The First World War continues to loom large in the historiography of twentieth-century masculinity, providing a further example of how gender studies have tended to work within, rather than to recast, established topics and chronologies. Debate has focused on trench warfare in particular, and how far it contributed to a reassessment of Edwardian concepts of manliness. The question of whether or not heroic ideals were buried in the mud of Flanders figures in histories of public schools and youth organizations; in literary studies of interwar imaginative writing; as well as in research directly inspired by gender history, on topics as diverse as men's bodies, sexuality, and domesticity. Shell shock, and its effect on medical and military ideas of manliness, has been at the forefront of the discussion.
Despite this relatively developed historiography, there is little agreement. During the 1980s, building on the work of authors such as Paul Fussell, who had argued that the chivalric language of the prewar was found hopelessly wanting in the trenches, scholars pointed to the impact of the war in the reassessment of heroic ideals.Footnote 1 In a still-influential essay published in 1987, Elaine Showalter argued that shell shock was nothing less than “the body language of masculine complaint, a disguised male protest not only against the war but against the concept of ‘manliness’ itself.”Footnote 2 Young subaltern officers, socialized through their public school education in the stoic ideal, broke down under the repeated necessity to repress fear. Her analysis of the treatment given to Siegfried Sassoon by W. H. R. Rivers at Craiglockhart, the hospital for neurasthenic officers, implied that psychoanalysis had constituted a significant contemporary influence in the reappraisal of manliness.Footnote 3
Writing at a similar moment, although with no apparent knowledge of Showalter's work, Ted Bogacz, in a carefully argued essay on the War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock,” showed how it accommodated traditional notions of manly character with a recognition that shell shock should not be seen simply as cowardice. Although the enquiry's report of 1922 adhered in some ways to “inherited conceptions of how a man ought to act,” its conclusion that men could be driven to a point where they were unable to exercise the power of will over fear implied a major revision of nineteenth-century discourses about manliness.Footnote 4 Both Showalter and Bogacz, although drawing primarily on official sources about shell shock, argued that it was the traumatic emotional experiences of soldiers in the war that had opened prewar norms of manly behavior to scrutiny.
In the 1990s these arguments about the war as a moment of change were revisited. Later studies tended to emphasize the continued vitality of Edwardian gender scripts into the midcentury. Joanna Bourke has in numerous publications questioned the extent to which medical and military understandings of shell shock departed from traditional conceptions of character. Treatments that drew on techniques from psychoanalysis were, she argues, not the norm. Many experts continued to regard shell shock as cowardice and to emphasize the rebuilding of manliness through physical effort. Any wartime lessons about the unconscious dimensions of neurasthenia were quickly forgotten.Footnote 5 Writing about the relationship between masculinity and militarism, George Mosse also emphasized continuity. War constituted an important test of manliness for young men of the Edwardian middle class. The disillusionment expressed by the war poets did not lead to a rejection of manliness, but to its reconfiguration around themes of pain and sacrifice.Footnote 6 The immediate successors of the war generation, far from rejecting romantic notions of war, lamented that they had been too young to submit themselves to its rigors.Footnote 7 Most recently, Allen Frantzen, in a study of propaganda, postcards, and war memorials, has argued that chivalry not only endured but provided a primary means of evaluating masculine conduct, especially violence.Footnote 8
This article reviews these debates through an analysis of autobiographical accounts, including personal memoirs and fictional writing, by middle-class veterans of the First World War in the half-century after 1918. They are the “war generation,” those born in the last decades of the nineteenth century. My aim is to identify the subjective sense of self expressed in such accounts and to draw some conclusions from this about middle-class masculinities at midcentury. In contrast to the revisionist interpretations, I will argue that, beginning just after the war itself and continuing up to the final quarter of the century, there emerged among the British middle class a means of reflexively assessing the codes of “manliness.” Two important aspects of this development were the widespread experience of fear among frontline soldiers during the war and the postwar filtering into popular consciousness of psychology and other sciences of the self.
In undertaking a commentary focused on subjective understandings, I also wish to raise larger issues about how masculinity is defined and how its history is being studied. In studies of the First World War, as in so many other fields, the cultural codes relating to ideals of war and manliness are being exhaustively mined. However, what Alexandra Shepard observes in her article in this issue, that work on the English Civil War lacks an account of “men's gendered experience of war,” might, with a few exceptions, also be said of the First World War, despite its developed historiography.Footnote 9 In the “revisionist” work I have cited, masculinity is conceived primarily in terms of social ideals, which are studied through the utterances of key public actors, for example, supporters of the public school or boy's organization, military officials, or medical experts. These approaches leave unanswered questions about how publicly circulating codes of masculinity relate to the behavior and emotional dispositions of individual men. They have little to say about the emotional effects of trench warfare, about how such experiences were assimilated mentally or contained in writing. Prioritizing ideology or discourse over experience, they fail to see how the effort to represent war's profound personal effects might motivate the search for new forms of self-expression or encourage reflection on the old. In what follows I cannot hope to advance a developed alternative approach to the study of men's gendered experience in the First World War, although my current research on mother-son relationships attempts this.Footnote 10 Such a task is, however, necessary if we are to consider masculinity as more than a set of abstract codes, and if we are to pursue a properly grounded notion of “identity,” which includes autobiographical experience. Without this, we risk a history of masculinity in which normative statements are taken as evidence of subjectivity, in an elision of the social into the psychic, which itself has a long and troubling history.
