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Abstract
Applying the critical lenses of feminism, autographical theory and literary analysis, this essay performs a triple reading of Vera Brittain’s multi-genre writings about gender, war,and university education. Focusing specifically on The Dark Tide (1923), Testament of Youth (1933) and The Women of Oxford (1960), the essay argues that Brittain (de)constructs competing views of academic work and war work in order to reveal and critique competing definitions of women’s duty in wartime. Over the course of her life and writings, Brittain’s attitudes toward academe changed from euphoric feminist possibility to anti-spinsterish paranoia. Ultimately, Brittain was unable to reconcile these conflicting perspectives and instead chose a new, modern path in pacifism. Looking at a diverse body of her work reveals how much gender, education and the war impacted on Brittain’s perceptions of her self, her work and her writing.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Gail Braybon, “Winners or Losers: Women’s Symbolic Role in the War Story,” in Evidence, History, and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18, ed. Gail Braybon (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 89, 97. I want to acknowledge Joan Scott’s and Gail Braybon’s warning against viewing women’s war experiences as simplistic “watershed” moments in social history, which risks turning them into “light relief” or “symbols” rather than active participants in the war. Likewise, Susan Grayzel and James McMillan have similarly cautioned against under-theorised “cause and effect” assumptions about changing gender roles and the First World War.
2 Vera Brittain, The Women of Oxford: A Fragment of History (New York: Macmillan, 1960); Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 (New York: Penguin, 1933).
3 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 655.
4 See Susan Leonardi, Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990) for her analysis of the five “Somerville” novelists, including Vera Brittain.
5 Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1919) was one of the earliest and more popular women’s accounts of the First World War, comprising a collection of sketches, short stories and poems based on her experience as a war nurse.
6 Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain and the First World War: The Story of Testament of Youth (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014), 127, 157. Women’s absence from First World War history remained problematic throughout most of the twentieth century. As Bostridge notes in his biography of Brittain, when BBC Television produced its fiftieth anniversary documentary series, The Great War, in 1965, it devoted only minutes of the 17-hour running time to women’s experiences in the war. It was not until the 1980s when feminist historians began to demand more attention to and theorisation of gender and history that more gendered analyses became common.
7 Quoted in Deborah Gorham, Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 224.
8 Anela Freedman, “Mary Borden’s Forbidden Zone: Women’s Writing from No-Man’s Land,” Modernism/Modernity 9, no.1 (January 2002): 111. Margaret Randolph Higgonet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel and Margaret Collins Weitz, eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 15.
9 Esther MacCallum-Stewart, “Female Maladies? Reappraising Women’s Popular Literature of the First World War,” Women: A Cultural Review 17, no. 1 (2006): 79.
10 Higonnet et al., 3.
11 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 32.
12 Brittain, Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary 1913–1917 (New York: William Morrow, 1982), 29–30.
13 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 108, 72.
14 Vera Brittain, Chronicle of Youth, 118.
15 Ibid., 123.
16 Ibid., 149
17 Ibid., 102–03, 173.
18 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 37.
19 Ibid., 108.
20 Ibid., 60.
21 Dan Shen and Dejin Xu, “Intratextuality, Textratextuality, Intertextuality: Unreliability in Autobiography versus Fiction,” Poetics Today 18, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 44.
22 H. Porter Abbot, “Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for Taxonomy of Textual Categories,” New Literary History 19, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 603.
23 Paul deMan, “Autobiography as Defacement,” MLN 94, no. 5 (December 1979): 919.
24 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice,” in The Private Self, Theory and Practice in Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Sherri Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 34, 47–48.
25 Quoted in Ilya Parkins, “Feminist Witnessing and Social Differences: The Trauma of Heterosexual Otherness in Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth,” Women’s Studies 36 (2007): 101. Braybon, 89. While Stanford Friedman, Henke and others recognise the important position women and other marginalised groups represent in history, autobiography and culture, more recently feminist critics have cautioned against taking overly generalised representations of “women’s” experience as the norm. Gail Braybon, among others, has warned against the impulse to represent “all women” as a single category, particularly in historical analyses. In her portrayal of “women’s experience” of the war, for example, Vera Brittain seems unconscious of her own privileged position as a white, heterosexual, middle-class British woman, and only represents the war from her specific subject position. Brittain’s perspectival “blind spot”, combined with her tendency to fictionalise the “exact truth” of her life story (Testament of Youth, 12), make her a particularly slippery subject for an analysis of the First World War, women and higher education.
