From Private Story to Public History:
Irene Rathbone Revises the War in the Thirties
Geneviève Brassard
Abstract
This essay examines Irene Rathbone's wartime diary and her overlooked novel We That Were Young (1932) as key texts for our understanding of women's participation in World War I and of their contribution to that conflict's literary canon. Rathbone's novel is a feminist revision of war narratives foregrounding an ambivalent attitude toward the war and the changes it brought within English society. Rathbone both rewrites a typically male war history by featuring a marginal heroine in a liminal position between safety and danger at work near the front, and she also revises her personal wartime writings into a public work of testimony. My essay ultimately argues that Rathbone's formally traditional texts complicate and expand limited definitions of modernism as aesthetic experimentation and convey modern thematic concerns such as changing gender roles and the relativity of time during and after the war.
Keywords
autobiography / fiction / First World War / Rathbone, Irene / trauma
This "remembering" was something inward and unexpected—something which broke her completely up, and which there was no resisting. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers—officers and privates—from those best known, most loved, to those spoken to once, in a camp or hut—they came before her. A ghost world, but more real than any since.
—Irene Rathbone (1932, 463)
By the early 1930s, World War I had been the subject of numerous accounts by male participants such as Richard Aldington (1929), Robert Graves (1929), and Ernest Hemingway (1929), among others. Women's texts had been published as well, but they were quickly disappearing from literary history as male authors and critics constructed a war mythology around the figure of the male combatant in the trenches. 1 In this essay, I examine Irene Rathbone's wartime diary and her overlooked novel We That Were Young (1932) with a nod to similarities in purpose and narrative strategies with Virginia Woolf's The Years ([1937] 1965). I read Rathbone's novel as a feminist revision of war narratives foregrounding a paradoxical and ambivalent attitude toward the war and the changes it brought within English society. I use "revision" in two senses in this essay: Rathbone rewrites war history by foregrounding women's experiences in wartime and also revises her personal wartime writings into a public work of testimony and memory. This essay ultimately suggests that the war allowed [End Page 43] Rathbone to rewrite a chapter of modern history as women's history, by re-imagining the war years through the eyes of a marginal heroine in a liminal position between safety and danger at work near the front. 2 Our understanding of women's literature of World War I can only be enriched by enlarging our scope of vision to include works by authors such as Rathbone who articulate private and public responses to concerns brought up by the intersection of gender, autobiography, and war, as Woolf and other canonical authors do. 3
My reading of Rathbone's texts owes much to recent revisionist approaches that contest the use of the term modernism to define the literary period following World War I, and particularly women's often overlooked contributions. As Rita Felski put it, "Modernism is only one aspect of the culture of women's modernity" (1995, 25); many female authors of the period foreground modern preoccupations whether they write in traditional or experimental modes. Following Felski's lead, feminist and cultural scholars have recently examined texts and contexts typically relegated to the margins of modernism. 4 They argue that historians of modernism have traditionally privileged male stylistic experimentation at the expense of many female narratives more concerned with thematic explorations in the modern period. My analysis of Rathbone's diary and novel extends these scholars' argument by demonstrating how her texts' thematic concerns and feminist narrative strategies challenge male war narratives, foreground women's war work, and underscore Rathbone's sense of living through a period of rapid social change brought on by the war.
Rathbone's autobiographical and fictional narratives are radical departures from traditional male war texts dominated by the twin tropes of trench warfare and spiritual disillusionment. Rathbone's "politics of remembering" (Smith and Watson 1998, 39) goes against the grain of these male narratives by foregrounding female experience as equally authoritative, despite its lack of reporting of trench combat firsthand. She claims history by writing in a genre, autobiography, typically reserved for men in the early decades of the twentieth century, and by stressing the key roles women played in wartime alongside male combatants. Rathbone also claims history for herself and her colleagues when she transforms her personal wartime writings into a feminist narrative of public memory, thus putting women back into World War I history at a time when their contributions, both in life and in literature, were threatening to disappear from cultural and social history.
