Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War

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Reconstructing the Body Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War A N A C A R D E N - C OY N E

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Ana Carden-Coyne 2009

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Carden-Coyne, Ana Reconstructing the body : classicism, modernism, and the First World War / Ana Carden-Coyne. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–954646–6 1. World War, 1914–1918—Influence. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Social aspects. 3. Civilization, Modern—20th century. 4. Great Britain—Civilization—20th century. 5. United States—Civilization—20th century. 6. Australia—Civilization—20th century. 7. War and society—Great Britain—History—20th century. 8. War and society—United States—History—20th century. 9. War and society—Australia—History—20th century. I. Title. D523.C295 2009 940.3’1—dc22 2009014877 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed and bound in the UK on acid-free paper by MPG Biddles Ltd, Kings Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–954646–6 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Doris (1 December 1902–12 March 2001) and Margaret (19 June 1896–7 September 1997)

Acknowledgements This book is the outcome of thinking initiated while studying in the Department of Archaeology, Classics, and Ancient History, at the University of Sydney. The six years spent there is the background from which I came to modern history. I am grateful to my teachers in those years, especially Professor Allen James for teaching me the joys of Theocritus, Professor Bill Ritchie for bringing depth to my comprehension of Greek tragedy, and Dr Suzanne Macalister for enlivening the Attic Greek language and injecting feminist theory into classical literature. Dr Jim O’Neil sustained me through years of focused Greek historical research, while Martin Stone and Dr Peter Brennan supported my interest in the Roman world and, later at the University of New South Wales, the establishment of the first Ancient History course convened with the most magnanimous colleague and mentor, Dr Nick Doumanis. I can never thank Nick and his wife Helen Tirekidis enough for their encouragement and enduring friendship. In the History Department at the University of Sydney, Dr Carole Adams inspired a generation of feminist historians, and Professor Stephen Garton and Professor Richard Waterhouse supported the project. In supervising my PhD dissertation I was privileged with Richard White’s guidance and generous spirit, while Professor Roy MacLeod blessed me with close readings, sharing his extraordinary knowledge of European intellectual and scientific history. I am indebted to their patience and patronage. Through the long transition from thesis to book, I am grateful for the numerous dialogues with Professor Jay Winter, as well as the deep engagement of the four anonymous Oxford University Press readers. At the University of Manchester, my scholarship has enjoyed exceptional support from colleagues at the Centre for the Cultural History of War—Professor Penny Summerfield, Professor Peter Gatrell, Professor Bertrand Taithe, and Dr Max Jones. In the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, Professor Laura Doan has sustained me through many of the complexities encountered when publishing on war, sexuality, and gender. My role in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (CIDRA), with Professor Frank Mort and Professor Janet Wolff, encouraged my interdisciplinarity, and I am thankful for colleagues in other disciplines across the School of Arts, Histories, and Cultures, especially Dr Polly Low (Classics), Professor Amelia Jones (Visual Studies), and Professor James Thompson (Drama). The research for this book was conducted in Europe, the United States, and Australia over many years, including collections in the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts, the Costume Institute (Metropolitan Museum of New York),

Acknowledgements

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the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), New York Public Library, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, the British Library, the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and the Tate Gallery. In France, the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, the George S. Pompidou Museum of Modern Art, and the Musée Picasso provided material. In Australia, the Mitchell Library (State Library of New South Wales), the La Trobe Library (Victorian State Library, Melbourne), the Australian National University Library, the National Library of Australia, and the National War Memorial (Canberra) provided much empirical data. The staff of the Schaeffer Library, and Image Library of the Power Institute (University of Sydney) assisted the project. A number of medical libraries offered important collections, including the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS), Melbourne, the Wellcome Library, London, and the Royal College of Surgeons, London. Special thanks to Catherine Green (RACS), Rachel Cross (Wellcome), and Dr Andrew Bamji, Curator of the Gillies Archive, Sidcup Hospital. Early travel to these resources was the result of a number of awards: the Farrington-Thorpe Scholarship, the John Fraser Travelling Scholarship, and an Australian Postgraduate Research Award. I am grateful for early insightful conversations with Professor Joanna Bourke, and her continued deep engagement with my research. Dr Catherine Moriarty, initially at the Imperial War Museum, has also supported this project. The seminar I gave on ‘The Cult of the Female Body’ at New York University was beneficial for the exchange of ideas. I am thankful to Professor Marilyn Young, Director of the Department of the History of Women and Gender, for arranging this. Thanks to Jane Henderson for editorial assistance; and to Assistant Commissioning Editor Seth Cayley and Commissioning Editor Rupert Cousins at the Oxford University Press. Long-standing friends supported this project since its early days, especially Uriel Macklin and his extraordinary artistic and graphics mind, Ros Deaker, Kath Fielden, Michael Wolf, Chris Photakis, Pauline Penklis. Dr Julie Anderson has been my gemstone in Manchester and partner in disability thinking. I am thankful to Dr Monica Pearl for her magic: warm laughter and editorial wit. I am especially grateful to Dr Patty O’Brien for sharpening my ideas about colonialism, sexuality, and primitivism and over a decade of friendship. Dr Andreas Dafinger devoted time to reading and commenting; thank you for being so proud of me. The constant support of my beloved sister Vida, my second mum Jill Coyne and my brother Kym Notermans, has grounded me in love. Finally, I must thank my parents William Coyne and Joan Carden for their unfailing belief, profound conversations, and loving generosity. I dedicate this book to my great Aunty Doris Lewis and her sister, my adored grandmother, Margaret Ethel Carden. Growing up in the era of the First World War, with three brothers returning to rural Tasmania bearing its scars,

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Acknowledgements

these young women became sustaining influences of independence and abiding humour. Some parts of this book have been published in Humanities Review, 10 (2004), 40–50; Journal of Australian Studies, 63 (2000), 138–49; and in Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier (eds), Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005), 207–28.

Contents List of Illustrations

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Introduction

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1. Reconstructing Civilization in Post-war Culture

22

2. Culture Shock: Trauma, Pleasure, and Visual Memory

59

3. Monumental Classicism: Healing the Western Body

110

4. The Sexual Reconstruction of Men

160

5. The ‘Golden Age of Woman’

213

6. Performing the New Civilization

265

7. Healing and Forgetting

311

Select Bibliography Index

320 333

List of Illustrations 2.1 Captain Hewatt, Shell Shock, London Fourth General Hospital Gazette. Courtesy of the Wellcome Trust, London.

61

2.2 Inside cover, Newnes Illustrated (2 May 1915). Courtesy of the British Library.

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2.3 C. R. W. Nevinson, The Doctor (1916). Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.

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2.4 William Orpen, To the Unknown British Soldier in France (1922). Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.

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2.5 ‘Repair of the Cheek’. Harold D. Gillies, Plastic Surgery of the Face (London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 63. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

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2.6 Henry Tonks. Private Ashworth. Courtesy of the Royal College of Surgeons, London.

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2.7 Daryl Lindsay, Corporal Waldron. Watercolour drawing. Courtesy of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons.

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2.8 Burn injury and surgical skin map. Harold D. Gillies, Plastic Surgery of the Face (London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 365. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. 101 2.9 Patient with septic amputation; recovered patient, amputee. Basil Hughes and H. Stanley Banks, War Surgery: From Firing Line to Base (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1918), 194–5. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. Every effort has been made by the author to contact the rights holders and to obtain permission for this reproduction. 104 2.10 Shoulder wound and healed shoulder. R. C. Elmslie, The After Treatment of Wounds and Injuries (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1919), 94–5. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

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3.1 Edwin Lutyens Cenotaph and Stone of Remembrance, Manchester. Courtesy UK National Inventory of War Memorials (left); Photograph by Lee Hamer (right). 117 3.2 Giles Gilbert Scott and Henry Pegrum, Preston Memorial, 1926. Photograph by Lee Hamer.

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3.3 Lorimar Rich, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington, Washington, DC. Collection of the author. 136

List of Illustrations

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3.4 Francis Derwent Wood, Machine Gun Corps Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, London, 1925. Courtesy United Kingdom National Inventory of War Memorials, record 2129. 138 3.5 Rayner Hoff, Anzac, Exterior Seated Figures. Anzac Memorial, 1931–4, Hyde Park, Sydney. Collection of the author.

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3.6 Rayner Hoff, The Sacrifice, bronze statue, 1931–4. Collection of the author.

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3.7 Ferdinand Blundstone, Stalybridge Memorial, 1921. Photograph by Lee Hamer.

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3.8 Rayner Hoff, The Crucifixion of Civilization, 1914 (1932). Every effort has been made by the author to contact the rights holders and to obtain permission for this reproduction. 149 3.9 Charles Sargeant Jagger, Royal Artillery Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, 1925. Collection of the author. 156 3.10 Close-up on corpse, Jagger memorial. Collection of author. 4.1 Clarence Weber as Laocoon. Cover, Weber and Rice’s Health and Strength College Annual (Melbourne, 1925). Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

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4.2 Lionel Strongfort Advertisement. ‘Shot to Pieces in the World War’, Physical Culture ( July 1924), 4. Every effort has been made by the author to contact the rights holders and to obtain permission for this reproduction. 181 4.3 Wounded soldiers demonstrating rehabilitation exercises. In Colonel H. Deane, Gymnastic Treatment for Joint and Muscle Disabilities (London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton, 1918). Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria. 184 4.4 Light Metal Prosthesis, British Ministry of Pensions. In E. Muirhead Little, Artificial Limbs and Amputation Stumps: A Practical Handbook (London: H. K. Lewis and Co., 1922), 245.

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4.5 Mackay Worker’s Arm with rubber hand. In E. Muirhead Little, Artificial Limbs and Amputation Stumps: A Practical Handbook (London: H. K. Lewis and Co., 1922), 114.

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4.6 Diagram of cinematized stump, British Ministry of Pensions. In E. Muirhead Little, Artificial Limbs and Amputation Stumps: A Practical Handbook (London: H. K. Lewis and Co., 1922), 119. 197

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4.7 Rockwell Kent, The Pinnacle (1929). In Vanity Fair (Feb. 1929), 59. Courtesy of Plattsburgh State Art Museum. Every effort has been made by the author to contact the rights holders and to obtain permission for this reproduction. 200 4.8 Photograph of Norman Hockey, Marrickville. In Health and Physical Culture (May 1930), 34. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. 201 4.9 Photograph of Walter J. Lyons, Australian and World record weightlifter. In Withrow’s Physical Culture (Apr. 1923), 182. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. 204 4.10 Photograph of Kenneth Terrell and Al Kemp. Photograph of Harry Stevens. Physical Culture (Dec. 1920), 52. 205 4.11 Photograph of F. Collett, Maitland. In Health and Physical Culture (Mar. 1930), 33. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. 5.1 Female Atlas. Cover, Health and Physical Culture (Dec. 1929). Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

210 226

5.2 Advertisement. E. M. Lorimar and C. M. Webb’s Open-air Roof Gymnasium, ‘2nd position of the Archer’; The Home (Sept. 1920). Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. 232 5.3 Margaret Morris, ‘Dance of the Bow’. In Margaret M. Morris, Margaret Morris Dancing (London: Kegan Paul, 1926), plate IV. Courtesy Fred Daniels and the International Association of Margaret Morris Movement. 237 5.4 Dorothy Thornhill, Resting Diana (1931). Courtesy Australian National Gallery.

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5.5 Paul Thévanaz’s ‘Modern Diana’. In Vanity Fair (Feb. 1922), 31. Courtesy of Condé Nast publications. Every effort has been made by the author to contact the rights holders and to obtain permission for this reproduction. 239 5.6 Rayner Hoff, Australian Venus, 1927, marble. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

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5.7 Venus Cover Girl. Cover, The Home, 14 (8 Mar. 1933). Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

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5.8 Venus facial massage. In Helena Rubenstein, Beauty in the Making: The Stepping Stones Thereto (London: 1925). Courtesy of the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, New York.

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6.1 Ruth St Denis as ‘The Spirit of Freedom’ (1918). Courtesy of the Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library. Photo by Nickolas Muray, copyright Nickolas Muray Photo Archives.

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6.2 ‘Two Beautiful Physical Culture Girls’, Health and Physical Culture ( July 1930), 33. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

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6.3 Helen Moller’s students leaping on the beach (1918). In Helen Moller, Dancing with Helen Moller (London: John Lane Co./Bodley Head, 1918). Courtesy of the British Library.

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6.4 Nike. Cover, Physical Culture (1920). Every effort has been made by the author to contact the rights holders and to obtain permission for this reproduction. 287 6.5 Female footballer leaping. Cover, Physical Culture (Dec. 1920). Every effort has been made by the author to contact the rights holders and to obtain permission for this reproduction. 288 6.6 Peggy St Lo, the ‘Perfect Girl’. League of Health and Beauty, England. In Mary Bagot Stack, Building the Body Beautiful: The Bagot Stack Stretch and Swing System (London: Chapman and Hall, 1931). Courtesy of the British Library. 289 6.7 Gertrude Cahill, Greenwich Village Follies, Physical Culture (Mar. 1924), 42. Every effort has been made by the author to contact the rights holders and to obtain permission for this reproduction. 296 6.8 Madelyn Killeen and Marie Prevost, Physical Culture (Oct. 1924), 43. Every effort has been made by the author to contact the rights holders and to obtain permission for this reproduction. 297 6.9 Mary O’Connor of New South Wales, Australia. Health and Physical Culture (Aug. 1929), 8. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. 298 6.10 Margaret Morris, Poise (1926). In Margaret M. Morris, Margaret Morris Dancing (London: Kegan Paul, 1926). Courtesy Fred Daniels and the International Association of Margaret Morris Movement. 299

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Introduction For a young man all is decorous When he is cut down in battle and torn with the sharp bronze, and lies there dead And though dead still all that shows about him is beautiful. King Priam, in Homer, Iliad. Some say a host of horsemen, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the dark earth; but I say it is what you love. Sappho, Fr. 16.¹

After the battle of Bullecourt in 1917, artist Mervyn Napier Waller returned to Australia, his right arm amputated to the shoulder. Artist Christian Waller—his wife—nursed him and financially supported him as a commercial illustrator. With his left hand, Napier Waller painted a golden age of peaceful civilization and industrious rebuilding: muscular, homoerotic bodies transcend the horror of war, as seen on the cover of this book. Inspired by classical ideals of mind–body unity and Theosophical striving to perfect humanity, Napier Waller’s physical utopia visualized the affects of survival and hope. Beauty lived within and beyond the body, redeeming its pain. The First World War destroyed human bodies on an unprecedented scale. Modern technologies mangled faces, blew away limbs, and ruined nerves. Ten million dead, twenty million severe casualties, and eight million people with permanent disabilities, modern war obliterated with unsparing, mechanical efficiency.² The onslaught upon bodies and minds, and its impact upon European and Anglophone culture, is the concern of many compelling histories. Mass injury and mutilation shocked families, haunted personal memories, and initiated ¹ From Page DuBois, ‘Sappho and Helen’, in Ellen Green (ed.), Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1996), 80: quot. Grace M. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence: Death and the Displacement of Beauty (London: Routledge, 2004), 59, 63. Iliad, trans. R. Lattimore (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964). ² Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001), 1.

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Reconstructing the Body

new medical and social services. Enormous suffering and grief were terrifying consequences of mass warfare, and yet this truth is not the entire story. People also rebuilt their lives, their communities, and their bodies. This book investigates the cultures of resilience and the institutions of reconstruction in Britain, Australia, and the United States. Immersed in efforts to heal the violence and triumph over adversity, reconstruction motivated politicians, professionals, and individuals to transform themselves and their societies. This book investigates shared responses in Anglophone cultural, medical, and commercial networks that targeted the reconstruction of the body. Bodies were not to remain locked away in tortured memories. Instead, they became the subjects of outspoken debate, the objects of rehabilitation, and the desirable commodities of global industries. Bodies were strewn across pages of novels and magazines, as subjects of loss and retrieval, of degradation and rehabilitation, but also as new forms of manufactured desire. Beauty, aesthetics, and pleasure were the passionate quests of artists and ordinary people, even through the influenza pandemic and the Depression to the early 1930s. Hoping to make themselves whole again, men and women harnessed inspiration from the classical imaginary in conjunction with modernism, mass culture, and the dynamic spirit of transformation. The classical canon—Graeco-Roman art and architecture, philosophy, and literature—is a perpetual current in western history. In the aftermath of the First World War, classical imaginary was rehabilitated, not just as a familiar cultural vocabulary or retreat to the safe past, but as a relevant set of values regarding beauty, symmetry, and civilization.³ Since classicism was a universal aesthetic aimed at resolving paradoxes harmoniously, it offered a special understanding of the world in violent conflict.⁴ Through its established visual schema, such messages were especially conveyed through bodies. At the same time, the merging of the classical tradition with modern attitudes infused corporeality with the vibrant gesture of reconstruction. Many of those in charge of reconstruction were classically educated in the arts and humanities; not just artists and dancers, writers and scholars, but also soldiers, statesmen, surgeons, and memorial officials. After the war, why did they reach for the symbols of classicism and modernism? With these powerful cultural tools for rebuilding civilization, how was the body re-imagined? This book investigates classicism in relation to the principles of modernism (a paradigm that valued crisis) and its visual cultures, and within the historical context of modernity ³ Colin J. Horne, ‘The Classical Temper in Britain: Origins and Components’, in John Hardy and Andrew McCredie (eds), The Classical Temper in Western Europe, Papers from the annual symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983), 62. ⁴ Anthony Stephens, ‘Weimar Classicism as a Response to History’, ibid. 87.

Introduction

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(an era of progress and transformation).⁵ Modernity had destroyed the body and mind in war—how, then, could it assist now? Modernism injected into classicism the cultural energy required for post-war reconstruction. Sexuality and heightened bodily experiences provided succour and, crucially, a new excitement for life. Artistic, commercial, and political endeavours worked to reshape society through the body. For instance, artists deeply affected by the war, some also wounded and disabled, featured classical bodies in war memorials, modern art, and graphic design. This book locates the influence of classicism and modernism amongst surgeons and rehabilitation therapists, and commemoration authorities, as well as exercise enthusiasts, beauty therapists, dancers, and sexual reformers. Additionally, it considers the impact of reconstruction on popular body industries. How was reconstruction implicated in selling images of sexual freedom and self-transformation, alongside bodily discipline? Classical and modern ideals assisted people wanting to renew their bodies through the living principles of balance and dynamism in the aftermath of war. Reconstructing the body embraced the individual, the communal, and the political in diverse ways that continually drew upon the classical and modern. This book asks how they infused cultural and medical practices aimed at overcoming the disabling experiences of war. Transforming the realities of war required welfare programmes, government initiatives, and the cooperation of charities and voluntary organizations. Ordinary citizens from the broadest range of social classes, religions, races, and ethnicities participated in the war. Hence, reconstruction required psychological resolve and social commitment to bury the painful past and overcome its residues. But, reconstruction was not simply an effect of imagery and discourse—there were also strong desires across Anglophone communities to resist suffering and to seek out life’s pleasures. This book considers how the political and medical purposes of reconstruction joined wider community needs to reconcile the war with peacetime. A central question is how reconstruction mediated mourning and recovery: how could classicism and modernism facilitate remembering the war while healing from its wounds? Solving this conundrum is the key to understanding the different ways that individuals interacted with the visual and performance cultures of reconstruction. Reconstructing the Body examines the impact of war in Anglophone medical, cultural, and commercial networks that aimed to rebuild bodies by drawing ⁵ Hal Foster, ‘Postmodernism: A Preface’, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), p. ix; Henri Lefebvre, ‘Modernity and Modernism’ (trans. Paul Smith), in B. H. D. Buchloch, Serge Guilbaut, and David H. Solkin (eds), Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), 2.

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inspiration from modernism and classicism. This book questions why post-war recovery in Anglophone societies was accompanied by an unrelenting drive to reconstruct, perfect, and beautify the human body. Classicism provided what I describe as an ‘aesthetics of healing’ and modernism an erotic promise of the future. The First World War was a spectacularly visual war. Images of mutilated and reconstructed bodies permeated literature, medical texts, and humanitarian publicity, and were displayed in visual culture and museum exhibitions. This book sustains an interdisciplinary approach to the impact of the war on the body in Britain, Australia, and the United States, consulting a range of military medical, commercial, and cultural sources. By weaving together scholarship in visual culture, the sociology of art, and classical antiquity, this book examines new relations between the past and the present forged in Anglophone societies after the war. In order to grapple with this global project of reconstructing the body, current studies into disability and queer theory inform the investigation of bodily liberation and enabled passing. Such studies illuminate the post-war period, when sexual practices, physical appearances, and disability encountered similar medical, commercial, and cultural interventions. While veterans secured identities and pensions by differentiating their conditions from the congenitally or industrially disabled, the approach of this book is to conceptualize the interrelation of disabled and enabled bodies. Across the Anglophone world, the war produced common reactions as disabled soldiers literally embodied the fears of enabled people. These fears were mirrored in government concern about economic reliance on the state; social anxieties about loss of independence, helplessness, and passivity; social and medical incentives for productivity.⁶ As inseparable constructions, disabled/enabled bodies informed what I refer to as ‘embodied citizenship’: the physical, visible, sexual, and reproductive aspects of all men’s and women’s lives. After the war, citizenship was shaped in the biological terms of health and reproductive competence, in the social terms of sexuality and beauty, and in the economic terms of bodies that produce and consume. Performance and choreography studies inform this book’s theoretical engagement with questions of gender, mobility, power, and agency. Drawing together different disciplines (interdisciplinarity), connecting the ancient and modern worlds (inter-temporality), and crossing Anglophone cultural networks (transnationalism), are imperfect practices. These approaches, however, offer creative possibilities and exciting scholarly conversations, shaping this investigation of the post-war reconstruction of the body, beauty, and sexuality through modernism and the classical imaginary. ⁶ Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky (eds), The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), 7.

Introduction

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T H E B O DY A N D T H E C U LT U R A L I M PAC T O F WA R To understand the recycling of classicism after the First World War, it is important to appreciate that the ancient past is never static; it is continually reinterpreted and has generated multiple modernities. The longer currency of the ancient past provided the cultural ancestry that influenced the re-articulation of classicism in response to the war. Ancient historian James Porter states, ‘the bodies of Greece and Rome are in us’,⁷ and hence I begin with the suggestion that historical continuities are moulded into and performed through the body. Comprehending the social role of beauty in classical Greece offers important clues to its sustained appeal in western thinking about appearances. Beauty contests in ancient Greece defined difference and rewarded excellence. Manly beauty was associated with physical strength, whereas feminine beauty distinguished respectable women.⁸ Beautiful bodies were idealized in life and in death. While the disabled body was shunned, the dead hero achieved a ‘beautiful death’, as expressed in the opening quotation from King Priam.⁹ In the Homeric poem, the Iliad, horrific wounds symbolized virtue and social status.¹⁰ The classical canon defined both the image of the fallen warrior and the public meaning of beauty, inspiring modern warrior myths, commemoration, and commercial beauty culture. What, then, was the impact of disability on society after the First World War? What were the economic, gendered, and class values of beauty? How did these values impact on disabled and enabled embodiment? While Priam ennobled the beauty of violence, Sappho called to the many possibilities of ‘what you love’.¹¹ Scholarship on the war disabled of Britain, Europe, and the United States has focused on vocational retraining, voluntary institutions, and state welfare services, as well as political unrest and social protest, and the way that national differences inflected class and race relations. This book considers the wider impact of disability on embodiment and reconstruction. What role did dead bodies play in commemoration? Was the iconic value of the warrior his eternal beauty? If the war was to be remembered in rituals and monuments, where ⁷ James I. Porter (ed.), Constructions of the Classical Body (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 15. ⁸ Richard Hawley, ‘The Dynamics of Beauty in Classical Greece’, in Dominic Montserrat (ed.), Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 37–56. ⁹ Christine F. Salazar, The Treatment of War Wounds in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ¹⁰ Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘A ‘‘Beautiful Death’’ and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic’, in Froma I. Zeitlin (ed.), Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 50–74. ¹¹ Sappho, Fr. 16, trans. DuBois.

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were the disabled ex-servicemen? How did the social value ascribed to bodies affect medical treatment and the reform of citizens? Across Anglophone societies, disabled rehabilitation shifted between a ‘culture of caregiving’ and ‘aggressive normalization’; men were often denied the right to ‘regret and lament’.¹² How did men respond—were they resentful, compliant, or resistant? Some disabled men formed new identities as ‘limbless soldiers’ or ‘shellshocked veterans’, insisting their wounds were heroic. Families and welfare groups distinguished servicemen from ordinary cripples and lunatics, lobbying for special treatment commensurable with their sacrifice.¹³ Heroic discourses had long dominated British masculine identities, but they were reconfigured after the war owing to the extent of disability.¹⁴ Disabled organizations supported the ideal of disabled heroes, but frowned upon begging, drinking, or public displays that triggered social antipathy or made their ‘otherness’ too noticeable. Given the complex responses to the body by disabled and enabled people, why did popular body cultures appeal to men after the war? Was the spectacular performance and consumption of male sexuality ‘therapeutic’? Emphasis on industrially productive, enabled citizens occurred at the same time that the classical icon of the sacrificial warrior was democratized. The warrior’s new image appeared as nations had to account for the war’s casualties and ameliorate the grief. However, when disabled soldiers rejected retraining and the pressure to ‘overcome’, they were perceived as a social threat. Gesturing resistance with their ‘ungrateful bodies’, activists provoked: ‘what is normalcy?’¹⁵ This was a period when norms in bodies and sexualities were coming into being. Norms were debated but not yet fixed; the ‘hetero’ and the ‘homo’ were not clear binaries; frank discussions about sexual and personal fulfilment were possible because bodies, genders, and sexualities had many possibilities—identities were not secure, roles were not predetermined, embodiment was adaptable. Censure and resistance coexisted with the normalizing techniques of medicine and ¹² Jeffrey Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2004); Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001); David A. Gerber (ed.), Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 295–321; Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 85–8. ¹³ Fiona Reid, ‘Distinguishing between Shell-shocked Veterans and Pauper Lunatics: The ExServices’ Welfare Society and Mentally Wounded Veterans after the Great War’, War in History, 14 (2007), 347–71. ¹⁴ Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994). ¹⁵ Jennifer Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Ana Carden-Coyne, ‘Ungrateful Bodies: Rehabilitation, Resistance, and Disabled American Veterans of the First World War’, European Review of History, 14, 4 (2007), 550.

Introduction

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visual culture. Orthopaedic surgeon and Medical Director of the New Jersey Rehabilitation Commission (1925) Howard Kessler noted at the time: There is no such entity as a normal person . . . the concept of the normal being is a social judgement and represents a series of physical and psychological traits not inconsistent with social prejudices and attitudes . . . it is very difficult to tell what the term ‘unfit’ means.¹⁶

The war amplified the vulnerability of the mind and body; yet this made classical ideals and images more appealing. In the nineteenth century, the search for normalized models saw physical states categorized into variations of the typical (normal) and different (pathological). With the rise of statistics, ‘normal’ entered medicine and health, but it was not yet a firm ideological tool. Measuring fitness standards in the Boer War and the First World War broadened the focus on ‘unfit’ physical and mental groups in Britain. In both periods the results of medical exams fuelled fears of ‘deterioration’, generating national fitness campaigns. In the US Army, too, draftees’ physical standards indicated that few people were ‘completely normal’. Yet intelligence tests were developed in psychology in order to standardize minds.¹⁷ War exacerbated older beliefs about problem populations, but also provided a cache of bodies for professionals to study. By contrast to these normalizing techniques, classicism offered a holistic account of the mind and body. More flexible than the binaries of normal and pathological, many parts made up the whole. In Germany, neurologist Kurt Goldstein insisted that brain-damaged soldiers could lead meaningful and productive lives. Similar views were held in rehabilitation networks across the Anglophone world; pressure was exerted on social reintegration rather than segregation in care homes. While the mechanistic or ‘biomedical’ account of the body separated disease and organs from the whole person, ‘holistic’ medicine (a term coined in 1926) saw the body as a vital unity—a view that gained new force after the First World War.¹⁸ The appeal of the classical ideal of mind–body harmony lay in how it attributed social values to bodily facts; the war disabled had a place in civilian society; sexuality was regenerating. ¹⁶ Henry Howard Kessler, The Crippled and the Disabled: Rehabilitation of the Physically Handicapped in the United States (1935; Manchester, NH: Ayer, 1980), 4. (International Labor Office (p. 6)). France, Britain, the United States, and Australia determined disability by physical incapacity; Germany and Austria by vocational incapacity (p. 146). ¹⁷ Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. C. R. Fawcett (1943; New York: Zone Books, 1991); Jay M. Winter, ‘Military Fitness and Civilian Health in Britain during the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 15 (1980), 211–44; Albert G. Love and Charles B. Davenport, Physical Examination of the First Five Million Draft Recruits (Washington, DC: US Surgeon General’s Office, Bulletin 11, 1919), 521; Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 169. ¹⁸ Anne Harrington, ‘Kurt Goldstein’s Neurology of Healing and Wholeness: A Weimar Story’, in Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz (eds), Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 25–45.

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Normalizing processes are not simply top-down impositions or social formations. To understand the value of the normal after a war that produced dramatic bodily change, this book examines the pleasures of ‘the self ’, class dynamics, and personal motivations in relation to political and institutional discourses. In disability studies, Henri-Jacques Stiker’s ideas about the social striving for normality, and Rosemary Garland Thomson’s critical rendering of the ‘extraordinary bodies’ of the invalid and cripple, have queried the boundaries of normality, otherness, and difference.¹⁹ The emergence of what I call the ‘aesthetics of normalizing embodiment’ is explored in this book. Cultural signs and artistic forms were deeply implicated in reconstructing the body in order to normalize it. This project was still embryonic, in process but not yet fixed, endorsed by medicine and commerce, for instance, but not wholly incorporated. Classicism and modernism were aesthetic ideals to ‘overcome’ disability and to sexualize bodies. Nevertheless, this book also highlights variation in experiences, queer diversity, and resistant practices alongside pressures to conform. Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power—regulating and socializing bodies to act—and ‘biopower’—managing reproduction and public health—grounds this investigation of how state, commercial, and personal incentives interacted with the post-war reconstruction. That the body is a cultural construct and sexuality is a motivating force in modern life informs the consideration of how pleasurable and sexualized bodies negotiated reconstruction.²⁰ In Foucault’s ‘political anatomy’, institutions regulate bodies, such as in the school, the asylum, and the prison.²¹ This book frames the gymnasium and dance studio, as well as commercial institutions such as the magazine and beauty industry, where discipline is voluntary and seductive. Feminist criticism that bodies are not ‘docile’ is especially important when considering disability.²² This book explores how women and men claimed sexual subjectivity and embodied agency through self-transformation. Disability and feminist scholars insist upon disability as a category of analysis (like race, class, and gender) and an affect of representation, social process, and power relations.²³ When deployed as ‘another other’, disability becomes an analytical tool that frames the historical impact of war on gender and ¹⁹ Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Rosemary Garland Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). ²⁰ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, i (London: Allen Lane, 1979); id., The History of Sexuality, ii The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985). ²¹ Id., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), 138. ²² Caroline Ramazanoglu (ed.), Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions Between Foucault and Feminism (New York and London: Routledge, 1998); Sandra Lee Bartky, ‘Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’, in Rose Weitz (ed.), The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance and Behaviour (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25–45. ²³ Longmore and Umansky, The New Disability History, 15; Rosemary Garland Thomson, ‘Feminist Disability Studies’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30 (2005), 1557–87.

Introduction

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sexuality, on disabled and enabled people, on cultural forms integral to the body politics of reconstruction in the post-war period.²⁴ Disabled bodies are also queer bodies, disrupting the categories of normalcy and pathology, crafting resistance to social exclusion, and refusing essentialized identities.²⁵ Anglophone concerns about population decline saw disabled men feared as unemployable and emasculated citizens. Queer theory argues that compulsory able-bodiedness is linked to compulsory heterosexuality.²⁶ The historical context of the First World War, however, reveals that sexual practices were affected by the war, including emphasis on sexual display and yearning for intimacy. Significantly, sexualities were not fully realized as identities: personal agency and cultural experimentation thrived in that creative ‘in-between’ space. Thus while the war incited official and personal investment into norms intended as restorative, disabled overcoming or sexual passing occurred within the unstable relations of bodies and sexualities. Queering disabled and enabled bodies together, this book shifts the focus away from the dichotomy of the ‘social versus medical’ model of disability.²⁷ Instead, it entwines the normalizing power of institutions and social discourses, the nuances of political exclusions and economic constraints, the physical reality of impairment and pain, and the cultural affects of bodily representations, while seeking out the complexities of agency and resistance.²⁸ This book is not a study of specific disabilities, but considers disability as a conceptual, physical, and visual alterity that framed the embodiment of all citizens, amplifying the sexual and reproductive meaning of bodies—and the significance of beauty—after the war. Theorizing ‘the body’ must not be disconnected from emotional experiences of living in a body.²⁹ How, then, can the impact of discourse and culture be measured in individual lives? This book explores relationships between bodies (their experiences, styles, and performances) and those represented in images and material culture. Janet Wolff ’s examination of the sociology of art production shifts the comprehension of visual culture from aesthetic codes to cultural products. The magazine graphic, artwork and film, rehabilitation photograph, medical text, or war memorial, is not a ‘transcendent, universal fact’, but is produced by social groups, markets, local and global networks, and in cultural, ²⁴ Catherine Kudlick, ‘Disability History: Why We Need Another Other’, American Historical Review, 108 (2003), 763–93. ²⁵ Mark Sherry, ‘Overlaps and Contradictions between Queer Theory and Disability Studies’, Disability and Society, 19 (2004), 769–83. ²⁶ Rob McRuer, ‘Compulsory Able-bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence’, in Lennard J. Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2006), 306. ²⁷ Longmore and Umansky, The New Disability History, 20; Julie Anderson and Ana CardenCoyne, ‘Enabling the Past: New Perspectives in the History of Disability’, European Review of History, 14 (2007), 447–57. ²⁸ Shelley Tremain (ed.), Foucault and the Government of Disability (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Michigan University Press, 2005). ²⁹ Montserrat, Changing Bodies, 4.

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professional, and commercial exchanges that shape visual knowledge.³⁰ In the 1920s, images informed how the body was observed, interpreted, and assimilated. Mass circulation of images facilitated the absorption and reinvention of classicism within modern culture, connecting life to art, as people responded to images and reconstructed their bodies individually. Body and beauty culture in this period were major industries that deployed classicism and modernism to attract clients. Mass culture was the ‘hidden subtext’ of the modernist project.³¹ The body was a central motif in modernism, especially in technological fantasies and sexual spectacles. Science imagined the future civilization, and yet also aroused fears of regression and bodily uncertainty.³² The First World War intensified these contradictions; technology wounded, but it also promised new life with prosthetics that enhanced masculinity. Although Surrealists and Dadaists celebrated mutilation, the primitive, and the ‘convulsive beauty’ of the fetishized and castrated body, others marshalled classicism as a liberating force against Victorian prudery.³³ As women’s social roles and visibility were changing, sexuality was also recoded. The classical body became modernist, vernacular, and an agent of mass culture and commercial imagery—a sexual spectacle. Real bodies contributed to the production of cultural images of bodies, whether injured or enhanced. The trauma of the First World War has preoccupied much scholarship. Eric Leed argued that industrialized killing damaged men psychologically, distancing them from non-combatants. Scholarship on women writers with direct war experience, however, argues that ‘female modernism’ arose, ‘bearing witness to the trauma of the war’. Women recorded their own distressing experiences and identified with shell-shocked soldiers.³⁴ This book considers both the ‘pleasure’ and trauma cultures of the ‘war-wrecked body’, testing the appropriateness of trauma studies in apprehending the impact of war on people in the past.³⁵ ³⁰ Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (2nd edn, New York: New York University Press, 1993), 137, 139. ³¹ Andreas Huyssen, ‘Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other’, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986), 47. ³² Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2–3. ³³ Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Antivision’, October, 36 (1986), 147–54; Christina Simmons, ‘Modern Sexuality and the Myth of Victorian Repression’, in Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (eds), Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press), 157–77. ³⁴ Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 192; Angela K. Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 2000; Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Margaret R. Higonnet (ed.), Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War (Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 2001), p. xxxiv. ³⁵ Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000); Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentiethcentury Warfare (London: Granta, 1999); Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, Md. and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4–5.

Introduction

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The historical specificity of industrial war and mass culture provides critical nuance to Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry’s treatises on pain and beauty; Cathy Caruth on trauma; and the work of Paul Ricœur and Marc Augé on memory and forgetting. How could violent imagery appeal to audiences, especially those wounded or grieving? Why did this occur at the same time as the classical revival that valued the body as beautiful, whole, and inviolable? Scholars have viewed the war as a conflict between tradition and the outcomes of modern industrial society; war defined ‘modern consciousness’ and modernism through imagination and memory.³⁶ The structural capacity for mass violence was located in the pre-war era, with technology the hallmark of the challenge to tradition, and death and despair ‘the psychological turning point in the creation of modernism’.³⁷ Jay Winter’s intervention revealed that ‘sites of memory’ were also ‘sites of mourning’ that drew on tradition to negotiate loss and grief.³⁸ Medievalism and classicism, for instance, resonated in war memorials in Britain and Germany.³⁹ This book collapses the distinction between tradition and modernity, finding complexity in political, institutional, and individual responses to war. The war affected how men and women viewed the body and sexuality. Supported by cultures of reconstruction, they visualized embodiment in a range of ways that drew on the familiar as well as the modern, entwining them in new forms of selfhood. Instead of a radical gulf between old and new worlds, between men and women, parents and children—where the past was remote and useless—this book locates intersections between the classical past and the desire for a modern future. Grief and despair were deeply felt, and yet so too were ideals of rebuilding civilization, visualized and performed through the physical and cultural reconstruction of bodies. Scholarship on women at war has focused on gender constructions and class relations, contesting assumptions about political and social advancement.⁴⁰ Studies have examined women’s militarized roles in medical and auxiliary services, and their activities with feminist nationalism and white feather campaigns.⁴¹ While women’s energies were mobilized, their proximity to violence was problematic.⁴² ³⁶ Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 8; Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The Great War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1991). ³⁷ Modris Eksteins, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 12. ³⁸ Jay M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). ³⁹ Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War and Remembrance in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). ⁴⁰ Laura Doan, ‘A Challenge to ‘‘Change’’?: New Perspectives on Women and the Great War’, Women’s History Review, 15 (2006), 337–43. ⁴¹ Nicoletta F. Gullace, ‘The Blood of Our Sons’: Men, Women and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 55, 119. ⁴² Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

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Class allegiance was important: many bourgeois women occupied conventional roles in philanthropy and voluntary nursing, and continued to do so after the war.⁴³ While wartime rhetoric was charged with notions of equality, men and women had fought ‘different wars’, filtered through class relations within military medicine.⁴⁴ Highlighting the contradictory effects of war, scholars have shown that Anglophone women were involved in nation building and preserving the valour of motherhood. The maternal body played a role in propaganda—in fears of rape and the vulnerability of the national body—which was also why the regulation of female bodies was critical.⁴⁵ Respectable women needed protecting, but others were seen as predatory. Pleasure-seeking girls were accused of ‘khaki fever’, and working-class munitions workers of promiscuity or parental neglect.⁴⁶ Demobilization brought further contradiction. Some women ‘made peace’, finding comfort in marital and domestic relations; others continued to work in voluntary and political organizations.⁴⁷ In this wide field of enquiry, gender and class relations were of principal concern, whereas this book positions sexuality and the body as the main analytical themes. War had blurred gender identities and yet also sexualized women. Healing the body and reconstructing sexual relations was a response to the violence and social change. When discussing the reconstruction of female bodies in sport, leisure, beauty culture, and memorials, this book shifts the discussion to sexuality, physical self-expression, and lived embodiment. By investigating the female body as subject of reconstruction, agent of self-empowerment, and object of commodification, experience and representation are woven together. After the war, how and why did body industries appeal to women from a range of classes to invest in their own personal reconstruction? Beauty and fitness implicated class, age, and marital status—but it also concerned the state. Were women being reconstructed as ‘embodied citizens’, where beauty meant marriage and motherhood? The war had brought ‘topsy-turvydom’ to gender roles across the Anglophone world—women in heavy industry, uniforms, and ⁴³ Janet Lee, War Girls: The First Aid Nursing Yoemanry in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 3. ⁴⁴ Janet K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 60, 71. ⁴⁵ Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). ⁴⁶ Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London: I. B. Taurus, 1998); Laura Lee Downs, Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); Angela Woollacott, On Her their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (London: California University Press, 1994); id., ‘Khaki Fever and its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29 (1994), 325–47; Watson, Fighting Different Wars, 2. ⁴⁷ Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 109.

Introduction

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paramilitary organizations; men breaking down, disabled, and unemployed. While motherhood was characterized as war service, ‘war babies’ were proof of women’s immorality, like venereal disease.⁴⁸ Studies of maternalism and citizenship, however, have not fully explored sexuality. Given the degree of dispute over what women could and should do with their bodies, how did women claim their agency? In Britain, Australia, and the United States, individual men and women negotiated the discourses and aesthetics of bodily reconstruction. In international beauty culture and dance crazes, women aimed to modernize and transform their bodies, while enjoying consumerist pleasures and self-fashioning.⁴⁹ In Australia, the fashion and magazine industries peddled modes of ‘feminine appearing’ across a global culture of consumer modernity, producing a local and international ‘spectacular modern woman’. Significantly, the racial identity of the white modern body was shaped by colonial ideas and modern consumerism, locking out indigenous and black bodies with few exceptions.⁵⁰ While war exacerbated how race relations were inscribed onto national bodies in Britain, Australia, and the United States, and racial difference in bodily ideals was critical to post-war reconstruction, this book focuses on disability and sexuality as the main tools of analysis. Certainly, race and sexuality were dual concerns after the war—fears of ‘mixed dancing’, predatory sexuality, and miscegenation abound. In Australia, the war service of Aboriginal soldiers went unrecognized, at the same time that indigenous symbols were freely appropriated in modernism. The racial undertones of classicism and modernism might also set the modern and classical against the primitive and uncivilized. Whether in discussions of memorials for black American and British colonial troops or eroticizing the white body, racial descriptors were carved into representations. Moreover, the black body was largely erased from the memory of war and from the vision of reconstructing civilization. Race and skin colour defined the value of the white, classical body, and were embedded not just in the history of colonialism and empire building, but in the cultural hegemony of the Graeco-Roman ‘western tradition’, as discussed in Chapter 1. The whiteness of the classical body was an assumed norm within the aesthetic discourses traversing Anglophone medicine and commemoration, popular culture, and modernism. While classicism was meant to heal and transform, its target audience was predominantly white. Hence, this book ⁴⁸ Doan, ‘ ‘‘Topsy-turvydom’’: Gender Inversion, Sapphism and the Great War’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 12 (2006), 517–42. ⁴⁹ Jill Julius Matthews, ‘Building the Body Beautiful’, Australian Feminist Studies, 5 (1987), 17–34; and id., ‘Dancing Modernity’, in Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle (eds), Transitions: New Australian Feminisms (St Leonards, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1995). ⁵⁰ Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004).

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focuses on the sexualizing, gendering, and modernizing of classicism during post-war reconstruction, and its significance for disabled and enabled white bodies. The impact of war upon British men’s bodies and minds—shell shock, disability, fear, alcoholism, and malingering—aggravated anxieties about masculinity. Prioritizing men’s subjective experiences, Joanna Bourke demonstrated that discourses of power shaped not just how men were treated but also their self-perceptions. Discipline and conformity were pressures transferred from the military to civilian scene in rehabilitation and employment.⁵¹ Class conflict—strikes, riots, and protests for social change—implicated gender tensions about work and the maintenance of peace in civil society. In Luton in 1919, Peace Day celebrations ended in the torching of the Town Hall; although ex-servicemen were blamed, unemployment, housing, and the social position of women were at the root of social unrest.⁵² Commemorating the heroic dead contrasted with the unheroic reality of post-war life. Against official images of sacrifice, working-class masculinity appeared disruptive. Hence, the healing aspiration of classicism aimed to reconstruct the body, comfort the grief-stricken, and restrain ‘unacceptable behaviour’.⁵³ This book emphasizes the coexistence of violence and healing, of resistance and retreat, of rupture and continuity. The Edwardian middle-classes did not wholly reject manliness, but reframed it around pain and sacrifice.⁵⁴ Bitter war poetry and ‘disenchanted’ literature was one profound reaction to war, although not the only one.⁵⁵ Unlike the disillusionment found in poetry’s ‘ironic’ mode—which Paul Fussell thought defined the war’s ‘modern memory’—some popular novelists upheld a middle-class desire to contain the impact of the war by rehabilitating the hero and preserving ‘Englishness’ in rural motifs. British conservatism was seen in women’s writing and in representations of bourgeois femininity—concomitant with women’s embracing of modernity and ‘new patterns in domestic life’. Indeed, the domesticated male reshaped national identity.⁵⁶ ⁵¹ Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1996). ⁵² Neil Gordon Orr, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning: Peace Day in Luton 1919’, Family and Community History, 2 (1999), 17–32. ⁵³ Gabriel Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914–1930: A Study of ‘Unconquered Manhood’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 5. ⁵⁴ George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). ⁵⁵ Hugh Cecil, ‘British War Novelists’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter H Liddle (eds), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London: Pen and Sword, 1996), 801–16; Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). ⁵⁶ Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory; Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 3; Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 9.

Introduction

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Despite the rhetoric of democratic victory in honouring the ordinary soldier, class difference was heightened by the war, and the middle classes turned, introspectively, to the safety of home.⁵⁷ Yet all classes were consumers and producers of modern bodies. This book examines the construction of the modern body through classical motifs, and the fact that sexuality and gender played an important role in recovering from war. Was modern consumption liberating or did it have the ‘domestic’ endpoint of marriage and parenthood? Exploring the visual culture of the reconstructed body, this book concurs with recent analysis of the ‘sensory’ effect of war. In letters, diaries, and literature men and women articulated the brutality of industrialized killing, while yearning for intimacy. Soldiers and nurses sensed the ‘dissolution into formless matter’, as corpses, blood, and mud permeated their world. ‘Touch’ was a response to this sensory degradation.⁵⁸ Given the extremes of fear and devastation experienced on the front line, and men’s expectations of their return to civilian life, awareness of subjective, psychological responses tempers the view of ‘masculinity’ as a singular category.⁵⁹ This book links personal reconstruction to political discourses and cultural representation. Emphasizing contradiction in what appears as ‘hegemonic masculinity’, and recognizing competing masculinities, reveals that gender and sexuality are unstable.⁶⁰ Multiple masculinities—even in one lifetime—blur the boundaries of sex and gender in representation.⁶¹ Ambivalence in how people interpret gender roles troubles the association of personal and institutional power.⁶² Masculinity is not a monolithic trope, then, but a changing interplay between the physical, emotional, and social, encoded by class, race, and sexuality, and is also constituted in relation to women. In this book, masculinity is seen through the lens of disability and sexual reconstruction. Although some scholars worry that cultural history’s focus on representation excludes social evidence, this book argues that real bodies are living interpretations of the visual world of bodily signs. Diary-writing entails self-representation as much as bodies, negotiating subjectivity in relation to images, discourses, and symbols. The available ‘cultural scripts’ are incorporated with great complexity.⁶³ ⁵⁷ Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). ⁵⁸ Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 37. ⁵⁹ Michael Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity: The ‘‘War Generation’’ and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1950’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), 343–63. ⁶⁰ R. W. Connell, ‘An Iron Man: The Body and Some Contradictions of Hegemonic Masculinity’, in Michael A. Messner and Donald F. Sabo (eds), Sport, Men and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1990), 83–95. ⁶¹ Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (eds), Constructing Masculinity (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 3. ⁶² Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992). ⁶³ John Tosh, ‘What should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 38 (1994), 179–202; Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard,

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Seeing the male body through the window of both its vulnerabilities and its forceful displays frames the discussion of post-war masculinities. The male body could be a site of ‘shame, self-hatred, and concealment’.⁶⁴ Hyper-masculine images reacted to changes in women’s roles and embodiment. While industrialized violence exposed the failed expectations of manliness, reconstruction addressed uncertainty about what it was to be and look like a man. Classicism and modernism provided models of gender and sexuality, which men interpreted individually. Bodies, therefore, indicate a world beyond themselves—mutual affect occurs between real bodies and cultural signs.⁶⁵ Classical and modern bodies contained the ‘explanatory power’ of reconstruction while also ‘the very ‘‘stuff ’’ of subjectivity’; in reconstructing selfhood sexual bodies were ‘volatile’ rather than stable.⁶⁶ Images of mutilated flesh occupied the minds of witnesses and curious audiences. This book examines how citizenship and selfhood were negotiated through the body, and why classicism offered an antidote to the mind–body dualism that war magnified. The historical context of the First World War illuminates Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about the ‘intercorporeal’ language of bodies and cultural signs, of interior and exterior worlds, a ‘kinship’ of the invisible and visible, the living and the dead.⁶⁷ Indeed ‘the self ’, as Erving Goffman argues, is ‘a product’ of the social group and the means by which it is produced. Communication, audience, and image are critical to the production of selfhood.⁶⁸ But so, too, are historical and cultural experiences and perceptions of bodies, which this book finds in circles across Britain, Australia, and the United States. In the visual and performed domains of classical and modern bodies, this book considers the impact of post-war reconstruction on gender and sexuality. Since gendered embodiment is ‘performed’ (not simply constructed) in body and beauty culture, modern dance, and sport, the agency of the subject confronts institutions of power, such as advertising, fashion, medicine, and health.⁶⁹ The scripts are cultural, social, and political, and yet also contingent on times, places, and points of intersection. Nevertheless, embodiment is also interpreted and ‘What have Historians Done with Masculinity? Reflections on Five Centuries of British History, circa 1500–1950’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), 280. ⁶⁴ Susan R. Bordo, ‘Reading the Male Body’, in Laurence Goldstein (ed.), The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 265–306. ⁶⁵ Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). ⁶⁶ Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. vii–xvi. ⁶⁷ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969). ⁶⁸ Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Allen Lane, 1969). ⁶⁹ Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 128–41.

Introduction

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flexible. To appropriate Bourdieu, then, the body is flesh and ‘habitus’; it has a materiality and mobility that is shaped in social and cultural contexts.⁷⁰ This book connects post-war reconstruction and women’s production of an embodied self that was both gender performance and sexual expression. Classicism and modernism provided the ‘corporeal style’ and the staging of ‘the act’, suggesting ‘a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning’, but one mediated through the materiality of living as a body.⁷¹ Gender performance is also useful for understanding male community in bodybuilding and the public exhibition of rehabilitated men. This book connects enabled and disabled bodies, arguing that gender is ‘choreographed’, involving styles and forms of movement, a wide range of physical actions, and technologies of mobility.⁷² Prosthetics produced variation in movement; the war veteran’s desire to pass as normal produced movements; rehabilitating, working and dancing bodies produced routines and repetitions. Everyday movements were ‘performed’ in public spaces that staged bodies. Rituals, dances, and sports involve theatrical aesthetics and ‘directions’. For instance, both commemoration and walking with a prosthetic leg require rehearsals that are gendered.⁷³ Still, choreographies of the gendered and sexualized body are interpreted and incorporated individually. Despite the sway of normalizing processes, social expectations and cultural norms often met with resistance. Classicism and modernism still enabled ‘queer possibilities’ in reconstructing the body.

CLASSICISM, MODERNISM, A N D T R A N S N AT I O N A L H I S TO RY Classicism and modernism can be understood as ideas, forms, and myths of the European and western imaginaries. In the Anglophone context, they generated particular local variations, and informed different social inscriptions of culture, empire, and nation. Since the global currency of representations often overlapped national borders, travelled across nations, and appeared upon international stages, this book focuses on their symbolic capital in both national and international contexts, and hence the discussion moves between the three Anglophone cultural settings. This book seeks out broad cultural variations of classicism and modernism in global dialogue and at the local level, connecting Anglophone and European networks of exchange in memorials, medicine, and visual and popular culture. ⁷⁰ S. P. Wainwright and B. S. Turner, ‘Reflections on Embodiment and Vulnerability’, Medical Humanities, 29 (2003), 7. ⁷¹ Butler, Gender Trouble, 129, 139–40. ⁷² Susan Leigh Foster, ‘Choreographies of Gender’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 24 (1998), 1–21. ⁷³ Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 7.

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Anglophone cultures interpreted European models of embodiment in fashion, dance, and magazine culture. Rehabilitation experts worked with French and German medical industries, body attitudes, and aesthetic practices. Classicism and modernism were linchpins in both. While the impact of war on the body and culture is the focus, this book is not a history of nations or nationalisms. Instead of the nation, Anglophone discourses are seen across various networks in order to consider how individual historical actors engaged with classicism and modernism in reconstruction. Nevertheless, there are clear limitations in dealing sufficiently with cultural and national differences between Britain, the United States, and Australia. Yet by highlighting global dialogues, networks of exchange, and common practices—and drawing upon an interdisciplinary approach to cultural history—this book can explore elite and mass cultures together, which will demonstrate the significance of cultural symbols in post-war reconstruction. This book brings together common motivations and shared beliefs that drew on the classical and the modern after war. To be sure, distinct cultural, professional, and institutional conditions were significant in shaping responses. For instance, Vanity Fair was the flagship of the Condé Naste magazine empire from 1914 to 1936, when it merged into Vogue. Under the editorship of Frank Crowninshield, it reached a circulation of around 85–99,000.⁷⁴ The magazine brought European modernism to the United States, becoming an international literary and style leader, inspiring magazines elsewhere. In Australia, The Home followed similar social commentaries, style sheets, and fashion advice, linking with the European and American cultural scenes. Together, The Home and Art in Australia (1916–42), created by publisher Sydney Ure Smith, became the premier vehicle by which American and European fashion and visual culture were circulated, influencing artists, many of whom were networked in the artistic and literary circles of Britain, Europe, and the United States. The magazine industry facilitated the global transmission of ideas and forms, from articles on Picasso and Cocteau to discussions about beauty and slimming. While body culture industry magazines had smaller circulations, the range of schools and papers occupied a significant global network for the dissemination of body ideals. Bernarr Macfadden’s empire was arguably one of the largest, and set the tone for many others in Britain and Australia. Another significant Anglophone network influencing body ideals occurred between medical rehabilitation and voluntary welfare agencies. They informed attitudes to disability and embodied citizenship through newspapers and pamphlets, exchanged fundraising tactics, and participated in international conferences. This dialogue often compared national approaches to rehabilitation, but also occurred at a transnational level when reiterating common hopes to rebuild ‘Civilization’ by physical reconstruction. The various Inter-Allied ⁷⁴ John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Introduction

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Conferences on disabled soldiers generated ‘frank interchange of opinions in conversation between men and women of the several nations deeply interested’ in rehabilitation.⁷⁵ Across this Anglophone scene, reconstructing the body was structured around middle-class objectives—prosperity, individualism, and selftransformation—which travelled across nations through shared medical and cultural ideals, so that physicians and artists influenced embodiment through classicism and modernism. Comparative history can reify ‘the nation’ as the single unit of analysis, while transnational history offers ‘entanglements’. Both have strengths and weaknesses. This book investigates the multiple uses of classicism and modernism as culturally significant global agents aimed at rebuilding civilization. Thus bodies—in relation to institutions and cultural discourses—rather than nations are the main focus. Although reconstruction operated in distinct political contexts, this book locates intersecting ideas in professional networks and commercial cultures. Comparisons might use ‘paradox as the point of departure’; however, the nation state can override individual lives and erase subtleties within local communities. Still, comparison works well when ‘intricate relationships’, international discussions, and similarities and differences are teased out.⁷⁶ This study of the impact of the First World War has aimed for ‘flexible’ and thematic intersections of representations and experiences of sexuality and the body across ‘battlefronts’ and ‘peace fronts’.⁷⁷ By exploring shared networks across Britain, the United States, and Australia, this book locates interactions between medical and artistic groups, commemorative and literary fields, academic and political circles, popular culture entrepreneurs, and social reformers. It shows how post-war reconstruction centred on bodily discourses and cultural signs could traverse nations, especially via the mass media and institutional networks. This study of global dialogues in classicism and modernism draws on the idea of cultural transfer to reveal linkages across professional and social groups from different nations, and between individuals within commercial and leisure circles that conducted reconstructive efforts to restore humankind. Cultural transfer is indicative of ‘points of contact, of movements that travelled, of ideas that were exchanged’, uncovering how individuals on the ground reshaped the classicism and modernism in Anglophone societies.⁷⁸ Some strove to overcome the war; ⁷⁵ Lieutenant Colonel Sir A. Griffith Boscawen, MP, ‘Report on the Inter-allied Conference for the Study of Professional Re-education and other Questions of Interest to Soldiers and Sailors Disabled by the War’, Paris, 8–12 May 1917 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office), 4. ⁷⁶ Deborah Cohen, ‘Comparative History: Buyer Beware’, German Historical Institute Bulletin, 29 (2001), 23–34. ⁷⁷ Maura O’Connor, ‘Cross-National Travelers: Rethinking Comparisons and Representations’, in Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor (eds), Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-national Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004), 133; Grayzel, ‘Across Battle Fronts: Gender and the Comparative Cultural History of Modern European War’, ibid. 72. ⁷⁸ Cohen, ‘Comparative History’, 24.

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to develop their professional skills; to rebuild communities; assisting humanity and the future of civilization. Considering the role of cultural transfer and local adaptation enhances understanding about war’s effect not only upon individuals, but also social practices and political ideas. Investigating modern uses of the classical body in reconstruction, this book locates influences from the mass media to professional and cultural networks, from the privacy of the artist’s studio to the public space of war memorials, from the externalized horror of the war novel or film to the display culture of the gymnasium, from the physician in the rehabilitation hospital to the culture of the specialist. Extending John Boardman’s insight that each age stamps its mark on classicism, modern war also transformed the classical past.⁷⁹ Classicism and modernism travelled well across the Anglophone world because they are defined by basic rules readily co-opted by institutions and adapted by individual visions. Tracing classicism and modernism across European and Anglophone reconstruction networks, this book is neither comparative nor nationalizing; dialogues, exchanges, and local manifestations are the main concern. Through the dual lens of classicism and modernism, this study of the impact of war on the body locates reconstruction cultures that intersect.

F RO M S I T E S O F M O U R N I N G TO S I T E S O F H E A L I N G Moving from the commemoration of the dead to the medical and commercial arenas, Reconstructing the Body considers correlations between bodily experiences and representations. It explores how visual and material cultures were vehicles of social and physical reconstruction. Through the realms of flesh, narrative, and image, the transformation of the body from fragmentation to reconstruction is examined. At each point, the modern drew upon the classical to reconstruct the body broken in the First World War. Chapter 1, ‘Reconstructing Civilization in Post-war Culture’, discusses the European context of academic classical study, its popularization and its politicization on the world stage, and its manifestations in the Anglophone context. It explores how the quest for civilization was renegotiated at a level of global peace discourse rather than national conflict. In Chapter 2, ‘Culture Shock: Trauma, Pleasure, and Visual Memory’, the traumatic and pleasurable aspects of war are explored. Visual culture—films, art, war writing, and surgical literature—influenced the ‘cultural memory’ of the ‘war-wrecked’ body, to which reconstruction responded. Turning from visual to material culture, Chapter 3 discusses the sensory and emotional spaces of classical war memorials. ‘Monumental Classicism: ⁷⁹ John Boardman (ed.), Oxford History of Classical Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1.

Introduction

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Healing the Western Body’ investigates how classical motifs attempted to heal the bodily violence seen in visual culture. Instead of the motif of ‘war-wrecked bodies’, classicism offered peaceful repose and sanitized beauty. Although classical memorials were ‘sites of mourning’, they were designed to heal by transforming the memory of violence. This chapter explains how classicism reconstructed the mutilated body in memorial architecture. The ‘aesthetics of healing’ materialized as an antidote to the physical and emotional suffering of the war. Continuing with the consideration of real bodies in relation to cultural signs, Chapter 4—entitled ‘The Sexual Reconstruction of Men’—investigates medical rehabilitation, commercial, and visual culture. In Chapter 5—entitled ‘The Golden Age of Woman’—the reconstruction of the female body and beauty are discussed, and how classical and modern imagery manufactured sexuality and gender ideals for women. Chapter 6 focuses attention on the Classical-revival dance movement and its aims to reconstruct women’s bodies. In ‘Performing the New Civilization’, the discourse of physical liberation through fitness and beauty is explored alongside notions of heterosexual orthodoxy and maternal fitness. Finally, this book concludes with a discussion of ‘Healing and Forgetting’ and considers classicism and modernism in relation to cultural memory and social amnesia. Governments, physicians, beauty and body therapists, monument designers and visual artists looked to classicism and modernism as the tools for rebuilding civilization and its citizens. What better riposte for loss of life, limb, and mind than a body reconstructed?

1 Reconstructing Civilization in Post-war Culture [W]hatever the international spirit may accomplish there can be no question that never in the history of any civilization . . . has the idea of humanity taken so large a place in European and American life. Frederick Watson, 1930.

Reconstruction addressed the consequences of war, cohering with wider humanitarian and cultural goals for civilized humanity. Originally a political term, ‘reconstruction’ encompassed the rebuilding of cities and economies and the reorganization of society, including repatriation and welfare provisions. From 1917, Britain had its Ministry of Reconstruction, with parallel initiatives in the Commonwealth and the United States. Linked to reconstruction were the terms ‘rebuilding’, ‘restoration’, and ‘rehabilitation’, signifying material progress, physical fortification, and the rebirth of a lost world. These expressions evoked the hopes for recovery in the aftermath of war. Reconstruction implicated demobilization and gender relations: how were men and women to be reintegrated into the civilian society and economy? In local and international discourses, reconstruction coexisted with the French ‘rappel a` l’ordre’ (return to order) and English ‘regeneration’; both revered rural and domestic life.¹ Reconstructing civilization fundamentally implicated disabled soldiers, as the British founder of the Cripples’ Journal (1924–30), Frederick Watson (son-in-law of orthopaedist Sir Robert Jones), noted in his book Civilization and the Cripple (1930). Building new ideals required the ‘healing powers’ of the ancient therapeutic arts, such as at ‘the Asclepion of Cos [where] clinical observation and hygienic treatment’ were practised. Although tested in wartime by the institutionalization of triage, Hippocratic philosophies were recuperated as the foundation of civilized medicine.² ¹ Christopher Lawrence and Anna-K. Mayer (eds), Regenerating England: Science, Medicine and Culture in Interwar Britain (London: Rodopi, 2001). ² Frederick Watson, Civilisation and the Cripple (London: John Bale, 1930), 105, 3.

Reconstructing Civilization

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Across the European and Anglophone world, medical and welfare organizations were preoccupied with the reconstruction of disabled soldiers. In Reconstructing the Crippled Soldier, Douglas McMurtrie, Director of the American Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, exclaimed that when soldiers overcame their injuries ‘the transformation is amazing’. A major figure in the international rehabilitation industry, McMurtrie drew upon global reconstruction discourses, such as British calls to ‘Carry On’ and to be ‘Recalled to Life’, and European exclamations that: ‘There are no more cripples!’ This industry drew upon classical ideals to empower the mind, just as modern prosthetics empowered the body, inciting ‘ambition to overcome’ the physical and emotional ‘inertia’ of wounding.³ By focusing on the healing of mind and body, rehabilitation was also being demilitarized as men transformed from warriors to citizens. At the King’s Lancashire Military Convalescent Hospital in England, rehabilitation was ‘no longer in the hands of the Drill Sergeant’. To rebuild civilization, as Edward Leech put it, was to imagine a ‘new and far more beautiful country . . . seen as from a pinnacle by the Greeks’.⁴ The war may have been crippling; however, reconstruction generated new humanist philosophies. It was not just cities, economies, bodies, and minds that warranted reconstruction, but western civilization itself. Reconstruction captured the contradictory mood of the Armistice era resonating from the negotiating tables of Versailles, to the Anglophone political and medical arena, and through the circles of artists, thinkers, and writers. This chapter explores the European and Anglophone context of reconstruction, and examines how modernism and classicism were important cultural sources for rebuilding civilization. In war and peace, classical ideals of civilization were mobilized: this chapter examines these longer traditions through the impact of war. Classicism in the Academy is considered, especially classics and anthropology—disciplines that framed debates about civilization during the war and ideals of rebuilding afterwards. The impact on modernism is also explored, especially the effect of ‘cultural nostalgia’ on representations of the body. Together, classics, politics, and medicine set the context whereby classical ideals could be rejuvenating. The longer history of European classicism—and anxieties about civilization—provide an important background for why, after 1918, physical perfection, social regeneration, and western cultural renewal were imagined through both the classical and the modern in reconstructing the body. European reconstruction aimed to motivate communities and individuals to physical and economic recovery. Ideals, however, were often imposed upon individuals, ignoring the continuation of misery and the struggle for rights that ³ Douglas C. McMurtrie, Reconstructing the Crippled Soldier (New York: Red Cross Institute, 1918), 3, 9. ‘The Meaning of the Term ‘‘Crippled’’ ’ (New York: n.d.), 9. ⁴ ‘A Description of the Work of the Central Fund on Behalf of the Wounded in the King’s Lancashire Military Convalescent Hospital’, compiled by Edward Leech, Honorary Secretary (Squire’s Gate, Blackpool, Dec. 1917), 10.

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citizen soldiers, as well as male and female workers, expected. This disjuncture generated anger, protest, and in some cases rioting by soldiers, workers, and the disabled in Europe and the Anglophone countries. At a political level, reparations, while crippling for Germany, were meant to compensate France and its Allies for the cost of war and the toll of their suffering. In 1919, Clemenceau could not exonerate Germany, believing that German justice ‘is not the same as ours’.⁵ Critical differences between nations remained, despite Wilsonian attempts at Anglo-European unity. Continued denial of the enemy by minimizing German losses, enabled savage punishment and the excruciating dissection of Europe imposed through the Treaty of Versailles. Blame and revenge were aspects of those negotiations, as militarists in Germany and France vowed never to forget this war. Contradictions of war and peace thus marked European life. The League of Nations discussed international peace, while subjugating Germany. Certainly, the memory of violence was difficult to appease, and this was expressed in various cultural forms of the period. Violence to the body was redefined in visual languages, literature, and film. In France, Abel Gance’s film J’accuse! used living soldiers’ bodies to form those two damning words in his opening titles. With bodies as words, Gance accused the war and man for his inhumanity. In Britain and France, too, writers and poets churned out words with pained venom. In Germany and Switzerland, the artists of the Dada movement elevated nihilism into a kind of cultural attack. Civilization seemed to be imploding in the ultimate retribution for its sacrifice. In Austria and Germany, women, children, and the elderly were sick from starvation in 1919. Art and beauty seemed as dead and meaningless as the rotting corpses of Berlin. Nowhere was implosion more apparent than in the violence targeted at Jews and other minorities. Many people believed that total war had waged a new level of obscene disregard for human life. Plunged into trenched earth, missing bodies had become units to calculate. Visions of cruel death were forced upon the eyes of the educated as much as the ordinary soldiers. The range of social classes and races, covering vast geographies, involved in the conflict represented a new coalition of war dead. Death by violent fragmentation, and the impossibility of burying the multitude of fleshed remnants, contributed to a degree of social numbing, which one French soldier described as a desperate and collective need to ‘turn their eyes away’.⁶ Some soldiers, given the task of body retrieval during the war, declined to do so afterwards despite pleas from senior commanders. Soldiers’ diaries and memoirs from various combatant countries speak of the initial horror from sickening encounters with mutilated bodies, and yet also their guilty adaptation to living ⁵ Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Andoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker, France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 179. ⁶ Antoine Prost, In the Wake of War: ‘Les Anciens Combattants’ and French Society (Providence, RI: Berg, 1992), 4.


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amongst the dead. Temporary denial was a mechanism of survival at the time. The next chapter shows how visual languages graphically described the wounded body, and how images were part of a determination to remember. From literary visions of slaughtered youth in ‘Flanders Fields’, to desperate and disabled people in Weimar, many people insisted that the suffering would not be forgotten. The war was retold in texts, envisioned on canvas and film, and performed in theatre and commemorative ceremonies. In those fields, the suffering of war was culturally productive for the creators, and compelling for the public. New research on fake war memoirs commissioned by contemporary publishing houses suggests the currency of war’s violent narratives. They offered a form of cultural confession, offered as ‘truths’ that cried, ‘I was there, I witnessed and I suffered’. Yet violent stories and pictures of suffering also maintained cultural currency at the same time that social problems and political questions remained. How could deliverance, forgiveness, or healing ever be imagined and envisioned, let alone enacted? Contiguous with the fires of reckoning was there also a burning desire for something else, something other than violence and despair? People suffered personal and emotional torment, and many soldiers, widows, and politicians on all sides felt disillusioned. Still, many people also looked for ways to heal themselves and their communities. Motivated by opposition to the Treaty and the hope of reintegrating Germany, some career soldiers became politicians, while others joined their countries’ Legion organizations to foster camaraderie with German veterans.⁷ British and American rehabilitation experts also turned to Germany ‘to learn from our enemy’ new approaches to prosthetic design and disabled reconstruction, and published accounts praising their ingenuity and compassion.⁸ The United States admired the Düsseldorf retraining programme, which seemed to concur with American capitalist aims to push men ‘up the labour and social ladder’, with systems that ‘quickly taught [them] to climb’.⁹ This idea of reconstructing civilization was fuelled by utopian visions of the classical past and the modern future—dynamics that many hoped might fan the embers of change. The coexistence of violence and serenity, of confrontation and escape from the realities of war, seem extraordinary contradictions in the postwar era. Disillusionment and anger also generated philosophical and aesthetic contemplation of the meaning of life and death. Some searched for peace through beauty, enabling the war to be contextualized within the long history of humankind. Why, if also the targets of war machines and human crimes were human bodies regarded as symbols of civilization’s rebirth? Against the power of modern technology, how could the frail human body be seen as the crucible of ⁷ Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 33. ⁸ McMurtrie, The Organization, Work and Method of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men (New York, 1918), 23. ⁹ Id., ‘Re-educating German War Cripples at Düsseldorf ’, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 178 (1918), 182–7.