My focus, therefore, is not primarily on masculinity seen as a matter of cultural representations, but on self-perceptions and emotional sensibilities, that is, on subjectivity.Footnote 11 Insofar as the article considers languages of fear, it does so as a pointer to phenomenological realities, that is, to emotional experiences that authors were attempting to render in words. My concern is with masculinity as revealed through a process of reflexive looking back on an Edwardian childhood, and on a youth spent at war.
Some of the autobiographical writings produced by the “war generation”—such as those published in the late 1920s by Robert Graves, Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, and Richard Aldington—are now thought of as “classics” of the war literature. Now, as at the time of their publication, they are regarded as poignant expressions of the anger and disillusionment felt by ex-soldiers in the postwar period.Footnote 12 This disillusionment might take many forms, from lingering hostility toward those on the “home front,” particularly women and the “old men” who had directed the war, to attacks on the institutions of the middle-class family and public school. These various targets often cohered around the theme of manliness. Aldington's novel of 1929, Death of a Hero, contains pointed satirical descriptions of the bourgeois family, of the traditions and mores of public school education, and of the army. It seeks to expose their workings as part of a comprehensive ideology of manliness, which is named as such. The public school attended by the central character, George Winterbourne, is reviled because of the manner in which it “set out to produce ‘a type of thoroughly manly fellow,’ a ‘type’ which unhesitatingly accepted the prejudices, the ‘code’ put before it, docilely conformed to a set of rules.”Footnote 13 Accounts such as this made Edwardian manliness an explicit topic of discussion and, in the most critical examples, placed it in the dock. Psychological understandings could be mobilized in powerful ways to challenge the tenets of manliness. The Long Weekend, the memoir of an Edwardian upbringing written in the early 1970s by the Kleinian psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, presented a harrowing account of his public schooling and of the damage wrought by a training in emotional repression.Footnote 14
Veteran writers were typically more equivocal than Bion or Aldington, juggling old and new, oscillating between the romance of heroism and vivid descriptions of the mental disturbance caused by trench warfare. Sometimes the evocation of manliness in memoirs was largely positive, with writers reviving it in the face of traumatic memories. Even they, however, as I shall show, conceded the challenges to manliness that the war, and postwar concepts of subjectivity, had posed. Manliness was under scrutiny among veterans in the midcentury, a scrutiny that contributed to a certain loss of hegemonic status. Veteran accounts provide a useful point of entry into the history of twentieth-century masculinity in Britain, revealing as they do an ongoing internal dialogue between the nineteenth-century codes of manliness in which this generation was brought to manhood and “modern,” more internally focused, concepts of the self.
Manliness and the Languages of Psychology
What kind of training in manliness was inculcated among Edwardian boys of the middle class? By this period, the “muscular Christianity” of the mid-nineteenth century, which had emphasized such qualities as compassion, fairness, and altruism, had given way to secular and more aggressive ideals. Particular value was placed on stoic endurance, that is, the forbearance of pain and the suppression of sentiment.Footnote 15 As Bertrand Russell commented, “kindliness [was] sacrificed for toughness, imagination for firmness.”Footnote 16 An education in “manly independence” was accomplished in the public schools through the playing of games, and by the removal of boys from domestic comforts and their subjection to Spartan surroundings designed to toughen them into men.Footnote 17 In an era of international commercial competition, imperial dominance, and military threat, it was self-control—now seen as a matter of emotional restraint rather than of spiritual goodness—that qualified the middle-class son for national duty.Footnote 18 By the early twentieth century, the culture of imperial manliness had spread to other sections of the middle- and lower-middle classes, becoming institutionalized through militaristic organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Boys’ Brigades.Footnote 19 It is estimated that by 1914 over 40 percent of British adolescents belonged to a youth organization or one kind or another.Footnote 20
A number of characteristics defined manliness as a concept. Although its features were a matter of debate, and even in the late-Victorian period it was composed of, to some extent, competing influences, it was perceived as a unitary normative standard.Footnote 21 As Mosse remarks, it was “regarded as of one piece from its very beginning: body and soul, outward appearance and inward virtue were supposed to form one harmonious whole.”Footnote 22 It was this appearance of singularity—and the sense that the individual achievement of manliness was a matter of supreme social good—that defined it as a form of “hegemonic masculinity.” “Manliness” connoted attributes that were socially and culturally vaunted.
Furthermore, manliness was judged largely in terms of external qualities: it was from a man's comportment, his physical appearance and performance, that inner qualities were judged.Footnote 23 As Michèle Cohen notes in her essay in this issue, bodily exertion was the means to a sound mind. Games were not only a means of improving physique, but of teaching team spirit, and of diverting young men from enervating self-abuse. Nervous complaints, seen as failures of manliness, might be cured through routines of physical hardening.Footnote 24
For the generation of young men inculcated with such notions—and explicitly trained in military routines through public school associations such as the Officer Training Corps—war was felt as a test of manhood. The reservist Lyndall Urwick, fresh from a history degree at Oxford, was deeply anxious about whether he could live up to the exalted image of the soldier hero. In his last letter before leaving for France, he wrote to his mother, “All my ideals England is fighting for. That I may not disgrace her is my constant prayer.”Footnote 25 Oscar Wilde's son, killed in 1915, felt that he had a heavy burden to bear in upholding the traditions of manliness against the reputation of his father: “first and foremost, I must be a man. There was to be no cry of decadent artist, of effeminate aesthete, of weak-kneed degenerate.”Footnote 26 Young subalterns were typically just as anxious about acquitting themselves properly—and avoiding shame—as about the possibility of death or injury.
