Abstract
In an article on Katherine Mansfield, Con Coroneos describes war as “a very complex space … a mental and geographical practice constituted through actual battle sites and cultural and mental space.”1 Coroneos asks us to recognize that the geography of the First World War is incomprehensible if we ignore the cultural, ideological, and psychic dimensions informing spatial designations such as the Western Front and the home front. Over the last 30 years feminist scholars have used this perspective to analyze the gendered nature of First World War spaces, drawing our attention to the porous boundaries between seemingly distinct locations. Thus, women participated directly in war work, as ancillary workers behind the lines or in Britain, about 2,000,000 women engaging, for example, in munitions work alone.2 All British civilians experienced the realities of “total war,” whether through bereavement, rationing, the physical dangers of zeppelin bombing and munitions work, or the psychological effects of the home population’s mobilization in support of the war. However, the naming of actual spaces as either civilian or military, combatant or non-combatant, introduces a hierarchy in which home-front action and experiences always fall short of the true war experience. The barring of civilians from the war zone thus delimits a specific location and a set of experiences that belong only to men and that are associated with firsthand experience of combat conditions. The ample attention many feminist critics have given to the war’s version of separate spheres makes it unnecessary to revisit this point.3 However, these critics’ emphasis on the role of the actual physical territory of the British Isles in an imaginary topography of the war marks the “home front,” itself an ideological creation, as an important focus in any discussions of how British culture during and after the First World War represents the always contradictory and unstable geography of English nationalism.
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Notes
Con Coroneos, “Flies and Violets in Katherine Mansfield,” in Women’s Fiction of the Great War, ed. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate (Oxford University Press, 1997), 204. Resolution: Global
Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 49.
Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology (New York: D. Appleton, 1900–1), vol. 2, 736.
Paul Cornish, “Sacred Relics: Objects in the Imperial War Museum 1917–1939,” in Matters of Conflict: Material Culture and Memory and the First World War, ed. Nicholas Saunders (London: Routledge, 2004), 36.
Charles ffoulkes, Arms and the Tower (London: John Murray, 1938), 110.
Observer, 11 April 1920, qtd in Gabriel Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914–1930: A Study of “Unconquerable Manhood” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 169.
Sue Malvern, “War, Memory, and the Museums: Art and Artefacts in the Imperial War Museum,” History Workshop Journal 49 (2000): 178 n. 4.
Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 89. Resolution: Global
M.H. Port, Imperial London: Civil Government Building in London 1850–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 82–92, offers a good account of the longer history of London development in this area and its relationship to competing visions of London as the center of Britain’s empire.
W.F. Albright, “The Excavation of the Conway High Place at Petra,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 57 (February 1935): 18–26.
Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Richards, Commodity.
Prince Albert’s opening speech, 1851, Crystal Palace, qtd in Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: Art, Science, and Productive Industry (London and New York: Athlone Press, 2002), 30.
Qtd in G. Alex Bremner, ‘“Some Imperial Institute”: Architecture, Symbolism, and the Ideal of Empire in Late Victorian Britain, 1887–93,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 62.1 (March 2003): 52.
Tim Barringer, “Re-presenting the Imperial Archive: South Kensington and its Museums,” Journal of Victorian Culture 3 (1998): 357–73
Tim Barringer, Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture, and the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998), 11.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 139–43.
See also Terence Eagleton on traces of history as scars on the “auratic object,” qtd in Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 99 n. 106.
Sir Martin Conway, Foreword to Catalogue of the Imperial War Exhibition (1918), 3rd edition. IWM Admin. Files: Imperial War Museum Guidebooks, EN1/1/MUS/41 np.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 148.
Carolyn Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever,” in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory, ed. Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 13.
C. Reginald Grundy, Local War Museums: A Suggestion (London, 1917), 10–11. Resolution: Global Grundy first published his remarks as an essay titled “Local War Museums” in the art magazine Connoisseur in November 1916.
Arthur J. Brock, “The Re-education of the Adult: The Neurasthenic in War and Peace,” Sociological Review 10 (1918), 25–40. Qtd in Pick, Machine, 195.
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© 2015 Claire Buck
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Buck, C. (2015). Bringing the War Home: The Imperial War Museum. In: Conceiving Strangeness in British First World War Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471659_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471659_6
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