Home during the First World War,” in Masculinity in Politics and War: Rewritings of Modern History, ed. Dudink, Stefan, Hagermann, Karen, and Tosh, John (Manchester, 2004), 295–315Google Scholar.

11 My earlier attempts to develop this kind of analysis of masculinity include “Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: The Composure and Re-composure of Masculinity in Memories of the Great War,” History Workshop Journal 50 (Spring 2000): 181–205Google Scholar, and “Splitting in Unsent Letters: Writing as a Social Practice and a Psychological Activity,” Social History 26, no. 3 (2001): 318–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 The accounts, which proliferated in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, as the war generation reached old age, are less commonly discussed, although, as Bourke suggests, more strongly influenced by psychological thought. See Bourke, Joanna, “Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History,” History Workshop Journal 55 (Spring 2003): 111–34, 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Aldington, Richard, Death of a Hero (London, 1965), 83Google Scholar.

14 Bion, Wilfred, The Long Weekend, 1897–1919: Part of a Life (London, 1986)Google Scholar.

15 See Tosh, John, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (London, 1999)Google Scholar; Mangan, J. A., Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar; Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves.”

16 Quoted in Mangan, Athleticism, 135.

17 Tosh, A Man's Place, 118, 189; Mangan, J. A., “Social Darwinism and Upper-Class Education in Late Victorian and Edwardian England,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, ed. Mangan, J. A. and Walvin, James (Manchester, 1987), 135–60, quote on 151Google Scholar.

18 Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves,” 151.

19 See Springhall, John, “Building Character in the British Boy: The Attempt to Extend Christian Manliness to Working-Class Adolescents, 1880–1914,” in Mangan, and Walvin, , eds., Manliness and Morality, 52–75Google Scholar.

20 De Groot, Gerald, cited in George Robb, British Culture and the First World War (Basingstoke, 2002), 33Google Scholar.

21 Mangan, Athleticism, 135–40.

22 Mosse, Image of Man, 5.

23 Warren, Allen, “Popular Manliness: Baden Powell, Scouting and the Development of Manly Character,” in Mangan, and Walvin, , eds., Manliness and Morality, 199–220, quote on 199Google Scholar.

24 Cohen, Michèle, “‘Manners’ Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 312–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves,” 148–50.

25 Lyndall Urwick to “Mother,” 11 August 1914, private collection.

26 Quoted in Robb, British Culture, 34.

27 Thomson, Matthew, “Psychology and the ‘Consciousness of Modernity’ in Early Twentieth Century Britain,” in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War Two, ed. Daunton, Martin and Rieger, Bernard (Oxford, 2001), 97–119Google Scholar.

28 Ellesley, Sandra, “Psychoanalysis in Early Twentieth-Century England: A Study in the Popularisation of Ideas” (PhD thesis, University of Essex, 1995), 62Google Scholar.

29 Bogacz, “War Neurosis,” 250.

30 Quoted in Ellesley, “Psychoanalysis,” 126.

31 See, e.g., Barbara Low's Psychoanalysis (1920), cited in Beauman, Nicola, A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel, 1914–1939 (London, 1989), 148Google Scholar.

32 Graves, Robert and Hodge, Alan, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939 (London, 1940), 103Google Scholar. For the views of another contemporary see Mowat, Charles, Britain between the Wars (London, 1955), 214Google Scholar.

33 Pick, Daniel and Roper, Lyndal, eds., Dreams and History: The Interpretation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis (London, 2004), 10Google Scholar.

34 Rose, Nikolas, The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869–1939 (London, 1985), 182Google Scholar; see also Weeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1981), 155Google Scholar.

35 Rivers, W. H. R., Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses (Cambridge, 1924), 208–9Google Scholar.

36 Quoted in Rupp, Dean, “The Early Discovery of Freud by the British General Educated Public, 1912–1919,” Social History of Medicine 3, no. 2 (1990): 217–43, quote on 217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Quoted in Beauman, A Very Great Profession, 169.

