Soldier Heroes

British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities

Graham Dawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135089511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Soldier Heroes explores the imagining of masculinities within adventure stories. Drawing on literary theory, cultural materialism and Kleinian psychoanalysis, it analyses modern British adventure heroes as historical forms of masculinity originating in the era of nineteenth-century popular imperialism, traces their subsequent transformations and examines the way these identities are internalized and lived by men and boys.

Part I

Soldier heroes, adventure and the historical imagining of masculinities

What qualities are there for which a man gets so speedy a return for applause, as those of bodily superiority, activity and valour? Time out of mind strength and courage have been the theme of bards and romances; and from the story of Troy down to today, poetry has always chosen a soldier for a hero. I wonder is it because men are cowards in heart that they admire bravery so much, and place military valour so far beyond every other quality for reward and worship?

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)¹

One feature above all cannot fail to strike us about the creations of these story-writers: each of them has a hero who is the centre of interest, for whom the writer tries to win our sympathy by every possible means and whom he seems to place under the protection of a special Providence. If, at the end of one chapter of my story, I leave the hero unconscious and bleeding from severe wounds, I am sure to find him at the beginning of the next being carefully nursed and on the way to recovery; and if the first volume closes with the ship he is in going down at sea, I am certain, at the opening of the second volume, to read of his miraculous rescue — a rescue without which the story could not proceed. The feeling of security with which I follow the hero through his perilous adventures is the same as the feeling with which a hero in real life throws himself into the water to save a drowning man or exposes himself to the enemy’s fire in order to storm a battery. It is the true heroic feeling…[that] ‘Nothing can happen to me!’ It seems to me, however, that through this revealing characteristic of invulnerability we can immediately recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and every story.

Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-dreaming’ (1908)²

Had he [Churchill] been entirely serious, I wondered, when he said that ‘war is the normal occupation of man’? He had indeed qualified the statement by adding ‘war — and gardening’.

Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey (1945)³

1

SOLDIER HEROSES AND
THE NARRATIVE IMAGINING
OF MASCULINITIES

Masculinity and narrative in nationalist discourse

Within nationalist discourse, narratives about soldier heroes are both underpinned by, and powerfully reproduce, conceptions of gender and nation as unchanging essences. The importance of essentialist conceptions of gender to the discourse of traditional British nationalism becomes evident in the unlikeliest of contexts. Early in 1981, for example, the first Thatcher government introduced in Parliamentary Committee its British Nationality Bill, by which it sought to redefine the notion of British citizenship. Hitherto, this had been an automatic and inviolable right of babies born in Britain, regardless of the nationality of their parents. The bill provided for citizenship in future to be exclusively dependent upon that of the parents, but it broke with precedent in allowing transmission to occur through the mother as well as the father. The bill, which became an Act effective from 1 January 1983, was widely attacked as a racist measure designed to further restrict the citizenship rights of black people from the new Commonwealth and their descendents.¹ At one point in the Committee debate, however, the complex and contentious issue of British nationality in the post-colonial world appeared to hinge upon the question of whether or not women were able to fight for their country.

The context was an amendment moved by the Ulster Unionist MP Enoch Powell, who sought to delete from the bill all reference to transmission of citizenship through the mother.² Such provision, Powell argued, was based on two ‘dangerous and destructive…myths which are inconsistent with the nature of man and human societies’.³ The first of these myths is that nationality can be defined other than as a matter of allegiance to a nation-state, the ultimate test of which is military service ‘in the life and death conflict between nations’.

Nationality, in the last resort, is tested by fighting. A man’s nation is the nation for which he will fight. His nationality is the expression of his ultimate allegiance. It is his identification with those with whom he will stand, if necessary, against the rest of the world, and to whose survival he regards the survival of his own personal identity as subordinate.

The second myth is that of discrimination against women. That this military form of collective identification and expression is exclusively open to men rests, Powell suggested, not upon discrimination, but upon ‘the essential specialisation of the two sexes of our race’.⁴

One of the essential differentiations of function is that between fighting on the one hand, and the creation and preservation of life on the other. The two sexes are deeply differentiated in accordance with those two functions….One is specialised — to use an old-fashioned expression, but it will do for now — to bear arms, specialised for all the attitudes of killing and all the social emotions that are associated with the conduct of war. The other is specialised — however much it may sustain the society in that conflict — to the preservation and care of life.

