The Great War and British fiction by women, 1917-1925.

Abstract

This study of British women writers of the Great War highlights the connections between literature and social history in the first quarter of the twentieth century. An examination of The Tree of Heaven (1917), The Return of the Soldier (1918), The Crowded Street (1924), and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) will reveal the manner in which male and female gender roles were subject to acute interrogation in wartime and post-war British society. Chapter 1 surveys literary and cultural scholarship on the Great War in order to emphasize the failure of gender-specific narratives of social change to address the complex dynamics of gender conflict which characterized the period. Chapter 2 investigates the non-combatant communities of women created through the gender-segregation of the War, revealing that the constructions of feminism in The Tree of Heaven and The Crowded Street are contextualized within their appropriation of military models for female collectivity and interaction. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationships between non-combatant women and shell-shocked veterans in The Return of the Soldier and Mrs. Dalloway, illustrating that the male and female subjects of these texts are constructed in terms of their mutual subjection to the discursive institutions of the State in wartime and post-war society. All four texts provide both Modernism and feminism with a compelling, if contradictory, dimension which needs to be recovered.