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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