Rathbone kept a detailed diary during the war, as did Woolf (1983), and both women used the private thoughts recorded in them when they wrote their novels in the 1930s. 5 The different dynamics of these two eras, the war years and the thirties, are crucial to an understanding of Rathbone's diary and later novel. From 1917 to 1918, as Caroline Playne [End Page 44] put it in her social history of the war years, Britain was holding on to a fading jingo ethos (1933). The country's mood had shifted from excitement to disillusionment following the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917), despite the pro-war press's valiant attempts to fan the waning flames of patriotism among the population, and Rathbone's diary reflects this shift (see Hynes 1991). At the same time, however, Rathbone reports subtle but inexorable changes in social mores at home and at the front, particularly in terms of broken barriers between individuals and exposed taboos and inhibitions. Her novel, written like Woolf's The Years (1965) from the perspective of a disappointing peace and the rise of fascism, with many years of experience and reflection on war's bitter legacy, is firmly anchored in a decade increasingly polarized politically and socially. 6 Following the height of literary experimentation in the 1920s usually typified by male "high modernists" and the flood of war narratives by former male combatants, the 1930s emerged as a return to a literary realism imbued with political engagement, and as a decade during which women's novels and autobiographies flourished. Rathbone's We That Were Young responds to male war narratives by re-imagining the war from a female perspective, as Woolf's The Years does, and Rathbone also resists cultural assumptions about femininity in wartime while paradoxically celebrating the changes the war made possible. 7
Rathbone's diary and novel demonstrate, as Margaret and Patrice Higonnet suggest, that "women experience war over a different period from that which traditional history usually recognizes, a period which precedes and long outlasts formal hostilities" (1987, 46). Rathbone's novel spans the years 1915-1928, and the later parts emphasize the idea that for female survivors, the war will never be over. Within her diary she also dwells on the notion of war time as somehow unreal, at once stretched out to feel like a decade as well as surprisingly quick to steal one's youth. The diary exemplifies Shari Benstock's notion of autobiography as a "coming to knowledge of the self" (1988, 11), as Rathbone deliberately sets out to keep a record of her novel experience working in a YMCA hut in France. Her candid admission that self-awareness overpowers spontaneity in her personal writing echoes Benstock's appraisal of Woolf's diary as a space where she poses "theoretical and practical questions of writing" (17). Rathbone's awareness of writing for a future audience, whether herself or the public, suggests that her wartime experience triggered her desire to record her perceptions for posterity. 8 When she used this material for fictional purposes, she kept many incidents and sentiments but subtly refashioned them to smooth out emotional outbursts or pointed critiques of the authorities. Spatial and historical distance allows her to turn the novel into a more political document by enlarging her scope and muting personal emotions. In the novel, Rathbone more explicitly deploys feminist strategies to question and resist cultural assumptions about femininity [End Page 45] in wartime. Rathbone's heroine Joan and her colleagues and friends are childless, a suspect condition in a culture for which motherhood and femininity are inseparable, as Susan Grayzel (1999) and Susan Kingsley Kent (1993) usefully remind us. 9 Romantic entanglements do not figure prominently in the novel as they do in the diary, and Rathbone rewrites traditional female scripts by focusing instead on relationships between women and on gender role reversals in which stronger women take care of men weakened by their combat experience. Rathbone's fictional narrative, unlike the diary, also features multiple perspectives in order to provide a more democratic viewpoint on the events, as Jane Marcus (1989a) has argued, and it brings to the foreground young women whose commitment to war work was quickly forgotten after the Armistice.
This essay ultimately argues that both Rathbone's diary and We That Were Young reveal an undeniable ambivalence toward the war. While Rathbone was a recognized pacifist, her diary articulates a paradoxical view of war as a unique cultural moment that opened up possibilities of personal transformation and social change. 10 Her record of wartime thoughts and feelings suggests that the cataclysmic event of her lifetime triggered her literary imagination and led to further explorations of these insights in fictional form more than a decade later. Finally, this essay seeks to raise critical awareness for Rathbone's contribution to war literature and suggests that overlooked figures such as Rathbone share ideological and thematic concerns with canonical authors such as Woolf, despite formal differences in their novels.
"Such Comfortable Camouflage": Irene Rathbone's Wartime Diary
The diary Rathbone kept while working at a YMCA rest camp near Boulogne in 1918 provides revealing insights into the liminal position of women working behind the lines but in constant contact with soldiers. Neither civilians nor combatants, these women unsettle traditional wartime boundaries between home and front, since they are expected to recreate a bit of homeland comfort and cheer abroad while also working hard in a dangerous environment. Rathbone's diary is relatively free from cultural constraints and expectations, since she was writing years before the onslaught of male narratives centered on combat as a guarantee of authenticity. This time-capsule aspect of the text makes it an invaluable document for the study of literature written in medias res, when the conflict seemed never ending. 11 Like any form of self-representation, however, Rathbone's diary is never innocent: she does not write in a historical vacuum but with a tremendous sense of importance and opportunity. My reading of this deeply self-aware and yet authentic document participates [End Page 46] in an ongoing theoretical conversation in academic circles about the ways women's autobiography negotiates issues of agency, identity, and authority. 12 In addition, works by women war participants such as Rathbone unsettle previous definitions of canonical war literature "shaped around the experiences of soldiers who experienced the traumas of war: death, injury, and 'shell-shock'" (Higonnet 2002, 3).
Rathbone's text suggests that war workers, such as Rathbone and her comrades, experienced trauma because they were in a novel yet improbable position of offering support to the troops while listening to tales of horrors, yet masking their own fears and feelings. In a 1915 essay, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," Sigmund Freud provides useful insights into the ways trauma seeped into the lives of combatants and civilians alike, and penetrated wartime cultural discourse. Freud suggests that this war's global reach brings "disillusionment" in part because it "ignores the prerogatives of the wounded and the medical service, [and] the distinction between civil and military sections of the population" (1957, 278-9). Freud also argues that the "low morality shown externally by states [and] the brutality shown by individuals whom . . . one would not have thought capable of such behaviour" (280) were instrumental in shattering Europeans' illusions about their civilized nations. In her recent work on trauma, Cathy Caruth poses an "urgent question" plaguing trauma theorists: "Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?" (1996, 7). Her framing of trauma as an "enigma of survival" (58) provides a useful lens with which to examine Rathbone's wartime diary and novel. 13 Rathbone's texts anticipate Caruth's ideas, and they offer a complex and revealing answer to Caruth's question: "What does it mean to survive?" (60), and, in this particular case, how does a woman in a liminal position on the edge of the war zone negotiate her place as a survivor within the larger war narrative?