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justice? Alongside visions of mutilation and suffering, why did classical aesthetics appeal and how did it promise personal transformation? The new civilization looked to classical tradition, and yet it had to look and feel modern. Aligned not only with crisis and transformation, modernism—characterized by values of originality, authenticity, and autonomy—would play a role.¹⁰ Modernism was seen as rupturing and iconoclastic by both its supporters and detractors, a view consolidated by the mass media, consumer industries and leisure cultures. Although traditional interpretations position modernism as a rejection of classicism, such a monolithic approach is incongruent with the interwar period.¹¹ Modernism’s claim to originality and continual newness was in itself a fiction. Artists’ use of the grid, repetition, and multiplicity, was part of the paradox of the idea of a work of art’s originality.¹² The study of modern art is linked to understanding classicism, not only owing to the role of abstraction, but in the treatment of the figure. Reacting against Rodin’s fusion of the natural and romantic in his forms, artists who pondered the dynamic of the modern and classical often created an austere geometric order, which symbolized the grand serenity of the historical past. This dynamic made oppositions of the new and old impossible to secure. Modernists actively drew upon classical constructs and motifs. The grid was predicated upon rules of classical geometry, just as Platonic thought underpinned abstract art’s discourse of purity.¹³ Purity, absolute truth, and unity were embraced more than ever as ideals for a new civilization, one reborn by the hope for a new golden age of humanity. In the aftermath of war, these ideals were linked to concepts of universal peace and global community. The conditions of the Versailles Treaty dominated the political climate, but modernism was giving new life to the classical body. Artists wanted to believe again in the beauty of form, seeing an innate humanity in abstraction. Cultural practices could contribute to world peace. Classicists and modernists were excited by pre-war body cultures, but they forged new ideas and forms as well. Embedded in this nostalgia for an invented, distant past was a desire to build a better future. Perfection of the classical body through the eyes of the modern represents a remarkable effort of post-war culture. Rehabilitators, dancers, beauticians, bodybuilders, sporting men and ¹⁰ R. E. Somol, ‘Statement of Editorial Withdrawal’, Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 21. ¹¹ Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfaction of European High Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 5; Monique Chefdor, ‘Modernism: Babel Revisited?’, in Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Watchel (eds), Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 2. ¹² Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths (1986; 9th edn., Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1994), 160. ¹³ Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstraction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).


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women, not just Olympians, pursued this perfection. Post-war ‘Olympism’, informed by Pierre de Courbetin’s philosophy, played a role in modernizing the classical ideal. In the 1920s, the Olympic movement grew into a conduit for internationalism and the idealization of the modern and democratic body.¹⁴ Reinventing classical ideals of the body made a mockery of loss and destruction, which had been so physically experienced, narrated, and remembered in this modern war. Inherent in the cultural politics of reconstruction was the sentiment that by rejuvenating the war-wrecked population, the dead, disabled, and the grief-stricken could be compensated. If civilization passed from the horror of war, through a heroic journey, and to a beautiful new world, the pain and suffering of mankind was not meaningless. The trope of western civilization in peril had a pre-war history. In France, Gustav Le Bon’s The Psychology of Revolution (1895) described the crowd as descending to a low degree of civilization tantamount to savagery—a view that influenced right-wing political thought well into the twentieth century. Le Bon saw civilization as a means of escaping the decline into primitive brutality, an idea that later inspired anti-liberal and anti-democratic ideologies.¹⁵ During the First World War, the idea that European civilization was at risk was not just military and political propaganda, but had a major scholarly basis. Scholars on the left and right saw France defending the classical tradition from German ‘scientific’ kultur, which was nevertheless regarded as classical by Germans and fundamental to school and university education. British soldiers were also aware of this rhetoric. The editors of the Summerdown convalescent camp journal wrote: Even as we write these lines, the greatest battle the would has ever known, let us hope will ever know, is upon us, and Civilization is at grips with Culture, as understood and practised by our enemies . . . surely Civilization must eventually triumph . . . Kultur . . . the enemies of civilization.¹⁶

After the war, conservatives and progressives in France continued to disagree on which version of the classical revival they preferred. The intelligentsia weighed in on debates about the French system of education, with the Humanities (the classics, Greek and Latin) pitched against the modern sciences.¹⁷ Classicism in France was meant to provide models of republican virtue such as self-sacrificing heroism, relevant more than ever considering the annihilation of its citizens. ¹⁴ J. A. Lucas, ‘Genesis of the Modern Olympic Games’, in Jeffrey Segrave and Donald Chu, Olympism (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1992), 1–6. ¹⁵ Gustav Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, trans. Bernard Miall (1895; London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), 102–5, 158–60; Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley,Calif.: University of California Press, 1997), 30. ¹⁶ Summerdown Camp Journal (27 Mar. 1918), 1. ¹⁷ Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 11, 145.

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If private bereavement was to be transcended, allowing the nation to mourn without being overcome with grief, then classicism was suitable for the sculpture of sorrow mixed with heroism.¹⁸ The First World War substantiated the reappraisal of modern civilized life. In Britain the vulnerability of civilization and how to redress it were popular subjects for discussion in the sciences, classics, and the humanities. Europeans, too, reflected on the meaning of civilization, calling into question the values of past and present, hoping to make some sense of the future for humanity. For Sigmund Freud, the war brought civilization to its knees; science had ‘lost her passionless impartiality’. Gases and shells delivered a new level of viciousness. Freud linked brutality with primitivism, only now it had become the typical behaviour of modern individuals.¹⁹ Civilization was not regressing but collapsing, it seemed. Was humanity on the brink of extinction? Fear of decline into madness and social chaos was part of a deeply felt crisis of modernity and machinery when directed at world destruction. Science had been deployed to perfect mechanisms for injury and death. Industrialized and mass warfare seemed to obliterate the values for which the war had been fought. From this painful irony, men and women expressed degrees of disillusionment. Bombs, chaos, and casualties challenged the historical achievement and values of western culture. Paul Valéry analogized the fragility of civilization to that of a person’s life. Mankind was enduring a ‘crisis of the mind’, for although not everything had been lost in the war ‘everything has sensed that it might perish’. Many European intellectuals had died in combat, and Valéry felt that intellectual inquiry and the Arts were in a state of paralysis, gripped by fear and uncertainty: ‘no one can say what will be dead or alive tomorrow, in literature, philosophy, aesthetics; no one yet knows what ideas and modes of expression will be inscribed on the casualty list, what novelties will be proclaimed.’²⁰ Alongside such critiques, the idea of classical rebirth accompanied the view that modern civilization, like human life itself, was the greatest casualty of the war. Reviving classicism was an antidote to the brutality of modern warfare, appealing as a cultural apparatus for the reconstruction of western civilization. The glorious and fantasized past could be remodelled for the purpose of healing. Instead of suffering, classical ideals and beauty would inject lust for life back into society. Freud’s musings on civilization and sexuality resulted from his own complex valuing of libidinal desire and love as a process of ¹⁸ Vincent Scully, Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (London: St Martin’s Press, 1991). See Hanna, Mobilization of Intellect, 147. ¹⁹ Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ (1915), Civilization, Society and Religion, trans. James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, xii (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 61, 67, 88. ²⁰ Paul Valéry, Crisis of the Mind, First Letter (1919); see Steven Kreis, ‘The History Guide: Lectures on Twentieth-century Europe’ (2006) .


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civilization.²¹ Eros combined human individuals, then families, races, peoples, and nations, unifying humanity.²² Freud was not alone in seeing sexuality and humanism as a way of reinvigorating civilization. Technology, sexuality, and gender could renew civilization. Sexualizing the body, especially the white male body, through classical tropes, represents a significant shift in representing men and sexualizing ‘others’. In the eighteenth century, the nude male featured as either a neoclassical warrior or a feminized ephebe: both were consciously desexualized, reflecting new forms of public masculinity in the wake of the French Revolution.²³ Antique imagery was also mobilized in revolutionary discourse: the people possessed the heroic virtues once reserved for the king. The ideal man was a dying hero or ‘Stoic’ figure, such as in Jacques Louis David’s Death of Socrates (1787).²⁴ Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans revered male beauty in classical statuary, especially following the debates set by German critics. Johann Winckelmann interpreted classical beauty as the restraint of desire, emotion, or pain, exemplified in the sculpture Laocoon—the heroic Trojan priest endures the torment of the devouring serpent.²⁵ In Lessing’s critique, however, suffering should have been imagined rather than expressed, and hence sculpture’s tactility was regarded as potentially ignoble. These influential discussions linked beauty and pain and revealed the tensions in classical art that troubled the gendered boundaries of emotional expression.²⁶ Amongst German military thinkers, too, the sublimation of individual sensuality was valued, not for art but leadership, forging an ideal of nationhood based on distinctions between normal and abnormal sexualities.²⁷ German asexual classicism provided models of thinking imitated all over Europe and the Anglophone world. At the London exhibition of American sculptor Hiram Power’s classical nude, Elizabeth Barrett Browning praised its ‘passionless perfection’ that strikes with ‘thunders of white silence’.²⁸ Across the international scene of writers and artists—both male and female—classical ²¹ Freud, ‘Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’ (1915), Civilization, Society and Religion, 39. ²² Id., ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ (1930), ibid. 333. ²³ Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997). ²⁴ Claude Mossé, L’Antiquité dans la Révolution française (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), 9, 141; Alex Potts, ‘Beautiful Bodies and Dying Heroes: Images of Ideal Manhood in the French Revolution’, History Workshop Journal, 30 (1990), 1–22; Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 153, 159. ²⁵ Victor Anthony Rudowski, ‘Lessing Contra Winckelmann’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 44 (1986), 235–43. ²⁶ Simon Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1992). ²⁷ George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985). ²⁸ Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 68.

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beauty emanated the purity symbolic of the white civilization only truly intelligible by the educated classes. Appearances and sexuality implicated the racial meaning of the body. While classicism was de-sexualized, libidinal economies structured the imperial project and resonated in the metropolis. Women, non-western peoples, the working classes, and the poorest inhabitants of ‘darkest England’ were the ‘natural’ subjects of racialized thinking across the colonial world. Categories of health, disease, living standards, heredity, morality, and appearance governed imperialist imagination and defined the boundaries of the civilized.²⁹ Indigenous women were especially subject to sexual exoticization, part of the fantasy of power embedded in imperialism.³⁰ Sexual desire was imposed on the indigenous and lower classes, which distinguished the primitive from the civilized, but also rationalized the jurisdiction of colonial and local governance in white, elite hands. In Britain, philhellenism entered debates about democracy, as the elite cast themselves as rational, philosopher guardians.³¹ At its peak amongst intellectual and cultural circles in the late nineteenth century, the ancient past was seen as a high point of civilization and the pursuit of the heroic, the ideal, and the philosophical.³² Victorian Hellenism, however, must be understood with nuance. John Ruskin preferred the calmness of the Elgin marbles to ‘the convulsions of Laocoon’; willingness to challenge the classical canon coincided with the professionalization of art criticism.³³ In some quarters, classicism opposed religious restraint and the materialist scourge of industrial modernity, or was easily co-opted into liberal beliefs and bohemian practices. Walter Pater, Aldington Symonds, and Oscar Wilde converted philhellenism into a homosexual counter-discourse capable of valorizing male love as transcendent spirituality.³⁴ Wilde was a member of the Council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, indicating the class of his anti-Victorian paganism.³⁵ Resisting medical categories of homosexuality, the special case of Ancient Greece lent an esoteric quality to ‘homophilia’, resonating with English ²⁹ Gail Ching-Liang Low, White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 15. ³⁰ Patty O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2006). ³¹ See G. W. Clarke (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and English Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ³² John Boardman (ed.), Oxford History of Classical Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1. ³³ See Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). ³⁴ Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. xiii. ³⁵ Paul Cartledge, ‘The Importance of Being Dorian: An Onomastic Gloss on the Hellenism of Oscar Wilde’, Hermathena, 147 (1989), 7–15.


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intellectuals.³⁶ Yet, in some political and imperial circles, Ancient Greece was revered as a restricted civilization, a proud and cohesive monoculture elevated by the value placed upon purity, whiteness, intellect, and enterprise. In this version, decadent or erotic aspects of the Graeco-Roman past were marginalized, favouring instead a myth of origin that naturalized the glorious and righteous history of the west.³⁷ Such attitudes enabled young Christian soldiers to find inspiration in their pagan ancestors, and to march to war with the feeling of God and history on their side. While European models of manliness and beauty connected political discourses of masculinity to their social application, the First World War enhanced the association of manhood with militarism and nationalism.³⁸ The Nietzschean analysis of Apollonion serenity defending against Dionysian ecstasy and the forces of chaos was translated in various ways in political, medical, and cultural circles. The superman—with his untamed natural strength—competed with bourgeois models of masculinity and effete sensibilities. Eugenists credited both Sir Francis Galton and Nietzsche for the ‘scientific religion’ of the superman, which excited ‘proto-Fascist’ politics in Edwardian and interwar Britain.³⁹ Indeed, some scholars see continuous development from the late nineteenth century brute to the Fascist superman of the 1930s and 1940s; nude figures were, however, too easily associated with racial superiority.⁴⁰ Classicism was equated with authoritarian body ideals in Fascist art and architecture and in the Greek warriors admired by the Nazis.⁴¹ Yet, since the early twentieth century, modern artists had appropriated antiquities and nudes, creating the ‘New Classicism’. Some artists reiterated Nietzschean ideals of reconciling intoxicating sexuality with tranquil beauty, while others expressed deep ambivalence to modernity or made ironic gestures the hallmark of the avant-garde.⁴² This has been associated with the interwar ³⁶ Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 1995), 136. ³⁷ Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Donald E. Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ³⁸ George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3–16. ³⁹ Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race, and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), 62. ⁴⁰ Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996); J. A. Mangan (ed.), Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon—Aryan Fascism (Portland, Oreg.: Frank Cass, 1999). ⁴¹ Benjamin H. D. Buchloch, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting’, in Benjamin H. D. Buchloch, Serge Guilbaut, and David H. Solkin (eds), Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), 89. ⁴² Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy (eds), On Classic Ground: Picasso, Leger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), 26–8.

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‘return to order’—a period of political conservatism and moral reaction across Europe. Picasso’s classicism was seen as a ‘reaction formation’.⁴³ The idea of ‘return’—retrieving something perceived to be lost—was located in the regionalist gaze, rustic art, and landscape painting, and the human figure in modernism, but also in right-wing, xenophobic, racist, and anti-feminist thought.⁴⁴ Nevertheless, great variety in classicism and modernism existed to the extent that their normative representation cannot be postulated. The political polarization of the classical (reactionary) and modern (progressive) has been contested. Within the social framework of the French home front, artists saw classicism as an inevitable new direction for modernism.⁴⁵ Classicism is said to contain a ‘secret longing’ for tradition, and thus an ‘undefiled, immaculate and stable present’.⁴⁶ Nevertheless, to avoid a reductive approach to the complex network of political and cultural exchanges in this period and across the international scene, Peter Bürger suggests ‘seeing more in neo-classical works than a sheer relapse into reactionary thinking of order’.⁴⁷ Totalitarian aesthetics and ideologies are not the logical endpoints of classicism. In Britain and Australia, classical bodies oscillated between hypermasculine sexuality and eugenic body ideals. Although classical bodies were useful in national fitness campaigns, the idea of a ‘British superman’ was relegated to fringe circles in the 1930s; political conservativism characterized the mainstream.⁴⁸ Classicism was mobilized in the rhetorics of order, rebuilding, and reconstruction, but the dream of the past was also about the hope for the future, where the body was liberated, individual, and could overcome its problems: biology was not necessarily destiny. The impact of war on the male body and artistic form often contradicts political coherence. While some artists and writers saw that, with all its primitive energies, the neoclassical model could not compete against the destructive capacity of modern technologies, others found it possible to rehabilitate classical man through technology. Reconstruction discourses infiltrated medicine and popular culture—responding to the threat war posed to men’s virility with the promise of bigger, better bodies. The phallic fantasy of prosthetic technologies and a revamped classical ideal of beauty authenticated new models of manliness; crucial, given that ⁴³ Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998). ⁴⁴ Buchloch, ‘Figures of Authority’, 81–115; Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics between the Wars (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1995). ⁴⁵ Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1987). ⁴⁶ Jurgen Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, New German Critique, 22 (1981), 5. ⁴⁷ Peter Bürger, The Decline of Modernism, trans. Nicholas Walker (Pennsylvania, Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992), 34, 35. ⁴⁸ Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (2006), 595–610.


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mass disablement of young men was the result of service to the state. Displacing instinctual animality, body cultures also embraced the cult of civilization and viewed the technologizing of the male body as sexually empowering. Ancient classicism merged with a model of modern, virile sexuality. New discourses about female sexuality also entered the public domain as dance and exercise culture propagated heterosexual virility in the technological, phallic body of men. After the war, then, a distinction was carved into the art and culture of the Allied countries. Winckelmann and Pater’s interpretations of classical art were overturned, no longer imitative or passionless, and Neitzsche’s primitive brute was civilized and sexualized in new ways.⁴⁹ This shift occurred from engagement with modernism, consumerism, and new discourses on sexuality. Nietzsche might have thought him a vacuous product of the capitalist market, but the classical supermodel’s debt to the nineteenth century was transformed by expansion in sexual knowledge and visual culture. Classicism had both intellectual heritage and popular symbolism, transgressing the boundaries between high and low culture. For some, classicism became the common thread in the modernist project, emphasizing unity and cohesion. Yet its pliability enabled different practitioners to construct their distinct versions. Classicism purported to innovation while remaining symbolically attached to a traditional order, evident in experiences and appearances of the body. During the war, working-class men were subject to the medical and objectifying gaze in the process of militarization and the defence of Empire. Classicism deepened the imperial imagination but also facilitated looking at and performing the male body. This development was assisted by photography, and the internalizing effect of selfhood and individualism at the heart of capitalism and commercial culture in the post-war period. Sexuality’s relationship to consumerism and advertising are important themes in the reconstruction of civilization through the body. From the early nineteenth century an increasingly feminized commodity culture was met by a mixture of health zealotry and sexual panic, evidenced in campaigns for vegetarianism and crusades against masturbation. Stringent bodily discipline was used to assert supreme control over the body.⁵⁰ The shift from masculine restraint to the celebration of the sexualized male body endowed muscles with a new social capacity. Classicism was a useful aesthetic code for rebuilding male confidence through body image and consumer culture. Inspiring men to transform themselves after the war required new forms of embodiment to satisfy the needs of both tradition ⁴⁹ Michael Fried, ‘Antiquity Now: Reading Winckelmann on Imitation’, October, 37 (1986), 87–97; Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 147. ⁵⁰ Michael S. Kimmel, ‘Consuming Manhood: The Feminization of American Culture and the Recreation of the Male Body, 1832–1920’, in Laurence Goldstein (ed.), The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 12–41; Andreas Huyssen, ‘Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other’, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986).

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and modernity. New ideas about bodily perfection were at the epicentre of this dialectic between the classical and the modern. Reconstructed bodies had to be supremely civilized, geometrically ordered and, most significantly for the post-war world, bolstered by the renewing spirit of human sexuality. Women’s bodies were implicated in the civilizing process. Through sport, dance and practices aimed at ‘fit motherhood’, body cultures mediated various biological discourses, oscillating between prenatal and eugenic allegiances. For some critics, however, the ideal of reconstructing civilization was a misguided product of the educated classes, who possessed ‘sentimental’ views about ‘the beauty of motherhood and . . . the future of the race’. Maternalism ‘was in no sense civilized’, according to Margaret Sanger, the American eugenist and advocate of birth control. Indeed, she spoke of ‘conscripted motherhood’, where women’s bodies were co-opted by the state, and yet did not even ‘rise to the level of the barbarous or the primitive’. So powerful was this culture of rebuilding civilization, she thought, that ‘the politicians are at one with the traditions of a civilization which, with its charities and philanthropies, has propped up the defective and degenerate’.⁵¹ Concurring with Sanger, H. G. Wells entwined eugenics and peace discourse with the birth of a new civilisation: The New Civilization is saying to the Old now: ‘We cannot go on making power for you to spend upon international conflict . . . You must organize the Peace of the World; you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all mankind. And we cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth . . . We want fewer and better children . . . and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.⁵²

While Sanger imagined ‘Spartan methods’ imposed on Americans to curtail ‘chaotic breeding’ and ‘liberate womankind’, popular body cultures debated these issues and left it up to individual women to decide how they would contribute to reconstructing civilization. Sublimation, repression, and pathological indulgence were rejected in favour of ‘expression’, ‘integration’, and ‘assimilation’ of sexual experience.⁵³ Modern war destroyed the body in lived experiences and persistent cultural memories and although bodies and minds suffered on a scale never seen before, hope for the future was not entirely obliterated. For some, the scale of loss, injury, and grief provoked a refusal to surrender to the limits of humanity. Whether yearning to avenge or redeem the fallen, many felt that bodies should be not just remembered, but also renewed. In the European and Anglophone political context, nationalism was thinly veiled by the rhetoric of universal humanism. ⁵¹ Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s Press, 1922). ⁵² H. G. Wells, Preface, ibid. ⁵³ Sanger, ibid.


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Classicism avowed to reconstruct the body, seemingly healing the rifts between nations at war. Rebuilding civilization fostered the absorption and reinvention of classical ideals. Ancient Graeco-Roman traditions were drawn upon to harness the ritual meanings of death and renewal through the elevation of the human body. Post-war societies were charged with tensions wrought by the transfiguration of personal experiences into cultural ones. Governments advocated ‘self-renewal’, leisure cultures promoted muscular ‘rebuilding’, and medicine advanced ‘restoration’ and ‘rehabilitation’. Post-war reconstruction thus conjured powerful ideals, attached to the historical mobilization of notions of rebirth. Emerging from the abyss of war, ‘our renaissance’ was hailed by body enthusiasts who claimed to be working ‘towards a new civilization’.⁵⁴ ‘ C U LT U R A L N O S TA LG I A’ I N M O D E R N I S M Artists and writers were particularly confronted by the war’s technological violence, which forced them to reconsider their relationship to the modern. Technology had once seemed exciting, erotic, and full of potential but war had transformed these fantastic visions into bloody realities. Recollections of the pre-war past were refracted through what I call ‘cultural nostalgia’, partly a longing for, or an idealizing of, the past, and partly a need to make productive use of the past through cultural practices. Just as private nostalgia in mourning lessens the impact of loss, cultural nostalgia defends against despair, enabling the hope of rebirth and continuity.⁵⁵ Cultural nostalgia underscored the turn to classicism, defending not authentic memories of the past, but enacting revision and change as a productive way to heal. Members of the Bloomsbury set idealized the pre-war period. Clive Bell reiterated a widely held belief that the war’s extreme violence had almost wiped out ‘civilization’. Virginia Woolf, too, felt that romance was in ruins.⁵⁶ While many artists, thinkers, and writers were deeply affected by the war, they turned their minds to rethinking the future of the modern, looking to classicism as a source of solace and an impetus for reconciliation. Nostalgia was not just ‘an exercise of mourning’, but also an attempt to rebuild.⁵⁷ Modernists redefined their relationship with tradition as well as the very meaning of the past, the ⁵⁴ Health and Physical Culture (1930) (journal). ⁵⁵ Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 119, 62. ⁵⁶ Clive Bell, Civilization (1928; London: Chattow and Windus, 1932), 31. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929). In Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The Great War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 469. ⁵⁷ J. M. Fritzman, ‘The Future of Nostalgia and the Time of the Sublime’, Clio: Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History, 23 (1994), 168.

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present, and the future. After war, distinctions between the past and the present were more ambiguous. Artists responded to the war, redefining the body and making peace with the past. Classicism had symbolized conservative, reactionary, and stultified conventions in the humanist tradition, emphasizing mimicry and privileging the human form.⁵⁸ In the post-war period, rethinking the body was not simply to ‘return to man’, but to reorganize the body as abstract, objectified flesh—a new architectural embodiment invoking its symmetry and unity. Artists reassembled the bodies shattered in the war into new configurations. Valorizing the object was therefore not to dispose of the human fragment, but to develop body ideals from classical principles. Classicism spoke the language of certainty and logic instead of sensation and emotion. In 1920, a group of artists led by Russian Vladimir Tatlin pronounced: ‘We declare our distrust of the eye and place our sensual impressions under control.’⁵⁹ In Russia as in Europe, the war had tested the capacity for truth, justice, and resolution, although many artists remained revolutionaries. The influence of classicism means that the ‘rhetoric of rupture’ cannot be taken at face value.⁶⁰ It also complicates our understanding of modernism and its encounters with the past, making the polarization of conservatives and radicals difficult to sustain. The war forced artists and intellectuals to reconcile modernist theories and experimentation with violence, death, and mutilation.⁶¹ Technological reality countered romantic notions of speed and masculine action of the Futurists and Vorticists, who suffered terrible losses. Boccioni, Gaudier-Brzeska, and Wilfred Owen were killed; Braque and Léger were wounded; Blaise Cendrars, Laurence Stallings, and Napier Waller had limbs amputated; Roger de la Fresnaye suffered complications for seven years until his death; and Guillaume Apollinaire died of influenza on Armistice Day.⁶² Picasso and Juan Gris, ‘aliens’ living in France as non-combatants, were abused as pacifists and foreigners, intensifying their hatred of war.⁶³ In a world transformed by the war, some artists revisited classicism; Apollinaire defined it as a renewing force, a ‘new spirit’ of modernism.⁶⁴ This ‘new spirit’ sought social harmony by juxtaposing the classical codes of purity and ⁵⁸ Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics between the Wars (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1995). ⁵⁹ Vladimir Tatlin, et al., ‘The Work Ahead of Us: Moscow, 31 December 1920’, in Stephen Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 12. ⁶⁰ Hal Foster, Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 10. ⁶¹ Paul O’ Keefe, ‘Art, Action and the Machine’, in ‘Dynamism: The Art of Modern Life before the Great War’, exhibition catalogue (Liverpool: Tate Gallery, 1991), 49. ⁶² Peter de Francia, Fernand Léger (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 30. ⁶³ Silver, Esprit de Corps, 107. ⁶⁴ Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘The New Spirit and the Poets’ (1918), in C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds) Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 225.


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unity with the blood spilt in war. The harmonious relation of ‘peace through order’ signalled hope for a unified society.⁶⁵ Mondrian’s Platonic mysticism spoke of ‘the world psyche’ and ‘universal consciousness’, whereby art—like Platonic symmetry—was defined by ‘relations of equivalence’.⁶⁶ Others politicized similar ideas. The 1922 Congress of International Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf equated ‘universalism and unity’ with ‘internationalism as opposed to nationalism’.⁶⁷ By 1934, so accepted was the Platonic turn, that New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition on machine art quoted the Philebus on the absolute beauty of geometric forms.⁶⁸ Artists appropriated the language and imagery of classicism while maintaining the vigour of modernism. The avant-garde felt ‘the new classic age that was dawning was the next, and inevitable, direction for the modern sensibility’.⁶⁹ War had made it possible, if not necessary. In Britain, Wyndham Lewis, formerly an anti-classical Vorticist committed to Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909) replaced the chaos of ruptured perspectives with linear geometries and volumetric figures. From the jagged dynamism of war—conjuring the sounds and sensations of war and the brutality of mass conflict (A Battery Shelled (1918))—he turned to a distinctly sombre classical quality combined with linear figuration in such images as Girl Reclining (1919), Portrait of a Woman (1931), depicting the Viscountess Glenarpp, and the Venusfaced Portrait of Edith Sitwell (1923–35). His vision of reconstruction was both social and architectural.⁷⁰ From 1919, Lewis worked entirely from life models under a fluid interpretation of ‘truth to life’ rather than the raw, ‘truth-telling’ narratives of war literature and memoirs.⁷¹ His post-war portraits and studies of friends, associates, and models were profoundly humanist in conception.⁷² In the 1920 ‘Seven and Five Society’ exhibition at London’s Walker’s Galleries, Lewis’ group aimed ‘merely to express what they feel in terms that shall be intelligible, and not to demonstrate a theory nor to attack a tradition’.⁷³ London’s Fine Art magazine described him as an ‘artist-philosopher whose many-sided activities recall those of the men of the Renaissance’.⁷⁴ ⁶⁵ Michel Seuphor, ‘In Defence of an Architecture’, Cercle et Carré (Paris), 1 (15 March 1930). See Bann, The Tradition of Constructivism, 190. ⁶⁶ Piet Mondrian, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality: An Essay in Trialogue Form, 1919–1920 (New York: George Braziller, 1995). ⁶⁷ In Bann, The Tradition of Constructivism, 59. ⁶⁸ Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Machine Art (1934; New York: Arno Press, 1969). ⁶⁹ Silver, Esprit de Corps, 89. ⁷⁰ Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 276. ⁷¹ Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism: 1900–1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 160. ⁷² Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis Paintings and Drawings (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1971). ⁷³ Ibid. 164. ⁷⁴ Fine Art (1931), 105.

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Lewis the man, the thinker, and the painter was elevated by his own rebirth. Lewis and the Seven and Five Society have been criticized for its ‘pseudoliberalism’.⁷⁵ This view does not acknowledge Lewis’ suffering and his depression after the death of Henri Gaudier-Breszka; his refusal to find war’s redemptive value; or the cultural atmosphere that fostered sentiments of reconciling with the past. Nor does it acknowledge that while official war artists relished the creative opportunity provided by the war some were pro-peace or critical of its conduct. Sue Malvern writes that Lewis saw modern war as ‘an artifice and a manufactured spectacle’. Ypres and Vimy Ridge had become ‘deliberately invented scenes’.⁷⁶ There was performative self-irony about Lewis’ personal and aesthetic shift, despite his increasingly vocal anti-semitizing and sexual conservatism. Nevertheless, the revival of classicism was connected to the need to reconstitute the body fragmented by war, replacing weakness with strength, destruction with restoration, and disability with physical perfection. The body could be beautified through structured forms; given solid arms, heads, and legs. Sensuality could be found in the austere, the monumental, or the linear. Platonic geometry and ideal types were applied to the body in art as in life. The Platonic notion that passion for the body motivates the quest for knowledge, encouraging spiritual growth, appealed to artists.⁷⁷ New classical renderings of the body often had a lofty, almost spiritual quality. Classicism idealized the mother–goddess, an increasingly popular figure in European painting, as the female body became the focus of eugenic and pronatalist discourses around population decline. In France—where 1.3 million men died in the war—artists may have been influenced by the 1921 ‘Exposition Nationale de la Maternité et de l’Enfance’, evoking the maternal and sensual; women appeared suckling children or revealing one breast. Picasso’s Maternity paintings (1920, 1921) and Mother and Child (1921), Andre Lhote’s Nude (1920), Amédeé Ozenfant’s The Source: Woman at the Spring (1927), Albert Gleizes’ Cubist abstraction, Mother and Child (1920), Roger de la Fresnaye’s Mother and Child (1923), and Fernand Léger’s Mother and Child (1922) valorized the female body as goddess of the past and mother of the future.⁷⁸ Olympian goddesses were superior physical types participating in popular leisure culture, such as in Picasso’s Bathers (1918, 1921); Family Beside the Sea (1923); and Two Women Running on the Beach: The Race (1922)—designed for Jean Cocteau’s Le Train bleu, a ‘sporting ballet’ with the Diaghilev Company. Although depopulation was a particular anxiety in France, it also resonated across Anglophone cultural circles. In Dame Laura Knight’s portrait of a woman ⁷⁵ Harrison, English Art, 65. ⁷⁶ Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War: Witnessing, Testimony and Remembrance (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 141, 134. ⁷⁷ Susan R. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays in Cartesianism and Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987), 94. ⁷⁸ Cowling and Mundy, On Classic Ground, 173, 255, 107, 244.


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Blue and Gold, the subject is an ideal, monumentalized figure. More than woman, her aloof expression, accentuated by the backdrop of heavenly skies, elevates her to the status of a goddess, while abundant breasts suggest motherhood.⁷⁹ Classical stylization appeared in the portraits of women by London-based painters such as Savely Sorine, William Roberts, and Dod Proctor.⁸⁰ Similarly, it was found in Bloomsbury sculptor Frank Dobson’s fecund depiction of (Woman) Reclining Nude (1925), with her colossal breasts and enlarged womb. Eric Gill’s stone sculpture of a female figure, Mankind (1927), delivers a similar message of procreative sexuality refracted through classical idealism. Beauty returned as an important element of workmanship and design. Gill saw it as a natural, gendered concern: ‘all men are artists . . . for all men are concerned with Beauty’.⁸¹ While some artists monumentalized the female body, others, like Charles Despiau, rendered Venus as slim and muscular. Rayner Hoff’s Vitalist classical bodies also depicted the ideal, ‘fit family’ as the outcome of a passionate marriage (Idyll: Love and Life, 1926). Alongside Vitalist ideas about health and the body, ideals about eugenic reproduction, the prosperity of the white race, and valorization of the family, shaped how classical bodies were modernized. Art provided visual models for reconstructing civilization through the female body, seen as an agent of regeneration. Fecundity and sexuality affirmed the sentiments of life after death, and peace after war. The appeal of these discourses reached across political and national divides. By contrast, the male body was objectified as hard and machine-like in the classical ideal of absolute form and utilitarian beauty.⁸² The end of war saw a social shift across the world, a shift toward the ordered, the lucid, and the pure.⁸³ Absolute, timeless forms replaced the glorification of the fragment in ‘the return to order’. Fernand Léger’s work turned from the dehumanizing Taylorism of military life in Le Soldat a` la pipe (1916)—painted during his convalescence—to L’Homme a` la pipe (1920), with its monumental humanity.⁸⁴ After 1918, classicism gathered momentum. From the circulation of body culture magazines and the wide practice of exercise regimes, to the theories and practices of the avant-garde, the western classical tradition was a potent, unifying force. French and Australian artists in particular referred to the classical symbolism of the Mediterranean in celebrations of seaside leisure culture. French artists, fashion magazines, and graphics advertising depicted beach scenes and statuesque nudes in modernist styles, which was copied in the United States and Australia. From Picasso’s Bathers (1918, 1921) to Le Train bleu by Jean Cocteau (who had shell shock in the war), representations of health, fitness, and dance ⁷⁹ Laura Knight, Blue and Gold. See British Painting (London: The Studio, 1930), 153. ⁸⁰ British Painting (London: The Studio, 1931), 150–1; ‘Contemporary Figure Painters’, The Studio (1925). ⁸¹ Harrison, English Art, 213. ⁸² de Francia, Fernand Léger, 60. ⁸³ Silver, Esprit de Corps, 230. ⁸⁴ ‘Léger and Purist Paris’, exhibition catalogue (London: Tate Gallery, 1970), 10.

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cultures traversed high art and leisure culture, reflecting their new popularity in Europe, the United States, and Australia.⁸⁵ Constructivist artists claimed ‘the days of destroying, laying siege, and undermining lie behind us’.⁸⁶ Even the Winged Victory of Samothrace—once a figure of Futurist disdain—was now admired for its ‘imaginary forward movement’.⁸⁷ Connecting time and space through the joy of motion, the classical aesthetic, inspired the artistic expression of pleasure, play, and sexuality that war art and literature rarely dared to address. Classicism was used as an artistic motif and social building block to provide healing and calm. It was embedded in cultural nostalgia—the personal and social processes of mourning and recovery. The historical continuity central to its various manifestations encompassed a distinct longing to use the ancient past as a passageway to a future state of peace and happiness. Modernists and traditionalists shared a recognised ‘nostalgia for the future’, idealizing classical civilization and the eternal promise of western progress. Classicism was adapted in an attempt to understand the meaning of war, to rekindle faith in human unity, placing the problems of wounding and healing, mourning and remembering, at the heart of social and cultural life.

C L A S S I C I S M I N T H E AC A D E M Y Alongside the political, popular, and artistic appeal of reconstructing civilization, the study of the classics in the academic arena forms a significant backdrop to the history and impact of the First World War. Before the war, classical studies were the privilege of the prosperous classes who entered formal higher education in the elite schools of Europe. Classical languages were the cornerstones of the German gymnasium system and elite Anglophone education. However, Germany and France dominated the production of texts, and took a deeply linguistic approach to analysis.⁸⁸ British archaeology and its institutions encouraged classical study: the British Schools at Athens (1883) and Rome (1901), and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (1879). European archaeology generated national competition and public fascination too. Heinrich Schliemann excavated Troy, Mycenae, and Kythera, and located the temple of Uranian Aphrodite. Freud admired him, and compared psychoanalysis to archaeology as layers of psyche excavated as intimate treasures. Freud collected over 2,000 antiquities, including ⁸⁵ Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, trans. Olivia Emmet (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 162. ⁸⁶ In Bann, The Tradition of Constructivism, 55. ⁸⁷ Naum Gabo, ‘Sculpture: Carving and Construction in Space’, J. L. Martin, B. Nicholson, and Naum Gabo (eds), Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (New York and Washington, DC: Praeger Publishing, 1971), 108. ⁸⁸ Thomas W. Africa, ‘The Owl at Dusk: Two Centuries of Classical Scholarship’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (1993), 147.


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statues of Eros, god of love and desire and central figure in his theories of libido struggling against the death drive.⁸⁹ Gustav Hirschfeld’s explorations at Olympia yielded the Nike of Paionios, which, as will be seen in later chapters, was popularized in the fashion, body, and beauty industries during the 1920s. In the 1890s, French excavations at Delphi captivated scholars and public imagination. By 1906, Arthur Evans’ excavations at Knossos struck a chord with British audiences. Classics and archaeology provided new ways of thinking about the modern world. The first General Meeting of the British Classical Association (1904) pronounced that the classics represented ‘the roots and the soil out of which the modern world has grown’. More revealing was the view that while the classics represented the historical origin of the west, it had also become an ‘instrument of culture’.⁹⁰ This marked the modern view of British and German thinking on the role of the classics in contemporary society. Such ideas appealed to the United States and dominion nations such as Australia, where Cambridge colonials exported classics to Harvard University and the University of Sydney. Specialized ancient, philological, and art historical studies that followed the intellectual and aesthetic trajectories through the Renaissance, helped to position local European cultural practices within the longer pathway of western tradition. In various individual ways, new nations were keen to be attached to this heritage. Greece was regarded as the ‘cradle of democracy’ and instigator of beauty, while Rome founded the rule of law and statehood.⁹¹ From such origins, modern Europe was pinpointed as the highpoint of ‘Western Civilization’, the apex of progress in intellectual, scientific, and aesthetic developments, born from the beautiful and grand classical past. At the turn of the century, modern Americans were deliberating upon this cultural heritage too, by examining European education and networking with schools and universities. In 1897, teacher Lucy Salmon travelled to Germany visiting thirty-two gymnasiums in eighteen different places. In her report to the American Historical Association, she marvelled that despite regional differences there was a comprehensive and systematic curriculum, in marked contrast to the United States.⁹² German classicism was distinctive in the way it permeated social, educational, military, leisure, and cultural life. The First World War impacted upon classical education as middle-class men underwent national service. Humanism, erudite writing on the ancient world, ⁸⁹ Janine Burke, The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection (Sydney: Knopf, 2006), 1–5. ⁹⁰ Arthur Evans, ‘The Place of Greek and Latin in Human Life’, Address delivered to the Classical Association at its First General Meeting, Held in the Examination Schools, Oxford, 28 May 1904, 3. See J. W. Mackail, Classical Studies (London: John Murray, 1925). ⁹¹ Henry Browne, Our Renaissance: Essays on the Reform and Revival of Classical Studies (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1917), p. xiv. ⁹² Lucy M. Salmon, ‘The Study of History in Schools: A Report to the American Historical Association by the Committee of Seven’ (New York: American Historical Association Report, 1899).

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and philosophical enquiry into beauty were challenged as the military called young men to be trained for modern warfare. Nevertheless, many an educated soldier went off to the war with a concept of noble combat garnered from the pages of the Iliad. Although there was hand-to-hand combat in the First World War, it was not what young men expected. Instead they encountered heavy artillery, mass casualties, and human bodies discarded as detritus. Bodies and machines smashed into the landscape was a far cry from the heroic figures of Achilles and Hector. For many combatants, reality stripped from war the allure of classical heroism and the fame of the great deeds professed in ancient stories. Classicists who had once spoken of patriotism and warrior ambition were less likely to do so after the war.⁹³ Initially, many classicists had expounded the rhetoric of war as a conflict of ‘Civilization’, a battle between culture and kultur. Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University, supported the war effort by working in Britain’s propaganda office, the Bureau of Information. Gilbert helped to draft the ‘The Writer’s Manifesto’ (1914) against German aggression, signed by key literary figures of the day.⁹⁴ In the United States, Andrew West saw America’s role in the war as saving ‘civilized freedom’ from the ‘barbaric spirit’ of ‘the Hun’.⁹⁵ Sir Frederick Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, accused Germany of claiming ‘a special right to the domination of the world’ due to its intellectual superiority.⁹⁶ Increasingly amongst intellectuals, however, there was uncertainty and contradiction. Kenyon later espoused ‘harmony and cooperation’ at the educational level, and Murray wrote in the preface of Trojan Women (1915) that ‘to deliberately hate Germany is a sin against civilization’.⁹⁷ During the Armistice, Murray hoped Germany would receive fair peace terms, and he used the classics to highlight justice. The malleability of the classical tradition meant it could justify either war or peace. Many classicists, as well as politicians and medical professionals with a classical education, adjusted their consciences, turning classicism to the arts of post-war reconciliation. Surgeon Sir William Osler, having studied in Berlin, pleaded against anti-German reprisals during the 1916 gas attacks. After the death of his son, though, Osler confessed in a letter to The Times that his sense of rage had ‘changed me into an ordinary barbarian’. Internalizing these common discourses about civilization and barbarism, Osler found that his loss challenged his personal and professional commitment to the Hippocratic oath. Yet, he surmised, the sciences and humanities could cure such ‘hells of inconsistency’.⁹⁸ ⁹³ Browne, Our Renaissance, 5. ⁹⁴ Francis West, Gilbert Murray: A Life (London: St Martin’s, 1984), 161. ⁹⁵ Andrew F. West, The Value of the Classics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1917), 3. ⁹⁶ Frederic G. Kenyon, Education Scientific and Humane: A Report of the Proceedings of the Council for Humanistic Studies (London: John Murray, 1917), 2. ⁹⁷ West, Gilbert Murray, 152. ⁹⁸ William Osler, ‘The Old Humanities and the New Science’, Presidential Address, the British Classical Association, 1919 (repr. Cambridge, Boston, and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., Riverside Press, 1920), 14, 17.


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Modern civilization was based upon liberal education and sound knowledge of the classics. Wartime made them seem under ‘attack’ as resources were directed towards science, technology, and engineering.⁹⁹ Afterwards, though, the British government rehabilitated classics since its ideals of civic duty could be useful for the state. The British Ministry of Reconstruction, while usually concerned with demobilization, industrial matters, and war workers, published pamphlets on the classics and citizenship, using language peculiar to both military and post-war peace rhetoric. Instead of ‘bitterness’ in discussions or ‘wasting time and forces in fighting one another’, education needed a ‘scheme of cooperation’. The ‘enemy’ of British education was lack of moral, spiritual, and intellectual values. Classics were placed at the centre of the ‘reconstruction of national life’.¹⁰⁰ Instead of recognizing class bias in educational standards, knowledge of the classics was recast as a form of democratic participation that the government was making available to the masses. At the highest political level, reconstruction raised issues of the place of tradition and modernity in the new world order. The classics were effectively politicized. Across the international field of education, classicists reiterated the importance of civic duty and national consciousness convened around humanist principles of learning. In his 1923 public lecture at Melbourne University, Scottish classicist J. W. Mackail spoke of the ‘kinship of the Universities of Empire’ appealing to the citizens of the British dominions as members of a civilized community sharing a common heritage, blood ties and the ‘common parentage of Greece and Rome’. In his vision of an ‘inclusive Imperial citizenship’, Mackail saw classics as having a role in political and diplomatic quarters, strengthening the ‘bonds among nations of the British Commonwealth’, and fostering ‘the sense of kinship and mutual understanding’.¹⁰¹ Why ties between Australia and Britain required strengthening was not discussed. Cracks were appearing in the myth of the imperial collective apparent within commemorative discourse and its heroic codes. It may have seemed a bitter irony—as much as a masculinist myth—that Commonwealth citizens had died for both ‘the mother country’ and the ‘birth’ of their nation.¹⁰² Some felt the Anzac soldier had paid a high price to be included in the myth of the classical warrior; others, however, saw it as part of an important imperial tradition that brought Australia closer to the international scene. ⁹⁹ ‘The Classics in Education: Report of the Committee Appointed by the Prime Minister to Inquire into the Position of Classics in the Educational System of the United Kingdom, 27 November 1919’ (1921), 18; ‘Joint Statement of Viscount Bryce and others’, first published in The Times (4 May 1916), and repr. West ‘British and French Statements’, The Value of the Classics, 345. ¹⁰⁰ ‘The Classics in British Education’, British Ministry of Reconstruction, 21, London, 1919, 1–15. ¹⁰¹ Mackail, ‘The Classics in Imperial Studies’, Classical Studies, 219, 224, 228. ¹⁰² Id., ‘What is the Good of Greek’, ibid. 32, 46, 52; Marilyn Lake, ‘Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation—Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts’, Gender and History, 4 (1992), 305–22.

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From 1919, classical education came to the centre stage of British politics and society in several parliamentary enquiries, which self-consciously sought to assert the modern relevance of classics after the war.¹⁰³ The Committee Appointed by the Prime Minister to Inquire into the Position of Classics in the Educational System of the United Kingdom asserted that the British Empire’s ideas of ‘law, citizenship, freedom and empire’ were rooted in ancient civilization. The Committee sat for eighty-five days and examined 140 witnesses at a cost of £2,602. Again, in 1921, the Prime Minister appointed the Committee, also sitting for eighty-five days at a cost of £2,917, and examining 143 witnesses.¹⁰⁴ At a time when liberal classical education was under pressure from the forces of modernity, and the questions of demobilization and retraining disabled soldiers were of paramount concern, the classics were pitched as an egalitarian and democratic pursuit, equally suitable for workers and professionals. Many testimonies came from school educators, who perhaps aimed to impose the classics as a standard in British education. Classics continued to play a major role within the establishment, while being idealized as benefiting the working classes. Although in Britain Latin was not required for entry into medicine after 1916, most elites in this period had studied classics, maintaining high regard for the subject and its social value.¹⁰⁵ In his address, the new President of the British Classical Association, surgeon William Osler (nominated by outgoing President, Gilbert Murray, and seconded by Frederic Kenyon), spoke of the ‘mutual affinities’ between medicine and classics.¹⁰⁶ Indeed, as discussed in the following chapter, the reconstructive surgeon Harold Delf Gillies engaged with the classical tradition. War pressured classical education and yet also returned humanistic thinking to politics, medicine, and international relations. According to the Prime Minister’s Committee, classical knowledge generated ‘a sympathetic imagination’. In an era of heightened diplomacy, the classics offered ‘the power to appreciate the point of view of those whose interests are different from or even antagonistic to his own’.¹⁰⁷ In Washington, DC, the Honorable James Brown Scott, member of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, invoked a world peace discourse, making claims for the continuity of civilization through study and respect for the classics, especially its potential to help solve modern-day political and social problems.¹⁰⁸ The idea that the classics could foster global humanism was shared amongst medical men, political agencies, and members within the League of Nations. At ¹⁰³ ‘The Classics in British Education’, 6. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid. 17. ¹⁰⁵ ‘Report of the Committee Appointed by the Prime Minister’ (1921), 253. ¹⁰⁶ Osler, ‘The Old Humanities and the New Science’, 50–5. ¹⁰⁷ ‘Report of the Committee Appointed by the Prime Minister’ (1921), 255. ¹⁰⁸ James Brown Scott, ‘The Classics in Modern Life’, in Francis W. Kelsey (ed.), Latin and Greek in American Education: With Symposia on the Value of Humanistic Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 206–10.


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the same time, protagonists contrasted Anglophone and German morality, despite thinking German intellectualism was superior.¹⁰⁹ Significantly, Gilbert Murray, the eminent Oxford University classicist on the Select Committee Inquiry into Classical Education, became a major figure of peace through internationalist intellectualism based on his own brand of neo-humanist discourse. Greek civilization was a ‘shining light’ against ‘the surrounding barbarism’.¹¹⁰ Murray worked in quasi-political institutions, as Chairman of the League of Free Nations Association (later League of Nations Union). As well, he continued to modernize ancient Greek tragedy exposing wider audiences to its humanist lessons. His Trojan Women and Medea were successes during and after the war, touring the British dominions in the 1930s. With the heroic narrative of Gallipoli, Australian audiences connected with the story of Troy. Performers, too, felt the power of Murray’s interpretation. Sybil Thorndike recalled feeling ‘all the misery and awfulness of the 1914 war was symbolized in that play’.¹¹¹ Murray touched Britons, Americans, and Australians with his cultural imagination, turning his insights on the human condition towards the performance of peace on the world stage. Gilbert worked on the Commission for Disarmament, in his role in the League Assembly. In the Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, he worked with Marie Curie, Henri Bergson, and Albert Einstein at a time when the British government barely supported the League, and had refused to sign the Geneva Covenant in 1924. Despite encountering anti-German sentiments in the League, he pursued reforms, guiding the Committees on Education, the Museums’ office in Brussels, and the Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters, and promoting an International Studies Conference.¹¹² In his own words, Gilbert saw peace and classicism as a line that connected the present and the past through the ‘eternal values’ within liberal humanism. It was, he said, ‘a matter of life and death for all of us’.¹¹³ Scholars began to oppose the propaganda of an imagined British civility fighting against German barbarity. This shift was occurring in classics and anthropology. The renewed influence of James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) saw that modern civilization was not competing with the atavism of the primitive. Instead, primitivism was alive in the modern world—as Osler had confessed. The notion of the ‘savage within’ was powerfully consolidated by the war and explicated through anthropology.¹¹⁴ Anthropologist and military ¹⁰⁹ Osler, ‘The Old Humanities and the New Science’, 21; Report of the Committee Appointed by the Prime Minister (1921), 267–8. ¹¹⁰ Arnold Toynbee, ‘The Unity of Gilbert Murray’s Life and Work’, in Jean Smith and Arnold Toynbee (eds), Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography with Contributions by his Friends (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), 213. ¹¹¹ Sybil Thorndike, ‘The Theatre and Gilbert Murray’, in Smith and Toynbee, Gilbert Murray, 166. ¹¹² West, Gilbert Murray, 193. ¹¹³ In Toynbee, ‘The Unity of Gilbert Murray’s Life and Work’, 212. ¹¹⁴ Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 119.

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psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers interpreted shell shock as the result of repressed instinctive tendencies dormant in all men. This was a universal rather than cultural model of human behaviour. Swayed by Frazer’s book, Osler spoke of the ‘emotions of our savage ancestors’, and contextualized the war within the unchanged nature of human ‘primal passions’.¹¹⁵ Modern war brought man face-to-face with his own primitivism, his psychological savagery, and his inner barbaric character. European culture must not be shocked by its own hypocrisy, but must reach into the ancient past to find again the tools with which to rebuild civilization. The study of contemporary civilizations across the world had a remarkable allure in this period, which was echoed in the search for meaning and the desire for healing after the war. Classical paradigms were used to interpret the lives of indigenous peoples, such as Malinowski’s seminal The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922—prefaced by Frazer). In the 1920s, academic and cultural texts used classicism and primitivism to play out western intrigue with sexuality (Sex and Repression in Savage Societies (1927); Sexual Life of Savages (1929)) at a time when death and mourning was discussed publicly, alongside sexuality and repopulation. Gilbert Murray’s interest in anthropology informed his analysis of ancient religious cults (Dionysian and Orphic). He also relied upon the views of his brother Hubert, Governor of Papua New Guinea. Although Murray believed in independence for India and Home Rule for Ireland, he thought Britain should retain sovereignty over the African colonies.¹¹⁶ In creating public war memorials, colonial policy saw palpable differences between white, Indian, and African combatants based on racial characteristics and assumptions about their ‘degree of civilization’. Despite the genuine assertion of equality in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission under Fabian Ware, colonial governors were often resistant. Memorials for East and West Africans were thought unnecessary since their tribalism and illiteracy rendered them insufficiently civilized to appreciate the sentiments of commemoration. Equality was an ideal to strive for, but only certain ‘races’ qualified.¹¹⁷ In the United States, around 200,000 black soldiers served overseas. However, lynchings and race riots increased during demobilization, especially with black soldiers wearing uniforms—a powerful symbol of their claim to citizenship. On the rare occasions when they were commemorated, racist objections were channelled into debates about appropriate location.¹¹⁸ In Britain, race riots followed demobilization in 1919, and implicated sexual relations. White men ¹¹⁵ Osler, ‘The Old Humanities and the New Science’, 11. ¹¹⁶ Wilson, Gilbert Murray, 180. ¹¹⁷ Michèle Barrett, ‘First World War Colonial Forces and the Politics of the Imperial War Graves Commission’, Interventions, 9 (2007), 451–74. ¹¹⁸ James Mennell, ‘African-Americans and the Selective Services Act of 1917’, Journal of Negro History, 84 (1999), 284; I. D. Lieberman, ‘Race and Remembrance: Philadelphia’s ‘‘All Wars


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were confronted not just by the damaging effect of war, but by the inability to work and to attract white women, for which black men were blamed. Thousands of Afro-Caribbeans, black colonial Africans, and a million subcontinental men had served Britain, often by force or coercion. Still, the role of colonial soldiers caused anxiety about public mourning. Tensions existed between black and white people, at home and in the colonies.¹¹⁹ In the West Indies, while war memorials evoked loyalty they also ignited a greater sense of rightful participation. The war exposed disparities and yet facilitated ‘black consciousness’, the radical press, and the franchise for Jamaican women.¹²⁰ Anthropological and social Darwinist views were critical to British colonial policy and American race relations, but the presence of black and colonial soldiers challenged the cultural remembering of the war in the embodiment of heroic white warriors. Since the late nineteenth century, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), theorizing human evolution, and Wallace’s ideas of race improvement, that as inferiors were ‘killed off . . . only the fittest would survive’, social discourses about competition between ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ groups were stabilized. Criteria for ‘natural selection’ shifted from fertility to intelligence, favouring the upper and middle classes, and influencing eugenic thinking about class and race. The ‘survival of the fittest’ pitched ‘civilized’ whites against ‘primitive’ blacks, rationalizing warfare with a ‘might is right’ rhetoric and justifying racial superiority in colonial policies and race relations.¹²¹ Although anthropologist Franz Boas, in the United States, resisted the traditional view of race, his voice was dim. Imperialism, scientific racism, and natural history were sustained in much anthropological thinking. Research institutions and museums often validated quasi-scientific vaudevillian exhibitions of primitives and public spectacles of inferior races. The evolutionary narrative that crystallized in anthropology influenced other disciplines such as classics and art history in pursuing the essential symbolic meanings of primitive and modern civilizations.¹²² Physical anthropology and archaeology facilitated the idealization of classical statuary as a way of comparing races, in a process of ‘Racial Hellenism’.¹²³ Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors’’ and the Politics of Place’, American Art Journal, 29 (1998), 18–51. ¹¹⁹ Lucy Bland, ‘White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War’, Gender and History, 17 (2005), 29–61; Albert Grundlingh, Fighting their own War: South African Blacks and the First World War ( Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1987); Brian Willan, ‘The South African Native Labour Contingent, 1916–1918’ Journal of African History, 18 (1978), 61–86. ¹²⁰ Glenford D. Howe, Race, War and Nationalism: A Social History of West Indians in the First World War (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002), 199–201. ¹²¹ In Gregory Claeys, ‘The ‘‘Survival of the Fittest’’ and the Origins of Social Darwinism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 61 (2000), 224, 229. ¹²² Andrew Apter, ‘Africa, Empire, and Anthropology: A Philological Exploration of Anthropology’s Heart of Darkness’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 28 (1999), 577–98. ¹²³ Athena Leoussi, ‘Nationalism and Racial Hellenism in Nineteenth-century England and France’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 20 (1997), 42–68.

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Anthropology shaped the representation of both the ideal antique body and the abject body in physical culture literature through to the twentieth century. The search for distinctions and correlations of the ‘primitive’ within the ‘civilized’ became the project of many academics and artists alike. Modern artists and writers tried to ‘go primitive’, projecting their fantasies onto non-white races.¹²⁴ The same artists were just as likely to ‘go classicist’ in their search to comprehend the meaning of civilization and barbarism after violent conflict. Similarly, the classicist Jane Harrison revered the ‘dark instincts’ she saw in human rituals of the present and past.¹²⁵ Her mentor Gilbert Murray’s interest was more in guarding civilization from decline. War had made such questions critical, accelerating the need for solutions in unlocking the history and future of mankind. Nevertheless, in this search for understanding and hope, anthropology, the classics, and art history re-enacted their own Eurocentric self-reflexive mechanisms, creating their own world of meaning. The reality of war, however, shattered many ideas about civilization and humanity, and humanist scholars responded. Some grappled with the meaning of the war by contemplating the visual and cultural world. Drawing on anthropology, philosophy, and classical art history, Aby Warburg linked German and British study into the ancient arts and symbols. Before his death in 1929, Warburg had been engaged in an astoundingly detailed project to collect and trace the evolution of ‘the western mind’ through classical and Renaissance traditions. This ‘Atlas’ he called Mnemosyne, from the Attic Greek meaning memory. At a time when war was shaping a ‘culture’ of memory, Warburg created an institute as an elegy of the humanist tradition. Although an expert in Florentine studies, his interdisciplinarity spawned an unconventional approach to art history. Where Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schiller idealized the classical Greek ‘as an object of longing’, Warburg focused on conflicts, such as the coexistence of primitive religious cults and elevated intellectualism. Nietzsche’s opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian forces in The Birth of Tragedy was pivotal in this dialectic.¹²⁶ Just as Nietzsche had spoken of the task of classical academism ‘to live in and with antiquity’, scholars like Aby Warburg and Gilbert Murray pursued the idea of a ‘living classicism’—Gilbert through his translations and peace work, Warburg in his tireless research.¹²⁷ This ideal assumed a deep pertinence after the war, well beyond the academy and into wider educational and bodily pursuits. Like many classicists and modernists of this period, Warburg found solace in both the intellectual and the sensual. Instead of seeing it as a struggle, he ¹²⁴ Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990). ¹²⁵ Wilson, Gilbert Murray, 159. ¹²⁶ Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970; 2nd edn, Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 12. ¹²⁷ James Whitman, ‘Nietzsche in the Magisterial Tradition of German Classical Philology’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 47 (1986), 463.


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looked with Jewish and Nietzschean eyes to the harmony of opposites. Joining Ruskin, Proust, and others, he found passion in Botticelli’s designs of swirling hair and chemise in motion, which he called ‘fluttering accessories’ (or ‘bewegte Beiwerke’).¹²⁸ Chapter 6 discusses academic fantasizing about classical femininity and its influence in European and Anglo-American body and dance cultures, popular photographers, and magazines. Cavorting nymphs, lithe athletic bodies, and feminine nikes performed for popular audiences. Alongside art history, scholarship in ancient history and classics fostered wider regard for classicism. Canadian-American artist Jay Hambidge’s analysis of geometry linked Greek art and architecture to natural forms. The theory of ‘dynamic symmetry’ drew on the Golden Ratio, the Fibonnaci Sequence, and ‘phyllotaxis’ (patterns in plants), and inspired modernist painters and fashion designers. Amédée Ozenfant believed all things in the world were linked by geometry. Madeleine Vionnet’s sketchbooks drew from Isadora Duncan’s costumes and Hambidge’s designs, infusing classical lines into drapery and creating a stark, sensual style. Vionnet revolutionized Parisian couture, reconstructing the female body by combining classical architecture with modern stripped form. Many agents in the arts, humanities, and commercial sectors saw the potential for a new humanism to be framed within the context of modernity. Arguably, Warburg was a thinker of the time—at no other stage in history had the popular and elite arts had more opportunity for convergence and massification. Warburg tried to understand humanism within a broader concept of symbols and social memory, which took his interests to mythology and astrology, pageantry and court festivals. To that extent, he linked the highest forms of fine arts to the lowliest symbols, such as postage stamps. Warburg’s notion of social memory was as a totally connected system of arts, humanities, and sciences. From the primitive to the classical, from the applied to the ideal, civilization was ‘an expression’ that connected the present with the ‘monuments of the past’.¹²⁹ Warburg’s ideas can be situated in the wider cultural scene where imagery and reality were crucial to social remembering, especially because of the war. The purpose of the Institute of Memory was to bring the past and present together, but not to erase the horrors through beauty and tradition. Instead, classicism was eternally meaningful, applicable to each age in new and different ways. For Warburg, classicism was an incitement to remember humanity. To connect the patterns of antiquity with modern civilization was the antithesis of forgetting, hence the Greek word ‘Mnemosyne’, inscribed above the door of the Warburg Library, implying that antiquity survived as a form of ‘human memory’ in the universal truth of humanity and civilization. The idea that the classical past could heal social rifts with truth and beauty held currency ¹²⁸ Anna Guilermin, review of Aby Warburg, ‘The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity’, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2000.01.18. ¹²⁹ Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 276, 264.

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across many different sectors of post-war culture, existing side by side with drives for revenge and graphic explications of human violence. Believing in beauty and historical continuity, Warburg saw himself as a creator of ‘beautiful memories’.¹³⁰ The question of reconstructing civilization through the classical had at its heart the troubled question of memory. This chapter has set the academic and cultural context in which classical beauty could be inscribed into cultural memory; later chapters will ponder the risky mediation of healing and forgetting within reconstruction. It is perhaps telling that, as a classicist working for international peace, Gilbert Murray reviled the graphic descriptions of the war in Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.¹³¹ Healing and peace could not be brought about by brutal language and visual imagination, he thought, even if they were profoundly anti-war. In some quarters, modernism was associated with violence, and an assault on traditional social relations and cultural life. Speaking about modern prose, Lord Hewart of Bury, Chief Justice of England and President of the Classical Association, said it ‘sheds a gloom over breakfast in the morning and over tea in the afternoon, is too often like a battlefield with corpses lying about—for words are like warriors shamming dead and ready to stab a man if he walks unwarily’.¹³² Owing to the explicit portrayal of physical destruction, war literature could be hailed for its realism or accused of repeating the violence of modernity. Yet the genre held enormous sway in the publishing and popular arena. On the other hand, beauty and the classical past appeared to elevate humanity onto the higher planes of civilized thought and behaviour. Mourners found comfort in the classical. Yet, writers such as Siegfried Sassoon saw manipulative politics in memorial design. Although it is difficult to ascertain which views were typical, complex needs for truth (about the war) and beauty (to heal its pains) underpinned many excavations into the classical and modern in searching for the meaning of the war. Classical scholars compelled by the war wanted to address a wider readership and renew interest in the subject, not just for the survival of the discipline and the love of western civilization and its heritage, but especially because the war had brought humanity to a new low in the eyes of many scholars. Sir Frederic Kenyon’s involvement with the Imperial War Graves Commission was a crucial selection by Fabian Ware to ensure aesthetic comprehension by the principal architects. Kenyon’s 1919 report to the Imperial War Graves Commission revealed his concern that the artistic ideals of the classical tradition be well received by the ‘mass of average opinion’. Although artists had ‘their higher ¹³⁰ See Giorgio Pasquali and Gertrud Bing, A Portrait of Aby Warburg: A True Intellectual Biography . ¹³¹ West, Gilbert Murray, 218. ¹³² Lord Hewart of Bury, The Classics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1926), 10.


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language’, they needed to communicate with the grieving public on whose behalf they were speaking.¹³³ Kenyon’s experience as Director of the British Museum furnished him with some appreciation of public concerns. But it was his seminal work on Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians which sensitized him to the magnitude of mass death by citizen soldiers at war for the city-state.¹³⁴ Mediating between the elite and the popular, he impressed upon the Commission the importance of democratic treatment for the war dead of the empire and its dominions. In this context, classicism was not merely the retreat to familiar and class-bound symbolism. It was positioned as an aesthetic able to elicit the sentiments of healing on multiple levels. Academic classicism reached across the elite arts and humanities into political relations and popular culture at a time when Europeans, Britons, and Americans were experimenting with different artistic and philosophical expressions. Classicists and modernists felt the urgency of the war, and the need to get their message across to wider audiences. Alongside interdisciplinary innovation that served to popularize new classical thinking, some scholars engaged with mass culture, photography, and magazines. In Gilbert’s case, he used modern play production and then later international politics to disseminate his personal and educative ideals of mitigating the impact of the war by gaining a lasting peace and instilling in people a collective belief in humanity. Moreover, that Gilbertian phrase ‘the living past’, became popular vernacular across the globe, appearing in dance, body, and visual culture. This resonance was also due to the profound search for meaning that followed the war. Together, it seemed, the spirit of modernism and classicism could effect mutual respect through the cultural appreciation of Europe’s imagined collective past and its mythic unified identity. By weaving new ideas with past traditions, the boundaries of creative possibility were opened, at the same time securing the relevance of the classical past to the conditions of the modern present. The ‘living past’ might rescue civilization from the edge of darkness. White European peoples could create their collective identity through the cultural memory of a civilized past and ensure its survival.

C L A S S I C I S M , N AT I O N S , A N D W E S T E R N C I V I L I Z AT I O N Classical tropes and images were vital to modern European thought, representation, and forms of embodiment. This chapter has discussed the European context ¹³³ Frederic Kenyon, ‘War Graves: How the Cemeteries Abroad will be Designed’, Report to the Imperial War Graves Commission (London, 1918), 4. ¹³⁴ Graham Oliver, ‘Naming the Dead, Writing the Individual: Classical Traditions and Commemorative Practices in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in P. Low, G. J. Oliver, and J. Rhodes (eds), Cultures of Commemoration: War Memorials, Ancient and Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy, 2009).

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in relation to Britain, Australia, and the United States, through the political, medical, academic, and cultural links across these countries. The ancient world was a source of information, fantasy, and security in the aftermath of war, and the classical thread was woven into the modern body. To what extent could this vision of reconstructing civilization overcome national borders? Classicisms are diverse and yet common ideological and aesthetic tropes in the story of empire and nation building woven across Europe and the Anglophone world. While classical ideas and images were coloured by indigenous or local issues, the global impact of the war was the major impetus behind the perception of its healing powers. Through all its diversity, classicism was universally linked to the meaning of ‘civilization’. Civilization was a marker that reduced many social, cultural, and racial factors into the geography of western progress. Generated by cultural nostalgia, ‘civilization’ was a set of behaviours and ideas moulded into influential institutions from politics and law to science and medicine. The notion of ‘the west’ was also understood to mean ‘civilization’. The two terms often merged, conjuring the longitudinal elegance of classicism with the imprecision of time and memory. The conjunction of western with civilization created visual and mental borders. Those borders become even more significant for redefining relationships between nation states after the First World War, and indeed for utilizing classicism to define something at once local, national, and global. In short, classicism was harnessed to reinvigorate the universal motif of the west. History has shown that the conceptual potential of classicism is malleable and discursive. In conjunction with the idea of western progress, modernity’s version of classicism inflected democracy, nation states, and industrial capitalism. This was important for post-war reconstruction, for economic, environmental, and cultural recovery. As a reconstructive ideal, classicism was deployed as a linking device so that disparate nation-states could be characterized under a common humanity, a common progress, a common representative tradition, as well as a common political and ideological heritage. From a western tradition perspective, classicism was located not just in Europe, but also in Britain and its dominions (focusing here on Australia), and the United States, and was deployed as a political and semiotic discourse. Australia is a useful point of comparison, not just because British and Australian soldiers held a mutual fascination, but also because professional and cultural bonds were formed that resonated strongly afterwards in reconstruction practices. Many of the cultural and medical networks created as a result of the war were developed further afterwards. This desire to generate a transnational brotherhood and a global community with shared visions for peace encouraged admiration for western universality. After 1918, one of the most iconic ways in which this manifested itself was in the sincere celebration of the classical body as a western symbol, literally embodying the ideals of post-war reconstruction across the European and Anglophone world. Serving the rhetoric of western progress,


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the classical body was integral to post-war reconstruction. Despite the impact of mechanized warfare, instead of rejecting the modern and retreating to a lost pre-war world, new alliances were made between the classical and modern in order to reconstruct civilization. Intricately linked, these monolithic notions—western, civilization, and classical—supplied the ancient tradition of characterizing strangers (xenoi), a category that in the fifth century was applied to resident or non-resident foreigners. Scholars are familiar with Edward Said’s concept of ‘others’—however both notions posited a ‘civilized norm’ against the barbaric, the foreign, the alien, the primitive, the undemocratic, and the feminine. Through language and policy, the ancients articulated identifiably Athenian notions of cultural sameness, social consensus, and equality of rights (isonomia): key elements in citizenship, property, and inheritance. Moderns were, arguably, more reductive, binding rights to skin colour, so that whiteness and enabled embodiment defined normative citizenship.¹³⁵ Over time, these ideas and practices were transformed into western virtues, attached to nations, and imposed on ‘national’ bodies. Colonization and anthropology honed western values into a white body that was the exemplary model of normative civilization. In contrast, the African body had been since the seventeenth century an object of taxonomical study and target of white economic power. Johann Blumenbach’s term ‘caucasian’ transposed notions of female beauty onto racial categories, which formed basic scientific assumptions in comparative anatomy, physical anthropology, and ethnology. European naturalists described apes more sympathetically than Africans—the ‘missing links’ in the great chain of being.¹³⁶ Representing the African body was central to western thought, becoming the critical model against which health and beauty were measured, and one drawn against the whiteness of classical perfection.¹³⁷ In imaginative and scientific literature of nineteenthcentury Europe, cultural differences to non-European ‘others’ were racialized and sexualized. Imperialist subjectivity divided white from black (or non-western), colonizer from colonized.¹³⁸ Constructs of western superiority and European sameness were crucial to the imperialist project framing nineteenth-century thinking, which had contradictory political uses at the end of the First World War. In carving out the Treaty of Versailles, the Allied victors homogenized the western tradition and its connection to Europe. Germany was the most guilty and aberrant of western nations. Japan’s ‘otherness’ locked that nation out of the best spoils, even though an ally. Australia ensured Japan was denied Papua and ¹³⁵ Françoise Lissarague, ‘The Athenian Image of a Foreigner’, in Thomas Harrison (ed.), Greeks and Barbarians (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 101–24; A. Stewart, ‘Imag(in)ing the Other: Amazons and Ethnicity in Fifth-century Athens’, Poetics Today, 16 (1996), 571–97. ¹³⁶ Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender and the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 5–7. ¹³⁷ Alexander Butchart, The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body (New York: Zed Books, 1998), 55. ¹³⁸ Ching-Liang Low, White Skins/Black Masks, 2–3.

