Real Men in Henry Green’s War Writing

Abstract

The civilian men in Henry Green’s fiction undergo a crisis of masculinity because they are too old, too young, or too unfit to live up to the masculine ideal of the soldier hero. These noncombatant men often imagine the soldier not as he is but as an iconic standard of masculinity, a standard that civilians can necessarily never obtain. Left behind on the home front, they must therefore rethink masculinity and find other ways of being real men in wartime. The People’s War compounded this crisis of masculinity by disrupting conventional gender roles on the home front: service in the People’s Army instead of the military meant joining a corps of men and women functioning on increasingly equal terms. Bowen’s and Lehmann’s fiction investigates from a female perspective the social limits of women’s freedom during the People’s War; Green’s war novels demonstrate from a male perspective the alarming rather than liberating prospect of changing gender roles. Examining the experiences of men across battle lines rather than those of women across class lines, the fiction describes men who either remain anxiously at home or return from combat physically and psychologically wounded. In both Caught (1943) and Back (1946), the resulting crises of masculinity force characters to become more open-minded about the possibilities for being a real man.