Motherfuckers: Gender, Sexuality and Otherness in First World War Fiction

Frayn, Andrew

Abstract

This paper argues that the visceral reactions, particularly of non-combatants, to the deaths of immediate relations and lovers, and the profound emotions evinced, can be understood through the lens of necrophilia. Necrophilia, building on the work of critics such as Lisa Downing and Patricia MacCormack, is not here understood as penetrative intercourse with the corpse, but as an erotic reaction to mortality. The primary case study is Richard Aldington’s novel Death of a Hero (1929), and I make links to other fiction from the post-war decade and situate these in the context of rituals of mourning and memorialisation.

Death of a Hero uses the structure of tragedy: the death of the protagonist, George Winterbourne, is announced on the first page. His mother’s reaction ‘was, strangely enough, almost wholly erotic’: this places alternative and taboo sexualities at the centre of the novel. Her reaction combines necrophilia, sadism, paedophilia and sexual otherness. The narrator describes her as ‘not only a sadist, but a necrophilous one’; she asserts (falsely) that she was ‘a child with a child’, in asserting her youth, and bemoans the loss of her ‘baby son’; her lover, Sam Browne, is the epitome of uniformed masculinity, but is othered sexually as a ‘sheik’, alluding to the E.M. Hull novel and the 1921 film adaptation starring Rudolph Valentino. Death is the source of social as well as sexual joy, as well as an intra-gender conflict between generations, as Winterbourne’s mother and wife dispute the right to the possessions which symbolise the absent body of the soldier. Similarly, Winterbourne’s wife resigns herself to his death on the Western Front, but both she and his mistress take him back as a lover whilst on leave.

The mother in First World War fiction is no longer nurturing but is, as Judith Ruderman puts it in her 1984 study of D.H. Lawrence, ‘devouring’. I end the paper by extrapolating the use of theories of necrophilia onto works such as D.H. Lawrence’s war stories and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy.

Citation

Frayn, A. (2012, October). Motherfuckers: Gender, Sexuality and Otherness in First World War Fiction. Paper presented at Modernism and Spectacle: Modernist Studies Association Conference, Las Vegas, NV

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Modernism and Spectacle: Modernist Studies Association Conference
• Start Date: Oct 18, 2012
• End Date: Oct 21, 2012
• Deposit Date: Apr 27, 2023