26 Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 121.
27 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 98.
28 Ibid., 105.
29 Lynne Layton, “Vera Brittain’s Testament(s),” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel and Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 73. Layton’s analysis of Brittain’s diaries during Somerville’s requisition reveals her feeling “joyful to be told that the sacrifice of one’s comfort and convenience is of use”. Layton describes Brittain’s conscious use of war language – she describes the missive as the principal’s “official communique” and that she is to be “billeted” – as a “chilling imitation” of masculine war speech, indicative of her desire to be considered part of the war effort.
30 For more detail about Somerville’s war and volunteer efforts during the war, see Pauline Adams, Somerville for Women: An Oxford College 1879–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
31 Brittain, Women of Oxford, 136.
32 Ibid., 136. Emily Frisella, “=‘Go Home and Sit Still’: WWI and Women’s Colleges at Oxford,” The Isis (2 March 2015), http://isismagazine.org.uk/2015/03/go-home-and-sit-still-wwi-and-womens-colleges-at-oxford/. More recently, Emily Frisella reported much higher numbers of enlisted Oxford men: more than 14,000 male members of Oxford enlisted in the war between 1914 and 1918, and by the end approximately 20% of those numbers had perished.
33 Ibid.
34 Adams, 87.
35 Ibid., 96.
36 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 137, 140.
37 Qtd. in Gorham, Vera Brittain, 69.
38 Brittain, Chronicle of Youth, 173.
39 Ibid., 194.
40 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 145.
41 Ibid., 165.
42 Brittain, Women of Oxford, 141–42. Pauline Adams’ excellent Somerville for Women: An Oxford College 1879–1993 (1996) and Emily Frisella’s more recent “‘Go Home and Sit Still’: WWI and Women’s Colleges at Oxford” (2015) include even more women academics who left Oxford for war work.
43 Brittain, Women of Oxford, 138.
44 Adams, 97.
45 Brittain, Chronicle of Youth, 170.
46 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 154.
47 Ibid., 154, 326. Susan Leonardi goes into more detail about press attacks on women university students in Dangerous by Degrees (1990).
48 Andrea Peterson, “Shell-Shocked in Somerville: Vera Brittain’s post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” in Gender and Warfare in the Twentieth Century: Textual Representations, ed. Angela K. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 35. As Andrea Peterson explains, “women who volunteered for active service as nurses were held up as icons of extreme femininity because of their caring role, whilst the equally feminine maternal role was projected onto those women who chose not to undertake any war work”.
49 James McMillan, “The Great War and Gender Relations: The Case of French Women and the First World War Revisited,” in Evidence, History, and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18, ed. Gail Braybon (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 138.
Susan Grayzel, “Liberating Women? Examining Gender, Morality and Sexuality in First World War Britain and France,” in Evidence, History, and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18, ed. Gail Braybon (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 113. Both James McMillan and Susan Grayzel have written about “hysterical male fantasies about the masculinization of women” during the war and assumptions that new opportunities like war work “opened up new spaces” that “liberated” women from pre-war gender identities (Grayzel, 113), cautioning against confusing discourses about women and the social realities of women’s actual experience during the early twentieth century.
50 Ibid., 509.
51 Brittain, Women of Oxford, 154.
52 Quoted in Adams, 149.
53 Frank Prochaska, “An Oxford Interlude,” History Today (May 2015): 17–18. For example, a recent article by Frank Prochaska included this broad statement about “women’s advancement” in the post-war economy: “If the war was disastrous for the men of Oxford, it presented an opening for the women left behind.”
54 Sandra Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” Signs 8, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 430.
55 Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora Books, 1987), 11.
