“Without sexual intercourse, frequent and pleasant”: Expurgating Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero

Frayn, Andrew

Abstract

Richard Aldington treads a delicate line in his Death of a Hero, between ‘writing in all the buggers and bitches’ and his need to be published and to live by the pen; he borrows from Djuna Barnes the method of asterisking expurgated sections, the visible scars to the text drawing attention to its mutilation. In the case of Aldington and his ‘obscene’ contemporaries (Rose Laure Allatini, Radclyffe Hall, D.H. Lawrence and others), it was not military experience which was taboo after the war, but sexuality and criticism of British social mores. The removal of sections on or allusions to sexual awakening, wedding-night sex, sexual pleasure and homosexuality radically skew readings of the novel towards restrictive, patriarchal norms which are critical, even fearful of change and liberation.

Citation

Frayn, A. (2019, June). “Without sexual intercourse, frequent and pleasant”: Expurgating Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero. Paper presented at Troublesome Modernisms: the British Association for Modernist Studies conference, London

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Troublesome Modernisms: the British Association for Modernist Studies conference
• Start Date: Jun 20, 2019
• End Date: Jun 22, 2019
• Deposit Date: Apr 26, 2023