Women are no less patriotic than men, no less committed ‘to the national cause’ and no less inclined to defend their country when under threat. The point is, Powell insisted, that the two sexes are specialized to serve their country by different means.⁵

Powell’s argument offers a perfect example from contemporary political debate of that apparently residual conception of the gendered nation which informed the discourse of nationalism during Britain’s imperial heyday. The confidence of its assertion here continues to derive from its philosophical foundation in two interdependent forms of essentialism. A racial, indeed Social Darwinist, conception of the essential being of the nation is at once grounded upon and helps to underpin supposedly ‘natural’ divisions of gender, in which womanhood and manhood are reduced to their fundamental, almost archetypal, functions of mother and soldier respectively.⁶ Labour MP John Tilley objected, unsurprisingly, that Powell’s argument bore relation neither to the realities of modern warfare nor to the real grounds for people’s sense of national belonging and identity; and Conservative MPs, too, pragmatically distanced themselves from the more archaic elements of Powell’s position. Although his amendment was defeated, it is apparent, reading the debate, that some of his arguments continued to exercise a deep emotional attraction for some Committee members. While Tilley denounced as sexist what he referred to, in a memorable phrase, as Powell’s ‘cavemanlike distinctions’ between men and women, the Home Office Minister, Timothy Raison, mounted a spirited refutation of Opposition claims that negative gender stereotyping contributed to discrimination against women. ‘What are now described as the stereotypes of womanhood and manhood embody, or are expressed by, some of the supreme ingredients of our civilisation. Therefore to try to destroy these notions that permeate our culture is nonsense.’ Despite this, Raison had to concede that times were a-changing in warfare:

At the heart of the old-style battle was simply the question of brute force. Of course courage, skill, tactics and all sorts of other things came into it, but the old-style fighting essentially depended on who was stronger. In those circumstances men would of course be stronger and their role in war would always be supreme. But nowadays it is changing.

I am not particularly keen to think of women playing an active part in the Armed Forces, but…it is now acknowledged that they may be able to use weapons…. Nowadays the finger on the trigger — or on the button for that matter — can equally well be male or female.⁷

Politically unwilling to follow Powell’s defence of traditional premisses to its logical conclusion, Raison’s deep unease at the implications of his own reasoning is evident, and is hardly assuaged by his subsequent reference to Mrs Thatcher herself, the current Commander-in-Chief of the British Armed Forces.

The idea of the martial woman is deeply transgressive of traditional gender identities.⁸ But it is also subversive of the essentialist conception of British national identity that lies at the heart of contemporary Conservatism. This is sustained by Whiggish historical narratives telling the story of the progress of the island race, never conquered since 1066, which established a bastion of freedom against tyranny and successfully defended it against successive waves of invaders, Spanish, French and German; which gave the world democracy, industry and free trade; and which exported its own superior way of life for the benefit of a quarter of the globe. This epic myth is held to express the very essence of national identity and the national character in the catalogue of its achievements. The master narrative of Britishness, it is constituted by numerous micro-narratives about the nation’s Great Men: the success stories of poets and politicians, administrators and engineers, and of course soldiers and sailors. With the occasional, troublesome exception of a Queen Bess, a Florence Nightingale or a Margaret Thatcher, the national epic has been predominantly a man’s story, and masculine prowess the dominant expression of national character.⁹

The theme of a national epic was a key motif in early Thatcherism. It underpinned an essentialist discourse of Britishness that had been strategically pivotal in establishing the New Right and securing its popular base during the 1970s. The Thatcherite inflection of the myth told of national decline from that previous greatness as a direct result of the Labour victory in 1945. This provided the foundation-stone for the Conservative ideological assault on social democracy, which bore fruit in the 1979 election and gave coherence to the programme of the Party in office. Versions of who ‘we, the British people’, essentially are and of our ‘common’ values and the sources from whence these are threatened, were mobilized across the spectrum of policy, from the economy and ‘law’n’order’ to immigration and defence. The Second World War itself featured prominently as the last truly heroic chapter in the story. Drawing on the vigorous popular memory of the war, pervasive in British culture during the 1970s and 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and other leading Conservatives evoked the ‘wartime spirit’ of Churchill, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, as embodying the essential, valued qualities of national character. Claiming themselves to be the heirs of that generation — with Thatcher, famously, cast in the role of Churchill — the Conservatives promised to restore the nation to its rightful course and open up a new chapter of the epic.¹⁰

In the elaboration of Tory defence policy (always a notable ground for the reworking of national memories), British rearmament during the second Cold War was legitimated in comparisons of the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany. Thatcher argued that ‘the strategic threat to Britain and her allies from an expansionist power was graver than at any time since the last war’, and that ‘the survival of our way of life’ was at stake.¹¹ Two weeks after the meeting of the Nationality Bill Committee, during a major Commons debate on defence policy, Enoch Powell spoke in support of the proposed upgrading of the British nuclear arsenal through the Trident programme, by arguing not about ‘technology or even military strategy’, but about national identity.