Rathbone crafts her wartime diary with deliberate precision and care, creating a definite persona and adopting a voice she invests with purpose. As Angela Smith notes, wartime diaries such as Rathbone's can be read as an "exploration of personal consciousness at a time of crisis" (2000, 19). Rathbone writes: "I read somewhere lately that it was impossible for a woman to write a really disingenuous diary. . . . I find myself writing this all the time for somebody else—either an interested girl friend, or myself when 60! As a matter of fact the light humorous line is the only one I find it possible to adopt in writing a diary" (July 1918). This candid self-appraisal foregrounds Rathbone's decision early on to adopt a cheerful façade in order to mask painful feelings to herself and others. Consequently, this diary can be read as memoir or autobiography of the present moment, immediate in its factual contents yet mediated by a deliberately distant consciousness. As Susan Stanford Friedman suggests, "the self constructed in women's autobiographical writing is often based in, but [End Page 47] not limited to, a group consciousness—an awareness of the meaning of the cultural category WOMAN for the patterns of women's individual destiny" (1988, 41). In Rathbone's case, the "group consciousness" is intensified by the war context, and her sense that she is recording an unusual life in progress. Her honesty in the passage above paradoxically underlines the emotional camouflage she deems inevitable when writing about war, as if she could only face obliquely the intense reality of the experience. The diary also gives her space to explore the nature of writing itself and to reflect on her need to record this new experience, in contrast with the novel where she follows a more traditional and linear narrative strategy: "How I wish I had the gift, because there are all sorts of things going round and round inside my heart which I would love to relieve myself by expressing—queer longings, passionate and strange, which sometimes I feel I must give vent to or bust!" (July 1918). These lines underscore the intensity of Rathbone's war experience but also her sense that her writing is not accomplished enough to capture what she feels. When she adds, "Give a feeling a form and it will cease to hurt" (July 1918), she hints at the healing power of art and the form her later novel will take.
Three major themes emerge from a close reading of the diary. The first could be described as the presence of the past, or constant comparison between 1915 and 1918 (it may be the same war, but Rathbone's outlook has changed); the second examines changes in gender relations, particularly the effect of war on sexual taboos and prohibitions; the final, overarching theme woven throughout the diary can best be defined as the emotional paradox of war, or the surreal juxtaposition of horror and merriment, two words Rathbone frequently uses to describe the incongruous proximity of the rest camp to the combat zone. For the most part Rathbone maintains her cheery mask of debonair efficiency, and yet at key moments in her diary she articulates the uncomfortable duality of her position as a young woman hired to soothe the troops as well as a war worker exposed to danger.
One revealing aspect of Rathbone's diary in terms of women's relation to history is her literal and figurative return to an earlier, more innocent self as she revisits in 1918 the site of her first employment in France in 1915. Rathbone is aware of the span of years with everything it implies, but also of her ability simultaneously to summon her younger self and keep her at bay. She looks at her 1915 diary and reflects on "How near the beginning of the war that was. What a sense of adventure in the air, and how fresh and keen we all felt for any kind of work" (June 1918). The tone of this passage suggests that Rathbone looks at herself almost as a stranger, a naïve young woman grateful to be of use and excited by the "adventure" of working near the front. Rathbone reflects on the changes wrought by the war years: [End Page 48]
Three years since then, and I am 10 years older. Nursing in military hospitals does not tend to preserve one's bubbling spirits, and there is a certain kind of youth which has died once and for all in the wards. That youth can never come back, and the youth of sheer inexperience and lightness of heart, but there is another kind, born I think out of the death of the first, which should last for all one's years, and help one to face up laughingly to every phase of life, and every high or hard adventure.
(June 1918)
From the first pages, Rathbone deliberately turns her back on regret and nostalgia. Her journal will not be a record of sorrow and grief, but one of cheerful disposition against the backdrop of horror and chaos. In the midst of her "hard adventure," she wills herself to control her emotions for fear of "slip[ping] back . . . into the outlook of 1915," which would "only result in dreariness and disappointment" (June 1918). Rathbone praises the pragmatism and realism of 1918 over idealized versions of the war still prevalent in 1915. Within the larger framework of the ongoing conflict, Rathbone draws distinctions between the earlier year and the present moment of the war, suggesting that years of combat have hardened the women on the sidelines as well as the men under fire.
The diary is more vocal and descriptive than the novel in its exploration of wartime flirtations and sexual attraction between female workers and officers on leave at the rest camp. In her introduction to Rathbone's novel, Lynn Knight points out that the war "threw most middle class women into the company of large groups of men, unchaperoned for the first time" (1988, xvi). The diary testifies to the giddier aspects of this new experience, such as mild flirtations with officers and excursions to the countryside with male escorts. Rathbone devotes many pages to her interactions with these men returning from the front lines. While she acknowledges the painful stories they need to share and the bravery they conceal underneath their nonchalant attitudes, she also focuses on strategies to get a man to dance and the reprimands she receives from her Christian superior for being too "vivacious" (July 1918). As she notes wryly, "to be attractive is to be condemned—to be a success, a crime" (July 1918). The unusual position of young women so near the front and in frequent contact with men long deprived of female companionship provokes much gossip. Rathbone notes that she and her colleagues are the "subject of much interest and speculation" in such circumstances (July 1918). She hints at the potential freedoms this physical proximity could provide but remains outwardly proper: "if only one hadn't got to be respectable, what a time one could have!" (July 1918). Rathbone knowingly points to changes in sexual mores, but also underscores the liminality of her position when it comes to acting out sexual feelings. She is too conscious of her image as a pure English lady to move beyond respectability and propriety. 14 Flirtatious passages such as these do not appear in the later novel; these [End Page 49] omissions underscore the marked differences between Rathbone's youthful and private musings and her public and fictional project, in which she highlights female friendships and the importance of women's war work.