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an affirmation of racial equality, despite Wilson’s protestations in attempting to shape a universal peace project.¹³⁹ Notwithstanding the racism built into Versailles, Germany lost all its colonies in Africa and the Pacific—which deepened the sense of disadvantage. African contributions to the war were especially marginalized in the sanitized representation of the empire as an imperial family, with her colonial sons coming to aid their motherland. Africans were given little recognition in commemoration. Indeed, notions of civilization and beauty continued to play themselves out in the colonial context. Africans remained subject to power structures determined by white notions of beauty and civilization, despite the rhetoric of inclusiveness communicated by the Imperial War Graves Commission. Where liberal thinkers saw a role for Indian and Irish independence, Africa’s colonial bond was strengthened. Even at the periphery, Africans were affected by the renewed concern for beauty and civilization, as it manifested in commemorative and consumer cultures. Whiteness had made a political contribution to the reorganization of Europe, as an essential element in the revaluation of western history. Inherent in the reconstruction of society was the redefinition of civilization and civilized behaviour. Japan’s failure to insert a statement of racial equality to the League Covenant exposed the extent of western control over human rights in relation to notions of civilization.¹⁴⁰ In his role as a League cultural authority, Gilbert Murray saw another war as the ‘doom of European civilization’.¹⁴¹ Catastrophe underpinned faith in the League and the appeal of classicism. Such ideas continued to be useful for reinvigorating the language of community central to commemoration and recovery. This was important not only for veteran rehabilitation and civilian reintegration, but also the entwined concerns of white repopulation and cultural renewal. Faith in the classical body, with its characteristic of pristine whiteness, transformed the need for healing from imagination to form and image. Mourning and remembrance took on new levels of political manoeuvring. The personal, local, and global became more affiliated through the ‘classical imaginary’. This ‘imaginary’ was a fundamentally embodied code in western culture. This was important because bodies were the major territories targeted in war, and bodies were also representative of ‘nations’. Benedict Anderson analysed the modern nation as an ‘imagined community’—a mythic fraternity that obscures inequality—while Nicole Loraux saw the Athenian citizenry as an imagined body politic. Performances of public mourning ‘invented’ its city-state ¹³⁹ L. F. Fitzhardinge, ‘W. M. Hughes and the Treaty of Versailles, 1919’, Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, 5 (1967), 130–42. ¹⁴⁰ J. Donnelly, ‘Human Rights: A New Standard of Civilization?’, International Affairs, 7 (1998), 11. ¹⁴¹ Gilbert Murray, The League of Nations and the Democratic Ideal (London: Oxford University Press, 1918), 9.


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identity. The ‘funeral oration’ created a powerful image of the state that was rehearsed in public commemoration ceremonies, where official memory was directed and performed.¹⁴² Classical tradition was similarly mobilized in the production of an imagined collective after the First World War—one highly selective in its rituals that became cultural memories. Homi K. Bhaba describes the nation as a narrative with lost origins and yet also a cohesive idea ‘whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force’.¹⁴³ Since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in conjunction with the imperial project, classicism provided western nations with this ‘symbolic force’. From India to Australia, classicism was an aesthetic code of the British Empire, connecting the centre and the periphery through culture and administration. In the American democracy and its Capitol in Washington, DC, classicism was the dominant political aesthetic. Classicism as a unifying practice generated ‘symbolic force’ by enabling diversity within its dominant system and representative tradition. After the war, the principles of unity were extended and globalized but inconsistently, and divisively, producing further distrust amongst the Allies. Despite that rancour, political rhetoric and philosophical desire for peace linked reconstruction to classical tradition and the value of liberal democracy. For Britain, it was a governing principle, for Australia a new foundation for a new nation, and for Woodrow Wilson’s United States, a delegation to lead the west. Loose connections were made to the democracy of ancient Greece, promulgating appeals to the egalitarian, juridical, free, and humanitarian. By 1918, American ideas and manpower had made inroads into old Europe with its antiquated militarism, dynastic rivalries, and economic insolvency. The liberal democratic dream of the League of Nations, however, did not reflect the politically diverse aims of member states, or their cultural differences. Russia and Japan, for instance, did not fit into the model history of the west. Peace and reconstruction politics used the rhetoric of European and western unity, embedded within the political language of the League. Yet the Treaty of Versailles possessed no coherent plan for European order and the US Congress would not bear the responsibility for, or leadership of, the world community.¹⁴⁴ While some states were marked for demolition, others were to be reinforced or reconstituted. This transitional social and geographical reality endorsed the need for unity even further. Classicism was a unifying language that naturalized national experiences of war and peace. The League of Nations employed the expertise of classicists (such as Gilbert Murray) and other intellectuals to this end. Classicism supposed unity, providing a system of cultural signification, ¹⁴² Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983); Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Orations in the Classical City (New Haven, Conn. and London: Harvard University Press, 1986). ¹⁴³ Homi K. Bhaba, Nation and Narration (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 33. ¹⁴⁴ Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order (London: Profile Books, 2001), 65–6.

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emphasizing the stability of the past and self-knowledge at precisely the time when these things, and indeed nations themselves, were, as Homi K. Bhaba terms it, ‘ambivalent’. Victory in the war had not entirely resulted in the triumph of nations: the body count was too high, the rhetoric uncomfortable, if not hollow. In the aftermath, the human body, like the nation, had become much more uncertain. This national and bodily ambiguity affected sexuality and gender, not just in flesh and discourse, but in the spaces, geographies, and terrains that bodies occupied. While the bodies of different nations were still strewn across battlefields, the classical, white, western body was being assigned its greatest ‘symbolic force’ in war memorials. Despite the ideal of holism in the classical body, the uncertainty of ‘ambivalence’ (Bhaba) remained. War had risked the body, the nation, and the colonial project—ambiguity was marked by vulnerability. Rebuilding civilization could not simply appeal to national duty, especially after the shocking losses of war. Instead, it offered personal agency and embodied subjectivity through commerce, the society of the spectacle, and mass technological warfare—the hallmarks of western modernity. The classical body has been an inherent product of the self-referential epistemology of ‘the west’—deeply racialized, imperial, and revered by bourgeois socieity. The line of progress from the Renaissance through the French and American Revolutions based in secular, rationalist, and scientific thought had been seen as an accomplishment pioneered by the Greeks.¹⁴⁵ Modern civilized people were seen as western—occidental not oriental—essentialized as European and white. White Europeans were not just the proud inheritors of civilization, but, crucially, the only contributors to its progress. Recovering from modern war, then, the classical tradition was put to use. If suffering injected classicism with momentum and urgency, then diversity in healing practices was the productive outcome. Masculine, imperialist imagination continued in ideals of heroic sacrifice, war memorials, and overcoming disability. Although the British adventure heroes of the nineteenth century, such as ‘exemplary’ imperialists Henry Havelock and General Gordon, did not have quite the same popular currency after 1918, the virtue of overcoming adversity was carried forth and reconvened in the disabled man who remained ‘unfailingly cheerful’, or, as the British Legion put it, ‘so heroic, so invincible’. The classical warrior might have had a prosthetic leg, but he stood firm as a symbol of human resilience, and the impossibility of civilization’s death. This image of cheerfulness, as Deborah Cohen writes, was ‘anything but natural’; it was rhetoric designed to inspire and educate public attitudes to disability.¹⁴⁶ ¹⁴⁵ Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 3. ¹⁴⁶ Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London and New York, Routledge, 1994), 153; Cohen, The War Come Home, 130, 140–1.


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Classicism and modernism were at the centre of the paradox of the war’s violence and the need for healing. Although the scale and intensity of modern warfare inflicted extreme injuries, people were more likely to survive. Injured and disabled men were integrated back into the communities. They were visible everywhere: on streets, in the media, and in cultural imagery. Classicism and modernism provided a meaningful point of reference in this visual field. Perfection of form and the ordering of bodily movement were aspects of classicism that appeared to offer solace from the primordial catastrophe, generating hope and instructing the rebirth of civilization. Urgent passions for recovery tuned in with cultural experiments and commercial fashions regarding modern embodiment. Underpinned by post-war anxieties about bodily existence and experience, visual artists, architects, dancers, body and beauty culturists expressed the energy and spontaneity of life—especially in physical activity, beauty, and sexuality. This chapter has argued that the intellectual and cultural history of western civilization provided models that were adapted both to the prosecution of war and to the reconstruction of society afterwards. Civilization was a homogenized concept, repackaged through the classical past and yet providing motifs of white European unity. Politically, this was grand Anglophone rhetoric that denied differences between European states. At the same time, artists, writers, scholars, and humanists, as well as ordinary men and women, took up universalist thinking, searching the past for continuity and the future for hope. Classicism was a productive rather than stale tradition, charged with invoking the timeless condition of humanity in the search for healing. Although promoting universal values, classicism presented an illusion of the shared heritage of white civilization. Despite being a profoundly middle class concern, it was assumed not to discriminate on grounds of class, race, or nationality. With a mythic democratic ethos, classicism appealed to unity, especially unifying all those contributing to the Allied war effort. The consequences of war were being addressed and assimilated. People affected by war interacted with powerful discourses that valued independence, prosperity, and aspiration. Just as classicism reinforced belief in human resilience and the potential to reconstruct civilization, modern culture amplified tradition into the commonplace, extended it via commercial markets. Providing an indispensable language for communities—families, towns, cities, and nations—classicism reappeared across the Anglophone world to express and transform the meaning of war, especially in creating topographies that simultaneously acknowledged and appeased war. Alongside the discourse of sacrifice, classical beauty attempted to transcend the reality of bodies destroyed by modern war. The ideal of reconstructing civilization elicited notions of universal love and western unity to motivate societies and individuals to heal the damage of the war. As we shall see, public mourning rituals attached to classical memorials were, for many people, intimate and soothing. Others felt they offered the banality of history, exploiting the wounded and widowed for the purposes of a

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pseudo-autonomy sponsored by government rhetoric. Classicism was a powerful tool in shaping community ideals of rebuilding, and yet it was not without controversy and resistance. War impacted upon cultural forms of remembering and the hopes of recovery. Bodies were being reformed as whole, and spectacularized by imagery and consumption. What effect did this have on cultural memory? Western civilization was often presented as therapeutic and unifying; the past moulded for the contemporary purposes of recovering and empowering. Classicism’s ‘healing aesthetics’ were part of that reinvestment into the values of white civilization and an embodied vision of humanity. Classicism was culturally and politically productive, traversing networks of influence between the three main Anglophone societies, and generating fruitful dialogue between cultural and medical networks engaged in reconstruction. Reconstructing civilization was not a one-dimensional political ruse, then, but a profound need that crossed nations. It worked in tandem with individual agency, cultural production, and commercial enterprise. Although the ideal of reconstructing civilization through the body motivated healing, some questions remain. Why, given the pain of war, did people renew meaning in their lives through their physicality? Did reconstruction aim to erase violence and carnage, even while constantly retelling it? The following chapters of this book question whether hidden in the symmetry, beauty, and sensuality of classicism, was also the forgetting of barbarity?

2 Culture Shock: Trauma, Pleasure, and Visual Memory Men rarely see the thing in front of them, but only the image the thing creates in their mind. Bacteriologist A. E. Wright reciting G. B. Shaw, 1926. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. Cathy Caruth, 1995. Collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating . . . with pictures that lock the story in our minds. Susan Sontag, 2003.

Contemplating painful experiences of war bound together vision and memory in new narratives. Writers, artists, and film-makers responded to the war with a commitment to articulate its shocking visions. Modern war assaulted the full range of sensory awareness; its noises were felt as violations of the body, forms of wounding. Soldiers had flash recollections of the horrors of exploding shells, artillery bombardments, and mustard gas attacks long after the events. Shell shock, mutilation, and disability were subjects of concern and fascination; responses to them permeated society with ‘culture shock’, reverberating especially in visualizations of the body. Although many were overcome by war imagery, others grew accustomed to emotional and visual disturbances. Some men shared their experiences in hospital newspapers and ex-servicemen’s magazines, asserting a degree of agency not usually discussed by scholars. Although with little education, working-class soldiers found ways to express their pained voices. Australian Imperial Force (AIF) Private A. L’Hotelier published his poem ‘Battle Dreams’ in an ex-serviceman’s magazine: As on the transport deck I lie Strange battle dreams run thru my head Again I hear the wounded cry I see the faces of the dead . . . .

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Reconstructing the Body With blood, their tunics dripping wet And thru my flesh again I feel The seething of the bayonet The wounded smothering in the slush¹

Although writing when the concept of trauma was not yet widely known, L’Hotelier illuminates its features: nightmares and repetition; sensory triggers; physical sensations of being wounded; horrible visions of the dead; and paralysing fear. These became common cultural scripts with a striking visuality that was both product of the war and the substance of its impact on cultural memory. Hospital gazettes were also important sites for patients to express the suffering they witnessed. Captain J. P. D. Hewatt’s sketch Shell Shock (1916) depicts a patient at breakfast, his face dark with depression, mouth grimly down-turned, and hair shooting up like a shockwave (Fig. 2.1). This is a powerful testimony to the intimate encounters experienced between men in military hospitals during the war. By narrating the theme of suffering, patients, writers, and artists sought to express but also to heal. Cultural forms had a therapeutic effect on the pain of witnessing. George Duhamel—a medical officer at Verdun—authored The New Book of Martyrs (1918), exclaiming: ‘I will not let all your suffering be lost in the abyss’.² Away from the brutality of men, he saw domestic life—in the image of Odysseus’ devoted wife Penelope—as a healing power.³ Classical images of intimacy and sexuality were common responses to war in Anglophone societies, too, reflecting the social and cultural struggles for survival. Current theories of trauma suggest such struggles are also empowering.⁴ In Britain, Gerald Lowry’s autobiography exemplifies this: he transforms his experience of being shot through the temple and blinded at the Battle of Mons into a story of triumph over affliction. He learned remedial massage at St Dunstan’s and became an osteopath, redeeming ‘the wretchedness’ by treating other wounded men. Lowry’s retelling of the war—and reinvention of himself—is a reminder that people suffered and recovered from war in individual ways. Lowry underwent several operations for his wounds, was haunted by the ‘ceaseless crackle of rifle fire’, and endured nightmares and ‘depression’ from his ‘impenetrable blackness’. Yet he did not see himself as traumatized—not simply because the diagnosis was unavailable to him, but because medical and social discourses of ‘overcoming ¹ The Bayonet, 3 (24 Jan. 1919), 5. ² Angela K. Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 76, 83. ³ Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Post-war France, 1917–1927 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 10. ⁴ Derek Summerfield, ‘The Social Experience of War and Some Issues for the Humanitarian Field’, in Patrick, J. Bracken and Celia Petty (eds), Rethinking the Trauma of War (London and New York: Free Association Books, 1998), 22.

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61 Fig. 2.1 Captain Hewatt, Shell Shock, London Fourth General Hospital Gazette. Courtesy of the Wellcome Trust, London.

disability’ informed his personal motivations. Hence, Lowry describes his ‘mental uplift’ in doing ‘good my fellow men’. Resisting the category of the ‘helpless’, he did not wish to be ‘an object of sympathy’. Significantly, Lowry distinguishes his memoir from the genre of war literature, displacing its ‘bestial horror and its misery’ with ‘the sight of God’s earth . . . that view of woodland and country’ around Neuve Chapelle—his last visual memory before being blinded.⁵ This ‘overcoming’ was the dominant social and medical response to disability. In orthopaedics, surgeon Sir William Osler described it as surgical and educational, teaching ‘the patient’s mind’ and muscles.⁶ Wounded men often incorporated overcoming into their reconstruction strategies; others created ‘veteran’ identities from the social value of wounds.⁷ ⁵ Gerald Lowry, From Mons to 1933 (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1933), 24. ⁶ In Frederick Watson, Civilisation and the Cripple (London: John Bale, 1930), 18. ⁷ Lowry, From Mons to 1933, 1–5; Ben Shepherd, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. xxi; David Gerber (ed.), Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

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Through such responses gory imagery informed the ‘cultural memory’ of the war.⁸ The visuality activated by the First World War was not simply the power of sight and visual imagination, nor did it fix upon traumatic experiences. It was psychologically and culturally penetrating, revealing the need to convey sensations and emotions through pictures and words.⁹ Visuality was communicated across social networks, disseminated in a variety of forms, and was a core dynamic in producing the ‘memory’ of the war as physical and psychological pain. In the latter half of the twentieth century, that ‘memory’ has increasingly been understood as traumatic. The subjects of trauma, memory, history, and culture have generated an enormous literature, partly through the influence of Shoah studies; fascination with the Vietnam War; an increase in the numbers of museums and memorials; and the consumption of films about war, creating a ‘memory boom’ or a ‘memory wave’.¹⁰ Memory is the object of struggle within families and political communities, not just amongst intellectuals and historians. This obsession places memory as the ‘signature of our own generation’, and ‘traumatic memory’ as the archetypal post-1918 cultural script, but it also requires visuality for meanings to be conveyed.¹¹ Trauma is a contentious psychiatric diagnosis with a complex history operating in a highly politicized context including pressure groups, defence departments, private psychiatrists, and military physicians. Although the concept of traumatic neurosis evolved in the nineteenth century, it has been shaped by changes to Freud’s thinking as well as later events to which stress response syndromes were seen as transient reactive processes.¹² In 1980, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) entered the DSM-III¹³ as a result of expanding professional interest in the psychological legacies of the Vietnam War and the influence of grass roots movements seeking to redress the stereotype of the veteran as a psychopathic babykiller.¹⁴ The role of professional medicine in categorizing traumatic symptoms ⁸ Jay M. Winter, ‘The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the ‘‘Memory Boom’’ in Contemporary Historical Studies’, German Historical Institute Bulletin, 27 (2000), 8. ⁹ Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, Md. and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 5. ¹⁰ Andreas Huyssen, ‘Monumental Seduction’, New German Critique, 69 (1996), 181–200; Winter, ‘The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies’, Raritan, 21 (2001), 52–66; Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory, 41 (2002), 179. ¹¹ Winter, ‘The Generation of Memory’, 13. ¹² John Wilson, ‘The Historical Evolution of PTSD Diagnostic Criteria: From Freud to DSM-IV’, Journal of Traumatic Stress, 7 (1994), 681–98. ¹³ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edn, published by the American Psychiatric Association. ¹⁴ Wilbur Scott, ‘PTSD in DSM III: A Case in the Politics of Diagnosis and Disease’, Social Problems, 37 (1990), 3; Simon Wessely and Edgar Jones, ‘Psychiatry and the ‘‘Lessons of Vietnam’’: What Were They, and Are They Still Relevant?’, War and Society, 22 (2004), 89–103.

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explains some of its currency.¹⁵ Within political and national communities across the globe, the concept of trauma has been mobilized as a discourse, despite its basis in western approaches to madness and therapy.¹⁶ Trauma has come to symbolize the legacy of war, but it can also generate simplistic scripts about suffering that are mapped onto people in the past. Responses to the First World War varied widely between nations and theatres of action, qualifying the extent to which the impact of war can be generalized as traumatic. Scholars warn that trauma is framed by neurology and psychiatry, and should not be applied to a whole culture or as an overarching historical reality.¹⁷ When writing history, Dominick LaCapra proposes an approach of ‘empathetic unsettlement’, with critical sensitivity to the norms and dissonances of the past that may not fit with the present.¹⁸ At the time of the First World War, Freud’s notion of trauma was not consensus and, in Britain, the medical establishment resisted psychoanalytic theory. Nevertheless, as ‘shell shock’, it resonated in popular and literary culture, despite often being misunderstood.¹⁹ Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier mixes different Freudian and psychiatric ideas through the psychoanalyst Dr Anderson who treats shell-shocked veteran Chris Baldry. Despite the diagnosis, the patient having temporarily retreated to his past life was more likely in a state of ‘fugue’.²⁰ The concept of shell shock was generally applied regardless of military medicine’s banning of the term. Public awareness of shell shock and empathy with soldiers came from newspaper reports, disability literature, and veteran advocacy, as well as popular novels and films. During the war, public pressure was put on the military to limit its use of the death penalty in courts martial.²¹ Yet later newspaper reports on soldiers accused of malingering, fraud, and murder cast suspicion over those claiming shell shock as an insanity defence in civilian trials. While the diagnosis and social meaning of war trauma is historically conditioned, contemporary accounts demonstrate that deeply anguishing experiences lingered years afterwards. Used cautiously, current work on trauma can facilitate understanding about the impact of the First World War and its visual codes of ¹⁵ A. Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). ¹⁶ Patrick J. Bracken, Joan E. Giller, and Derek Summerfield, ‘Psychological Responses to War and Atrocity: The Limitations of Current Concepts’, Social Science and Medicine, 40 (1995), 1073–82. ¹⁷ Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 191. ¹⁸ Dominick LaCapra, ‘Trauma, Absence and Loss’, in N. Levi and M. Rothberg (eds), The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). ¹⁹ Dean Rapp, ‘The Early Discovery of Freud by the British General Educated Public, 1912–1919’, Social History of Medicine, 3 (1990), 217–43. ²⁰ Wyatt Bonikowski, ‘The Return of the Soldier Brings Death Home’, Modern Fiction Studies, 51 (2005), 513–35. ²¹ Shepherd, A War of Nerves, 141.

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remembering, since visuality was crucial in the life that collective and traumatic memory constructed. M E M O RY S T U D I E S A N D T H E V I S UA L Psychological and neurological aspects of memory formation often separate the individual from the way that social groups and cultural practices inform remembering.²² Memory is better understood as a composition of personal, psychic ‘underlay’ knitted together with social ‘overlay’. How and what we remember, our experiences and observations, informs identity—as seen with Lowry’s narrative of personal overcoming and the social values that shaped his selected remembering.²³ Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, writing in the 1920s, emphasized the role of group dynamics—familial, communal, class, and social—in the way memory is constructed.²⁴ Veteran and widow groups, rehabilitation agencies, surgeons, the ‘new’ professions, artists, and writers are some of the groups that influence the memory of war. Power is embedded in the imagined ‘collective’, which generates social influence and personal reward. But ‘collective memory’—a memory shared by individuals across a society—is a misleading notion that denies the mediating effect of groups and the imaginative agency of consensus. Individual stories might be adopted as ‘collective memories’, and then attached to mythic representations of the self within a shared past. There are complex gender dynamics too. Women might ‘reconstruct their wartime lives’, diminishing their own role or hiding transgressive behaviour, and men might highlight or diminish events as their life changes.²⁵ As society sponsors new versions of the past, ‘collective memories’ alter according to dominant discourses. Collective memory cannot accommodate dissent. It constructs and homogenizes the past, eliminating dissonance with a dominant and acceptable view of war.²⁶ Moreover, it is never value free; it is governed by social and political forces and intimate needs, and altered by social, intellectual, and historical forces. Collective memory harnesses emotional communities of an unstable and privileged kind. Susan Sontag writes that ‘what is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened with pictures that lock the story in our minds’.²⁷ ²² Winter, Remembering War, 277. ²³ Michael Roper, ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal, 50 (2000), 181–204. ²⁴ Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). ²⁵ Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000); Roper, ‘Re-remembering the Soldier Hero’, 181–204. ²⁶ Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique, 65 (1995), 125–33. ²⁷ Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 86.

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Pictures and words are central to the narratives of horror in war stories and across reverberating society, but they often obscure the patriotism, excitement, boredom, humour, and optimism, which are incompatible with ‘traumatic memories’ of the war. Memory is provisional, fragmented, and continually reconstructed; it is ‘always open to contestation’. Conflict and controversy should be ‘the hallmarks of studies of collective memory, rather than concepts of distortion’.²⁸ The premise of memory ‘distortion’ supposes a reality or truth that can be captured and interrogated. Anthropologists suggest enormous cultural variation in the ways that violent conflict and traumatic memory are assimilated within communities. Critics have noted the erroneous conflation of memory with culture and identity.²⁹ Social forces and psychic processes influence narratives of remembrance, and propose several questions: Is this everyone’s story? Who is being left out and why? How have changes in society, politics, and culture informed the construction of the collective’s ‘memory’? Who is represented, and empowered, by the ‘collective’? Do we all ‘remember’ in the same ways? The narratives of L’Hotelier and Lowry showed that war did not affect everyone in the same way. Hence, it is inaccurate to speak of a ‘lost generation’ who suffered and remembered equally. Some people saw the war as beneficial: it disrupted complacency; provided opportunities for adventure and travel; created new professions (especially medical and scientific); raised administrative standards; and streamlined bureaucracies. Many soldiers claimed to have profound bonding experiences in war, even when friendships were not sustained. Comradeship served personal and social functions once soldiers returned home—some remembered the war years as the best of their lives, assimilating terrible experiences through the memory of happier times.³⁰ One soldier wrote, ‘some people say that you came to accept death, but I don’t think any of us really did. It affects you terribly when a man dies, but we had some happy times because there was such a sense of comradeship’.³¹ Favourable memories may have compensated for the participation in killing. Complex psychologies of survival influence both re-remembering and retrospective constructions of war experiences. Resentment and cheerfulness were often expressed through satire and dark humour.³² Trench journals, hospital newspapers, rehabilitation magazines, patient cartoons, and poems are testimony to soldiers’ mixed feelings of sorrow and the elation of survival, suggesting a ²⁸ Michael Schudson, ‘Dynamics of Distortion in Collective Memory’, in Daniel L. Schacter (ed.), Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past (1995; 2nd edn, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 360–1. ²⁹ David Berliner, ‘The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology’, Anthropological Quarterly, 78 (2005), 197–211. ³⁰ George Mosse, ‘The Two World Wars and the Myth of the War Experience’, Journal of Contemporary History, 21 (1996), 491–593. ³¹ Martin Stephen, The Price of Pity: Poetry, History and Myth in the Great War (London: Leo Cooper, 1996), 109. ³² Ibid. 103–4.

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Reconstructing the Body Fig. 2.2 Inside cover, Newnes Illustrated (2 May 1915). Courtesy of the British Library.

cultural need for relief through representation, whether at the front or behind the lines. People suffered to varying degrees but they were also socially conditioned to endure their reactions.³³ Stoicism and emotional remove were the behavioural norms of the Edwardian military man. Military propaganda framed violence against the enemy as patriotic. In Britain, killing was represented as exhilarating in popular war magazines and illustrated newspapers, such as The Times History and Encyclopaedia of the War, The Illustrated War News, The War Illustrated. Covers highlighted hand-to-hand combat, death, wounding, and bayoneting, performed in cinematic mid-action. The first edition of Newnes Illustrated in May 1915 depicted a British soldier dramatically clutching his wounded face as he falls in pain (Fig. 2.2). In the United States, Life magazine published photographs that contrived American soldiers being wounded and gassed, dramatizing the overseas frontline. Patriotic propaganda was part of an accepted ‘pleasure culture of war’—games, stories, education, print media, and films; there was little room for traumatized soldiers in such popular imaginings of war.³⁴ Even though suffering was acknowledged throughout and after the war, the appeal of violence, ³³ Alex Watson, ‘Self Deception and Survival: Mental Coping Strategies on the Western Front, 1914–1918’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (2006), 247–68. ³⁴ Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000).

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imperialist bravado, and heroic identities were not obliterated.³⁵ In the interwar period, British boys’ stories were more violent than previously, with the hero’s physical strength his main attribute.³⁶ In combat, atrocities occurred, and some men took pleasure in killing, collecting trophies, taking photographs of slain enemies, and posting them to girlfriends.³⁷ The brutality of war was not always directed at the enemy. Despite the dominant narrative of male bonding in wartime, on occasions medics entrusted with their care mistreated the wounded. Such experiences altered how the war could be talked about, and reshaped the memory of violence over time, especially as social values changed. Resisting emotional reactions was a dominant code of military masculinity, and one imposed upon the rehabilitation of disabled men. And yet how effective were these insistent practices of ‘overcoming’? Shell-shock victims were overwhelmed with emotions. The diaries of working-class patients reveal a remarkable degree of private reflection on bodily pain in military hospitals, where emotional containment was enforced manly conduct. Pain has been understood as uniquely individual and destructive of language.³⁸ Like trauma, physical and emotional pain can create deep reservoirs of silence that isolate sufferers. Soldiers’ diaries were not merely private confessions of things that could not be said out loud; they were often written for their comrades. During the war, soldiers wrote believing their memoirs would have an audience. The war stimulated a desire to write and a yearning to read about its agonies. The visual languages were a significant part of the attraction, opening lines of communication between those who experienced the war first-hand and their families and social networks. Literature and visual culture offered codes for grappling with the meaning of war. Accounts of returned soldiers became staples of the publishing industry in Britain and France. Fewer were published in Australia and the United States, but collections of published and unpublished accounts of war were widely available, often serialized in the press. New languages were created to express the pain of experiencing and witnessing, fuelling the currency of ‘traumatic narratives’, influencing many aspects of culture, and shaping the visual aspect of remembering. The genre saw translations across languages, creating international audiences and globalized memories. Although there is still much to learn about how visual memory functions it is generally accepted that it has both short-term and long-term aspects that are ³⁵ Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6. ³⁶ Kelly Boyd, ‘Knowing Your Place: The Tension of Manliness in Boys’ Story Papers, 1918–1939’, in Michael Roper and J. Tosh, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). ³⁷ Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth-century Warfare (London: Granta, 1999). ³⁸ Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 5.

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relevant to traumatic memory. The short-term visual memory (STVM) can retain visual stimuli or patterns, with considerable precision for prolonged periods, but it is rare for long-term memories to form the basis of visual hallucinations through spontaneous recall.³⁹ Visual memory is an interactive relationship between stimulus and response involving encoding, memory, and decision.⁴⁰ In our ‘working memory’, complex information is integrated, although there is scholarly conflict as to whether STVM represents information as an integrated object. The process of ‘binding’ is vulnerable to interference, which may limit or unify complex ‘thought objects’.⁴¹ Traumatic memories increase the sufferer’s vulnerability to the intrusion of vivid sensations and images.⁴² Experience and memory are complex cognitive and identity-constructing processes and traumatization alters ‘patterns of memory encoding, leading to the formation of memories with reduced contextual information’. The recall of ‘autobiographical memory’ is affected by scales of remembering versus knowing, rehearsal, and importance, for both the distinctive events in a person’s life as well as in daily routines.⁴³ Experiences are reconstructed over time, but trauma adds layers to this ‘reconstruction’. Negative information is more readily recalled than neutral information. Such memories are enhanced by emotive and negative language.⁴⁴ The image and language of bodily wreckage was used during the war by medical staff, writers, as well as the injured and disabled who saw themselves as ‘wrecks of manhood’.⁴⁵ Physician J. S. Taylor wrote of military medicine’s problems in relieving ‘the wreckage of war’; nursing commander Muriel Thompson saw the trees on the Menin Road as like limbless soldiers: ‘all looking indescribable wrecks, or else, just stumps’.⁴⁶ In ‘The Surgical Triumph’, Ellen La Motte described the suppurating stumps of a multiple amputee, his weeping, blind eyes ³⁹ K. M. Faber and L. N. Johnson, ‘Hallucinating the Past: A Case of Spontaneous and Involuntary Recall of Long-term Memories: Perspectives on the Hemispheric Organization of Visual Memory’, Journal of Neurology, 250 (2003), 55–62. ⁴⁰ K. Sakai and T. Inui, ‘A Feature Segmentation Model of Short-term Visual Memory’, Perception, 31 (2002), 579–89. ⁴¹ M. E. Wheeler and A. M. Treisman, ‘Binding in Short-term Visual Memory’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131 (2002), 48–64. ⁴² Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 38; E. A. Brett and R. Ostroff, ‘Imagery in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: An Overview’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 142 (1985), 417–24. ⁴³ L. L. Catal and J. M. Fitzgerald, ‘Autobiographical Memory in Two Older Adults over a Twenty-year Retention Interval’, Memory and Cognition, 32 (2004), 311–23. ⁴⁴ E. A. Kensiger and S. Corkin, ‘Memory Enhancement for Emotional Words: Are Emotional Words More Vividly Remembered than Neutral Words?’, Memory and Cognition, 31 (2003), 1169–80. ⁴⁵ A. M. Northwood, ‘Broken’, Summerdown Camp Journal (10 Oct. 1917), 2. ⁴⁶ J. S. Taylor, United States Naval Medical Bulletin, 15 (1921). See Fielding H. Garrison, Notes on the History of Military Medicine (Washington, DC: Association of Military Surgeons, 1922); Thompson in Janet Lee, War Girls: The First Aid Nursing Yoemanry in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 215.

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and face inadequately rebuilt by plastic surgery. The nameless, unrecognizable soldier is reduced to a damaged and objectified body: ‘the wreck’.⁴⁷ Similarly Catherine Black, nursing assistant to the plastic surgeon Sir Harold Delf Gillies, recalled that ‘[there] came the stream of wounded, men with half their faces literally blown to pieces, with the skin left hanging in shreds and the jawbones crushed to a pulp that felt like sand under your fingers’.⁴⁸ The metaphor of ‘the wreck’ had become part of the dominant cultural memory of modern war through literature, medicine, and visual culture. The term ‘cultural memory’ recognizes that memory is a cultural phenomenon systemized through myths, rituals, commemorations, but also material culture and representation.⁴⁹ It relies on personal and social networks, and interactions between the past and the present. The past is creatively modified when narrating through the ‘screen’ of the present.⁵⁰ Visual languages informed cultural memory and were shared between individuals and communities, across national borders within Europe, and among the Anglophone cultures of Britain, the United States, and Australia.

T H E S H O C K O F WO U N D S Today, psychologists recognize that individual and community responses to traumatic events vary depending upon the degree to which prevention is perceived possible; previous experience of disaster and loss; and the degree of preparedness for it.⁵¹ Central to understanding society’s response to the war’s violence is recognizing that the scale of damage was mostly unforeseen. A few writers and painters had apocalyptic visions of trench warfare, and some doctors lobbied for hospitals to cater for 2,000 casualties, ‘a number hitherto undreamt of in this country’.⁵² Alarming predictions, however, had a limited circulation. Military leaders like Moltke were resolutely optimistic that the presence of the elite classes would moderate the violence.⁵³ ⁴⁷ Ellen N. La Motte, ‘The Surgical Triumph’, The Backwash of War (1916; London: G. P. Puttnam’s Sons, 1934). See Smith, The Second Battlefield, 78. ⁴⁸ Catherine Black, in Harold D. Gillies and and D. Ralph Millard Jr, The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery, i (London: Butterworth, 1957), 8. ⁴⁹ Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, 126–7. ⁵⁰ Mieke Bal, ‘Introduction’, in Mieke Bal, Jonathon Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), p. vii. ⁵¹ Robert J. Ursano, Brian G. McCaughey, and Carol S. Fullerton, ‘The Structure of Human Chaos’, Individual and Community Responses to Trauma and Disaster: The Structure of Chaos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 404. ⁵² Hew Strachan, The First World War, i To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 135; id., European Armies and the Conduct of War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 110; Joseph Griffiths, First Eastern Hospital Gazette, 1 (1914), 200. ⁵³ Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War, 110.

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Advances in weapon design since the nineteenth century resulted in firepower of greater accuracy and velocity.⁵⁴ Combining the explosive and projectile components in bullets and shells meant that more rounds could be fired in a given period of time with less risk to the artillerymen. Improved training in artillery and tactical developments increased the efficiency of deployments. The potential killing power of the average infantryman increased tenfold, and expected casualties ‘were far astray as proved by the frightful awakening of those opening days’.⁵⁵ Aerial bombing added still further to the destructive capabilities of the military. Long and intense battles now delivered an entirely new level of carnage.⁵⁶ On the last day of the war, twenty tons of bombs were dropped in France, destroying entire villages and seriously injuring their inhabitants.⁵⁷ In the Boer War, the British Army fired just 25,000 shells and the magazine-loaded Mauser rifle delivered precise injuries with clean entrance and exit wounds. In the First World War, clean injuries were few: the high-speed, rotary motion of the dome-tipped bullets reduced the soft tissues and blood vessels to ‘a devitalized pulp’.⁵⁸ There were complaints from both sides that cartridges were modified (‘dumdums’), creating ‘inhumane’ wounds.⁵⁹ Inside the body, the bullet ‘somersaulted’, tearing tissues, shattering bones, and leaving ragged-edged exit wounds containing infectious foreign bodies.⁶⁰ Colonel Cuthbert Wallace, Consulting Surgeon to the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), wrote in 1915 that the bullets ‘inflict injuries which have to be seen to be appreciated’.⁶¹ By February 1914, shellfire had expanded fourfold, greatly increasing the numbers of wounded.⁶² Angular-shaped, high explosive shells ‘[had] an immense velocity and consequently great penetration’, caused serious vascular injuries, and ‘greatly multiplied the cases of traumatic aneurysm’.⁶³ The use of incendiary, explosive rifle-calibre ammunition in aerial warfare, despite being outlawed, extended to use on the ground.⁶⁴ ⁵⁴ Strachan, From Waterloo to Balaclava: Tactics, Technology and the British Army, 1815–1854 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 113. ⁵⁵ Tim Travers, How the War Was Won: Command and Technology in the British Army on the Western Front, 1917–1918 (London: Routledge, 1992); Francis Gordon Bell, Surgeon’s Saga (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1968), 113. ⁵⁶ Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War, 108. ⁵⁷ Wireless Press, HQ, RAF, 12/11/18. RAMC records 364/6. Wellcome Library Collection. ⁵⁸ Garrison, Notes on the History of Military Medicine, 201. ⁵⁹ Paul Cornish, ‘Unlawful Wounding: Attempts to Codify the Interaction of Bullets with Bodies’, in Nicholas Saunders and Paul Cornish (eds), Bodies in Conflict: Materiality and Corporeality in the First World War (London: Imperial War Museum/Routledge, 2009). ⁶⁰ Albert E. Morison and William J. Tulloch, ‘Treatment of Wounds in War by Magnesium Sulphate’, Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 37 (1916), 376–7. ⁶¹ Cuthbert Wallace, ‘A Preliminary Note on the Treatment of Abdominal Wounds in War’, Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 25 (1915), 2. ⁶² Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War, 137. ⁶³ Wallace, ‘A Preliminary Note’, 2; George Makins, ‘On the Vascular Lesions Produced by Gunshot Injuries and their Results’, British Journal of Surgery, 3 (1916), 353. ⁶⁴ Cornish, ‘Unlawful Wounding’.

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Antiseptics, modern surgical methods, and the revival of debridement —the excision of dead tissue—certainly reduced the number of deaths, but it was often difficult for stretcher-bearers to reach the wounded in time. Patients hid in bomb craters, road conditions were dire, and ambulance trains were few, delaying treatment for days, allowing infections to worsen.⁶⁵ The Royal Army Medical Corps had been criticized for neglecting the wounded in the Boer War, resulting in wholesale reform of procedures and sanitation. Although the understanding of epidemic diseases had improved since the Russo-Japanese War, mobile bacteriology and pathology laboratories were not readily available; disease continued to be a major challenge.⁶⁶ Alongside dysentery, pneumonia, and cerebro-spinal disease, was the problem of wounds heavily infected with pathogenic organisms, gas gangrene, gas cellulites, and a wide range of foreign bodies such as farmland bacteria, animal excrement, and Mesopotamian dust. Local disease carriers (mosquitoes, sand flies, decomposing bodies), spread of malaria, enteric fever, cholera, typhus, and smallpox, complicated recovery.⁶⁷ Problems were exacerbated when supplies were diverted or when political tussles within the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and Australian Army Medical Corps (AAMC) raged over medical evacuation, equipment distribution, and the circulation of experienced surgical teams.⁶⁸ Even hardened surgeons were shocked by the extent and nature of the wounds sustained. In the official medical press, men like Colonel Maynard Smith spoke of the ‘foul deaths’ and the ‘prolonged and painful’ hospitalization that soldiers endured.⁶⁹ Multiple injuries were a major challenge for the often inexperienced surgeons, and were a continual source of conjecture, described by Major-General Sir George Makins (British Army Medical Services) as raising ‘a host of doubts and uncertainties’.⁷⁰ ‘Wound shock’ and haemorrhaging created volatile conditions ⁶⁵ George H. Makins, ‘The Development of British Surgery in the Hospitals on the Lines of Communication in France’, British Medicine in the War, 1914–1917: Being Essays on Problems of Medicine, Surgery, and Pathology Arising among the British Armed Forces Engaged in this War and the Manner of their Solution (London: British Medical Association, 1917), 59. ⁶⁶ Mark Harrison, Medicine and Victory: British Military Medicine in the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 9; Wilmot Herringham, ‘Bacteriology at the Front’, British Medicine in the War, 1914–1917, 9. ⁶⁷ Seymour Barling and John T. Morrison, A Manual of War Surgery (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), p. vii. See also W. H. Wilcox, Mesopotamia 1916–1919 (London: Morton and Burt, 1919), 6; G. Grey Turner, Royal Army Medical Corps ( T ), Medical and Surgical Notes from Mesopotamia (London: British Medical Association, 1917), 20 (Wellcome Collection, RAMC 364/5–6). ⁶⁸ John William Springthorpe, ‘Report to the Minister of Defence by Senior Physicians to the No. 2 Army General Hospital, AIF’, ‘Medical Diary of the War’, ML MSS 1709. ⁶⁹ S. Maynard Smith, ‘A Lecture on the Treatment of the Wounded in the Aids Posts and Field Ambulances’, British Medical Journal (10 Aug. 1918), 127. ⁷⁰ Preface, Major General Sir George H. Makins, Barling and Morrison, A Manual of War Surgery, p. vii.

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for anaesthesia and surgery.⁷¹ At times, experimental surgery was exciting for surgeons, although arbitrary for patients. Survival rates for severe wounds were high when transport to centres of surgical expertise was quick. Captain Henry Kaye recorded the ‘indescribable state’ of a soldier, ‘brain protruding from an evil hole in his eyes’, mixed with blood and dirt. After two hours of surgery, the patient was ‘nicely fixed up.’⁷² The sheer number of wounded meant that not every patient could receive such attention. Triage identified those most likely to live and sent them for treatment; palliative care was given to the others. Abdominal wounds, in particular, caused extreme pain before death.⁷³ Shell wounds presented deep and wide perforations, and ‘nearly all wounds were severe, lacerated and suppurating’, challenging surgeons’ abilities to save lives.⁷⁴ Wound treatments were hotly debated. Faced with high casualty rates, some doctors, seeing many hopeless cases, reluctantly wished their patients a speedy death. In memoirs, surgeons explained their bewilderment at the wounds and their patients’ suffering. Surgeon Henry Kaye, treating a patient with ‘many feet of gut protruding and his ileum smashed to atoms—a most gruesome mess’, was ‘thankful’ when he died a few hours later.⁷⁵ Surgeons’ diaries and memoirs recorded both personal and professional struggles. They anguished over resources and medical supplies, felt frustrated by red tape, and struggled with the burden of triage. They were humbled by their patients and despaired that they could not do more for them. In his memoir, Medicine and Duty, Captain Harold Dearden wrote of his excitement about the professional opportunities the war would provide. Soon, however, he felt conflicted between military duty and honouring the Hippocratic oath: I found myself, moreover, unreasonably clumsy at reconciling my present duties with my previous conception of my calling. To succour the wounded, that they might with greater celerity return to wound or be wounded on a subsequent occasion . . . shifted the plane of the whole grim business from the illogical to the insane.⁷⁶

Military surgery often faltered, but close to the action it was stretcher-bearers, surgeons, nurses, and medical officers who confronted the realities of modern warfare. Official histories acknowledged that while ‘many problems had been foreseen . . . a succession of others was rapidly presented, some of them new, others old but under new aspects’.⁷⁷ Surgeons experienced with severe industrial accidents had rarely seen such injuries. ⁷¹ Anthony Bowlby (Surgeon General), and Cuthbert Wallace, ‘The Development of British Surgery at the Front’, British Medicine in the War, 1914–1917, 42. ⁷² Henry W. Kaye, Royal Army Medical Corps war diary, 20 Sept. 1915, 182. RAMC 739/5, Wellcome Collection. ⁷³ A. A. Martin, A Surgeon in Khaki (London: Arnold, 1915), 63. ⁷⁴ J. Laffin, Surgeons in the Field (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1970), 203, 209, 217. ⁷⁵ Kaye, war diary, 13 Jan. 1916, 95. RAMC 739/7, Wellcome Collection. ⁷⁶ Harold Dearden, Medicine and Duty (London: Heinemann, 1928), p. vii. ⁷⁷ Preface, British Medicine in the War, 1914–1917, p. vi.

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The presence of the wounded was a constant and difficult reminder of the war’s violence and its repercussions. In Germany, one in six men had been in the army; in France, one in five; in Britain, one in seven; and many of them recorded their terrible experiences.⁷⁸ In Britain, over 240,000 men had total or partial limb amputations, 60,500 were wounded in the head or eyes, while another 89,000 sustained serious damage to other parts of their bodies. In 1938, 641,000 men were still receiving disability pensions, which represented a longer legacy of suffering than of victory.⁷⁹ The numbers of men living with disfigurement, chronic ailments, and disability highlighted the paradox of modern technology with its capacity to inflict horrific injuries while enabling medics to keep the wounded alive. This paradox informed the search for meaning, creating a desire to remember and yet also recover. Throughout the 1920s, the violence of war on the body was played out in the lives of people who read about it, heard about it, saw the suffering of its victims, and were affected by the resulting social, economic, and political changes. Medical memoirs had a popular audience, just as people looked to war novels and poetry, film, and visual art to find meaning in the war, to assimilate the shocking impact of wounding and deep personal loss.

V I S UA L M E M O RY A N D T H E WA R - W R E C K E D B O DY Witnesses to war used visual language to generate popular understanding of the war-wrecked body. Official war correspondent with the British Army, Philip Gibbs, was one of the first to describe rotting flesh near the battlefield in The Soul of War (1915). As a trusted witness, he informed audiences about men’s bodies torn to pieces by shells. But he also reframed them as a metaphor: ‘the stench of this corruption floats down upon us with foul odours. Bits of their rotting carcasses are flung into our faces . . . as new shells burst and scatter them . . . That is war.’⁸⁰ By 1929, Robert Graves’ fictional memoir Goodbye to All That depicted a soldier in France who committed suicide by blowing the back of his head out.⁸¹ Graves was not just an unreliable reporter, he was writing a fictionalized memoir, and yet his book was received, like Gibbs’, as authentic and authoritative. Visual codes were created to evoke the war-wrecked body, whether the memoirs of journalists, novelists, soldiers, or surgeons. Captain Harold Dearden (RAMC) recalled having ‘patched and prodded agonized creatures ⁷⁸ John Terrain, ‘The Substance of War’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter H Liddle (eds), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London: Pen and Sword, 1996). ⁷⁹ Winter, The Experience of World War One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 206; Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1996), 33. ⁸⁰ Philip Gibbs, The Soul of War (London: Heinemann, 1915), 237. ⁸¹ Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 142.

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back into the arena’, using common tropes and emotive language found in war literature.⁸² The wounded body featured in the writing of men and women, combatants and non-combatants alike. Walter Downing’s memoir To The Last Ridge describes shattered limbs, maggoty infections, and groaning soldiers, one with eyeballs hanging on his cheeks. He is haunted by a ‘night of horror and doubt’, as a wounded man screamed for water. Some men pleaded to be shot, while others called out for their friends or mothers. One soldier yelled all night ‘Bill, Bill’, but Bill did not respond. With novelistic phrasing, Downing painted the scene: ‘Between the salvos of shells we heard him again and again till dawn. Then that voice was also stilled.’ He stumbled between bullet-perforated skulls and the ghost-like appearance of men’s pallid bodies: a ‘white-face boy, naked to the waist . . . [with] a hole in his side’.⁸³ The body was defenceless; rats gnawed off fingers and picked skeletons clean.⁸⁴ The impersonal brutality of war was mixed with the intimate and everyday, rendering the dramatic spectacle more convincing. In orderly Ward Muir’s published account, The Happy Hospital (1918), men with facial mutilations were ‘hideous’ ‘smashed faces’, and symbols of the ‘incredibly brutalizing effects’ of war that ‘reach a climax of mournful grotesquerie’; once ‘wholesome’ men were now ‘broken gargoyles’.⁸⁵ Through explicit, graphic descriptions, the plight of the wounded and dead reached the reading community. In the 1920s, Downing’s memoir was serialized in an Australian newspaper. The mutilated body offered visual evidence of the tragedy of war, searing it into cultural memory. Visual language was a call to memory’s triggers. Siegfried Sassoon asked: Do you remember the rats; and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench · · · · · · · · · · As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men? · · · · · · · · · · With dying eyes and lolling heads.⁸⁶

Edmund Blunden’s poem Third Ypres witnessed survival amidst the carnage: We crawl to save the remnant who have torn Back from the tentacled wire, those whom no shell Has charred into black carcasses—Relief!⁸⁷ ⁸² Dearden, Medicine and Duty, p. vii. ⁸³ Walter Downing, To the Last Ridge: The World War I Experiences of W. H. Downing (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1998), 66–7, 76, 10–11, 40, 64, 10. ⁸⁴ Graves, Goodbye to All That, 182–3. ⁸⁵ See Andrew Bamji, ‘Facial Surgery: The Patient’s Experience’, in Cecil and Liddle, Facing Armageddon, 496. ⁸⁶ ‘Aftermath’, in Peter Vanisttart (ed.), Voices From the Great War (London, Jonathan Cape, 1981), 266. ⁸⁷ John Lehmann, The English Poets of the First World War (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 86.

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Finally, it is ‘that strange whim | Their body’ which must pull them from this dream-like nervous state.⁸⁸ War cultivated an uneasy disregard for the body. Diminishing emotionality was a factor in survival. Decomposing bodies became the ‘detritus of warfare which soldiers stepped on, tripped over, tossed away, or reassembled into the protective walls of another trench’.⁸⁹ Artists, writers, and surgeons alike comprehended the reality and metaphorical image of broken bodies. British surgeon Basil Hughes noted this fragmentation when discussing the problems of locating and disposing of the dead in ‘No Man’s Land’.⁹⁰ Surgeons observed, ‘it was not at all an infrequent occurrence to find limbs, or a head or some other part of a corpse, projecting into the trench’.⁹¹ Bodies were buried everywhere in the clay and slush: ‘The deeper one dug, the more bodies one exhumed. Hands and faces protruded from the slimy, toppling walls of the trenches. Knees, shoulders and buttocks poked from the foul morass’.⁹² Men wondered what their wives would say; some felt ashamed at disposing of corpses unceremoniously. Absurd humour diverted unsettling visions.⁹³ Once soldiers and medical staff settled back into civilian life, they reassembled their visual memories by writing memoirs, with the body as the central motif. Militarized bodies were transformed from the private to the public sphere; becoming part of the territory upon which boundaries were carved. Dead bodies amounted to nations won or lost. Disabled and mutilated bodies symbolized entwined stories of victory and defeat. The body was an object of fear and fascination, and writers described how the injured confronted pain, physical change, and the new boundaries of their subjectivity. Laurence Stallings’ story turns the body into a battleground, with its Commander observing the assault of infection on his own body: The gangrene spread downward. It was a dark shadow moving around the dial of his left nipple. The Major was observing the progress of enemy troops against the citadel of his heart . . . One almost expected him to say to his Adjutant: ‘Mr Green, the enemy is making progress against the carotid artery. Please tell the 74th Company of white corpuscles to form a line of skirmishes to the left and dig in. They must hold Collarbone Ridge at all costs’.⁹⁴

If war was an enemy disease attacking the body, it had to be defended against the ‘advance’; on the corporeal battlefield, personal and public meanings of war were inseparable. The Major’s intense examination of his body compares with patients who recorded in diaries their illnesses and wounds. The letters of J. B. Middlebrook ⁸⁸ Ibid. ⁸⁹ Winter, The Great War and the British People, 296. ⁹⁰ Basil Hughes and H. Stanley Banks, War Surgery: From Firing Line to Base (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1918), 349. ⁹¹ Ibid. 250. ⁹² Downing, To The Last Ridge, 17. ⁹³ Prost, In the Wake of War, 4. ⁹⁴ Laurence Stallings, ‘Esprit de Corps’, in J. H. Cotton Minchin (ed.), Great Short Stories of the War: England, France, Germany, America (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1930), 919.

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reveal that disabled men initially spoke of their bodies in the third person, as a being outside the self. In hospital, an amputated stump was ‘it’ or ‘my baby’, or as a poem by a paraplegic reveals, ‘my shadow’ (who walks around at night without him). It took some time for a coherent subjectivity to be reassembled through the process of ‘renegotiating the body’.⁹⁵ The disabled body was a site of conflict where masculinity was reframed in experience and imagination.⁹⁶ Vulnerability in combat and after injury often led to dissociation of the self from the body, as seen with disabled men in the early stages of recovery. The language of dismemberment permeated texts, reducing the body to fragments of what was once a human being. In his poem The Soldier Addresses his Body Edgell Rickword suggests that the body is both a trusty friend and yet also an uncertain other: ‘I shall be mad if you get smashed about, we’ve had good times together, you and I’.⁹⁷ Writers captured the separation of self and flesh that is the hallmark of mourning and seen in visualizations of ‘war-wrecked’ bodies.⁹⁸ Bodies conveyed the political and the social through cultural performance and aesthetic formulation. The pervasive metaphor of the body’s fragmentation in war encouraged wider suspicion of the body’s integrity. Embodiment had become trickery, an illusion. The body was now more than ever a site of imbalance and uncertainty; mutilation was horrifying and yet fascinating. Memories refracted through the lens of visual culture appealed to audiences keen to know the truth about the war. The authenticity of visual evidence helped people to assimilate death, heal the pain of loss, and move beyond mourning. In medicine and the arts, visual culture contributed explicit knowledge and public awareness of men’s bodies. When Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse Vera Brittain addressed her brother: ‘Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart’, she felt a painful connection between the dead and the living as a shared corporeality.⁹⁹ His pain was also hers. This dramatic description of loss subverted her memory of having encouraged him to volunteer, against their father’s objections.¹⁰⁰ Memory of the body is important in the acceptance of death and the process of mourning, but it is also situated at the apex of reconstructing and remembering wartime ‘experiences’. The body in pain dominated the cultural memory of the war. In Ivor Gurney’s poem To His Love, a soldier writes to a girlfriend, overturning her memory of his body: ⁹⁵ Wendy Gagen, ‘Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity during the First World War, the Case of J. B. Middlebrook’, European History Review, 14 (2007), 525–42. ⁹⁶ Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 11. ⁹⁷ Edgell Rickword, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), 32. ⁹⁸ Mardi J. Horowitz, ‘A Model of Mourning: Change in Schemas of Self and other’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 38 (1990), 297–324. ⁹⁹ Vera Brittain, ‘To My Brother (In Memory of July 1st, 1916)’, in Catherine Reilly (ed.), Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the Great War (London: Virago, 1981), 15. ¹⁰⁰ Watson, Fighting Different Wars, 254 ff.

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His body that was so quick Is not as you Knew it, on Severn river · · · · · You would not know him now.¹⁰¹

The powerful image of the war-wrecked body blurred the boundaries between the frontline and the home front, as communities saw war’s impact first hand. Women writers, often nurses or ambulance drivers, focused on the bodies of the wounded and dying. Scholars have seen these intimate descriptions of the male body in fragments as poignant examples of female modernism.¹⁰² In the novel War Nurse (ghost-written by Rebecca West), Corinne joins the medical services after her fiancé is killed, hoping ‘to sponge the blood away from wounded flesh’ of other men.¹⁰³ The novel contained graphic images: ‘I won’t forget the time I took a cloth off a man’s face and looked into his eye, as one naturally does, and saw right down into his throat’.¹⁰⁴ The book was hailed as ‘the true story of a woman who lived, loved and suffered on the Western Front’. Stories comforted and informed families by speaking frankly of the human cost of war. Women often appear as the archetypal witnesses to the pain of war. Through the heroine’s feelings and emotions writers examined the deeper social meanings of war, intimate emotions and experiences of loss. Although women could mourn for the nation, reaffirming gender codes, they were also burdened as nurturers, witnesses, and torchbearers for cultural memory.¹⁰⁵ In The Living Present: French Women in Wartime (1917), American author Gertrude Atherton—awarded the Légion d’honneur—wrote of women who had given ‘up their every waking hour to . . . nursing the wounded in hospital . . . washing gaping wounds, preparing shattered bodies for burial, or listening to the horrid tales of men and women home on leave’.¹⁰⁶ War was a preoccupation, an emotional and physical hazard, since women, as Atherton writes, ‘have been stark up against the physical side’.¹⁰⁷ Ignoring Edwardian codes of decorum, women wrote about their medical ¹⁰¹ Ivor Gurney, ‘To His Love’, in Lehmann, The English Poets of the First World War, 90. ¹⁰² Jane Marcus, ‘Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing The Body In/At War’, in Helen Zenna Smith, Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War (London: Feminist Press, 1989), 249; Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). ¹⁰³ Anon. (Rebecca West), War Nurse: The True Story of a Woman Who Lived, Loved and Suffered on the Western Front (New York: Cosmopolitan Press, 1930), 39. See Nicola Beauman, ‘ ‘‘It is Not the Place of Women to Talk of Mud’’: Some Responses by British Women Novelists to World War One’, in Dorothy Goldman (ed.), Women and World War One: The Written Response (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), 142. ¹⁰⁴ Goldman, Women and World War One, 51. ¹⁰⁵ Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). ¹⁰⁶ Gertrude Atherton, The Living Present (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Press, 1917), 217. See Goldman, ‘ ‘‘Eagles of the West?’’ American Women Writers and World War One’, Women and World War One, 190. ¹⁰⁷ Goldman, ‘Eagles of the West?’, 217.

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experiences rejecting squeamish femininity, conveying instead unforgettable images of wounded men’s bodies.¹⁰⁸ Muriel Stuart, in Forgotten Dead, I Salute You, describes the bodies lying in unmarked graves, and the implications for society: None remember him: he lies In earth of some strange-sounding place Nameless beneath the nameless skies · · · · · · Far and forgotten utterly By living man · · · · · · Because his heart beats not again his rotting, fruitless body lies That sons may grow from other men.¹⁰⁹

Emotional wounds were slow to heal. Mourning her absent son, the mother expresses what became a post-war obsession: the presence and absence of the human body. Letters between mothers and sons also reveal intimacy, deep love, and anguish, and a degree of romantic emotion akin to wartime male bonding or marriage.¹¹⁰ Stuart touches this generational anguish: ‘That sons may grow from other men’. It also suggests some of the ensuing anxiety about regeneration felt by families and implicating the nation. Stuart’s words resonated with critics and public alike. Two volumes of her poetry were published in close succession, in 1918 and in 1922, followed by an American edition in 1926. Stuart, like many women writers, captivated audiences eager to understand what had happened to their kin, creating an understanding about physical suffering that lingered as a predominant cultural memory of the war. This cultural work supplied the community with ways of thinking and feeling and allowed people to visualize events they had neither witnessed nor experienced. Long after the war, Sara Josephine Baker could look back and see her father being ‘torn apart by shrapnel or smothered [with] poison gas’.¹¹¹ Her account, Fighting For Life (1939), was based on a suspicion and an imagined knowledge of her father’s demise. The description reflected the role of culture, which, over many years, she incorporated as ‘memory’. Like many grieving women, her ‘recollections’ were coloured by the graphic, physical exactitude of the war’s cultural memory, which by then had become a commonplace cultural script. ¹⁰⁸ Laurie Kaplan, ‘Deformities of the Great War: The Narratives of Mary Borden and Helen Zenna Smith’, Women and Language, 27 (2004), 35–43. ¹⁰⁹ Muriel Stuart, ‘Forgotten Dead, I Salute You’, in Stephen, The Price of Pity, 104. ¹¹⁰ Richard White, ‘War and Australian Society’, in M. McKernan and M. Browne (eds), Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace (Canberra: Australian War Memorial in association with Allen and Unwin, 1988), 418. ¹¹¹ Sara Josephine Baker, Fighting for Life (New York: Macmillan, 1939). See Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 17.

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As early as 1919, an Australian Fathers’ Association warned against female ‘war strain’ from reading morbid and depressing war literature: Women are found sitting, sad eyed and weary—thinking their thoughts away with their boys, picturing the most desolate happenings. They mentally go to the trenches, they see and hear the sights and sounds of battle, they read war books, and they really drift into a morbid mental state which has its reflex on their physical conditions . . . the effect is pitiful in cases of highly sympathetic women.¹¹²

Women’s empathy was distinctly sensory and visual, sponsored by cultural forms. Fathers worried about violent images or depictions of victims in war literature and films.¹¹³ Some preferred uplifting stories of overcoming adversity, especially to assist disabled sons, in keeping with military medical advice not to indulge in self-pity. Still, both women and men were responding to the culture of violent imagery. Women envisioned horrifying experiences of their loved ones. Poet and novelist Rose Macaulay—Oxford educated and daughter of a Cambridge classicist—worked as a VAD, Land Girl, and War Office clerk. While she never encountered fresh combat injuries, exposure to wounded and shell-shocked soldiers inspired her novel Non Combatants and others (1916). Empathy and imagination heightened her identification with soldiers, despite the clearly pacifist endpoint of the work. Still, in her poem ‘The Shadow’ she describes violent scenes with the visual language of the eyewitness: Are the spilt brains so keen, so fine, crushed limbs so swift, dead dreams so sweet? There is a Plain where limbs and dreams and brains to set the world a-fire Lie sodden in heaps of mire.¹¹⁴

The body of the dead is not a ghost that haunts the living, but a memory of a body, now reduced to a gloomy silhouette. Macaulay had suffered mental breakdowns, first following the murder of her brother in 1909. She was deeply affected by her friend Rupert Brooke’s death and suffered a relapse in 1919. Her visions of the male body connected her personal loss with wider concerns with visual culture and the impact of war.¹¹⁵ Her use of visual language compares with that of soldier-poets who were both combatants and witnesses. Isaac Rosenberg, in his poem Dead Man’s Dump describes: ‘A man’s brains splattered on | A stretcher-bearer’s face’, and the faces of the dead that were ‘Burnt black by strange decay’.¹¹⁶ There was a significant degree of cross influence between war writers, male and female. Diaries, memoirs, and ¹¹² ¹¹³ ¹¹⁴ ¹¹⁵ ¹¹⁶ 123.

‘Women and War Strain’, Our Empire (19 Aug. 1919), 2 (my emphasis). ‘Weary of War Films’, Our Empire (18 Oct. 1920), 14. This poem, ‘The Shadow’, is published in Reilly, Scars Upon My Heart, 67–8. Smith, The Second Battlefield, 145. Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, in Lehmann, The English Poets of the First World War,

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letters used stock language to describe the body at war. For instance, in a letter to his aunt, Captain Theodore Percival wrote: the calculated death, the deliberate tearing of fine young bodies—if you’ve once seen a bright-eyed fellow suddenly turned into a goggling idiot, with his own brains trickling down into his eyes from under his cap—as I’ve done, you’re either a peace-maker or a degenerate . . . God help us all!¹¹⁷

Percival expressed moral doubt about the war, but by 1930, when it was included in the collection Letters by Fallen Englishmen (1930) it was given a different political staging as part of the cultural memory of the war’s victims. In all these ‘memories’, visual language was central to conveying the painful impact of the war on the wider public. Rudyard Kipling’s mantra ‘Lest We Forget’ was an honorific behest to future generations to recall the past, much as ‘Our Glorious Dead’, ‘Our Fallen Heroes’, or France’s ‘Morts pour la France’ were intended.¹¹⁸ Such phrases were touchstones of the concern for remembering and the fear of amnesia. In his poem Aftermath, Siegfried Sassoon turned this fear into a desperate query: ‘Have you forgotten yet? . . . Look down, and swear by the slain of the war that you’ll never forget.’¹¹⁹ Responding to his call for the absolute value of memory in perpetuity, American poet S. Gertrude Ford, in her ironic contemplation ‘The Tenth Armistice Day’ chimed, ‘And yet, so short the memories of men’.¹²⁰ Two decades after the Armistice, loss and grief continued to mix social rejuvenation with personal re-evaluation. In 1924, Edmund Blunden admitted that he kept going over and over the war in order somehow to come to terms with it.¹²¹ Retelling and re-remembering was a way of formulating a coherent narrative with which he could live, perhaps inspiring his uplifting work with the Imperial War Graves Commission. Yet, in 1936, Blunden was still writing traumatic poems such as ‘The Survivor’s Ghosts’, where ‘sound, smell, change and stir | New-old shapes for ever | Intensely recur’.¹²² Recent trauma studies show that survivors are often so preoccupied with death that it becomes a central feature of their psychology, profoundly affecting those close to them.¹²³ Immediate psychiatric intervention will not necessarily counter ¹¹⁷ In Laurence Housman (ed.), War Letters of Fallen Englishmen (London: Victor Gollancz, 1930), 298. ¹¹⁸ Ken Inglis, ‘Les Memoriaux dans les pays anglophones’, in Phillipe Rive, et al. (eds), Monuments de memoire: monuments aux morts de la grande guerre (Paris: MPCIH, Secretariat d’État aux Anciens Combattants et Victimes de Guerre), 123. ¹¹⁹ In Peter Vanisttart (ed.), Voices From the Great War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), 266. ¹²⁰ S. Gertrude Ford, ‘The Tenth Armistice Day’, in Reilly, Scars Upon My Heart, 39. ¹²¹ In Andrew Rutherford, The Literature of War: Five Studies in Heroic Virtue (London: Macmillan, 1978), 86. ¹²² Edmund Blunden, An Elegy and other Poems (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1937). ¹²³ Caruth, ‘An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton’, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 128.

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the effect of trauma.¹²⁴ After the First World War, when little was known about war trauma or alleviating it, some articulated their suffering, their witnessing, and that of others. While this was not a personal ‘working through’ (in Freud’s sense), it did show a desire to engage suffering as a medium for communication, and to create meaning out of the horror by reading and, particularly, by writing about it as can be seen from soldiers’ diaries and patient magazines in military hospitals. Today, trauma survivors are known to have a powerful need to comprehend the past, to order the disrupted consciousness. They try to create a ‘fully realized narrative’ by bringing together ‘the shattered knowledge of what happened, the emotions that were aroused by the events, and the bodily sensation that the physical events created’.¹²⁵ To recall, to reconstruct one’s consciousness, is an act of wholeness, pulling the body and mind back together through the agencies of memory. The processes of consciousness reconstruction and cultural remembering are evident in the narratives of the interwar years. Confronting traumatic memories as Blunden did through writing allowed them to be integrated into life. There was ‘restorative power’ in writing, and therefore it is important to be able to see the desire ‘to tell’ as part of the cultural construction of memory.¹²⁶ While many writers were obsessed with the horror of war, for some such visual and traumatic memories were entangled in the hope of displacement and forgetting. Writing about his dead friend’s body, the poet Ivor Gurney described beautiful flowers covering the mutilated body. This urge to forget, to cover up the recurring visual disturbance was powerful and yet impossible: Cover him, cover him seen And with thick-set Masses of memoried flowers Hide that red wet Thing I must somehow forget.¹²⁷

The visual memory of Gurney’s friend’s mutilated body could not be supplanted by the beauty or tranquillity of nature. Funerary wreaths could not appease his vision of ‘that red wet thing’—once his friend. These extracts reveal his traumatic memory as a visual ‘possession’; the bloodied corpse is repeatedly visualized. ¹²⁴ Ashraf Kagee, ‘Concerns about the Effectiveness of Critical Incident Stress Debriefing in Ameliorating Stress Reactions’, Critical Care, 6 (2002), 88; S. Wessely and M. Deahl, ‘Psychological Debriefing is a Waste of Time’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 183 (2003), 12–14. ¹²⁵ Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum, 1994). See Kirbey Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (Baltimore, Md. and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 1. ¹²⁶ Judith Herman, in Marita Sturken, ‘Narratives of Recovery: Repressed Memory as Cultural Memory’. See Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer, Acts of Memory, 235. ¹²⁷ Ivor Gurney, ‘To His Love’, in Lehmann, The English Poets of the First World War, 91.

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Permanently disabled veterans, who had trouble coming to terms with their injuries, were often haunted by the memory of dead friends. For them, forgetting was a helpless longing. In his poem ‘Convalescence’, a patient at Summerdown Camp in Eastbourne touched upon the painful irony of being injured and escaping the front. The cheerful environment of the hospital affords him time to dream; but with dreams come interminable visions: And some men vow that new-found happiness Is sure inducement to forgetfulness The dim half-light of dawn is here Alluring warmth of some soft bed Which lately lulled my every sense And soothed me to a poppied dream Is gone. More swift than lightning gleam My soul is stirred to lonely fear While every tiny nerve is tense And I am back among the dead.

For this patient, ‘memory comes with a tragic spell’, as he ‘treads again war’s tortured ways’, and his repeated nightmares mean that even ‘God’s wide eternity’ cannot ‘bring forgetfulness to me’.¹²⁸ Forgetting was also difficult for families. Containment and communication in remembrance rituals offered some relief, as did retelling war horror stories. Together, the personal and cultural forces of memory and forgetting pulsated in the minds of the living. The body was a visual code that mediated the ordeal of the war through spectacle. Although class, race, and gender shaped various ‘ways of seeing’ as a psychological, sensory, and mnemonic process, in war representations, the body—more than the person—was the vision remembered.¹²⁹

V I O L E N T S PE C TAC L E S A N D C U LT U R A L M E M O RY I N T H E AT R E , F I L M , A N D A RT Alongside literature, with its powerful effect on audiences, theatre, film, and art played an important role in the cultural memory of violence. Just as visual culture disseminated the pain of war, and called out for audiences to act as witnesses, audiences saw visual culture as an important source of information about their loved one’s experiences, which could give them personal relief. At the same time, the ‘pleasure culture of war’ drew audiences to shocking ‘truth-telling’ narratives. As reality and representation merged, playwrights gained credibility if ¹²⁸ Leicestershire, ‘Convalescence’, Summerdown Camp Journal (15 Aug. 1917), 2. ¹²⁹ John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).

