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But it's not even real and I care about her and I care what she learns
I have just discovered that there will be a total lunar eclipse early tomorrow in my time zone between moonset and sunrise. It gave me instant Hilaire Belloc: My brother, good morning; my sister, goodnight. What a liminal thing for the orrery of the skies to do.
Earlier in the afternoon I was talking about Dorothy L. Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) with the natural result that I am re-reading The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. I had forgotten this exchange between Wimsey and Sheila Fentiman:
'But I must tell you about George.'
He looked at her, and decided that she really must tell him about George.
'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bully. One has an ancestral idea that women must be treated like imbeciles in a crisis. Centuries of the "women-and-children-first" idea, I suppose. Poor devils!'
'Who—the women?'
'Yes. No wonder they sometimes lose their heads. Pushed into corners, told nothing of what's happening, and made to sit quiet and do nothing. Strong men would go dotty in the circs. I suppose that's why we've always grabbed the privilege of rushing about and doing the heroic bits.'
'That's quite true. Give me the kettle.'
'No, no, I'll do that. You sit down and—I mean, sorry, take the kettle. Fill it, light the gas, put it on. And tell me about George.'
What Peter's comment about the privilege of heroically rushing about is not really glossing over, because in some ways the entire novel is about the war and its aftermath, is that strong men in the circs—himself included—did go dotty. Exactly that enforced helplessness is one of the conditions associated with trench warfare. And its archetypal result, shell-shock, shared in the best traditions of the shadow side or perhaps just the statistical realities of post-WWI Britain by the sleuth of the mystery with one of the suspects in the murder, the aforementioned George whose "queer fits" of imagining himself under the direction of the Devil are perhaps the counterpart to Peter's paralyzing "old responsibility-dream," is so conventionally feminizing a disability with all its hysteria and vulnerability that Pat Barker makes its explicit examination as such a cornerstone of Regeneration (1991):
Mobilization. The Great Adventure. They'd been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure – the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys – consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down [. . .] This reinforced Rivers' belief that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace.
And then I had to hunt down a passage in Rachel Mann's Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God (2017), which is blunter and more poetic still:
War always intersects with masculinity's deepest terror: its annihilation in death. The Feminine, the Other, Death itself threaten to overwhelm and generates terror. Yet, the Great War – principally understood as a war which was dominated by stasis and powerlessness in the face of high-explosive – doubles this threat. Not only is death threatened, but men are deprived of the means by which to face it 'like a man.' He is reduced to being done to rather than doing.
It is very frustrating more than a hundred years later to watch people trying to reimpress categories that have never been stamped and sealed. It is a staple of the mythos of World War I that it blew up time, but surely we've laid down some new strata since. Look at that moon.
Earlier in the afternoon I was talking about Dorothy L. Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) with the natural result that I am re-reading The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. I had forgotten this exchange between Wimsey and Sheila Fentiman:
'But I must tell you about George.'
He looked at her, and decided that she really must tell him about George.
'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bully. One has an ancestral idea that women must be treated like imbeciles in a crisis. Centuries of the "women-and-children-first" idea, I suppose. Poor devils!'
'Who—the women?'
'Yes. No wonder they sometimes lose their heads. Pushed into corners, told nothing of what's happening, and made to sit quiet and do nothing. Strong men would go dotty in the circs. I suppose that's why we've always grabbed the privilege of rushing about and doing the heroic bits.'
'That's quite true. Give me the kettle.'
'No, no, I'll do that. You sit down and—I mean, sorry, take the kettle. Fill it, light the gas, put it on. And tell me about George.'
What Peter's comment about the privilege of heroically rushing about is not really glossing over, because in some ways the entire novel is about the war and its aftermath, is that strong men in the circs—himself included—did go dotty. Exactly that enforced helplessness is one of the conditions associated with trench warfare. And its archetypal result, shell-shock, shared in the best traditions of the shadow side or perhaps just the statistical realities of post-WWI Britain by the sleuth of the mystery with one of the suspects in the murder, the aforementioned George whose "queer fits" of imagining himself under the direction of the Devil are perhaps the counterpart to Peter's paralyzing "old responsibility-dream," is so conventionally feminizing a disability with all its hysteria and vulnerability that Pat Barker makes its explicit examination as such a cornerstone of Regeneration (1991):
Mobilization. The Great Adventure. They'd been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure – the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys – consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down [. . .] This reinforced Rivers' belief that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace.