While the majority of ex–public school subalterns were imbued with the notion of war as a test of character, alternative understandings of the self were emerging in British society at the very same moment in the early twentieth century. Such understandings departed in significant ways from the tenets of manliness. The influence of new social sciences such as sociology and psychology was increasingly felt in the first decades of the century. Matthew Thomson has argued that psychology was important in introducing new concepts of the self, contributing to a shift from identity based on “character” to a notion of the mind as composed of both conscious and unconscious elements. However, in his view this shift owed little to orthodox Freudian thinking. Rather, it was through popular societies and the dissemination of psychological thought in magazine advice columns and self-improvement books that psychological ideas entered the wider culture.Footnote 27
Work focusing on Freudian theory has also emphasized the diffuse and eclectic nature of its take-up. Sigmund Freud's writings were first translated in 1911, but the initial influence of psychoanalysis was limited to elite circles, especially Bloomsbury, where the interest in the irrational and the workings of the unconscious had preceded Freud's reception.Footnote 28 The First World War helped promote public knowledge of psychoanalysis, particularly the treatment given to some shell-shock victims, whose disturbing dreams pointed to the role of unconscious conflicts in its genesis. The 1922 War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock,” although explicitly rejecting the value of psychoanalytic treatment, nevertheless adopted some of Freud's theories in its report.Footnote 29
Rivers certainly believed that the war had “brought the subject [of psychoanalysis] within reach of many who had hitherto taken no special interest in this branch of medicine.”Footnote 30 Later translations of Freud's work—in particular, the standard edition of Freud's works begun by James Strachey in the early 1920s—helped to widen its influence, along with texts that rendered Freudian ideas for a lay audience.Footnote 31 By the mid-1920s, psychoanalysis was not only fashionable within certain middle-class circles, but a matter of national discussion. This is evidenced by debates within the national and regional press in the 1920s, debates that, although critical, nevertheless, as Sandra Ellesley suggests, had the effect of widening public awareness. “We are all psycho-analysts now,” the Daily News commented in 1922.Footnote 32
Rather than a pure core of Freudian thinking, aspects of his theories, often used in conjunction with other traditions, became influential. Such expropriations were sometimes far-fetched.Footnote 33 Yet, even more orthodox renderings, such as undertaken by Rivers himself, perhaps the most psychoanalytic of medical practitioners dealing with shell shock during the First World War, demonstrated an element of eclecticism. He like others who constituted what Nikolas Rose refers to as the “New Psychology” largely abandoned Freud's emphasis on the sexual instincts as the root cause of neuroses.Footnote 34 His treatment of shell-shock victims led him to believe that the condition stemmed, not from the repression of sexual instincts, but from a clash between the instinct to preserve life and the social and military necessity for duty.Footnote 35 Despite such modifications to Freudian thinking, Rivers, like others, embraced many of the central concepts of psychoanalysis. The notion of a topography of the mind, with its distinction between the conscious and the unconscious, and the emphasis on irrational motivations, particularly the concern with psychic mechanisms of forgetting and repression, could be found among practitioners of the “New Psychology.” Such elements might also be found, as I shall show below, in memoirs by the war generation.
Although a full account has yet to be written of the cultural impact of psychology in Britain, clearly there was widespread interest in new concepts of the mind in the decades after the war. While the sources of such knowledge were diffuse, Freud's name was most often associated with them. W. H. Auden is famously reputed to have remarked that by 1939 Freud was “no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion.”Footnote 36 Although Virginia Woolf claimed never to have read Freud, she felt that she had no need to do so, since within Bloomsbury circles, at least, versions of Freudian thought were “so much in the air.”Footnote 37
Considered as “ideal types,” the ideas associated with Freudian thinking contrast with the constellation of values connected to manliness. Whereas manliness in its imperial incarnations was, as Tosh describes it in his essay for this issue, an “external code of conduct,” the processes of identify formation described within the new psychology were primarily internal.Footnote 38 Insofar as these approaches focused on the body, they did so not as a means of instilling valued social precepts, but as a means of gauging maladies that were thought to originate within the mind. The somatic expressions of the hysterical soldier gave clues as to his mental state. While “manliness” in all its forms encouraged and approved an attitude of forgetfulness of self in favor of action in the world, the concept of “masculinity” loosely associated with Freudian thought did just the opposite. It was associated with an attitude of soliciting awareness of internal states and motives.
Perhaps the most significant contribution of Freudian thought, however, lay in its emphasis on the deep instability of subjectivity. For Freud, who believed that men and women were constitutionally bisexual, the route through childhood to maturity was a fraught process, always based on repression. In contrast to the social ideologies surrounding “manliness,” which held a notion of the development of manly character as, in theory, perfectible, personality in Freud's view was neither unitary nor stable, composed as it was from the complex interplay of deep and contradictory early influences. The general thrust of Freud's thinking opened the way to a perception of childhood development and socialization as an unstable process.Footnote 39
Finally, in contrast to ideologies of manliness, the discourse of psychology did not claim to endorse certain norms or types of behavior but was couched instead in a language of scientific objectivity. It possessed an air of moral neutrality, which, in a postwar context of disillusionment with the prewar values, might not only permit self-reflection but might be deployed as a means of critique of the institutions—such as school and family—within which subjectivity was formed.