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they had been soldiers, just as the ‘soldier-poets’ were hailed as the ‘true historians of the war’.¹³⁰ Scholars have argued there was a ‘myth of the war experience’, and that imaginative versions of reality were created in wartime and afterwards.¹³¹ Questions of literary and historical veracity, however, miss the complexity that audiences searched for intimacy with the dead alongside a growing entertainment industry that placed war’s shocking culture as the central attraction. J. C. Sherriff ’s play Journey’s End (1929) was praised for its ‘realism’, since Sherriff had been wounded in the war. In the production, cast members were also acclaimed as having special ability to convey reality; two had been wounded, and one had been a prisoner of war. Authenticity verified truth, as though the actors were simply ‘re-enacting their past’, but it also rendered the violence more real.¹³² Still, the fact that Sheriff had suffered a nervous disorder was not part of this ‘truth’. Indeed, critics were often selective about the realities they were willing to confront; drunkenness, shell shock, and cowardice were expunged from the ‘real’ vision of violence. Nevertheless, theatre and film continued to expound the spectacle of brutality.¹³³ The play attracted audiences in Europe, the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, and was made into a motion picture in 1930. While reality was continually merging with representation, repeated visual languages were becoming the vernacular of the cultural memory of the war, which crossed cultures and languages in the interwar period. In the United States, Maxwell Anderson’s and Lawrence Stallings’ play What Price Glory? (1924), based on the experiences of the artist and writer Captain John Thomason (US Marine Corps), described the lingering impact of war on the central character, Captain Flagg.¹³⁴ There is a smell to war—not a pleasant smell, compounded of the reek of unwashed bodies, the stench of slain flesh, and the high angle stink of explosive. If you have smelled it once, you will never get it out of your nose as long as you have a nose.¹³⁵

Smell and vision were common memory triggers that writers sought to convey and audiences sought to experience. In his fictionalized memoir Goodbye to All That, Graves tried to conjure the smell of ‘gas-blood-lyddite-latrine’ permeating the trenches. Visual language in fiction conveyed both the spectacle and sensory ¹³⁰ ‘The War Poetry of Soldier Poets’, The English Review ( July 1921). ¹³¹ George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The Great War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1991). ¹³² Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 152. ¹³³ Ibid. 161, 197. ¹³⁴ Stallings, ‘What Price Glory?’, in M. Anderson and L. Stallings, Three American Plays (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1926). ¹³⁵ ‘Introducing Captain Thomason of the Marines—In which a Soldier, who is Also an Author and an Artist, Talks of the War’, Vanity Fair ( June 1925), 70–102.

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effect of war, provoking a form of recollection that allowed audiences to share experiences.¹³⁶ Stallings’ play received considerable attention in the American media, as did Thomason’s drawings, published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1925, which showed Germans impaled on trees and young Marines twisted and bleeding. The play was turned into a silent film by Fox studios in 1926—where the horror of war was mixed with its pleasures—Flagg’s body is tattooed with the words: ‘soldiering for wages, loving, and fighting for fun’. Sexual rivalry, violence, and masculine bravado constitute the visual plot of the film so that the victimhood and pathos are overshadowed by the dazzling image of war as fierce entertainment. Stallings, a Marine and amputee, had also written a semi-autobiographical novel, Plumes, about a troubled, disabled soldier, and later became co-writer on the hit film The Big Parade (1925), which included battle scenes and the disablement of the lead character. He contributed to the screenplay of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), in which fear, wounding, dying, and disablement were treated with dramatic candour.¹³⁷ Such plays and films received much media attention, becoming part of the genre of explicit writing that combined information with graphic detail. Visual and performative media constituted both the search for meaning and the pleasure culture of war, popularized in cinematic visions of the period. To reconstruct the past is also to alter it, engaging layers of analysis that bring ‘memories’ into sharper focus.¹³⁸ Memory has many triggers: conversations, newspapers, images, suggestions, dreams, environmental associations, and an entire range of sensory stimuli, containing specific and general pieces of information, that form an increasingly detailed visual picture. Readers of war literature hoped memory triggers might give them access to those they mourned. Established writers and poets, particularly Imagists, used images and words together to create symbols and pictures that would trigger memories. In Rebecca West’s novel, The Return of the Soldier, the amnesic officer, Chris Baldry, regains his identity having connected his past and present through memories of his dead child and the nursery, which acted as triggers, restoring his memory and returning him to the frontline.¹³⁹ In Teresa Hooley’s poem ‘A War Film’, a cinematic image triggers her visual imagination: ‘As in a dream | still hearing machine-guns rattle and shells scream | . . . sudden terror that assaulted me’. She imagines her child ‘Tortured Torn | Slain | Rotting in No Man’s Land, ¹³⁶ Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 37. ¹³⁷ Andrew Kelly, Cinema and the Great War (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 31–2. ¹³⁸ Elizabeth F. Loftus, ‘Remembering Recent Experiences’, in Laird S. Cermark (ed.), Human Memory and Amnesia (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982), 239–55. ¹³⁹ Jane Gledhill, ‘Impersonality and Amnesia: A Response to World War One in the Writings of H. D. and Rebecca West’, in Goldman, Women and World War One, 175, 185–6.

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out in the rain’.¹⁴⁰ Although not her direct experience, the vision appears as a ‘memory’, one triggered by seeing the film The Battle of Mons (1926). Image triggers crossed back and forth between literature and cinema: pictures inspired words, and words inspired pictures. Modern visuality provided women with ‘mobile dynamics’—where the spectator crosses an imaginary path, traversing multiple and distant sites, connecting the past and present.¹⁴¹ Exposure to films and war literature allowed women to visualize male bodies and to evoke them with highly charged visual languages. Censors and moral campaigners, however, were concerned about sexual morality. Although the Bishop of Bristol described ‘the appalling way in which girls run after soldiers’, the film industry was largely self-regulating and defended this ‘amiable feminine weakness’ as ‘irrelevant to the ethics’ of the cinema.¹⁴² In wartime, the cinema was a female social space that the industry relied upon, but Coventry City Council appointed female inspectors to check films, posters, and lighting—to the objection of the Chief Constable.¹⁴³ Given the prolific depiction of vamps, exotic seduction, and independent women, female munitions workers’ social and sexual lives were ‘played out’ in cinematic spaces.¹⁴⁴ Violence, however, was of far less concern in the surveillance of working-class women’s morality. Unlike sex, violent images were patriotic and used to maintain the female war effort. The First World War was a highly visual war. Previous wars certainly created photographic records and cinematic representations. The memory of the American Civil War was ‘the legacy of a handful of photographs’.¹⁴⁵ American film-makers provided news propaganda during the Spanish–American War, as did the British in the South African War—footage focused on camp life or contrived battle scenes.¹⁴⁶ While audiences desired dramatic war imagery before 1914, now its visual culture crossed forms—the visual fields were literary, cinematic, and medical. This enabled dazzling representations to merge with reality in culturally shocking ways. Films were informative and entertaining—offering realism and drama together—which excited and disturbed audiences. Narrative structures informed film styles. The British propaganda film Battle of the Somme (1916) was accompanied by music to heighten its visual and emotional impact as well as textual commentary to help audiences understand, and to contain the impact of the images. With its depiction of men going over the top, the wounded being treated, and a shocking scene of a soldier dying, the film broke attendance records.¹⁴⁷ Invigorating ¹⁴⁰ Teresa Hooley, ‘A War Film’, in Reilly, Scars Upon My Heart, 56. ¹⁴¹ Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), 56. ¹⁴² Cinema (25 Mar. 1915), 8, 128, 60. ¹⁴³ Bioscope (22 Mar. 1917), 34, 545, 1255. ¹⁴⁴ Angela Woollacott, On Her their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (London: California University Press, 1994), 143. ¹⁴⁵ Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs’, Representations, 9 (1985), 1–35. ¹⁴⁶ John Barnes, Filming the Boer War (London: Bishopgate Press, 1992). ¹⁴⁷ Hynes, A War Imagined, 125.

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patriotism, Lloyd George and King George V praised the film, which reinforced popular commitment to the war.¹⁴⁸ Although some battle scenes were contrived, it was seen as documenting the truth.¹⁴⁹ People were also profoundly moved by its ‘realism’. Lloyd George’s secretary Frances Stevenson pictured what her brother Paul had gone through when he died. The film produced a memory that felt like a ‘Greek tragedy’—a dramatic script for his experience.¹⁵⁰ Audiences pictured their loved ones and responded emotionally to a culturally inspired memory. Film propaganda, however, was in its infancy and the military did not exploit its potential.¹⁵¹ Dramatic realism in official war films, such as The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks (1917), was seen as educative, truthful, and patriotic. The National Council of Public Morals Cinema Commission reported in 1917 that the film offered children an ‘intelligent conception’ of warfare. Advertisements for The Massacre of the Fourth Cavalry (1915), said that it would not ‘offend the most sensitive’ of audiences.¹⁵² Other films such as Thomas Ince’s Civilization (1916) had shown dying men, although with a controversial depiction of Christ moving across the scene, which was banned by censors.¹⁵³ Such films challenged people’s tenuous control over their emotional responses, especially as more and more experienced personal loss. In 1917, Roll of Honour films were abandoned, for the faces of serving soldiers, proudly displayed in the intimacy of the cinema, became a macabre display of the wounded and missing. Such films stirred patriotism while at the same time provoking private anxiety.¹⁵⁴ Censorship rules were largely industry led; restrictions on ‘indecent and obscene’ posters shifted to a weaker concept of ‘objectionable’ representations, an ambiguity that focused on sexual morality rather than violent imagery.¹⁵⁵ Pacifist and pro-war films, documentaries, and fictional dramas dealt with gritty issues of violence and sex. The Horrors of War (1916) included death scenes from Russo-Turkish confrontations. Thomas Ince’s The Mother and the Law ended with the aerial bombing of New York. In Fred Niblo’s The Enemy (1928), ¹⁴⁸ Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? (London: Cassell, 1999), 31–5. ¹⁴⁹ Michael Hammond, The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War, 1914–1918 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006), 100; S. D. Badsey, ‘Battle of the Somme: British War Propaganda’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 3 (1983), 91–115; Modris Ecksteins, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (London: Bantam, 1989), 318; Nicholas Reeves, ‘Cinema, Spectatorship and Propaganda: Battle of the Somme (1916) and its Contemporary Audience’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 17 (1997), 5–28. ¹⁵⁰ Hammond The Big Show, 116, 122. ¹⁵¹ Roger Smither, ‘A Wonderful Idea of the Fighting: The Question of Fakes in The Battle of the Somme’, in Suzanne Bardgett and Peter Simkins (eds), Imperial War Museum Review No. 3 (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1988), 14. ¹⁵² Hammond, The Big Show, 168. ¹⁵³ Andrew Kelly, Cinema and the Great War (London and New York, Routledge, 1997), 23. ¹⁵⁴ Hammond, The Big Show, 217, 72. ¹⁵⁵ Dean Rapp, ‘Sex and the Cinema: War, Moral Panic and the British Film Industry, 1906–1918’, Albion, 34 (2002), 428.

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Lillian Gish played an Austrian woman whose husband and baby are killed in the war. In I Was a Spy (1933), a Belgian nurse, and spy for the British, has sex with a German officer. John Ford’s Pilgrimage (1933) followed American mothers to the French graves of their sons. Indeed, one American reviewer observed that film audiences had ‘an abnormal interest in exploding shells, rattling artillery and fields strewn with the dead and dying’.¹⁵⁶ In the United States, successful war films included Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and The Big Parade (1925), a largely anti-war film focusing upon the romantic complications of a disabled soldier. By the 1930s, romanticism gave way to brutal realism. Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), a strongly scripted film, exposed soldiers’ fears of mutilation and the painful experience of injury, drawing viewers in to witness the agony of slow death. It relied on a trope in war narratives and art: men trapped in and merging with the landscape. As the main character Paul Baumer says: ‘It is dirty and painful to die for your country . . . Our bodies are earth and our thoughts are clay, and we sleep and eat with death’.¹⁵⁷ Audiences and critics felt that films gave them an insight into modern war, satisfying thirst for information and fascination with modern technology.¹⁵⁸ In Britain during the war, the curious public gathered at train stations where modernized hospital trains were on display. Audiences marvelled at the state-ofthe-art facilities and rows of pristine beds, empty and awaiting patients. Yet, few such trains were actually in service at the front. Not just medical modernity, but the wounded were also part of the spectacle of war. Thousands of visitors attended hospitals to ‘cheer up’ the wounded, and a trade in visitor passes developed to the extent that restrictions were put in place. Wounded bodies had sexual appeal, and blue uniforms enabled flirtations when outside the hospital. Yet patients also complained of feeling like talking exhibits expected to retell their stories on demand, to which some soldiers responded with exaggerated tales of horror and wounding. One patient joked: ‘I was in the Expeditionary Force; I seem now to be in the Exhibitionary’.¹⁵⁹ At Queen Mary Auxiliary Hospital, Roehampton, soldiers had to ‘parade arms’ and legs before the King and Queen, to show ‘how well they were getting accustomed to their artificial limbs’, and also appeared in numerous postcards sold in fund-raising campaigns.¹⁶⁰ Visitors revealed an appetite for tales of wounding and overcoming, suggesting that, far from horrifying, the wounded body and the military hospital were theatrical sites. Violence and wounding were ¹⁵⁶ Kelly, Cinema and the Great War, 18, 12, 25, 17. ¹⁵⁷ Ibid. 29, 33. ¹⁵⁸ Review of Civilization (1916), in Hammond, The Big Show, 168. ¹⁵⁹ Jeffrey Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2004), 111; ‘Wit from the Wards’, The First Eastern General Hospital Gazette (25 May 1915), 64. ¹⁶⁰ ‘The King and Maimed Soldiers: ‘‘Parades’’ with Artificial Limbs’, The Times (13 Mar. 1916), 5.

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continually transformed within the arena of dramatic spectacle. The shock of war penetrated society and yet a pleasure culture was also created, not just with films and narratives but also the real bodies of wounded men. As we shall see, this spurred on greater interest in the medical aspect of war. In the interwar years, clinical photography and film were ‘the means by which the medical professions defined and advertized the role of medicine’.¹⁶¹ Photographs showed that medicine was ‘vigorous, scientific, and a powerful agent of progress’,¹⁶² and were central to media campaigns and rehabilitation propaganda. In 1914, the Wellcome Medical Museum’s exhibition of historic battlefield surgery displayed the letters of dying patients and surgical instruments, including amputation knives and bullet extractors. Audiences were comforted that ‘the wounded are nowadays lucky’.¹⁶³ Some of these media did not stay in the confines of medicine, and were used in public exhibitions and hospital fund-raising campaigns. In 1918, an exhibition of the Canadian Army Medical Corps at the Hunterian Museum (Royal College of Surgeons, London) included war specimens, drawings, and photographs. Opened by Sir Robert Borden, the Canadian Prime Minister, and addressed by Sir George Makins (Royal College of Surgeons President), the exhibition received press attention.¹⁶⁴ When the brutality of war was shown, technical and explanatory texts tempered the impact by discussions of recovery and progress. Visual culture and language reiterated the profound paradox of modern technologies: war destroyed while medicine repaired, and photography recorded the process for history. The dead and wounded stimulated cultural and artistic responses that permeated visual memories. Newspaper reports about the wounded and disabled, as well as paintings and films, reinforced the idea of the male body as a site of pain. As well, visual artists, like writers,—many of whom were official war artists with frontline experience—depicted dead bodies as the nightmares of shell-shock survivors. Dead bodies rising as ghosts from graves became a cultural trope, simulated in memoirs, films, and paintings—for example, Abel Gance’s film J’accuse!, or Stanley Spencer’s mural Resurrection of the Soldiers (1928–32) for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, or Australian war artist John Longstaff ’s painting of the dead emerging from Ypres’ burial grounds.¹⁶⁵ Artist Paul Nash described the Western Front as ‘unspeakable, godless, hopeless’; not a landscape, but ‘one huge grave’ that becomes ‘invisible to sight’. Yet Nash was ¹⁶¹ Daniel M. Fox and Christopher Lawrence, Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and American Since 1840 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), 181. ¹⁶² Ibid. ¹⁶³ ‘Wounded Nowadays Lucky’, New York Times (27 Dec. 1914). ¹⁶⁴ ‘War Surgery: Canadian Exhibition Opened’, The Times (15 Aug. 1918), 9. ¹⁶⁵ Richard Cork, ‘A Bitter Truth’: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press/Barbican Art Gallery, 1994), 238, 300; Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 171; Sue Malvern, ‘Memorizing the Great War: Stanley Spencer and Burghclere’, Art History, 23 (2000), 182–204.

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compelled to paint the destruction of war with complex bodily metaphors.¹⁶⁶ The enmeshing of reality and representation reflected the struggle to find meaning in the war, creating shocking visual memories. Audiences and critics viewed exhibitions of war art as channels of public information about war, wounding, and the fate of loved ones, inciting visual knowledge. The Times praised the ‘modern revolution’ in the war artists’ portrayal of ‘the horror’. Interpreted as ‘experiences in paint’, since ‘something seen and felt’ was ‘much more vivid’.¹⁶⁷ Magazines and newspapers printed stories and reproduced pictures of war art as well as publishing special editions of photographs. In 1918, war paintings became ‘the most talked about art in London’; Nevinson’s Paths of Glory roused curiosity about its lurid portrayal of death, especially once the work was censored.¹⁶⁸ As the recovering wounded became more numerous, the fascination with images of violence increased. Artists like Nevinson were said to be ‘anxious to crawl into the frontline and draw things full of violence and terror’, but this was a craving audiences shared.¹⁶⁹ Within the search for meaning was a culture of war’s horror, partly informative but also enticing. Dramatic emotions were elided with realism. Critics felt that in Wyndham Lewis’ paintings, ‘you can almost see and hear the shells’ descending with ‘powerful . . . material force’, and that with Paul Nash’s ‘trails of desolation . . . [it is] as if the earth cried out at [man’s] inhumanity’.¹⁷⁰ The horror of war attracted artists, critics, and audiences—both locally and overseas. In 1919, the British War Art Collection of the Imperial War Museum, having already drawn ‘unprecedented crowds’ in London, travelled to Washington and New York, where Vanity Fair hailed its ‘emotional and imaginative appeal’.¹⁷¹ The 250-piece exhibit included many troubling images of war, such as Vorticist William Roberts’ The Signallers, depicting soldiers’ anguished faces in an entanglement of frenetic bodies. In Gassed and Wounded (1918), Eric Kennington depicted blinded and bandaged men at a dressing station, with an orderly carrying a patient. The writhing agony of the man on the stretcher mirrors the bearer’s melancholic face. His burdened shoulders seem to shrink with hopelessness. In Nevinson’s The Doctor (1916), a man groans in pain as his head wound is bandaged. The anonymity and indignity of wounding is also depicted; the focus shifts to a man’s exposed buttocks, with a gaping, bleeding wound (Fig. 2.3). The work was exhibited in ‘The Nation’s War Paintings and other ¹⁶⁶ In Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War: Witnessing, Testimony and Remembrance (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 32–4. ¹⁶⁷ ‘Art’s Fresh Start: A War Revolution—Experiences in Paint’, The Times (12 Dec. 1919). ¹⁶⁸ Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War, 37. ¹⁶⁹ C. F. G. Masterman to John Buchan, 18 May 1917, IWM Dept. of Art, Nevinson file, in Paul Gough, ‘Shared Experience—Art and War: A Commission with the Army: Selection, Training, Action’, unpublished paper, 2007. ¹⁷⁰ ‘Art’s Fresh Start: A War Revolution—Experiences in Paint’, The Times (12 Dec. 1919). ¹⁷¹ ‘War Pictures by British Artists’, Vanity Fair (Feb. 1919), 29.

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Fig. 2.3 C. R. W. Nevinson, The Doctor (1916). Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.

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Records’ (Royal Academy, 1919–20)—suggestive of state power and the bureaucratic organization of citizen soldier and war artist—and had public exposure throughout the 1920s. Commissioned by the British War Memorial committee (Ministry of Information), Henry Tonks’ An Advanced Dressing Station, France (1918) depicted a chaotic scene after a bombardment, with wounded men writhing in pain. The work was critically acclaimed for its ‘realistic’ depiction of suffering. In the same exhibit, Harold Sandys Williamson’s stark hygienic depiction of the Sixth General Hospital operating theatre, where he worked as a stretcher-bearer during the war, was chillingly titled Human Sacrifice (1918).¹⁷² While the Ministry censored some images of dead bodies, wounding was often regarded as heroic more than distressing. Visual art dramatized wounding, complementing disillusioned war literature and explicit medical memoirs, similarly informing families and communities.¹⁷³ Alongside wounds, mustard gas attacks were depicted as especially horrifying. Although a ‘silent’ weapon, it resulted in visible, painful wounds, blistering the skin and stripping the body of flesh. An Australian soldier lived for five years in a saline bath after losing all his skin in a gas attack.¹⁷⁴ Stories of gassing were widely circulated. In a letter to a friend, Captain John Eugene Crombie described the tactics of gas warfare as ‘barbaric’. ‘Mopping up’ a captured trench meant smoking the enemy out until they came crawling up choking and half-blinded, and because of lack of resources ‘the instructions are that these poor half-blinded devils should be bayoneted as they come up’.¹⁷⁵ Chemical warfare destroyed the Victorian notion of honour in battle. Written in 1917, Crombie’s letter was published in 1930 as part of a collection designed to ‘tell the truth’ about modern warfare. Narratives and paintings brought to life the pain of chemical poisoning, which could maim and kill, even years after the initial exposure. Gas wounds had a clear presence in literary and visual languages used to describe the impact of war. War art testified to violence and suffering, communicating physical pain frankly and emotively, and the media reported extensively on exhibitions as well as debates surrounding memorials and commemorative sculpture. Exhibitions provided spaces for viewers to be surrounded by the bodily drama of war. At the 1923 Royal Academy Summer Show, William Orpen unveiled To the Unknown British Soldier in France (Fig. 2.4). The two central figures guarding a casket are emaciated, young soldier-boys, naked except for the tatters covering their genitals—an ironic reference to classical drapery. Two classical busts on pedestals flank the soldiers, while two cherubs arrange garlands around the casket, their infant sturdiness contrasting sharply with the young soldiers’ ¹⁷² Julian Freeman, ‘Professor Tonks: War Artist’, 290. See also Henry Tonks, An Underground Casualty Clearing Station (1918). ¹⁷³ Wilmot Herringham, A Physician In France (London: Edward Arnold, 1919). ¹⁷⁴ Laffin, Surgeons in the Field, 222. ¹⁷⁵ Housman, War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, 82.

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Fig. 2.4 William Orpen, To the Unknown British Soldier in France (1922). Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London.

haggard bodies.¹⁷⁶ Orpen was haunted by his memories of the dead, and this picture suggests the burden of memory.¹⁷⁷ When General Haig died in 1928, Orpen offered the painting to the Imperial War Museum as a tribute to him, painting out the cherubs and soldiers. Similarly, the ‘gravitas’ of classicism was overturned in John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1918–19), painted for the Hall of Remembrance in England. Recalling the sculpted friezes of the Parthenon, the wounded lead a demoralized parade of blinded soldiers across a landscape illuminated by a noxious-looking, yellow vapour and littered with countless weary bodies. War art was not simply personal artistic ‘memories’ on canvas. After 1918, it continued to communicate the violence of war through visual language. Some surgeons, educated elites, pacifists, modern artists, and vocal classical humanists turned away from these horrors to the classics. In his 1918 presidential address to the British Classical Association, the renowned Canadian surgeon ¹⁷⁶ Cork, A Bitter Truth, 266–7.

¹⁷⁷ Evening Standard (7 May 1923), ibid. 266.

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Sir William Osler spoke of the barbarity of chemical warfare, ‘I am sorry to have seen Sargent’s picture Gassed in this year’s Academy. It haunts the mind like a nightmare.’¹⁷⁸ Anguished pictures, disabled soldiers, and classical heroes, symbolized war in different ways. Violated bodies may have shocked the classical canon, but the continued desire to inform and be informed about modern war was one of its most charged legacies, invoking remembrance and yet also generating cultural attractions both disturbing and entertaining. M U T I L AT I O N A N D R E S TO R AT I O N Wounded bodies were seen in streets, exhibitions, and medical propaganda, stimulating public curiosity. In June 1920, the Imperial War Museum exhibition at the Crystal Palace, London, displayed military hardware and private war trophies. Attracting enormous public attention, it was not regarded as offensive or insensitive but patriotic, enabling visitors to attach meaning to war service. Yet the exhibit also included an array of photographs, drawings, and paintings of wounded patients in trenches, wards, and hospital ships, among other material objects—as well as John Lobley’s poignant painting of the facially wounded making toys in their rehabilitation workshop at the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup.¹⁷⁹ Did remembering war involve social disconnection from the effect that war machines had on fleshy bodies? The ‘aestheticization’ of technology and wounds was not necessarily incongruous, even though some objected that the exhibition was propaganda.¹⁸⁰ The King, however, declared it a record of the ‘toil’ of Britons, the Dominions, and the Allies. It was ‘a memorial which speaks to the heart and to the imagination’—‘an embodiment’ of ‘common sacrifice’. Despite the King’s sombre speech, The Times dramatically reported the exhibition as ‘intensely grim and fierce’, with ‘relics’ of ‘fearful scenes and incidents’, and ‘repellent and terrible’ subjects. Indeed, 40,000 visitors attended the show on one day, with choir, orchestra, and fireworks provided.¹⁸¹ The spectacle of wounding and medical treatment was informative and comforting, and satisfied a curiosity that could be entertaining. During the war, families had been anxious about the care of the wounded and the quality of medical services, following scandalous reports of tardy evacuation, patient neglect, and high amputation rates by the Royal Army Medical Corps.¹⁸² ¹⁷⁸ William Osler, ‘The Old Humanities and the New Science’, Presidential Address, the British Classical Association, 1919 (repr. Cambridge, Boston, and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., Riverside Press, 1920), 13. ¹⁷⁹ Montague Henry Knapp collection. Wellcome Collection. ¹⁸⁰ Gabriel Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914–1930: A Study of ‘Unconquerable Manhood’ (London: Ashgate, 2007), 167–71. ¹⁸¹ ‘The Greatest War Memorial: Opening by the King—Human Interest at the Crystal Palace’, The Times (10 June 1920), 11; ‘The New Crystal Palace: 40,000 Visitors on Saturday’, The Times (14 June 1920), 11. ¹⁸² Ian R. Whitehead, Doctors in the Great War (London: Leo Cooper, 1999), 181.

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To counter this image, media campaigns were conducted to showcase medical innovations, modern transport, rehabilitation, and prosthetics. Over time, the public was familiarized with medical terminology and procedures. As one surgeon noted: The non-medical mind is as interested in the wounds and sufferings of our men as are the doctors . . . Compound fractures and splintered bones, septic wounds, tetanus, brain injuries, inoculations are words freely bandied about and understood by any group of ladies met together round an afternoon tea table.¹⁸³

From having been ‘almost unknown . . . in civil practice’, conditions such as gas gangrene and cellulitis were now understood by the public and freely discussed in all their complexity in surgeons’ memoirs.¹⁸⁴ In response to the growing interest in war surgery, official medical texts and histories addressed a broader readership. Major General Sir George Makins considered Barling and Morrison’s Manual of War Surgery appropriate ‘for all those interested in War Surgery’ and that ‘the reader will not fail to be struck by certain characteristics of the book, such as its eminently practical nature’.¹⁸⁵ Medical histories attracted public attention in newspapers: war surgery was praised for ‘achievements so dazzling as to bewilder’, and that ‘triumphs in wound healing’ rendered surgery ‘the soldier’s best friend’.¹⁸⁶ The Times recommended Major Alfred Hulls’ Surgery in War: this ‘romantic’ story tells ‘how success . . . courage and self-sacrifice have triumphed over a hundred obstacles’. Although manuals were written for professional doctors, they were also ‘chapter[s] in history’. As military medical propaganda, such books aimed to comfort the ‘friends of men in the firing line’ whose ‘anxieties will be set at rest’.¹⁸⁷ Mutilation could be transformed into restoration, and military pain became civilian gain. Sir George Makins declared the lessons learned from military medicine were ‘destined to exert a happy and lasting influence’ on civilian medical practice. Just as with war exhibitions, medical texts claimed to provide a ‘fitting’ and ‘useful memorial of the Great War’, highlighting successes, the ‘experience gained’, the consolidation of professions, and the narrative of modernity.¹⁸⁸ War was claimed to have been ‘good for medicine’ since peace had ‘deprived surgeons of their native initiative and resource’.¹⁸⁹ Still, ¹⁸³ Martin, A Surgeon in Khaki, 184. ¹⁸⁴ Maynard Smith, ‘A Lecture on the Treatment of the Wounded’, 127. ¹⁸⁵ Barling and Morrison, A Manual of War Surgery, p. vii. ¹⁸⁶ ‘War Surgery: Discoveries in Healing’, review of W. G. Macpherson (ed.), ‘Medical Services: Surgery of the War’, The Times (19 Dec. 1922), 15; also ‘Surgery in War: Triumphs of Wound Healing—Record of Great Work’, The Times (26 Sept. 1922), 12. ¹⁸⁷ ‘Surgery in War: Successful Methods of the RAMC’, The Times (6 Mar. 1916), 5. ¹⁸⁸ Barling and Morrison, A Manual of War Surgery, p. vii. See also Grey Turner, Medical and Surgical Notes from Mesopotamia, 23: ‘These lessons will not be lost, and must have an effect on civilian practice after the war’. ¹⁸⁹ Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison, and Steve Sturdy (eds), War, Medicine, and Modernity (Stroud: Sutton, 1998); ‘Surgery in War’, The Times (26 Sept. 1922), 12.

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in the drama of surgical enterprise under duress, surgeons were portrayed as ‘heroic figures’.¹⁹⁰ In official histories, too, success was continually highlighted: ‘British medicine, by an appeal to results, is justified before the nation. It has yielded an army free from sickness. To the wounded it has brought instant and sustained relief’. This reassurance, however, was followed by an admission of the cruel realities of the war for patients: the purpose of military medicine was ‘ever to search out and study the secrets of Nature by way of experiment’.¹⁹¹ Surgical experiments and patients’ reactions to treatment were recorded in detailed, illustrated texts. Classical training and the study of anatomy underpinned medical illustration since the Renaissance. From the eighteenth century, camera obscura techniques increased accuracy in drawing, in keeping with Enlightenment ideals of objectivity.¹⁹² In the nineteenth century, magnifying lenses assisted in diagnosis and clinical photography recording the stages of treatment.¹⁹³ Medical images were published in the Photographic Journal, showing the influence of professional networks between photography and medicine. Clinical photography was used extensively in the First World War and it enjoyed the reputation of a precise science. Beauty and symmetry were the fundamental ideals of reconstructive surgery; Ralph Millard described it as ‘the perpetual Battle of Beauty versus Blood Supply’.¹⁹⁴ Medical photographs were often retouched and tinted by hand, or as one surgeon put it ‘coloured from life’ to make them more realistic and enhance their appeal.¹⁹⁵ Successfully restored cases might have the lip-line, eye, or nose symmetry improved by retouching the image, such as in Figure 2.5. While the text identifies the procedure as the ‘Repair of the Cheek’, the photographs present the linear transition from initial treatment with metal mouth-apparatus, surgical treatment defined by diagrams mapping excision and suturing sites, and then two stages of healing: post-operative and one year later. This visual record could be regarded as the perspectives of the patient, the surgeon, and the public—hence the photograph of the final healed condition has been retouched. Case notes reveal that Private W. Ashworth, Eighteenth West Yorks Regiment, aged 23, was wounded in July 1916 and three months later received his first ‘plastic operation’. He endured most of the year at Sidcup with a fractured jaw and, prior to being discharged ‘unfit for military service’ in September 1917, ¹⁹⁰ H. M. W. Gray, The Early Treatment of Wounds (London: Oxford Medical Publications, 1919), p. xi. ¹⁹¹ Preface, British Medicine in the War, 1914–1917, p. viii. ¹⁹² Alison Gernsheim, ‘Medical Photography in the Nineteenth Century, part 1’, Medical & Biological Illustration, 11 (1961), 85; Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 103. ¹⁹³ Ken Arnold, ‘Picturing the Body: Five Centuries of Medical Images’, An Exhibition at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (London: Wellcome Trust, 1993), 6. ¹⁹⁴ D. Ralph Millard Jr, Preface to Gillies and Millard, The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery. ¹⁹⁵ A. Gersheim, ‘Medical Photography in the Nineteenth Century’, Medical & Biological Illustration, 11(1961), 147–56.

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Fig. 2.5 ‘Repair of the Cheek’. Harold D. Gillies, Plastic Surgery of the Face (London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 63. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

could only manage a ‘soft diet’ due to soft-tissue damage.¹⁹⁶ While Gillies had performed a masterful ‘restoration’ on a patient whose cheek was almost entirely blown away, the retouched images affirmed the importance of the ‘restored’ appearance for the patient, the public, and the professional alike. By contrast to the clinical viewpoint, Henry Tonks’ tender illustration of Private Ashworth, dressed in the ‘hospital-blue’ uniform that identified military patients to local communities, conveys the patient’s dignity and humanity (Fig. 2.6).¹⁹⁷ In the nineteenth century, medical illustrations were coloured to achieve realistic skin and blood tones, whereas retouching photographs made the patient’s face appear more symmetrical, reinforcing the image of surgical success. Clinical photography documented the mutilation of men and their surgical resolution, but ¹⁹⁶ 1071 Private W. Ashworth, Register no. 359, Gillies Archive at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup . ¹⁹⁷ See Royal College of Surgeons’ Collection, ibid.

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Fig. 2.6 Henry Tonks. Private Ashworth. Courtesy of the Royal College of Surgeons, London.

they were unable to ‘penetrate the inner recesses exposed in surgical operations’, and many surgeons preferred conventional hand-drawn illustrations.¹⁹⁸ Facial reconstruction and the design of facial masks were high profile. The Times claimed men received ‘new jaws for old’. Once ‘cured’, special masks were constructed, such as by war memorial sculptor Derwent Wood at the Third London General Hospital (back cover), who designed the classical nude in the Machine Gun Corps Memorial, Hyde Park, discussed in the next chapter.¹⁹⁹ But masks also covered the failures of reconstruction. Orderly Ward Muir described the post-operative adjustment: ‘surgery has at last washed its hands of him; and in his mirror he is greeted by a gargoyle’. Ward wondered if the patient was married or engaged, or if women could approach him ‘without repugnance’.²⁰⁰ Just as with retouched photographs, it did not seem contradictory that ‘cured’ men had to mask their ‘restorations’. Maxillofacial surgery used clinical photography, x-rays, and older techniques of medical illustration to show surgical procedures and the patient at various stages of recovery. Illustrations overturned some conventions; artists made their interpretative quality more apparent and patients were often named on the drawing, indicating greater awareness of the individual and an intimacy forged ¹⁹⁸ John Thornton, Medical Book Illustration: A Short History (Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1983), 114. ¹⁹⁹ ‘New Jaws for Old: The Sculptor’s Aid in War Surgery’, The Times (17 June 1916), 3. ²⁰⁰ Ward Muir, The Happy Hospital (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1918); see Bamji, ‘Facial Surgery’, 496.

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Reconstructing the Body Fig. 2.7 Daryl Lindsay, Corporal Waldron. Watercolour drawing. Courtesy of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons.

between artist and subject. The personal nature of the negotiation was heightened when the artist had, physically, to touch the patient, as seen in the photograph on the back cover, with Derwent Wood fitting the patient with his hand-crafted and personalized facial mask. In medical illustration, however, the wounded soldier was recognized as a person and yet also an object to be studied.²⁰¹ Faces were significant for communication and intimacy, and fundamental to personhood and individual identity. Such images delivered the message that the individual patient could not be separated from the wound being studied. The use of watercolour allowed for more emotive depictions than conventional lithograph or woodblock prints. Some artists worked from photographs and facial moulds, using their imaginations to depict patients’ expressions. At Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, which housed 1,000 beds for specialized plastic surgery cases from Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, artist Daryl Lindsay depicted over 200 severely wounded Australian soldiers. Corporal W. Waldron (Thirteenth Royal Fusiliers, aged 21) was shot in the face and arm on 5 April 1918. Two weeks after amputation, he was transferred to Sidcup. Although not x-rayed until 28 April, the drawing is dated 27 April (Fig. 2.7), suggesting that before facial treatment Lindsay sketched Waldron at his bedside—surely an extraordinary meeting between one man’s subjective pain and another’s artistry.²⁰² ²⁰¹ Daniel M. Fox and Christopher Lawrence, Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and American Since 1840 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), 54. ²⁰² Case Notes, Corporal W. Waldron, P3/1/183, Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, Melbourne.

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Clinical art was not new, but facial and dental reconstruction was an experimental field requiring input from artists and photographers to document what plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies referred to as his ‘prize cases’.²⁰³ The portraits are clinical but also testify to the surgeon’s professionalism; surgeons often kept photograph albums, which could be understood within historic practices of collecting medical specimens. Dr Albert Norman—‘honorary clinical photographer’ at the King George Military Hospital, London—collated extensive records of plastic surgery patients, which he kept in a private album.²⁰⁴ Generally, though, the authorship of medical photography was anonymous, increasing its objective power as agents of medical authority. By contrast, artists signed medical drawings, revealing their interpretive capacity. Surgeons employed artists to deliver their professional message of ‘restoration’, a term that linked the past, the present, and the future—signalling transition from normal to abnormal to reconstructed. The Ministry of Pensions claimed its principle was ‘not pensions so much as restoration’ and to ‘restore’ men to the full use of their limbs.²⁰⁵ Restoration was political and medical discourse, but it was also underpinned by the complexities of the social desire for healing; to rescue the body from the conditions of the present; and to return visual memory to a safe pre-war past. Restoration discourse contrasted with intimate responses to the ‘harrowing’ cases of men ‘unable to talk, unable to taste, unable to sleep’, as Gillies’ nursing assistant Catherine Black recalled.²⁰⁶ Although mirrors were banned from the wards, men knew they were horribly disfigured. At Sidcup, the wounded felt shunned by the community. Park benches were painted the same ‘hospital blue’ as their uniforms, a segregation aimed at not affronting locals. As Andrew Bamji writes, ‘the stigma of disfigurement was often very difficult to cope with’, and some patients became seriously psychologically distressed, turned to alcohol, or exploded with anger.²⁰⁷ Although restoration discourse attempted to erase individual suffering from public consciousness, the visibly mutilated disrupted this process. In France, the mutilated were incorporated into discourses of heroic sacrifice, leading the victory parades. Why not in Britain and the Empire? Sandy Callister argues that medical photographic evidence—subsequently locked in archives—allowed the memory of mutilation to be contained and forgotten.²⁰⁸ Cultural memory, as Joanna Bourke argues, ‘operates in the service of power. It ²⁰³ Gillies and Millard, The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery, 11. ²⁰⁴ Royal Army Medical Corps Muniment Collection, RAMC 760, Wellcome Collection. ²⁰⁵ John Hodge, Minister of Pensions, Address at Trocadero Restaurant, ‘Better Artificial Limbs: Scheme for Experimental Laboratory’, The Times (14 Sept. 1917), 3. ²⁰⁶ Catherine Black, Gillies and Millard, The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery, 8–9. ²⁰⁷ Bamji, ‘Facial Surgery’, 498. ²⁰⁸ Sandy Callister, ‘Broken Gargoyles’: The Photographic Representation of Severely Wounded New Zealand Soldiers’, Social History of Medicine, 20 (2007), 114.

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not only assails history, demanding that it pays attention to ‘‘who we were there’’, but history also assails memory’.²⁰⁹ The ‘restorative’ attitude amongst surgeons was not simply a device to legitimize surgical specialization; it reflected wider, more complex social attitudes to mass wounding—the recognition of suffering but demand for overcoming, the coexistence in war of traumas, advances, and uneasy pleasures.²¹⁰ Restoration had cultural significance, but it was intrinsically tied to the corporeality of loss and suffering. At the same time, the body resonated with symbolism that not even the annihilation of total war could erase. At times, restoration discourse disguised inadequate surgical outcomes, competing with the pictorial record. Herbert Cole’s drawings of soldiers with primary gunshot wounds to the face were ‘examples of loss of facial tissues’.²¹¹ One of these patients appeared in a series of clinical photographs indicating loss of eye and orbit, cheek rebuilt with skin flaps, and partial rhinoplasty with implants. Despite the obvious and extensive scarring of the ‘restored’ condition, surgeon H. P. Pickerill concluded: ‘the result was quite gratifying’.²¹² Gillies’ book included diagrams of operations accompanied by ‘before and after’ photographs of the wounded which, compared with medical watercolours and drawings, were mercilessly explicit, exposing the hideous nature of war wounds and the appalling appearance of the resulting scar tissue.²¹³ The patient’s skin was the surgeon’s canvas on which he marked the places for skin removal to make pedicles that increased blood supply and tissue growth, especially crucial in burns cases (Fig. 2.8)—although in this case the lengthy operation increased the shock and the skin failed to graft to the chest and face. Gillies reflected: ‘one could have wished that this brave fellow had had a happier death’.²¹⁴ Photographs documented the transition from initial healing to the secondary operations, in which stents and cartilage implants were fixed, to the final result, including prosthetic eyes.²¹⁵ The objective, linear diagrams of surgical procedures mapped onto the body contrasted with ‘after’ photographs—a grim record of the transition from sculpted flesh to human being. Clearly this surgery was lifesaving; however, the focus on surgical outcomes drew attention away from the patient’s experience of pain or his emotional reactions to disfigurement. Military medics instructed them to ‘forget’ they had disfiguring facial wounds, advising that they distance themselves from their appearances—a formidable challenge given the conspicuousness of wounds and the increasing value placed on looks and self-image.²¹⁶ ‘Mass-mutilation’, as ²⁰⁹ Bourke, ‘Remembering War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39 (2004), 484. ²¹⁰ Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). ²¹¹ Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 35. ²¹² H. P. Pickerill, Facial Surgery (New York: William Wood & Co., 1924), 59. ²¹³ Bamji, ‘Facial Surgery’, 490–51. ²¹⁴ Gillies and Millard, The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery, 365. ²¹⁵ Ibid. 72–3. ²¹⁶ An attitude criticized by Jean Camus, in Physical and Occupational Reeducation of the Maimed, trans. W. F. Castle (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1918), 20.

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Fig. 2.8 Burn injury and surgical skin map. Harold D. Gillies, Plastic Surgery of the Face (London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 365. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

Joanna Bourke states, ‘was there for all to see’.²¹⁷ Men knew what they looked like and sensed the horror that others felt towards them. As hospital orderly Ward Muir said: ‘He is aware of just what he looks like: therefore you feel intensely that he is aware you are aware . . . you are afraid to gaze unflinchingly . . . afraid for him.’²¹⁸ Within the widening culture of appearances and mutual looking, photographic records of surgery witnessed the violence and proposed the solution as both technological and artistic. The ‘art of reconstructive surgery’ had a clear impact on visual culture. Propaganda images of failed German surgery, such as a patient with chicken bones for implants, which were structurally weak and infection inducing, aimed to show the sophistication of Allied techniques.²¹⁹ Yet it was a German text on jaw surgery that had first initiated Gillies into plastic work. Tonks described Gillies’ operating theatre as a ‘chamber of horrors’, but he also imagined the patients as classical warriors: ‘One I did the other day of a young fellow with a rather classical face was exactly like a living damaged Greek head as his nose had been cut clean off.’²²⁰ Perhaps this classical projection helped to contain his emotion so he could produce ‘accurate’ records. Despite his concerns about their disturbing nature, ²¹⁷ Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 35. ²¹⁸ Muir, The Happy Hospital, 496. ²¹⁹ Otto Dix, Skin Graft ( Transplantation) from The War (Der Krieg) (1924): etching, aquatint, and drypoint, British Museum, London; see Cork, A Bitter Truth, 276; Pickerill, Facial Surgery, 46. ²²⁰ Letter from Tonks to D. S. MacColl, in Julian Freeman, ‘Professor Tonks: War Artist’, Burlington Magazine, 127 (May 1985), 286.

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he permitted the work to be published in Gillies’ Plastic Surgery of the Face (1920).²²¹ At times distressed by what he witnessed, Tonks turned to his classical education and the ‘permanence’ of Plato for respite from the ‘fleeting world’. He and Gillies agreed that the ‘link between the past and the present should never be lost’.²²² Classicism often informed the views of surgeons and artists. The comfort of Platonic certainty inspired many modernists to reformulate classicism as a visual philosophy to rebuild civilization. After the war, traditionalists, too, looked to classicism, giving it new currency, making it an important force in visual culture. Art had the capacity to heal, and a dialogue between the classical and modern bridged the pre-war impasse. Tonks emphasized ‘mimesis’ in life drawing and copying from the antique— anathema to most modernists. After the war, his mimetic philosophy took a new direction. He began to see visual representation itself as an act of ‘restoration’. Art critic and close friend D. S. MacColl touched upon this alliance in a poetic tribute, describing the artist as a reconstructive surgeon ‘To Henry Tonks, Artist, Surgeon, Caricaturist, and Face Restorer’: And Tonks, his worthy delegate, In Art and Anatomy Twisteth the nose in High Estate But straightens it for Tommy.²²³

Tonks’ philosophy was traditional but also individualist; his students Wyndham Lewis, Stanley Spencer, and Mark Gertler also shaped the cultural memory of the war. Gilles, too, saw himself as an artist, with a medical and social role. He felt a duty to his ‘spectacular successes’ and his ‘patched-up pensioners’, and to make men ‘presentable enough’ to re-enter society as disabled.²²⁴ His book, published after the war, was of great public and political interest not only because it recorded his groundbreaking surgical techniques but also because of a growing interest in beauty, physical perfection, and cosmetic surgery. Indeed, Gillies hoped that his ‘strange new art’ would render the patient not just normal but more beautiful than before. Surgeons and artists idealized the wounded. Working alongside Gillies, sculptor Kathleen Scott (widow of the legendary explorer) said: ‘men without noses are very beautiful, like antique marbles’.²²⁵ The reconstruction surgeon worked ‘with the living flesh as his clay’. Skill with the blade was required, but so, too, aesthetic judgement based on classical ideals of beauty. In his ‘art’ practice, the surgeon must ‘assert his imagination’ and yet ²²¹ Joseph Hone, The Life of Henry Tonks (London and Toronto: Heinemann, 1939), 127; Gillies, Plastic Surgery of the Face (London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton, 1920). ²²² Gillies, Plastic Surgery of the Face, pp. x, 138–91. ²²³ Ibid. 135. ²²⁴ Callister, ‘Broken Gargoyles’, 122. ²²⁵ See Caroline Alexander, ‘Faces of War’, Smithsonian Magazine (Feb. 2007).

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be ‘tempered by the limits of practicality’. Plastic surgery was ‘the attempted achievement of normalcy in appearance and function’—a significant challenge given the numbers of wounded.²²⁶ In Britain alone, 60,500 men were wounded in the head or eyes, and advances in medical technology meant that the mutilated returned to their communities—often in pain—as constant reminders of the war. The severity of mutilations was so unprecedented that nothing could have prepared families and communities for this degree of physical devastation.²²⁷ Confirming this, one soldier wrote to his mother from his hospital ward in France: ‘I can stick anything but [my] depressed fracture of the skull’.²²⁸ Men were conscious not just of their appearance but also the public’s need to be protected from facing the reality of war—a further burden the mutilated carried. Hence men often wore rubber prostheses or painted tin masks. Men lived feeling they were always being watched or that their bodies were medical and public possessions. Wounded men were examined, operated upon, and studied like specimens. Although surgical innovation was inseparable from their healing, it also obscured their suffering. At times, the focus on clinical results and new procedures diminished their humanity. Clinical photographs reveal the slow progress to recovery over months and years for treatments such as the reconstruction of a cheek, which used painful stents to force it to heal symmetrically. It is telling that even Gillies—a surgeon of great humanity—referred to the patients as ‘his bodies’.²²⁹ Although medical literature offered frank disclosures, it almost entirely overlooked patient suffering and the reality of living with disfigurement, emphasizing instead advances in medical and surgical procedures. For instance, the CarrelDakin antiseptic irrigation system, originally used in the Balkans, was reported to be the most efficient system of wound treatment, but this was hotly debated even after the war. Some argued that antiseptic solutions were chemically dangerous, while others saw open wound treatment as the best way to deal with infection.²³⁰ The field ambulance, where wounds were initially dressed with antiseptics, operated a triage system for transferring soldiers to the clearing stations, where they would be treated. When fit to travel, they were sent on to base hospitals to recuperate fully. Surgeons claimed treatments were ‘painless from start to finish, and many limbs and lives [were] saved which would by the older methods have undoubtedly been sacrificed’.²³¹ The system, however, did not always operate smoothly and the wounded endured an ordeal before being treated. ²²⁶ Jerome Pierce Webster, Foreward, Gillies and Millard, The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery, p. ix. ²²⁷ Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 33. ²²⁸ Lance Corporal Harold Chapin, RAMC, 1 June 1915, in Housman, War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, 73. ²²⁹ Gillies, Plastic Surgery of the Face, 63. ²³⁰ William Seaman Bainbridge, ‘United States Naval Medical Bulletin Report on Medical and Surgical Developments of the War’ (Washington, DC: Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Navy Department, 1919), 48. ²³¹ Hughes and Banks, War Surgery, 2.

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Fig. 2.9 Patient with septic amputation; recovered patient; amputee. Basil Hughes and H. Stanley Banks, War Surgery: From Firing Line to Base (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1918), 194–5. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

The standard medico-military discourse emphasizing medical advances and extolling the technological sophistication of contemporary surgery contrasted sharply with the literature and visual culture that showed the destructive capacity of technology in war. Some surgeons seemed unmoved by the disjunction between their words and the dramatic photographic evidence of the degradation of young men in modern war. Images could further dehumanize wounded men. The ‘before’ photograph shows an emaciated patient with a septic amputation, with the ‘after’ photograph demonstrating ‘recovery’ (Fig. 2.9).²³² Yet little is said of the patient’s physical and personal restoration other than mentioning the healed stump and that the patient could use crutches. The priorities of military medicine—patient survival and returning them quickly to the front—affected treatment as well as military and civilian morale. Soldiers and families were assured that the men would be cared for with the best ²³² Hughes and Banks, War Surgery, 194, 195.

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possible modern treatments.²³³ Publicity about hospital work and media stories about individual medical heroes were part of this effort. Surgeons amputated only if the life of the soldier was threatened by infection or haemorrhage, but for a soldier the loss of a limb was a cause of great anxiety and ongoing pain.²³⁴ With heavy irony, poet Edward Thomas wrote: If I could only come back again, I should I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so I should want nothing more.²³⁵

The idea of giving up body parts for the nation until none remained was an irony not lost on wounded men or artists and writers. Surgeons, however, often differed in their approach. Dr R. C. Elmslie said the object of orthopaedic surgery was the ‘restoration to maximum functional utility’ and not the ‘correction of deformity along anatomical lines’.²³⁶ However Dr Forbes Mackenzie said the ‘business of orthopaedic surgeons is to make straight people by combating deformity’.²³⁷ The ‘framework of the human body’ was important for function and appearance, and an integrated or holistic approach to quality of life was not advanced in wartime. Instead, utility was often privileged over beauty. Yet long-term complications and pain were often disregarded as a legacy of war. One soldier with an extensive shoulder wound suffered a permanent ulcer, a severely sloping collar line and lopsided gait, which were permanent physical reminders of his experience (Fig. 2.10).²³⁸ Surgeons deemed the operation successful: the patient had survived without nerve injury. In Britain, orthopaedic and special facial surgery developed rapidly during the war, but many soldiers could not access appropriate support once they returned home. In 202 patient charts of Australians who underwent facial surgery at Sidcup Hospital, some record the patient being sent for discharge to Horseferry Road with a request that they return for adjustment of apparatus and general checking within three months. It is unlikely that Australians could afford to return to Sidcup, or were able to find comparable specialty care once they returned home.²³⁹ Pickerill, however, returned to Dunedin Public Hospital, ²³³ R. C. Elmslie, The After Treatment of Wounds and Injuries (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1919), 1. ²³⁴ A. Mackenzie Forbes, Reconstructive Surgery in Peace: Based on Orthopaedic Surgery in War (Philadelphia, Pa.: Medical Council, 1919), 7. ²³⁵ Edward Thomas, ‘As the Team’s Head-Brass’, in Lehmann, The English Poets of the First World War, 105. ²³⁶ Elmslie, The After Treatment of Wounds and Injuries, 2. ²³⁷ Mackenzie Forbes, Reconstructive Surgery in Peace, 6. ²³⁸ Elmslie, The After Treatment of Wounds and Injuries, 94–5. ²³⁹ Sidcup Collection, P3/1/2–P3/1/199 and three uncatalogued records, Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, Melbourne.

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Fig. 2.10 Shoulder wound and healed shoulder. R. C. Elmslie, The After Treatment of Wounds and Injuries (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1919), 94–5. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

New Zealand, heading a facial and jaw unit, and in 1927 was senior plastic surgeon at Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney. Henry Simpson Newland—head of the Australian Section, Sidcup—returned to Adelaide consulting at the Repatriation General Hospital; however, much of his work was taken up in general public surgery. Physical rehabilitation was available to some soldiers, but there were long waiting lists for artificial limbs.²⁴⁰ The numbers of physical and occupational therapists in Britain and the United States gradually increased; however, some veterans felt the focus on vocational re-skilling ignored their painful convalescence.²⁴¹ Some surgeons were sympathetic to the plight of patients but generally agreed with the military that self-pity should be discouraged. Governments, too, ²⁴⁰ Bourke, ‘The Battle of the Limbs: Amputation, Artificial Limbs and the Great War in Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 29 (1998), 52–3. ²⁴¹ Roger Cooter, Surgery and Society in Peace and War: Orthopaedics and the Organization of Modern Medicine, 1880–1948 (London: Macmillan, 1993); De Witt Law, Soldiers of the D. A. V.: A History of Disabled War Veterans and the American Pension System (Pasadena, Calif.: 1929).

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promoted healing as self-motivated. Without adequate post-operative treatment and continued rehabilitation, ‘good recovery’ indicated the patient had survived but said little about his quality of life or ongoing complications, such as chronic osteomyelitis and pain. In the rehabilitation magazine Reveille Captain Q. S. Spedding described the life of the war-disabled as ‘A War that is Without End’.²⁴² While absent from war memorials, representations of the wounded were a common trope of medical propaganda, media images, war literature, and visual art, such as Jacob Epstein’s drawing of a soldier with a head wound.²⁴³ Epstein completed a series of studies of soldiers while recovering in a Plymouth hospital from what he called a ‘severe mental crisis’, brought about by the war.²⁴⁴ After the war, military surgeons used what they had learned to develop plastic surgery as a specialty. It was applied to victims of motor and industrial accidents, but also for cosmetic purposes—breast, eye, and neck lifts, dental prosthetics, and rhinoplasty. With professional confidence, Pickerill stated: ‘there are very few—if any—cases now which, however extensive, would be regarded as beyond restoration’.²⁴⁵ Noted surgeon Colonel Sir Arbuthnot Lane—Commander at Aldershot Military Hospital—said that the lessons learned from military surgery were ‘directly applicable to the relief of disfigurements met within civil life’. He recognized the potential for cosmetic work, noting that ‘ugly scars’, ‘deformities’, and ‘protrusions’ not only caused ‘distress and anguish but materially lower the market value of the individual’.²⁴⁶ War surgeons recognized that the human body was now a consumer item, a factor in marriage and employment. Modern bodies had to display and market their appearances, like mannequins in shop windows.²⁴⁷ After the war, Sir Harold Gillies opened a cosmetic surgery clinic in London, servicing accident victims, society ladies, and film stars. From what Gillies described as the ‘grotesque procession’ of the war-wounded to the spectacle of post-war beauty, plastic surgery reconstructed bodies, merging the classical imaginary with modern techniques of normalizing and perfecting.²⁴⁸ In the 1920s, the marketing strategies of cosmetic surgery and beauty culture drew upon classicism and the visual culture of the war. While soldiers wore tin masks to cover the failures of reconstruction, beauty companies like Elizabeth Arden advertised beauty masks for women. One of their campaigns, designed by leading fashion photographer, Baron Adolf de Meyer, showed women’s heads swathed in gauze bandages, a clear reference to wartime reconstructive ²⁴² See Bourke, ‘Battle of the Limbs’, 58; Reveille (1 Jan. 1933). ²⁴³ Jacob Epstein, Wounded Soldier (1918): graphite on white wove paper; see Cork, A Bitter Truth, 245. ²⁴⁴ See ibid. 244. ²⁴⁵ Pickerill, Facial Surgery, p. viii. ²⁴⁶ Gillies, Plastic Surgery of the Face, p. vii (my emphasis). ²⁴⁷ Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004). ²⁴⁸ Gillies, in Bamji, ‘Facial Surgery’, 495.

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surgery. Rather than treating wounds, beauty ‘therapists’ cleansed and refined the appearance with topical treatments.²⁴⁹ While classical beauty aimed to offer what Elaine Scarry calls a ‘life-saving reciprocity’, bodies—and relationships between interiority and exteriority—had been broken by war, some irreparably despite the compensating narrative of heroic wounds and fetishized war imagery that de-politicized the body in pain.²⁵⁰ The pleasure culture of war, consumerist body aesthetics, and the political and medical culture of overcoming, occurred at the same time that mass wounding became apparent in Anglophone societies; families and individuals negotiated their suffering in this climate.²⁵¹ Artistry, an influential concept with surgeons and beauticians, invoked the transcendence of the sublime—a fantasy of healing. Yet nothing could be taken at face value, as though ‘in plain sight’. While consumerism highlighted spectacle, the boundaries between reality and representation—between the subject and object—between looking and being looked at—were collapsing under the weight of war’s visual affects.²⁵² Beauty and body culture turned classicism into a ‘normalizing aesthetic’ and a goal of perfection that contradicted the lives of most disabled people returning from war. Yet, with the idealism of surgeons like Gillies and disabled artists like Napier Waller, ‘restoration’ was not simply a device to legitimate surgical specializations: it also reflected the profound and complex intertwining of personal and cultural responses to wounding.

C O N C LU S I O N In visual culture, the violated body was pervasive after the war, coexisting uneasily with peace discourse; the social interest in overcoming suffering; and cultural developments in classical aesthetics. The images were not only potent memory triggers but became the dominant mode of remembering. War art, film, and literature created visual languages of physical suffering that permeated the ‘cultural memory’ of the war. Current trauma discourse has often been universally and collectively assigned to experiences of people in the First World War. With caution, this chapter found that it has some uses in illuminating the context in which painful narratives and images resonated from the individual ²⁴⁹ Haiken, Venus Envy. ²⁵⁰ Eric Santner, ‘History Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma’, in Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 144; Elizabeth Dauphineé, ‘The Politics of the Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery’, Security Dialogue, 38 (2007), 139–55. ²⁵¹ Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 402. ²⁵² Lilliane Weissberg, ‘In Plain Sight’, in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (eds), The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 397.

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to society through cultural forms. Yet it does not account for the pleasure culture of war and the curiosity around the wounded body. The ‘culture shock’ of modern warfare visualized violence and suffering, and this was part of the search for meaning. Audiences found visual culture informative, comforting, and entertaining, even if the authenticity of images was uncertain. Medical professionals contributed to visual culture through texts, photographic records, and media stories about the expertise acquired treating severe war injuries, complementing other ‘truth-telling’ texts that frankly discussed the brutalization of the human body. These different sources informed professionals, families, and communities. At the same time, they gave injured bodies a symbolic voice, although only as subjects of observation, treatment, and representation. Pain and suffering were part of a spectacle that sustained the power of visual memory through the production of culture. Classical beauty was proffered as a ‘healing aesthetic’ to the scars of war. Andreas Huyssen contrasts the post-Holocaust ‘culture of memory’—which emphasized witnessing to avoid forgetting—with that of the interwar years, which promoted an active culture of amnesia.²⁵³ My aim is to query the polarization between remembering and forgetting by examining the conflicting visual memories inspired by modernism and classicism. If ‘traumatic’ images of war are aligned with its pleasure culture, how are cultural memory and amnesia implicated? Did classicism—as language of mourning and agent of reconstruction—attempt to heal or institutionalize forgetting, especially of the war-wrecked body? ²⁵³ Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Culture of Memory’, unpublished paper, Trauma and Memory: Cross-Cultural Perspectives Conference, 23 May 1998, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

3 Monumental Classicism: Healing the Western Body Fix your eyes every day on the greatness of Athens as she really is, and . . . become her lover. Perikles’ Funeral Oration: Thucydides. The body is the only access we have to the past, but it is impossible to reach back without reaching within, by way of our own bodies. The bodies of Greece and Rome are in us. James I. Porter, 1999.¹

When the disabled artist Philip Carey—the central character in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915)—hears news his friend has died in the Boer War, he is immediately drawn to the British Museum. Sitting alone in a room full of Athenian funeral stelae (gravestones), he senses ‘the exquisite spirit of Athens’. Two male nudes carved into an intimate scene of departure elicited serene beauty even in death: On all was the tragic word farewell; that and nothing more. Their simplicity was infinitely touching. Friend parted from friend, the son from his mother, and the restraint made the survivor’s grief even more poignant. It was so long, long ago, and century upon century had passed over that unhappiness; for two thousand years those who wept had been dust as those they wept for.²

As an artist, Philip comprehends the disjunction between the ugliness of war and the beautiful marbles. Published in 1915, when the heroic striving of brave warriors was the language of the day, Maugham’s novel imbued the disabled civilian with the sensitivity to interpret the brutal world around him. The ¹ History of the Peloponnesian War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 149. I translate this differently from Penguin’s ‘fall in love with her’, taking into account gignomai (‘process of becoming’) and erastes (‘lover’). Perikles is speaking to the assembled Athenian locals, women, and foreigners; however, ‘lover’ applies to Athens the homoerotic meaning of the passive, feminized partner. This was poignant for warriors and their sexual rites of passage from youth to manhood. I am grateful to Polly Low for this discussion. Porter, Constructions of the Classical Body (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1999). ² W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (New York: Random House, 1999), 524.

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controlled emotion of the classical aesthetic calms the urgency of his grief. Philip is particularly stirred by a tender bas-relief of two men holding hands: its aesthetic simplicity and ‘reticence of line’ are an inspiring memorial to friendship. Historically, Maugham could not yet identify as ‘homosexual’; however, in the novel Philip feels ‘queer’ to have been ‘so intimate’ with Hayward, pondering their ‘separation’ and his ‘futile death’. Maugham had seen men suffering while serving in the Ambulance Corps, but he also found beauty in his young lover, Gerald Haxton. The novel closes with Philip philosophizing about joy and pain, exiting the Museum in a state of emotional uplift: ‘Philip was happy’. Maugham channels a universal history of grief through the material culture of the classical, revealing the redemptive capacity of idealized human forms. Despair is transformed and horror tempered, as the historical narrative of the distant past is woven into the present. Maugham was prophetic; during and after the First World War classical ideals informed the arts, medicine, humanities, and commemoration. Two thousand years of war-induced grief connect the past and present; beauty carved into sombre stones materialized humanity’s capacity for recovery. At the time that Maugham was writing, Sir Frederic Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, walked around its rooms, also drawing inspiration for his 1917 report to the Imperial War Graves Commission on a uniform and appropriate way to commemorate the war dead across the culturally diverse Empire. Kenyon’s study of Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians grasped the significance of the Athenians’ monuments to the war dead, and realized that the Classical tradition could speak to all who mourned.³ Why did the classical tradition appeal to the public, artists, and committees engaged in commemoration aesthetics? Was it merely the continuation of nineteenth-century tradition or did it have other meanings peculiar to this war? This chapter explores how classical motifs transformed the violent experiences and visual memories of war, establishing historical continuity and offering an alternative, modern vision. Commemorative architecture connected with reconstruction discourses through the reinterpretation of classical ideals and the elevation of the body. The classical paradigm envisioned the past, but also promised utopia with wholeness and beauty as antidotes to human suffering. Commemorating a war that killed and maimed so many citizens demanded more than just traditions steeped in class privilege, or hollow notions of grand, heroic victory. Memorials had profound social and emotional functions. But they also had to have a degree of universality in order to reconcile competing political, national, community, and individual interests. How could classical memorial architecture claim to represent all humanity? What was classicism’s influence on the rhetorics of healing, democracy, and unity in the context of ³ I am grateful to Graeme Oliver for this discussion. See P. Low, G. J. Oliver, and P. J. Rhodes (eds), Cultures of Commemoration: War Memorials, Ancient and Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy, 2009).

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imperial and international politics? Why was it necessary to present a collective vision of the citizen body in western democracy? Were racial minorities, colonial, and ethnic communities included in the representation? Did British officials think that classical monumentalism could democratize the grand symbols of war and Empire? If the ordinary soldier was the symbol of a cohesive citizenry, how was bodily specificity avoided? Classical war memorials crafted beautiful and white human forms, without injury, class, or race. Transcending racial diversity and weaving bodies together as one, classicism evoked a shared humanity and a universal vision of peace through respect for the dead. In Britain, Kenyon’s report to the Imperial War Graves Commission stressed the importance of an aesthetic that would supersede class, rank, and race while respecting religious differences and cultural burial rites, especially in regard to Indian soldiers.⁴ Order and uniformity would be imposed on the chaos of the often-unidentifiable war dead. Classical graves, with their simplicity and historicity, refocused the attention of survivors and families allowing them to transcend their grief, promoting personal, and community healing, acknowledging the citizenship of the dead. This chapter explores how ‘monumental classicism’ created an alternative architectural body, responding to the pervasive image of the war-wrecked body. The classical corporeality of memorial architecture freed the visual memory of dismembered flesh, reshaping it with familiar aesthetics, and providing an image of the western body as restored, beautiful, and everlasting. The classical body informed western identity, celebrating the beauty of muscularity as the exemplar of unity and wholeness. Commemorative architecture, with the healing aesthetic of classicism, was a commanding declaration of historical continuity, reorienting the memory of war away from violence and physical damage towards peace and community cohesion. Monumental classicism offered an antidote to the dominant narratives of suffering prevalent in contemporary literature and film. It demonstrated the renewal of the ‘Greek spirit’ and promoted the ideals of world peace and human empathy reflected in the democratic and internationalist ethos of the League of Nations. Publicly promoting the League of Nations’ charter, classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson wondered: ‘Can the Greek spirit, rising again more splendid and more potent than before, accomplish the salvation of mankind, in the greatest crisis with which it has yet been confronted? For remember, [it] exists only when we breathe into [it] the life of our own age.’⁵ Dickinson, a pacifist and intellectual among many who supported the League, imagined conversations ⁴ Frederic Kenyon, ‘War Graves: How the Cemeteries Abroad will be Designed’, Report to the Imperial War Graves Commission, London, 1918, 11. ⁵ G. Lowes Dickinson, The Contribution of Ancient Greece to Modern Life (London: Allen and Unwin, 1932), 32 (inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge University).


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between Plato and modern men, optimistic that a new polity could arise from the ashes of war.⁶ Popular political literature disseminated the idea that classical ideals could heal societies. Seamus Burke, an Irish advocate of international peace, said that the ‘universal cataclysm’ was ‘a powerful stimulus to the votaries of the cultus [sic] of perpetual peace’. Human beings were ‘exhausted’ from ‘years of horrors and tortures’. War was a ‘malignant social disease’, and peace was a ‘natural’ reaction.⁷ Although at times critical of the League, Burke nevertheless advocated cooperation among nations for the collective good. Peacetime meant moving on from the turmoil of the war years, but this had to be handled sensitively. Bristol’s Alderman Lyne included surviving families in their memorial’s inscription, but also incorporated the rhetoric of the day: ‘They Died That Mankind May Learn To Live In Peace’. Alongside peace, sentiments around democracy and freedom were important, such as in the ‘Memorial Arch’ at Leicester: ‘Remember in gratitude twelve thousand men . . . who fought and died for freedom’.⁸ Democracy and freedom were regarded as the pinnacle of western values of civilization, which had particular significance in a global war between empires, and continued to be politically mobilized afterwards. Reflecting on the sacred ground of Imperial War Graves on the Western Front, King George V explained: ‘The existence of these visible memorials will, eventually, serve to draw all peoples together in sanity and self-control, even as it has already set the relations between our Empire and our allies on the deep-rooted bases of a common heroism and a common agony.’⁹ Memorials and cemeteries for the war dead were reminders of shared bonds and that the Empire and its allies must maintain the peace. Hence, Britain was positioned as the rational leader of international diplomacy. The classicist and League of Nations enthusiast Lowes Dickinson argued that Britain—the moral victor of ‘Liberty and Right’—must lead the way in safeguarding democracy: ‘And of the temple we have to build, trust is the cornerstone.’¹⁰ Memorials were meant to reinforce the ideal of civilized peace but critics such as Walter Benjamin said that ‘no amount of ceremonial gilding . . . would efface ⁶ Id., War: Its Nature, Cause and Cure (New York: Macmillan, 1923; id., The International Anarchy, 1904–1914 London: Allen and Unwin, 1926); id., The Future of the Covenant (London: League of Nations Union, 1920); id., After Two Thousand Years: A Dialogue Between Plato and a Modern Young Man (London: Allen and Unwin, 1930). ⁷ Seamus Burke, The Foundations of Peace (Dublin and London: Maunsel and Co., 1920), 1; J. A. Hobson, ‘Vainglory and Credulity’, The Problems of the New World (London: Allen and Unwin, 1921), 227. ⁸ D. Boorman, At the Going Down of the Sun: British First World War Memorials (York: Ebor Press, 1988), 152. ⁹ King George V, May 1922, in Shrine of Remembrance: An Everlasting Tribute from the People of Victoria to the Glory of Achievement and the Nobility of Sacrifice (Melbourne: Colarts Studios, 1929–34), 38. ¹⁰ Dickinson, The Choice Before Us (London: Allen and Unwin, 1917), 262, 267, 269.