The diary also suggests the troubling avenues of knowledge the war setting opens for sheltered young women. Through Rathbone's innocent but slowly opening perspective, the reader witnesses a strange reversal in traditional gender relations: men assume a more vulnerable position in her eyes, while women take on a protective role. On this subject Rathbone drops the mask and expresses her feelings plainly: "There are horrible facts about the army as well as splendid ones. One knows this all the time of course, but now and then one is brought right up against something which turns one sick and angry" (July 1918). The "horrible facts" mentioned here are not the male bodies splintered by shells at the front but the houses of prostitution catering to the troops on leave. The women she describes as "powdered ladies of easy virtue" personify the underside of war and directly contradict the official discourse on the "uplifting and purifying influences of war" (July 1918). These women, according to Rathbone, "get the under-aged boys into their clutches and that goes to one's heart—these young fresh creatures who ought still to be at home. This is the way they first learn of love" (July 1918). The situation makes Rathbone "sick" but also leads her to reflect on the way a barrier remains between the sexes: "How little we know the men really. Of course they are dear and polite with us; but below the surface how far do we penetrate" (July 1918)? This passage points to the paradoxical nature of Rathbone's function at the rest camp: she must provide pure and innocent entertainment while pretending to ignore the nature of the soldiers' visits into town.
The subject of men's sexuality and Rathbone's limited influence preoccupy her. She laments the limited power she has over these men: "Again I saw how little one knows about the men. Are we or are we not any good at all. . . . Granted then that we are an influence for good, what a passive influence it is" (August 1918). Rathbone recognizes here the restricting definitions of women's roles in wartime, which only allow for the opposites of degrading whore or pure angel, and questions this cultural assumption. While she seemingly acquiesces to the official discourse condemning women who sell their body to relieve the soldiers' sexual urges, she realizes the limitations of her own role as purifying nurturer. She condemns the French "powdered ladies" who lure innocent British boys starving for human contact and turn them into men, but she also punctures the fragile image of the pure, fresh-faced British girls who serve fish and chips with a smile while keeping the men at a safe distance physically and emotionally. She deflates this idealized image when she writes of an intimate moment in a car with an officer she finds attractive: "it was not merely through kindness and because he was a soldier going to the front, that I let my hands stay in his—though that is the reason I would like to [End Page 50] give to myself, and probably shall afterwards; but at the actual moment of writing I must break through such comfortable camouflage" (August 1918). Rathbone articulates a quiet resistance here: she acknowledges her efforts to censor her own feelings and motivations for dropping the mask of pure English virginity, underneath the official role of soothing female presence for the soldier on leave.
Lynn Knight suggests that the rest camp of St-Valery is "representative of that peculiar coexistence of hedonism and danger that war creates" (1988, xiii). Throughout the diary, Rathbone underscores the paradoxical nature of her position as a rest camp worker so close to the front: "Such a queer life, consisting of such tremendous, and such trivial things, the background tragedy and terror, the foreground ridiculous merriment" (28 June 1918). She emphasizes the peculiar duality of her borderline position as a civilian catering to the soldiers' moral and emotional well-being. Amidst the merry foreground that is her life, the tragic background is never absent. She notes her reaction to an officer's tale from the front: "One gathered through all the absurd narrative how extraordinarily brave they had both been. . . ; it doesn't need much imagination to realize the appalling experiences they have been through. It is a perpetual marvel to me how any men have kept their reason at all" (October 1918). Rathbone is conscious of being in an unusual position; soldiers returning from the front confide in her and transmit a sense of the horror they have experienced and yet she must maintain a reassuring nonchalance and keep her true feelings under wrap. 15
When a friendly officer leaves after his two-week stay at the camp, Rathbone records her regrets at her inability to shed the mask: "I wish I could have done more for him—that is got more intimate with him and know what he cared for in life. I feel that I have somehow failed—had an opportunity and not taken it. And yet, it is . . . difficult in our peculiar life here to get on those terms with any man. We are always all together, and in those circumstances flippancy or at any rate lightness of tone is inevitable" (4 August 1918). The unusual circumstances of war offer the possibility of opening up, of revealing oneself to another beyond the bonds of propriety and decorum traditionally set up between men and women at the time. Rathbone is aware that her cheery mask has a cost; the constant physical proximity with soldiers paradoxically requires emotional distance and detachment. The horror lurking just beyond the camp must be counteracted with sweetness and light, even if feigned.
Rathbone provides a revealing clue to her self-perception when she describes a playful conversation between female workers and officers at a dance: "We compared the blood in various people's veins to various kinds of drinks. . . . Mine, soda-water—fizz but not much body" (3 September 1918). This metaphor sums up Rathbone's persona in her war diary: she keeps things light, and she refrains from delving too deeply into painful [End Page 51] or disturbing thoughts. And yet, in key passages Rathbone lets the cheery mask slip and exposes the paradoxical state of mind produced by her liminal position near the front. Rathbone's diary provides an illuminating answer to Caruth's question: surviving trauma on a daily basis necessitates a constant control of emotions at the expense of being true to oneself. 16 The diary ultimately reveals a sensitive mind at odds with itself, a woman who can feel deeply and observe keenly but deliberately controls her emotions in writing as a means of surviving the ongoing trauma of war experience. However, as I explain below, the diary contains more truthful emotions and revelations than the published novel. Evidence of self-censorship already present in the private document is more apparent when analyzing the shifts in tone and emphasis from diary to novel.
