LECTURE TWO

The Great War, Gender War, the threat of Civil War in Ireland and the
Anglo-Irish War
Propaganda became a necessary instrument for controlling the enfranchised
citizens, which is
Why The First World War (or, in American English World War I) came to be called
The Great War, although the lie of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori had
been exposed (as seen in the war poems). The two power blocks that entered the
First World War were, on the one hand, the Central Powers (Germany, the AustroHungarian and Ottoman empires - old empires whose powers Germany had rallied
in order to oust the newer British Empire from power) and the Allies (or Triple
Entente: the French Republic, the British Empire and the Russian Empire; these
powers were seconded by Italy, in 1915, and by Japan, Belgium, Serbia, Greece,
Montenegro, Romania plus the Czech legions.) After two years of pitched battle with
volunteers, conscription became obligatory conscientious objectors only refused to
go to war the Great War, as the propaganda called it, ended. BUT SEE THE
INFORMATION IN MACDOWALLS BOOK ABOUT THE TWO WEAKNESSES, ONE OF
BRITAIN AND FRANCE, THE OTHER OF BRITAIN ONLY, WHICH CAUSED THE
OUTBREAK OF THE WAR: the failure of Britain and France to stop the advance of
Germany with The League of Nations (whose President Nicolae Titulescu was);
Neville Chamberlains appeasement of Germany
One of the important (international) changes in society and mentality due to the
First World War was also the gender war, as seen in the poem Glory to Women,
due to the changes in the occupational structure of society during the war and the
increase of the roles played by women in society (see Mc Dowall International
changes: the enfranchisement of women because the War had changed the face of
the world, granting power to women, who replaced men at home and who started to
fight (literally!) for emancipation (see the suffragettes in MacDowells book and on
the internet). Between 1906 and 1918 women were given the right to vote (ie, they
were enfranchised) first in Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, then, in the late
1920s, in Britain and in America. France, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Romania and
Yugoslavia did not join in this emancipation movement until after the Second World
War and Switzerland only enfranchised women in 1971. Womens emancipation
increased the rate of divorce and made women socially more visible and powerful. 1
Two more significant changes occurred at about the same time in Europe: the
breakup of Southern Ireland from the United Kingdom (AND SEE THE EXPLANATIONS
ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR AND THE GUERILLA WAR WHICH LED TO IRELANDS
DECOLONIZATION) and the withdrawal of Russia from war, which led to the
1

Students should include in their Portfolios the comparison between womens life before and
after emancipation, by placing side by side the two columns in MacDowals book indicated in
class.

appearance of the first peoples republic on the map of the world, the Soviet
Republic (a Bolshevik republic). The details and effects of the latter changes are
instructive for understanding twentieth century social and political history. Soviet
Russia, which engulfed the former Tsarist, i.e., feudal empire, was to become in the
course of the twentieth century a communist backward tyranny, which drew its
power from feudal economic, social and political relationships that conveyed
poverty and blindfolded obedience to the Eastern half of Europe after the Second
World War. The appearance of a new kind of state, a communist state, in Soviet
Russia was also a major factor of historical change in the latter half of the twentieth
century, in the wake of the Second World War, when Russian imperialism asserted
itself ready to divide the world in conjunction with America and Britain (see the
secret Conferences at Yalta and Potsdam which are responsible for offering East and
Central European countries, together with Balkan Countries, as a gift to Russia see
in Kazuo Ishiguros The Remains of the Day the secret agreements between the
Realpolitik, strong, merciless and actual rulers of the world obliquely presented
through the eyes of a very English butler who records without understanding
completely very many things, as a typically unrealiable narrator. 2

For Britain, the major change consisted in the rise of the Labour Party. The advent of
the Labour Party (a socialist offshoot of the Trade Unionist and Socialist movements
of the nineteenth century) and the establishment of the welfare state (which gave
financial and other kinds of assistance to people in need laid out workers families,
sick and elderly people) changed the political, social and cultural history of Britain.
Britain became a mixed economy, with state intervention in various public life
sectors (for example, by subsidizing national health and education) (see McDowal,
Chapter 22)

See the excerpts from the book in the seminar.