38 Tosh, John, “Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800–1914,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 330–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Rose points out that this aspect of Freud's thought tended to be ignored with the new psychology that began to permeate child guidance and other social agencies in the interwar period (The Psychological Complex, 185–90). Nevertheless, its influence is detectable in middle-class memoirs.

40 Quoted in Bracco, Rosa Maria, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Oxford, 1993), 92Google Scholar.

41 Ellesley, “Psychoanalysis,” 117.

42 Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 109.

43 Ibid., 111.

44 Bogacz, “War Neurosis,” 227.

45 Ellesley, “Psychoanalysis,” 117.

46 Quoted in Bogacz, “War Neurosis,” 228.

47 Vaughan, Edwin Campion, Some Desperate Glory: The Diary of a Young Officer, 1917 (Bury Saint Edmunds, Suffolk, 1981), 212Google Scholar.

48 Letters Sent from France: Service with the Artists Rifles and the Buffs, December 1914 to December 1915 (London, 1994), 115Google Scholar.

49 Bion, Wilfred, War Memoirs, 1917–1919 (London, 1997)Google Scholar.

50 Carrington, Charles, Soldier from the Wars Returning (Aldershot, Hampshire, 1965), 265, 191Google Scholar.

51 This recognition led some of those who had served in the trenches to revise their notions of cowardice. Cases of self-inflicted wounds or of desertion might be regarded, as Hynes comments, in a “notably uncensorious” manner. See Hynes, Samuel, The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (London, 1997), 65Google Scholar. “I understand desertion,” wrote Max Plowman in 1927: “A man distraught determines that the last act of his life shall at least be one of his own volition; and who can say that what is commonly regarded as the limit of cowardice is not then heroic?” (ibid., 59).

52 Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London, 1991), 71Google Scholar. The relationship of escapism to reality was, however, sometimes made apparent in detective fiction, most notably in the “nervy assininity” of the Dorothy L. Sayers's character Lord Peter Wimsey, who suffered from recurring nightmares about the war (ibid., 73).

53 Shephard, Ben, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914–1994 (London, 2000), 35Google Scholar. In the discussion that follows, I have drawn on the insightful commentary of Bracco, Merchants. Autobiographical novels about fear not discussed here but mentioned by Bracco include Charles Benstead, Retreat: A Story of 1918; Naomi Ellington, Honour Come Back (1935); Terence Mahon, Cold Feet (1929); and Gilbert Frankau, Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant: A Romance of Married Life (1919).

54 Bracco, Merchants, 92.

55 Cited in Rupp, “The Early Discovery,” 220.

56 Sinclair, May, The Romantic (London, 1920), 244Google Scholar. Beauman describes Sinclair as “one of the most important of the ‘psychological’ novelists” (A Very Great Profession, 149).

57 See, e.g., Rivers's essays in Instinct and the Unconscious.

58 Such novels adopted a similar position to that of Rivers, who had argued that the typical victim of neurasthenia was highly conscientious, his will worn down by the constant struggle of duty against instinct.

59 Herbert, A. P., The Secret Battle (Thirsk, North Yorkshire, 2001), 5Google Scholar.

60 Bracco, Merchants, 151; see also Light, Forever England, 72.

61 Sherriff, R. C., Journey's End (London, 1981), 58Google Scholar.

62 Pound, Reginald, A. P. Herbert: A Biography (London, 1976), 55Google Scholar.

63 Ibid.; Hynes, Samuel, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London, 1992), 213, 305–6Google Scholar.

64 Herbert's impulse to set the record straight did not end with The Secret Battle but is also reflected in his adaptation for the screen of the 1922 best seller by Ernest Raymond, Tell England. His 1930 script replaced “the rhetoric, the chivalric message, the celebration of male love” of Raymond's original text with a view of war that was much more “downbeat, agonised, spare” (Richards, Jeffrey, Happiest Days: The Public Schools in English Fiction [Manchester, 1988], 227)Google Scholar.