"A Sort of Ghastly Glamour": Revisiting the War in the Thirties
We That Were Young appeared in 1932, "the peak year of suicides" as Rathbone put it in her embittered novel of the interwar years They Call It Peace (1936, 495). 17 From the vantage point of a troubled peace, Rathbone revisited the scene of her wartime youth in order to craft her fictional tribute to a female generation shaped by its war experience. Ironically, Rathbone's expanded scope and her decision to write a novel, albeit autobiographical, rather than a memoir such as Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth (1933), may have cost her a readership hungry for war narratives centered on a (male) autobiographical consciousness. 18 Surprisingly, perhaps, the emotional involvement and the painful feelings Rathbone struggles with in her diary are muted in the novel. Reading the novel after the diary provides a revealing window into the creative process, particularly when it comes to turning a private story into public, and published, history. Rathbone censors her younger self, limiting or omitting passages that may be unflattering; she significantly downplays her romantic involvements with officers, for instance, opting instead for a more dignified persona. Rathbone adopts a more measured narrative voice and tempers both her enthusiasms and her sorrows in the published version. 19 This narrative strategy goes against the current of male war narratives of the late 1920s, which highlight the bitter disillusionment of former combatants and dichotomize home and front, civilians and combatants, in antagonistic terms. In the wake of combatant narratives such as Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rathbone's sometime lover Richard Aldington, to name a few, Rathbone deliberately foregrounds women as active and willing participants in the war effort, and sees in her wartime experience opportunities as well as disenchantment. In addition, unlike male war texts, We That Were Young deliberately blurs boundaries between [End Page 52] combat and civilian life, a narrative gesture sensitive to the global reaches of this first modern war. Rathbone does not privilege bitterness and anger in the novel because her feelings toward the war are ambivalent, in that she embraces the experience with everything it contains, and positive aspects were part and parcel of her wartime memories. Rathbone never rejoices at male suffering, as Sandra Gilbert has suggested many women did during the war (Gilbert and Gubar 1989); but her proximity to their suffering opens up the possibility of a more intimate knowledge of oneself and others, a phenomenon Virginia Woolf also explores in the 1917 section of The Years. 20 The novel differs from the diary in its timeframe, of course, since the diary only covers a few months in 1918 while We That Were Young takes place during but also after the war. The larger themes, however, are similar in that Rathbone is aware in both texts that she is drawing a portrait of women in war, and understands the necessity to be true to this unique experience.
Early on in the novel, Rathbone suggests that real knowledge in wartime is difficult to attain and nevertheless essential to acquire. She remarks that "through contact with these men direct from the line an ever clearer picture of horror was forming in Joan's mind, such as the reading of accounts in the papers at home had been unable to produce" (37). This passage emphasizes Rathbone's thirst for information, something shared by the general population, who was only fed rumors and propaganda by the Northcliffe Press. 21 Joan prefers to know what war is really like rather than being lulled into complacency and ignorant jingoism like her friend Barbara, who hopes that guns kill millions of Germans: "Did Barbara really feel like that about it? Or was it lack of imagination? If so, what a blessed gift! Better just blindly to hate your enemy, better just blindly to love your country, better just blindly to believe in the return of your loved ones" (70). The ironic tone here suggests that a sensitive and inquisitive woman such as Joan cannot ignore the facts: knowledge is both necessary and painful. In both diary and novel, Rathbone suggests that two wars are being waged: the conflict falsely reported to civilians in newspapers, and the actual horrific event described to Joan by combatants. Both texts make clear that Rathbone privileges by far the unvarnished truth, even though she is at times guilty herself of censoring painful feelings in order to continue her work.
The novel, like the diary, emphasizes the self-censorship and even repression necessary to carry on duties. When Joan works at the Ist London General hospital, the feelings she represses during the day come back to haunt her at night. She dreams about the wounds "floating before her eyes. . . . With unconscious wisdom she let down a sort of safety-curtain between her mind and the sights before her, keeping them at bay, preventing their full significance from penetrating. If she had not done so she would have been useless" (195). Here war trauma insinuates itself [End Page 53] into her unconscious, and the protective mechanism that leads to the formation of a distantiating shell or mask is both necessary and unconscious. The only option in this situation, Rathbone seems to suggest, is to repress one's emotions in order to be useful and productive. Without the "safety-curtain," Joan could not do the job she prizes. When she describes the "mental atmosphere of the ward" as one of "cheery pessimism" (202), she underscores the paradoxical nature of her wartime experience as one torn between usefulness and hopelessness.
Rathbone uses a cultural phenomenon as a metaphor to illustrate this paradoxical position women workers occupy in wartime. She describes the song "Broken Doll" as the "worst" of "all the lyrical atrocities produced by the war" and "yet it was extremely popular in the summer of 1916. That ghastly broken doll—half-waxen, half-human—stumbled its way in and out of Joan's dreams" (238). The broken doll is a particularly apt metaphor for the damaged women who find themselves pulled in different directions by dueling desires in wartime. No longer "doll-like" and trapped in stuffy parlors, they work as hard as men and yet they are nevertheless still treated as women—feminine, delicate, nurturing. Joan's reaction to the song underscores Rathbone's gestures of resistance to the wartime propaganda machine and its idealization of women. The song's popularity underscores the social tensions between the roles society expects women to play in wartime, and the developing liberation paradoxically triggered by women's involvement in war work. Rathbone suggests throughout the novel that war is transforming women and, by extension, their relationship with men.
