The First Cyborg and First World War Bodies as Anti-War Propaganda

Abstract

This article discusses a play published in The Strand Magazine during the First World War which features a cyborg presenting anti-war and pacifist messages, used by The Strand to create anti-German propaganda. The article draws on theories of disability, cyborgs and the posthuman, and from new research on wartime fiction magazines. The importance of the cyborg character, Soldier 241, for the literary history of science fiction is explored by focusing on the relations between the mechanical and the impaired body, and on the First World War as a nexus for technological, surgical and military development. As a cyborg, this character reflects politicized desires that the wartime authorities did not acknowledge: a longing for the end of war, and refusal to countenance a society that rejected the impaired body.

KEYWORDS:

• cyborg
• First World War
• disability
• propaganda
• pacifism
• posthuman

Acknowledgements

The research from which this article is drawn was supported by a visiting research fellowship at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, in the CENDARI (Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure) project funded by the European Commission FP7 for Research (2013); and by the award of the Sassoon Visiting Research Fellowship at The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (2014). Additional thanks are due to Dr David Marsh for data visualization; to Dr Patrick Belk and Professor Elizabeth Amann for their help in acquiring images; to the Panter and Hall Gallery, London, for their assistance with tracing the artist's estate; and to Nick Spurrier for kindly granting permission for the use of the illustrations by Steven Spurrier. An early version of this essay was presented at the conference First World War Popular Culture at the University of Chester, 2–3 July 2015; and was published as a feature article in History Today 66:5 (May 2016), 31–36.

ORCiD

Kate Macdonald http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8667-4051

Notes on contributor

Kate Macdonald is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of English Literature and Language at the University of Reading. She has published widely on twentieth-century British popular print culture and publishing history. Her most recent monograph is Novelists Against Social Change. Conservative Popular Fiction, 1920–1960 (2015).

Notes

1 The term ‘normate’ was coined by disability studies theorist Rosemarie Garland Thomson as a way of identifying ‘the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them’ (Garland Thomson, 1997: 8).

2 The film has been restored by the British Film Institute and can be seen at http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-silent-horror-films (accessed 27 April 2016).

3 These are wheeled tripods designed to go of their own accord to the assemblies of the gods and return again.

4 These periodicals were Nash's Pall Mall Magazine, The Story-Teller, The Grand Magazine, Cassell's Magazine, and The Strand Magazine. Around 4000 stories were read, published between July 1914 and December 1918, producing a corpus of 181 stories that explicitly use or engage with impairment.