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the grim fate of the victims of even the most famous victory’.¹¹ War cemeteries with classical memorials vindicated the historical continuity of democracy with a mythic representation of human equality. Although the Imperial War Graves Commission aimed not ‘to perpetuate any international ill will’, and the Bishop of Arras reminded them that ‘in the sight of God the dead of Germany were the equals of the dead of France’, German experiences were marginalized by the focus on the peace negotiations and the debates about appropriate commemoration.¹² Gestures to universal humanity could be tainted by the desire for revenge and restitution embedded in national self-righteousness. In commemorative practices and reflection upon the meaning of war, some universal humanists also remained patriots. Amongst many peace advocates, imperialist patronage merged with patriotic humanism.¹³ Over the protests of the Left, some political commentators reconciled the sentiments of British good will, tolerance, and diplomacy with the burdens of war guilt and reparations placed upon the German people.¹⁴ The moral victory of the Allies had been proven, it seemed. Still, the ideal of international peace was a powerful belief. Drawing on the accessible language of the western tradition, universalism erased the differences seen as the cause of the conflict in the first place. Fabian Ware—who began recording graves and pressured the War Office to establish a Graves Registration Commission, becoming Vice Chairman in 1915—believed that: ‘old hatreds . . . have been merged in a common pity and a common recognition of heroism, until at the last the Commission have been able to unite France, Germany and the British Commonwealth in an organized movement of common remembrance of the dead of the Great War.’¹⁵ The ideal of international peace through common remembrance, symbolized in the classical aesthetics of democracy, embedded civic mourning in the spirit of reconstruction. International peace discourse took many forms, but its classical humanist underpinnings were widely shared. Gilbert Murray—the Oxford University Classics Professor and world statesman—founded the educational wing of the League of Nations to promote internationalist thinking. He stressed humanity’s ‘power of recovery’, using classical stories to emphasize Europeans’ common ¹¹ Martin Jay, ‘Against Consolation: Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn’, in Jay M. Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 232. ¹² Fabian Ware, The Immortal Heritage: An Account of the Work and Policy of the Imperial War Graves Commission during the Twenty Years 1917–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 38. ¹³ Burke, The Foundations of Peace, 160, 171; J. H. Nicholson, The Remaking of the Nations (London: Kegan Paul, 1925). ¹⁴ David Lloyd George, The Truth about Reparations and War-Debts (London: Heinemann, 1932), 138. ¹⁵ Ware, The Immortal Heritage, 39.


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heritage rather than focus on national differences.¹⁶ In 1922, he established the International Museums Office to promote the idea of western cultural longevity. Many such individuals encouraged the humanist turn after the war, visualizing peace and renewal through cultural enterprise and remembrance. The dialogue between classicism and modernism in war monuments is pivotal when considering the impact of war, but so also are the complexities of recovery and social cohesion. Memorials could generate intense debate and analysis, at the national and local levels, in the emotionally and politically charged post-war period. Donations often came from women who had lost partners and sons in the war. Women had played a range of roles in wartime—as patriots, war workers, and peace advocates—and wanted their sacrifices recognized. They called for the construction of permanent markers for the purposes of personal and cultural healing. Yet mourners could be vulnerable to indifference, censure, and political exploitation. Colonial troops and disabled mourners, however, were often absent from ceremonies and representations, and left out of the ‘cultural memory’ of the war. Scholars have seen memorials as a cathartic response to the ‘festering sore’ of national memory and as a strategy of forgetting, sanitizing death while marking out the space for its commemoration.¹⁷ By examining the use of classicism in memorial architecture, understanding the complexities of the social and political responses to the war, this chapter looks beyond the ‘modernist/traditionalist divide’, bringing embodiment to the personal and political aspect of cultural memory.¹⁸ Classical memorials—figurative and non-figurative—provided symbolic bodies to replace the ‘many absent, fragmented corpses’ still being exhumed from battlefields. They shaped private memories and created public myths, avoiding references to ‘physical and social fragmentation’.¹⁹ Masses of names on classical monuments elevated the dead into heroic figures. This chapter asks: could classical beauty and wholeness redeem the violence? Did local and international politics determine the ‘aesthetics of healing’ or was classicism underpinned by a deep need to cleanse the physical violence of war from cultural memory? ¹⁶ Gilbert Murray, The Ordeal of this Generation: The War, the League and the Future (London: Allen and Unwin, 1928), 224–5, 234–6 (Halley Stewart Lectures). ¹⁷ Marilene Henry Patten, Monumental Accusations: The Monuments Aux Morts as Expressions of Popular Resentment (New York: Lang, 1996), 81; Michael Ignatieff, ‘Soviet War Memorials’, History Workshop Journal, 17 (1984), 157–63; Maurice Agulhon, ‘Politics, Images and Symbols in Postrevolutionary France’, in Sean Walentz (ed.), Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 177–205; Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Culture of Memory’, unpublished paper, Trauma and Memory: Cross-Cultural Perspectives Conference, 23 May 1998, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. ¹⁸ Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5. ¹⁹ Catherine Moriarty, ‘The Absent Dead and Figurative First World War Memorials’, Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, 39 (1995), 37.

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E M OT I O N S A N D S E N S E S , S PAC E S A N D F O R M S The central function of funerals, cemeteries, memorials, monuments, and pilgrimages is to enable mourners to revisit the lives of their loved ones, to acknowledge loss, and to pay respect. Mourners use memorials as spaces for ritual exchanges, offering flowers and mementoes to the dead.²⁰ In contrast to the violent narratives of film, art, and literature, war memorials rarely focused upon death or mutilation. Nevertheless, they are part of the same responsive continuum and ‘must be seen not only as projects with a life-history of their own, but also as outcomes of earlier projects, of earlier and ongoing efforts to tell the story of the war and its victims’.²¹ Just as people read war literature to commune with the dead, memorials established reciprocity between bereaved individuals, and mourning communities. To meet the emotional needs of survivors and families who have suffered loss, memorials intertwine death and life, emphasizing the nobility of the cause and the worthiness of the sacrifice rather than the details of death in combat. War memorials were also informed by the politics of remembering and the objectives of reconstruction.²² Governments counted on public mourning rituals to appease post-war societies. Although the meaning of memorials and the interpretation of war changes over time, they are part of a ‘political world of images’ and can, therefore, become both ‘sites of mourning’ and ‘sites of conflict’.²³ The expense of memorials, for instance, rankled with those unable to find work after the war. As one soldier wrote to the local Bolton newspaper, ‘Now that we have a roll of ‘‘glorious Dead’’, I suggest a roll of our Glorious but Forgotten Living, who are unemployed’. Reciting a popular expression, he said: ‘Our plight recalled our old saying ‘‘If we have won, God help the poor devils that lost’’.’²⁴ In Manchester, locals complained of ‘hypocrisy’; soldiers were ‘robbed of their pensions’, their ‘dependants are starving’, ‘and you want to erect a Cenotaph?’ Another ‘starving citizen and ex-serviceman’ railed against the extravagance of monuments to the dead, given the ‘thousands more that are almost joining them through starvation and awful privations’.²⁵ For some Mancunians, wasting ²⁰ Winter and Sivan, ‘Setting the Framework’, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, 38. ²¹ Winter, ‘Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War’, ibid. 54. ²² Notable exceptions include: Battle of Marne Memorial by Gilbert Ledward; the First Battle of Ypres Memorial by C. S. Jagger; Blackburn Memorial; Bolton Memorial (1928); in Verdun, the 69th Division Memorial, known as Le Mort Homme, by J. Froment-Meurice; Troyon Memorial; Carces by Gourdon. ²³ Reinhart Kosselleck, ‘War Memorials: Identity Formations of the Survivors’, in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Kerstin Behnke and Todd Samuel Presner (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press), 2002, 287, 289, 293, 310; Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. ²⁴ In B. Darlington, ‘Soldiers, Saints and the Female Form: Five North West Memorials of the First World War in the National Context’, unpub. BA thesis, University of Manchester, 2006, 16. ²⁵ Manchester Evening News (16 May 1923); ibid. (17 Feb. 1923).


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Fig. 3.1 Edwin Lutyens Cenotaph and Stone of Remembrance, Manchester. Courtesy UK National Inventory of War Memorials (left); Photograph by Lee Hamer (right).

money on ‘dead stone’ exposed the Council riding ‘roughshod’ over its citizens.²⁶ Given the high unemployment in the industrial North of England, locals felt betrayed when London labourers were given jobs that the Mayor had promised to the community. Yet, after the unveiling in 1924, this conflict and socio-economic need was erased from public view; Manchester Cenotaph (Fig. 3.1) was hailed for its ‘simplicity of forms and rhythmic beauty of proportion’ in the Grecian style.²⁷ Classical monuments framed war and peace as a unity, continuous throughout western history. Although executed with a range of traditional and innovative approaches, they projected the experience of modern warfare as both unremitting and uniquely tragic.²⁸ In contrast to the cathartic effect of war art, film, and literature—with its ‘apocalyptic imagination’—classical memorials aimed to provide a cultural antidote to the ‘traumatic narrative’ of the war.²⁹ Classical beauty and simplicity distanced mourners from the violence and bloodshed. That distancing enabled a pleasure culture around war memorials too. ²⁶ Manchester City News (17 Feb. 1923). ²⁷ Ibid. 5 July 1924. ²⁸ Alan Borg, War Memorials from Antiquity to the Present (London: Leo Cooper, 1991), 15. ²⁹ Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 233.

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Samuel Hynes argues that while literature encourages identification with characters and their experiences—visualizing and empathizing with them—official ‘sites of mourning’ leave us empty, unable to fill in the details from our own experience.³⁰ Did war cemeteries and memorials turn the painful war experiences into entertainment? Pilgrimages and battlefield tourism, although popular, received mixed responses. In the United States, advertisements for thirty-day tours in the American Legion Annual encouraged soldiers to ‘go back to France and visit the place and scenes of ’17, ’18, ’19’. Far from traumatic, it was pitched as a ‘never-before’ opportunity for ‘all ex-serviceman’, but also for those who ‘didn’t get over there’.³¹ In Britain, however, mourners often resented the morbid consumerism and ‘the inanities of trippers’.³² As with war literature, art exhibitions, and cinema, while some audiences searched for memory triggers and to make sense of the war, others found ‘pleasure’ in the cultural activities the war produced. Responses to these landscapes, nevertheless, changed over time—especially for those who had learned about it later. As a child, J. C. Waters was schooled in compelling tales of warriors’ deeds in battle: war was a romantic adventure. In the 1930s, however, and now an adult, he toured the Western Front, finding that: ‘Now, for the first time, I (a boy in the war years) can conceive the heart-rending torture of war.’³³ The countless monuments to the dead and missing moved him, prompting his exhortation never to forget the horror. The cemeteries and memorials of the First World War carved out ‘emotional spaces’, provoking profound responses even for those who had not been involved.³⁴ This suggests that by the 1930s the ‘traumatic’ and ‘pleasure’ cultures of war were working in tandem. Battlefield tourism facilitated vicarious experiences. Iconographic symbols may lose their precise resonance over time and, paradoxically, permanent memorials ‘testify to transitoriness’, even though they try to create an impression of wholeness and restoration.³⁵ Although familiar symbols of remembrance—classical, romantic, pastoral, and medieval—mediated bereavement, they were traditions reinvented by modernity.³⁶ In Germany and Britain, as well as in France and Italy, modern classicism competed with medieval modernism, German expressionism, Catholic romanticism, and ³⁰ Samuel Hynes, ‘Personal Narratives and Commemoration’, in Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, 206. ³¹ United States Lines, ‘30-Day Tours to France—All Expenses Paid—$275—Third Class Cabins—Excellent Food and Service’, American Legion Annual, Official History of the American Legion (5th anniversary edn., New York: American Legion, 1919–24), 66. ³² David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1998), 42. ³³ J. C. Waters, Crosses of Sacrifice: The Story of the Empire’s Million War Dead and Australia’s 60,000 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1932), 9 (my emphasis). ³⁴ Juhani Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (London: Academy Editions, 1996), 44–5. ³⁵ Kosselleck, ‘War Memorials: Identity Formations of the Survivors’, 288. ³⁶ Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 5.


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Celtic forms of commemorative architecture to express historical continuity.³⁷ However, these ‘revivals’ were not purely mimetic. The historical continuity of classical memorials created an iconography that was clearly of its own time—a ‘reinterpretation of a living tradition, not the sterile reproduction of outmoded forms’.³⁸ In the process of creating a new ‘tradition’ it gave new meanings to death, mourning, and recovery. The building of war memorials involved a range of personal, social, political, and aesthetic interests. The ‘sociology’ of art positions artistic practice as the mediator of aesthetic codes and facilitator of cultural expression.³⁹ Sculptors and designers were selected by public competitions or through their professional reputations. They had to negotiate the delicate relationships between families, veterans, and widows’ groups, as well as the interests of the military, governments, religious leaders, and local politicians. Memorials were embedded in the modern, the political, and the communal but they also provided sensorial spaces where painful experiences were narrated, interpreted, and shared. Scholars have noted that ‘ocularcentrism’—the privileging of vision—from Greek thought and reason has sustained western paradigms of knowledge to the present day.⁴⁰ In war memorials, the visual plays a complex role, for it is inextricably bound up with the sensory and emotional nature of commemorative spaces. The memorial is visual and spatial, sensory, and embodied, especially in the mass and weight of the monuments. Architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa argues that buildings are a ‘communication from the body of the architect directly to the body of the person who encounters the work’.⁴¹ The heightened awareness of death and loss created embodied symbolism and sensorial experience for visitors to war monuments. This could be transformative, connecting individual sorrow to communal loss through cultural expression. Some memorials deliberately aimed to create spaces in which emotions could be freely expressed and yet also contained within the commemorative ritual. The unveiling of the Burnley cenotaph (1926) indicates that the mourning rituals responded to the sensorial capacity of the structure, in order: to express the emotion felt in the human heart at the ideals of those who have fallen in the Great War. The mother overwhelmed in this emotion, places a wreath in the memory of her son at the foot of the cenotaph, and as she stoops, the cenotaph shapes itself in her heart into the features of her son.⁴² ³⁷ Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War and Remembrance in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). ³⁸ Borg, War Memorials from Antiquity to the Present, 15. ³⁹ Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (2nd edn, New York: New York University Press, 1993), 137, 139. ⁴⁰ David Levin, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994). ⁴¹ Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin, 46. ⁴² In Moriarty, ‘The Absent Dead and Figurative First World War Memorials’, 19.

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The empty tomb provided a new body for the mother to remember. The memorial acts as a powerful agent of corporeal reconstruction instructing how mothers might create private memories out of individual relationships, and codifying emotional responses. The public display of emotion by the mothers of the war dead could be directed, narrativizing and naturalizing death in war and thus containing the extremities of grief in ritualized spaces. This cenotaph literally reconstructed the dead, embodying them through the abstract structure, which ascends to form the bodies of three male figures: soldier, airman, and sailor. The male figures are godlike, in contrast with the figurative bronze mother and wife (or sister) situated beneath. The classical symbolism of post-war memorial architecture immortalized the dead and reminded people of the heroic achievements of ordinary men. The classical vocabulary implied the continuity of western civilization, human progress, and perpetuity. Its most important function was the construction of an inviolable alternative body—noble, ideal, and spiritual—but most of all corporeal. Fabian Ware, who had worked in a Red Cross mobile unit on the Western Front, gave the Imperial War Gravestones human attributes; they were not just ‘a massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war’, but also ‘the greatest advocates of peace on earth’; a discourse increasingly absorbed by visitors to these hallowed sites.⁴³ Yet it also implied that each named grave contained an identified body; it was a mistaken belief of mourners that their loved one’s remains were sheltered under the battleground. Classical stelae were private headstones and symbolic bodies, whereas public monuments served as replacement bodies for all within the civic environment. Classicism in cemeteries and memorials aimed to transfer the site of ‘traumatic memory’ from bloody battlefield to pristine panorama, from painful place to soothing space. The memory of war could be pacified, and emotions transformed. Pierre Nora speaks of Lieux de mémoire signifying ‘sites of memory’, the material or ideal entities that possess symbolic meaning for a given community, constituting national identity through sacred rites and rituals, which perform common acts of remembrance and create a collective past.⁴⁴ In addition to responding to nationalist agendas, classicism aimed to promote universal peace. It could accommodate a range of political ideals: humanitarianism; world harmony; Internationalism; and the principle of cooperative transnationalism within the League of Nations. While symbolic of historical continuum, classical memorials had to be relevant and universally accessible. Reconstruction practices and policies had to deal with the destructive consequences of modern technology, acknowledging the burden of suffering. Mounting social and political tensions and economic instability demanded ⁴³ Ware, The Immortal Heritage, 23. ⁴⁴ Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, i Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).


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an honest and honourable response. Emotions ran high in urban areas in the interwar period, with veterans and workers agitating for social justice and a decent living wage. Although a police presence at Armistice Day ceremonies maintained order, strikers, some of whom were veterans, still used memorials as meeting places, turning them into places in which class conflicts were played out, as well as sites of mourning and healing.⁴⁵ During the war the commemoration of the dead with architectural memorials gained momentum. The Imperial War Graves Commission was established in May 1917 and, following his visits to France and Belgium, Kenyon suggested that young architects who had served in the war be used, mentored by established architects. Kenyon and the Imperial War Graves Commission believed that such architects would be suitably empathetic and be acceptable to mourning families because they shared in the communal experience of suffering and recuperation.⁴⁶ In one instance, a combatant artist complained bitterly about a non-combatant artist receiving a major public commission. C. E. W. Bean’s papers noted Wallace Anderson’s complaint that Rayner Hoff was awarded the Anzac Memorial commission when he had not been a soldier.⁴⁷ The principal architects were Sir Edwin Lutyens (designer of the Cenotaph and the Stone of Remembrance); Sir Reginald Blomfield (designer of the Cross of Sacrifice and Menin Gate); Sir Herbert Baker; and Charles Holden. Sir Robert Lorimar was in charge of cemeteries in Egypt, Italy, Greece, Germany, and the United Kingdom, while Sir John Burnet was in charge of the sites commissioned for Gallipoli, Palestine, and Syria. Major Edward Warren oversaw those in Iraq. In Australia, Philip B. Hudson and James H. Wardrop were selected to build the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance and Bruce Dellit the Anzac Memorial in Sydney. It is significant that the Committee selected these architects because they were soldiers. Architects, in collaboration with sculptors, students, and assistants, devised uniform styles for the Imperial War Graves Commission’s headstones and cemeteries, described as ‘stripped classicism’ because of its minimal decoration.⁴⁸ Their uniformity offered an image of democratic egalitarianism, a solution to the challenge of cultural diversity in Europe, Britain, and the United States. ⁴⁵ Alex King, ‘Remembering and Forgetting in the Public Memorials of the Great War’, in Adrian Forty and Susanne Kuchler (eds), The Art of Forgetting (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1999), 164; Nick Mansfield, ‘Class Conflict and Village War Memorials, 1914–1924’, Rural History, 6 (1995), 67–87. ⁴⁶ Kai Erikson, ‘Notes on Trauma and Community’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, Md. and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). ⁴⁷ Bean to Treloar, 22 Nov. 1926, AWM 38, File No 325, Wallace Anderson. Treloar was the Director of the Australian War Memorial. ⁴⁸ Inglis, ‘Monuments in the Modern City: The War Memorials of Melbourne and Sydney’, in J. Lack (ed.), Anzac Remembered: Selected Writings of K. S. Inglis (Melbourne, 1988), 189; Gavin Stamp, ‘Silent Cities, an Exhibition of the Memorial and Cemetery Architecture of the Great War’ (London: Royal Institute of British Architects, 1977), 11.

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Greek funereal stelae, Art Deco, and the International Style inspired ‘stripped classicism’, such as in the Buttes New British Cemetery by Charles Holden, and the square-based columns of the Brighton Memorial (1922). Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian columns predominate in memorials across the Empire and beyond. The Parthenon temple and friezes were an inspiration, as was the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Columns could define burial grounds, such as in the Doric Circle War Memorial, Brisbane (1930), naming battlegrounds rather than individuals, symbolically encircling the bodies buried and missing in Europe. Daphne Mayo—whose brother succumbed to his war wounds in 1925—was commissioned by the Brisbane Women’s Club to carve the relief tableau. Colonnades, too, were popular: the Royal Air Force Memorial at Runnymede and the cemetery at Le Touret by J. R. Truelove are just two examples. Alternatively, Charles Bradshaw’s Ploegsteert Memorial was a typical rotunda, while the Anzac Memorial in Sydney by Bruce Dellit and Rayner Hoff pays homage to Art Deco. Memorials could be abstract and traditional, with decorative elements or literal appropriations of classical motifs, such as Blomfield’s ‘Wrennaissance’ classicism or that of Wardrop and Hudson’s Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. Most popular were Trajanic archways (Benvenutum ad 144); obelisks; figures such as Nikes and Angels of Peace; and soldiers. Christian symbols suggested death transcended and were often combined with classical abstractions in memorials such as Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice.⁴⁹ Military cemeteries and war monuments, dominated by either Christian crosses or classical statues representing the heroic dead, defined the sacred spaces of a new civic religion.⁵⁰ With classical symbolism, grieving people of all religions could come to these public places to mourn. The aesthetic was meant to unify people in the collective experience of grief and mourning. Classical monoliths allowed the focus to be drawn away from death, diverting attention from the suffering body and reorienting thoughts to the discourses of honour and glory. But the simple classicism of headstones caused discontent with some people who saw their uniformity and lack of Christian references as an insufficient tribute to the dead. Families objected that they should have the right to put crosses on their son’s graves, suggesting that state practices were inadequate.⁵¹ When designing the Stone of Remembrance, Lutyens combined the Christian altar, ancient monumentalism, classical engineering, and modern abstraction, to make it non-denominational, while evoking permanence. Lutyens wanted a religiously neutral aesthetic, and classical antiquity could reflect the ‘equality of honour . . . of all denominations . . . Jews, Musselmens, Hindus and men of other creeds; their glorious names and their mortal bodies all equally deserving ⁴⁹ Catherine Moriarty, ‘Christian Iconography and First World War Memorials’, Imperial War Museum Review, 6 (1991), 63–75. ⁵⁰ George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 32. ⁵¹ Moriarty, ‘Christian Iconography and First World War Memorials’, 65.


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enduring record’.⁵² In his approach, Lutyens reiterated the well-known Periklean discourse that ‘their glory remains eternal in men’s minds’.⁵³ Religious conflict was sometimes difficult to avoid. The unveiling of the Liverpool Memorial (Lionel Budden, G. H. Tyson Smith, 1930) included the Free Church, Greek Orthodox Church, and the Jewish community, hoping to calm sectarianism between the Protestant and Catholic communities. Inspired by the Roman Ara Pacis Augustae, a monument to civic religion and the prosperity of the Augustan peace, the inscription read: ‘to the men of Liverpool who fell in the Great War and the Victory that day was turned into Mourning unto all the People’. Death becomes collective grief, but it is also a site of healing for everyone, depicting on alternate sides marching soldiers from local regiments (‘Out of the North parts—a great company and a mighty army’), and grieving women, children, widows, fathers, and grandparents gathered around a coffin (‘and behold we live’), with a multitude of Imperial War Graves Commission gravestones in the background (‘as unknown and yet well known as lying’), linking the local mourner to the distant cemetery.⁵⁴ Art Deco figures connect classicism and modernism; while respecting the dead, tribute was also paid to the living, who must renew life. The Imperial War Graves Commission architects were expected to give public meaning to the private tragedy of war, to combine notions of civic duty with rehabilitation. Architects such as Lutyens were profoundly affected by the conflict, regarding its consequences as the ‘obliteration of human endeavour’.⁵⁵ Monumental forms reminiscent of the western tradition, and the ‘Golden Ages’ of Greece and Rome, conveyed what Gilbert Murray saw as classicism’s ‘power of recovery’. Humanity’s resilience could be demonstrated in architectural monuments, testifying to human achievement. They commanded the attention of individuals and communities, with contemporary cultural references informed by the classical past, reshaping the memory of war from annihilation to reconstruction, from grieving emotion to corporeal renewal. B E AU T I F U L A N A E S T H E T I C S : C L E A N S I N G T H E V I S UA L M E M O RY O F WA R The range of, and experimentation with, classical symbolism was fitting, not only because of the scale of the tragedy, but because the loss was so bewildering. Classicism was tangible and had the capacity to displace the memory of the body ⁵² Stamp, ‘Silent Cities’, 10. ⁵³ Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 149. ⁵⁴ Bill Stegemann, ‘ ‘‘We Will Remember Them’’: The Significance of First World War Memorials in South-eastern New South Wales, 1919–1939’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 4 (1984), 26; Derek Boorman, At the Going Down of the Sun: British First World War Memorials (York: Ebor Press, 1988), 154. ⁵⁵ Stamp, ‘Silent Cities’, 5.

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in ruins, cleansing the horrific images of the war dead and wounded, replacing destruction and fragmentation with wholeness. Simple lines, minimalism, and allusion to the white marble of classical Greece suggested the restoration of civilized values. The commemorative projects were enormous undertakings, recalling the building works of the classical world. This was not an antimodernist fantasy of turning back the clock nor simply mimeticism, but rather an expression of hope for the continuation of civilization. Architects negotiated social recovery through secure traditions, with what they regarded as sustainable ideals for the future. The First World War had been conceptualized as a sacrifice that would purge the world of its moral miasma; the cleansing aesthetic of the modern classical had a strong discursive inheritance.⁵⁶ The Imperial War Graves Commission aimed to evoke feelings of permanence and wholeness rather than the grisliness of war. Official commemorative documents, too, articulated this aim. Who better to explain these ideals of art, beauty, and tradition than Edmund Blunden? In 1914 he won a Classics scholarship to Oxford University, and by the late 1920s had become one of Britain’s most cherished war poets. His pastoral poems, conjuring the beauty and destruction of the landscape, made him famous and the publication of Undertones of War (1928) consolidated his reputation. Blunden wrote the introduction to the Imperial War Graves Commission’s publication in which he described the ‘chaos and oblivion of the front line with its enormous process of annihilation’ in graphic detail, in keeping with the ‘traumatic narratives’ of war literature.⁵⁷ Almost twenty years later, Blunden described the war and its consequences in lurid detail typical of war literature. In a publication ostensibly about commemoration, readers were informed that French and Belgian farmers continued to dig up corpses at the rate of twenty to thirty a week. This was an extraordinary admission, because exhumations were conducted secretly and were mentioned only in passing in the Imperial War Graves Commission’s annual reports.⁵⁸ Blunden expressed a continuing need to find ‘homes’ for the missing, to mourn and to grieve for them, perhaps motivating him to share these visions. However, he did try to temper his candour by contrasting the past experience of corporeal, visual, and sensorial degradation with the present ‘degree of beauty achieved by the creators and guardians of these resting places’. It was the beauty derived from the ‘harmonious grace and dignity of architecture’ that remained with him, affirming the healing powers of classical design.⁵⁹ Blunden repeated the narrative of war literature and then delimited it with the soothing vision of memorial spaces, in keeping with the cultural continuum between the two. ⁵⁶ Alex King, Memorials of the Great War: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1998), 130. ⁵⁷ Ware, The Immortal Heritage, 37. ⁵⁸ Moriarty, ‘The Absent Dead and Figurative First World War Memorials’, 12. ⁵⁹ Ware, The Immortal Heritage, 37, 16.


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Lutyens agreed that although ‘repose and dignity’ were important, it was not necessary for cemeteries to ‘be gloomy or even sad looking places’.⁶⁰ This was a substantial shift from his initial feeling that no monument could do justice to the scale of the tragedy.⁶¹ Beauty seemed a necessary component in the ceremonies, the mourning landscape, and was essential for recovery. Drawing on Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917)—which described mourning as an attempt to keep the absent person (or love object) alive—Julia Kristeva asked, ‘might the beautiful object appear as the absolute and indestructible restorer of the deserting object?’⁶² This question can be applied to war memorials, asking: ‘might the beautiful cemetery or monument appear as the absolute and indestructible restorer of the dead or mutilated body?’ The reality of violent death, alongside the presence of shell-shocked and disabled men, resists the coherence intended by beautiful memorials and tranquil cemeteries. Classical memorials invoke the Platonic repetition of Eros and Thanatos, deploying familiar symbols to distract from the numbers of named war dead inscribed on them, locking death and renewal in the natural cycle of falling and rising civilization.⁶³ The post-war passion for monuments can be seen as part of the new privileging of the perfect and whole body. Memorials are ‘hypersigns’—allegories woven ‘around and with the depressive void’—which ‘withstand death’ through sublimation.⁶⁴ If—as Kristeva writes—‘abjection is always edged with the sublime’, then the war-wrecked body and the beauty of classical aesthetics are entwined. The responsive continuum between war art, literature, and memorials is similarly bound by abjection and sublimity, as well as trauma and pleasure—and these are important emotional and physical ambiguities at the heart of reconstruction. Looking out across the Imperial War Graves Commission cemetery, the tourist J. C. Waters comforts himself with the feeling of renewal after desolation. The ghosts of the dead ‘are out somewhere where lights twinkle in the gloom, out where new Life is springing green again over their unknown and shell-gouged graves’.⁶⁵ Classicism naturalized the relationship between remembering and forgetting, transforming horror into recovery. Significantly, the compulsion to assuage pain with beauty was at once personal, political, and cultural. Freud observed the effect of war on civilization, that it ‘lays bare the primal man in each of us’, compelling us ‘once more to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death’, and concluded that civilized manners were an avoidance of the reality of death. Freud inverted the Latin phrase ‘si vis pacem, para bellum’ (‘if you want to preserve peace, arm for war’) to suit modern times: ‘si vis vitam, para mortem’ ⁶⁰ In Stamp, ‘Silent Cities’, 11. ⁶¹ Borg, War Memorials from Antiquity to the Present, 73. ⁶² Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989), 98. ⁶³ Michael Rowlands, ‘Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacrifice in War Memorials’, in Forty and Kuchler, The Art of Forgetting, 131–2. ⁶⁴ Kristeva, Black Sun, 99–100. ⁶⁵ Waters, Crosses of Sacrifice, 89.

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(‘if you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death’).⁶⁶ While civilization was renewed in classical memorials, they also sublimated the war’s impact on soldiers and communities. In Britain, Siegfried Sassoon recognized the ruse of beauty, objected to the discourse of willing sacrifice, and rejected the mythologizing of peace and universality in grand classical war monuments. In his poem, ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, he contrasts the ‘sullen swamp’ experienced by the ‘unheroic Dead’ with the Salient now ‘crudely renewed’ as a beautiful place. He was outraged that the ‘dim defenders of this pomp’ were ‘paid’ by the classical grandeur he decried as a ‘pile of peace-complacent stone’. Instead, Ypres was ‘the world’s worst wound’. Sassoon protested at the pride with which the Gateway claimed: ‘Their name liveth for ever’, asking, ‘Was ever an immolation so belied | As these intolerably nameless names?’ Far from comforting him, the classical structure, unveiled in 1927, provoked his anger as he recalled the deaths of his friends: ‘well might the dead who struggled in the slime | Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime’.⁶⁷ He abhorred the appeasing rhetoric of reconstruction that exploited the grief of the bereaved to remove the government’s burden of moral responsibility for the war. For Sassoon, programmes of classical architecture anaesthetized people from the pain of war. The beauty and grandeur of classicism toyed with memory, especially the memory of the body’s demise. Beautiful structures of civilized reconstruction and geometric cemeteries with ordered gardens claimed that the warrior’s death was noble and beautiful. Classical mythology comforted and offended in its modern insistence upon transforming the horrific and degraded to the heroic and perfect. Pierre Nora concluded that rather than embodying memory, monuments displace it altogether.⁶⁸ While appearing to memorialize loss, they actually alleviate the private and collective burdens of memory. And yet, there was a fear of forgetting, encompassing the repressed awareness of the contradictory nature of the commemorative process, which ‘projects a certain anguish over memory itself, a desperate desire to make it better than its imperfections, its selectiveness, its stubborn associations and exclusions’.⁶⁹ If classicism diminished the degradation of trench warfare and mechanical slaughter, did it also induce amnesia? The implicit optimism, indeed passivity, of many classical monuments can be seen as a response to the ‘depressive void’ (Kristeva) they sought to fill. Classicism’s sanitized vision of war reveals the contest of memory and forgetting at the heart of cultural practices. ⁶⁶ Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, iv (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 88–98. ⁶⁷ Stamp, ‘Silent Cities’, 4. ⁶⁸ Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 5. ⁶⁹ Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 308.


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Although mitigating the horror of war through architecture and ceremony was abhorrent to Sassoon, many families, friends, and lovers of the dead and wounded found welcome relief in them. Beautiful anaesthetics might include just a few wreaths carved in stone, or a simple colonnade, and often no figuration (except perhaps a casket or single helmet carved in stone) in the ‘stripped classical’ style. Large structures too transferred the memory of horror to a site of beauty, and yet they were called ‘Arches of Remembrance’, as in Lutyens’ Leicester Memorial (1925) and Etaples Military Cemetery, or the Pozières Memorial to the Missing, a British cemetery by W. H. Cowlishaw. The ‘stripped classicism’ alongside the archways in Charles Holden’s Corbie Communal Cemetery extension and George Goldsmith’s Memorial to the Missing of Marne erased the nightmare of mutilated bodies never found. With minimal decoration and simple references to the past, classical forms realized the aesthetic strategy of memory displacement. Colossal forms aimed to transcend the war-wrecked body, abstracting pain and insisting upon reconstruction. Nevertheless, this project was paradoxical. The sacrificial body simultaneously avoids and reiterates the sense of pain, and the ‘beautiful death’ is edged with abjection (Vernant; Kristeva). Classical memorials attempted to ‘remake’ the world with their anaesthetic, healing powers. Beauty was intended to be ‘lifeaffirming’, as Elaine Scarry asserts in her defence of beauty as an ‘incitement’ to justice and humanity.⁷⁰ Yet, how successful were these beautiful cemeteries and memorials in escaping the violence that invoked the classical imaginary?

M O N U M E N TS TO T H E R E C O N S T RU C T E D B O DY The reference to human body was the key factor in war memorials. Whose bodies, how they were represented, and what they were intended to symbolize, were matters of debate and conflict in most combatant countries. In war, bodies are disputed territories because they symbolize the nations for which they are fighting; hence, they are sacrificed, degraded, and mutilated. After the war, the body was a complex element in the recognition of death, private grief, and national sacrifice. Politics, community, families, comrades, nationhood, and the meaning of war itself, were other matters for consideration. Classicism helped to mediate conflicts over what the living wanted to see, what they wanted to be reminded of, and what they might be induced to feel. Although the dead and disabled were major consequences of war, classical memorials often had no figures at all. Instead, architectural structures replaced the bodies of the dead, shifting the memory of violence towards a more neutral, ⁷⁰ Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 114; id., On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 42 ff.

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impermeable corporeality. Classical memorial architecture was not intended to trigger the memory of war as carnage or physically dismembering, but to sponsor an idealized memory that appeased traumatic memories, especially those of mourners. The Bristol Memorial (1932) appears as a classical fragment, as though part of a former building—and yet it is poised in its own right as a resolved, geometric entity. Its monumental style exudes mass and completeness, projecting a solemn eternalism by its solid penetration of space. Monumental classicism was imposing, suggesting the technological superiority of the victorious nations, and appropriate to its function of enshrining memory and allaying fears that society would forget. Although erected to keep ‘sacred the memory’ of the 6,000 ‘sons and daughters who made the supreme sacrifice’, it avoided glorifying war. Unlike the fragmented bodies of the people named on memorials, the architectural body was created as an enduring, and beautiful whole. Symbolically, then, each memorial stood for a person named on it. In Bristol, the monumental fragment stood in for the missing limb—a stone prosthesis for all the survivors. Memorials possessed something of the intimate nature of the human body, while symbolizing its wider community and nation. They were ‘bodies’ protecting society from the visual memory of the dead and missing. Their classicism transformed the horror of war into awesome embodiment. Bodies were exhumed, identified, and reinterred in large-scale operations. The impossibility of recovering every dead soldier meant that memorials took on even greater significance. The ancient Greek practice of recording the names of the war dead on public monuments had been revived in the nineteenth century although, at that time, other ranks had rarely been singled out for commemoration. But, after the First World War, the lists of names inscribed around the bases of memorials included both officers and other ranks, signifying the democratization of war.⁷¹ Not only did this transform the dead into beautiful objects, but also embodied them in the structure itself. Inscriptions accorded the war dead recognition and, by extension, elevated the family too: ‘Their Name Liveth for Evermore’. At Ypres, the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing has inscribed 57,000 names upon an archway that served a reflective rather than traditional, imperial function, despite its massive scale and visual link to the Arc de Triomphe.⁷² The massive number of names incised on its surfaces added to the impressiveness of the memorial and recreated them as one monumental body. The beauty of its historic form transformed the memory of loss and suffering. J. C. Waters was ⁷¹ Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’, in John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 150–3. ⁷² Inglis sees it as both triumphal arch and hall of memory: Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 264.


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moved less by the names of on the Menin Gate, but more the structure and the number of deaths: I had left cemetery after cemetery with heavy heart, and came on this great monument with a shock. Dreadful melancholy wraps one round. One’s eyes grow dim. Out of this exit from Ypres went a quarter of a million Empire soldiers never to come back. This lofty gateway exudes nothing of triumph, unless it be the stately triumph of Life after Death. It is there firm and solid and British, 20,000 tons in weight.⁷³

Civilization continues through the cycle of death and renewal, something that writers such as Sassoon and Benjamin found reprehensible. Waters, on the other hand, did not experience the war himself. His sentiments are those of a pilgrim, informed by mystical tales of great warriors, and a belief in Britain as the protector of civilization. Classicism showed that war did not end with death and that life could be reconstructed. Names were not without bodies in heaven or earth. Explicit articulations of memory’s complex embodiment appeared in the Stones of Remembrance—uniform oblong monolithic structures such as at Polygon Wood cemetery in Belgium or accompanying memorials, such as in Manchester, accompanying Lutyens’ Cenotaph. Erected in Britain, Gallipoli, Belgium, Iraq, France, and Flanders, they—like cenotaphs—followed the Parthenon’s principle of entasis —a convex curve in the columns used to correct the illusion of concavity. The expanded shaft also gave the impression of a monolith, seen in both ‘Stones’ and cenotaphs. Inscriptions on the façade of the Stone included the words from Ecclesiasticus chosen by Rudyard Kipling: ‘Their Name Liveth for Evermore’ and the reference from John’s gospel: ‘Greater Love Hath No Man’. Marked as agents of remembrance, their abstract appearance had a mystical quality. They avoided reference to the dead, and yet were imbued with the human faculty of remembering, symbiotic with those who remember. Figurative elements were similarly absent from cenotaphs—pylons of cut and jointed stone, set back on alternate planes, modelled with entasis. Like a column, it reached upwards to the sky, drawing the onlooker’s eyes heavenward. The modern cenotaph was an empty tomb—it contained no body. Yet, it represented the human body by resonating closely with the corporeal context of the war, avoiding any relationship to the very human flesh it memorializes.⁷⁴ Some communities adapted the cenotaph by adding lifelike figures, such as a soldier standing guard (Chadderton, Greater Manchester) or a bowing-headed soldier set in relief (Burslem, Staffordshire). Catherine Moriarty writes that the emptiness of the cenotaph was an overpowering reminder of the pain of absence.⁷⁵ ⁷³ Waters, Crosses of Sacrifice, 88. ⁷⁴ A notable exception is the Croydon Memorial: ‘A tribute to the men and women of Croydon who died and suffered ’. ⁷⁵ Moriarty, ‘The Absent Dead and Figurative First World War Memorials’, 15.

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Cenotaphs might incorporate coffins or dead bodies—when they did, they were situated at the peak, well out of reach of human gaze. Even then, cloth carved from stone usually covered their bodies and tin hats often covered men’s faces. The killing and dying of men in war—and their mode of death—was rarely deemed suitable for memorialization in stone. Lutyens’ Midland Railway Memorial, at Derby (1921) is a cenotaph with cloth-covered body on top and ‘Wreath of Peace’ just below. It is a simple and yet solemn memorial to the 2,833 men of the railway who died in the war. Such memorials had little decoration, and were executed with the severe linearity of modernist geometry, but they also generated the characteristic ‘aesthetics of healing’. Minimalism aimed to open up the emotional space for mourning and inner reflection. Allegorical figures, classical motifs, abstract or literal religious symbols, or features interweaving traditional and modern elements transformed the real consequences of war for individuals into lofty symbols of a higher cause. Death became sacrifice, and the ordinary working-class soldier became noble in dying for his nation. Cenotaphs were often built in conjunction with other monolithic structures. In Lutyens’ Manchester Memorial (1924), two obelisks flank the main cenotaph. In addition, a large ‘stone of remembrance’ creates ancient symbolism in the modern civic space of Albert Square. The use of monoliths in the construction of public mourning spaces connected tradition and modernity. Arguably, it also abstracted the meaning of war from its consequences. At the unveiling ceremony, local people who had suffered losses were included, such as Mrs Bingle, whose three sons had been killed. This was important; her participation—as a woman with the burden of extraordinary grief—endorsed the space as an emotional one, and yet also ratified official control of the meaning of war. The appeal of public ceremonies and rituals should not be underestimated. Even during the war, officers complained that ‘memorial services want a bit of stage-managing to be effective’, and that ‘standing about anyhow looks and clearly feels all wrong’.⁷⁶ The military had traditional ceremonies for honouring the dead, which were useful for bonding, unit cohesion, and identity. In this war, however, it had to satisfy the regimental and numerous other agendas—the public, the private, the state, and communal, and the cultural habits of the working and middle classes who had particular conventions in staging mourning rituals.⁷⁷ Memorial spaces are performance spaces, organized to foster ‘rejuvenation and reaffirmation’.⁷⁸ Stage-managing, as surgeon Henry Kaye put it, was a way of preventing a memorial ceremony from being a ‘dismal affair’, he said, which might have adversely effected military and public morale. The public staging ⁷⁶ Henry Wynyard Kaye, Royal Army Medical Corps, war diary, 1 Nov. 1915, 22. RAMC 739/7, Wellcome Collection (my emphasis). ⁷⁷ Julie-Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2005). ⁷⁸ Richard Schechner citing Goffman, in Performance Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 14.


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of mass mourning could be exploitative and highly gendered. Mrs Bingle was transformed from grieving mother to exemplary good citizen, sacrificing her sons for the benefit of the community—the suffering but uncomplaining woman. This brings into question the role of memorials, public remembrance, the controlling of public space, and the capacity for emotional spaces—those defined by objects and rituals of mourning—to distract from the violence of war, select what is to be remembered and to appease the dissonant elements of cultural memory. One of the most poignant contradictions of post-war society was that while literature and film played up, and memorials effaced, the violence of war, the living continued to bear the costs of war. Sufferers of pain and grief are meant to be appeased by heroic discourses of sacrifice for peace and freedom, and yet—as has been shown—memorials were often controversial, generating community conflict. Such public occasions were often felt as the due recognition of a family’s loss—a public acknowledgement that their menfolk were important, and that they too had suffered. If a soldier’s family believes he died for a noble cause, for the greater good of civic purpose, then it is a loss for all. Public commemoration recognizes individual loss as communal—which is central to understanding how and why the myths of collective memory are integrated into family narratives that mitigate the intimacy of their pain. The physically and mentally injured, however, almost never feature on memorials; their suffering is forced into silence under the pressure of ‘overcoming’. Dead soldiers thus have a political value in a way that the disabled do not. Public commemoration united the home front with the front line, but in an officially sponsored form, completely insulated from the sounds and sights of modern war. The tension between the absence and presence of bodies, and between remembering and forgetting is made clear in the style of figuration or when bodies are obscured from view. There is marked unease between the absent bodies memorialized and the colossal signs directing the memory process. How could death be so beautiful, so peaceful? Invoking the sentiments of the ancient warrior, young men had become beautiful in their deaths: their silence and beauty was the secret to their immortality. In the Preston Memorial (1926) by Giles Gilbert Scott and Henry Pegram, modern ‘stripped classicism’ takes the form of a colossal pylon with a carved relief of a Nike holding a Wreath of Peace in each hand. The goddess rises above a group of nudes; some are androgynous, although male genitals are defined on one figure. The raw nudity and pained expressions enhance their beseeching stance (Fig. 3.2). Art Deco classicism in the relief design complements the geometry of the monumental style. The vulnerability of the male nudes adds poignancy to the inscription: ‘Be ever mindful of the men of Preston who fell in the Great War’.⁷⁹ Yet the cenotaph also symbolizes transformation, whereby the prosthetic monument reshapes the memory of war’s impact on soft flesh. The ⁷⁹ Boorman, At the Going Down of the Sun, 263.

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Fig. 3.2 Giles Gilbert Scott and Henry Pegrum, Preston Memorial, 1926. Photograph by Lee Hamer.


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cenotaph can be regarded as an architectural limb that reinvests the memory of weak, male bodies with architectural inviolability. In keeping with the classical underpinnings of physical rehabilitation, the cenotaph compensates for physical damage and loss, while signifying gendered reconstructions with classical females as peace-builders. Cenotaphs were profoundly implicated in the culture of reconstruction. Rising high above the ground, the cenotaph flexed its stone muscularity in two ways. By referencing a fragment of a classical building, the cenotaph appeared to be at once ancient, a relic, and yet its pared-down minimalism was modern. Art historian Linda Nochlin argues it is out of the loss of the whole that the modern itself is constructed.⁸⁰ Reconstruction and its productive corporeality inextricably entwined notions of dismemberment, fragmentation, sacrifice, and castration. The human body was a site of pain, but also an object of beauty and desire. Personal and cultural agencies were generated from deep inside. The cenotaph operates less as a site of suffering, in so far as it references a severed limb but reforms into a whole body. It facilitated hope through rebuilding, as though an invincible superstructure. Such a play between the historical and eternal was one of the key factors in the iconography of classicism after the war. Scale, proportion, and classical grandeur created a modern affectation of permanency, enshrining the architectural body as an ageless fixture of time immemorial. Lutyens drew upon Greek prototypes at Xanthos, and Roman examples at Igel near Trier. Parthenaic architecture and the principle of entasis were key features. His sustained admiration for the engineering in classical temples led him eventually to Greece in 1932. The connection between the ‘Golden Age’ of building, under the guidance of Perikles and Phidias, and post-war reconstruction seemed hopeful. The effectiveness of the aesthetic and spatial imagery of London’s Cenotaph can be measured by the unprecedented outpouring of emotion at its unveiling in 1919 and the fact that it immediately became a ‘sacred place’ for pilgrimage, unveiling a new civic religion for modern societies. The design was appropriated at the local level, on a smaller, more affordable scale, across Britain and the Dominions.⁸¹ Throughout the Empire, these common, familiar structures unified the metropolis with the township, rural, and colonial peripheries. Overcoming local differences, the universalizing classical aesthetic nevertheless invoked white, western identity. Cenotaphs asserted the relationship between architecture, civic space, and human bodies. The absence and presence of the human body teetered precariously on the slippery edge between the meaning of war and peace—especially if the white body stood for all. ⁸⁰ Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 8. ⁸¹ Winter, ‘Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War’, in Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, 54.

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Tombs of the Unknown Warrior in which unidentified bodies were placed, were potent symbols of absence. Thucydides’ description of the symbolic burial of the missing in Athens allowing the families to mourn by public ritual was well known, and self-consciously borrowed from by artists, memorial designers, and architects trained in the classical tradition.⁸² The minimalist aesthetic was intended to distract from the horrific memory of the fragmented body, while at the same time presenting the ‘unknown soldier’ as sacrificial. The Unknown Soldier had none of the distinctions of class, rank or race he would have borne when alive.⁸³ Unknowns were the endpoint of the ‘democratization of death’; not really a person but rather a mere symbol, he was a malleable body offered up for anyone to shape in their imagination. At first revived in England and France, the United States subsequently took up this ritual consecration along with many other European countries: Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Iraq, and Greece. London’s Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey was the Church of England’s equivalent to the Cenotaph, consecrated on the morning of Armistice Day 1920. It had specific Christian implications of divine sacrifice for the greater good.⁸⁴ Foreign dignitaries were excluded from the unveiling ceremony at the Abbey, indicating a similar politics of national inviolability imposed on the body of ‘the unknown’. Democratic rhetoric underpinned the discourse of ‘the unknown’. Thomas Laqueur argues that in the tomb of ‘the unknown’, the social body was made whole so that one unknown was everyone’s unknown—there was a democracy in that symbolic interment and act of consecration. As Catherine Moriarty observes, this anonymity was intended to enable every mother to form a memory of her own son.⁸⁵ By contrast, individuals are named on the gravestones of the Western Front, a corresponding dynamic implying the need to account for each of the war dead.⁸⁶ The monument to the ‘unknown soldier’ reconstructed ‘the absent body’ as architecture, immortalizing the memory of the dead in the eternal aesthetic of classicism. Notably, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Russia did not entomb unknown soldiers in this period. Perhaps for Germany and Russia, the burden of heavy defeat—hunger, loss of life, and territory—rendered the epic value of the ‘unknown’ an expensive illusion. And for those living at a great distance, just as for the vanquished, cenotaphs with no bodies at all were far less socially confronting than disinterring and transporting the dead. In Australia, the Anzac myth (and the numerous statues it spawned across the country) was ⁸² Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 143. ⁸³ Laqueur, ‘Memory and Naming’, 157. ⁸⁴ David Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’, in Joachim Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981), 217–26. ⁸⁵ Moriarty, ‘The Absent Dead and Figurative First World War Memorials’, 15. ⁸⁶ Laqueur, ‘Memory and Naming’, 158–9.


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thoroughly incorporated into the everyday narrative of the ‘birth of the Australian nation’, which perhaps offset the desire for repatriation of the dead for burial at home.⁸⁷ In the United States, however, 70 per cent of families demanded the return of bodies for symbolic burial at home.⁸⁸ At Arlington, one of the 1,237 unidentifiable soldiers interred overseas was selected, brought home and reinterred. President Woodrow Wilson signed this process into legislation on 4 March 1921. In 1926, the architect Lorimer Rich was commissioned to design an elaborate shrine to be placed on top of the pedestal base of the original Tomb. The classical sarcophagus, of white Colorado marble, was completed on 31 December 1931 in conjunction with the sculptor Thomas Hudson Jones. It was carved with the motifs of a classical building and Ionic columns were carved in relief on each corner. The simplicity of decoration, minimal lines, and flat, planar approach to the handling of the marble combined modern abstraction with classical form (Fig. 3.3). The inscription, ‘Here Rests in Honoured Glory an American Soldier Known But To God’ reminded the viewer of the inviolable secret of ‘the unknown’. Erected near the grand classical amphitheatre (1920), overlooking the valley down to the Capitol, the tomb of the silent ‘unknown soldier’ occupies a space evocative of democracy, civilized prosperity, and freedom of speech. A twenty-four-hour guard honours this symbol, protecting the soldier who died to protect democracy, adding to the theatrical spectacle, where tourists join relatives in rituals of memory and mourning. The tomb is typical of the classical posturing of the grand building programme of the New Deal. The Arlington Memorial Amphitheatre commemorated the dead of both the Civil War and the First World War. In his inauguration address, Chief of Staff of the US Army, Major General Peyton C. March, paid tribute to the 80,000 dead whose ‘bodies lie abroad in 593 cemeteries, and the first of this great number of heroes are now reaching the United States’. By 1923, only sixty-four bodies had been repatriated and, since 20,000 bodies remained permanently in France, families were assured that ‘their graves will be cared for tenderly and carefully’.⁸⁹ Architect Thomas Hastings endeavoured to ‘obtain a classic and serious character in order to express the dignity of the purpose’. He studied the Theatre of Dionysius at Athens and the Roman Theatre at Orange and other ‘conspicuous classic examples’, at the same time linking it to the buildings of Washington’s Capitol.⁹⁰ Within the Theatre, the Committee commissioned an ornamental plaster frieze by Ulysses A. Ricco, which included the figures of Pallas ⁸⁷ Marilyn Lake, ‘Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation— Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts’, Gender and History, 4 (1992), 305–22. ⁸⁸ G. Kurt Piehler, ‘The War Dead and the Gold Star: American Commemoration of the First World War’, in Gillis, Commemorations, 173. ⁸⁹ ‘Address of Major General Peyton C. March, Chief of Staff of the United States Army’, Report of the Arlington Memorial Amphitheatre Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1923), 71–2. ⁹⁰ Hastings, ibid. 11–12.

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Reconstructing the Body Fig. 3.3 Lorimar Rich, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington, Washington, DC. Collection of the author.

Athene, Goddess of War, ‘reclining in memory of her dead heroes’. Although a Greek goddess, she was ‘quite symbolic of our own country, the United States’, leading men ‘through victory to peace and prosperity’. Classicism joined classical Athenian with modern American achievements in reconstructing cities and lives, linking modern industrial progress to the Golden Age civilization of classical Athens. This was an especially American version of the classical, bound up with what General Peyton March described as ‘the spirit of pure Americanism which our Army in the World War so splendidly exemplified’.⁹¹ Ancient myths and classical architecture bolstered national purpose and unity, and maintained democratic ideals as continuous from the past to the future. Part of a burial ground, the amphitheatre echoed with the spirits of the dead, giving voice to the sentiments of peace and national pride. But the peaceful beauty and classical grandeur of the official Tombs of the Unknown Warrior were different from literary memorials to the dead, where ‘the unknown’ was said to look on with pity at his surviving comrades: ‘weeping for his living brother | Maimed, unreverenced and scorned’.⁹² Although disfigurement was a ⁹¹ ‘Address of Major General Peyton C. March’, 72. ⁹² John Waring, The Unknown Warrior (London: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1922).


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deeply feared consequence of war, commemorative forms never honoured the disabled—and still do not. Unlike survivors and those living with disabilities, the dead are represented as noble and beautiful immortals. War maimed bodies, but classical memorials rebuilt them with the iconography of architectural reconstruction. Cenotaphs, stones of remembrance, and tombs of unknown soldiers disavowed the mutilated body, replacing it with monumentality and the symbolism of invulnerable flesh. The role of classicism was central in delivering the message of healing and reconstruction.

G E N D E R I N G D E AT H A N D R E N EWA L The classical ‘aesthetics of healing’ created coherent political and social relations, situating war in the natural cycle of life and death, and peace in the realm of the body and gender. Since war was regarded a masculine affair, and a test of individual, local, and national manliness, so the male body was central to its commemoration through the white bodies of the Tommy, the Digger or Anzac, the poilu, and the Doughboy. In Australia, digger memorials were ubiquitous. In Pimpana and Newcastle (New South Wales), diggers were mounted on classical plinths with Corinthian columns at each corner. One Digger (1919) was carved in Italy out of marble. On a 1916 memorial of the same style, the dedication reinforced the ‘manly, unselfish, and brave’ characteristics of ‘the digger’.⁹³ Gilbert Ledward’s nude warrior kneels before Britannia in the Corinthian columned portico of Stockport Art Gallery (1925). The symbols of glory (flag, laurel wreath, sword) become tenuous alongside the beauty of the masculine body, representing fallen heroes.⁹⁴ Francis Derwent Wood’s bronze David (Machine Gun Corps Memorial, Hyde Park, 1925 (Fig. 3.4)), combines Christian narrative with classical contrapposto embodiment, inspired by statues of Apollo, Praxiteles’ Hermes and Polycleitos’ Doryphoros. Bronze nudes and classical figures with defined musculature evoke the Greek warrior; the dedication is to the ‘glorious heroes’ of the Corps. Bronze enhanced the glistening of muscles, seen in the torsos of soldiers on the Anzac Memorial friezes, which represent battle action and living movement more than the tragedy of death. Beautiful bodies displace death with hope. In the Archibald Fountain—a tribute to Australian and French friendship during ´ the war—classical bodies are depicted in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts style. In Australian bodybuilding, too, the muscular body reconstructed the memory of the war-wounded, as discussed in the next chapter. During the war, Wood joined the RAMC, directing the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department (Third London General Hospital, Wandsworth), ⁹³ Michael Hedger, Public Sculpture in Australia (Craftsman House, Roseville East, New South Wales, 1995), 27. ⁹⁴ King, Memorials of the Great War, 68.

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Reconstructing the Body Fig. 3.4 Francis Derwent Wood, Machine Gun Corps Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, London, 1925. Courtesy United Kingdom National Inventory of War Memorials, record 2129.

where individually designed and painted metal masks were fitted to men with severe facial wounds, using techniques from ancient statues (back-cover image). Wood’s close contact with the victims of machine guns—whose fragmented faces could not be healed by reconstruction surgery—informed the memorial’s controversial inscription: beautiful David had slain ‘his tens of thousands’. Although some questioned whether a memorial ‘should contain references to the amount of slaughter’, artists grappled with helping the living, honouring the dead, and articulating the impact of war.⁹⁵ Like Napier Waller’s classically embodied utopia, mutilation was invisible and yet an integral part of the ethics of hope. Inspired by Wood, American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd set up a facial mask unit for the Red Cross in her Paris Studio, and was awarded a Légion d’honneur. While her masks shielded the public from the consequences of war, her memorials confronted the violence with a decaying corpse on barbed wire ⁹⁵ International Arbitration League, in Nicholas Penny, ‘English Sculpture and the First World War’, Oxford Art Journal, 4 (1981), 36–42.


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(American Legion), and male allegory ‘The Cost of Victory’, with a dying youth at his knee.⁹⁶ Although reconstruction demanded hope—even glory—fragility was often its grim brother. Masks lasted only a few years and deprived wearers of emotional expression.⁹⁷ Like classical memorials, they functioned to cover the horror of war and its disfiguring legacies. Charles Sargeant Jagger’s bronze Wipers (‘Soldier on the Defence’), Hoylake and West Kirby memorial (1922) or ‘Sentry’, Britannia Hotel, Manchester, and Gilbert Ledward’s Guards Memorial, St James Park (1926) reconstructed the dead with square bodied masculinity. Wood, Jagger, and Ledward trained under Edouard Lanteri, influential in British ‘New Sculpture’ and its dynamic naturalism of the body. The ‘Sentry’ stands astride his weapon in a defiant, masculine, and sexualized stance. In the Anzac Memorial, masculine figures carved like solid blocks of Art Deco stone command the exterior of the building. Bronze friezes depict glistening Australian torsos straining and flexing muscles in mid-action. Similarly, Wallace Anderson’s bronze sculpture of the Australian soldier evacuating Gallipoli combines naturalism with undulating chest and stomach muscles.⁹⁸ Such works aligned symmetry and masculinity with bodily perfection. Denying pain or vulnerability, the strong male body was charged with the role of social and cultural renewal. General Ian Hamilton much preferred robust masculine figures in war memorials, and thought the ‘delicate Greek features and smooth cheeks’, found in memorials such as Tait Mackenzie’s The Homecoming in Cambridge (1922), was a ‘bastard Greek sculpture’. Youthful, classical beauty appeared unmanly to Hamilton, preferring his own fantasy of ‘the real thing in the rough’. Serving as a combat soldier, Jagger had been wounded, which may have impressed audiences; sculptor and subject sharing the masculine embodiment of the heroic ideal of overcoming pain and reconstructing the body. Nevertheless, the public reacted to overtly aggressive images. Jagger’s Wipers, one complaint to the newspaper read, ‘lacks all sensitivity’, and was more reminiscent of ‘the bludgeon and the boot’.⁹⁹ Masculinity had to be reconstructed in a way that was acceptable to civilians. The gendering of war and recovery was a significant aspect of memorial embodiment. Gender may be considered a ‘corporeal style’ or an ‘act’, that is both intentional and ‘performative’, suggesting ‘a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning’. Hence, the relationship between objects, discursive and individual practices produces a life, an embodiment, a staging. Although the idea of gender as performed is usually reserved for the living, it can be applied ⁹⁶ The American Legion’s World War Memorial, American Magazine of Art ( July 1924). ⁹⁷ Katherine Feo, ‘Invisibility: Memory, Masks and Masculinities in the Great War’, Journal of Design History, 20 (2007), 17–27. ⁹⁸ Australian War Memorial Art Catalogues, Wallace Anderson, Cat. No. 003 (1926). ⁹⁹ J. A. Black, ‘Who Dies if England Live? Masculinity, the Problematics of ‘‘Englishness’’ and the Image of the Ordinary Soldiers in British War Art, 1915–28’, in S. Caunce (ed.), Relocating Britishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 158–60.

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to the analysis of the body in commemorative architecture.¹⁰⁰ War monuments interact with ideas about embodiment and are staged in ceremonial practices and rituals of remembrance. Classical monuments represented death in war as masculine and beautiful, and the renewal of life in peacetime as feminine and maternal. The relationship between war and peace and between death and renewal have parallels in gendered space. The notion of a partnership is crucial here: the architectural body is paired with the memory of the body in war. Classicism’s timelessness and universality were distancing, presenting an alternative periodicity to the painful, immediate past. Distancing also created an alternative memory of war, which, as Pierre Nora has powerfully argued, encouraged collective amnesia or a displacement of memory.¹⁰¹ Classical symbolism provided an image of peace that was a partner to war. War, then, was not diminished, but rather naturalized as part of a universal cycle, sitting comfortably alongside the image and political meaning of peace. The classical metaphor was highly useful in the production of what could be called a ‘companionate memory’ accompanying the embodied structures of monuments. The representation of war and peace involved a social, political, and aesthetic marriage, and consequently was profoundly gendered. Pilgrims’ responses to memorials and cemeteries were also gendered, linking death in war to the masculinity of the nation. After his visit to the Western Front, J. C. Waters reiterated notions of masculine sacrifice and the birth of the nation as an epic tale. As a schoolboy he had heard of stories of ‘the manhood and youth of Australia’, and their battle ‘prowess . . . like some romance of other centuries’. He ‘revelled’ in their ‘adventurous youth’ and ‘manly conviction’, asking can the next generation ‘visualise what it all meant’? Yet he also reflected on the visible presence of the wounded: ‘the remnants of war wreckage with us still, cripples in war hospitals and hostels. Over their ashes of sacrifice has been built the foundation of our security and happiness as a Nation.’¹⁰² Witnessing the row-upon-row of gravestones made him realize the extent of the sacrifice that had been made for ‘security and happiness’ of the nation. That uneasy juxtaposition between the heroic, exterior myth of Australian masculinity and inward feelings of vulnerability was demonstrated in the ambiguities of the male figures of the Anzac Memorial, which was both nationalist and global in style. The soldiers carved in stone on the exterior are at once Anzacs and universal warriors (Fig. 3.5). The bodies allude to the French poilu or the British Tommy. In keeping with its ‘stripped classical’ Art Deco vocabulary, the colossal figures, such as Light Horseman, Lewis Gunner, Nurse, Air Forceman, A. B. Seaman, are generic with minimal detail on their faces and uniforms. They ¹⁰⁰ Butler, ‘Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversion’, Gender Trouble, 33. ¹⁰¹ Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, i Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). ¹⁰² Waters, Crosses of Sacrifice, 9–10.


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Fig. 3.5 Rayner Hoff, Anzac, Exterior Seated Figures. Anzac Memorial, 1931–4, Hyde Park, Sydney. Collection of the author.

appear as modern Olympian gods, carved from monolithic stone, despite the official line that the design offered ‘no pomp, no vainglory, no glamour . . . rather is there stark tragedy, grim reality and bitter truth’.¹⁰³ Art Deco, square-based columns rise around the outside, supporting the colossal square figures and in harmony with the cube structure of the entire building (Fig. 3.5). Together the geometric figures and columns coalesce with its overall modern classical symmetry. The presence of classical columns comforted C. E. W. Bean, historian of the Anzac Legend, finding the figures too modern. Since a memorial ‘has to stand for hundreds of years, to be a centre of reverence’, the classical elements provided him with ‘the simple, permanent standards of art’.¹⁰⁴ ¹⁰³ S. Napier (ed.), The Book of the Anzac Memorial (Sydney: Beacon Press, 1934), 50. ¹⁰⁴ Bean to Robb (President RS and SILA, New South Wales Branch, 14 June 1932), AWM 38—File No: 328—Rayner Hoff.

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Fig. 3.6 Rayner Hoff, The Sacrifice, bronze statue, 1931–4. Collection of the author.

Accompanying the masculine exterior, however, was a more vulnerable interior. Gendered connections between death and the rebirth of civilization could produce inversions of masculine stereotypes. Inside the Anzac Memorial, the tragedy of death was portrayed in Rayner Hoff ’s centrepiece, The Sacrifice (1931–4), which combines both classical and Christian elements in articulating familiar languages of loss (Fig. 3.6). The arms of the naked figure are draped across the sword in a crucifix position. Less heroic, however, Hoff was praised for his ‘emotionalization of form’.¹⁰⁵ Hoff studied at the Royal Academy under Derwent Wood, whose sensitivity to classical elements was also profoundly shaped by the war. The sorrowful female figures—a caryatid of wife, mother, and sister— appeared in the modern classical style typical of Art Deco. Just as the Greeks had developed symbolism and myth in the representation of war, Hoff used classicism as an allegorical construct. The shield image was a clear reference to the Spartan mothers described by Plutarch, bidding their sons to return either victorious or dead. Motherhood in Sparta was ‘inhumanly heroic’, but an essential ‘civic ¹⁰⁵ Earl Beauchamp, Howard Ashton, E. C. Temple Smith, and W. Bede Dalley, Rayner Hoff (Sydney: Sunnybrook Press, 1934), 2.


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activity’.¹⁰⁶ Hoff’s figures were a chilling reminder of women’s support for the war, including the Anzac Fellowship of Women, those who campaigned for conscription and those who gave out white feathers. If one is aware of Plutarch’s alarm at the power of Spartan citizen women within its polis, the classical symbolism seems critical of women inciting heroism. Australia women were more likely to join the imperialist patriotic National Council of Women, than peace groups, and a majority of Australian women voters supported conscription in referenda of 1916 and 1917.¹⁰⁷ The pathetic, naked corpse of the soldier on the interior contrasts with the massive warriors on the exterior, offering a challenging complexity to the male body as symbol of the nation. Still, the architect Dellit thought the emaciated soldier was appropriately masculine. Perhaps for him only a truly masculine man could make such a sacrifice—and representing women in support roles confirmed that war was the business of men.¹⁰⁸ The male figure’s passivity contrasts with the strength that the women must possess in order to carry him. The official programme of the Anzac Memorial praises the ‘Women of the State’ for their ‘support’ during the war, and it is clear that although the caryatids are a tribute to women’s sacrifices, they were valued for their de facto role.¹⁰⁹ Women’s capacity for sacrifice was described as ‘the beautiful quality of womanhood’ and in their passive roles, women ‘with quiet courage and noble resignation bore their burdens, the loss of sons, husbands and lovers.’¹¹⁰ Unlike the fascist evocation of masculinity as a flight from the feminine—identified by Klaus Theweleit—female figures here represented a partnership of male and female sacrifices.¹¹¹ However, it was an uneven partnership, reflecting the gender politics of the time and debates about the status of the returned soldier, the role of motherhood, and women’s claims to citizenship.¹¹² In this partnership war was memorialized through the male body and death was a masculine event.¹¹³ Allied to this were idealized and allegorical female figures, such as the Nike—Winged Victory—a goddess traditionally representing the desire for, and realization of, military success, with no connection to the cycle of human life and frailty. Her power lay in inspiring men to victory. In fact, she is ¹⁰⁶ Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 12. ¹⁰⁷ Inglis, ‘Men, Women and War Memorials: Anzac Australia’, Daedalus, 116 (1987) (Learning about Women: Gender, Politics and Power), 55; Carmel Shute, ‘Heroines and Heroes: Sexual Mythology in Australia, 1914–1918’, Hecate, 1 (1975), 7–22. ¹⁰⁸ In Inglis, ‘Men, Women and War Memorials’, 45. ¹⁰⁹ Napier, The Book of the Anzac Memorial, 37. ¹¹⁰ The Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, New South Wales (Sydney: Anzac Memorial Official Publications, 1930), 7. ¹¹¹ Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, i Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). ¹¹² Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). ¹¹³ Nancy Huston, ‘The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes’, in Susan Suleiman (ed.), The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 119–36.

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not bound by her gender, with ‘no children, no lovers; she exists outside human sufferings; as success itself, Nike does not undergo the pains of loss, material or spiritual’.¹¹⁴ Instead, warriors were her protégés, and she guided them to realize their noble desires for triumph. In Sheffield, the York and Lancaster Regiment Memorial consists of a tall bronze Nike with two soldiers, one holding a revolver, and the other a rifle. Weapons, an ammunition box, a helmet, and a drum are also represented. Unapologetically belligerent effigies of Victory or Patriotism appeared—for instance Athena Parthenos in the Calverley Memorial, Yorkshire (1922). In Australia, Gilbert Doble’s Winged Victory (Marrickville, 1919) holds a wreath of peace in one hand and a victoriously raised sword in the other, honouring the men who gave their lives for ‘the cause of humanity’. Poised on top of a large Corinthian column, this Nike is a grand statement by the small community that funded the commission. The personification of Peace as feminine is typical, and few belligerent allegorical images exist.¹¹⁵ The Berwick Memorial by Alexander Carrick in Northumberland is an Angel of Peace with large wings and holding a wreath. In the Clayton-Le-Moors Memorial in Lancashire, a large bronze classical female points the way for a soldier, with one colossal hand placed on his shoulder. She can be seen as directing the way either to peace or to victory, a subtle ambiguity: ‘Pass not in sorrow but in lowly pride and to strive to live as nobly as they died’.¹¹⁶ In the Thornton Memorial in Yorkshire (1922) by Harold Brownsword, the female figure in ancient Greek dress holds up two wreaths personifying Peace. She is not a Nike and has no wings, but is classicized in her costume and typical contrapposto limb—literally ‘counterpoised’—visible through the drapery, as the foot weighting gives the impression of forward movement. Despite women’s roles during the war, both as patriots and as peace advocates in such groups as the Women’s Peace Party, the Women’s Peace Army, and the Sisterhood of International Peace, they were rarely publicly commemorated.¹¹⁷ Nikes or angels were allegorical figures deemed more suitable to honour the masculine enterprise of war. Peace motifs were clearly the preferred signifier of the war’s end in parts of Australia, evidenced by the fact that Bertram Mackennal’s sculpture of the Roman war goddess Bellona, was never given a permanent home.¹¹⁸ It was significant that, in this case, the aggressive figure was female and therefore did not sit well with Australia’s masculinist self-perception. In 1921, Paul Montford’s classical female figures for the Shrine of Remembrance were designed to represent traditional symbols of ‘Justice’, ‘Peace and Goodwill’, or even ‘Patriotism’, but ¹¹⁴ Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985), 131. ¹¹⁵ A notable exception is in the Welsh National War Memorial (1928): Boorman, At the Going Down of the Sun, 160. ¹¹⁶ Ibid. 86. ¹¹⁷ Darryn Kruse and Charles Sowerwine, ‘Feminism and Pacifism: ‘‘Women’s Sphere’’ in Peace and War’, in Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns (eds), Australian Women: New Feminist Perspective (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986), 42–58. ¹¹⁸ Ibid. 43.


