Abstract
Among the most persistent myths of the First World War is that of an unbridgeable gap between the civilian population in Britain and those with direct war experience. Memoirs, narratives, and autobiographical fiction by writers such as Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Vera Brittain, and the war journalist Philip Gibbs, as well as post-war histories by veterans such as the historian Liddell Hart, are built not only on the presumption of radically different experiences, but also on distinct spaces in which those experiences occur.1 Men (and many women) went to war and came back transformed by an experience they could not effectively communicate. This image of an absolute divide between the war zones and home replicates the divided spaces of empire. Empire, for the British, was always overseas and elsewhere, spatially distinct from the domestic nation. As historians Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose argue in At Home with Empire, the idea of “home and away” operates as a structural trope in Victorian Britain’s imperial lexicon.2 War, like empire, seemingly happened overseas and elsewhere. This homology between the imaginary geographies of war and empire is, as we have seen in previous chapters, by no means coincidental. Nowhere is this more evident than in the process of imagining the war’s alterity within Britain’s home front.
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Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told (Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1920).
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Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War, 8. See Roper, Secret Battle, 10–14 for critical evaluation of Grayzel and other historians on the divide. Roper argues that Grayzel, Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), and others go too far in their argument that soldiers and civilians were able to bridge the gap.
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© 2015 Claire Buck
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Buck, C. (2015). Mapping Alterity on the Home Front: Kipling, Bagnold, and Allatini. In: Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471659_5
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