65 Bracco, Merchants, 156–60.

66 Ibid., 162.

67 Sherriff, Journey's End, 57.

68 Sherriff's feelings about the way in which the general public responded to the character of Hibberd give a further indication of his autobiographical investment in the character. He was apparently dismayed by the lack of public sympathy for him, feeling that Hibberd had been “misunderstood.” When subsequently adapting the play into the novel, Sherriff sought to make the characters of Hibbert and Stanhope more similar. The complex relationships among Sherriff's war experience, his play, and his adaptation of the play into a novel are described in Bracco's final chapter (Merchants, 145–96).

69 Sherriff, Journey's End, 91.

70 Herbert, Secret Battle, 103.

71 Deeping, Warwick, No Hero—This (London, 1936), 300Google Scholar. For further examples of how repugnance toward another men's fear is understood as a reaction to one's own fears, see Manning, who observes that the “merciless” attitude shown by the men toward a deserter stemmed from the thought that “it might be I, one felt involuntarily” (Manning, Frederic, Her Privates We [London, 1999], 122)Google Scholar.

72 Quoted in Showalter, Female Malady, 170.

73 Deeping, No Hero, 170.

74 Aldington, Death, 287.

75 Manning, Her Privates We, 6.

76 Deeping, No Hero, 79.

77 Herbert, Secret Battle, 134–37.

78 Ibid., 7.

79 Sherriff, Journey's End, 43.

80 Quoted in Bracco, Merchants, 163.

81 SirSlim, William, Courage and Other Broadcasts (London, 1957), 7–8Google Scholar.

82 Osborne to Stanhope, in Sherriff, Journey's End, 43.

83 See, e.g., Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 119. Bogacz, who recognizes the contradictions in Moran, nevertheless cites the book as evidence of typical pre–First World War views of courage, although it was published toward the end of World War II (“War Neurosis,” 230–31).

84 Bogacz, “War Neurosis,” 252, n. 19.

85 Moran, Lord, The Anatomy of Courage (London, 1945), 170Google Scholar.

86 Ibid., 14.

87 This view, with its emphasis on the power of education and tradition as a source of control over the instincts, is close to that of Charles Myers, who had published his recollections of work with shell-shock victims in 1941. Myers identified two kinds of “nervous subjects”: the one, “often a highly intelligent person, keeping full control over his unduly sensitive nervous system; the latter, usually of feebler intellect, having little hold over his instinctive acts to escape danger” (Shell-Shock in France [Cambridge, 1940], 38).

88 Moran, Anatomy, 41.

89 Quoted in Lovell, Richard, Churchill's Doctor: A Biography of Lord Moran (London, 1992), 213Google Scholar.

90 Moran, Anatomy, 70–71.

91 Slim, Courage, 5.

92 Ibid., 6.

93 Lyndall Urwick, “Apprenticeship to Management: An Autobiography of Lt. Col. L. F. Urwick” (1970), 38, private collection.

94 Lowell, Churchill's Doctor, 40–42.

95 Moran, Anatomy, 16.

96 Lovell, Churchill's Doctor, 43; Shephard, War of Nerves, 35.

97 Moran, Anatomy, 69, v.

98 SirSlim, William, Unofficial History (London, 1970), 27Google Scholar.

99 Ibid., 12.

100 Deeping, No Hero, 434.

101 Mort, Frank, “Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons in Postwar Britain,” Journal of British Studies 38, no. 3 (1999): 353–85CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Francis, Martin, “Tears, Tantrums, and Bared Teeth: The Emotional Economy of Three Conservative Prime Ministers, 1951–1963,” Journal of British Studies 41, no. 3 (2002): 354–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 Hynes, A War Imagined, 304, 307.

103 Connell, R. W., The Men and the Boys (Cambridge, 2000), 7Google Scholar.

104 For a different view of the relationship between fear and memory, see Joanna Bourke, “Fear and Anxiety,” 121. She emphasizes how “the very act of narrating changes and formulates ‘the experience.’”

105 For further reflections on this topic, see Roper, Michael, “Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History,” History Workshop Journal 59 (Spring 2005): forthcomingCrossRefGoogle Scholar.