Rathbone devotes much narrative attention to what she perceives as sweeping changes in gender relations during the war. Some changes she perceives more positively, but others strike her as more complex and difficult to untangle. When Joan's friend Trush sleeps with her boyfriend during his leave, Joan meditates on the way the war invades the most private moments and emotions: "What Trush had done was right—for her. It might not be right for another. In any case without the one thing needful—passion—it was unthinkable. . . . The war—always the war! Sometimes its effect was to keep people apart; sometimes to drive them too suddenly together; but always somehow to strain and complicate relationships" (141). This passage emphasizes the quiet revolution in female sexuality brought on by the war; for Joan, however, the rush to consummation brings on its own set of complications. She directly links wartime conditions with women's self-imposed pressure to embrace sexuality, whether they are ready for the experience or not. For Joan, unlike Trush, sexual awareness comes during her nursing duties. As she washes a patient, she reflects that "She was a nurse in uniform, and he was a wounded soldier; the gulf between them was fixed and rigid. And yet across that gulf, unrecognized and certainly unheeded by either, stretched [End Page 54] the faint sweet fingers of sex" (213). Rathbone unveils the uncomfortable truth beneath the mask of cheery efficiency women adopt around wounded soldiers. Despite the distance and business-like demeanor of both nurse and wounded, women and men cannot forget their sexuality and the incongruous intimacy in which the war places them. On the one hand Joan remains sexually reserved and angel-like in her nursing function, but on the other she acknowledges the powerful presence of sex beneath the decorous surface.
The war exacerbates this unusual intimacy between the sexes, and especially at the rest camp in France where Joan works. In a passage revised from her 1918 diary, Rathbone describes a brief interlude of peace that emphasizes the vulnerable position of men and underscores the way the female gaze has gained agency and independence since the beginning of the war. Joan watches naked soldiers swimming in pools formed by the retreating sea, and rejoices at the sight of "hundreds of white bodies running and leaping in the sunlight—like human beings in the Golden Age" (397). Her interest is not sexual but humanistic and pacifist; for Joan, "this was what men were made for; not to blast each other to bits with senseless machinery, but to run and bathe in sunlight and sea—naked, happy, whole" (397). She foregrounds her own position as an observer but also as the narrator in control of the gaze. The diary passage is very similar, but it includes the observation that the scene was "far away enough to make a picture" (August 1918), thus emphasizing the constructed and mediated nature of the scene, even in a diary entry. Rathbone also leaves out from the novel version the following statement: "The whole scene was so beautiful that it almost made one cry" (August 1918); this passage suggests that Rathbone found such emotional outbursts appropriate for her diary but wholly unsuited to the published version of her story. This small but telling change in the scene underscores my reading of the novel as a more emotionally restrained version of the diary, as well as Rathbone's foregrounding of women as practical and capable creatures who fulfill their wartime functions without sentimental excess.
Conversely, in a passage not included in the diary, perhaps because it denotes an emotional as well as temporal distance from the war moment, Rathbone illuminates her sense of time as a fluid and unreal entity during the war. Near the end of her service in France, in October, Joan reflects that "suddenly it came over [her] that though this was the Present it was already the Past. Curious how certain moments, even as you lived them, seemed to have no reality. Later, when you looked back on them, they acquired their reality. This moment lay in the Past" (406). This passage suggests that Rathbone had been in an altered state during the war, in a state of suspended animation from which she must free herself in order to enter the reality of peace. When Joan writes to her friend Pamela that "the ending of the war can only be felt, at first, as the ending of a powerful [End Page 55] and blessed drug" (408), she underscores this ambivalent feeling of having lived beside time, in a state of heightened awareness induced by her war experience.
By extending her novel beyond the Armistice, Rathbone emphasizes this notion of wartime as a fluid concept, an experience that cannot be contained within specific dates and is often relived without warning in the midst of "peace":
The curious thing about misery was the way it rose and fell. Sometimes you felt quite ordinary. You read books; you shopped; the world seemed normal and pleasant. And suddenly, out of the four corners as it were, misery came, and swamped you. You could do nothing about it. You just sat there at the heart of it. Everything else was blotted out—even your personality. You were just a primordial, enduring, suffering nerve.
(423)
Joan resists well-meaning efforts to put the past behind her, perhaps because past and present are inextricably intertwined: "People said 'Time will heal,' but you didn't want time to heal—or rather you didn't want it to heal at the price of remembrance" (423). Joan expresses a paradoxical feeling here: healing could mean forgetting, the erasure of experience. The novel can be read as an act of remembrance, a memorial to wartime in all its wide-ranging aspects.