And then I had to hunt down a passage in Rachel Mann's Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God (2017), which is blunter and more poetic still:
War always intersects with masculinity's deepest terror: its annihilation in death. The Feminine, the Other, Death itself threaten to overwhelm and generates terror. Yet, the Great War – principally understood as a war which was dominated by stasis and powerlessness in the face of high-explosive – doubles this threat. Not only is death threatened, but men are deprived of the means by which to face it 'like a man.' He is reduced to being done to rather than doing.
It is very frustrating more than a hundred years later to watch people trying to reimpress categories that have never been stamped and sealed. It is a staple of the mythos of World War I that it blew up time, but surely we've laid down some new strata since. Look at that moon.
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He's a good guy and all but I don't think he will ever see for himself what I saw there.
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I don't think you were wrong to see it.
A few days ago, I got in the car and a woman was being interviewed on the radio about her research on American male attitudes toward health insurance, which had been carried out in a sequence of in-person interviews pre-pandemic and became dramatically relevant mid-pandemic as she had found again and again that a preponderence of white American men would reject any immediate benefit to themselves if (a) it was seen to benefit anyone else in the process (b) it implied the mildest hint of accommodation to the needs or desires of any other person. Anything that made them feel like less than absolute monarchs of their own self-defined liberty—which of course did not end where anyone else's nose began—was an unacceptable concession. It didn't matter if the proposed initiative was directly lifesaving! It didn't matter if they were offered it for free! And then, because masks and vaccines might protect other people, because other people needed them to be masked and vaccinated, she saw them begin to die. In absolute numbers, she stressed, the majority of victims of COVID-19 remain people of color, because of the effects of institutional racism on access to and quality of medical care and so on. But she witnessed a wholesale die-off of white dudes for exactly the reasons she had just been studying and even starting from a position of low sociopolitical naïveté, she still sounded as though the experience had been frankly weird.
(I do not mean to imply that your union member must be white. I don't have the impression that his very strong feeling is any respecter of color lines.)
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I have some color blind dudes in my program and have had to institute some standards so they can LITERALLY SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING and they are deeply uncomfortable with asking for accommodation. I get it but at the same time I make cracks about how no we WILL be accommodating white men in this program.
They put up with it from me because we've been in the field together but they absolutely can't hear it and won't tolerate it from, say, HR. They'd rather just not be accommodated than have the conversation. I really get it, because I'm often the same way, and also it grieves me.
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I am glad you have been able to make the accommodations happen in a way they can use. I understand that it's complicated. I watch some people in my own life not build in the structures that would really help them because it means they can't just do everything all by themselves.
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Oh that's brilliant. I wish more people would recognize this.
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You can distinguish between ways in which people should not be treated and but it's not fair when it happens to me.
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I get sucked back into her books for a reason!
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'No, no, I'll do that. You sit down and—I mean, sorry, take the kettle. Fill it, light the gas, put it on. --THANK YOU, PETER.
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I appreciate very much that the endgame of the series is working out what an equitable relationship between a man and a woman looks like, and it's not an easy process, and of course the solution has features unique to the couple in question, and they manage it.
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Instead, the domestic backlash of the '50's, then second-wave feminism?
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ETA- I think the real explanation for the 1950s is the Cold War, ie "whatever the USSR does culturally/socially, we have to do the opposite as much as possible!"
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Yes. It's all through literature and people's lives. It's in The Gentle Sex (1943)! I will never get over the egalitarian future that film assumes will naturally succeed the conditions of wartime and that Leslie Howard didn't live to be disillusioned about. Which reminds me, have you ever seen Great Day (1945)?
(George Fentiman is actually too disabled to hold down a job, although he keeps trying and losing them, so Sheila is the breadwinner of the household—as much bread as can be won working the till of a tea-shop—and the stresses of being desperately poor are not ameliorated by the stresses of George being desperately ashamed of the entire situation and mostly rowing about it with Sheila instead of trying to figure out how to support her as much as he can in their conventionally reversed positions, not that his society is giving him any help on that front. They obviously love each other, which makes it more difficult to watch. I don't know that we ever hear of them again in future books, but I always hoped they worked out. I had forgotten, too, that one of the epilogues of the novel is Marjorie Phelps very lightly and tactfully, but seriously, proposing to Peter Wimsey.)
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The other is that the traumatic event was done to you deliberately, or that the aftermath of it involved someone's deliberate choices, particularly if the person or people who did it were someone you trusted who betrayed you.
You can see why WWI was particularly bad for PTSD. So is incest.
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That tracks with my experience, which I thought for years I was being self-dramatizing about until it turned out that grad school really did clinically give me PTSD.
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Thank you!
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You're very welcome! Thank you for telling me so.