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nothing so directly masculine as ‘War’. Unlike in France, the United States, or Britain where the nation was often symbolized in a female figure derived from Athena (Liberty, Marianne, and Britannia), the Australian nation was rarely comfortable with its personification as a powerful female, preferring the citizen soldier or bronze lifesaver.¹¹⁹ The modern Nike was not just an allegorical figure; she was characterized, personalized, and individualized with the capacity to feel, to suffer, to empathize, and to grieve. Classical female figures were often thought to be nurses, their role conflated with motherhood and the feminine functions of comforting and grieving. Such representations drew upon wartime images of women’s roles in voluntary nursing, and were furthered by such institutions as the Red Cross, where ‘it was not the training that made the nurse, it was femininity’.¹²⁰ The popularity of the nurturing Nike was informed by maternalist discourses and the population politics of reconstruction. The Anzac Memorial did not distinguish between nurses and mothers. The Army Medical bas relief depicts ‘one of the noblest phases of the war—weary and wounded men tended with loving care by the Mothers of the race—here is to be seen a Matron, and two of her charges’.¹²¹ The traditionally belligerent figure of Nike was now portrayed as a nurse or, in keeping with the gendered assumptions about nursing, a mother. This interpretation is evident in many representations of women. In the Folkestone Memorial (1922) a female in classical Greek dress and body posed in contrapposto, and holds a colossal wreath of peace and a Union flag at half mast. Its creator, Ferdinand Blundstone, intended it as a representation of Motherhood, but also as an embodiment of the nation and thus the national sacrifice. Rather than homage to women’s sacrifices, it is a gendered representation of the national meaning of war, and a symbol of the importance of women in bearing children—the hope of the future. In Blundstone’s Stalybridge Memorial in Cheshire (1921) and his memorial for the Prudential Assurance Company in London, a barebreasted Nike (or Angel) attends a fully clothed, collapsed Tommy, forming an erotic dynamic (Fig. 3.7). Appropriated from the archetypal Nike of Paionios at Olympia, the natural connections between sex and life, succour and rebirth are represented: in keeping with post-war reconstruction, sexuality appears healing and reproductive. Maternal and sexualized nikes represented both military assistance and social replenishment. As well, the surplus raised in donations was often put towards a fund for orphans—for instance at Mont-près-Chambord, Loire-et-Cher—where a bare-breasted figure in ancient Greek dress grasps an obelisk dedicated to ¹¹⁹ A rare exception is Daphne Mayo’s sculptural tympanum for the Brisbane Town Hall (1930); Kay Saunders, ‘ ‘‘Specimens of Superb Manhood’’: The Lifesaver as National Icon’, Journal of Australian Studies, 56 (1998), 96–105. ¹²⁰ Margaret Darrow, ‘French Volunteer Nursing and the Myth of the War Experience’, American Historical Review, 101 (1996), 92, 83. ¹²¹ In The Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, New South Wales, 13.

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Reconstructing the Body Fig. 3.7 Ferdinand Blundstone, Stalybridge Memorial, 1921. Photograph by Lee Hamer.

the ‘Children of Mont who died for France’.¹²² The monumentalized Nike reflected the bodily services of women—she was now procreator, incubator, and nurturer, with spacious womb, and her exposed breast ready for suckling. The transformation of the Nike reflected the population politics of post-war reconstruction, with struggles over women’s independence and the procreative role of their bodies.¹²³ Moreover, the gendered deployment of the Nike in war memorials transformed her from a perfunctory military symbol to a feminine, socialized personality. No longer a benign figure representing grand traditions or an aloof and unpredictable Goddess, the grieving, nursing, Nike reflects the wider cultural phenomenon of what can be seen as the ‘emotionalization’ of war monuments. This marked a transition from the effigy of imperial victory to the site of mourning and also of healing based on the values of reconstruction. Occasionally, war monuments and their accompanying literature included women, often their main fund-raisers and donors. They grieved for lost sons, husbands, lovers, and friends in such works as the Shrine of Remembrance. The ¹²² Sherman, The Construction of Memory, 206. ¹²³ Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Post-war France, 1917–1927 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994).


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solitary mourning figure in the Bushey Memorial in Hertfordshire, by William Reid Dick, is a woman bowing her head, one hand held up to her face as though she is crying, and carrying a Wreath of Peace in the other. The embodiment of Peace as female and the maternalization of the Nike were informed by modern gender identities in the context of reconstruction politics. In ancient Greece, public mourning constituted a central act of civic identity and unity, and heroes could weep for their wounded warriors and mourn their dead bodies.¹²⁴ In modern discourses of war and bereavement, there are continuities with, but also differences from, the classical. Depictions of angels and Nikes as mortal mothers were paradigms of the grieving widow or mother. In St Anne’s Memorial, Lancashire, a woman in classical dress stands on top of a stone obelisk, her arms outstretched, beseeching the pity of the gods. It is a desperate evocation of grief, and corresponds with the bronze figure below, a seated mother with a child clambering at her neck. One of the bronze panels at the base of the memorial depicts a soldier saying goodbye to a woman wearing long drapery with a child in contemporary dress. This mixture of contemporary and classical elements links the widow to the classical figure on top of the obelisk, evoking women’s sacrifices as much as men’s. The unveiling ceremony highlighted the mother’s ‘agony of mind’, her ‘anguish and sorrowful reverie’; her sacrifice parallels his heroism, a partnership of grief in service to the state, reflecting wider concerns about motherhood and repopulation as the ‘key to post-war recovery’ in Britain.¹²⁵ At the same time, there were powerful contradictions to the masculine enterprise of war, and the view that women need to be protected. As the symbolic mother of western history and the future of Civilization, the Nike was sometimes produced with a muscularity that portrayed her as a physical force, a protector of men. In the Blois War Memorial, Loir-et-Cher (1923), two stone, winged Nikes hold above their heads a coffin that symbolically contains within it the bodies of all the men who are named on its pylon. Their strength is revealed in bare arms and their wings—which help to support the coffin. The symbolic importance of the Nike’s wings was not lost on the local mayor in his dedication speech. Questioning the process of commemoration and fearing the evaporation of war’s meaning, he asked, ‘Are all the words we have just uttered only words, will they fly away forever?’¹²⁶ The Nike as an emblem of flight symbolized the fear of forgetting. The fleeting temporality of the mourning process is evoked through the Nike, yet her solid monumentalism helps to ground her, to establish her permanence in the earthly realm. The flight of the Nike is dualistic. Wings imply the passing of time, the healing of wounds, the forgetting of pain, and the recovery of society, and yet her material form makes her anything but light and temporal. Despite her wings, the modern Nike cannot escape the past. With the heavy burden of ¹²⁴ Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 35. ¹²⁵ Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War, 234, 241. ¹²⁶ Marcel Bernard, 1923, in Sherman, The Construction of Memory, 308.

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history, she embraces the future—one in which her role as ‘mother protector’ is central to the continuance of western civilization. Women personified and embodied as ‘Peace’, ‘Civilization’, or ‘Humanity’ (Charles Sargeant Jagger: Hoylake and West Kirby War Memorial) reinforced popular maternalist ideas combined with the robust, masculine Tommy of the Wipers. One radical attempt to invert the gendered ordering of commemorative architecture was made in Australia by the English e´migré Rayner Hoff. His sculptural group The Crucifixion of Civilization, 1914 (1932) (Fig. 3.8) outraged the Catholic Church with its ‘immoral’ and ‘gravely offensive’ evocation of war: the Archbishop thought it ‘too Protestant’. Instead of a grieving or nurturing Nike, Hoff ’s central figure was a naked, crucified woman. Without the modest folds of a classical chemise, the traditional allegorical female was replaced by a fleshy woman—stripped, tortured, and wounded. Instead of masculine heroism and Christian redemption, her sexualized corpse challenged the gendering of war as male courage and sacrifice; she was both an active participant and an active sufferer of pain, not a supporting act to the main—masculine—event. If Civilization was female, then responsibility for reconstruction could be seen as women’s. Moreover, biological duty could be misconstrued as a sacrifice—which might have been awkward in a period when women were urged to leave their employment and return to their traditional sphere. Given post-war debates over female citizenship, the symbolism of the gender role partnership was politically useful. Although originally selected by jury, Civilization was ultimately rejected because of the controversy it generated and was replaced by the male figure of Sacrifice, which continues to stand in the Anzac Memorial today. It is intriguing that an emaciated and naked soldier from antiquity resembling Christ was preferred. The authority of classicism in Sacrifice was preferable to the figure of a naked woman brutalized on the Christian cross. Hygienic classicism wiped away all the messy sexual and biological connotations of the naked female body. Although sexual violation of women was used in war propaganda, in memorials women as victims of war were never acknowledged. The American Legion used a similar allegorical theme in its photographic tableaux, with live models representing ‘The Spirit of the American Legion’. Liberty’s breast-plated costume endowed her with the sexual appeal akin to the vaudeville stage or cinema, more than memorials, despite the accompanying group of dying soldiers, one with bandaged eyes.¹²⁷ The ‘spirit’ was tragic and yet titillating, reflecting popular forms of war’s pleasure culture. The gendering of death as masculine and peace as feminine in classical war monuments was complex. On the one hand, they affirmed gendered codes of behaviour and stereotypical roles. On the other hand, some architects and ¹²⁷ Sudney G. Gumpertz (ed.), State Historian, ‘The Spirit of the American Legion’, The Legion Annual: A Compendium (New York: American Legion, 1922–3), 25.


Fig. 3.8 Rayner Hoff, The Crucifixion of Civilization, 1914 (1932).

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sculptors engaged with the themes of war and death in an exciting, ambiguous, and unconventional manner. Flexibility in interpreting classicism allowed these ambiguities. The classical motif channelled social commentary and personal politics without seriously offending commissioners of public works. The Nike figure was a symbol of classical beauty and the continuity of civilization deployed to diffuse the ‘traumatic memory’ of the war embedded in cultural memory. Beauty provided highly gendered evocations of death and renewal as a partnership. War and Peace were naturalized as a marriage of classical figures, as visions of wholeness and restoration, and therefore proposing a traditional gender order in a time of social and bodily fragmentation.

I N C A R N AT I O N S O F ‘ T H E B E AU T I F U L D E A D ’ For a young man all is decorous When he is cut down in battle and torn with the sharp bronze, and lies there dead, and though dead still all that shows about him is beautiful.¹²⁸ King Priam, on seeing Achilles’ corpse · · · · · · · · · · · Achilles stripped away from the shoulder the bloody armour. And the other sons of the Achaians . . . gazed upon the stature and on the imposing beauty of Hector.¹²⁹

One of the most fascinating aspects of the ancient Greek hero cult is the way it functioned in modern commemoration. The classical aesthetic was crucial, since it replaced the brutalized and mutilated with a myth of bodily beauty or serenity. Drawing upon the Homeric tradition of the ‘beautiful dead’, post-war memorials mythologized ‘the fallen’ with an aesthetic that complemented the sentiment of heroic beauty. George Mosse argued that veteran writers later created a ‘myth of the war experience’ that was a nostalgic recreation, valorizing dead comrades, emphasizing positive memories such as male bonding, and minimizing the horror.¹³⁰ Yet this too could be seen within the spectrum of responses to war that reacted within and against the dominant narrative of suffering and victimhood. Classical memorials were, in part, a sanitization of war, but they also incorporated uplifting ancient Greek ideals about the death of a warrior.¹³¹ In the Homeric songs, a warrior’s passage to heroic immortality occurs when he achieves a ‘beautiful death’ (kalos ¹²⁸ King Priam, in Homer, Iliad, trans. R. Lattimore (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961), Book 22, ll. 71–3. ¹²⁹ Ibid. Book 22, ll. 370, 437, 445. ¹³⁰ George Mosse, ‘The Two World Wars and the Myth of the War Experience’, Journal of Contemporary History, 21 (1996), 494. ¹³¹ On the ridicule of war oratory in comedy, see Loraux, The Invention of Athens, 304–5.


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thanatos).¹³² Not a ‘die young and stay pretty’ fantasy, the ideals of noble sacrifice were bound to the beauty of youthful masculinity embedded in the aristocratic conventions of archaic warrior culture, as exemplified in the Iliad. The physical beauty of a young man who died in battle revealed his warrior status, his virtue, and innate goodness. It also bestowed upon him honour and glory, through fame. In the classical period, the idea features in Athenian funeral orations. An ancient Greek war hero was a man whose greatest accomplishments were his deeds in battle. Just as Hector had pleaded ‘let me not die without a struggle, inglorious, but do some big thing first, that men to come shall know of it’, renown became a measure of the warrior’s ‘beautiful death’, which could be recorded in public inscriptions.¹³³ Given that love between men is the highest in the Homeric tradition—and bodily admiration a part of that mutual recognition, even between enemies, such as the Achaians who admired Hector’s body—it is not surprising that men experience the beauty of death binding them together, affirming the gender of death in combat and the beauty of masculinity cut short in its prime. The pursuit of victory, fame, and glory is entwined in the appearance of eternal youth. There are some remarkable convergences with the way the dead were glorified after the First World War. Ambrose Pratt replayed Homeric heroism in his interpretation of the role of the Anzacs in the war in the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance. Like the ‘gallant hosts of Troy’, the Anzacs went to war ‘not in lust of conquest or in hope of gain, but to rectify a wrong, to vindicate outraged justice, to sustain liberty and to safeguard the basic principles of civilization’.¹³⁴ Such glorification of the dead far exceeded the recognition accorded survivors, except perhaps in Australia where returned soldiers were named alongside the dead, a gesture of egalitarianism.¹³⁵ The recording of names upon war memorials—as observed earlier—aggrandized the individual’s commitment to the collective and democratized the ancient concept of noble heroism. Beauty in death was no longer associated with the privileges of wealth, status, and class.¹³⁶ The rank and file were not just sacralized, but socially elevated by the grand gestures of classicism. Classicism also helped to avoid ‘aesthetic embarrassment’, and the public often trusted its architects for their privileged education, expertise, and classical tastes.¹³⁷ Architects and designers had trained in the classical tradition, but speeches at memorial inauguration ceremonies also drew on the Periklean and Christian ¹³² Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘A ‘‘Beautiful Death’’ and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic’, in Froma I. Zeitlin (ed.), Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 50–1. ¹³³ Homer, Iliad, Book 22: 305, 443. ¹³⁴ Ambrose Pratt and John Barnes, The National War Memorial of Victoria: The Shrine of Remembrance—An Interpretative Appreciation (Melbourne: W. D. Joynt, 1934), 9. ¹³⁵ K. S. Inglis and Jock Phillips, ‘War Memorials in Australia and New Zealand: A Comparative Survey’, in John Rickard and Peter Spearritt (eds), Packaging the Past? Public Histories, special issue of Australian Historical Studies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1991), 186. ¹³⁶ Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’, 217–26. ¹³⁷ Sherman, ‘Art, Commerce and Memory’, in Gillis, Commemorations, 191.

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traditions. In his Funeral Oration, Perikles spoke of the emotional man who could not bear the thought of losing his beloved city. Such is the attachment to the city-state, a way of alleviating the pain of loss was to ‘fix your eyes every day on the greatness of Athens as she really is, and . . . become her lover’.¹³⁸ Ambrose Pratt said that the inscription on the Shrine of Remembrance was worthy of Perikles himself. Its classical aesthetic ‘belongs to the Periklean age when the art and architecture and the moral strength of Greece attained splendour beyond comparison’. Periklean sanguinity was a reference point for the design and consecration of modern memorials. Australian classicism inflected both reconstruction and nation building, effacing pain with a sexualized image of the masculine warrior-nation. Ambrose Pratt said that, like Greece, Australia had produced a ‘young and virile nation’ with the same virtues as the ancients and honoured its sons with ‘the most perfect example of classical Grecian architecture the world contains’.¹³⁹ Classically educated war veterans and politicians rediscovered their traditional male education and built a narrative in stone of western progress and entwined it with the purpose of social healing. Perikles had exhorted the people of Athens to ‘let your hearts be lifted up at the thought of the fair fame of the dead’ rather than mourning, a sentiment repeated in memorials.¹⁴⁰ Fame and recognition would alleviate the pain of loss. Australian poet Leon Gellert, writing about the Anzac Memorial, said that ‘Theirs the departure, theirs the fame; Ours the reverence and the wonder’.¹⁴¹ Official attitudes encouraged veterans to glorify their dead friends. Describing the fearless and vigorous character of the Anzac warrior, Elliott Napier in the official Book of the Anzac Memorial, wrote: ‘Let the epitaph, which 2,400 years ago, was written over Athenian soldiers, record its service.’¹⁴² In poetic form, the book locates the origins of Australian nationhood on the battlefield of Gallipoli, echoing official historian C. E. W. Bean’s heroization of the AIF as ancient warriors: These by the Dardanelles laid down their glorious youth In battle, and won great renown for their native land, So that their enemies groaned bearing war’s harvest from the field. But for themselves they raised a memorial that will never die.¹⁴³

The young war dead brought fame and glory to themselves but also to the collective nation. Extending the myth of the Anzac warrior, Prime Minister Hughes, in his speech inaugurating the Anzac Memorial on the banks of the Suez Canal, declared ¹³⁸ Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 149. ¹³⁹ Pratt and Barnes, The National War Memorial of Victoria, 9–10. ¹⁴⁰ Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 150. ¹⁴¹ The Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, New South Wales (Sydney: Anzac Memorial Official Publications, 1930), 2. See Marilyn Lake, ‘The Power of Anzac’, in McKernan and Browne, Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace. ¹⁴² Napier, The Book of the Anzac Memorial, 1. ¹⁴³ Ibid. 32.


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that the narrative of the site ‘tells a story not less enthralling, romantic and wonderful than the Odyssey itself. Surely the most sluggish imagination must be fired by the bare recital of the journeying, adventures and trials of these young warriors’.¹⁴⁴ The use of Greek mythology and heroic idealism complemented the rhetoric of a soldier’s immortality gained by his sacrifice for the nation. The political function of memorials was to maintain a sense of national identity. As Reinhart Kosselleck noted, the constancy of stock classical forms from the time of the French Revolution ‘betrays a common visual signifier of modernity’, especially in relation to the preservation of nation-states. Classical forms negotiated the politics of victory and political education at the same time as responding to specific community needs. Significantly, enemies and the defeated were not represented.¹⁴⁵ If the murderous enemy was present in a community, how could he be forgotten? Moreover, enemies change, new alliances are formed, and memorials are eclipsed as the political landscape changes. The focus of classical war memorials on universal peace and love was to help families and communities move on from their grief. Mourning had its place, but needed to be indulged sparingly in a controlled way in annual commemorative rituals. Institutionalized mourning did help some people to come to terms with the war and, to some extent, to assimilate their deeply personal losses. However, it also enabled governments to absolve themselves of responsibility for the slaughter. Civilian reintegration and rehabilitation were placed in veterans’ own hands. Reconstruction and recovery would be self-generated. No self-respecting warrior would be reliant upon government handouts. Widows, disabled veterans, and ex-serviceman, were thanked, their sacrifice duly noted and ritually honoured in ceremonies, but not, generally, given the financial support they needed to make their lives were bearable. Indeed, the Shrine of Remembrance educated the public in the duties of citizenship, as Ambrose Pratt wrote, ‘to teach us and those who come after how to live—and how to die’.¹⁴⁶ The classical bodies on the Shrine’s friezes and tympanums are idealized, with no signs of war’s violence, despite the unusual reference to 150,000 Victorian ‘men and women’ who served and the 18,000 who did not return, ‘as well as to the unknown thousands more who died at home after years of suffering’, mentioned in the official catalogue.¹⁴⁷ Despite this recognition, death was not tragic or pointless, and youth was not wasted. Classical aesthetics assuaged painful memories of combat and death. As Ambrose Pratt said: ‘It forbids us to forget our valiant dead; but it forbids us to remember them as tragic victims of an inexplicable and dreadful Wrath, cut off from wanton cruelty in the flower of their young strength Life’s purpose unfulfilled.’¹⁴⁸ ¹⁴⁴ ¹⁴⁵ ¹⁴⁶ ¹⁴⁷

William M. Hughes, Anzac Memorial Inauguration Speech, ibid. 83–4. Kosselleck, ‘War Memorials: Identity Formations of the Survivors’, 295, 299, 301. Pratt and Barnes, The National War Memorial of Victoria, 14–15. Ibid. 1. ¹⁴⁸ Ibid. 19.

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As bereavement practices were collectivized, on Armistice Day or at the burial of the Unknown Warrior, the war dead of all classes were no longer dispossessed corpses, as had been the case for some sectors of the lower classes before the war.¹⁴⁹ Now every name, every missing body, was a warrior who had died beautifully and reaped the rewards of renown: ‘Their Name Liveth for Evermore’ etched in stone. Through his attachment to a sacred architectural feature, the glory of the dead warrior was made eternal. The material object both embodied the soldier and enhanced his renown—a significant development of the warrior myth by democratizing the Homeric principle of fame accorded to those who achieve a ‘beautiful death’. The idea of the ‘beautiful death’ was expressed in modern images of soldiers, who appeared to be sleeping rather than dead. War grave cemeteries too were recognized as places ‘Where They Sleep’.¹⁵⁰ From the battlefields of Europe to the Anzac Memorial in Australia, sleeping figures appear on the bas-reliefs and the sculptures on the external walls are posed with bowing heads, making it difficult to tell who is dead, who is sleeping, and who is mourning. The elision is conscious, as the editor of the Anzac Memorial book wrote: Hush thou thy weeping there; They are but sleeping there · · · · · · How our sons fell · · · · · · Theirs is life evermore. Hail them, our Living Dead—Hail!¹⁵¹

Making sense of death meant infusing it with the values of life, the hopes of peace, and faith in the eternal cycle of humanity. The notion of a ‘living dead’—ghosts of the eternally young—which featured in war art and literature—also ameliorated the pain of loss, an irony that may not have comforted the physically and mentally disabled survivors whom heroic discourse excluded. Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’—published in The Times in 1914, and used at the unveiling of the London Cenotaph (1919)—became the Australian Returned Services League’s official ‘Ode’ in 1921 and was learnt by every Australian child to be recited on ANZAC Day. Binyon worked in the British Museum and was a Red Cross orderly in the war. As a mantra, the poem affirmed the ‘beautiful death’ by transforming dead bodies into young immortals: They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.¹⁵² ¹⁴⁹ Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914. ¹⁵⁰ Waters, Crosses of Sacrifice, 113. ¹⁵¹ ‘Ave’, Napier, The Book of the Anzac Memorial, 80. ¹⁵² Laurence Binyon, ‘For the Fallen’, The Times (21 Sept. 1914).


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The Periklean and Homeric values of fame, eternal youth, and beauty were compensations for death in modern war, and classical ideals of beauty appealed to men who had participated in death and destruction. Beautiful things—writes Elaine Scarry—have a forward momentum: inciting us to rediscover and recover them in whatever new things get made. The pliancy or elasticity of beauty—hurtling us forward and back, requiring us to break new ground but obliging us to bridge back not only to the ground we just left but to still earlier, even ancient ground.¹⁵³

As many classical memorials demonstrated, masculine beauty frozen in a timeless vortex offered the fantasy of eternal renewal, and the avoidance of death. Unlike war art, and literature, these effigies disavowed bodily pain. Restful repose was common in figurative memorials, cushioning the reality of death for mourning families. George Lambert’s Recumbent Figure (1930), a sculpture for the St Mary’s Cathedral Memorial in Sydney, is a soldier who lies sleeping, silent and noble, inside a Catholic cathedral. Adapted to Christian purposes, the ‘beautiful death’ is projected from polished bronze surfaces, and the hero shines in demonstration of his warrior status. Lambert intended the figure to be saint-like, in the equally popular medieval style, but he also drew upon the revived currency of the ‘beautiful dead’ to create the impression.¹⁵⁴ Although a bullet has penetrated the young soldier’s chest, his face is nevertheless peaceful. His delicate hands lie gently across his chest and locks of hair tumble carelessly over his forehead. It was, as Australian nationalist painter Arthur Streeton said, executed with ‘the clear, cold beauty one sees in the figures of the Parthenon frieze’.¹⁵⁵ The ‘beautiful death’ was imagined in Edwin Lutyens’ Southampton Memorial (1920) and Manchester Cenotaph, where the dead body is perched so high above that it is almost entirely obscured from view. The face and body may be unidentifiable, but his fame (and those of the 1,800 names inscribed upon the pylon) shall be the reward for the ‘beautiful death’.¹⁵⁶ At Rochdale, Lutyens’ recumbent figure allowed the viewer to ‘appreciate the beauty of the upper portion on which it rests’. The figure was not an end in itself, but a device to connect the beauty of the structure to the memory of the male body. This proved emotionally potent with mourning communities. For Lutyens, the appropriate architectural form for commemorative architecture, was ‘the abstract shape and intrinsic beauty’ of classicism.¹⁵⁷ Lutyens’ use of the phrase ‘the glorious dead’ on many memorials summed up his belief that men who ‘fell’ in war should be ¹⁵³ Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 46. ¹⁵⁴ Graeme Sturgeon, The Development of Australian Sculpture, 1788–1975 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 94. ¹⁵⁵ See Anne Gray, George Lambert’s Drawings, 1873–1930 (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1993), 19. ¹⁵⁶ Boorman, At the Going Down of the Sun, 121. ¹⁵⁷ Christopher Hussey, Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens (London: Country Life, 1950), 375.

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Fig. 3.9 Charles Sargeant Jagger, Royal Artillery Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, 1925. Collection of the author.

memorialized for their beauty and glory. His respect for the classical tradition reflected older visions of war and death. Classical monuments replaced the brutalized and mutilated with a heroic treatment of bodily beauty, and tied it to a myth of serenity important for peacetime recovery. Recumbent figures in poses of the ‘beautiful death’ contrast with explicit effigies of war and military might, such in Charles Sargeant Jagger’s Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner, London (1925). The phallic stone howitzer towers over the robust male figures, as well as the dead Tommy, whose face is covered by his greatcoat (Figs 3.9 and 3.10). Although the greatcoat identified the soldier as serving in the forces, in death it became his shroud.¹⁵⁸ The soldier’s anonymity and the weight of his coat become a solemn representation. A ‘subtle melancholy’ prevails, and yet the figure is entirely depersonalized, as ¹⁵⁸ Catherine Moriarty, ‘Remnants of Patriotism: The Commemorative Representation of the Greatcoat after the First World War’, Oxford Art Journal, 27 (2004), 294.


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Fig. 3.10 Close-up on corpse, Jagger memorial. Collection of author.

death, pain, and injury are dissociated from war.¹⁵⁹ The inscription beneath the corpse refers to the ‘fellowship of death’ whereby the ‘memory is perpetuated’ by the stone so that ‘their glory will abide for ever’. The upright male figures resist the painful memories by reconstructing the dead body. The fusion of severe modern and classical elements demand heroic recovery, disallowing the gloomy view of war. Realism pleased ex-servicemen, but worried some committee members, who felt that it was gruesome. There was considerable resistance by memorial committees to showing a dead body, despite the fact that such figures were common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as tomb sculptures or personal memorials.¹⁶⁰ Death was overshadowed by the muscular, squared bodies—they stand astride in a bold statement of masculine reconstruction. Alongside this mythology of the ‘beautiful dead’ was the reality of living with impairment and disfigurement. Most veterans were not comfortable wearing their facial deformities like ‘badges of honour’, and they often wore scarves or painted masks to protect themselves from pitying stares or to protect the public from the horror of their wounds. In Britain, mutilated men were excluded from ¹⁵⁹ Richard Cork, The Times (12 Nov. 1994).

¹⁶⁰ King, Memorials of the Great War, 135.

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victory parades, although this was ‘the least of many indignities disabled veterans suffered . . . reconstruction condemned the British disabled to a life on the periphery’.¹⁶¹ Memorials thus embodied the dead, eulogized them as beautiful, and then jettisoned any reference to disability or mutilation. This mirrored wider attitudes regarding ‘perfection as normality’ simultaneously pursued in this period, as will be shown in discussions about beauty culture. Significantly, the dual reaction to war was embodied in architecture and commemoration of the ‘beautiful dead’, alongside the pervasive striving for unattainable physical perfection. Classical war memorials revived the ancient notion of ‘the beautiful death’. Soldiers in Britain, the United States, and Australia were depicted as Homeric warriors, given cult status by virtue of their death in battle; they had done their civic duty and distinguished themselves and their countries. This compensatory principle was part of the overarching framework of classicism used to bring comfort to families and healing to survivors through mythology, language, and iconography. M O N U M E N TA L C L A S S I C I S M : H E A L I N G T H E W E S T E R N BO DY Monumental classicism reconstructed the western body by appropriating European and ancient cultural traditions and repackaging the body into an inviolable whole. This served the social function of a ‘healing aesthetic’. Architects and sculptors looked to the classical to restore the body with the nostalgic and utopian assumptions of western cultural supremacy. Philosophically, classicism was a symbol of unity across diverse cultural traditions within Europe, the United States, and dominion nations such as Australia. The hope was to unify warring nations with simple messages of historical continuity and tradition made new. The classical body merged with the western body, and with that manifested visions of wholeness, symmetry, and perfection at precisely the time when so-called ‘warriors’, including disabled and shell-shocked veterans, were attempting to recover from war and to reintegrate into communities. Monumental classicism displaced the recent knowledge of the body as vulnerable flesh when pitched against machines. Instead, the architectural bodies of classicism presented a vision of beauty, minimalist geometry, and restful sleep. The forces of social reconstruction and cultural rebirth charged classicism with the aesthetic task of rebuilding. Monumental classicism conveyed the unity of the western body—and therefore imagined the unity of the west itself—at a time when its nations, its peoples, bodies and minds, were anything but unified or healed. ¹⁶¹ Cohen, The War Come Home, 102.


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Reconstructing the body in war memorials and monuments attempted to turn the war from a tale of horror and corporeal dislocation, into a three-dimensional picture of cultural renewal through classical beauty. In the next chapter, the power of reconstruction discourse will be seen in the spectacular rebuilding of male bodies.

4 The Sexual Reconstruction of Men Modern people are motivated by both a will to change—to transform themselves and their world—and by a terror of disorientation and disintegration, of life falling apart . . . the dread of a world in which all that is solid melts into air. Marshall Berman, 1983.¹

When Europe embarked upon mass industrial war, dread filled the everyday lives of many people. As the war dragged on, hopes for victory evaporated as relentlessly as blood spilled and disillusion mounted. At home, lives fell apart, while bodies rotted in the trenches. Terror became bound to survival in ways that could never have been predicted. For some, emotional suffering became a retreat that buried its victims in repetitive nightmares—a condition later called trauma. Today, haunting stress disorders are accepted as the consequence of modern warfare, alongside totalizing technologies, propaganda machines, and ‘collateral damage’. The view from 1918 was that modern warfare had obliterated the old world; after it nothing could be the same. With its shocking capacity for destruction, total war became a defining feature of modernity. The First World War was soon framed as one of the most trenchant modern experiences, marking most Europeans, Britons, and many from the Commonwealth and the United States. While historians have highlighted the dismembering of war, examining reconstruction presents a different perspective. Emerging from war with deep scars and conflicted memories, people tried to rebuild their lives, reconstitute their societies, and heal their bodies and minds. The First World War may have been defined as the first global ‘modern trauma’, but it was also one of the greatest motivating experiences of the twentieth century. This book has discussed the creative responses to the war; from the body in material culture, it now turns to flesh. While victorious governments carved up Europe and figured out how to punish the vanquished, other questions arose. How was society to be reconstructed? How were soldiers to be reintegrated into civilian life? How could the injured be ¹ My emphasis. All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso Press, 1983), 13.

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rehabilitated? The challenge was to put the past to rest, with its nightmares and ghosts. At the same time, ideals were needed to provide solace and to create a new future. Cultural rebirth looked to models from the past and present giving classicism and modernism a role to play in the cultural politics of post-war reconstruction. Reconstruction sought to redress what Marshall Berman refers to as the ‘terror of disorientation and disintegration’, repeated in violent images and narratives of the war.² The paradox of modernity was that fear of change affected modern revisions of the classical body. Body culture shaped exterior borders, acting as a buttress against the sense of decay and uncertainty which permeated the ‘air’ of modernity, and, yet, was inherently defined by the anxiety against which it reacted. Through the culture of the physique, modernity involved both reconstructive and deconstructive impulses. The ‘dread’ of bodily fragmentation and the dissolution of the ‘masculine self’ underscored the transformation sought by body culturists. Rehabilitating veterans and rebuilding masculine purpose were major problems facing governments, medical practitioners, physical educators and social reformers alike. Since the late nineteenth century, medical and social agents feared masculinity was in crisis. Scholars, too, evoked masculinity in this way, especially due to the war. Men struggled with the gulf between Victorian ideals of military heroism and the unhinging effect of mass, industrial violence.³ Yet, afterwards, security was relocated in home life and intimate relations, which shaped a more conservative national identity in Britain for instance. However, scholars also see ambiguity in responses to war; men travelled back and forth between escapism and domesticity.⁴ This chapter continues with such an approach, focusing on the sexual reconstruction of the male body in Anglophone networks of medicine, leisure, and consumer culture. The diversity of masculinities is highlighted, taking a queer theoretical approach to considering why different men found body culture life enhancing. The First World War placed unprecedented attention on the male body— medical surveillance was built into recruitment, and the social scrutiny of soldiers and men could be disempowering. The poor health standards of recruits were used as evidence that masculinity was in decline, and hence men damaged by war came under even more scrutiny. In Britain, in 1917, the Ministry of ² Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 13. ³ Judith A. Allen, ‘Men Interminably in Crisis? Historians on Masculinity, Sexual Boundaries and Manhood’, Radical History Review, 82 (2002), 191–207; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), 167–94; Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). ⁴ Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991); Martin Francis, ‘The Domestication of the Male? Recent Research on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Masculinity’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 637–52.

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National Service (MNS) conducted a survey into the physical fitness of men of military age to ‘stimulate interest in the vital problem of the health of the Nation’. In 1919, the Medical Department of the MNS was transferred to the Ministry of Pensions, signalling new forms of bureaucratic administration of both able-bodied and disabled men.⁵ Poor physique was seen as ‘a quality’ of ‘race inheritance and environment’. Even though the Committee found no evidence of ‘race degeneration’ on a large scale, it feared ‘the baneful effect of modern conditions of life upon the physique of youths’ and its effect on ‘succeeding generations’.⁶ David Lloyd George launched a media campaign on national fitness, aiming to ‘harness the pursuit of individual fitness to the promotion of national vigour and imperial power’. Countering his own negative depiction of the ‘C3 population’, he proposed an ‘A1 nation’ of fit and healthy men.⁷ Heroic masculinity was a long-standing feature of British national identity, fuelled by imperial fantasies of frontier adventure, and the popular consumption of the ‘pleasure culture of war’, as Graham Dawson argues.⁸ After 1918, the democratization of death, recognized in memorials that sanctified the bodily sacrifice of masses of working-class men, complicated the convention. Reconstruction discourse was inextricably linked to sacrifice, however its ideal of overcoming worked against the view of men as helpless victims of war machines. While the vulnerability of the male body in modern war was exposed, reconstruction proposed new codes of masculinity in returning soldiers to civilian life. Male bodies would become spectacular sites of this physical and social transformation. Considerable overlap already existed between military and civilian ideas about weakness and strength, connecting national fitness to sport and physical culture. Between 1860 and 1920, such practices were used in recruitment, training, and regimental identity.⁹ In wartime, sport was aimed at troop fitness and morale, as well as curtailing boredom or sexual licence.¹⁰ Physical exercise was used in the rehabilitation of the wounded. Disabled soldiers also gave sports displays to raise funds for facilities and reassure the public that they were physically capable and masculine, in keeping with the prevailing rhetoric of ‘overcoming disability’. ⁵ James Galloway, to the Rt. Hon. Sir Auckland Geddes, KCB, MP, President of the Board of Trade, Dec. 1919 (31 Mar.), in Report upon the Physical Examination of Men of Military Age by National Service Medical Boards, 1 (London, 1920). ⁶ ‘The Causes of Low Grading and Rejection’, ibid. 22. ⁷ ‘Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (2006), 595–610. ⁸ Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London and New York, Routledge, 1994), 7. ⁹ C. Veitch, ‘Play up! Play up! And Win the War! Football, the Nation and the First World War 1914–15,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985), 363–78. ¹⁰ J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).


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At Queen Mary’s Convalescent Auxiliary Hospital, postcards were sold to the public with amputees in running races. Disabled soldiers seemed manly when able to exert their bodies in ‘a keen competition’. Far from becoming adversely affected by wounds, military medicine proposed that men were improved. At the King’s Lancashire Military Convalescent Hospital, Colonel Netterton Barron believed that with all the ‘new advances brought by the war, none were more marked than the great impetus which it has given to the treatment of human ills by exercises’. Physical training involved a classical and holistic approach to ‘the care of the body which embraces the care of the soul and mind of man’. The wounded man—no longer dependent on medications or the state—transformed into a philosopher and athlete. The principle of mind–body harmony was the source of renewed inspiration in military rehabilitation. Greek ideals were the seeds of rebirth, not just for the wounded man to become a self-supporting and physically capable individual, but also, crucially, for an entire new civilization built upon masculine beauty and strength. Physical utopia was a dream of military men such as Colonel Barron. ‘Humanity’, he felt, can reach ‘nearer the gods’, creating a ‘far more beautiful country’ than ‘a land of drugs’, and one ‘long ago seen as from a pinnacle by the Greeks, but never yet peopled’.¹¹ Indeed, Australian disabled artist Napier Waller, who painted classical physical utopias (cover image), may have embraced these rehabilitation ideals while being treated in military hospitals in Britain. Sporting methods in rehabilitation were sustained through the Second World War; paraplegics could be made productive and ‘turned into taxpayers’.¹² Alongside military rehabilitation, commercial gymnasiums viewed soldiers as a new market with which to ‘people’ this new civilization. Appropriating reconstruction discourse—sharing similar classical ideas and images—they presented their systems as rebuilding not just soldiers, but all men. Classicism addressed the fear of male disempowerment stirred in visions of dismemberment.¹³ Offered as a practical aid to society, physical culture and bodybuilding was imbued with this classical ‘aesthetics of healing’ for both soldiers and civilians. Against the fragmenting effects of war, modern interpretations of the classical ideals of unity and symmetry produced the belief that men’s bodies could be restored to wholeness. Classicism inspired a degree of hope and security that could be invested into the human body. In ancient Greek culture, muscularity ¹¹ A Description of the Work of the Central Fund on behalf of the Wounded in The King’s Lancashire Military Convalescent Hospital, compiled by Edward Leech, Honorary Secretary (Squire’s Gate, Blackpool, Dec. 1917), 10. ¹² Julie Anderson, ‘ ‘‘Turned into Taxpayers’’: Paraplegia, Rehabilitation and Sport at Stoke Mandeville 1944–1956’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38 (2003), 461–76. ¹³ Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1996).

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had philosophical and symbolic meanings beyond just beauty. Muscles gave physical expression to the idea of unity and wholeness, at the same time revealing the character of one’s soul. Galen’s anatomical philosophizing On the Usefulness of Parts linked each body part with the function of the entire human organism—muscles were intrinsic to selfhood.¹⁴ In the twentieth century, muscular action became firmly associated with masculine identity and the sexual body. In the aftermath of war, muscles came to symbolize the rehabilitation of the whole man, even when he was missing a limb. This became a powerful basis for rebuilding confidence in the male body and masculinity. Rehabilitation asserted the importance of the body by highlighting its visual symbolism. Body industries developed a modern sense of the ‘masculine self ’ in the performance of flexing and releasing muscles. The expanding popular media industries contributed by widening the discussion of the human body and by emphasizing its erotic capacity. In particular, biceps and forearms were showcased. Photography delivered hyperbolic messages of glamorous strength and forceful virility. Muscles were sexualized, and the masculine self became a spectacle of sexuality. However, it was not a benign and predictable result of commercial enterprise or keen marketing. This new muscular sexuality entwined the social task of post-war rehabilitation with the fashioning of the most intimate of subjectivities, at a time when men experienced disability on physical, mental, and social levels. Body culture contrived exacting procedures of observation and measurement that affected men’s self-perceptions. Crucial for masculinity was the way in which the western tradition of muscular identity became a quest for individual agency and social acceptance through sexualized subjectivity. Muscles became markers of men’s rehabilitation and civilian reintegration, showing that the fragmented man could be restored through classical ideals of wholeness. Classical images of masculinity countered the social decay that the brutal war had unleashed. Against the often exaggerated prudishness of Edwardian society, physical culturists offered an alternative to what they painted as a decadent recent past.¹⁵ Liberating the body from excess and instituting regimes of selfcontrol raised the importance of the individual in the ‘will to change’. Recoiling from the fleshiness of Victorian bodies, models of slimness, muscularity, and fitness were upheld. The mass media and commercialism packaged male bodies into social and cultural objects; men became subjects of reconstruction and desire. This chapter argues that reconstruction reoriented men’s bodies towards practices of ‘therapeutic consumption’, entwining sexualized selfhood with the state, medicine, and civilian reintegration. ¹⁴ Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body: The Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 123, 144. ¹⁵ Louis W. Marvick, ‘Aspects of the Fin de Siècle Decadent Paradox’, Clio, 22 (1992), 1–19; George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 77.


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The First World War exacerbated long-held fears of mental and physical degeneration with dramatic visible evidence.¹⁶ Fears of male degeneracy loomed large in nineteenth-century medicine and cultural imaginings, but war turned the focus onto sexual failure and the ‘sexually disabled’. Impotence, as Angus MacLaren shows, would be rehabilitated in consumerist images of virility that insisted on the fulfilment of desire.¹⁷ Body culture offered hope to the degenerate, white, male body, and promised sexual gratification in a spectacle of imagery. Advocates saw the benefits of training as developing a sportsmanlike spirit and creating ‘a new standard of honour’.¹⁸ Masculine honour was deeply disturbed by modern war: malingering, shell shock, venereal blindness, disfigurement, self-inflicted injuries, desertion, and cowardice were seen as exposing the weakness of men’s bodies and minds.¹⁹ Could men retrieve their masculinity by perfecting and sexualizing of their bodies? The transforming motivations of body culture encouraged new typologies of embodiment and elicited pressure to conform to ‘perfection as normality’. Honour could be convened not in terms of duty and sacrifice, as it was in wartime, but rather in survival and pleasure. Sculpting the body with a vision of reconstructing civilization, body culturists aimed to remedy the violence of the recent past, to grieve for its losses, and at the same time celebrate the values of the future and the dynamism of life. The focus upon masculine recovery was central to the discourse. Scholars have noted that the male body was to be rehabilitated through work, which was part of an ‘aggressive normalization’ process.²⁰ Reconstruction was also invested into the male body through leisure, domesticity, and sexuality—but was not simply a response to women’s public visibility. After 1918, the values of male reconstruction pervaded the social and political agenda and were integral to cultural renewal. Building a ‘new civilization’ referenced the distant past and fantasized future, which explains the appeal of classicism to modernists, and vice versa. Classicism, in its modernized style, propelled masculinity from the Victorian past into a technological and sexualized future. Drawing connections and distinctions between the Anglophone and wider European contexts, this chapter considers men’s bodies in rehabilitation and ¹⁶ George Robb, ‘The Way of All Flesh: Degeneration, Eugenics and the Gospel of Free Love’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6 (1996), 600. ¹⁷ Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), 150. ¹⁸ ‘The Spirit of Play’, Health and Physical Culture (1 Nov. 1930), 46. ¹⁹ Bourke, Dismembering the Male; Ted Bogasz, ‘War Neurosis and Cultural Change in England, 1914–1922: The Work of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into Shell-Shock’, Journal of Contemporary History, 24 (1989), 227–56. ²⁰ Deborah Cohen, ‘Will to Work: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany after the First World War’; Jeffrey S. Reznick, ‘Work Therapy and the Disabled British Soldier in Great Britain in the First World War: The Case of Shepherd’s Bush Military Hospital, London’, in David Gerber (ed.), Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 295–321, 185–203; id., ‘Finding Disabled Veterans in History’, Disabled Veterans in History, 1–51.

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physical culture, and the role of the classical and the modern in reframing men’s experiences and imagery. Reconstruction is seen in prosthetic technologies, classical cultures of masculine virility, and in modern art, which furthered the fantasy of the superior male body. It also explores the central contribution of photography to male embodiment, and discusses the role of mass consumption in promoting the sexual reconstruction of men through the modern reconfiguration of the classical ideal.

BU I L D I N G T H E M O D E R N C L A S S I C A L H E RO In the 1920s, body cultures encompassed physical culture, bodybuilding, gymnastics, athletics, and beauty culture. Men were offered classes in boxing, wrestling, gymnastics, classical posing, bodybuilding, and weight training. For women there were Dalcroze eurhythmic exercises, gymnastics, Classical revival dance, archery, and classical posing. As well, weight training and boxing were considered both ‘hardening’ and ‘fashionable’, and office girls were recommended cricket and boxing as ‘serious play’.²¹ The toning and accentuation of muscles reshaped the body in the ‘political anatomy’ of reconstruction. In Britain, Australia, and the United States physical culture schools and gymnasiums had been in commercial operation since the late nineteenth century. Increasingly, they engaged in the cross-cultural transfer of ideas through travel and the mass media. Across Britain, physical culture was promoted by touring vaudeville musclemen, such as the evocatively named Thomas Inch and Charles Atlas, or Eugene Sandow and his successor W. G. Hunt, or former athletic or physical culture champions such as Alfred Danks, Percival Carne, Lionel Stebbings, Georg Hackenschmidt, and W. A. Pullum, as well as eugenic reformers such as Bruce Sutherland, and even former Olympians such as George de Relwyskow. In the 1920s, they established schools and institutes, wrote books, distributed pamphlets, and published magazines, such as T. Bowen Partington’s Health and Strength, in Britain. In the United States, the main schools were Bernarr Macfadden’s College of Physcultopathy in Chicago, the colleges of Arthur Hyson in New York, and those of the German bodybuilder Lionel Strongfort, who advertised regularly in British, American, and Australian magazines. Italian-American Charles Atlas—who won Macfadden’s ‘Most Perfectly Developed Man’ competition in 1921—went on to develop a global business, selling thousands of courses in his ‘Dynamic Tension’ ²¹ ‘Crack Hardy!’, Health and Physical Culture ( July 1930), 5. Malcolm Mackolm, ‘More Play is What We Need’, Health and Physical Culture (Mar. 1930), 26; and the ‘Modern Sports Girl’, who ‘has taken seriously to the punchball’, Health and Physical Culture (Oct. 1930), 32.


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technique.²² Individual weightlifters, such as Earle Leiderman, made names for themselves as teachers and pin-ups. In Australia, body culture schools such as Tom Maguire’s School of Boxing and Physical Culture in Newcastle grew rapidly after the war. In Melbourne there was Meesha Carruthers’ School of Physical Culture; George Beattie’s School; Karl Saxon’s Physical Culture College; and the Weber and Rice School, which published an annual from 1925. In Sydney, Alfred J. Briton’s Physical Culture Institute and Walter J. Withrow’s college circulated monthly publications from the 1920s to the 1940s. In this international industry, schools and individuals borrowed their images, ideas, and marketing strategies from each other. This was due to the success of touring showmen such as Strongfort and Sandow, France’s Apollon, and Canada’s Louis Cyr, and cross-fertilization of techniques and ideals between European and Anglophone networks. This resulted in mutual admiration among sportsmen, strongmen, and body gurus.²³ American models of marketing, pioneered by such entrepreneurs as Bernarr Macfadden, Karl Saxon, Arthur Hyson, and Lionel Strongfort, influenced practices in Australia and Britain. Commercial leaders employed modernist and classical discourses in their strategies to rebuild men, and after the war they had a captive audience. As one Australian ex-serviceman observed: ‘the gym was packed with a seething mass of ‘‘Soldiermanity’’.’²⁴ The new client base comprised of returned soldiers and civilians looking for fitness, comfort, and new ways of representing themselves. Advertisements in ex-servicemen’s magazines addressed returned soldiers with sympathy: ‘you’re probably suffering from shattered nerves, shell shock, general physical weakness?’ Entrepreneurs promised to ‘enabl[e] you to fight the battle of life with confident anticipation’, and to ‘make a new man of you’.²⁵ In Britain and Australia—where the losses of war made a substantial impact— rehabilitation was acutely felt. Even though the United States was only in the war for eighteen months, the American model of the ‘reconstructed man’ was influential in other countries. It was driven by a particular brand of capitalist individualism, linking muscular physique to wealth and self-made success, which appealed to British and Australian men. The physical and emotional effects of the war were discussed at political, medical, and public levels, and rehabilitation discourse permeated post-war culture across the United States, evidenced in ²² Elizabeth Toon and Janet Golden, ‘ ‘‘Live Clean, Think Clean, and Don’t Go to Burlesque Shows’’: Charles Atlas as Health Advisor’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 57 (2002), 39–60. ²³ Earle Leiderman, the American bodybuilder, advertised in Britain’s Health and Strength, such as in 30 June 1928 (p. 685). ²⁴ The Digger (15 Sept. 1918), 1, 7, 3. ²⁵ ‘We’ll Give You Health, Strength, Will Power and Mental Efficiency’: Weber and Rice Health and Strength School advertisement, The Bayonet, 10 (14 Mar. 1919), 23.

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numerous newspaper articles about disabled veterans and pensions.²⁶ The political demands of reconstruction encouraged those in the rehabilitation industries to look beyond their own shores for answers to the global problem of returning veterans. International networks of surgical specialization, medical rehabilitation, and organized voluntary aid to the disabled were also developed in this period. Commercial gymnasiums and rehabilitation shared reconstruction ideals. American business practices and styles were adopted in Britain and Australia. In the global networks of medicine and popular culture, knowledge transfer occurred easily among English-speaking countries. American practices drew upon the discursive tone of rehabilitation therapeutics, similarly emphasizing the reconstruction of the male body, while British and Australian practices, which were more medicalized, were inspired by American industrial strategies. Across these nations, rehabilitation discourses were applied to war injuries as well as the problem of civilian masculinity. Similar critiques of national fitness and striving to build a healthier body appeared in Britain, the United States, and Australia in the same period. Some body culturists worked with doctors or rehabilitation therapists, and shared languages were developed based upon the heroics of rehabilitation, which implicated all men, not just veterans, in the body politics of reconstruction. Commercial rehabilitation emulated medico-military authorities but also supported veterans. In England, John Galsworthy, literary advocate for disabled and wounded soldiers, spoke of the great ‘deeds of restoration’, which maintained the heroic description of self-transformation of the disabled. The terminology of restoration mirrored that of surgical discourse, as discussed in Chapter 2. Rehabilitation institutions and voluntary organizations, such as at Roehampton’s artificial limb centre; St Dunstan’s Hostel for the war-blinded; and the Red Cross Society for the Crippled and Disabled in the United States encouraged heroic ideals. Many servicemen did feel honoured for the sacrifices they had made.²⁷ Others resisted medical impositions or public scrutiny of their bodies, especially the predominant notion of ‘overcoming’ disability, which felt hollow to some groups. As one American disability advocate noted: Rehabilitation accomplishments, while often more imaginative than real, have been an incentive for the speculation of the former serviceman’s prospects . . . No choice of the individual concerned was regarded to be of sufficient importance to warrant a disabled man’s refusal to cooperate.²⁸ ²⁶ Caroline Cox, ‘Invisible Wounds: The American Legion, Shell-Shocked Veterans, and American Society, 1919–1924’, in Mark Micale and Paul Lerner (eds), Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 280–305. ²⁷ Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001), 7. ²⁸ De Witt Law, Soldiers of the D. A. V.: A History of Disabled War Veterans and the American Pension System (Pasadena, Calif.: 1929) (my emphasis).


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Rehabilitation could be overbearing and disempowering. Indeed, the United States Director of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, Douglas McMurtrie, even issued an overtly militarist ‘order to advance’, situating vocational rehabilitation within the same kind of ‘indomitable courage’ that soldiers should demonstrate when facing the obstacles of battle.²⁹ In Britain, heroism was convened around self-transformation, although for some the therapeutic aspect was more appealing. Frederick Watson’s Civilization and the Cripple (1930) invoked classical imagery and ancient therapeutic arts, where ‘at the Asclepion of Cos clinical observation and hygienic treatment’ were said to have ‘healing powers’. Hippocratic philosophies were seen as instituting the system from which civilized medicine had grown.³⁰ Medical rehabilitation did not focus on the male body in the same way as commercial industries, but shared in the discourse of overcoming: the warrior hero cured by his own mental and physical fortitude. The conjoining of medical, voluntary and commercial ventures around physical rehabilitation, vocational retraining and prosthetics ensured many commonalities in the approach to reconstruction internationally. Physical culture was significantly in tune with the discourse of overcoming. Physical culturists and bodybuilders often worked with physicians, and some recruited doctors’ support for their advertising campaigns. Anglophone industry leaders referred to their regimes as ‘modern’ and ‘scientific’. Providing systems of ‘health and strength’, they claimed to be an alternative to allopathic medicine, and yet also called upon medical practitioners to support their claims. Noted wartime physician Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, and co-founder of the New Health Society, was quoted in Britain’s Health and Strength magazine, along with other high-profile practitioners. Hospital surgeons testified to the success of physical culture with post-operative patients. A typical example from an assistant physician declared: ‘I have no hesitation in putting patients needing physical exercise under Mr Hunt’s care, and have watched the beneficial results obtained during treatment.’³¹ Surgeons had long been sending patients to commercial gymnasiums for rehabilitation and ‘curative exercise’. Some physicians believed that the injuries incurred in war did not necessarily require exceptional treatment, which is one reason why disabled soldiers and children were paired in England.³² Although veterans were defined as heroic and exceptional individuals, special treatment for injured soldiers was meant to be temporary, despite extensive lobbying by families and welfare agencies. Although physical culture magazines tended to be self-help oriented, favouring ideas of individual will power and personal commitment to recovery, they also offered advice and dialogue. Health and Strength had a section called ‘Our Consulting Room’, a textual medical space to which people ²⁹ Douglas C. McMurtrie, Reconstructing the Crippled Soldier (New York: Red Cross Institute, 1918), 33–6. ³⁰ Frederick Watson, Civilisation and the Cripple (London: John Bale, 1930), 3. ³¹ W. G. Hunt, ‘Health and Perfect Fitness without Medicine’, Health and Strength (30 June 1928), 691. ³² Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 39, 41, 49–51.

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could take their various ailments. The replies were published, and those requiring further information were requested to send money. Helping yourself was a fundamental principal of post-war reconstruction—it suited medical institutions under pressure, scrutinizing military medics, and governments unwilling to provide adequate pensions. ‘Overcoming’ and self-transformation were intrinsic to the rehabilitation of male bodies and masculinity. The language and imagery associated with the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome took on a new modern purpose in the military and commercial rebuilding of the male body. Appropriating the heroic discourse of official medical rehabilitation, industry leaders also introduced a compelling ideology of physical liberation through the sexual body. They championed muscular sexuality as bodily liberation and the key to overcoming disability. This had obvious benefits to governments keen to keep returned soldiers from emasculating pensions that drained the public purse. The sexual meaning of muscularity became fundamental to the reconstruction of men’s bodies, and this had a wider significance for civilian reintegration, repopulation, and the renewal of society as a whole. This was a new development in the wake of the First World War. Before the sexual reconstruction of men is discussed in detail, it is important to situate this development within the history of the modern body and body consciousness more generally. Since the nineteenth century, modernists had demonstrated a preoccupation with physicality. Harold Segal’s work has shown that disenchantment with elite culture spurred a rejection of tradition, which was associated with feminine weakness. Against the sedentary lifestyle that surrounded high art, modernists admired dynamic action, which they saw in popular pursuits such as sport, gymnastics, and physical culture. This emphasis upon the body originated in nineteenth-century sports and military exercise. The British public school tradition, notions of sportsmanship and ‘fair play’, influenced Pierre de Courbetin, despite its upper-class origins of preparing young men to be leaders in war.³³ Muscular bodies in pure white marble appealed to modernists and nationalists alike—both fantasized about the masculine heroic body. The revival of the Olympic Games was initially a militarist counter-offensive, driven by French defeat in the Prussian War of 1871. After the war, however, de Courbetin became an advocate of sport as diplomacy; competition instead of war, peaceful internationalism instead of nationalism and armed conflict. De Courbetin was not alone in this conversion. By 1918, such a view became popular in many different quarters and included practices designed to turn soldiers into productive civilians. Society and culture were infused with ‘the physical imperative’.³⁴ Transforming the male body into ³³ J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and New York, 1981). ³⁴ Harold B. Segal, Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).


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a sexual one became pivotal to post-war reconstruction. Classicism served a new purpose, distinct from its nationalist, paramilitary origins. Physical culture, gymnastics, and exercise programmes of the nineteenth century were part of a wider health and diet movement in Europe, the United States, and Australia. Christian evangelism, combined with naturalist views about health, included preference for outdoor exercise and restrictive diets. Healthy activity had a significant moral implication, and devotees were exhorted to health in God-fearing language. Increasingly ecclesiastical, the tomes of Victorian physical culture emphasized the interior of the body as a spiritual vessel, a temple of morality and Christian purity. Combining quasi-scientism with religious zealotry, the functions of organs maintained a particular fascination for health cultists. Diet, mastication, digestion, and bowel movements determined the status of the corporeal tabernacle. J. H. Kellogg at his Michigan Sanatorium encouraged the scrutiny of stools.³⁵ As well, travelling strongmen and vaudeville showmen like Eugen Sandow promoted physical culture to sufferers of constipation and indigestion. Internal health—the ‘national marrow’—indicated the strength of the British nation and the social corpus of the Empire.³⁶ Under the probing eye of the microscope, the analysis of bacteria in food protected against the miasma of the interior body, so that colonic irrigation was a method of treatment. Expelling the body of pollutants involved a strident religiosity. Exhortations to temperance, abstinence from food (fat and meat especially), as well as cigarettes, popularized vegetarianism and turned health into a moral creed. The combination of fasting and exercise was seen as the key to American masculinity and was endorsed by ‘apostles of abstinence’.³⁷ In Britain, ‘muscular Christianity’ and imperial masculinity, predicated upon class assumptions of gentlemanly competition, lent character to the external body.³⁸ In the context of military values, the classical warrior furthered the moral codes of the muscular Christian. The First World War generated a shift away from this Christian philosophy. Instead of turning boys into men, war highlighted the frailty of the muscular Christian when pitted against the indiscriminate effects of modern technology. ³⁵ J. H. Kellogg, Plain Facts for Old and Young: Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life (Burlington, Ia.: I. F. Segner, 1888). ³⁶ Eugen Sandow, Life is Movement or the Physical Reconstruction and Regeneration of the People (A Diseaseless World) (Family Encyclopaedia of Health, 1919), 9. ³⁷ R. Marie Griffith, ‘Apostles of Abstinence: Fasting and Masculinity during the Progressive Era’, American Quarterly, 52 (2000), 599–638. ³⁸ Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body in Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978); Donald Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 1880–1910 (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1983); James C. Whorton, Crusaders for the Fit: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); David Faulkner, ‘The Confidence Man: Empire and the Deconstruction of Muscular Christianity in the Mystery of Edwin Drood’, in Donald E. Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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Instead, an anti-Victorian, self-consciously pagan, and phallically charged masculinity was promoted. Enlarged muscles and hard bodies glamorously displayed in gymnasiums, photographs, and magazines, desperately tried to compensate for masculinity’s recent losses.³⁹ Although war strengthened the call for corporeal as much as social and national regeneration, there were conceptual and aesthetic shifts within body culture in the post-war period. Man’s instinctual ability to attack, conquer, and defend seemed compromised by the war, undermining confidence in his capacity to perform, reproduce, and provide. English physical culturists were influenced by French ‘cultures of the abdomen’ and ideas of ‘intestinal fortitude’, and framed their ideas of male prowess through the Nietzschean superman, which valorized the ‘primitive’ energies lying dormant in man, and Darwinian ideas of sexual selection and the male biological basis of warfare.⁴⁰ As well, they valued the fantasy of the forceful and indestructible man.⁴¹ Growth in the bodybuilding industry spurred on the masculine mythology of invulnerability and perfection, envisaged through the imagery of classicism and the dynamics of modernism. The primitive energies of the male body—virility, wildness, and aggression valued by Nietzsche—now appeared no match for modern technological warfare.⁴² Tanks, machine guns, mustard gas, hand grenades, and other developments in projectiles ravaged the flesh of men, destroying masculinity. New versions of the classical ideal rejected Christian morality, reoriented Nietzschean primitivism, and inverted naturism in favour of the urban activities of the gymnasium, the athletic club, and the modern city. The rebirth of civilization could only occur if the dynamism of life was harnessed. Modernity needed to be embraced in order to strengthen humanity for the future. As one body culturist declared, the new masculinity was no ‘product of savagery, but of high civilization’.⁴³ High civilization included a new enthusiasm for technology and the masculinity of engineering, construction, and manufacturing. The body was to be perfected as a technologized object, an ‘ingenious and beautiful piece of mechanism’.⁴⁴ Body cultures embraced reconstruction from a position of both fear and fantasy about machines. War machines destroyed men but they were also important in rehabilitation and prosthetics. Although bodybuilding revealed ³⁹ Jonathon Goldberg, ‘Recalling Totalities: The Mirrored Stages of Arnold Schwarzenegger’, Differences: Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies ( The Phallus Issue), 4 (1992), 175. ⁴⁰ Adrian Del Caro, ‘Dionysian Classicism or Nietzsche’s Appropriation of an Aesthetic Norm’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 50 (1989), 589–605; Christopher E. Forth, ‘Guts and Manhood: The Culture of the Abdomen in Modern France’, in Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier (eds), Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005). ⁴¹ Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996). ⁴² E. Anthony Rotundo, ‘Body and Soul: Changing Ideals of American Middle Class Manhood, 1770–1920’, Journal of Social History, 16 (1984), 32. ⁴³ Porkobidni, ‘Conscious Evolution’, Health and Physical Culture (1 Oct. 1931), 19. ⁴⁴ Madame Lola Montez, ‘The Art of Beauty’, Withrow’s Physical Culture (Mar. 1923), 160.


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deep anxiety about masculinity, it reacted by making the body hypermasculine and sexualized. Susan Bordo suggests the male body should be read through the ‘window of its vulnerabilities rather than the dense armour of its power’.⁴⁵ Furthermore, the vulnerabilities are linked to the search for armour; how they work together is the key to understanding the reconstruction of masculinity through the sexual body. Certainly, body cultures proposed their activities as a solution to the defencelessness of the male body exposed in war. Jack Devaney, an Australian bodybuilder, felt that all the fit men had been ‘mutilated, gassed, killed, or reduced to nervous wrecks’, leaving an entire population of rejects to produce the next generation.⁴⁶ For Devaney, physical culture attended to that problem. Others, such as Walter Withrow, director of the Withrow Athletic Club and Physical Culture Institute in Sydney, envisaged State support for commercial opportunities in the rehabilitation industry, highlighting that although ‘the war has lowered the physical standard of the male sex’, the ‘betterment of the human body’ should be studied. Veteran health implicated all men and ‘the coming generation’.⁴⁷ Physical culture presented the male body as an optimistic conduit for the progress of human civilization. In response to the suffering inflicted by the war, bodybuilding aimed to transform men through hypermasculinity and sexual prowess, increasingly emphasizing exterior image and erotic display. Bernarr Macfadden and Alfred Briton emphasized sex appeal as the key to men’s success with women.⁴⁸ Gertrude Stein observed a shift from masculinity before the war to today, when ‘men have no confidence and so they have to make themselves . . . more beautiful more intriguing more everything’.⁴⁹ Men began to obsess over their fitness and beauty, revealing new vulnerabilities as they were pressured into conformity with new ideals of beauty and sexuality. At the same time, body cultures claimed to be giving them confidence. Masculine sexuality was redefined as a pivotal social force, just as sex was becoming a matter of public discussion. Post-war body cultures embraced a modern attitude towards sex, a significant departure from the conventions of Victorian physical culture and gymnastics, which professed a sanitized and asexual classical body. Appropriated for political and social ends, Graeco-Roman art and architecture inscribed the modern male body with new cultural meanings. Body cultures looked to ancient Greek athletes to connect high civilization and physical superiority. The Greek ideal was invoked in the use of gymnastic treatment for returned ⁴⁵ Susan Bordo, ‘Reading the Male Body’, in Laurence Goldstein (ed.), The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 266. ⁴⁶ Jack Devaney, ‘What Do I Know of Eugenics?’, Health and Physical Culture (May 1930), 54. ⁴⁷ Walter E. Withrow, Withrow’s Physical Culture ( Jan. 1923), 3. ⁴⁸ Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York and London: New York University Press, 1993), 30; ‘I Found my Manhood when I Lost my Girl’, Health and Physical Culture (Apr. 1930), 7. ⁴⁹ Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, quoted in Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh, 129.

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soldiers and was heavily promoted in body culture literature. Gymnastic poses exhibited evolved and civilized bodies, demonstrating agility and symmetry. Emulation of the Discobolos sculpture by Myron inspired an image of modern masculinity based upon athletic ideals. Fred Stancliff—a college discus champion and trainer at the Rice Dieting Institute in Houston—posed as a classical discus thrower for Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine. His body displayed ‘grace, poise and strength’, just like ‘the famous Greek statue’, an exemplary male ‘body beautiful’.⁵⁰ Macfadden suggested that men should build their bodies as ‘an artist paints a picture or a sculptor moulds a statue’.⁵¹ Men would become living art—not static ‘tableaux vivant’, but dynamic bodies modernized by photography—only now wearing skimpy costumes with lighting and ‘packing’ emphasizing the groin. Walter Balmus proudly displayed his muscular self, posed as a Greek statue and a ‘magnificent example of Australian Manhood’.⁵² Posing was not simply emulating statuary; it was modelling masculinity and inspiring men to a heightened sense of embodiment. A modernized and popular culture version of the ancient sculpture Laocoon was turned from aesthetic icon of classical beauty—defined by emotional restraint to the pain of wounds—into a proud self-image of virile hyper-masculinity displayed in bodily strength.⁵³ After his war service, former heavyweight wrestling champion Clarence Weber became director of Weber and Rice Health and Strength College and posed naked as Laocoon in his promotional material (Fig. 4.1).⁵⁴ As a brand logo for Weber’s school, gracing the covers of magazines and programme pamphlets for public demonstrations, Laocoon was emulated but transformed. Weber’s naked combat with a giant python illustrated the triumph of civilization over the primitive world of beasts. Muscular Weber flamboyantly exposed the sexualized power of bodybuilding, its most significant development since the war. This inflated sexual subjectivity was motivated by consumerism, and yet also appears defensive—the inner conflict of man’s struggle with himself. The symbolic (and phallic) python resonates with anxieties about masculine sexuality after war. More than ever, men’s ability to fight, to work, to succeed sexually, to marry, and reproduce was questioned. The essence of heterosexual reproduction appeared to be at stake. With physical rehabilitation wedded to sexual virility, men could rise again, but not before they mastered their bodies and inner beasts. Repression was not the ⁵⁰ Discobolos Pose by Fred Stancliff, Physical Culture (Dec. 1924), 49. ⁵¹ Bernarr Macfadden, ‘Fat, Disease and Death’, Physical Culture (Feb. 1920), 44. ⁵² Walter Balmus, Health and Physical Culture (Nov. 1929). ⁵³ Victor Anthony Rudowski, ‘Lessing Contra Winckelmann’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 44 (1986), 235–43. ⁵⁴ Drawing of Laocoon, based on cover to Clarence Weber, Weber and Rice’s Health and Strength College Annual (Melbourne, 1925). This image was repeated in Withrow’s Physical Culture. Weber also posed naked as Damoxenus (the Boxer), in Weber and Rice’s Health and Strength College Souvenir Programme, Twenty-third Annual Health and Strength Demonstration (Melbourne: Wirth’s Olympia, 26 Mar. 1925).


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Fig. 4.1 Clarence Weber as Laocoon. Cover, Weber and Rice’s Health and Strength College Annual (Melbourne, 1925). Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

solution. Instead, sex and sexual expression, bodies and muscles, were spotlighted as the star quality of male recovery from war. Weber was seen as a fine example of this sexual reconstruction. Although a widower to seven children, he married war widow and mother Ivy Filshie, and had a further three children. She, too, was active in the physical culture movement as a teacher. In 1930, aged just 48, Clarence died of a heart attack, leaving Ivy with eleven children. She entered politics as an Independent, becoming the first woman elected in an Australian general election (1937) on a platform of ‘Mother, Child, Family, Home and Health’. Nevertheless, she believed that married women should only work if their circumstances were desperate. Emphasis on sex was intimately bound to the experience of war, connected not just through increases in sexual opportunity and venereal disease, but also in the cultural imagination. Paul Fussell argued that the language of military attack such as ‘assault, impact, thrust, penetration overlaps with sexual importunity’.⁵⁵ Perceptions of failure shaped the scrutinizing of masculinity, compounding the sense of loss and betrayal. Discussion of male sexual problems appeared in popular and medical texts. Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel’s Impotence in the Male (1927) ⁵⁵ Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 270–309.