In the last section of the novel, which takes place in 1928, Rathbone suggests the powerful pull of war memories, triggered by the tenth anniversary of the Armistice: "For years Joan, immersed in work, and in a variety of friends and amusements, had scarcely given the war a thought—not her own personal war. Now, at the echo of that belated pistol-shot, it rose and faced her" (463). This image of an entire span of years emerging vividly from the subconscious underscores the impossibility of erasing or forgetting war experience. Unlike the solemn two-minute silence observed throughout the city which "roused in her an obscure irritation," Joan's memory of her "personal war" becomes more real than her actual, present life: "This 'remembering' was something inward and unexpected—something which broke her completely up, and which there was no resisting. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers—officers and privates—from those best known, most loved, to those spoken to once, in a camp or hut—they came before her. A ghost world, but more real than any since" (463). Joan's war life has marked her so indelibly that her memories of the past dominate her "real" and present existence.
Rathbone sums up her conflicted emotions toward her war experience in a 1928 conversation with her younger cousin Molly. When Joan tells Molly that "Youth and the war were the same thing—youth and the war were us," the younger woman immediately assumes that Joan must have "cursed" the war (464). Joan's response truthfully examines the ambivalent sentiment the war inspires: [End Page 56]
"We did—we did. But looking back, now, I think we loved it too. Oh, it's so difficult to explain [and] so difficult not to put one's present emotions back into that period. At the time, you see, the war was so ordinary—it was just our life. Yes, we hated it, and loved it, both. Loved it only because we gave so much to it, and because it was bound up with our youngness—rather like an unhappy school. It was our war, you see. . . ; it seems, now, to have a sort of ghastly glamour. . . . It was our war."
(464-5)
Rathbone emphasizes the impact of the war on an entire generation but also Joan's personal feelings and the complicated significance of the war in her life. The "ghastly glamour" encapsulates the paradox of war many women writers expressed: war as destroyer and creator, war as premature death and heightened life, war as prison and liberation. War may have been an "unhappy school," but it provided women with an education in life they could never erase from their consciousness.
Rathbone's novel ultimately presents a conflicted and at times surprisingly positive assessment of war in one woman's life that stands for many others whose youth was permanently transformed by their war experience. Her diary is at times more open in terms of feelings, particularly when Rathbone confesses her inability to write truthfully about certain painful emotions. What both texts reveal, ultimately, is the emotional paradox that lies at the heart of many women's war experience: in the midst of chaos, positive changes occur. The novel's ending underscores Joan's ambivalence toward the war: she is visited by ghosts more real than flesh and blood friends, and war remains both loved and cursed ten years after its end.
This essay suggests that the process of reading texts by Irene Rathbone in light of Virginia Woolf's similar contributions uncovers common thematic strands despite differences in form and narrative emphasis. Both writers privilege the perspective of a marginal woman as wartime heroine and the use of private writings as the basis for fictional representations of wartime experiences in liminal spaces, whether behind the lines in France in Rathbone's case, or during a raid in London. Rathbone's diary allows her to construct a private history of a war-torn present from a female perspective, one privileging changes in human relationships and perceptions. Rathbone's choice to privilege the perspective of a marginal woman as wartime heroine and her attention to the relative nature of time, a landmark of modern experience especially relevant when writing about war, both suggest greater similarities than differences between authors such as Woolf and Rathbone typically regarded in oppositional terms. Ultimately, Rathbone's diary and the way she turned her private record into fiction emphasize the already crafted nature of personal writing and the self-awareness present in any autobiographical writing. The diary's most personal incidents and feelings have been muted or transformed in the novel, but they remain in a different form as witnesses who
[End Page 57]
authenticate Rathbone's fictional project. Rathbone uses her diary to write herself into history, to paraphrase Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, and she uses her private writings as indispensable materials to write women back into World War I history. Rathbone's firsthand knowledge authenticates We That Were Young and underscores its role as a work of testimony and public memory.
Geneviève Brassard is completing her dissertation on feminist strategies in women's literature of the First World War at the University of Connecticut. She has published in Tulsa Studies Women's Literature, Modernism/Modernity, and English Literature in Transition 1880-1920. Send correspondence to Dept. of English, Box 4025, University of Connecticut, 215 Glenbrook Rd, Storrs, CT 06269-4025; Genevieve-brassard@cox.net.
Endnotes
1. For an early critical construction of war literature as predominantly male, see Paul Fussell (1975). For more recent assessments of war literature overlooking or undervaluing women's contributions, see George Parfitt (1988) and Samuel Hynes (1991).
2. My aim in this essay follows Janet Montefiore's claim that "women writers of the 1930s have been ignored" in literary histories of that decade; my focus on a text revisiting the war years extends her argument that "much of the writing of and about the 1930s is a self-conscious literature of personal memory" (1996, 2).
3. Unlike Virginia Woolf, whose life has been widely documented, little is known about Rathbone's life. See Jane Marcus's "The Nurse's Text" (1989) and Lynn Knight's "Introduction" (1988) for brief biographical sketches.
4. For recent critical explorations of modernity as a more apt term to describe the complex interplay between literature and culture during the interwar period, see the collections High and Low Moderns edited by DiBattista and McDiarmid (1996), Outside Modernism edited by Hapgood and Paxton (2000), Challenging Modernism edited by Deen (2002), and Women's Experience of Modernity edited by Ardis and Lewis (2003).
5. As Angela Smith usefully suggests in her TheSecond Battlefield, "diaries and letters may be linked with other forms of women's life-writing such as autobiography," and a "related argument can be constructed to suggest women's diaries, too, may hold significant literary value" (2000, 19-20). See also Sellers (2000) for a discussion of Woolf's diaries and letters as literary works worthy of critical attention as a genre separate from her fiction and essays. I read [End Page 58] Rathbone's and Woolf's private writings as both sources for their fiction and crafted literary works in their own right.
