War ravages bodies, minds and societies. Following such devastation attempts, both individual and collective, are made to rebuild lives and bodies. Society as a whole must be rebuilt after the chaos of war disrupts social relationships. But what are the models, themes or stories that help to make sense of experiences of war? In this book, Carden-Coyne asserts that classicism was at the heart of the reconstruction effort after the First World War. It was classicism and its themes towards which society turned in its efforts to rebuild itself after the traumas of the war. The book successfully covers a vast range of material. Carden-Coyne weaves together discussions about diverse subjects including art, war memorials and reconstructive surgery to reveal the way in which the bodies and ideals of classical Greece and Rome provided the template upon which men and women rebuilt their bodies, themselves and the society in which they lived.
Using material from America, Britain and Australia she shows how the influence of classicism infiltrated these anglophone countries in similar ways. Reconstruction was based around a ‘modern re-imagining of classical beauty,’ (p. 311). Faced with bodies and minds wrecked by war, the turn to classical Greece and Rome suggested bodies could move beyond merely being recovered: they could be made magnificent. Classicism gave the inspiration of beauty, which was to provide an antidote to the brutality and destruction of war.
Bodies take centre stage as the book examines the construction of the modern body through classical motifs. It is classical bodies of Greece and Rome that provided the model upon which notions of reconstruction were based. Carden-Coyne examines ‘how citizenship and selfhood were negotiated through the body, and why classicism offered an antidote to the mind-body dualism that war magnified,’ (p. 16).
The book situates itself amongst other influential work on the relationship between gender, gender relations, sexuality and war. As others have suggested before her (Bourke, 1996; Showalter, 1985), war had blurred gender identities and yet also sexualized women. ‘Healing the body and reconstructing sexual relations was a response to the violence and social change,’ (p. 12). Gender and sexuality were central in reconstruction efforts.
The book will be of interest to a large number of scholars including war historians, art historians, sociologists and anthropologists. Of particular interest to anthropologists is that Coyne explores themes in the discipline that link to this turning toward classicism. Scholars ‘began to oppose the propaganda of an imagined British civility fighting against German barbarity,’ (p. 45). Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) influenced those who wished to emphasize that primitivism was alive in the modern world. The notion of the ‘savage within’ ‘…was powerfully consolidated by the war and explicated through anthropology,’ (p. 45). She shows how anthropology was of interest because of the fascination with contemporary civilizations across the world as part of a search for meaning and efforts at healing in post-war environment.
Carden-Coyne explores the relationships between bodies (their experiences, styles and performances) and those represented in images and material culture. The book is ambitious and offers the reader a vast amount of diverse information to digest. A clear argument threads the main points throughout the book giving the reader a sense of focus. The themes of classicism are followed through a variety of subjects and images. The reader is left with a clear notion of the power of the influence of the ideal Greco-Roman marble, white, strong body. As Carden Coyne concludes: ‘…despite all the pain and suffering of the war, human beings demonstrated a remarkable capacity to forgive themselves the carnage, to reconstruct their bodies, and reshape their memories of violence through modern visions of the classical imaginary,’ (p. 319).