War, Fear, and Manliness
What the First World War taught—a lesson that struck at the heart of Edwardian manliness—was that neither a public school nor a military training in manliness, however rigorous, could quell fear. Willpower alone was not enough. As the protagonist remarks in Warwick Deeping's novel Kitty (1927), “All the decent, honourable feelings you’ve grown up with seem to drop like water out of a burst paper bag. You’re just a cunning, shivery creature ready to bolt into a hole—and leave someone else to do the dirty job.”Footnote 40
The social signs of failures of repression would have been widely observable in wartime. The sheer numbers of men diagnosed and treated as suffering from a “nervous disorder,” some eighty thousand during the war itself, ensured this.Footnote 41 Bourke estimates that, discounting wounding, such disorders were responsible for one-third of army discharges during the war.Footnote 42 The fact that the majority of victims were experienced soldiers, and some had been awarded medals for bravery, emphasized the difficulty of living up to the heroic ideal.Footnote 43 At the beginning of 1921, there were sixty-five thousand men drawing disability pensions for neurasthenic disablement, and nine thousand of these were still being treated in hospitals.Footnote 44 The widespread extent of the condition in the postwar period necessitated the setting up of further psychiatric clinics.Footnote 45
Although men diagnosed as neurasthenic were in a minority, most subalterns had experienced moments of intense fear. The ex–general staff officer Lord Holme, in supporting the motion for the War Office Committee Enquiry into “Shell-Shock,” commented that “under the novel conditions that are met with on a modern battlefield there is no man who does not suffer from fright.”Footnote 46 Among veterans, the borderline between fear and breakdown was recognized to be narrow, and all too easily crossed. E. C. Vaughan describes a scene at the third battle of Ypres, where, after a prolonged bombardment, he and his runner had burst into laughter as a fellow officer broke down. His laughter was not derisive, even though he disliked the officer, but was rather seen by Vaughan as an indication of his own fragile mental state: “my nerves had been giving way under the strain until I was reduced to the childishness of laughing at another man's fear.”Footnote 47
Fear might surface through recurring nightmares. Second Lieutenant Ernest Smith, for example, wrote home to his mother as he prepared for sleep that “I have been having horrible dreams about my entire platoon convicted of something dreadful and being left out in the filthy rain all night with practically nothing on!!”Footnote 48 Disturbing emotional experiences encouraged reflection on self-conduct. In the months immediately after his demobilization, the tank commander and later psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion was visited by recurring nightmares, and by troubling memories of leaving casualties to fend for themselves, and of times when courage seemed to fail him.Footnote 49 Even Charles Carrington, who was scornful of the “self-pitying school” of memoir writers, recalled moments when fear had been beyond his control. In a testament both to the ubiquity of mental disturbance and to the reach of psychological thinking in the midcentury, he wrote in his 1965 memoir of being “a little schizophrenic (although the word had not been invented)” during Passchendale.Footnote 50 The emotional situation of the neurasthenic was recognizable to many of his fellow soldiers, even to those who disassociated themselves from the postwar critique of manliness.Footnote 51
The continuing repercussions of war trauma, widely felt by civilians and veterans alike, were captured in literature and drama of the interwar period. Alison Light, for example, has argued that the increasing popularity of detective fiction in the interwar period lay in its capacity to tap into the psychic aftermath of war, especially the memory of fear, among readers. She calls this a “convalescence literature”: emotionally undemanding, it concealed the signs of violence. It was, one contemporary enthusiast commented, “a sedative for the nerves.”Footnote 52
By contrast with this largely civilian literature, many of the veteran memoirs and novels that proliferated during the late 1920s and early 1930s sought to elaborate, rather than to displace, fearful and violent memories. Ben Shephard goes so far as to conclude that such reflection was its defining feature: “‘The management of fear’ is the subject of nearly all Great War literature.”Footnote 53 Veterans explored its personal effects and how it was handled within the military. Some even made explicit attempts at psychological analysis.Footnote 54 May Sinclair, who was reputed to have taken Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) with her onto the battlefields when working in the Field Ambulance Corps,Footnote 55 included a psychotherapist in her 1920 novel, The Romantic. The final pages include a long monologue in which he interprets the central character's attraction to manly exploits, not as a sign of moral vigor, but as a pathological state: “He jumped at the war because the thrill he got out of it gave him a sense of power. He sucked manhood out of you. He sucked it out of everything—out of blood and wounds.”Footnote 56
The general emphasis on internal reactions to fear had obvious implications for manliness. Trauma in the postwar novels was now a matter of emotional exploration, rather than something that must be put out of mind, or whose effects must—as the cult of athleticism implied—be overcome by strenuous activity. This reflected the message conveyed in some of the medical treatments given shell-shock victims during the war. The more psychotherapeutic varieties endorsed by Wilfred Brown, Charles Myers, and, under his auspices at Craiglockhart, Rivers had entailed trying to undo the work of emotional repression that was institutionalized in the routines of the public school. Men were encouraged to confront traumatic experiences that they had been trained at school and in the army to forget. Indeed, for Rivers, the psychic injury caused by repression sometimes appears as more damaging than the originating traumatic experience.Footnote 57
Perhaps the most significant challenge to manliness posed by such accounts was the perception that courage and fear were not exclusive qualities and that in the circumstances of war even the bravest of men might succumb to fear. Many memoirs were devoted to an exploration of the personal scars inflicted on those most loyal to stoic ideals.Footnote 58 Harry Penrose, the central character in A. P. Herbert's powerful 1919 novel, The Secret Battle, begins his war full of “eagerness and readiness for sacrifice.”Footnote 59 His courage is, however, eroded by the mounting toll of battle, physical illness, the stress of responsibility for other men's lives, and unjust treatment by superior officers, which culminates in his eventual shooting for cowardice. Herbert's novel is the biography of a breakdown, in which the main theme is the extraordinary perseverance of Penrose in his “secret battle” to fulfill his duties as an officer.