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claimed thousands of soldiers were now ‘war-impotent homosexuals’ and that men’s ‘love inadequacy’ had increased to an ‘alarming degree’.⁵⁶ The wheelchairbound husband in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or Nellie’s impotent boyfriend in Helen Zenna Smith’s Women of the Aftermath (1931) also channelled such beliefs. As Lesley Hall has shown, the impotent male was almost always cast as a victim of a war wound. Beyond literary imagination, men’s letters to sexologists and physicians revealed their willingness to seek advice about sexual problems and feelings of inadequacy.⁵⁷ War brought long separations, sexual experimentation, venereal disease, hasty marriages, higher divorce rates, and new challenges for domestic marriage.⁵⁸ New discourses of sexuality and marital intimacy responded to the problems of the male body returning to civilian life. Medical authorities reinforced narratives of castration and impotence. In official quarters, shell-shock patients and war neurotics were almost universally regarded as sexually impotent and unfit for parenthood.⁵⁹ The physically disabled, too, were cast as fragmented and impotent in war literature. Surgeons wrote memoirs describing horrors that turned the stomachs of even the most hardened. American nurse and war novelist Mary Borden drew attention to ‘mangled testicles’. Wounded soldiers were no longer men.⁶⁰ Photography testified to the emasculating effect of war in unsparing detail, for instance in images of genital mutilation. Surgeons described the partial detachment of portions of the penis and the perforation of the scrotum, advising the removal of gangrenous testicles. Photographs of gunshot wounds to flayed buttocks showed the effects of mustard gas infection with accompanying texts explaining the damage done to the rectum and anal canal, and the dangers of infection. Even when healing was complicated by a fractured pubic bone, readers were assured the patient made a ‘good recovery’, while surgeons strained to comprehend and treat serious multiple injuries.⁶¹ Medical photographs demonstrated the dramatic impact of war upon men’s bodies. Wounded soldiers became the subjects of war imagery. In hospital photographs, patients’ faces were included, and their name and rank sometimes appeared in the text, according them the status of distinct individuals.⁶² Horrific ‘before surgery’ photographs contrasted with ‘after’ shots and the labels asserting the patient’s ‘rapid recovery’. Patients were asked to smile when ⁵⁶ Wilhelm Stekel in McLaren, Impotence, 161; Kevin J. Mumford, ‘Lost Manhood Found: Male Sexual Impotence and Victorian Culture in the United States’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 3 (1992), 48. ⁵⁷ Lesley A. Hall, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900–1950 (Cambridge and Chicago: Polity Press/University of Chicago Press, 1991), 114; Mumford, ‘Lost Manhood Found’, 56. ⁵⁸ Kimberly Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 152. ⁵⁹ Shepherd, A War of Nerves, 148. ⁶⁰ Henry Souttar, A Surgeon in Belgium (London, 1915); and Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (London, 1929), in Cohen, The War Come Home, 1, 128. ⁶¹ Basil Hughes and H. Stanley Banks, War Surgery: From Firing Line to Base (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1918), 413. ⁶² Daniel M. Fox and Christopher Lawrence, Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and American Since 1840 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), 52.


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posing for the camera, and many texts maximize the impression of the skill and technological advance of the various surgical methods. Although war was not as ‘good for medicine’ as medics claimed, the idea that new technologies repaired men better than ever was perpetuated by an increasingly impersonal, bureaucratized, and militarized profession.⁶³ Military experience lent legitimacy to the professionalism of doctors and nurses in peacetime. The war had provided an environment in which surgical experiment and specialization could flourish under the auspices of military expediency.⁶⁴ The RAMC, however, had to develop an effective programme for its Medical Officers—especially when inexperienced doctors were expected to act as surgeons.⁶⁵ Orthopaedic surgery and plastic surgery were two specializations that benefited greatly from the violence of modern warfare. Many published accounts assert their contributions to the fields of both military and civil medicine.⁶⁶ Yet, in 1919, a report of an address made by the Director of Orthopaedics in the US government medical services stated that between 75 and 85 per cent ‘of those who came back from the front proved to be cases which needed some kind of surgical repair’.⁶⁷ In some ways, advances could not keep pace with the rate at which scientific and military strategies deployed new ways to maim. Psychiatrists joined the army of medical men who published their findings for professional and lay audiences. In discussions of shell shock as a conflict of ‘incompatible emotions’, Anglo-American psychiatry was ‘indebted to Freud’, but the model of sexuality as the basis of neurosis was overwhelmingly rejected in the case of soldiers.⁶⁸ Nevertheless, the emotional interpretation allowed sexuality and gender to be conflated. Since the nineteenth century, psychiatrists and sexologists diagnosed sexual inversion in patients whose gendered behaviour was deviant, such as the masculine New Woman or the feminine Dandy.⁶⁹ Military psychiatry rarely turned its attention to the sexuality of the soldier, but when it did it followed these same patterns. Military psychiatrist David Eder diagnosed one soldier as ‘ambisexual’. The ambiguity lay not in his sexual preference, but rather in the fact that he cried ⁶³ Roger Cooter, ‘War and Modern Medicine’, in W. F. Bynam and Roy Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, 2 vols. (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), ii. 1537. ⁶⁴ Mark Harrison, ‘Medicine and the Management of Modern Warfare: An Introduction’, in Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison, and Steve Sturdy (eds), Medicine and Modern Warfare (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 6. ⁶⁵ Ian R. Whitehead, ‘The British Medical Officer on the Western Front: The Training of Doctors of War’, ibid. 163–84. ⁶⁶ Cooter, Surgery and Society in Peace and War: Orthopaedics and the Organization of Modern Medicine, 1880–1948 (London: Macmillan, 1993). ⁶⁷ A. Mackenzie Forbes, Reconstructive Surgery in Peace: Based on Orthopaedic Surgery in War (Philadelphia, Pa.: Medical Council, 1919), 5. ⁶⁸ Foster Kennedy (MD, FRS (Edin.)), ‘On the Nature of Nervousness in Soldiers’, War Medicine (Paris: American Red Cross Society, 1918), 30. ⁶⁹ McLaren, ‘ ‘‘Perverts’’: Mannish Women, Effeminate Men and the Sex Doctors’, Twentieth Century Sexuality (London: Blackwell, 1999); Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870–1936’, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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excessively, exhibiting the ‘timid emotionalism one would normally find in a woman’. Eder, unable to understand the soldier’s need to shed tears, concluded the patient wished to become a woman, since the unconscious, repressed female displayed fears greater than any woman.⁷⁰ Alongside gender pathology, the soldier’s body was aberrantly sexed, as though in a state of flux and ‘embodied transition’—neither male nor female.⁷¹ Ardent defenders of normative military manhood found it hard to digest the impact of war on sexuality. Colonel Frederick Mott denied the existence of sexual disorders in military men. Nevertheless, colourful perversions were sensationally implied. Feeling ‘disgusted’ by his patient’s sexual fantasies, Mott declared he could not even describe them in print.⁷² Despite Mott’s abhorrence, or feigned suppression, he made the lurid suggestion that the patient was disturbed by the smell of putrefying corpses. Sex and death caused fear amongst medical and military men. While psychiatrists used soldier sexuality to impugn gender transgression and emphasize heteronormative masculinity, the erotic response to the condition of war was a factor impossible to ignore. Soon both soldier and civilian were implicated. Just as psychoanalysis inaugurated new ways of thinking, acting, and governing, grounded in diagnosis and intervention, the institutions of medical rehabilitation and commercial body culture gained a new ‘therapeutic authority’.⁷³ In the United States, body cultures concurred with policies that positioned veterans as ‘consumer-civilians’, countering their image as a violent, social threat, especially given the public visibility of protests, civil unrest, and socialist agitation, which were represented in the press. At a time when American women were being urged to marry returned servicemen—to counter the potential for male violence and Bolshevism—and the role of the ‘civilian male protector’ was being re-imagined, body cultures offered a therapeutic space where men’s restlessness could be channelled into their sexual bodies, and where consumption benefited the individual and the society.⁷⁴ Joining the hospital and the clinic as a therapeutic institution, gymnasiums often appropriated military medical thinking, aligning with discourses of reconstruction. However, its therapeutic authority was bound to consumption and the idea of individual free will—the desire to overcome injury and inadequacy—creating desire to transform the self, reinforcing official belief that rehabilitation should be self-generated rather than reliant upon government assistance. Commercial body culture tuned in to these discourses, creating an ⁷⁰ Montague David Eder, War Shock: The Psycho-Neuroses in War Psychology and Treatment (London: Heinemann, 1917), 95. ⁷¹ Jay Prosser, Second Skin: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). ⁷² Frederick Mott, War Neuroses and Shell Shock (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919), 113, 125. ⁷³ Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, ‘On Therapeutic Authority: Psychoanalytic Expertise under Advanced Liberalism’, History of the Human Sciences, 7 (1994), 29–31. ⁷⁴ Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, 173, 155.


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enterprise that, first, played up the war as emasculating and, second, transformed pathological masculinity into sexual heroism. Supremely sexual displays of bodybuilding often masked defence. Lifting weights may have helped men develop a massive set of muscles, but the genitals were still vulnerable to injury. The ‘pal’—supportive underwear—helped an athlete to ‘protect [his] danger zone’.⁷⁵ Masculine bodies required shielding in a period marked by fears of castration and loss as a result of mechanized warfare, when no mere mortal could defend the epicentre of manhood. Physical status delivered a gamut of information, not only mental, but also about class, race, nationality, as well as ability and personality. Muscular fitness mirrored the mind and soul, offering an account of masculine character. Fat men were seen as unintelligent and cowardly. In the United States, ‘a fat man cannot fight, and in every sphere of endeavour a fighter is needed’; in Australia men were told ‘flabbiness is deplorable’.⁷⁶ Able neither to flee nor fight, fat men’s inert state rendered them unmanly.⁷⁷ Worse still, fat men were sometimes constructed as bad lovers, with no sex appeal to women. Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine boasted ‘the Regeneration of a Big Slob’, and in his True Story asserted that no woman wanted a ‘fat boob’, the latter term implying effeminacy.⁷⁸ Another physical culturist confessed he was ridiculed for being fat. Unable to fight a larger, more muscular man trying to ‘win’ the affections of his girlfriend, he was taunted as ‘old bulgy’, as his muscular suitor reduced him to ‘a mass of quivering nerves’.⁷⁹ Connection between muscles and nerves was commonly used in advertising literature to imply that men without muscles were not only mentally suspect but also effeminate. While this judgement echoed nineteenth-century notions of male degeneracy, the focus on the virile aspect of enlarged musculature was a development in post-war body culture discourse. There was a new dimension to the sexual demands and expectations of men. More than ever, men were pressured to be more sexual, and impotence or effeminacy was equated with mental instability or homosexuality.⁸⁰ Against the Victorian imperial vision of war as a ‘baptism of fire’ for manhood, bodybuilding magazines exposed total war as a process of emasculation.⁸¹ Photographic images of returned soldiers in rehabilitation exposed the emasculating effects of injury by modern technologies. Following the photographic style of clinical medicine, ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots demonstrated the curative effects of ⁷⁵ Advertisement for ‘Pal’ supportive underwear, in (Vivid) Health and Physical Culture (Dec. 1929), 27. ⁷⁶ Macfadden, ‘Fat, Disease and Death’, 44; Withrow’s Physical Culture (Mar. 1923), 117. ⁷⁷ ‘The Ideal of Symmetry’, Withrow’s Physical Culture ( Jan. 1923), 15. ⁷⁸ White, The First Sexual Revolution, 30. ⁷⁹ Jason Onslow Pettingill, ‘What the Physical Culture Magazines Did for Me: How Love and Happiness Came to One who was but a Mockery of a Man’, Vanity Fair (Mar. 1926), 122. ⁸⁰ White, The First Sexual Revolution, 65. ⁸¹ Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 74.

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bodybuilding on male enfeeblement. Initially described as a ‘cot case’ with enteric fever, Walter Withrow’s student, O. W. Dunning of the Australian Infantry Forces was transformed by bodybuilding. The photographs provide evidence of his transition to manhood and the restoration of his masculinity.⁸² At the same time, the ‘before’ photographs of wounded soldiers affirmed the vision of them as wrecked men, emaciated flops. These images countered the mythology of the warrior hero or stalwart Anzac, a powerful stereotype promulgated in the epic retelling of the Australian man at war by C. E. W. Bean. Much hero-making literature appropriated the Trojan War and the ancient Greek model of Homer’s Iliad for nationalist ends.⁸³ The Anzacs were heroes who in a myth of origins provided the seed and ‘gave birth’ to the Australian nation.⁸⁴ In Britain, too, the ‘warrior nation’ was displayed in heroic tales and manufactured images of soldiers at war, such as produced in Mons, a reconstruction of exciting battle action on film.⁸⁵ One of the remarkable aspects of body culture was that the sexual appeal and prowess of men were both queried and upheld in its literature, attesting to the dynamic link between the vulnerabilities and the ‘armour’ that codes of masculinity provided.⁸⁶ On the one hand, bodybuilding drew upon government, media, and medical assertions that men’s bodies had been divested of their masculinity. On the other hand, rather than reiterating the image of the socially and sexually impotent war veteran, classical bodies were employed to shore up men’s confidence in masculinity. Here, the modern collided with the classical. Instead of seeing the modern as bodily fragmentation, it merged with the classical image of wholeness. Men could be made whole through the sexual healing of embodied masculinity. Bodybuilding made a striking adjustment to the ruptures of modernity and warfare. Chapter 2 discussed the male ‘war-wreck’, his body fragmented by modern weaponry, as a cultural trope of the First World War. Testimonials in bodybuilding magazines drew upon these metaphors, while vouching for the transformation from pieces to whole. When Dr Joseph Stashak, an American soldier and doctor, proclaimed he was ‘Shot to Pieces in the World War’, he announced his experience of physical pain through the available language of fragmentation. At the same time, he delivered a message of self-reconstruction through the development of muscles. After suffering shrapnel and gas wounds, he attended the bodybuilding school of Lionel Strongfort in Newark. Wearing just his underwear, Stashak ⁸² J. R. Davies of NZ, ‘The Glory of Man is Strength’, Health and Physical Culture (Apr. 1930), 23. ⁸³ Robin Gerster, Big Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing (Carlton, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987). ⁸⁴ Marilyn Lake, ‘Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation—Gender and other Seminal Acts’, Gender and History, 4 (1992), 305–22. ⁸⁵ Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000), 152. ⁸⁶ Bordo, ‘Reading the Male Body’, 266.


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Fig. 4.2 Lionel Strongfort Advertisement. ‘Shot to Pieces in the World War’, Physical Culture ( July 1924), 4.

posed with his biceps flexed and chest puffed out (Fig. 4.2). Summoning the ‘therapeutic authority’ of the medical profession, the accompanying text declared his transformation into a ‘truly extraordinary expression of American manhood’, and a ‘marvel of physical ascendancy’.⁸⁷ Enlarged biceps restored his shattered body to wholeness. Although the war did not have the same impact in the United States as in Britain and Australia, bodybuilders nevertheless drew upon reconstruction discourse in their marketing strategies. Redeemed from wounding, Joseph Stashak reclaimed his masculinity. His robust body verified the modern act of transformation from pieces to whole, from wounded to healed. Moreover, his rebuilt body symbolized transition from total war to peace and prosperity. Body culture literature was filled with photographs and stories by and about returned soldiers, promoting a mixture of self-criticism and self-confidence. Six years after the close of the war, its spectre still looming, bodybuilders continued to reflect upon their lives, ridiculing their own masculinity. Jason Pettingill constructed his narrative of transformation from a confessional of masculine ‘mockery’ into a man whose rebuilt body found him happiness in marriage. Just as military psychiatrists David Eder and Frederick Mott feminized soldiers who ⁸⁷ Lionel Strongfort advertisement, ‘Shot to Pieces in the World War’, Physical Culture ( July 1924), 4.

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experienced fear, ex-servicemen incorporated similar views in their self-analysis: Pettingill described his fears of fighting and the sight of blood as effeminacy.⁸⁸ While masculinity was conceived in militarist terms and as a function of the male body, bodybuilding provided a familiar apparatus, technique, and ideology by which manhood could be recovered. Connecting this physical change to an improved chance of marriage, and by implication sexual appeal, affirmed the role of bodybuilding in transforming the undeveloped ‘soldier boy’ into a virile post-war man.⁸⁹ To men affected by the war, body culturists promised to revive the inner warrior in a civilian environment: ‘You’ll see a different man! . . . A big, strapping, handsome fellow who looks as if he is fit for anything—ready to go out and conquer the world.’⁹⁰ Courage was connected to an ‘erect attitude’ that delivered personal pride. Body culture ‘eliminated fear. You feel master of every situation . . . It helps to bring the mental attitude associated with courage’.⁹¹ Charles Atlas embodied the principles of Darwinian ideas of sexual selection and the biological basis of warfare; women were the spoils.⁹² Despite the failures of men in industrial war, compensation could still be gained through sexual competition. These were compelling ideas of masculine empowerment through sexual success. This shifting focus in the literature, from degraded to resuscitated masculinity, was edged with defensiveness. Discourses of sacrifice, compulsion, and will, deployed the heroic propaganda of war that sanctified male loss. Masochistic selfsacrifice conflated the symbol of Christ with the eulogized soldier-poet Rupert Brooke, symbol of classical masculinity. Adrian Caesar speculates that Siegfried Sassoon’s internalized self-loathing about his sexuality motivated his audacious heroism as a masculine and heteronormalizing performance.⁹³ In Germany, one volunteer exclaimed: ‘Now we are made sacred’ and analogized sacrifice in war to the Passion and resurrection of Christ.⁹⁴ Conflations of bodily degeneration and beauty in war monuments, such as Rayner Hoff’s Sacrifice, confirm that representations of sacrifice and transformation permeated wartime and post-war culture. In Australian war-disabled artist Napier Waller’s physical utopia (book cover), the eroticized, muscular heroes are constructing a building reminiscent of a Christian cross. ⁸⁸ Pettingill, ‘What the Physical Culture Magazines Did For Me’, 62. ⁸⁹ Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Soldiers Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women and the Great War’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 8 (1983), 422–50. ⁹⁰ Alfred J. Briton, ‘A New Body For You’, advertisement in Health and Physical Culture (1 Nov. 1930), 57. ⁹¹ Bernarr Macfadden, ‘Fat, Disease and Death’, Physical Culture (Feb. 1920), 43, 1; ibid. ( Jan. 1920), 14. ⁹² John Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 313. ⁹³ Adrian Caesar, Taking it Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets (Manchester: Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1993), 32. ⁹⁴ Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 74.


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While some soldiers internalized representations through feelings of defeat and recovery, bodybuilding played upon the idea of resurrection, engaging a similar aspect of masochistic loss in attempts to restructure the male body after the war. As one returned soldier explained, the war had made him feel negatively towards himself, as ‘a man who grovelled face to face with failure. I was cheek by jowl with despair . . . I seemed to be but a part of my former self ’. His fragmented identity was attributed to the war, since ‘a man couldn’t go through what most of us went through and come out unscathed’. Magazine stories and advertisements, he claimed, encouraged him to take up a programme of physical culture, enabling him to become ‘robust, dominant and self-confident’.⁹⁵ New confidence in his body seemed to repair much of his damaged self-image. Heroic stories of degeneration and repair were common, and classicism was used to connect the image of the new masculine self with a stable historical model. Classical models restored certainty and timelessness in a period of great social and economic flux. In Australia, the bodybuilder Alfred Briton argued that these classical bodies promoted the spirit of the Anzac. His gymnasium, like many throughout Britain and the United States, took up the charge to create new urban heroes—men of capital, progress, and civilization. Gymnasium proprietors recognized the war’s psychological and physical effects, which could be ‘overcome’ by will, discipline, and masculine role models. Sculpting a new classical hero began on the battlefield and continued in the gymnasium. Instead of training warriors, gymnasiums designed similar medical programmes for rebuilding the muscularity of injured soldiers and demonstrating masculine restoration. Such was the appeal of fitness mania and the gender affirmation achieved in displaying ‘overcoming’, that when ‘Instructor Judd’ was seen ‘tearing the muscle fibres in his neck’, in front of his ‘band of clever pupils’, he was praised for his ‘Spartan effort’ in continuing ‘the show’.⁹⁶ Images of injury and transformation appeared in rehabilitation publications, pamphlets for hospital fund raising, and media stories reporting successes. The role of exercises and sports in rebuilding male bodies was a central focus. At Croydon Hospital, Colonel Deane designed body-strengthening exercises for the wounded. He deployed the ‘before and after’ photographic strategy used in medicine and bodybuilding imagery. In Figure 4.3, soldiers with severe shoulder wounds and scarring rehabilitate by exercises on parallel bars, strengthening the upper torso and biceps. After one month’s gymnastic treatment, a patient with total paralysis of his left arm could support his weight in an acrobatic back flip, photographed for public display. Diagnosed with paralysis, another soldier wounded in the arm, showed improved condition by his ability to throw wooden pins. Acrobatics and gymnastic flexibility signalled patient recovery. Images of transformation represented a very different vision from that of disabled soldiers ⁹⁵ ‘I Saw Failure Ahead’, Health and Physical Culture (Aug. 1929), 24, 27. (my emphasis). ⁹⁶ The Digger (15 Sept. 1918), 1, 7, 3.

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Fig. 4.3 Wounded soldiers demonstrating rehabilitation exercises. In Colonel H. Deane, Gymnastic Treatment for Joint and Muscle Disabilities (London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton, 1918). Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

as cripples, schoolboys, or efficient workers, published in the typical fundraising propaganda such as for Shepherd’s Bush Military Hospital.⁹⁷ Instead of infantilizing men, the dominant message was strength and agility. Colonel Deane’s programme at the Croydon Hospital aimed not only to rebuild strength but also to diminish the very notion of disability. Disability, he said, was merely a ‘psychogenic’ idea, affirmed by overly sympathetic women.⁹⁸ Deane shared Freud’s view that overly attentive mothers helped to create sex repression in their children. Hence Freud did not support Marion Piddington’s idea of artificial insemination for war widows in Australia.⁹⁹ American behaviourist John Watson argued that ‘too much mother love’ could turn a normal child into a whining, dependent, ‘mummy’s boy’.¹⁰⁰ In military and rehabilitation ⁹⁷ Seth Koven, ‘Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children, Wounded Soldiers and the Great War in Britain’, American Historical Review, 99 (1994), 1167–202. ⁹⁸ H. Deane, Gymnastic Treatment for Joint and Muscle Disabilities (London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), 25. ⁹⁹ Diane Wyndham, Eugenics in Australia: Striving for National Fitness (London: Galton Institute, 2003), 80. ¹⁰⁰ Peter N. Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), 86.


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culture, at a time when men were breaking down from shell shock, this was amplified. Deane banned nurses from the wards, believing their nurturing femininity jeopardized men’s recovery. Physical health was closely entwined with the mental factors that sustained masculine integrity. A man’s will—and his attitude—were central to his ability to ‘accept’ treatment and be ‘cured’ of disability. Prosthetics expert Muirhead Little agreed with Deane, stating that ‘the temperament of the patient is almost more important than the stump—some men will try, others lack grit and perseverance’.¹⁰¹ Ironically, Deane’s notion of men’s ‘acceptance’ still placed them in a passive position. Instruction from another man was far less detrimental than the influence of women. Deane declared that gymnastics stimulated man’s power and will to action, ‘which has been inevitably weakened by the stress through which he has passed’. Fired up by the pressure to ‘overcome’, one soldier’s improvement within six weeks of injury was attributed to his ‘keenness on getting better’, to the extent that some patients tried to prove their masculinity by tolerating painful and risky treatments.¹⁰² Attitudes were critical in the battle to rebuild the masculine body. Physical exercise was a measure of masculinity and rehabilitation was regarded as virtuous work. Recovery was a passage from practising feminine handicrafts to manly labour, such as the curative or occupational therapies offered in most military hospitals and at facilities such as Lord Roberts’ Memorial Workshops, Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital (Washington, DC), and Caulfield Hospital (Melbourne).¹⁰³ Instead of social usefulness, Deane emphasized physical effort and masculine will. Victorian militarist ideas continued in military medicine and popular forms of rehabilitation, but with a new emphasis upon body consciousness and display. Deane’s rehabilitation techniques combined physical culture, Swedish gymnastics, and medical gymnastics, originally designed by Per Ling in Sweden in the early nineteenth century. In England, Edgar Cyriax developed this into a system called mechano-therapeutics, which was an early form of physiotherapy including massage, manipulation, and electrotherapy.¹⁰⁴ Cyriax trained as a doctor at Edinburgh University and worked in military hospitals in Sweden, Belgium, and England, perfecting his method into military aid for soldiers with post-operative problems. The Swedish War Hospital was an Officers’ Hospital and 40 per cent of the cases were treated with mechano-therapeutics. Cyriax was widely respected amongst military surgeons and published many articles on soldiers’ ailments. ¹⁰¹ E. Muirhead Little, Artificial Limbs and Amputation Stumps: A Practical Handbook (London: H. K. Lewis and Co., 1922), 260. ¹⁰² Deane, Gymnastic Treatment for Joint and Muscle Disabilities, 34, 102. ¹⁰³ Jeffrey Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2004), 178–9. ¹⁰⁴ Edgar Cyriax and A. Kellgren, ‘Manual Treatment of the Abdominal Sympathetic: The Invention of the Swedish School of Mechanotherapy, not of the Osteopaths’, Collected Papers on Mechano-Therapeutics (London: John Bale, 1924), 90–3.

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Cyriax treated soldiers with multiple gunshot wounds; broken spinal columns; vertebrae injuries; rheumatic fever and muscle spasms; respiratory disorders including mustard gas poisoning; groin and abdomen wounds; amputations; and nervous disorders including neurasthenia and hysteria. He practised a typically detached form of military medicine, which tended to disguise difficulties of living with injury and chronic pain by focusing on the transformation from illness to recovery. Mechano-therapy involved active movements where the patient exercised and stretched muscles, or passive movements, which were applied to the body by nerve friction, massage, manipulation, or electrotherapy. In his work at the Swedish War Hospital, Cyriax said that signs of healing could be seen within twenty-four hours of treatment. Scars were freed from contractions or adhesions, so that the original contour of the body was accurately reproduced, functional movements completely restored and, most importantly, muscle power preserved.¹⁰⁵ Such rapid response seems remarkable, considering that 61 per cent of injured veterans died in hospitals within two months of repatriation.¹⁰⁶ One of Cyriax’s patients was a soldier shot in the head in December 1914. Although it was three weeks before he was operated upon, he was speedily returned to the front within eight weeks of having the shrapnel removed. The following year, the same private was shot in the shoulder, wrist, and hand. He was returned to the front within four months. A year later he was buried up to his neck by a bursting shell. When he was rescued after fourteen hours he could not walk; suffered breathing complications; back, neck, and head pain; headaches; tinnitus; and memory loss. By the time he was discharged from the British Army, he had major pain problems associated with his multiple injuries, not to mention the complication of amputated toes. Understandably, the patient also suffered from neurasthenia. Cyriax explains how mechano-therapeutics dramatically improved his condition. Within four months, he could sleep and walk again, had no pain or tinnitus, and no tremors. Evidence of his cure was that he now had the strength to carry boxes on his head, ‘his ordinary method of carrying weighty packages before enlisting’.¹⁰⁷ In other cases, the successful recovery of wounded soldiers was measured by the ability to hold up weights for a period of time. Cyriax also pioneered the use of mechano-therapeutics on septic wounds. In one case, he recorded that after suddenly jerking the bone of a septic hand wound, ‘not the slightest pain was caused by this proceeding, and the immediate result was that there ensued great amelioration in the pain and tenderness’.¹⁰⁸ Remedial massage, however, was ¹⁰⁵ Cyriax, ‘Report on the Mechano-Therapeutic Department of the Swedish War Hospital from September 1916 to January 1919’, ibid. 444. ¹⁰⁶ Gerber, Disabled Veterans in History, 2. ¹⁰⁷ Cyriax, ‘Case of Cervical Vertebra after Treatment by Mechano-Therapeutics’, Collected Papers, 176–7. ¹⁰⁸ Id., ‘Treatment of Septic Warfare Wounds’, Collected Papers, 438, 433.


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quite controversial when pain endurance was part of the treatment aimed at remasculinizing patients.¹⁰⁹ The ‘before and after’ method of case studies was a common narrative structure, seen in war surgery, psychiatric medicine, medical gymnastics, and body cultures in this period. Case studies inscribed documentary techniques that, although mapping an individual’s treatment and behaviour, nevertheless constituted an impersonal dossier.¹¹⁰ While the recovery of patients was no less remarkable, it is striking that both medical and commercial practices of rehabilitation shared similar discursive techniques of assessment and assurance. Networks between military and popular medicine delineated formal structures, and yet discourses were allied in practice and ideological structure. One important thread linking these ‘institutions’ was the study of, and admiration for, fit bodies. Proponents of physical culture, Swedish gymnastics, and rehabilitation appropriated classical bodies in their practices. Studying the movements of gymnasts, acrobats, and dancers, Colonel Deane applied their rhythms to the treatment of injured soldiers. Across the Channel at this time, a French veteran invalided out of the war also began to study acrobats and circus gymnasts. Fernand Léger, one of France’s leading modernists, depicted the gymnast as a warrior, fitted with a technological body and intricate articulations. In depictions such as Acrobats in the Circus (1918), the theatre of war transformed gymnastic bodies into armour-plated machines. They appeared as physical modernists, as much as exemplars of rehabilitation, demonstrating flexibility, muscularity, and kinaesthetic energy. Pulsating with life, their muscular agility imbued them with heroic qualities. The gymnast was at once modern and classical, a warrior of technological beauty. Fit male bodies symbolized modernism and post-war rehabilitation. In Australia, the YMCA held gymnastic competitions and public demonstrations. At the 1923 demonstration at Wirth’s Park in Melbourne, 200 gymnasts enrolled. Emulating both classical poses and machine dynamics, participants were seen as ‘men of muscle’ in ‘a maze of mass movements’. The programme proudly declared them, ‘Melbourne’s Marvellous Marbles in statuesque Greek poses’.¹¹¹ Posing and movement together made a powerful exhibition of masculine recovery. Life imitating art and art imitating life. Artistry and technology in gymnastics attracted men as well as the coming generation. In England, Thomas McDowell, a school sports master and member of the Institute of Hygiene and Fellow of the British Association of Physical ¹⁰⁹ Ana Carden-Coyne, ‘Painful Bodies and Brutal Women: Remedial Massage, Gender Relations and Cultural Agency in Military Hospitals, 1914–1918’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 1 (2008), 139–58. ¹¹⁰ John Forrester, ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’, History of the Human Sciences, 9 (1996), 11. ¹¹¹ Official Souvenir Programme of the First Annual Gymnastic Circus (Melbourne: Wirth’s Park/Hilton Press, 13 Oct. 1923).

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Training, considered gymnastics important for returning men to the workforce, training office workers and young boys in fitness.¹¹² Classical posing demonstrated the body–mind equilibrium; however, war technology also inspired. McDowell designed exercises replicating the mechanism and movement of tanks. Two ‘tank boys’ gripped hands and rolled over each other in a circular body motion. Tank technology informed models of masculinity for young boys. The tank pervaded public discourse, newspaper articles and cartoons, novels and popular literature, and generated a fantasy about a future machine culture in which humans would be replaced. Trudi Tate writes: the tank ‘promises new kinds of agency and displaces the human subject from the narratives of war’.¹¹³ Mimicking tank positions in gymnastic movement proposed man and machine in a symbiotic relationship, promising new forms of masculine power and transforming traditional drill and school athletics.¹¹⁴ Arguably, training young boys to imitate the tank helped to domesticate technologies that fathers had met on the battlefield. Boys may have been thrilled by these games, acting out the ‘pleasure culture of war’. Physiotherapy and popular leisure cultures both divided exercises and movements into active and passive. The Tank position was regarded as an active movement, despite the fact that it required two boys to act upon each other, an inaccurate appropriation of Swedish medical gymnastics. Strikingly, commercial gymnasiums borrowed from the techniques of rehabilitation medicine, and yet set themselves apart from the military hospital and its disciplinary therapies. Jeffrey Reznick has shown that soldiers often felt military rehabilitation was like being ‘processed by a medical machine’. Recovery was institutionalized and disciplined; men were required to be efficient even in healing wounds, and this tended to ‘undercut their sense of heroism and masculinity’.¹¹⁵ By contrast, the gymnasium bolstered masculinity because its disciplinary regimes were subsumed under the rubric of an alternative community, one where men were free to develop themselves as individuals. Crucially, muscular heroism in the commercial sector was voluntary, and positioned as a matter of personal benefit and pleasure, rather than duty to the military unit or the nation. Far from the ‘war machine’, the gymnasium was a communal, male space, and, arguably, an alternative to the civilian family.¹¹⁶ It was a space where fantasies of male empowerment were encouraged, as soldier and citizen merged into one masculine supermodel. The bonded male environment that the gymnasium ¹¹² Thomas McDowell, Gymnastic Movement (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 7–8. ¹¹³ Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 145. ¹¹⁴ David Kirk, Schooling Bodies: School Practices and Public Discourse, 1880–1950 (London and Washington, DC: Leicester University Press, 1998); Mark Connellan, The Ideology of Athleticism, its Antipodean Impact and its Manifestations in Two Elite Catholic Schools (Bedford Park, South Australia: Australian Society for Sports History, 1988). ¹¹⁵ Reznick, Healing the Nation, 2–7. ¹¹⁶ Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1993).


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allowed could be reassuring and mutually reinforcing—a shared masculine community. By 1935, the gymnasium was presented as the physical centre of male life, a space exemplified in the Brussels pavilion and Le Home du Jeune Homme.¹¹⁷ Where government rhetoric highlighted common suffering and military duty, body cultures invoked modernity and self-empowerment, inviting rehabilitation as an individual pleasure and pathway to civilian success. Inspired by German physical culture and Swedish gymnastics, bodybuilder Alfred Briton founded the Australian and New Zealand Legion of Gymnasts as a vision of civic pride and community spirit through the bodily organization of fit men and women marching in legions and giving free demonstrations.¹¹⁸ Briton turned the private men’s world of the gymnasium into a public mixed-sex exhibition of physical fitness. Eugenic ideas about health and repopulation filtered through physical culture and ‘bodily nationalism’ in Australia, Britain, and the United States. In the 1920s, there was a range of attitudes to rebuilding civilization, some aligned with mainstream ‘national efficiency’ campaigns, which viewed social engineering as voluntary. At times, however, ‘extreme’ eugenic views were entertained in shaping the national corpus by weeding out the ‘unfit’.¹¹⁹ In Britain, fascist rhetoric, rightwing politics, and misogynist attitudes to women were popular in fringe circles in the 1930s. The dominant approach, however, was a mixture of ‘patriotic humanism’, ‘imperial manliness’, and progressive attitudes to companionate marriage, reflecting the mainstream views of its female and male participants.¹²⁰ War tuned physical culturists into reconstruction, only framing embodied citizenship through modernity and sexuality. Appropriating rehabilitation discourses, body cultures aimed to reconstruct both the soldier and civilian by fashioning him into a classical hero carved from the conditions of modern life and its pervasive technologies. Transforming a wrecked male body into a confident masculine machine, classical bodies converged with contemporary ideals of civilization and modernity. New technologies would also restore faith in men’s virility. P RO S T H E T I C V I R I L I T Y A N D V I S UA L K N OW L E D G E Investing phallic potential into prosthetic technologies was another way of engineering the sexual reconstruction of men. Ex-serviceman and disabled veterans ¹¹⁷ Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics between the Wars (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 99, 95. ¹¹⁸ ‘The Nude Cults of Germany’, Health and Physical Culture (May 1929); Alfred J Briton, ‘Community Spirit and Civic Pride’, Health and Physical Culture (Oct. 1930), 5. ¹¹⁹ Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race, and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002). ¹²⁰ Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (2006), 595–610.

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were encouraged to adjust the classical hero to the conditions of modernity. A combination of bodybuilding, gymnastics, and prosthetics furthered this process. Body cultures promoted the image of the masculine body as a machine, energized by technological dynamism. Prosthetic limbs were a central feature of rehabilitation, but they were also valuable objects for men; they signalled the transition from the military to the civilian sphere, and offered the appearance of normality. At Roehampton Hospital, men were urged to ‘master their limbs’ and regain control over the dysfunctional body, as Wendy Gagen argues. Training the body to wear a prosthetic and appearing normal renegotiated gender ideals of bodily integrity. Some men, however, threw away their artificial limbs, as they were impractical for working. Such acts of defiance were also a way of reclaiming masculine agency.¹²¹ Still, prosthetic technologies asserted classical visions of wholeness and the importance of appearances.¹²² Belief that the flesh of men could be armour-plated was a fallacy reliant upon the fantasized future of technology, and therefore a faith in that which produced the body’s destruction in the first place. Hyper-masculine discourse within prosthetic technologies overcompensated for lost limbs and the symbolic virility invested in them. Prosthetic virility was often incongruent with the reality of ex-servicemen’s lives. In Britain, the government had virtually abandoned its 755,000 permanently disabled veterans, who relied mostly on over 6,000 charitable organizations for assistance. In 1924 alone, war pensions represented only about 8 per cent of the national budget. Married disabled veterans were barely supported. Families with children born after disablement were not entitled to further assistance. Against the discourse of prosthetic masculinity and sexual virility, was the reality that disabled pensions could not provide for two people living together.¹²³ Despite this, government concerns about repopulation continued to affect social relations and reconstruction therapeutics. Disabled men were encouraged in their relations with women, inflecting medical and cultural discussions about companionship and ‘skilfulness’ in marital intimacy.¹²⁴ Emphasis on ‘mutual orgasm’ pressured men to please their wives and yet this could generate a deep sense of failure.¹²⁵ At the same time, the rehabilitation industry endowed prosthetics with phallic ¹²¹ Wendy Gagen, ‘Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity during the First World War, the Case of J. B. Middlebrook’, European History Review, 14 (2007), 533. ¹²² Roxanne Panchasi, ‘Reconstructions: Prosthetics and the Rehabilitation of the Male Body in World War I France’, Differences, 7 (1995), 109–40. ¹²³ Cohen, The War Come Home, 190–4, 154. ¹²⁴ Ben B. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Companionate Marriage (New York: Boni and Liverwright, 1927); and also Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde, Ideal Marriage: Its Physiognomy and Technique (New York: Random House, 1930); Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, ii Sexual Inversion (New York: Random House, 1936), 514; Marie Stopes, Radiant Motherhood (London: Putnam and Sons, 1920), 160–5; Margaret Sanger, Happiness in Marriage (New York: Brentano’s, 1926). ¹²⁵ Hall in Hidden Anxieties; Michael Gordon, ‘From an Unfortunate Necessity to a Cult of Mutual Orgasm’, in James Henslin (ed.), The Sociology of Sex (New York: Schocken Books, 1978),


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potential, adding sexual mythology to the image of the motorized hero. Whereas Victorian prosthetics mechanized the amputee in order to ‘naturalize him’, now the limbless had become fleshed machines. Modernism engineered their bodies with virile masculinity and classicism reconstructed the image of heroism.¹²⁶ Prosthetic masculinity appeared as heightened experience of perfection and beauty. Light metal limbs were said to make a man feel more of a man—although in Australia they were expensive and less available.¹²⁷ Prosthetic rhetoric emphasized developments in orthopaedics and medical engineering, showcasing the change from a rudimentary, cosmetic limb replacement to a mechanical addition to a lost function.¹²⁸ This gave prosthetics an entirely new social image and function. Freud had quipped that man was becoming a ‘prosthetic God’; yet, one incapable of merging ‘bionically’ with his limb extensions.¹²⁹ Romance with the futuristic machine-man had cultural and commercial currency. Disabled men posed for prosthetic trade catalogues, such as Charles Salmon and Sons, London. The double amputee transforms into muscular ‘cyborg’—he appears as a ‘human novelty . . . part man, part machine’.¹³⁰ Prosthetics and body culture both promised perfection of the human machine, and offered the disabled man confidence in his body through greater, ‘more efficient’ muscle performance. Prosthetic technology engaged discourses of heroic masculinity. Making the connection between ‘ancient and modern artificial limbs’, one British manufacturer boasted to its ‘wounded heroes’ that ‘their mutilations will be badges of their courage, the hallmark of their glorious service’.¹³¹ Technological bodies were presented as futuristic heroes. Amputation stumps, however, were often painful, rendering sustained use of prosthetics difficult, even when made from ‘duralumin instead of wood and leather’.¹³² The Ministry of Pensions reported that men had ‘a disinclination to persevere in the use of their artificial arms’, and consequently amputees were requested to remain in orthopaedic centres for one month’s training.¹³³ Unwieldy prosthetics may also have been painful reminders of the war’s impact on the body, hindering rather than assisting movement. 59–83; Beth L. Bailey, ‘Scientific truth . . . and Love: The Marriage Education Movement in the United States’, Journal of Social History (1987), 711–32. ¹²⁶ Erin O’Connor, ‘Fractions of Men: Engendering Amputation in Victorian Culture’, Representations, 60 (1997), 1–68. ¹²⁷ Joanna Bourke, ‘The Battle of the Limbs: Amputation, Artificial Limbs and the Great War in Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 29 (1998), 55. ¹²⁸ Mia Fineman, ‘Ecce Homo Prostheticus’, New German Critique, 76 (1999), 103. ¹²⁹ Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 77. ¹³⁰ Koven, ‘Remembering and Dismemberment’, 1200. ¹³¹ H. H. Thomas, Help for Wounded Heroes: The Story of Ancient and Modern Limbs (London: Essential Artificial Limb Co., 1920). ¹³² Mackenzie Forbes, Reconstructive Surgery in Peace, 105; ‘Standard Artificial Limbs. New Metal Type Approved’, The Times (28 July 1920), 18. ¹³³ ‘Limbs for the Disabled: Men’s Reluctance to Use Artificial Arms’, The Times (28 Oct. 1918), 4.

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Elaine Scarry writes that injuries, scars, and disabilities serve as permanent reminders of war.¹³⁴ Artificial limbs can also be understood in this way—as markers of painful memories. Fathers of the Australian war-disabled said: ‘There’s few of us philosophical enough to regard the partial dismemberment of our body with equanimity . . . It’s not a loss you can forget.’¹³⁵ However, the fantastic coalition of the organic and mechanical ‘re-remembered’ the injured body, projecting utopian visions of rebuilding civilization. During the American Civil War, rehabilitation ‘wed techno-scientific knowledge with humanistic visions of reform and progress’, now, after the First World War, workshop machinery was converted to accommodate amputees, with tools adapted for stumps.¹³⁶ Limb attachments were designed for workers: a ‘Horticulturist’s Hand’ could hold a branch with the action of secateurs, while a ‘Postman’s Hand’ could hold just one letter, although if springs were added two or three packets of letters could be held at the same time.¹³⁷ Manufacturers Broca and Ducroquet considered the ‘Vinedresser’s Hand’ convenient for its lightweight attachment, which could be kept in a man’s pocket and easily screwed in place. Although hardly the most advanced technologies, these prosthetic adaptations envisioned the disabled exserviceman returning to work with a new kind of masculine enterprise. Training men for rural work was a main strategy for resettling soldiers in France, Britain, and Australia—and French and German technology was often imported into rehabilitation programmes. Prosthetic and surgical literature emphasized the relationship between manliness and employment, but also advanced the amalgamation of man and machine. Surgeon R. C. Elmslie described the aim as restoring the ‘functional utility’ of the damaged part of the body for military and civil purposes.¹³⁸ Work and masculine utility were crucial to the premise of physical and surgical reconstruction—bodies had to be viable and productive, as citizenship was bound to functional embodiment.¹³⁹ It was also important to medical professionals charged with determining the disability categories governing pensions. While the normalization of men was the primary aim, the prosthetics industry offered the limbless a new masculinity expressed through the fusion of man and machine. ¹³⁴ Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 114. ¹³⁵ ‘Legs and the Man’, Our Empire ( June 1919), 7. ¹³⁶ Lisa Herschbach, ‘Prosthetic Reconstructions: Making the Industry, Re-Making the Body, Modelling the Nation’, History Workshop Journal, 44 (1997), 25; Little, Artificial Limbs and Amputation Stumps, 100. ¹³⁷ Broca A., and J. Ducroquet,, Artificial Limbs (London: University of London Press, 1918), 114, 113, 111. ¹³⁸ R. C. Elmslie, The After Treatment of Wounds and Injuries (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1919), 1–2. ¹³⁹ Susan Pederson, ‘Gender, Welfare and Citizenship in Britain during the Great War’, American Historical Review, 95 (1990), 983–1006.


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Fig. 4.4 Light Metal Prosthesis, British Ministry of Pensions. In E. Muirhead Little, Artificial Limbs and Amputation Stumps: A Practical Handbook (London: H. K. Lewis and Co., 1922), 245.

New light-metal limbs from the British Ministry of Pensions (Fig. 4.4) claimed technological sophistication created a new type of worker. A metal attachment for a forearm stump, the Anderson and Whitelaw ‘Working Arm’ facilitated chiselling or gardening with an attachment of rake or shears. The McKay ‘Worker’s Arm’ (Fig. 4.5), with a rubber hand and an intricate moving elbow, as well as the ‘Pringle-Kirk Hand’ were intended to possess bionic possibilities. Light metal and rubber, and a system of hinges, catches, and spiral springs for joint flexion, enabled greater movements and generated the impression of a futuristic hyper-masculinity. Ministry adviser Muirhead Little’s view was optimistic: ‘even an above-elbow amputee can do a great deal of hard work in such occupations as agriculture’.¹⁴⁰ That most ex-serviceman could not afford these innovations, and that many disabled were part of the long-term unemployed, did not complicate prosthetic propaganda.¹⁴¹ In Australia, Denyer prosthetics retailed rubber hands and feet and artificial limbs that affected ‘a natural, easy walk’.¹⁴² Prosthetics offered the appearance of normality and the ‘restoration . . . of full physical efficiency’, which was important for those ¹⁴⁰ Little, Artificial Limbs and Amputation Stumps, 100, 98, 114–15. ¹⁴¹ Cohen, The War Come Home, 158. ¹⁴² Advertisement, Our Empire (May 1918), 8.

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Reconstructing the Body Fig. 4.5 Mackay Worker’s Arm with rubber hand. In E. Muirhead Little, Artificial Limbs and Amputation Stumps: A Practical Handbook (London: H. K. Lewis and Co., 1922), 114.

who feared the discriminating eyes of both employers and women. Although fathers comforted sons that ‘stiff legs are the honourable legacies of dangers encountered’, some felt they had ‘to pass’ as enabled. This was a factor in the ‘gendered choreography’ of normative masculinity and its performance of embodied citizenship.¹⁴³ Prosthetics and bodybuilding claimed to improve both appearance and efficiency: ‘the efficient man is the ever growing man’. Men would gain strength, ¹⁴³ ‘A Natural Easy Walk’, Denyer advertisement, Our Empire (Dec. 1918), 6; ‘Legs and the Man’, ibid. ( June 1919), 7; Susan Leigh Foster, ‘Choreographies of Gender’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Autumn 1998), 1–21.


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energy, and the willpower to accomplish more, to produce the best results, to render the most effective service, and to design work with the highest quality.¹⁴⁴ Disabled soldiers were expected to ‘reabsorb’ into society with ‘speed and completeness’, like machines.¹⁴⁵ Similarly, Australian body-culturist Walter Withrow advised that bodybuilding produced ‘a capable machine . . . a five horse power dynamo, charged to the full with energy, enthusiasm, vivacity, magnetism’.¹⁴⁶ Taylorist management systems, mass assembly-line production, as exemplified in Fordism and the European science of work, shaped this thinking, promising not only to improve a worker’s tasks by regulating time and motion, but also to transcend class.¹⁴⁷ Health therapists declared ‘Henry Ford’s Idea Applies to the Human Body’.¹⁴⁸ Reconstruction discourses intrinsic to bodybuilding and prosthetics sought to turn men into efficient, masculine workers. Modern artists, too, drew upon this idea, glorifying the masculinity of the worker in the image of the automaton. Representations of machines were critical in reconstruction discourse linking post-war industrialism, rehabilitation, bodybuilding, and visual culture. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the industrial centres of post-war America, where workers’ bodies and masculinity were visualized together. At the Ford plant, George Ebling’s company photographs revered the symbiotic relationship between men and industrial production. Murals completed by Marxist painter Diego Rivera for the Ford Pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934 valorized the man–machine in masculine enterprise.¹⁴⁹ The influence of Taylorism and Fordism resulted in a preoccupation with motion and performance, but also in a fantasy of the way the body could adapt to technology. Increasingly, the deconstruction of tasks into abstract, mathematical relations had important consequences for human bodies and modern art, especially with the renewed emphasis upon geometry and elegant-but-functional design.¹⁵⁰ Director of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, Douglas McMurtrie, wrote pamphlets on disabled soldiers and modern graphics. He mused about the ethics of ‘Fitness to Purpose vs Beauty’ in typography, reflecting debates about prosthetics, architecture, and design. Pleasure and beauty were essential, he said, for art to ‘evoke an emotion’.¹⁵¹ The Institute highlighted the efficiency of the disabled worker, and his elegant adaptation to industrial ¹⁴⁴ ‘The Efficient Man’, Withrow’s Physical Culture (1922), 42, 22. ¹⁴⁵ ‘The Returning Soldier’, Our Empire (Feb. 1919), 1. ¹⁴⁶ Walter E. Withrow, ‘Forceful Manhood’, Withrow’s Physical Culture ( Jan. 1926), 5. ¹⁴⁷ ‘Henry Ford’s Idea Applies to the Human Body’, Blackney Chiropractic and Nature Cure Institute’s advertisement, Health and Physical Culture ( June 1930), 43. ¹⁴⁸ Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 238. ¹⁴⁹ Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 220–1. ¹⁵⁰ Rabinbach, Human Motor, 242. ¹⁵¹ McMurtrie, ‘Fitness to Purpose vs Beauty in Book Typography’, Publishers’ Weekly (14 May 1927), 3–8.

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technology, such as a blind soldier working the assembly lines of the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (Delco, Dayton, Ohio) or mastering complex machines in the Robbins and Myers Company factory (Springfield, Ohio)—‘his sense of touch’ made him ‘faster than a man with sight’.¹⁵² Given their ‘keen appreciation’, McMurtrie trained disabled men to manufacture prosthetics, improve designs, and experiment with new approaches to materials, ‘securing specimens and data’ from Europe to develop the field in the United States.¹⁵³ Other mechanical trades deemed suitable for the disabled included welding, drafting, printing, dental mechanics, auto mechanics, and photography. Efficiency and rationalized economic production infiltrated post-war bodies and modern art, creating an energetic corporeality of male body and machines.¹⁵⁴ In prosthetics, McMurtrie asserted that these ‘mechanical marvels’ were ‘nearly human’.¹⁵⁵ Classicism reinforced the machine ideal with sterile formalism that conveyed economy in structure and concise form. This fusion was shared across artistic networks and popular culture. Human dynamism could alter human values, introducing, as one Vanity Fair art critic wrote: a perfection of human conduct, an ideal of no motion lost, no effort wasted; a mechanical ideal under which the soldier becomes a number on a tag, the workman a mere unit of production . . . like any other cog or wheel.¹⁵⁶

Just as artists had glorified the worker–machine, after the war they turned soldiers into machine heroes, in paintings such as Fernand Léger’s Three Comrades (1920), which represented worker, soldier, and machine as a single integrated form. Wounded soldiers were transformed into super automata, imbued with bionic masculinity. Significantly, governments and commercial rehabilitators also experimented with turning machine ideals into reality. The British Ministry of Pensions attempted to develop a ‘cinematized stump’ with a system of pulleys and motors. Mechanization aimed to charge men with technological masculinity (Fig. 4.6). Muscular and prosthetic arms both contained social messages about reconstructing the body as a pumping, throbbing technology. That the arm was ‘cinematized’ projected hope and modernity for the disabled body, notwithstanding that disabled soldiers were retrained as cinema technicians for the ‘rapidly growing industry’ of motion pictures in Britain and the United States.¹⁵⁷ The American Red Cross produced 2,000 sets of exhibition posters in their public education campaigns, distributed to libraries, schools, conferences, and county ¹⁵² Red Cross Institute for the Blind, ‘Economic Supervision of the Returned Blinded Sailors, Soldiers and Marines’ (1919), 11. ¹⁵³ McMurtrie, The Organization, Work and Method of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men (New York, 1918), 6. ¹⁵⁴ Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh, 130. ¹⁵⁵ McMurtrie, ‘Reconstructing the Crippled Soldier’, 12–13. ¹⁵⁶ John Peale Bishop, ‘The Painter and the Dynamo’, Vanity Fair (Aug. 1923), 58. ¹⁵⁷ McMurtrie, ‘The Work of an American School for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled’, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 180, No. 3, 59–65 (New York: 16 Jan. 1919), 14.


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Fig. 4.6 Diagram of cinematized stump, British Ministry of Pensions. In E. Muirhead Little, Artificial Limbs and Amputation Stumps: A Practical Handbook (London: H. K. Lewis and Co., 1922), 119.

fairs. Disabled cinema technicians—photographed wearing prosthetics—were glamorized by ‘the lure of the movies’.¹⁵⁸ Cinematized prosthetics diminished the belief that an amputee suffered—or should be compensated. From 1917, the Ministry of Pensions determined disability ‘in relation to a theoretically perfect physical machine’, and assessed whether a man was better or worse off with the loss of a particular ‘body part’.¹⁵⁹ Technological development in prosthetics endowed disablement with heroic qualities. Sterile formalism in modernist aesthetics combined with classical ideals of the masculine body provided a new visual language through which the human automaton could be heroized, made beautiful, and even superior, than any pre-war man, thus presenting war as a transforming experience. ¹⁵⁸ Id., ‘A Graphic Exhibit on Rehabilitation of the Crippled and Blinded’, ibid., panel 5. ¹⁵⁹ Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 65.

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In the German industry, ‘homo prostheticus’ advertised prosthetic limbs on a Greek statue by Praxiteles—a ‘conspicuous token of irreparable lack’, symbolic of defeat.¹⁶⁰ By contrast, Anglo-American prosthetics promised wholeness where there was lack, and perfection where there was disfigurement. Limb manufacturers assumed that manhood would be rebuilt from the mere appearance of technological virility. This rhetorical strategy was used by the body culture and prosthetics industries alike. Technology and new attitudes to the body were to transform the hobbling wounded into classical heroes. Seductive for many men was the idea that technological virility enhanced the manliness of work and the chances of marital success. In Germany, the majority of disabled veterans found employment—unlike in Britain, where they were isolated in homes or workshops. The German National Pensions Law supported married veterans and additional children drew supplements. Some men reported feeling confident within marriage, content with the feeling that an able-bodied competitor could not replace them.¹⁶¹ By contrast, the British government fantasized about prosthetic virility with classical and modern ideals imagining utopian bodies far from the reality of ex-servicemen’s lives. Prosthetic industries imagined a new ‘civilization’ of men impervious to pain and suffering—a similar fantasy to the machine ideal in body cultures. Both drew upon a widely circulating notion that conflated perfection with normality, arousing even greater surveillance and inspection of bodies. Men were to be transformed and perfected. Modern artists also imagined the prosthetic body as technologically virile. Reality and representation were continually merging, widening visual knowledge of medical technology and turning reconstruction from rhetoric to form. The complexities of victory and defeat, however, shaped the symbolism. In Germany, Heinrich Hoerle’s Monument to the Unknown Prosthesis (1930) replaced the sacred soldier’s body with the prosthesis, symbolizing the reification of machines while diminishing men’s flesh and social position. Accompanied by a childlike automaton, the coming generation is truncated and anonymous in its objectified state. By contrast, the French artist Fernand Léger proposed the male object-body as the hope of civilization. During the war, Léger spent two days trapped in a shell hole with the corpse of a fellow soldier. Now he thought that ‘if the person, the face, and the human body become objects, the modern artist will be offered considerable freedom’.¹⁶² His diary describes the frontline as total corporeal disorder, ‘a spectacle of horror’ and ‘human remains—heads, fingers, teeth; the fragments of men and objects’.¹⁶³ ¹⁶⁰ Fineman, ‘Ecce Homo Prostheticus’, 85–7. ¹⁶¹ Cohen, The War Come Home, 151, 155. ¹⁶² Fernand Léger, ‘The Human Body Considered as an Object’, in Edward Fry (ed.), Functions of Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 132. ¹⁶³ In Eric Mitchaud, ‘Art, War, Competition: The Three Battles of Fernand Léger’, in Dorothy Kosinski (ed.), Fernand Léger, 1911–1924: The Rhythm of Modern Life (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), 59.


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Léger turned from drawing the wounded, such as in Le Blessé (1917), to synthesizing opposites: man and machine, the part and the whole. After being gassed at Verdun, he experimented with a grand classical, figurative style. In Le Méchanicien (1920) the civilian automaton is celebrated as a bodybuilder and worker, an idealized Olympian, sporting a monumental forearm with bulging musculature. Veneration of the worker’s body—bulging biceps—charged Léger’s painting with a similar virility to that which the British government looked for in its ‘cinematized stump’. The war had brought cross-cultural influence between European and Anglophone culture, a transfer of ideas and reinforcement of the sporting body. Paris had been the site of an important international meeting of soldier sportsmen. In 1919, the American Expeditionary Forces and the YMCA sponsored the InterAllied Games, held at General Pershing Stadium, Paris. They aimed to boost morale and the fitness of soldiers on non-combat duties. Whether conditioning the body for war or national competition, for public exhibition or personal play, the continued stress upon masculinity and athleticism in the 1920s imbued muscles with the signs of gender and sexual potency. Artists had complex responses to the prizing of male sexuality and hypermasculinity. American artist Rockwell Kent—an anti-war anarchist—depicted his Nietzschean superman as The Pinnacle —and yet one that evokes the amputee (Fig. 4.7). Critics remarked on the ‘massive silhouette’ and ‘tactile hardness’ of ‘Man’, ‘thrust up against a desolate and inimical sky’. Residing in the Alaskan wilderness, Kent embraced ‘the terror of emptiness’.¹⁶⁴ Indeed, his solitary superman commands a view over the world from which he withdraws, shoulders bent inwardly. Ideal ‘Man’ is both fragmented and sexualized by straddling the rock. With the perspective towards the groin, the same technique of bodybuilding photography is used. Loaded with phallic potency and yet tentatively posed, it signals the fear of dissolution that Marshal Berman described as the touchstone of modernity. The complexities of desiring physical utopia continued in visions of civilization. Australian artist and disabled soldier Mervyn Napier Waller depicted muscular classical figures such as Virgil (1922), the popularity of which earned him the mural commission for the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Waller was wounded at Bullecourt in 1917, his right arm amputated to the shoulder. Teaching himself to draw left-handed, Waller inserted virile images of a muscular utopia into Australian cityscapes. In Peace After Victory (mural, State Library Victoria, 1927), and The Pastoral Pursuits of Australia (1927, cover), classical mythology, abundant harvests, women, and children infuse the golden landscape with hope. Robust men—entwined in homoerotic camaraderie—literally construct buildings in a modernist grid formation, harmonizing key elements of ¹⁶⁴ In Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics and the American First Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 165.

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Reconstructing the Body Fig. 4.7 Rockwell Kent, The Pinnacle (1929). In Vanity Fair (Feb. 1929), 59. Courtesy of Plattsburgh State Art Museum.

the modern and the classical. In this antipodean utopia, there are no disabled people; instead of war, it is a prosperous and peaceful civilization inhabited by supermodels of classical perfection. Waller reconstructed the body as whole and erotic, at a time when beauty and sexuality obsessed post-war societies. The classical canon enabled the celebration of virile masculinity, which was channelled through prosthetics, visual art, and body culture. Together, they produced a visual knowledge of the new, ‘civilized manhood’, empowered by sexuality and reconstruction. C O N S U M I N G M A S C U L I N E S E X UA L I T Y Bodybuilding magazines claimed to break the shackles of propriety, canvassing readers to send in nude poses or bodies semi-clad in loincloths. Instead of classical drapery or transparent chemise (idealizing the naked body as a ‘nude’), bodybuilding flaunted the naked male as an outright object of desire and sexuality.¹⁶⁵ Posers stood on pedestals with the camera aimed from below, ¹⁶⁵ Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (London: University of California Press, 1993), 157.


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Fig. 4.8 Photograph of Norman Hockey, Marrickville. In Health and Physical Culture (May 1930), 34. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

exaggerating body size and width.¹⁶⁶ Techniques of sexing the self included pose, camera angle, props, and costume. Norman Hockey of Marrickville, Sydney, sent in his picture, wearing a groin-enhancing g-string (Fig. 4.8). Others painted their bodies white, making nudity acceptable for publication. These techniques of performing the sexualized body were applied in bodybuilding, classical revival dance, and vaudeville theatre. Performing nude in Death of Adonis (1923), Ted Shawn whitened his body in the role of an awakening marble statue. Discharged from the American Expeditionary Force, Shawn, married to dancer Ruth St Denis, established America’s first all-male dance troupe. The erotic male body was an object of beauty, becoming public spectacle and sexual commodity. Dancing Minoan God, Shawn transformed the ancient Cretan snake goddess into a modern phallic power—just as Australian Clarence Weber sexualized Laocoon in his advertisement. Boys, too, sexualized their bodies with modern techniques of display. In one of his ‘Apollo’ contests, Bernarr Macfadden published a photograph sent in by a group of schoolboys posing nude from the rear view.¹⁶⁷ While bathing boys was a common subject for painting, here boys created their own image and submitted ¹⁶⁶ ‘Hints on Posing’, Withrow’s Physical Culture (Aug. 1929), 19. ¹⁶⁷ White, The First Sexual Revolution, 29.

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it for adjudication and consumption. Both amateurs and experts of all ages entered into body competitions, such as George A. Collis, a champion wrestler, who posed holding up a barbell to instruct amateurs on muscular display.¹⁶⁸ Photography was crucial for the political and cultural enterprise of reconstructing men through the body and sexuality. Turning the muscular utopia into a sexualized spectacle, photography objectified and commodified men’s bodies. Objectification was a strategy of commercial advertising and medical photography—wounded soldiers were case studies more than people. Writer and war veteran Ernst Jünger noted that photography obscured ‘great suffering behind the images’.¹⁶⁹ Classicism raised amateur and shop front photography to the status of an art form, while classical masculinity was modernized—appearing sexual, dynamic, larger-than-life—through the action of the camera.¹⁷⁰ Mass-produced photographs, retouched in the studio, enhanced the message that this superior body with its magnified masculinity was attainable for ordinary men. Veterans, civilians, and young men interested in improving their bodies availed themselves of this technology with important implications for how men viewed themselves, what they wanted to convey, and how the industry used them. Photographs did not simply record reality but normalized the way things should appear, as Susan Sontag has argued.¹⁷¹ Photography empowered individuals by giving them access to self-representation. It also facilitated consumption. Magazines engaged the muscular and naked male body as an object of display. The male body became a socio-corporeal billboard upon which the visual signs of consumption and desire were exhibited. Enticing images signified classical beauty and racial homogeneity. Indeed, they must be understood in terms of the relationship between pleasure and desire and the implications of narcissism, voyeurism, and fetishism inherent in representation.¹⁷² Photographer and viewer were bound by their shared sense of ecstasy derived from the ‘scopophillic’ gaze—the pleasure of looking—and, here, exhorted to stare and consume.¹⁷³ Body culture and its discourses of masculinity were enhanced by the saturating visibility of the male body. The rehabilitated and sexualized male body was on display in hospital magazines, trade catalogues, popular magazines, and gymnasium walls, ¹⁶⁸ Photograph of George A. Collis, Health and Physical Culture (Oct. 1929), 46. ¹⁶⁹ Ernst Junger, ‘War and Photography’, trans. Anthony Nassar, New German Critique, 59 (Spring–Summer 1993), 26; Dora Appel, on German medical photography, in ‘Cultural Battlegrounds: Weimar Photographic Narratives of War’, New German Critique, 76 (1999), 49–84. ¹⁷⁰ Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin de siècle France (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 74. ¹⁷¹ Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 87. ¹⁷² Bruce Adams, ‘Pleasure of the Gaze: Image and Appearance in Recent Australian Art’, exhibition catalogue (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1985), 10. ¹⁷³ Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasures in Narrative Cinema’, in Karen Kay and Gerald Perry (eds), Women and Cinema: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977).


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supporting Guy Debord’s definition of the modern spectacle as an ‘integration’ of market and government forces.¹⁷⁴ Commodity culture was merging with reconstruction discourse and the rhetoric of overcoming bodily flaws. Furthermore, this ‘integrated spectacle’ incited sexualization and identification with images that fetishized the male body as a symbol of post-war recovery. Yet the homoerotic display of the sexualized man was affirming; magazines, competitions, and the gymnasium’s social arena provided spaces for agency and resistance to the normalizing ‘integrated spectacle’. The deployment of classicism in modern bodybuilding legitimized the sexualization of masculine power by invoking the cultural heritage of Greece and Rome. Sexual sublimation gave way in the 1920s to sexual gesture and display. Fashionable body posing was a prominent aspect of that expression. ‘Body beautiful’ competitions and photographic posing contests were a staple of the magazine industry. When individuals sent pictures into magazines they proudly displayed their achievements, told their stories, and boasted of their accomplishments. Men marvelled at their ability to transform themselves. Australian and world record holder for weightlifting, Walter J. Lyons, was photographed staring with serious pride at his enlarged biceps (Fig. 4.9) in his regular contributions to Withrow’s Physical Culture magazine. Modern photography and consumerism transformed a perceived connection between soul, mind, and body into a consciousness bordering on narcissism. Visuality played an important role in comprehending the relation of the exterior body to the soul; it implied the quality of husband, according to Dr Frank Crane in his defence of nudism.¹⁷⁵ Following eugenic concepts of selective breeding, women were encouraged to inspect men’s bodies and minds. Bodybuilder Jack Devaney said that since women were the ‘safeguards’ of the race, they ask themselves: ‘What Do I Know of Eugenics?’¹⁷⁶ Women’s gaze upon men’s bodies was lent an air of propriety, for the sake of civilization. In California—where eugenic sterilization was legalized in 1909—women judged male bathing beauty pageants in front of large public audiences.¹⁷⁷ Although beauty competitions were part of the ‘spectacle of the modern woman’, Anglophone body cultures targeted men’s bodies, inviting women to vote for their favourite entrant by judging pose, artistic interpretation, and muscle size.¹⁷⁸ Playing to the female gaze—and male gratification at being spectacularised—further facilitated cross-class gazing and homoerotic sexuality heightened ¹⁷⁴ Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1998), 12. ¹⁷⁵ Frank Crane, ‘Clothing Pride or Body Pride’, Physical Culture (Nov. 1920), 18. ¹⁷⁶ Devaney, ‘What Do I Know of Eugenics?’, 6. ¹⁷⁷ Photograph of Male Beauty Pageant, California, Withrow’s Physical Culture Annual (1929), 20. ¹⁷⁸ Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004), 132.

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Fig. 4.9 Photograph of Walter J. Lyons, Australian and World record weightlifter. In Withrow’s Physical Culture (Apr. 1923), 182. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

in wartime.¹⁷⁹ Bernarr Macfadden paid five dollars for William Wareing and J. M. Hernic’s ‘beautiful physique’ portrait.¹⁸⁰ Athlete Harry Stevens was photographed in an intimate studio setting, transformed from sportsman to pin up (Fig. 4.10). Such images defined the gymnasium as a dual space: privately male and publicly consumable, a closed homosocial environment and a forum for both women and men to look and be pleasured. Photography enabled mutual admiration between men. Identifying as ‘professional equilibrists’, Kenneth Terrell and Al Kemp depicted themselves in a portrait of homoerotic camaraderie. The accompanying text draws attention to the ‘poise’ of their stance, which cannot distract the viewer from the spectacle of their intimacy (Fig. 4.10). Emulating the noble love between men in ancient Greece, magazines provided a queer, dualistic space for male intimacy. Across the Anglophone world, the gymnasium was spared the psychiatric view of homosexuality as deviant.¹⁸¹ While guardsmen who were ‘rent boys’ traded sex on their symbolism as ‘soldier heroes’, they were relegated to ‘London’s queer ¹⁷⁹ Lynette Finch, The Classing Gaze: Sexuality, Class, Surveillance (St Leonards, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1993), 32. ¹⁸⁰ William D. Wareing and J. M. Hernic, ‘Our Monthly Photo Contest’, Physical Culture (Nov. 1920), 17. ¹⁸¹ Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 41–72.


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Fig. 4.10 Photograph of Kenneth Terrell and Al Kemp. Photograph of Harry Stevens. Physical Culture (Dec. 1920), 52.

underworld’.¹⁸² By contrast, gymnasiums provided safe spaces where men could legitimately flaunt their attentions on each other’s bodies, while maintaining the respectable image of the ‘soldier hero’ as an embodied ideal of masculinity and British national identity.¹⁸³ Body culture magazines maintained the appearance of heteronormativity; however, the possibility was open for homosexual desire to be shared across pages, whether in photographs of heroic posers, muscle builders, or action shots of Graeco-Roman wrestlers.¹⁸⁴ Correspondence pages sufficed as homosexual meeting points; in Britain’s Health and Strength, men gave their body measurements when looking for a ‘penpal’. The increasing sophistication of photographic techniques glamorized the male body; the camera lens threw into high relief the signals of desire and classical aesthetics, rendering homoerotic exchanges more viable. Homosexual desire was often framed in terms of ancient Greek male friendship, rather than the available psychoanalytic language. Self-representations in ¹⁸² Matt Houlbrook, ‘Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys: Homosex, Masculinities, and Britishness in the Brigade of Guards, circa 1900–1960’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003), 351–88. ¹⁸³ Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 6. ¹⁸⁴ ‘Gems of Wisdom from Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophers’, Withrow’s Physical Culture Annual (1920).