6. Rathbone's 1936 novel, They Call it Peace, can be read as a more embittered sequel to We That Were Young, and it traces, at times too didactically, the shifting political allegiances of various characters marked by the war. Marcus suggests that it is "obvious what a debt . . . The Years owes to Rathbone's simultaneous horizontal writing of a generation and her zigzag vertical rejection of the rigid decade in a socialist/feminist/pacifist time line" (1989, 471-2).
7. My discussion of Rathbone's novel extends Montefiore's efforts to "correct some errors of omission" from "dominant accounts of the Thirties." Like her I believe we need to question the "paradigms by which the history of the Thirties has been defined," and attempt "the more difficult task of creating new ones" (1996, 26). My focus on feminist revisions of wartime narratives could be read as one such new paradigm enabling us to expand our definitions of women's war literature.
8. Margaret Higonnet usefully suggests, in her analysis of nurses' texts, that "the sense of the self, which we so often take for granted, is not stable or coherent through time, especially when an intense propaganda effort is under way to reshape women's sense of their own capacities" (2001, xxviii-xxix). Higonnet goes on to argue that these texts (and, I would add, Rathbone's diary as well) can be read as a "many-voiced act of self-representation whose self varies according to the intended audience" (xxix).
9. In the 1917 section of The Years, Woolf similarly re-imagines the air-raid experience from the perspective of an aging spinster, Eleanor Pargiter, a civilian nevertheless touched and changed by a war that penetrated the home front for the first time in British history.
10. Woolf similarly suggests such possibilities in the air-raid scene when her heroine Eleanor Pargiter first meets the foreigner and homosexual Nicholas, and develops an unlikely friendship with him.
11. See Debra Rae Cohen (2002) for a recent discussion of home front fiction by women who wrote while the war was still ongoing.
12. See the introduction to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's anthology of autobiography theory and criticism, in which they map the history of women's autobiography as a recently formed, and currently expanding, field of critical inquiry (1998).
13. See Margaret Higonnet's "Authenticity and Art in Trauma Narratives of World War I" for a discussion of trauma as a condition also experienced by noncombatants (2002). Higonnet uses texts other than Rathbone's diary as evidence. [End Page 59]
14. Virginia Woolf also notes similar transformation in sexual matters on the home front when she reports in December 1916 that a "nice woman . . . lectured us upon Venereal Diseases, and moral risks for our sons" at a Women's Co-operative Guild meeting (1976, 138). Woolf finds this taboo-breaking episode enlightening and significant.
15. Rathbone's indirect war experience illustrates Freud's theory of "traumatic neurosis," which suggests that symptoms of trauma can occur "without the intervention of any gross mechanical violence" ([1922] 1950, 9).
16. In "Notes on Trauma and Community," Kai Erikson suggests that "classic" symptoms of trauma may include "feelings of numbness" toward others (1995, 183-4), a sentiment Rathbone expresses throughout the diary.
17. We That Were Young has received scant critical attention apart from Jane Marcus's illuminating reading of the text as an "exact mimesis of nursing" (1989, 476). Critics typically read the novel as an indictment of the war and its "exhausting and unglamorous" work (Tylee 1990, 200). Nicola Beauman describes Rathbone's autobiographical heroine as "another of the legion of disillusioned heroines whose life has been virtually ended by the War" (1993, 144). The authors of Women Writers and the Great War offer an abbreviated reading of Rathbone's diary, focusing on "the opportunity for sexual freedom" the war provided (Goldman, Gledhill, and Hattaway 1995, 22). Rosa Maria Bracco mentions the novel in her discussion of Middlebrow writers and concludes that its "tone is somber and quietly desperate" (1993, 116). Valerie Sanders devotes a paragraph to Joan's close relationship with her brother Jimmy in a recent study on brother-sister culture in British literature (2002, 161-2). In a review marking the reissue of We That Were Young and Not So Quiet. . ., Bonnie Kime Scott reads Rathbone's text as a "genteel, well-made novel, revealing the social mores of a passing age and presenting fully-developed stories of a number of women" (1990, 340). In a similar double review Doris Eder calls the novel a "highly detailed social documentary" and describes its tone as "elegiac" (1990, 132). I was unable to locate reviews from the time of its first publication. For the most part, these critics' emphasis on the darker aspects of Rathbone's work overlooks the troubling but nevertheless real suggestion that women's war experience was also transforming, challenging, and even rewarding in many ways.
18. See Lynn Knight's introduction to the novel where she suggests that Rathbone "felt that the success of Testament of Youth was in part due to its publication as straight autobiography" (1988, xxii). Knight also points out that "cynicism was the mood of the day" and Rathbone's failure to "vilify" the war may have kept her book from enjoying widespread success at the time of its publication (xxii).
19. It must be noted here that Rathbone's diary held at the Imperial War Museum only deals with the year 1918; the diary she kept during the previous war years was not preserved. [End Page 60]
20. See Gilbert's "Soldier's Heart" (1989). Gilbert's argument has been disputed by, among many noted feminist critics, Jane Marcus (1989) and Claire Tylee (1988).
21. For a detailed catalogue of the British press's biggest fabrications, see Arthur Ponsonby (1928), Peter Buitenhuis (1987), and Gary Messinger (1992).
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