| For many British women writers, World War II catalyzed a state of provocative ambivalence: while it intensified revulsion for Nazi fascism and prompted identification with Britain's struggle for survival, it also renewed ironic contemplation of the incipient fascism in patriarchal culture. Although the call to cast out the mote in Britain's own eye gained prominence with Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, it surfaced, conspicuously or in disguise, with significant frequency in other women's war-related writing. Such texts revised the traditionally male genre of war narrative by mapping the psychic and domestic battlegrounds as the most fundamental, illuminating, and potentially transformative sites of conflict.; Stevie Smith, Katharine Burdekin, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Doris Lessing all expose and critique the adversarial epistemology and ontology shared by conventional gender systems and militarism--ways of seeing and being validated by traditional war stories. In each case, however, their resisting re-presentation is complicated by implicit and even open complicity with Britain's militarism and/or the insidious modes of perception their texts otherwise call into question. From the resultant clash of discourses there nevertheless emerges a persistent call for altered states: deconstruction of the state of mind that perceives and thereby prescribes reality in terms of perpetual hierarchy, opposition, and otherness; and, accordingly, transformation of contingent (individual and collective) states of being. For these writers, the "truth about war" is that we will continue to "make" war until we question and revise the larger ideological structures of which gender conflict and war are twin manifestations.; The ideologically saturated state of literary discourse becomes both the subject and object of their transformative impulses. Although firmly grounded in one literary tradition or another, each of the war-evoked texts examined here embodies alternative narrative strategies that function in one of two ways: to model and enact precisely the deconstructions the text invokes or, conversely, to undermine its own radical position. The latter instance demonstrates these writers' inevitable vulnerabilty to the very consciousness and discourses they would disclose and disarm. |