Echoes of the War in Major Twentieth Century Literature (Modernism)

Postwar British literature stands out owing to the historical sense (the feeling
that the whole past has a bearing upon the present, and that the present has a
word to say in answer to the past so as to make a difference to be important).
Modernism is the name of a literary trend that appeared after the First
World War as the literary form of the avant-garde art protest against
bourgeois art conventions: a revolutionary change in literature.
It had three main directions in Britain, illustrated by three famous modernist
authors:
-the use of twisted myth (myth stood on its head, myth read rebours, i.e. against
the grain) - used to impart a sobering view about the fate of the modern world:
William Butler Yeats The Second Coming;
-the use of tradition to deplore the present of exhausted postwar humanity: T. S.
Eliots dramatic monologueGerontion (1920) and fragments from his epic poem
The Waste Land (1922) - both speaking indirectly about war
-intimate presentations of postwar characters mind in stream of consciousness
novels: Virginia Woolfs war novel Mrs. Dalloway

I
The use of twisted myth in Yeatss horror poem The Second Coming
The figure of the gyre: the spiral of cyclical history, two cones generated one from
the base of the other and containing the contrary phases of history; when the
maximum expansion is reached, the cone of the contrary movement is about to be
generated and there are spectacular events and signs that all can see.
The reverse Biblical prophecy coming from the Spiritus Mundi, not from the
Christian Providence to confront humanity not with love but with a violent effigy
matching the heart of stone of Christians, still a heart of stone (a cruel, inflexible

heart) after twenty centuries: the rough beast slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be
born.
Notice the question mark: the interrogative tone of the poem leaves room for pity,
unlike what a curse would be, or a sadistic statement would connote.

The Second Coming

BY W ILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172062

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

II
T.S. Eliots Gerontion and The Waste Land

1. Gerontion
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.

HERE I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

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-Notice the allusions to heroic battles of antiquity (480 BC, Thermopilae,

The Hot Gates is "the place of hot springs" and in Greek mythology it is
the cavernous entrances to Hades"
-Notice the anti-Semitism and metropolitan mentality reflected by the
capital names where a Jew (spelt with a small case in the poem!) could
make a living to make/lend money
-Notice the depressing representation of the modern city: Rocks, moss,
stonecrop, iron, merds
What follows in the poem is a tragic/disenchanted biblical modulation speaking
of the alienation/estrangement of modern people from Christ and holiness in a
kind of prayer;.

Then we can read about the sense of condemnation as the characteristic mood
of people who live in modern times in the postwar period of modern history:

Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
Whats not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, whats thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

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The same feeling of oppression for people living in the City of London is
expressed in the most unusual modernist poem of the twentieth century: an
epic which has in it all the ages of English civilization and all the places or
voices that contribute reminiscences of war
The Waste Land
(Part I/The Burial of the Dead l. 60-76)

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, thats friend to men,

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Or with his nails hell dig it up again!

You! hypocrite lecteur!mon semblable,mon frre!

Compare this with life before the war as described at the beginning of The Waste
Land:

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archdukes,
My cousins, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

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5

-Notice the unpleasant ring of the German words (of, probably, a Jewish woman who
declares she is echt deutsch ), an aristocratic and metropolitan voice, closely
related to the Archduke (which evokes the beginning of the First World War
-Notice the pre-war urban pastimes and famous places of leisure in Munich and on
the German lake of Starnbergersee
Explicit echoes of the First World War in Part V: What the Thunder Said (l. 366-376)

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

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-Notice the similarity of murmur of maternal lamentation with the end of Siegfried
Sassoons Glory of Women and the images of the hooded hordes swarming over
endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth that evoke Wilfred Owens terrifying
images from Dulce et Decorum Est: Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

/Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, and Men marched asleep.
Many had lost their boots/But limped on, blood-shod./ All went lame; all blind;/Drunk
with fatigue

The echoes of war in Virginia Woolfs fiction. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) begins by
alluding to war and allow it to loom greater and more frightening because war is
contained in a shell-shocked mans mind. Septimus Warren Smiths madness
syndrome, which leads him to suicide, is the other half of the novels plot.
( a1)For it was the middle of June. The War was over,

except for some one like

Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice
boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady
Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand,
John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven over.
There exist references to war everywhere, beside the minds of the main
protagonists, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith.
- Richard Dalloway:

setting off with his great bunch held against his body to Westminster to say
straight out in so many words (whatever she might think of him), holding out
his flowers, I love you. Why not? Really it was a miracle thinking of the war,
and thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shovelled
together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle.
(i)

Miss Kilman an antipathetic character with sympathies for Germans and ready to
denigrate the English.
(iii)And she had

never been happy, what with being so clumsy and so poor.

And then, just as she might have had a chance at Miss Dolbys school, the war
came; and she had never been able to tell lies. Miss Dolby thought she would
be happier with people who shared her views about the Germans. She had had
to go. It was true that the family was of German origin; spelt the name

Kiehlman in the eighteenth century; but her brother had been killed. They
turned her out because she would not pretend that the Germans were all
villains when she had German friends, when the only happy days of her life
had been spent in Germany!

