Women's Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance

Comparative Literature, Spring 1998 by Harlow, Barbara

WOMEN'S FICTION OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR: GENDER, POWER AND RESISTANCE. By Gill Plain. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. 207 p.

War stories-or stories written in a time of war? The question is a generic one perhaps, but in Gill Plain's Women's Fiction of the Second World iVar it is both radically gendered and critically literary-historical as well. This study of "gender, power and resistance" features seven narratives by five women writing in the context of World War II: Dorothy Sayers, Stevie Smith, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, and Elizabeth Bowen. The analysis of these texts is underwritten, then, not just by the difference between "war stories" and "stories written in a time of war," but by the vexed questions in feminism that have sought to distinguish women from war, and the historian's difficult distinctions drawn between the two world wars that have demolished twentieth-century politics.

If World War I found memorable expression in the poetry, for example, of a Wilfred Owen, a Rupert Brooke, and a Siegfried Sassoon, the Second World War, Plain argues in the introduction, was much less distinguished by the literature that immediately memorialized it. Whether out of war-weariness, a "spiritual oppression," or because of political censorship. writers responded in a different register to the century,'s second global cataclysm. By thus emphasizing the difference that is made by repetition, Plain's examination of women's writings of the period also specifically challenges the received binarism that has traditionally associated men with war and women with peace. Against these persistent constructions of woman-"appropriated as symbol of peace and domesticity... [and/or] constituted [as] the object of battle"-Plain proposes instead an inquiry into the "impact of war's contradictions upon the texts of a diverse group of women writing in time of war" (p. ix-x). The selections of writers and texts are both diverse and coherent. Chosen because of the period in which they wrote (between the end of World War I and the culmination of its sequel), their generic affiliation as novelists, and their gender, Savers, Smith, Woolf, Mitchison, and Bowen nonetheless contribute differently to the critique of the definitions of "gender, power and resistance

Women's Fiction of the Second 1World lEar is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the "prelude to war," and the second describing strategies for "weathering the storm." Each section is comprised of three chapters, each of which focuses on a particular fictional narrative. Dorothy Sayers is the first of the three "pre-war (Cassandras" of the first section. In the chapter "Safety in Sanctity," Plain considers the "marriage of convenience" between Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey that culminates the series of detective novels featuring Wimsey. Wimsey himself is a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, whose sleuthing is read as a concentrated effort to repeat and expiate the guilt that remains ftom that experience and his having given orders that sent men to their deaths. From determining death on the battlefield to dispatching criminals to death on the scaffold, Sayers's Wimsey seeks both an "acceptance of the need for war" and aconcomittant"rejection of the nature of war." The psychoanalytic approach that underwrites this representation of the classic detective novel also informs Plain's subsequent explications of the other novels. The chapter "Faith in a 'Watching Brief"' describes Stevie Smith's fascination with the "religion of fascism." The Second World War forced into question both the turn to organized religion that followed the first, and the political fanaticism that provided for the second conflagration. In her reading of Smith's Over the Frontier, published in 1938, Plain focuses particularly on the relations between Fascism and its uses of language. The concern with language continues in the presentation of Virginia Woolf's two immediately pre-war works, The Year.s (1337) and Three Guineas (1938), as well as their original conception as a single project in the 1932 "Novel-Essay" (only posthumously published as The Paigiterg tr If the novel is characterized by its "ambiguity, dislocation, and fragmentation," the argumentative essay is overwritten by its "anger, polemic, and structure" (p. 84). But their very separation into two distinct texts is itself evidence, maintains Plain, of Woolf's effort to come to terms not only with the dichotony of masculine and feminine, but also with the apparent incompatibility of literature and politics.

It is Virginia Woolf who provides the connection between the "prelude to war" and the project of "weathering the storm." Part two of Plain's study begins with a reading of the "myth of our island history" in Woolf's last work, Between the Acts. The question is no longer "how...are we to prevent war?" but rather that other imperative posed bv the global confrontation, "how are we to survive war?" Virginia Woolf did not survive the war, and her suicide is considered as much a wartime casualty as the deaths of men on the battlefield. Her final novel, according to Plain, is nonetheless an attempt at regeneration through a "rc:discovery of the female line" that would reconstrue the "forces of history" that produced two world wars in a row. By comparison, Naomi Mitchison's "brave new world" in The Bull Gales (1947) looks for alternatives to the "hurting cores" that history has wrought. Written in a socialist realist register, Mitchison s novel would seem to contrast with Woolf's modernism, but, according to Plain, there is a likeness in their highly domestic approaches to historical narrative. And if Woolf's work was followed by her death, the completion of The Bull Calves was preceded by the death of Mitchison's baby. Plain concludes her study of women's fiction of the Second World War with a reading of Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day ( 1948) as a compelling example of the ways in which women's narratives contain a spectrum of responses to the "remorseless logic of war."