| This study of selected American, British, and French World War I novels examines male bonding as a psychosexual and class dynamic emerging from the cultural alienation surrounding the Great War. Placed within the context of turn-of-the-century models of masculinity, this examination probes why comradeship arising out of this wartime experience transcended class, age, gender and political differences, ultimately revealing how the war disrupted not only established definitions of politics and class, but also notions of gender, masculine representation, and male homosocial relations.; Chapter 2, for example, reveals how John Dos Passos's One Man's Initiation: 1917 and Three Soldiers, as representative of post-war writing about the war, served as a referendum on late 19th-century romanticized conceptions of national and personal masculine self-assertion. These 19th-century constructions of masculine identity persuaded men, in part, to accept warfare as a viable method of proving their masculinity. As the analysis in this chapter asserts, post-war writing about the war argued for a radical and necessary reexamination of traditional locations of male identification, including warfare, and of male homosocial relations.; Similarly, Chapters 3 and 4, respectively, examine the relationship between national self-interest and masculine identity found in British and French motivation for fighting the war. An analysis of Richard Aldington's critique of British empire-making and "stiff upper lip" mentality reveals not only the ambivalence many men experienced about their culturally defined male role, but also the inherent contradictions in British conceptions of male homosocial and homoerotic relations exposed by the war. Moreover, an analysis of French involvement in World War I reveals how the mounting gender anxiety of men spurred on by the demoralizing defeat in the Franco-Prussion war and changes in the French social fabric which threatened an already weakened masculine identity pushed France into the forecasted showdown with Germany. In this study, the assessment of French war novels by Henri Barbusse (Under Fire) and Roland Dorgeles (Wooden Crosses) shows how concerns for regaining masculine bravado rapidly dissolve in favor of insuring the survival of oneself and one's comrades. |