-The typical life story of a young man who had been in the war: Septimus Warren
Smith, the young man turned into a war veteran (old man):
*His sufferance caused by the war, which was supposed to make him mature:
(iv)Septimus was one of the first

to volunteer. He went to France to save an

England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeares plays and Miss
Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches the
change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football was produced
instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention,
indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name.
*The full reference to Mr. Brewer, Septimus Warren Smiths boss also contained a
powerful allegorical image of war:
(v).thinking very

highly of Smiths abilities, and prophesying that he would,

in ten or fifteen years, succeed to the leather arm-chair in the inner room
under the skylight with the deed-boxes round him, if he keeps his health,
said Mr. Brewer, and that was the danger he looked weakly; advised
football, invited him to supper and was seeing his way to consider
recommending a rise of salary, when something happened which threw out
many of Mr. Brewers calculations, took away his ablest young fellows, and
eventually, so prying and insidious were the fingers of the European War,
smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole in the geranium beds
*Septimus Warren Smith changed, too he could not feel anything: he was shell
shocked but continued his life, got married

(vi)when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far

from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a
friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably.
The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole
show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion, was still under

thirty and was bound to survive. He was right there. The last shells missed
him. He watched them explode with indifference. When peace came he was in
Milan, billeted in the house of an innkeeper with a courtyard, flowers in tubs,
little tables in the open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger
daughter, he became engaged one evening when the panic was on him that
he could not feel.
For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried, he had,
especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not
feel.
* Notice his callousness (his shell shocked feelings are the opposite of the Great War
propaganda) - during Sir William Bradshaws examination:

(vii) You served with great distinction in the War?

The patient repeated the word war interrogatively.

He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious
symptom, to be noted on the card.
The War? the patient asked. The European War that little shindy of
schoolboys with gunpowder? Had he served with distinction? He really forgot.
In the War itself he had failed.
Yes, he served with the greatest distinction, Rezia assured the doctor;
he was promoted.
And they have the very highest opinion of you at your office? Sir William
murmured, glancing at Mr. Brewers very generously worded letter. So that
you have nothing to worry you, no financial anxiety, nothing?
He had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by
human nature.
I have I have, he began, committed a crime
He has done nothing wrong whatever, Rezia assured the doctor. If Mr.
Smith would wait, said Sir William, he would speak to Mrs. Smith in the next
room. Her husband was very seriously ill, Sir William said. Did he threaten to
kill himself?
According to the doctors verdict (communicated after Septimuss death) - he suffered the
late/deferred effects of shell shock symptoms :
(viii)Some case, Sir William was mentioning, lowering his voice. It had its

bearing upon what he was saying about the deferred effects of shell shock.
There must be some provision in the Bill.
Sinking her voice, drawing Mrs. Dalloway into the shelter of a common
femininity, a common pride in the illustrious qualities of husbands and their

sad tendency to overwork, Lady Bradshaw (poor goose one didnt dislike
her) murmured how, just as we were starting, my husband was called up on
the telephone, a very sad case. A young man (that is what Sir William is telling
Mr. Dalloway) had killed himself. He had been in the army. Oh! thought
Clarissa, in the middle of my party, heres death, she thought.
He also had odd thoughts and hallucinations:

(x)The word time split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips

fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard,
white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an
ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered from behind
the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There
they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself
For Gods sake dont come! Septimus cried out. For he could not look
upon the dead.
But the branches parted. A man in grey was actually walking towards
them. It was Evans! [the man in grey was actually Peter Walsh, a character connected to
Mrs. Dalloway, the novels protagonist] But no mud was on him; no wounds; he was
not changed. I must tell the whole world, Septimus cried, raising his hand (as
the dead man in the grey suit came nearer), raising his hand like some colossal
figure who has lamented the fate of man for ages in the desert alone with his
hands pressed to his forehead, furrows of despair on his cheeks

London sites mentioned in The Waste Land: The City (part I; part III l. 173-185)
and in Mrs. Dalloway // The City Westminster
The City of Westminster i/wstmnstr/ is a London boroughoccupying much of the central area
of London, including most of the West End. It is located to the west of and adjoining the ancient City of
London, directly to the east of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and its southern boundary
is the River Thames. It is an Inner London borough and was created in 1965 when Greater London was
established. At its creation Westminster was awarded city status, which had been previously held by the
smaller Metropolitan Borough of Westminster.
Aside from a number of large parks and open spaces, the population density of the district is high. Many
sites commonly associated with London are located in the borough, including Buckingham Palace,
theHouses of Parliament, and 10 Downing Street. The borough is divided into a number of localities
including the ancient political district of Westminsteraround the Palace of Westminster; the shopping
areas around Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly and Bond Street; and the night time entertainment
district of Soho. Much of the borough is residential, and in 2008 it was estimated to have a population of
236,000. The local authority is Westminster City Council.

SEMINAR MATERIAL: prepare presentations of the following entries related to The

City of Westminster (from the internet): West End, parks and open spaces;
Buckingham Palace; the Houses of Parliament; 10 Downing Street; Bond Street;
Oxford Street; Soho.