Bringing the War Home: The Imperial War Museum

Abstract

In an article on Katherine Mansfield, Con Coroneos describes war as “a very complex space … a mental and geographical practice constituted through actual battle sites and cultural and mental space.”1 Coroneos asks us to recognize that the geography of the First World War is incomprehensible if we ignore the cultural, ideological, and psychic dimensions informing spatial designations such as the Western Front and the home front. Over the last 30 years feminist scholars have used this perspective to analyze the gendered nature of First World War spaces, drawing our attention to the porous boundaries between seemingly distinct locations. Thus, women participated directly in war work, as ancillary workers behind the lines or in Britain, about 2,000,000 women engaging, for example, in munitions work alone.2 All British civilians experienced the realities of “total war,” whether through bereavement, rationing, the physical dangers of zeppelin bombing and munitions work, or the psychological effects of the home population’s mobilization in support of the war. However, the naming of actual spaces as either civilian or military, combatant or non-combatant, introduces a hierarchy in which home-front action and experiences always fall short of the true war experience. The barring of civilians from the war zone thus delimits a specific location and a set of experiences that belong only to men and that are associated with firsthand experience of combat conditions. The ample attention many feminist critics have given to the war’s version of separate spheres makes it unnecessary to revisit this point.3 However, these critics’ emphasis on the role of the actual physical territory of the British Isles in an imaginary topography of the war marks the “home front,” itself an ideological creation, as an important focus in any discussions of how British culture during and after the First World War represents the always contradictory and unstable geography of English nationalism.