A similar portrayal of fear as a universal experience is offered in Journey's End, R. C. Sherriff's immensely successful 1928 play, which had a run of 594 performances at the Savoy and sold over 175,000 copies, then a record for a new play.Footnote 60 The heroism of the company commander and central character Stanhope, who went straight from school into the army, is never in doubt. He commands the unanimous admiration of his men and fellow officers though ravaged by the stress of three years at the front. The play focuses on the emotional costs of dutiful service, the audience witnessing Stanhope's unraveling through drink. Shame at his inability to live up to the prewar ideals of manliness—a shame brought home by the admiration of the new subaltern Raleigh, fresh from Stanhope's old school—is a central theme. Sherriff's play signals the survival into the postwar of a more troubled male identity, in which the cost of endurance is breakdown. Emotional suffering replaces unbending stoicism as a hallmark of courage. Sticking it out, remarks Stanhope in Journey's End, is “the only thing a decent man can do.”Footnote 61
Imaginative accounts such as these were based on, and worked over within the mind, intimate personal experiences of fear. The Secret Battle was written at great speed during 1917, while Herbert was convalescing from a shrapnel wound, during which time he was haunted by what he described as the “most horrible and extraordinary nightmares.”Footnote 62 He was especially animated by the shooting for desertion in late 1916 of Edwin Dyett, a fellow naval battalion officer, a case that sparked a national debate in 1918 about the military death sentence.Footnote 63 Herbert's novel includes angry criticism of the military court system, which had failed to recognize the plight of the broken-down man as anything other than cowardice. One reaches the conclusion, in reading The Secret Battle, that while the fate of Penrose is clearly based on the real-life fate of Dyett, nevertheless, the traumatic events at Gallipoli and France that led to Penrose's breakdown were ones experienced by Herbert himself. Writing about Dyett perhaps allowed Herbert a means of addressing profoundly disturbing emotional experiences of his own.Footnote 64
In writing Journey's End Sherriff was also, to some extent, examining personal reactions to fear. During his first prolonged experience of shelling in November 1915, Sherriff had written on a scrap of paper, “shell whizzes over … feel sick—breathing comes hard heart beats. … nerves.” He wrote to his parents that he hoped to be sent home with shell shock. Later he reported that he had gone off sick because of “his old complaint” of neuralgia, a complaint that was to flare up again on subsequent occasions, preventing his return to the line.Footnote 65 In Sherriff's play, the character Hibberd also complains of neuralgia, and, like Sherriff, he tries to be sent off sick with it. Rosa Maria Bracco comments that through the character of Hibberd, Sherriff may have been trying “to explain the genuineness of his plight without exposing his own story.”Footnote 66 The crucial confrontation between the hero Stanhope and the shirker Hibberd, which ends in Stanhope confessing that he feels “just as you feel,” seems to suggest this.Footnote 67 It might be interpreted as a form of self-exoneration on Sherriff's part, a plea that neuralgia, like heavy drinking, be understood as a natural response to fear.Footnote 68
The analyses offered in Journey's End and The Secret Battle did not draw directly on psychological concepts. Yet, in common with other accounts based on personal experience, they advanced an understanding of human motivations and behavior that departed from the prewar tenets of manliness. First, they regarded fear as a constitutional, and universal, reaction to war. They depicted emotional impulses of such force that no subaltern, no matter how staunch his character, could will them away. This is implied in Stanhope's half-question, half-accusation to the young Raleigh in Journey's End: “You think there's no limit to what a man can bear?”Footnote 69 Such a stance implicitly acknowledged that war neuroses were a matter of psychology.
Second, the experience of fear encouraged an interior perspective on motivations, not just one's own, but others'. The portrayal of men's reactions to fear could show quite a degree of psychological acuity. The harsh treatment meted out to shell-shocked men might be attributed to the fact that the victim was, in reality, only expressing the officer's own impulses. In The Secret Battle, Penrose, though he normally has great sympathy for his men, despises SIWs (men with self-inflicted wounds). His scorn, Herbert writes, “was a kind of instinctive self-defence—put on to assure himself, assure the world, that there was no connection—none at all,” between himself and the malingerer.Footnote 70 Similarly, in No Hero—This (1936), Deeping's protagonist recognizes elements of himself in a man with “unregenerate funk”: “but for the grace of God and another man's understanding I might have exhibited myself like this stuttering, slobbering coward.”Footnote 71 Such accounts convey an understanding of emotional processes that, within psychoanalysis, are theorized in terms of splitting and projection.
Third, memoir writers, although not necessarily operating with an explicitly psychological model of the causes of war neurosis, nevertheless echoed aspects of contemporary thinking. In particular, they emphasized the origins of breakdown in the tension between social ideals and primitive instincts, rather than seeing it as rooted in character or breeding. Journey's End and The Secret Battle were at pains to demonstrate the weight of social demands on the subaltern: to set an example to his men, to calm their anxieties, and, above all, to preserve their safety. It is the force of adherence to these demands, in the face of an equally strong desire to flee from danger, that drives the central characters to the point of breakdown.