56 Ibid., 38–39.
57 Ibid., 15, 11–12.
58 Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995). The Voluntary Aid Detachment was established in 1909 to provide voluntary nursing to the sick and wounded in case of an invasion. VADs were provided as provisionary nurses and received a small salary and accommodation from the military. Since VADs were considered the equivalent of a male officer, most were middle- to upper-middle-class women. In 1914 there were approximately 174,000 VAD nurses, with numbers substantially increasing over the war years (Berry and Bostridge, 81).
59 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 202.
60 Gorham, Vera Brittain, 108.
61 Berry and Bostridge, 126.
62 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 475. Interestingly, Deborah Gorham in her biography of Brittain once again points out how Brittain’s letters and autobiography do not seem to match up: “In sharp contrast to the desolate picture presented in the autobiography, in Brittain’s letters home during the year of her return to university we never see the exhausted, humourless, intensely sad, lonely and world-weary persona of Testament of Youth. The Brittain of these letters is in fact very much her pre-war self: she is lively, she is acutely observant of and intrigued by her surroundings, she is enthusiastic about Oxford, and she is very much involved with friends and family” (Gorham, 139).
63 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 493.
64 Ibid., 494.
65 Ibid., 484.
66 Susan Leonardi, “Brittain’s Beard: Transsexual Panic in Testament of Youth.” LIT 2, no. 1 (1990): 78.
67 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 497.
68 Andrea Peterson interprets the significance of Brittain’s beard as “a metaphor for patriarchal authority” – an authority she held responsible for the deaths of her fiancé, brother and friends (Peterson, “Shell-Shocked,” 43). Leonardi, on the other hand, sees it as a “punishment” for her masculine ambition – in both her war work and her academic studies (Leonardi, “Beard,” 79–80).
69 Heather Julien, “School Novels, Women’s Work, and Maternal Vocationalism,” NWSA Journal 19, no. 2 (June 2007): 121.
70 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 76.
71 Returning to Somerville after a vacation in spring 1915, Brittain wrote in a letter: “It is the feminine atmosphere I shall not be able to tolerate – strange how one can feel as I do about some women & be an ardent feminist still! … A feminine community is always appalling to anyone like me who gets on much better in the society of men” (quoted in Gorham, 72–73).
72 Ibid., 112.
73 Ibid., 484.
74 Ibid., 72.
75 Leonardi, Dangerous by Degrees, 220.
76 Brittain, Vera, The Dark Tide (London: Virago Press, 1999 [1923]), 1.
77 Ibid., 20.
78 Ibid., 5.
79 Ibid., 29–30.
80 Ibid., 32.
81 Ibid., 33.
82 This fictionalised scene is clearly based on a similar conflict between Brittain and Winifred Holtby while at Somerville in 1918.
83 Ibid., 167–68.
84 Brittain, Testament of Youth, 509.
85 Brittain, The Dark Tide, 36 (emphasis added).
86 Ibid., 141.
87 Ibid., 151.
88 Ibid., 231.
89 Ibid., 36. Biographers Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge maintain that this scene, like the debate between Virginia and Daphne, is also based on a real event from Brittain’s life. Brittain allegedly confronted Maude Clarke, history tutor at Somerville College and her contemporary, after Clarke failed to show appropriate sympathy and despair over the war and told her she might have achieved similar success as a don if she had not gone to war (148).
90 Brittain, The Dark Tide, 37.
91 Several scholars have published on Brittain’s career as a pacifist activist and writer. See: Yvonne A. Bennett, “Vera Brittain, Feminism, Pacifism, and the Problem of Class, 1900–1953,” Atlantis 12, no. 2 (1987): 18–23; Muriel Mellown, “Reflections on Feminism and Pacifism in the Novels of Vera Brittain,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 2, no. 2 (Autumn 1983): 215–28; Andrea Peterson, Self-Portraits: Subjectivity in the Works of Vera Brittain (Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006); and Rebecca Wisor, “Virginia Woolf and Vera Brittain: Pacifism and the Gendered Politics of Public Intellectualism,” Studies in the Humanities 35, no. 2 (December 2008): 137–53.