Writing the “people's war”: evaluating the myth of the blitz in british women's fiction of the second world war
- Autores: Lola Serraf
- Directores de la Tesis: Andrew Monnickendam (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2018
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Deborah Kelley (presid.), María Cristina Pividori Gurgo (secret.), Luis Alberto Lázaro Lafuente (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Filología Inglesa por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Resumen
In popular memory, civilians’ morale during the Blitz remained high, war production was little affected by the bombings and the will to fight the Nazis was stronger than ever in a classless, fraternal society. The ‘People’s War’ turned civilians into extraordinary heroes in their ordinary city life, as this new kind of ‘total war’ was fought equally as hard on the ‘frontline’ as on the ‘home front’. However, since the late 1980s, historians have started to question this seemingly idealised vision of the determined, invincible spirit of the Blitzed population. In The Myth of the Blitz, Angus Calder argues that the image of a nation united in adversity and resisting hardship was almost entirely constructed by the political propaganda of the 1940s. He believes it necessary to critically rethink the collective memory of the Blitz, stating that it has been ignoring ‘how frightening and confusing the period [...] was for the British people’ since ‘the Myth stands in our way’ (1991, p. 18).
Taking as a point of departure Calder’s chapter ‘Formulations of Feeling’, the main objective of my thesis is to oppose the historian’s idea that writers during the Second World War had a very limited ability to produce work that stood outside the People’s War rhetoric. Calder explains that although ‘the writer […] is in a position to defy the myth’s status as an adequate and convincing account of human feeling and behaviour’, unfortunately only few ‘work outside the myth’s paradigm’ (1991, pp. 143-144).
Whilst it is true that literature ‘was conscripted into the war effort’ by a government that ‘enshrined [it] as a democratic principle’ (Hartley, 1997, pp. 6-7), I believe too reductive Angus Calder and Mark Rawlinson’s argument according to which ‘the character of wartime writing was strongly determined by its relations to the discourses with which, in the broadest sense, Britain’s war effort was administered’ (Rawlinson, 2000, p. 205). I contend that it is unwise to consider that authors writing in a time of overwhelming social and cultural propaganda could not critically reflect on their surroundings and solely contributed to a literature that aimed to form a coherent defence of war.
This thesis is therefore one of the first pieces of research to take Angus Calder’s theoretical framework of the ‘myth of the Blitz’ as the main point of reference to discuss lesser known women’s texts of the 1940s. In his study, Calder deconstructs the ‘myth’ by confronting it with historical facts. In my thesis, I follow the same method by comparing specific values of the ‘People’s WaR4 rhetoric against the literary production of women writers. I have selected three main aspects of Calder’s work crucial to his definition of the constructed and superficial rhetoric of the ‘Blitz Spirit’: ‘class’, ‘patriotism’, and the more abstract ‘representation of the hurt body’. I analyse several novels by different authors in three separate chapters dedicated to each theme.
Through the close reading of the nine texts I focus on, my aim is to shed light on forgotten authors who produced works that present us with a vision of the war that questions, and even challenged the propaganda setting they were written in. My central objective is to help place women writers in a category of valuable, talented and recognised war writers by highlighting their ability to maintain their individuality and capacity to criticise even when surrounded with Churchill’s very forceful propaganda.