Postwar accounts, focusing on the tensions between emotional dispositions and public expectations of conduct, reflected medical discussions during the war among more analytically inclined medical and military figures. For Dr. Thomas Salmon, the American director of Army neuropsychiatry in France, shell shock resulted from a clash between the primitive desire to want to flee danger and the social proscriptions on flight, which had been “rendered impossible by ideals of duty, patriotism, and honor.”Footnote 72 Sometimes in postwar memoirs this struggle was depicted in explicitly psychological terms. In No Hero—This, Deeping explained that the soldier was caught between the “instinct for self-preservation,” which was “the strongest of all the elemental urges,” and the needs of society to “condemn and to coerce the natural urges of the individual.” Heroic manliness, he concluded in a succinct summary of instinct psychology, was the prize offered by society to counteract the natural urge for self-preservation. It “will help us to dress up our own cowardice in shining and noble armour, and call it by high-sounding names, patriotism, sacrifice, the pride of manly self-regard.”Footnote 73
In other cases, too, veterans drew directly on a psychological vocabulary in order to explain and rationalize disturbing states. Aldington, describing the process of mental decline among soldiers who had spent many months in the trenches, commented on how with every exposure to battle, “neurosis steadily became worse and required a greater effort of repression.”Footnote 74 In Her Privates We (1930), Frederic Manning employed the notion of the unconscious mind as a means of accounting for nightmares. His protagonist, Private Bourne, “tried to persuade himself that these convulsive agonies were merely reflex actions, part of an unconscious physical process.”Footnote 75
Fourth, the postwar memoirs and novels about fear not only emphasized the internal complexity of emotional reactions but their diversity. In so doing, they moved away from the belief in a singular, hegemonic notion of manliness and toward a more differentiated perception of masculine subjectivity. The four platoon commanders in Journey's End, for example, represent contrasting ways of dealing with fear, rooted in part in class background, but also seen as a matter of psychological diversity. Deeping's No Hero—This provides a vivid account of character types among the officers based on their reactions to fear, from the company commander who presents a convincing facade of bravery through “repressing things in himself” to the petty tyrant who, though full of bull and bluster, is too afraid to visit his own front line.Footnote 76 Herbert's The Secret Battle emphasizes that reactions to fear are not only a matter of individual personality, but of circumstance. Being physically unwell, or becoming married, are seen as elements that might make one man more “windy” than another. A sympathetic figure in the discussion makes the crucial point: “Anyhow, I don’t see that it need be such an absolute standard.”Footnote 77 War and the question of how men dealt with fear encouraged recognition of how internal states were conditioned by variations between men in their psychological makeup and circumstances. It led, in short, to a preoccupation with psychological interiority.
If one of the overall effects of the war was the reappraisal of manliness as a singular standard, this did not imply a wholesale rejection of its tenets. Some of the postwar accounts seek to modify rather than abandon the tradition of stoic manliness. “Modern,” psychologically orientated models of male identity did not simply succeed ones based on character. The war literature elevated a new type of man to heroic status: the “imaginative” officer. Unlike the prewar hero of boys' adventure stories, he was not insensitive to fear. Herbert's Penrose was “a high-strung, sensitive boy,” whose qualities and vulnerability lay in his “imaginative outlook towards the war.”Footnote 78 Similarly, whereas the working-class officer Trotter in Journey's End “has no imagination,” Stanhope has a capacity, as he confesses to the father figure of the play, to “look right through things, and on and on—till I get frightened and stop.”Footnote 79 This quality makes Stanhope vulnerable, but it is also a valuable trait of leadership, which enables him to empathize with his men's emotional states. Sherriff's quest to incorporate the quality of sensitivity within the heroic ideal was probably motivated in part by personal experience. After he went sick for the first time, in January 1917, he wrote to his father that “everyone has a different temperament I know, and I may have got a more imaginative one than suits the necessities of trench life.”Footnote 80
Reformulations of manliness such as this were not limited to men like Sherriff for whom there was a biographical imperative to rescue the “imaginative” subaltern from the imputation of failed manliness. The potential Victoria Cross, remarked Sir William Slim in a radio broadcast just after the Second World War, fresh from his victory over the Japanese in Burma, was either the individual who felt no fear or the one who has “quick intelligence and vivid imagination.”Footnote 81 Such perceptions differed greatly from Edwardian ideals of manliness, which praised nervous stability and saw heightened sensibility as a sign of effeminacy. By the mid-twentieth century the capacity to feel “more keenly” might be the very quality that distinguished the potential military hero from his peers.Footnote 82
The texts I have discussed above were undoubtedly distinctive in the degree of their critical attitude toward the war and prewar ideals of manliness. And yet, even men from within the postwar military and political establishment, who for the most part clung to the prewar codes, might also adopt elements of it. The Anatomy of Fear, published in the final year of the Second World War by Lord Charles Moran, Winston Churchill's physician and a Regimental Medical Officer (RMO) in the First World War, has been much discussed. It is most often cited as evidence of the persistence into the midcentury of traditional concepts of courage and cowardice.Footnote 83 This ignores the complexity of the text, which struggles to combine prewar notions of character with postwar understandings of fear. Bogacz is surely correct to describe Moran as a “divided man.”Footnote 84
At some points in The Anatomy of Fear, Moran gives fulsome expression to the Edwardian notion of war as a romantic quest. It is, he claims, “the supreme and final test if you will—of character.”Footnote 85 He insisted that cowardice was a failure of will and that the only manly course open to those experiencing “wind-up” was to stick it out. His account drew on hereditary ideas in order to explain why some men were more prone to fear than others.
