Lovely Boys, Good Blokes, and Bonzer Bints: Love and Eroticism in British and Australian Great War Narratives

Abstract

explicit homoSexuality homoerotic implicationS oF many britiSh Great War narratives have been studied by scholars such as Paul Fussell Santanu Das. While Hemingway's A Farewell Arms Ford's No More Parades convey desperate romance of wartime heterosexual relationships, many of classic Great War texts document intense male-male bonds. Excellent examples are found in of Sassoon Graves. It is perhaps surprising that, mired in perilous male world of trenches, most classic Great War texts either relegate romance sidelines or replace heterosexual relationships with more- or-less openly homosexual ones. Australian Great War narratives largely elide sexual themes: historical record of venereal disease among members of AIF provides evidence of sexual congress, but narratives tend coyness. In Anzac stories, most relationships with women involve females who are of any special emotional meaning are dismissed as bints. Unlike British protagonists, Aus- tralians on leave visit their own womenfolk. This situation is ref lected in scarcity of meaningful romantic interactions in narratives.Interestingly, Australian narratives, with their protagonists even more separated from their women, are also likely eschew homosexual themes. Although male tenderness exists, it is represented as being of a much lesser degree, at least in its physical manifestation. Male-male friendship-mateship-as represented by Austra- lian authors may carry undertones of emotional physical intensity, but this is usually expressed in curt, economical gestures. The lovely boys of British give way a bunch of good blokes. Readers need look more closely for evidence of romance special individual bonds.miSogyny abSent womanRomantic entanglements with women figure largely in many English, American, European Great War narratives. Many of these accounts, however, are seen as misogynistic by feminist critics. In Lost Generation works of Aldington Ford, women are only ignorant malicious supporters of war, but represent a malevolent force every bit as destructive as war itself. Sometimes these female characters goad torment their menfolk into enlisting. Sylvia Tietjens causes most of Christopher's problems in Parade's End; Sylvia Dilton, who selfishly uses Dominic Langton in When Blackbirds Sing, lives by the code [. . .] 'never be found out' (Boyd, Blackbirds 58). In Death of a Hero, Winterbourne's life is rendered in- tolerable by women closest him: poor old got so fed up, he went off joined infantry, fell into first recruiting office he came to (Aldington 26). Aldington spares no woman his bitter acrimony. George's mother is not only a sadist, but a necrophilous one who found news of his death exciting stimulating at first, especially erotically stimulating, although George only lasted his mother as a source of posthumous excitement for about two months (20, 17, 22). George's wife Elizabeth mistress Fanny both had that rather hard efficiency of war post-war female, veiling ancient predatory posses- sive instincts of sex under a skillful smoke-barrage of Freudian Havelock Ellis theories, falsely claiming that no primitive emotions such as jealousy could inhabit [their] enlightened rather f lat bosoms (25-6). Such women are particularly feminine, none displays tenderness expected of them: those functions are better fulfilled by male-male bonding in trenches. Even beautiful Catherine of A Farewell Arms, beloved of Frederic Henry in Great War's best-known love story, can read today as somewhat cloying, ineffective, pathetic, with her constant pleas be told she is loved: and you'll always love me, won't you? (Hemingway 112); I'll try make trouble for you (123); I look too big matronly now. …