For the last thirty or thirty-five years, consciously or not, Britain has been seeking a substitute, something to replace what it imagined that it had lost; looking in one direction and another for a surrogate for Empire, for the means to believe that we are still strong and great as we used to tell ourselves in those years that we were…. The debate will be part of an attempt by this nation to rediscover its true self.

Against this disturbing theme of imagined loss — where Empire appears to assume the nostalgic shape of a beloved mother, source of succour and strength, the return to whom is yearned for amid substitutes that never suffice — Powell asserted that Britain is ‘inherently immensely strong’. Acquisition of a genuinely ‘independent’ nuclear capability (free from American interference) would guarantee that ‘we’ remain ‘invincible’ and ‘a formidable power in the world’.¹²

A year after these debates, the opportunity came for the British nation to rediscover itself, not by the flexing of nuclear muscles but in the traditional way, through what Timothy Raison had called ‘old-style battle’ in the Falkland Islands. In her notorious ‘victory speech’ at Cheltenham Racecourse, Thatcher could claim to have done what she had promised, reawakening the nation to its essential greatness of spirit.

When we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts. The people who thought that Britain could no longer seize the initiative for herself…. that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history. This generation can match their fathers’ and grandfathers’ abilities, in courage, and in resolution. We have not changed. When the demands of war and the dangers to our own people call us to arms, — then we British are as we have always been — competent, courageous and resolute.¹³

Military victory in the Falklands gave Powell’s archaic essentialisms a renewed lease of life, a fresh charge of emotional energy, exploited by Thatcher in her rhetorical shift of pronoun from ‘they’ to ‘we’. The outcome of the war enabled a withering, residual form of identity to develop a growing tip which offered an organic connection with the energies that transfigured the past. This was not a nostalgic version of the nation, but one that connected to feelings of loss and decline in order to transform them: Britain has not changed; the British people have shown that they still possess the essential qualities that have always defined who they are. In mobilizing a collective identification with this version of the nation, the demonstrable continuities lie with our ‘fathers and grandfathers’: the celebration of national greatness is simultaneously a celebration of national manhood.

Traditional narratives of men and the nation at war appeared once again capable of offering an effective orientation within real conflicts in the present. By this means, an essentialist conception of masculinity was reinstated as a powerful component in the contemporary repertoire of British nationalism, and one that any effective critique of that politics ignores at its peril. Underpinning this possibility lies the deep-rooted popular conception that narrative simply expresses an identity that really exists, independently of its representation. The resonance of narratives like those of the Falklands-Malvinas War depend upon a continuing willingness to see stories about British soldier heroes as expressions of a national essence.

Feminism, fantasy and narrative

Contemporary critical writing about masculinity that sets out not to celebrate but to understand it almost invariably takes its orientation from feminism. Feminist politics and the scholarship derived from it have been almost single-handedly responsible for ‘making men visible as gendered subjects’ — without which a book like this would have remained inconceivable.¹⁴ Yet its legacy has been an ambivalent one for men who, being sympathetic to feminist concerns and influenced by feminist thinking, have wanted to work through the implications for their own lives and identities.

Post-1968 feminism has placed a fundamental emphasis on the intimate correlation between the subjectivities and everyday behaviour of men and the social structures and institutions through which the collective subordination of women is effected. This important and productive connection, however, could all too readily freeze into a reductive equation in which masculinity and patriarchy became virtually interchangeable, with masculinity as such being understood as an expression of ‘male power’ within patriarchal society.¹⁵ This tendency is less evident in feminist accounts sensitive to the interconnection of patriarchal structures with other historically specific relations and identities (of class, race and nation) than in radical feminist accounts that seek to make gender their primary or exclusive focus. These locate the source of patriarchy in a transcultural masculine nature, understood as a kind of will-to-power stemming from male aggression and issuing in acts of violence and destruction. Female nature, by contrast, is associated with love, nurturance and the principle of life itself.¹⁶

Radical feminism was a particularly influential position during the early 1980s, when it gave rise to a distinctive analysis of the renewed Cold War arms race. This was described, not as the outcome of a power struggle between the capitalist West and the Soviet bloc, nor as the result of economic and organisa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Soldier heroes, masculinity and British national identity
• Part I Soldier heroes, adventure and the historical imagining of masculinities
• Part II The hero–making and hagiography of Havelock of Lucknow: Imperialism and military adventure in the nineteenth century
• Part III The public and private lives of T. E. Lawrence: The imperial adventure hero in the modern world
• Part IV Soldier heroes and the imagining of boyhood masculinity
• AFTERWORD: Soldier heroes and the cultural politics of reparation
• Notes
• Index