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Abstract
After her 1915 execution in occupied Brussels for her role in organizing an escape network for French and British soldiers, British nurse Edith Cavell became a household name, and her fame as a ‘martyr-heroine’ persisted in the decades following the Armistice. This article compares and contrasts a range of sculptures, monuments and films featuring Edith Cavell that were produced during the interwar years in Britain (and what were then the Dominions), France and Belgium. Whereas existing studies of Edith Cavell have tended to focus on those produced in the Anglophone world, and to argue that she is universally made to embody female martyrdom against a ‘barbarous’ enemy, this article reveals that the different and evolving national and political contexts in which these cultural representations were produced resulted in important variations in the ways in Cavell was depicted.
Notes on contributors
Alison S. Fell is Professor of French Cultural History and is currently Director of the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute at the University of Leeds. She is the author of several books and articles on French and British women and the First World War, including her most recent monograph Women as Veterans in Britain and France after the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She also leads a research and public engagement hub called Legacies of War and is a Co-Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Gateways to the First World War Public Engagement Centre based at the University of Kent.
Claudia Sternberg is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She has published on screenwriting, migration and diaspora in British film and television, and media representations of the First World War since 1919. She is a member of the Legacies of War centenary hub at the University of Leeds and leads a collaborative British German project on civilian internment, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s First World War Centre for Hidden Histories.
Notes
1 After the war, Frenchman Gaston Quien, who had posed as a French soldier needing to escape in 1915, was convicted of collaborating and informing on the network in which Cavell was involved (TNA, KV2/844).
2 Three other members were also initially condemned to death, but their sentences were commuted to imprisonment and hard labour.
3 The models of other entries show similar interpretations, although interestingly the design placed second, to be sculpted by André Vermare, has a classically-draped Cavell standing defiantly, gazing towards the horizon with a much smaller French soldier and nurse seated either side of her, a version of Cavell that resembles the London memorial. See Le Pays de France, 9 November 1916.
4 The Hôpital-Ecole d’infirmières professionnelles françaises in Paris was inaugurated by Mme Poincaré in 1916. In 1920, the Institut Edith Cavell et Marie Depage was inaugurated in Brussels (Pickles, Citation2007: 139–155).
5 For letters from nurses with personal reminiscences about Cavell see for example British Journal of Nursing, 6 November 1916.
6 For a selection of postcards and illustrations see the Kay Seidenberg Nursing Postcards Collection, https://digital.library.vcu.edu/digital/collection/kay.
7 Feature films include Nurse and Martyr (UK 1915, dir. Percy Moran), The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell (Australia 1916, dir. by John Gavin and C. Post Mason), Nurse Cavell and La Revanche (both Australia 1916, dir. W.J. Lincoln) and The Woman the Germans Shot (released as The Cavell Case, USA 1918, dir. John G. Adolfi).
8 Surviving footage can be accessed digitally at British Pathé (https://www.britishpathe.com/), East Anglian Film Archive (http://www.eafa.org.uk/) and the Imperial War Museum Collections (https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections).
9 For a discussion of the press coverage in both countries see Biltereyst and Depauw (Citation2006: 141–48).
10 On German press responses see Döring and Schütz (Citation2007: 36–46).
11 Notably, however, the National Council of Women were among those who supported a ban of the film (Emmott, Citation1928).
12 Chamberlain, for example, stated in Parliament: ‘I hold it is an outrage on a noble woman’s memory to turn into melodrama, for the purposes of commercial gain, so heroic a story’ (HC, 27 February 1928, vol. 214, col. 15).
13 Another female-centred war film of 1928 is Petite Martyre Belge/Het Belgisch martelaresje, also directed by Francis Martin, which tells the story of Yvonne Vieslet, a Belgian child who was shot by a German soldier in 1918.