Yet, in other ways, his ideas about courage departed significantly from imperial and Edwardian notions. First, Moran explained that, whereas he had once felt that imagination “was merely a handicap,” his war experience had taught him that “the outstanding personal successes in this battalion at any rate have been among imaginative men.”Footnote 86 Imagination, Moran argued, did not necessarily result in cowardice. Rather, it gave men insight that prevented fear from being enacted in cowardice. The modern officer was one who, with the benefit of education and good breeding, could monitor his emotional reactions and thus prevent himself from the unconscious acting out of fear.Footnote 87
Second, alongside more traditional conceptions of character, Moran drew on newer languages of the self in his explanations of how fear affected men. A chapter entitled “Moods” is couched in the language of Freud's topography of the mind. Moran comments that a man's mood may expose the “workings of the conscious mind, as dreams lay bare what has hitherto been hidden in the unconscious.”Footnote 88 The psychological concepts underlying such sentiments are perhaps less obvious to the modern reader than the older notions of character that Moran employed. They were, however, striking to his contemporaries. Churchill refused to write a preface to the volume on the grounds that it seemed to question the military death penalty and might negatively affect recruitment to the armed services, but above all because it contained too much “damned psychological nonsense.”Footnote 89
Third, Moran disagreed with General Douglas Haig's view that civilian recruits would be hardened by battle. He argued on the contrary that battle was corrosive of a man's courage.Footnote 90 All men, he argued, possessed a limited stock of courage, a stock that could be, and often was, used up in the stress of war. At that point, no man, no matter how brave, could do anything to prevent breakdown. The only military solution was to make sure that men were removed from action before they broke down. This notion of courage as a limited fund seems to have had penetrated, to some extent, into the military and political elite, and beyond into the wider culture. Courage, remarked Field Marshall Slim in a radio broadcast in 1945, “is not merely a virtue; it is the virtue.”Footnote 91 His homily to the romantic ideal was, however, tempered by recognition that courage was not intrinsic, but an “expendable quality. We can use it up.”Footnote 92 The management expert Lyndall Urwick, who had withdrawn from the front line with violent diarrhea in October 1914, took heart as an old man from Moran's message that willpower alone could not restore courage. To him, it provided a vindication of an act that had felt at the time as desertion.Footnote 93
Moran's account demonstrates the contradictory effects of fear on the war generation, and on its attitudes toward manliness. Such divisions were deeply etched in Moran's biographical experience, as they were too in his contemporaries and near contemporaries. While working as an RMO, Moran was reputedly known for his tendency to send men back into battle when they reported sick at the aid post.Footnote 94 In the postwar he continued to maintain a dim view of the man who was unable to keep fear under control. If Moran's modern officer was more “sensitive” than his nineteenth-century counterpart, emotional repression still remained his keystone of manly conduct. Imagination must be “controlled by character.”Footnote 95
At the same time, The Anatomy of Courage was written in an attitude of reflection on the prewar codes of manly stoicism. Moran may have praised the moral value of repression, but he also confessed to immensely personal difficulties in containing his fears. At Hooge in late 1915, he had experienced uncontrollable shivering during a bombardment.Footnote 96 After the Somme, where the first battalion of the Royal Fusiliers had experienced 403 casualties, his fear asserted itself more strongly:
At the time I do not think I was much frightened, I was too stunned to think. But it took its toll later. I was to go through it many times in my sleep and then the mind was no longer doped, it hurt. Even when the war had begun to fade out of men's minds I used to hear all at once without warning the sound of a shell coming. Perhaps it was only the wind in the trees to remind me that war had exacted its tribute and that my little capital was less than it had been.
The split between the stoic image of Edwardian manhood and the emotional situation of the war generation is evoked in the very opening words of Moran's book: it was “dedicated to my father who was without fear by his son who is less fortunate.”Footnote 97
Differences such as these between the Edwardian and the postwar outlooks are acknowledged even in the most trenchant defenses of manliness. In 1959, Field Marshall Slim published a memoir of his service in Mesopotamia and Gallipoli that was, by the standards of its time, unusually free from ambivalence about the war. Slim confidently evoked the prewar cult of games: the experience of being shelled while eating, he reminisced, was “rather like a picnic during a shoot.”Footnote 98 Yet, Slim wrote his account in the full knowledge that his view of war and of manly conduct was now not in line with public sentiments. By the 1950s, a more introspective and critical tone seemed the more usual: “I suppose if I had been one of those wartime subalterns who have since written so prolifically and pathologically of their reactions to such scenes, I should have psychoanalysed myself into a desperate gloom, swallowed half a bottle of whisky, and laughed bitterly. But I had never heard of psychoanalysis, I had not seen whisky for a fortnight, and if I laughed it was from anything but bitterness.”Footnote 99 If Slim's commentary testified to the fact that some men still clung to the romantic ideal of war in the midcentury, it was, equally, a backhanded acknowledgement of the influence of a different perspective within the wider culture.
