Editor's Introduction: Wars

Abstract

With this issue, jml contributes to the centenary remembrance of the Great War. The hostilities demarcated by that war, however, were not confined to 1914–1918. The current collection of essays treats aggressions (and not only armed ones) that, beginning on the threshold of World War I, reach all the way to the present. Our memorial purview takes for its object the impact on literature of a century of global conflict. Jill Richards’s lead-off study, about the suffrage census strike in 1911, argues that the suffrage cause was betrayed by its enemies’ translation of women’s diverse aims into a mythical equivalent of a unified nation-state — a unity with no grounding in the cross-currents of reality. Perhaps, the essay suggests, war would be less thought of as an ultimate solution to conflicts if governments and populations patiently tolerated plural, contradictory phenomena. Luke Thurston’s account of May Sinclair implicitly reinforces Richards’s argument. It argues that Sinclair, bent on participating in the Great War, but blocked from doing so by women’s subordination to the male-centered effort, refused to recognize her disappointment. In Thurston’s view, Sinclair felt inward equivalents of Richards’s pluralities, none of which was rightly to be sacrificed to a masculinizing, coercive regulation. Outwardly, however, according to Thurston, Sinclair used her fiction to make the sacrifice, and thereby wrongly repressed the inevitable conflicts of self-division and public life. But what of the soldiers who, traumatized by the battlefield, found their inward conflicts insupportable, and yearned to replace them with self-renewing psychological integration? Carolyn Steffens’s and Elizabeth Covington’s essays address the therapies that sought to heal combatants’ self-division, and that are portrayed in fiction about the Great War by Pat Barker and Rebecca West. The novelists, according to both essayists, replace orthodox (i.e., Freudian) ideas about trauma and therapy with unorthodox perspectives (for example, W.H.R. Rivers’s). The replacement — providing, in comparison with routine psychiatric case histories, “a competing . . . cultural logic” — suggests that literary historians who rely on present-day “trauma theory” have new things to learn from the fictions of 1918 and 1991–95. Contrasts between unified and self-divided modes of consciousness unfold as our essays move towards representations of World War II and beyond it.