Concluding Thoughts
A focus on the war generation, and on some key examples of their writings in the mid-twentieth century, points toward some significant shifts in masculine identity among the British middle class. The widespread experience of fear and its emotional aftermath contributed to an attitude of scrutiny toward manliness, as subaltern officers found themselves placed in positions where it was impossible to live up to the stoic ideal. Memoirs provided a means through which such a review could be undertaken, allowing an exploration of fear and its manifestations. These accounts may have drawn on psychological concepts in idiosyncratic ways and have sought to transform as much as criticize the stoic ideal. Nevertheless, by the Second World War there was an acknowledgement even from some quarters of the military and political elite that unconscious reactions could not be ignored and that a capacity to be attuned to their operation—a degree of nervous sensitivity—might be beneficial.
I do not wish to suggest by this analysis that a psychological attitude replaced unreflective belief in manliness as a normative standard. As I suggested earlier, the problem with the accounts of masculinity given in the literature on shell shock is precisely that they start from a desire to identify clear epochs. The assumption is one of either change or continuity in masculinities. What emerges from a study of subjectivity in war memoirs is, by contrast, a view of masculinity as a process in which social scripts are negotiated, one on another, within the self. Hence, for example, a novel such as Deeping's No Hero—This presents a full and largely sympathetic account of men's reactions to fear but is couched as a romance in which the protagonist, after a shaky start, earns the praise of his men and revivifies the love of his wife. Despite its psychological insight the central character's final reflection sounds for all the world like an Edwardian boy's adventure story: “In spite of my fear I have endured. I am man and master of my manhood.”Footnote 100 Memoir writers of the war generation were always engaged in a process of continuing identification with, as well as distancing from, the social codes of “manliness.”
My analysis has some implications for future research on masculinity that, in conclusion, I would like to draw attention to. First, it suggests that the emergence of the so-called reflexive self was a rather more long-drawn process than is sometimes supposed. In recent work by Martin Francis and Frank Mort in this journal, the 1950s are seen as a crucial period of transformation toward a more “modern” self, characterized by a lifting of emotional restraints among men, and by an enhanced capacity—stimulated though discourses of psychology—for self-reflection on emotional conduct.Footnote 101 The accounts I have focused on suggest a rather longer history of engagement with popular psychology, conducted too in a spirit of reflexive self-examination. Aldington's savage critique of middle-class conventions of upbringing, with its wild Freudian interpretations, predates the 1950s by a quarter-century.
Second, a key consequence of the critique of manliness in the war literature is an altered sense of men's place within patriarchal power. Whereas the codes of manliness endorsed this place, what emerges from the war literature is a view of men primarily as victims. Samuel Hynes observes this trend in A War Imagined, writing of the emergence of the “damaged man … as a sympathetic figure” in literature from the middle of the war onward.Footnote 102 The Edwardian quest to attain the manly qualities necessary for the exercise of power within the Empire, army, or household is, in the war literature of midcentury, more often seen as a cause of psychic scars than as an appropriate foundation for manhood. Similar shifts in emphasis can also be seen in midcentury memoirs of public schooling, which increasingly viewed men as the emotional victims of a training in manliness.
This leads me to an observation about the term “masculinity” itself. While the discourses of manliness have been extensively researched in the context of the nineteenth century, the same cannot be said of the term “masculinity” and its usage within British society in the twentieth century. Here, at least, is an area in which further cultural histories are needed. Within early twentieth-century Freudian psychoanalysis, as R. W. Connell has noted, “masculinity” gained a new significance, connoting the complex of competing emotional impulses that together made up masculine subjectivity. It was Freud, Connell concludes, who constructed the first “theory” of masculinity.Footnote 103 Although the authors discussed above do not use the word “masculinity” in a discursively coherent manner, one might nevertheless argue that their emphasis on personal identity as consisting of contrary impulses, and thus as unstable, reflects the second-hand influence of such theories. My title, which positions the war generation “between manliness and masculinity,” is meant to imply this. What I have sketched is the emergence, born of violent events in wartime, of a form of subjectivity that predates “masculinity” as a fully fledged psychological identity; this is a case, if ever there was one, of experience, and not just language, being constitutive of identity.Footnote 104 We need to know more about when the term “masculinity” entered more fully into public discourse in Britain, what meanings were associated with it, and how far those meanings were influenced by psychological thought. Needed even more are studies that explore the personal implications of these discursive shifts on, for example, veterans outside the middle class, and on middle-class men who succeeded the war generation. Were such men equally steeped in the tenets of manliness and led to dwell on them in memoirs to the same extent?
I would like to conclude with a further reflection on why subjectivity threatens to slip out of view in recent studies of masculinity. My argument so far implies that it is a consequence of the purchase of cultural approaches within historical study. It might also, however, result from developments within gender history itself, which, through the 1980s and 1990s, was largely successful in reclaiming the concept of masculinity from the more psychological meanings of midcentury whose provenance I have traced here. In gender history the focus has, of course, been on men as agents of patriarchal power rather than as victims. This overlay of a gender approach onto earlier formulations has left an awkward and still unresolved legacy. Pregender conceptualizations of masculinity certainly lacked an adequate account of power and of the social and cultural contexts within which gender identities are formed, being, as it were, rather narrowly focused on individual emotional processes. They also tended to equate the masculine with the universal. Yet, Freudian thought, in particular, at least took the psychic roots of identity seriously, whereas in some variants of gender history, subjectivity risks being reduced to a mere aftereffect of the social relations of patriarchal power. The challenge that faces future work on the history of masculinity is to develop approaches that take full account of emotional experience, and which view it in relation to the cultural constructions and social relations of gender, while not collapsing these various levels into each other.Footnote 105