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photographs were often camp or coquettish, and it is difficult to imagine that the seductive poses of ‘Boy Beautifuls’ went unnoticed. Victorian Hellenism persisted in ‘life-stories’; combined with sexological models, homosexuality was shaped in this period. For women, too, ‘sapphic fashion’ underpinned the early origins of lesbian modernism.¹⁸⁵ The aesthetics of classicism in photographic poses by body culturists reiterated this elision. Developments in the style and techniques of photography facilitated the spectacle of masculine ocular exchange. Lighting techniques emphasized chest, biceps, and groin; negatives were retouched and theatrical make-up used.¹⁸⁶ Global practices in consumerist marketing turned readers’ eyes on themselves. An extract from New York republished in Melbourne—‘That Body of Yours. Are You Proud of Your Body?’—intoned the punitive voice of professional medicine and public health, rather than psychiatry, prescribing a dose of self-inspection and comparison. Dr James W. Barton enquired: Have you been at the bathing beach and . . . seen the strong, rugged bodies of the men . . . As you looked at them you have made a mental picture of yourself as compared with them . . . Do you know that . . . you can change the contour of your body so that your own discomforted eye will notice the change?¹⁸⁷

Identifying the bodies of ‘the men’ and measuring one’s apparent difference to them, proposed a conformist masculinity that required men to deconstruct themselves, to strip themselves of their social armour, to self-inspect, and to have other men judge them. Susan Bordo writes that orthodox masculinity dreads being surveyed and determined from without. The sexual nature of looking causes the deepest panic in men, including the feeling of violation.¹⁸⁸ Breaking down male confidence, and then reconstructing its value system through masculine embodiment, coerced men’s investment in self-transformation. This selfhood was displayed outwardly, appealing as a new form of individuation. The muscular hero was constructed as a warrior from the past and a forger of the future, but most of all as an individual, not part of a collective military unit. The emphasis on ‘you’, ‘your body’, and ‘yourself ’ spoke volumes to a deep and growing awareness of the masculine self. Men were trained in techniques of self-scrutiny, but equally important was the gaze of others. With therapeutic authority, James Barton’s medical gaze ¹⁸⁵ Chris Waters, ‘Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State: Discourse of Homosexual Identity in Interwar Britain’, in Bland and Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Cambridge and Chicago: Polity Press/University of Chicago Press, 1998), 166; Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). ¹⁸⁶ Garb, Bodies of Modernity, 70. ¹⁸⁷ James W. Barton, ‘That Body of Yours: Are You Proud of Your Body?’, Evening Telegram, New York, repr. Better Health and Racial Efficiency through Diet, Hygiene, Psychology and Physical Culture (Aug. 1925), Melbourne Horticultural Press, 18. ¹⁸⁸ Bordo, ‘Reading the Male Body’, 286.


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asserted the reciprocity of sight: the seen, the looked at, the mental picture, the discomforted eye. Together, medicine and commerce asserted the role of the visual spectacle in performing and consuming masculinity. The consumerism of the fetishized male body aided a ‘phantasmagorical’ spectacle, presenting this hypereal man as an illusion to be purchased. The ‘discomforted eye’ acknowledged this processes of ocular exchange, and the role of visuality in social acceptance and self-pleasure. Similarly, energy drink Milo advertised its own bodybuilding courses in physical culture magazines with a semi-naked, muscle man—with enhanced groin—who displayed the type of man that Milo could build.¹⁸⁹ Alfred Briton recommended looking in the mirror regularly.¹⁹⁰ Strongfort inverted the modern symbol of the retail store, quizzing: ‘Are You A Man Or A Mannikin?’ Liz Conor argues that the mannequin was a pervasive, material representation of feminine modernity in 1920s, enticing women to consumption and providing a body role model.¹⁹¹ Strongfort appropriated it as a negative image of men’s potential feminization. While slim women were coveted, slim men were a ‘laughing stock to every man and woman who sees [them]’.¹⁹² Masculine men were meant to have bulging biceps, protruding chests, and taut thighs, like Nat Pendleton, the intercollegiate and Olympic champion wrestler, hailed as a ‘body beautiful’ and specimen of ‘bodily perfection’.¹⁹³ Photographs placed male bodies as objects of male competition and desire, sexualized by modernized classicism and its visual codes in popular culture. Visual knowledge of the male body enabled masculinity to be critiqued, stabilized and consolidated.¹⁹⁴ Bodybuilding competitions confirmed this process. Walter Withrow instructed men to keep a sharp watch over their bodies, especially if they were over thirty.¹⁹⁵ Gymnasiums plastered their walls with pictures of perfect men. These images enacted a dual vision, at once a mirror to mutual recognition and gender affirmation, yet potentially critical and undermining. They affirmed the male body as a multiple site of autoerotic, heteroerotic, and homoerotic desires. Mutual pleasure connected erotic gratification with gender affirmation. Equality of the body’s muscular form offered a false impression of shared social power. The process of ocular exchange raised the possibility of the fallaciously presented democratic body being brought back into focus. ¹⁸⁹ Advertisement for the Milo Bar Bell Company, Physical Culture (Dec. 1930), 32. ¹⁹⁰ ‘The Ideal of Symmetry’, Withrow’s Physical Culture ( Jan. 1923), 15; ‘Hints on Posing’, ibid. (Aug. 1924), 20; A. Briton, ‘A New Body for You’, advertisement, Health and Physical Culture (1 Nov. 1930), 57. ¹⁹¹ Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 108. ¹⁹² ‘Are You A Man Or A Mannikin?’, ‘Strongfortism’ advertisement, Physical Culture (Jan. 1920), 12. ¹⁹³ Nat Pendleton, ‘The Body Beautiful’, Physical Culture (Feb. 1920), 41. ¹⁹⁴ Michael Hatt, ‘Muscles, Morals and Mind: The Male Body in Thomas Eakins’ Salutat’, in K. Adler and M. Pointon (eds), The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 62. ¹⁹⁵ Withrow’s Physical Culture (Mar. 1923), 117.

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Self-examination and mutual inspection—while affirming the visual appeal of the male body—also encouraged insecurity from the omniscient eye of society, group dynamics, and other men. Men of small statures were taunted as ‘undersized, puerile-looking beings . . . ashamed of their natural deficiencies’.¹⁹⁶ Men internalized such critiques, as seen in embarrassed confessions of being ‘sickly weaklings’ and admiring declarations of others’ ‘glorious manhood’.¹⁹⁷ Magazines shaped the internal dialogue: ‘If you are not strong, vigorous, quick, alive in every inch of your being, then what kind of a man do you call yourself.’¹⁹⁸ Without strength and speed, you were not a man at all. Muscular tissue contained ‘life, rhythm, action’—the essence of embodied modernity.¹⁹⁹ Virile manhood was expressed through the hardness and mass of the male body, but also through its agility. Man’s vitality and strength sprang from his muscles, according to H. J. Hendry.²⁰⁰ Transformation from ‘weedy youth to lusty manhood’ was experienced through the flesh and male sexuality.²⁰¹ Actions of flexing and releasing muscles were configured as not just exercises in modern fitness, but also celebrations of masculine sexuality.²⁰² Bodybuilding—as a performance of heterosexual normativity—displayed and linked sexual and social power. Muscles meant masculinity but also success, appealing to the bourgeois capitalist values of consumerist society.²⁰³ Lionel Strongfort declared that if a man was not virile, then ‘he is not magnetic, forceful or attractive: neither is he sought after’ by employers or women.²⁰⁴ Flexing and relaxing muscles in deliberate and controlled actions was part of what Hillel Schwartz has identified as modern torque or a new kinaesthetic asserting rhythm, wholeness, and fluidity. Drawing on classical ideals, kinaesthetics—produced by rotating motions of the body or torque—connected the exterior body and inner self.²⁰⁵ Jesse Gehman from New York demonstrated the smooth motion of ‘pull and release’ torsion with his naked body, clenched fists, and striding action, resembling the dynamic, swirling movement of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1912).²⁰⁶ The twisting action of Charley Hutley’s body—wearing a ‘pal’ with buttocks revealed—sexualized ¹⁹⁶ ‘Men Who Pass for Boys’, ibid. 3. ¹⁹⁷ ‘A Professional Man Discounts the Theory of Inherited Strength’ (Vivid) Health and Physical Culture (Dec. 1929), 10. ¹⁹⁸ ‘C. M.’, ‘The Truth about Weight-lifting’, 48. ¹⁹⁹ ‘The Ideal of Symmetry’, 15. ²⁰⁰ H. J. Hendry, ‘The Bodybuilder: The Foundation of Bodily Strength’, Health and Physical Culture (Aug. 1929), 40. ²⁰¹ William Thomas Dumbrell, ‘Bar-Bells Bring Physical Fitness’, ibid. (Sept. 1929), 32. ²⁰² Withrow’s Physical Culture ( Jan. 1932), 32. ²⁰³ Andrew Parker and Eve Sedgwick (eds), Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995). ²⁰⁴ ‘Are You A Man Or A Mannikin?’, 12. ²⁰⁵ Hillel Schwartz, ‘Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century’, in Johnathon Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 71–127. ²⁰⁶ Jesse Gehman, ‘The Body Beautiful’, Physical Culture ( Jan. 1924), 41.


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modern torsion. Dynamic male flesh was at once classical and modern, sensuous and exciting.²⁰⁷ The corporeality of this ‘kinaesthetic’ combined masculine eroticism and energetic movement with the classical imaginary. In the context of post-war reconstruction, erotic, masculine, modernity was both classical and enmeshed in population politics. War was understood as destroying instinctual masculinity and sexual potency. Bodybuilding played upon these insecurities. A man’s ability to attract and keep a woman, to arouse her sexual interest, was bound to his muscular status. Jason Petingill confided that his girlfriend was ‘yearning inwardly for a stronger arm, a brisker bicep . . . I saw that I was too weak for her; she wanted power’.²⁰⁸ Enlarged muscles had positive implications upon a man’s sexual prowess and success, but also showed up the inadequacies of the non-bodybuilder in both working and intimate life. For a man without strength and virility, ‘domestic happiness is soon upset’.²⁰⁹ Lionel Strongfort urged war veterans that bodily perfection led to ‘success in life, love and in business, family, and social connections’.²¹⁰ Enlarged and flexed biceps signified hypermasculinity and sexual success. Giant biceps featured on magazine covers, accompanied by taunts: ‘What’s Your Man Power?’ In a period of mass marketing, photographs aided the construction of consumerist identities. This delineated the boundaries between the fit and unfit, the beautiful and ugly, the muscular and weak—categories linked with sexual success. Walking into a gymnasium in Melbourne, surrounded by photographs, one man described feeling ‘impelled by some influence outside myself . . . I walked in and timidly asked to see the principal’. He claimed that an increase in his arm measurements enabled him to ‘claim his girlfriend back’, after she left him when he was a ‘weakling’.²¹¹ In the United States, films such as The Big Parade (1925), where an amputee also loses his girlfriend, reinforced the perception that disabled men were sexually inadequate. Films and popular culture highlighted ideal bodies and capitalized upon male insecurities. Pictures of body gods on gymnasium walls gestured imaginary approval. Such representations were not simply ‘constructed’ by discourses or ‘produced’ by abstract and institutional rhetoric. Such images were not ‘elite’ or ‘literary’; men felt inadequacy and agency, and expressed the human need to be validated.²¹² Audiences were invited to empathize with this highly personal constitution

²⁰⁷ Charley Hutley, in Health and Physical Culture ( Jan. 1930), 33. ²⁰⁸ Pettingill, ‘What the Physical Culture Magazines Did For Me’, 62. ²⁰⁹ ‘Are You A Man Or A Mannikin?’, 12. ²¹⁰ Lionel Strongfort advertisement, ‘Shot to Pieces in the World War’, 4. ²¹¹ ‘I Found my Manhood when I Lost my Girl’, Health and Physical Culture (Apr. 1930), 7, 8. ²¹² Mark S. R. Jenner and Bertrand O. Taithe, ‘The Historiographical Body’, in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds), Medicine in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000), 191–3.

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Fig. 4.11 Photograph of F. Collett, Maitland. In Health and Physical Culture (Mar. 1930), 33. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

of masculine subjectivity through the ‘timid’ and yet elating processes of transformation and recovery. This was a specific response to reconstruction and the consumer boom that stimulated new formulations of sexual and gendered identities. Entrepreneurs capitalized upon the vulnerability and empowerment of men by sexualizing reconstruction. Strongman Don Athaldo encouraged men visually to imagine their new muscular identity: ‘picture yourself as the man you would like to be . . . with powerful bands of rippling muscle’.²¹³ Australian poser F. Collett sent in his photograph—reclining with clenched fist in front of his genitals. This self-representation implies phallic power, muscular enhancement, and yet also the need for protection (Fig. 4.11). Indeed, Bernarr Macfadden promoted muscularity as well as a mechanical ‘peniscope’, containing a vacuum pump for penis enhancement.²¹⁴ Another Macfadden publication, True Story, promoted physical ideals in lurid sex confessions.²¹⁵ Body culture could be equally as ²¹³ Advertisement for Don Athaldo Royal Gymnasium, Sydney, in Health and Physical Culture (Feb. 1930), 6. ²¹⁴ In Michael S. Kimmel, ‘Consuming Manhood: The Feminization of American Culture and the Recreation of the Male Body, 1832–1920’, in Laurence Goldstein (ed.), The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 26. ²¹⁵ White, The First Sexual Revolution, 28.


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suggestive. Discussing ‘The ‘‘Looks’’ of It’, one bodybuilder said: ‘an inch makes all the difference’, the ‘thickness’ of 141/2 inches being ‘noticeably big’ compared with an 11 inch ‘scrawny’ arm.²¹⁶ Scholars distinguish the signifying phallus from the penis; men’s bodies are protected from popular investigation, whereas women’s bodies are common cultural property.²¹⁷ In the 1920s, however, men’s muscles were scrutinized and sexualized, reaching a high point of public access and imagined bodily empowerment. Bodybuilding flaunted phallic muscularity as both cultural artefact and socially fetishized physical ideal. The sexual loading of men’s body parts was a new way of both reconstructing the male body and investing masculinity with new cultural capital. Veterans’ muscles implicated all men in the sexual power of rebuilding civilization, enhancing the political and commercial appeal of reconstruction.

C O N C LU S I O N The sexual reconstruction of men was a government, cultural, and commercial concern after the First World War. Rebuilding the veteran into a muscular Modern Classical hero determined new standards for civilian men in Anglophone societies. Technology and visual culture propagated this version of masculinity through the rhetoric and imagery of sexual virility. Consumerism and mass culture played a key role in generating interest in the male body and masculine sexuality. Creative relationships between medicine, the military, and body culture reveal that modernism and classicism generated visual knowledge about the male body in the aftermath of war. This chapter has argued that classicism in Anglophone body cultures resurrected men’s confidence in the physical expression of their sexuality. To create a classical heroism for modern life meant infusing the individual man with an invulnerable masculinity, one that was self-motivated and pleasurable. Classical styles and motifs enhanced the spectacle of the male body. New techniques of posing, photographing, and displaying were entwined in discourses about self-care, self-transformation, and ‘overcoming’ disability. At the same time, the culture of the body propped up a fallacious vision of reconstructed masculinity. Ostensibly, this new classical body would renew men and make them whole again. When exercises turned into punitive regimes of self-inspection, however, body cultures asserted control over men’s lives. Some men conformed to stereotypical ²¹⁶ ‘The ‘‘Looks’’ of It’, Physical Culture (Oct. 1920), 30. ²¹⁷ Charles Bernheimer, ‘Penile Reference in Phallic Theory’, Differences: Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies ( The Phallus Issue), 4 (1992), 116–32; Maxine Sheets-Johnston, ‘Corporeal Archetypes and Power’, Hypatia, 7 (1992), 69, in Bordo, ‘Reading the Male Body’, 267.

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behaviour and appearances. By rebuilding masculinity through the sexual body, a new breed of man was hoped for. Some veterans were motivated by injury in the war—rehabilitation could be empowering, especially if it improved the pain of disability. Others felt the emphasis on work as rehabilitation disavowed their limitations and ongoing ailments. Civilian men were brought into the discourse. Reconstruction proposed personal benefits for all men. Commerce generated potent images that have sustained body consciousness well into the twentieth century. Images, words, and exercises were motivating yet inadequate. For, healing the consequences of war proved much more elusive.

5 The ‘Golden Age of Woman’ This is the Golden Age of Woman. The woman of today is a person who thinks, acts, breathes, and works, unshackled by prejudice, tradition, or tight clothing . . . In short, the helpless woman has passed. Woman has learned to help herself; and she is helping herself to about everything worthwhile that the world contains. ‘The Passing of the Helpless Woman’, Withrow’s Physical Culture, 1923.

Medicine and commerce endorsed men’s sexual reconstruction, while the impact of war on sexuality was debated in Anglophone societies. War, it seemed, had changed the modern generation in new and disturbing ways. Although men and women were seen as competing for employment, wages, and the visible signs of gendered embodiment, popular commentary widened the scope of the ‘sex war’ to social freedoms, feverishly observing the conduct of a younger and visibly ‘modern’ generation. Certainly, gendered codes of work, dress, and respectable behaviour had turned ‘topsy–turvy’.¹ Identifying youth with modernity, French dramatist and commentator on women, Marcel Prévost, expressed alarm at this new era of informal relations. The First World War ushered in new responsibilities, but also created ‘dangerous new liberties’. European and American parents, he chided, now freely discussed with their children the ‘sordid details’ of surgical operations, mental problems, and sex.² Sordid talk emanated from the base experiences of war, threatening bourgeois civility. This was a common view in Europe and the Anglophone world: modern war degraded humanity, affecting moral standards and the ‘consequent excesses of youth’.³ Participation in medical war work also changed bodily awareness. On battlefields, in ambulances, casualty stations, and military hospitals, young men and women from all classes—as volunteers or rising professionals—were confronted with human frailty. In addition to these painful and awkward encounters, men’s bodies became explicit subjects in war literature and visual culture. ¹ Laura Doan, ‘ ‘‘Topsy-turvydom’’: Gender Inversion, Sapphism and the Great War’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 12 (2006), 517–42. ² Marcel Prévost, Vanity Fair (Apr. 1923), 35. ³ Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004), 223.

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Despite women’s claims to medical professionalism, the complexity of class and gender relations occurring around the male body in pain heightened sexuality—and intimacy—as never before. Far from the military hospital being a site of ‘repression’, gendered, sexual, and bodily relations were ubiquitously unstable.⁴ The military hospital became a ‘queer space’ where bodies defied physical standards, class relations, and expectations of sexual and gendered behaviour. Within this ‘aggressively normative’ culture, men and women continually adjusted their preconceptions about embodiment, operating flexibly between ‘transgression and complicity’.⁵ This continued after the war: sexual imagery in popular culture and the mass media was more available, while medical and health reformers discussed birth control and venereal disease, contributing to an explosion in knowledge cultures. In Britain and Australia, reformers aimed to counter sexual ignorance, and the association of purity with innocence. Ettie Rout chastised society for distorting women’s perceptions and encouraging frigidity.⁶ Others, like American child psychologist Lorine Pruette, worried that girls were too conversant about sex, the result of parental indulgence.⁷ Anglophone social reformers often identified modernity with sexual knowledge, which body and beauty cultures reiterated. These debates in Anglophone health and popular culture revealed that young people were increasingly visible as sexual subjects. Disquiet about young people resonated in public debates in the United States, Britain, and Australia. Sensationalism about female modernity elided with concerns about women’s vanity, consumption, and even ‘sexual incitement’.⁸ In Britain, anxieties about a post-war ‘surplus of women’, female and male unemployment (two million in 1922), and population decline, fuelled the debate.⁹ In 1919, Sir Charles Tarring (Medical Advisory Board, British Ministry of Health) reported female sexual promiscuity to the Association of Moral and Social Hygiene, noting increases amongst ‘respectable’ middle-class girls. The war had induced an epidemic of ‘khaki fever’, while the Women’s Patrol Committee ⁴ Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Janet K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 75. ⁵ Kath Browne, Jason Lim, and Gavin Brown, Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices and Politics (London: Ashgate, London, 2007), 4, 113. ⁶ Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 27; Ettie Rout, Sex and Exercise (London: Heinemann, 1925), 14–15. ⁷ Lorine Pruette, ‘The Flapper’ in V. F. Calverton and Samuel D. Schmalhausen (eds), The New Generation: The Intimate Problems of Modern Parents and Children (New York: The Macauley Company, 1930), 572. ⁸ Lucy Bland, ‘The Trials and Tribulations of Edith Thompson: The Capital Crime of Sexual Incitement in 1920s England’, Journal of British Studies, 47 (2008), 648. ⁹ Sally Alexander, ‘Men’s Fears and Women’s Work: Responses to Unemployment in London Between the Wars’, Gender and History, 12 (2000), 401–25.

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and Women’s Police Service attempted to curtail drinking and illegitimacy.¹⁰ After the war, women who remained in industrial labour or delayed marriage were often criticized for contributing to the declining birth rate or characterized as ‘selfish flappers’. In Britain, several parliamentary enquiries, the sensational trial of accused murderer Edith Thompson (a smoking, bob-haired adulteress), and a plethora of positive and negative media commentary, invoked the flapper’s desires as the outcome of the war, the Depression, and the problem of the ‘modern woman’.¹¹ Flappers were modelled on screen stars and fashion models like Louise Brooks, who appeared in American Venus (1926). They were also called ‘business women’, referring to new employment in clerical rather than factory work. Regardless of employment, they were cast as frivolous girls, obsessed with sex and fashion. Yet flapper trends spread across ages and classes. Women outside the 16 to 20 age bracket responded to the marketing of flapper products and appearances.¹² Feared in some circles and celebrated in others, the flapper featured in pulp romance novels and magazines, becoming a symbol of feminine modernity and liberated sexuality.¹³ The alleged libertarianism of the flapper was embroiled in social reformers’ activities that cultivated the myth of Victorian ‘repression’.¹⁴ While flapper sexuality may have been ‘more professed that practised’, body cultures ignored social anxieties, and instead normalized youthful sexuality as ‘beautiful and virile young womanhood’.¹⁵ Poking fun at Victorians, one Australian body culturist wrote: Our modern girl . . . the flapper, does actually live with a sex urge. She must, to be a nice girl, repress it—no matter how that repression may injure her health. Or, and thus be daubed with that enigmatical prefix ‘modern’, she may express it and incur . . . the insults of our Vigilants . . . by her alleged immodesty, she is finding a healthy expression, and so paving for herself the way to happy and healthy womanhood. ¹⁰ Angela Woollacott, ‘Khaki Fever and its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29 (1994), 325–47. ¹¹ Lesley Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (London: Macmillan, 2000), 99; Bland, ‘Trials and Tribulations of Edith Thompson’, 628. ¹² Barbara Cameron, ‘The Flappers and the Feminists: A Study of Women’s Emancipation in the 1920s’, in Margaret Bevege, Margaret James, and Carmel Shute (eds), Worth Her Salt: Women at Work in Australia (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982), 259. ¹³ Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (New York: St Martins, 1988). ¹⁴ Christina Simmons, ‘Modern Sexuality and the Myth of Victorian Repression’, in Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (eds), Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1989), 157–77. ¹⁵ Cameron, ‘The Flappers and the Feminists’, 260; and G. Deeping Knowles, ‘Are Our Girls Immodest?’, Health and Physical Culture ( June 1930), 17.

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Body cultures—like sex reformers—defended women’s rights to ‘revolt against the fallacies which have forced their sex to suffer’ and the ‘hide-bound and injurious conventions’ of the past. Against their ‘enlightened’ approach were moralists, ‘whose minds stopped functioning a decade or two ago’.¹⁶ Body cultures were marketed as pro–woman, pro–youth, liberated, and sexually progressive—which equated with ‘modern’. Women were applauded for ‘helping themselves’, offered alternative models to traditional feminine behaviour, and permitted an erotic capacity.¹⁷ Selfishness was not a bad trait, but indicated female modernity, validating women’s independence of body and mind. To be ‘unshackled by prejudice’ implied that gender and sexuality should not obstruct women’s pursuit of personal fulfilment. Australian body culturist May Cottrell declared: ‘sex is central to human life, its manifestations are . . . so varied, its influence so tremendous, and its effects so vital to human lives and affairs.’¹⁸ Although women were criticized for heterosexual display on the one hand, and androgyny on the other, this ‘topsy-turvydom’ was upheld in Anglophone body cultures. They encouraged healthy, embodied, self-expression, masculinized physiques and activities, at the same time presenting heterosexuality with a strategic role in new forms of femininity. Moderns ‘are attracted by the slender, boyish, shorthaired, narrow hipped, cigarette smoking, cocktail drinking, impudently amoral variety’ of woman, one Australian magazine chirped.¹⁹ The ‘passing of the helpless woman’ facilitated female masculinity, new forms of femininity, youth culture, and married women ‘passing’ as single in order to work.²⁰ The renegotiation of gender roles and social relations between men and women occurred across the global fields of sexology, medicine, and health, as well as the mass media and consumer culture.²¹ Sexology’s interest in sexual behaviour was repeated in fitness cultures and the popular magazines. Studies such as Stella Browne’s Sexual Variety and Variability Among Women (1915) and Havelock Ellis’ Erotic Rights of Women (1918) joined the literature that discussed sexuality. War formed an important backdrop—pain and death were ¹⁶ Knowles, ‘Are Our Girls Immodest?’, 18, 17. ¹⁷ Schmalhausen, ‘The War of the Sexes’ in Calverton (ed.), Women’s Coming of Age: A Symposium (New York: Liveright Press, 1931), 28; Lorine Pruette, ‘The Flapper’, 572. ¹⁸ V. May Cottrell, ‘Sex in Relation to Life’, Health and Physical Culture (Aug. 1930), 13. ¹⁹ The Home (1 Mar. 1929), 10, 3, 92. ²⁰ Angela Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 2000). ²¹ George Robb, ‘The Way of All Flesh: Degeneration, Eugenics and the Gospel of Free Love’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6 (1996), 600; Barbara Caine and Glenda Sluga, Gendering European History, 1780–1920 (London and New York Leicester University Press, 2000), 145.


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connected to libidinal forces. Intimacy was seen as the gratification of desire, but also escape from the violence of war into the comforts of civilian life and ‘companionate marriage’. Body cultures were influenced by sexology, eugenist, and feminist ideas of female sexuality, printing articles by Margaret Sanger (United States) and Marion Piddington (Australia), who often saw the war as necessitating change. Another sexual ‘progressive’ and birth control advocate, Ettie Rout Hornibrook, had campaigned on venereal disease prevention in the New Zealand Medical Corps, and established a sexual welfare service for soldiers in Paris and on the Western Front. Rout was also a physical culturist who was equally fixated with the ‘national body’ and global concerns about fitness and sex. In her best-selling British book, Safe Marriage: A Return to Sanity (1922), Rout argued that exercise enhanced women’s capacity for sexual pleasure. Books on middle-class marital sex generated a new market. Marie Stopes’ Married Love (1918) sold 2,000 copies in its first two weeks, and was reprinted seven times in the year.²² Stopes—who later worked with Rout—constituted female sexuality as independent from men, separating reproduction and sex, and reconfiguring marriage as an erotic partnership.²³ Not just incongruous for women, the old patriarchal view of marriage no longer fitted with men’s need for closeness and domestic consolation. Stopes dedicated the book to ‘young husbands’ and people ‘betrothed in love’, articulating the ‘yearning of the bonds of intimacy’ satisfied in the ‘superphysical entity created’ by heterosexual ‘union’, at a time when men returning from war were both damaged and desiring subjects. Sex and intimacy were at the heart of reconstruction, affecting individual and family life. Alison Light argues that amongst the English middle-classes the war saw a conservative retreat from imperial masculinity, turning instead to home and rural life.²⁴ Consumerist body cultures promoted well-being and physicality as central to marital bliss, and creating a bond between men and women. The war touched the deepest recesses of love, family, and community. Death and injury collided with desires for healthy living, as beauty and intimacy were positioned as the keys to domestic harmony. Yet the reality of the thousands of soldiers returning home with venereal disease generated problems; Ettie Rout claimed marriage was now ‘the most dangerous’ of institutions. Lecturing for ²² Fisher, Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage, 31. ²³ Hall, ‘Impotent Ghosts From No Man’s Land, Flappers’ Boyfriends, or Crypto-Patriarchs? Men, Sex and Social Change in 1920s Britain’, Social History, 21 (1996), 54–70; Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 192. ²⁴ Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991).

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Britain’s Health and Strength League, she encouraged women to join in fitness campaigns. In conjunction with her husband, strongman and physiotherapist Fred Hornibrook (author of The Culture of the Abdomen (1924), which went to eighteen editions) and a circle of eugenist activists like Stopes, Sanger, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and Somerset Maugham, she agitated for sexual health and reproductive reform.²⁵ Social engineering required attention to sexual practices and gender roles. New alliances were forged between medicine and popular culture in the pursuit of fit—and reproductive—bodies. Governments also commandeered the visions of utopians and ‘progressives’, evidence of which can be seen in political and educational campaigns across the Anglophone world. The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology claimed that female sexual liberation had physical and racial benefits, an idea eagerly taken up by the body and beauty industry. Magazines engaged the opinions of experts, while applying their own rhetoric to the discourses of the day. Contributors debated changes amongst the new market of the young generation. In Australia, Jules Lefèvre observed that the war created a ‘wave of movements all directed at breaking down the old barriers of silence and mystery. The modern young mind is more than ever curious to learn’, which worried commentators like Prévost.²⁶ Anglophone magazines contained frank discussions, while depicting ‘young moderns’ in provocative poses; explicitness added to the debate (and appeal). The Anglophone body industry shrewdly rode the wave of social change, celebrating the ascendancy of the ‘Golden Age of Woman’, hailed as ‘modern woman’s’ utopia. Together, classical and modern images were central in shaping new visions of feminine agency. While body and beauty cultures celebrated women’s independence, they also created new rationales of sexualization. Reconstruction shaped consumer culture and female selfhood. Investigating women’s claims to subjective and ‘embodied truth’ during the ‘Golden Age of Woman’, this chapter first turns to sports and technology. Second, the globalized figures of ‘Modern Diana’ and ‘New Venus’—featuring in Anglophone beauty cultures, advertising, modern art, and graphic design—are discussed. Third, this chapter considers the drive for slimness in fashion and fitness culture in the context of utopian ideals about personal transformation. Fourth, the commodification of beauty is considered alongside the political and commercial incentives to strive for bodily perfection. The ‘Golden Age of Woman’ was a global language articulating belief in women’s social and sexual freedom; yet, how did the ‘liberated self ’ correspond to the complexities of post-war sexual morality and the compelling regimes of consumer culture? ²⁵ Jane Tolerton, ‘A Lifetime of Campaigning: Ettie Rout, Emancipationist Beyond the Pale’, in J. A. Mangan, Fan Hong, and Hong Fan, Freeing the Female Body: Inspirational Icons (New York: Routledge, 2001), 85–7. ²⁶ Jules Lefevre, ‘The Modern Sex Outlook’, Health and Physical Culture (Mar. 1931), 23.


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T H E B O N D S O F B E AU T Y Body and beauty consciousness was a major consequence of the First World War, and yet one neglected in cultural and historical studies. Bodily spectacle and the focus on appearances occurred at the same time as the increased visibility of—and anxiety about—mutilated and disabled men across Anglophone postwar societies. Population politics embellished anxiety about masculinity with fears of men’s physical failure. Sexualized visions were entangled in this history. While the reconstruction of male beauty was framed in terms of the muscular, sexualized body, women were also encouraged to invest in new body and beauty industries. Magazines and cosmetics were marketed at the middle, aspirational, and working classes, addressing clerical workers, stenographers, vaudeville, and classical dancers, as well as retail workers and shop girls. Mothers shared in their daughters’ interests, assisting their purchasing power.²⁷ Body cultures encouraged inter-generational consumerist bonding, such as in the English League of Health and Beauty’s magazine, Mother and Daughter. Body industries recognized young women as consumers of a new physicalized modernity, offering sexualized versions of femininity. Aggressive mass marketing encouraged all women to bond with beauty, the ‘desire of every normal woman’, according to League Director Mary Bagot Stack.²⁸ The social construction of perfection was marketed to appeal to all classes. Striving to overcome flaws in physique and appearance was part of what I call the ‘aesthetics of normalizing embodiment’: attempts to standardize bodies by visual practices. Gender, sexuality, and class aspirations were fundamental to fashion and body image.²⁹ Clothing, style, hair, and make-up implicated beauty in the way that gender, sexuality, and social status were performed and perceived. During the war, ambulance drivers and uniformed women were pleased to be free from the accoutrements of feminine masquerade; others, however, longed for the seductive glamour of such commercially eroticized figures as the flapper and the vamp.³⁰ Screen stars like Pauline Frederick could boast about the ‘hundreds’ of ‘men who have made love to me’, blurring distinctions between real and ‘reel’ encounters with leading men: ‘each man makes love in a way specially his own’. That Girls’ Cinema featured articles on love scenes and depicted famous ‘kisses’ while ²⁷ Selina Todd, ‘Young Women, Work, and Leisure in Interwar England’, Historical Journal, 48 (2005), 789–908. ²⁸ Mary Bagot Stack, Building the Body Beautiful: The Bagot Stack Stretch and Swing System (London: Chapman and Hall, 1931), 12. ²⁹ Doan, ‘Passing Fashions: Reading Female Masculinities in the 1920s’, Feminist Studies, 24 (1998), 663–700; id., Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). ³⁰ Doan, ‘Topsy-turvydom’, 517–42; Woollacott, On Her their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (London: California University Press, 1994), 194.

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discussing limitation in the ‘art of flirting’, suggests reality and representation were excitingly interlaced.³¹ Fantasies of escape from heterosexual femininity and sexual restraint took many forms. In body and beauty cultures, the ‘aesthetics of normalizing embodiment’ affected class, gender, and sexuality. Heterosexuality could be practised through gender play, implicating the bonds of beauty to the social construction of sexuality. Beauty—and its complex implications for sexuality—signified reconstruction for both men and women, a factor not often considered in studies of post-war gender roles, social engineering, and population politics. The 1920s were years of great turmoil and yet hope. Beauty, self-artistry, and new ways of self-fashioning, were at the vanguard of the utopian push for a reconstructed society. The sense of potential was encouraged by the dream of rebuilding civilization. Utopia appeared in many visions—seductive blends of tradition and innovation in visual and commercial culture, but also in thinking and feeling. In a period marked by war and recovery, by poverty and unemployment, there was also creativity and enterprise. Anglophone women negotiated their own images through cosmetic practices that offered the public ‘spectacle of feminine visibility’ and the promise of ‘sexual agency’.³² Given the extent of mutilation in this period, the elevation of the beautiful seems incongruous with the damage of the war. Reconstruction mediated this through classical and modern ideals. People of all ages experimented with the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality in their self-consciously ‘modern’ attitudes and self-fashioning. Hypermasculinity was defensive, but it also protected queer relationships. Female masculinity, androgyny, and flapper femininity were positioned as liberating and chic. Although tied to commercial practices, women found opportunities to pass, to disguise, and to play. While reconstruction rhetoric was imposing, young people were selectively compliant. Women expressed their unique subjectivities, creatively engaging with their bodies, gender, and sexualities. Despite scrutiny and regulation, women experimented with unconventional activities. In Britain, the United States, and Australia, commentators believed that war had changed women—it had masculinized them—and exposed them to greater knowledge of life and death. Disposable income temporarily gave women more autonomy, and commercial industries cashed in on the multiple possibilities for women’s femininities and masculinities. Even though body industries were marketed mostly at the middle-classes, working-class women aspired to its fashions. All women were affected by its compelling rationales, even when they were no longer in work or had much less purchasing power. ³¹ Pauline Frederick (actress), ‘Men Who Have Made Love to Me’, Girls’ Cinema (27 Nov. 1920), 1, 7; Tom Moore (actor), Girls’ Cinema (6 Nov. 1920), 1, 4, 7. ³² Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 3, 13.


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Peacetime altered women’s employment. In Europe, women were forced out of industrial labour, with the exception of the textiles industry, and some were redeployed in clerical and service industries, as well as the tertiary sector, public services, social work, and banking.³³ In Britain, the Ministry of Labour’s Central Committee on Women’s Training and Employment prepared young girls for domestic service to satisfy middle-class demand.³⁴ With war work recast as ‘temporary’, many women felt betrayed: ‘they threw us on the slag heap’. The Depression amplified their hardships.³⁵ Due to high male unemployment, women, although paid at lower rates, were personally attacked. Reliance on female incomes upset family relations, especially when men were unemployed.³⁶ In Birmingham and Lancashire, industrial districts with high female unemployment, women were discriminated against when claiming assistance, especially married women whose status depended upon their nominal attachment to male breadwinners.³⁷ The British government subsidized imperial migration; however, it was ineffectual in Australia, which was equally concerned with ex-servicemen, female unemployment, and social discord.³⁸ By the 1930s, English rural women employed in domestic service migrated to urban centres, which allowed more time for family and leisure activities. Working-class women moved from domestic service into clerical positions and light manufacturing, which also afforded more social mobility and purchasing power.³⁹ Despite the valorization of mothers in mourning rituals and repopulation discourses in Anglophone communities both during and after the war—and that female employment declined in militarized industries and auxiliary services—the ‘cultural memory’ of war work lingered in commentaries about how the war benefited women.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, whether in voluntary or paid work, women’s seeming independence from men generated anxieties about their sexual autonomy. ³³ Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 425–6; Susan R. Grayzel, Women and the First World War (London: Pearson, 2002), 109. ³⁴ Pamela Horn, ‘Ministry of Labour Female Training Programmes between the Wars, 1919–1939’, History of Education, 3 (2002), 71–82. ³⁵ Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora, 1987), 33. ³⁶ Alexander, ‘Men’s Fears and Women’s Work’, 401–25. ³⁷ Barry Hill, ‘Women and Unemployment in Birmingham, 1918–1939’, Midland History, 27 (2002), 130–45; Rex Pope, ‘Unemployed Women in Interwar Britain: The Case of the Lancashire Weaving District’, Women’s History Review, 9 (2000), 743–59. ³⁸ Dane Kennedy, ‘Empire Migration in Post-war Reconstruction: The Role of the Overseas Settlement Committee, 1919–1922’, Albion, 20 (1988), 403–19. ³⁹ Todd, ‘Young Women, Work, and Family in Interwar Rural England’, Agricultural History Review, 52 (2004), 83–98; ‘Poverty and Aspiration: Young Women’s Entry to Employment in Interwar England’, Twentieth Century British History, 15 (2004), 119–42. ⁴⁰ Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 236.

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Refeminizing women through beauty and body consciousness seemed necessary precisely because of this cultural memory. English writer and pacifist Aldous Huxley said the focus on beauty was ‘symptomatic of the changed status of women, of the new attitude towards ‘‘the merely physical’’ ’. Women had the right ‘if not to be less virtuous than their grandmothers were, at any rate to look less virtuous’.⁴¹ An era of consumerist reconstruction made appearances count more than ever. Dress, style, and posture gave an impression of liberation (or moral laxity), even if codes of respectability had not radically altered. Huxley also touched upon the deeper relationship between women’s war experiences and their participation in male activities: politics, public life, and leisure activities, including sport, dancing, and drinking. Such activities were taken as signs of modern female emancipation; newspapers eroticized this bold behaviour, transforming smoking and bathing women into ‘fire and water nymphs’.⁴² In Britain, old taboos against exposing the body were confronted by health discourse, popular leisure, fashion, and cinema.⁴³ Alongside new ideas shaping women’s lives, population politics and social reform required their cooperation. Beauty was meant to enhance intimacy, binding men and women together in the project of rebuilding civilization. The body and beauty industries campaigned simultaneously for women’s independence, harmony between the sexes, and global reconstruction. Visible changes to the body were associated with shifts across sex and gender boundaries. As Vanity Fair contributor Dorothy Richardson pointed out, an obsession with ‘the successful woman’ accompanied the belief that ‘modern men lacked maleness’ (her emphasis). Since war was emasculating, and women had appropriated men’s positions in society, ‘man’s day is done and woman WOMAN, the future belongs to her. Cheers! Who cares? She’s a marvel.’ When a woman broke the world motoring record, Richardson surmised, it was for some a sign of hope. For others, it meant the collapse of civilization. In both cases, the ‘present panic amongst men’ had arrived, ‘now that she is abroad in his world’.⁴⁴ War stripped an essentialized notion of masculinity from the male body, enabling both men and women a greater range of ‘queer possibilities’. As Judith Halberstam argues, ‘femininity was not wed to femaleness and masculinity was certainly not bound to maleness’; indeed, female masculinity is important for understanding the historical production of ‘modern masculinity’.⁴⁵ In the 1920s, ⁴¹ Aldous Huxley, ‘Beauty in 1929: Wherein a Quality Alleged to be Skin-Deep is Shown to Reach into the Recesses of the Soul’, Vanity Fair ( June 1929), 76. ⁴² Penny Tinkler, Smoke Signals: Women, Smoking, and Visual Culture in Britain (London: Berg, 2006), 87. ⁴³ C. Horwood, ‘Girls Who Arouse Dangerous Passions: Women and Bathing, 1900–1939’, Women’s History Review, 9 (2000), 663. ⁴⁴ Dorothy Richardson, ‘A Fresh Problem for Feminists’, Vanity Fair (Apr. 1929), 138–40. ⁴⁵ Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 48.


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the ‘Golden Age of Woman’ celebrated women’s agency in blurring gender roles, aptitudes, and behaviours, and in reconstructing bodies with creative ambiguity.

‘ G A M E S O F T RU T H ’ : T E C H N O LO G Y, S P O RT A N D S U B J E C T I V I T Y For industries concerned with the female body, it is significant that women’s relationships to machines were both normalized and glamorized. Flying aeroplanes and driving motor vehicles were presented as typical female pursuits. Women’s wartime experiences with machines continued in the cultural memory and the representation of modern femininity. Appreciation of women’s motoring skills emerged in the press from 1916, and representations of women as ambulance drivers featured in highbrow and popular literature. Radclyffe Hall’s Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (1926) described female masculinity and women’s ‘intense bonds’ with their ambulance cars during the war.⁴⁶ Women drivers and competitive racers appeared in magazines. Driving gave women a ‘feeling of liberty’ and a ‘new spirit of self-reliance’, according to Spanish tennis champion Lili de Alvarez.⁴⁷ The only female competitor at the Maroubra Speedway, and Royal Automobile Club of Australia Gold Medallist, Mrs Jones, said motoring contests and controlling vehicles ‘improved’ women.⁴⁸ Female drivers were associated with mobility, independence, and business savvy. Lois Windeyer had driven an ambulance in the war, returning to Sydney in 1920 to work for Dalgety Motors. Soon after, she established a hire car company. Celebrating her success, Health and Physical Culture magazine described her as ‘the bravest and best’ of Australian womanhood for her war service, but also that she ‘prove[s] that a woman can hold her own with men in the difficult world of motor salesmanship’.⁴⁹ Motor narratives characterized women as beneficiaries or consumers of technology; however, body cultures celebrated female drivers’ power and skill.⁵⁰ Motorists and aviatrices flexed their technological and intellectual muscles. Amy Johnston was a favourite example of female masculinity: ‘an enthusiastic physical culture girl . . . [with] tremendous endurance and nerves of steel’, Johnson’s body was both feminine and masculine. Her physicality was interpreted ⁴⁶ Doan, ‘Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War’, Women: A Cultural Review, 17 (2006), 27. ⁴⁷ Lili de Alvarez, ‘Joys of the Open Road and River’, Health and Physical Culture 1 (Nov. 1930), 13. ⁴⁸ ‘Women in the World of Sport’, Health and Physical Culture (Nov. 1929), 60–2. ⁴⁹ ‘Women in the World of Sport—Motoring’, Health and Physical Culture (Dec. 1929), 60. ⁵⁰ Georgine Clarsen, ‘The ‘‘Dainty Female Toe and the Brawny Male Arm’’: Conceptions of Bodies and Power in Automobile Technology’, Australian Feminist Studies, 15 (2000), 155.

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as a self-determined liberal feminist act, having ‘to lift herself above the petty restrictions of her sex and preparing herself to make the name of woman famous’.⁵¹ Although ‘mannish women’ had been subjects of scrutiny, ‘Johnnie’ was celebrated as a masculine achiever.⁵² In the global press, ‘Amy, Wonderful Amy’ was a cult figure, a celebrity, and a role model, defying the association of women with nature and sexuality. Looming in the background of the aviatrix was the first modern war that involved air power. Whereas the French military requisitioned aviatrices’ aeroplanes, Anglophone aviatrices were characterized with heroic masculinity.⁵³ Amy—dubbed the ‘flapper ace’—was seen as modern and physically free. Her personal achievements symbolized women’s agency in physical terms: mobility, mastering dangerous public spaces (sky) and masculine technologies (aeroplane, navigation equipment), and assuming heroic identities reserved for men (military Ace).⁵⁴ Body cultures promoted a female vision of modernity and technology, just as beauty culture appeared to constitute feminist goals of liberating women from social and cultural restrictions.⁵⁵ Prominent aviatrix Evelyn Follett was regarded as a feminist model, being the first woman to enrol in classes at the Australian Aero Club (New South Wales branch). Flying, she said, taught women to think and act quickly, and to develop a keen sense of observation.⁵⁶ Embracing the technological woman, body cultures negotiated the blurred boundaries of gender and sexuality. They celebrated other signs of female masculinity: short hair, trousers, and muscles.⁵⁷ Fashion and body culture were significant visual fields where female masculinity could flourish. Sporting women could ‘look modish at play’; sport was ‘free and easy . . . hygienic . . . [and] the height of fashion’.⁵⁸ Women had been active in sports since the late nineteenth century, despite ridicule or social disapproval. In the 1920s, female athletes were gender-tested at the Olympics, to determine their suitability for competition as women, suggesting the flexibility of bodily boundaries—and need for officiating—at the time.⁵⁹ Body cultures recognized female athletic expertise; however, the sportswoman was an objectified body in its consumerist imaging. Body cultures promoted women in masculine sports, such as golf, football, and ⁵¹ ‘Johnnie’s One of Us’, Health and Physical Culture ( July 1930), 12. ⁵² Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870–1936’, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Angus McLaren, ‘ ‘‘Perverts’’: Mannish Women, Effeminate Men and the Sex Doctors’, Twentieth Century Sexuality (London: Blackwell, 1999). ⁵³ Margaret Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2000). ⁵⁴ Justine Lloyd, ‘The Impossible Aviatrix’, Australian Feminist Studies, 15 (2000), 137, 138. ⁵⁵ Lois Banner, American Beauty (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1983), 17. ⁵⁶ ‘Women in the World of Sport—Aviation’, Health and Physical Culture (Nov. 1929), 63. ⁵⁷ Carrie Tenant, ‘Women Wear the Pants’, Health and Physical Culture (Apr. 1930), 51. ⁵⁸ de Alvarez, ‘How to Look Modish at Play’, Health and Physical Culture (Dec. 1930), 19. ⁵⁹ Laura A. Wackwitz, ‘Verifying the Myth: Olympic Sex Testing and the Category ‘‘Woman’’ ’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 26 (2003), 553–60.


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cricket, while recommending the balance of ‘feminine’ pursuits, such as archery and Classical revival dance.⁶⁰ Alongside sports and gymnastic exercises that honed agility and mental skill, body cultures provided opportunities for women to engage in aggressive sports such as ju-jitsu, fencing, and boxing. Office workers joined body culture clubs, proving themselves to be ‘formidable batsm[e]n’ and ‘crack hardy’ boxers.⁶¹ Far from being just a novelty, the ‘modern sports girl’ was taking ‘seriously to the punchball’.⁶² In the gymnasium, it was ‘not an uncommon sight to see boxing fans among the fairer sex’.⁶³ Ju-jitsu empowered women in self-defence techniques, ‘better than [the] brute strength’ of men.⁶⁴ Across the Anglophone world, women were not just avid audiences, but also claimed the right to compete in ‘rough sports’ against the advice of physicians. Annie Newtown, an English war widow who boxed to provide for her family, defended it as not ‘any more degrading, or half as hard work, as scrubbing floors’.⁶⁵ In 1923, the British Legion sponsored Sports Days especially for female athletic competition. Body cultures recommended push-ups, deflecting concerns about decorum or stamina: ‘girls will not die of exhaustion performing this exercise’.⁶⁶ Women’s bodies and minds could be trained and developed. The masculinity of fitness, sport, and technology became woman-centred. Hockey players in Sydney teemed ‘from the banks and business houses of the city’, and were ‘building up unconsciously outward physique[s]’ and ‘vital womanhood’.⁶⁷ Women footballers, water-skiers, divers, solo-sailors, and aviatrices became the new cover girls on magazines.⁶⁸ Yet these gender-blurring physical activities were also subject to the spectacle of sexualized glamour. Women appeared to be competing for, and winning, the visual signs of masculinity, with classicism affirming the association of muscular fitness with social power. Across the Anglophone scene, fitness and beauty were equated with liberation.⁶⁹ By contrast, in France, the anxiety created by La Femme moderne was considered a grave social problem.⁷⁰ French beauty and fashion nevertheless ⁶⁰ ‘If Your Golf is Graceful’, Health and Physical Culture (1 Oct. 1930), 17. ⁶¹ Malcolm Mackolm, ‘More Play is What We Need’, ibid. (Mar. 1930), 26; ‘Crack Hardy!’, ibid. ( July 1930), 5. ⁶² Ibid. (1 Oct. 1930), 32. ⁶³ Mackolm, ‘More Play is What We Need!’, 26. ⁶⁴ ‘Women Protect Yourself from Attack. It’s Better than Brute Strength’, Withrow’s Physical Culture ( Jan. 1923), 40. ⁶⁵ In Jennifer Hargreaves, ‘Women’s Boxing and Related Activities: Introducing Images and Meanings’, Body and Society (1997), 3, 33–49. ⁶⁶ Withrow’s Physical Culture ( June 1923), 288. ⁶⁷ Nove, ‘Our Hockey Girls’, Health and Physical Culture (1 Nov. 1930), 42. ⁶⁸ See Fig. 6.5, ‘Female Footballer’, Physical Culture (Dec. 1920); ‘Female Water-skier’, ibid. ( June 1924) and Health and Physical Culture (Oct. 1929); ‘Female Solo Sailor’, Physical Culture (Sept. 1924); ‘Aviatrix’, Health and Physical Culture (Sept. 1929). ⁶⁹ ‘The Poor Weaker Sex—by a Sydney Solicitor’, Sydney Opinion (Oct. 1929), 16, 88. ⁷⁰ Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Post-war France, 1917–1927 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 17–88.

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Fig. 5.1 Female Atlas. Cover, Health and Physical Culture (Dec. 1929). Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

set many trends followed in Britain, the United States, and Australia. Although sexual inversion was often equated with ‘the modern woman’, body cultures incorporated commercial approaches to both feminine and masculine female bodies.⁷¹ The spectacle of women in the public domain renewed interest in classical female figures, represented as sexualized, feminine, or androgynous. On the cover of Health and Physical Culture (1929) (Fig. 5.1), an Australian female replaced the traditional male figure of Atlas. Body-culture magazines constructed the new world order as a muscular utopia occupied by women. The feminization of Atlas took place just when Charles Atlas, the New York-based body culturist, ⁷¹ George Chauncey Jr, ‘From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female ‘‘Deviance’’ ’, in Peiss and Simmons (eds), Passion and Power, 107.


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was prized as ‘The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man’.⁷² When the female Atlas balanced the globe upon her shoulders, it symbolized female success in a new world order. This was not just the cover illustration of a magazine—it offered models for real women such as Grace de Carlton, the ‘tiny’ Atlas admired for throwing a male wrestler at the Greek Theatre, California.⁷³ Classical images symbolized skill, strength, and endurance. Beauty culturists also thought the development of muscles enabled women to work hard without tiring.⁷⁴ The modern female Atlas epitomized one of the central themes in classical body cultures: the mind–body equilibrium. Some women attributed their success at work to the mental agility and personal confidence gained from physical exercise.⁷⁵ Combining classical perfection with personal autonomy, the ‘woman of today’ led the Golden Age with ‘commercial or professional experience’, ‘pockets she knows how to fill’, and physical perfection: ‘with the casting aside of her tight corsets and binding shoes . . . the ‘‘doll’’ has come out of her wrappings, and she will never go back to them’.⁷⁶ Financial independence was as important as agility. Writing for an Australian body culture magazine, tennis champion Lili de Alvarez declared: ‘fainting went out of fashion as soon as we discarded our tight corsets and starched collars’.⁷⁷ In Britain, too, beauty writer Stanley Redgrove affirmed the ‘modern’ view that ‘the sports girl who threw away her corsets set a fashion that has benefited the Englishwoman enormously’. Restrictive clothing was intolerable, unhygienic, and contravened women’s freedom.⁷⁸ The beauty industry played up women’s mobility and visibility, decrying restrictive Edwardian fashions that symbolized female submission. In Australia, manufacturers Berlei criticized the distorting, tight corsets of old, promoting ‘flexible’ and ‘supporting’ garments. Employing classical motifs in their marketing strategies, aimed at sporting and working women, they claimed ‘the Greek spirit informs the modern world’.⁷⁹ The company advertised in the journal Art in Australia and produced a magazine, The Berlie Review: A Magazine of Hopeful, Helpful, Human Service, which promoted modern corsetry as liberated and humanitarian. Following European trends, the magazine stated ‘Fifty million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong’.⁸⁰ ⁷² William R. Hunt, Body Love: The Amazing Career of Bernarr Macfadden (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1989), 30. ⁷³ Physical Culture (Dec. 1920), 50. ⁷⁴ Margaret Hallam, Health and Beauty for Women and Girls (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1921), 18. ⁷⁵ ‘How I Became a Successful Business Girl’, Health and Physical Culture (Dec. 1929), 62. ⁷⁶ ‘The Passing of the Helpless Woman’, 259. ⁷⁷ de Alvarez, ‘Feminine Fitness’, Health and Physical Culture (Aug. 1930), 15. ⁷⁸ Stanley Redgrove, The Cream of Beauty: A Little Book of Beauty Culture (London: Heinemann, 1931), 8, 9. ⁷⁹ Berlei advertisement, ‘Beauty and Art in Australia’, Art in Australia (Oct. 1924). ⁸⁰ Berlei Review (Aug. 1933), 11.

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In Britain too, classicism met sexual allure and modernity in marketing. The ‘spirit of Greece’ associated youth with freedom, and beauty with physical fitness. Beauty expert Charles Willi stated that Greek statues were as beautiful as Englishwomen ‘on tennis courts and on sea-beaches’.⁸¹ Not just the young, but women of all ages could be rejuvenated. Australian Mrs Alice Smith explained that turning forty was the happiest time in her life: ‘Gone were the days when women were expected to retire into an obscure decline . . . Modern woman is more and more learning the truth about herself, and is rejoicing in her new-found energy.’⁸² Just as Miss Ogilvy had ‘found herself’, and modern woman was said to be ‘helping herself ’, Mrs Smith claimed she was becoming intimately aware of herself. Through her body, she gained self-knowledge. Identifying this ‘truth about herself’, Alice Smith made a telling admission, that qualifies Michel Foucault’s deliberations on human subjectivity and its ‘games of truth’.⁸³ Women’s bodies were not passive symbols but active competitors in such games. ‘The truth about herself’ was political and gendered, a relationship Foucault rarely considered.⁸⁴ The constitution of the self as a subject is a historical, political, and theoretical process.⁸⁵ Body cultures facilitated sexual and selfknowledge, informed by gendered notions of selfhood. Yet self-knowledge was possible without feminist consciousness. Australian feminists pursued electoral, economic, and marital issues at this time; by contrast, body cultures promoted sex education, health, and bodily pride as part of female selfhood.⁸⁶ How did this liberation discourse operate within the disciplinary strategies of the body and beauty industry? How could an emancipated ‘herself ’ be gained from a body that conformed to the demands of slimness and fitness? Liberal feminism had sought to free white women from social exclusion, marital submission, political disadvantage, and economic inequality. In 1920s European and Anglophone consumer cultures, women stretched the boundaries of respectability, demanding ‘more personal freedom, more pleasure, and more self-expression’.⁸⁷ Was this consumerist female selfhood liberating or constraining? ⁸¹ Charles Henri Willi, Facial Rejuvenation (London: Cecil Palmer, 1926), 20. ⁸² Alice Smith, ‘When a Woman Passes Forty—The Happiest Time of my Life’, Health and Physical Culture ( June 1930), 14–15 (my emphasis). ⁸³ ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault’, in James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (eds), The Final Foucault (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1984), 1, 9. ⁸⁴ Caroline Ramazanoglu (ed.), Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions Between Foucault and Feminism (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). ⁸⁵ Nancy Hartsock, ‘Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?’, in Linda Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernizm (New York: Routledge, 1990), 170. ⁸⁶ Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1999), 7, 93–5; Judith A. Allen, ‘Rose Scott, Feminism and Sexuality, 1890–1925’, Australian Feminist Studies, 7–8 (1988), 65–91; and id., Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994). ⁸⁷ Birgitte Soland, Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 170.


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Foucault qualified his ideas about the ‘care of the self ’ and its relationship to subjectivity, critical of its appearance as a ‘practice of freedom’.⁸⁸ Unlike controlling institutions such as the prison or clinic, he described a shift towards ‘an exercise of self upon self . . . to transform one’s self and to attain a certain mode of being’.⁸⁹ Self-care is part of the practice of subject-formation rather than a mode of liberation. The practice allows for agency and individuality, whereas the process is bound up with ideologies and institutions. Feminist scholars, such as Susan Bordo, have argued that gender is a fundamental part of this equation, since power is gained from the ‘achievement of femininity’.⁹⁰ Was the knowledge and practice of ‘herself ’—through body and beauty culture—more empowering than at first thought? Foucault’s point that ‘liberation opens up new relationships of power, which have to be controlled by practices of liberty’ introduces a useful problem to the relationship between discourse, agency, and subjectivity.⁹¹ Body and beauty cultures were instructive and coercive, seductively fusing reconstruction with commerce, health, and social engineering. It was an instrument of power, because women could fail at beauty standards.⁹² Still, women entered ‘body beautiful’ competitions and sent photographs to be published in magazine ‘portrait galleries’, such as Gwen Isles from South Australia, who credited her ‘beautiful figure’ to dancing and swimming, which made her feel healthy and confident.⁹³ This praxis was both personal and cultural, indicating the role of consumerist and self-reconstruction discourses in subjectivity.⁹⁴ As Liz Conor writes, beauty contestants submitted themselves to the public gaze, engaging in the ‘performative enactment of modern feminine subjectivity’ embedded in ‘commodity culture’s logic of display’.⁹⁵ In body and beauty cultures, age, social mobility, and marital status were factors in women’s pursuit of selfhood. Individuals like Gwen Isles negotiated institutional and commercial discourses in their own way. The Alfred J. Briton School magazine, to which she sent her photo, distributed the £50 prize, equal for men and women.⁹⁶ Unlike in the labour market, beautiful bodies were valued the same; by ‘universal laws’, beauty seemed democratic. ⁸⁸ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, iii The Care of the Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 39. ⁸⁹ ‘The ethic of the care for the self ’, 1–2. ⁹⁰ Susan Bordo, ‘The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault’, in Alison M. Jagger and Susan R. Bordo (eds), Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowledge (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). ⁹¹ ‘The ethic of the care for the self ’, 4. ⁹² Jill Julius Matthews, Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in the Twentieth Century Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 8. ⁹³ ‘Our Portrait Gallery’, Health and Physical Culture (Dec. 1929), 33. ⁹⁴ Mark S. R. Jenner and Bertrand O. Taithe, ‘The Historiographical Body’, in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds), Medicine in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000), 194. ⁹⁵ Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 134. ⁹⁶ Health and Physical Culture (Mar. 1930), 16.

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Medical, commercial, and social imperatives compelled women to selftransformation: from unhealthy to fit, from fat to slim, from plain to beautiful, from old to young, and, yet, most significantly, from passive to active. Women declared their personal ‘liberation’ and self-transformation as actions of their bodies—linked to new conceptualizations of modern, gendered, selfhood in the aftermath of war, when greater bodily awareness was roused and, as Liz Conor argues, as consumerist spectacles enhanced practices ‘appearing’. Body and beauty cultures encouraged women to explore this ‘truth about herself ’, while disguising discipline as liberation.⁹⁷

T H E ‘ M O D E R N D I A N A’ A N D T H E ‘ N EW V E N U S ’ Independent and physically fit women were characterized in two classical models: the ‘Modern Diana’ and the ‘New Venus’. These Graeco-Roman goddesses featured in European and Anglophone body cultures, symbolizing the physical and social transformation of the ‘modern woman’. The Modern Diana was conceived as slim-bodied and sporty. Based on the ancient model famed for her hunting skills and independence from men, the modern image appropriated ancient sculptures, such as Diana Chasseresse (Diana Huntress, 325 bc).⁹⁸ This figure was marketed at single, working, or affluent women. The more mature New Venus was an icon of sensual femininity and fashion chic, complemented by taut curves. In classical myth, Diana was a maiden but also the patron goddess of the hunt; revered for her androgyny and chastity. Throughout western cultural history, Diana and Venus were figures of female power and intriguing sensuality; interpretations of them appeared throughout Europe and Anglophone cultural landscapes. Female classical figures featured in public and commercial architecture, and European, British, and Commonwealth war medals and memorials. However, in 1923, when the defeated Turkish government handed over the Kneeling Aphrodite of Rhodes (third century bc) to the Italians—under the terms of the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Lausanne—it generated enormous media attention.⁹⁹ The legacy of the war, empire building, and international politics were subsumed under the marble’s ‘transcendent beauty’. Fashion magazines delighted that the statue was ‘astonishingly modern’, while consumer goods and fitness classes promoted Venus and Diana as ideal body types.¹⁰⁰ ⁹⁷ Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 158. ⁹⁸ ‘Hints on Posing the Physique Beautiful’, Withrow’s Physical Culture ( June 1923), 288; and ‘Hints on Posing’, ibid. (Aug. 1924), 19; ‘The Ideal of Symmetry’, ibid. ( Jan. 1923), 14. ⁹⁹ Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 220. ¹⁰⁰ ‘A Newly Discovered Aphrodite’, Vanity Fair (May 1930), 58.


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The Modern Diana became a commercial body image. Identified with rigorous exercise, athletic agility, and toned physique, she was a respectable icon of female masculinity. Her ‘boyishness’—pageboy haircut, narrow hips, trousers, and muscularity—was fashionable and ‘hygienic’, concurring with popular health advice. The coalition of body culture and medicine consolidated the view that self-control equated with personal care. Support for female masculinity occurred alongside the slimming craze; together medicine and fashion steered ‘compulsory slenderness’.¹⁰¹ The woman boxer—rather than scorned—‘kept her figure down’ and maintained interest in clothes and make-up.¹⁰² Traditionally, women’s muscles ‘connoted competition with men, androgyny, and the denial of difference’: excessive muscularity caused panic.¹⁰³ By contrast, the classical principles of equilibrium grounded body and beauty culture. Yet body culturists recommended muscle-sculpting activities such as weight-training and boxing. Women in ‘aggressive’ sports were not regarded as abnormal or unattractive. Feminine balance could be achieved in Greek rhythmic gymnastics, which shaped muscles carefully, maintaining the graceful corporeality of Greek sculpture. The female boxer was not violent but classically beautiful. Archery—a popular body culture sport of the period—also developed upper body strength. Since it was thought to improve concentration and graceful movement, it was suitable for young women. In Australia’s modernist The Home magazine, Misses Webb and Lorimer’s gymnasium in Melbourne encouraged athletic girls to emulate Diana. The ‘doll’ may have been unwrapped, but the ‘boyish look’ and technical skill of ‘the Archer’ was repackaged as figures of youthful modernity (Fig. 5.2). The Bjelke-Peterson System promised ‘Beauty of form, grace and movement, robust health and vitality’, along with the warning that ‘no married woman may lode [sic] her figure if proper measures are taken to keep the muscles firm’.¹⁰⁴ Firm muscles equated with wartime fantasises of robust Amazons, rather than feminine sock-knitters.¹⁰⁵ Women’s patriotism normalized their transgressions into masculine work and appearance, although this was offset by fears about working-class sexual morality.¹⁰⁶ Despite conventional images of Amazons as separatist, militarist, and self-mutilating, even the anti-feminist Punch magazine ¹⁰¹ Peter N. Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), 168; Christopher E. Forth and Ana Carden-Coyne (eds), Cultures of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion and Fat in the Modern World (New York: Palgrave, 2005). ¹⁰² Mackolm, ‘More Play is What We Need!’, 26. ¹⁰³ Jill Julius Matthews, ‘Building the Body Beautiful’, Australian Feminist Studies, 5 (1987), 26. ¹⁰⁴ Advertisement, Bjelke-Peterson Bros., School of Physical Culture, The Home (Sept. 1922), 3, 82. ¹⁰⁵ ‘Modern Amazons’, Society at War, 1914–1916 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931), 135; Bruce Scates, ‘The Unknown Sock Knitter: Voluntary Work, Emotional Labour, Bereavement and the Great War’, Labour History, 81 (2001), 29–49. ¹⁰⁶ Summerfield, ‘Gender and War in the Twentieth Century’, Intertnational History Review, 19 (1997), 8.

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Reconstructing the Body Fig. 5.2 Advertisement. E. M. Lorimar and C. M. Webb’s Open-air Roof Gymnasium, ‘2nd position of the Archer’; The Home (Sept. 1920). Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

viewed them favourably.¹⁰⁷ In Britain, the United States, and Australia uniformed women were celebrated in popular culture. In the 1920s, mannish heroism was eulogized as glamorous more than risqué. By 1933, historian Inez Haynes—in Angels and Amazons —argued the Amazon image was exhausted, having given an ‘all too glowing account’ of women’s advancement.¹⁰⁸ Body cultures, however, continued to promote women’s pursuit of ‘unfeminine’ sports, such as boxing, car racing, flying, and ju-jitsu. In an article entitled ‘If I were a Woman’, one man observed: ‘Practically all enterprising girls wish they were boys’.¹⁰⁹ Cultivating ‘boyishness’, they advocated the transgression of gender boundaries, celebrating the modern woman with her bobbed hair, slim, muscular figure, disposable income, and sporting interests. When identified with fashion, sporting women deflected ‘mannishness’; they did not ‘ape men in appearance’, but had ‘revolutionized fashion’. Similar attitudes were found in newspapers and magazines. In Britain, the link between mannishness and ‘inversion’ was not as evident until after the Radclyffe Hall ¹⁰⁷ Doan, ‘Topsy-turvydom’. ¹⁰⁸ Estelle B. Freedman, ‘The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s’, Journal of American History, 61 (Sept. 1974), 379. ¹⁰⁹ C. G., ‘If I Were a Woman’, Withrow’s Physical Culture ( Jan. 1923), 35.


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Well of Loneliness trial in 1928, and many women associated female masculinity with fashion and modernity.¹¹⁰ Sporting women were celebrated for physical beauty and poise; ‘the Amazon girl’ possessed a ‘litheness and grace’ and ‘beautiful classical proportions’, which can only be gained from ‘an active interest in suitable sports’.¹¹¹ Lili de Alvarez advised against ‘rough’ sports or obsessive practising, yet she was a multiple-sports champion. Maintaining ‘attractiveness’ was crucial. Indeed, de Alvarez became a media personality, shocking Wimbledon by wearing Schiaparelli’s split skirt—a precursor to shorts.¹¹² While, as Jennifer Hargreaves argues, expectations of sporting women to ‘play like gentlemen’ but ‘behave like ladies’ continued, the politics of female success collided with the commercialization of classical femininity and female masculinity.¹¹³ Although at times associated with the flapper, the Diana figure appeared respectable compared with the orientalized sexuality typified in English actress Maud Allen’s Salome, which had generated a wartime political scandal about an alleged ‘cult of the clitoris’. In the libel trial, sexological theories about gender and female desire were raised.¹¹⁴ While the commercial Diana type was masculinized, association with feminine fashion offset associations with the hypersexual female invert and her allegedly enlarged clitoris (hypertrophy).¹¹⁵ Sensational cases of ‘sex fraud’ featured in the popular press in the 1920s. However, female cross-dressers were framed in terms of social deviance and criminality, more than gender inversion or sexual pathology—and some women successfully passed as husbands and soldiers.¹¹⁶ Literary reactions to blurred gendered and sexed identities were mixed. Wanda Fraiken Neff ’s We Sing Diana (1928) explored intense bonds between college women, although it also portrayed them as suspect, influenced by Freudian sexual discourses. Yet Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928) was well received; her characters ¹¹⁰ Doan, ‘Passing Fashions: Reading Female Masculinities in the 1920s’, Feminist Studies (1998), 663–700. ¹¹¹ Lili de Alvarez, ‘If Your Golf is Graceful’, Health and Physical Culture (1 Oct. 1930), 17. ¹¹² id., ‘Feminine Fitness’, ibid. (Aug. 1930), 15. ¹¹³ Hargreaves, ‘ ‘‘Playing Like Gentlemen While Behaving Like Ladies’’: Contradictory Features of the Formative Years of Women’s Sport’, British Journal of Sports History (1985), 2, 1, 40–52. ¹¹⁴ Lucy Bland, ‘Trial by Sexology?: Maud Allen, Salome and the ‘‘Cult of the Clitoris’’ Case’, in Laura Doan and Lucy Bland (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Chicago and Cambridge, Mass.: University of Chicago Press/Polity Press, 1998), 183–98. ¹¹⁵ Elizabeth Lunbeck, ‘A New Generation of Women: Progressive Psychiatrists and the Hypersexual Female’, Feminist Studies, 13 (1987), 513–43; Margaret Gibson, ‘Clitoral Corruption: Body Metaphors and American Doctors’ Construction of Female Homosexuality, 1870–1900’, in Vernon A. Rosario (ed.), Science and Homosexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 109–132. ¹¹⁶ Ruth Ford, ‘The Man–Woman Murderer: Sex Fraud, Sexual Inversion and the Unmentionable ‘‘Article’’ in 1920s Australia’, Gender and History, 12 (2000), 158–96; Alison Oram, Her Husband Was a Woman! Women’s Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2007).

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taken as humorous rather than perverse.¹¹⁷ Although sexuality was scrutinized in medicine and law, the English parliament’s attempts to criminalize ‘acts of female indecency’ (1921) had failed. The ‘lesbian’ was not yet a coherent construction or public image; even in elite circles the term was not used.¹¹⁸ Despite the spectre of inversion, many sporting women went under the radar; Diana’s ambiguous female masculinity was not wholly subjected to normalizing aesthetics. Nevertheless, outside of fashion and popular culture, Modern Diana’s androgynous body could be pathologized, as sexology and Freudianism joined appearances, biology, and psychological disorder.¹¹⁹ In 1923, Stella Browne’s studies of ‘female inversion’ generated interest in female sexuality and masturbation. Educators of women in sport and fitness may have been attuned to the idea that female friendships were potentially dangerous. Browne described a patient whose ‘absorbing devotion’ was ‘unconsciously, passionate’. Her ‘instinctive horror of men’ was exacerbated by ‘social antagonism’ towards them.¹²⁰ In the nineteenth century, with the culture of separate spheres, such a woman would have been considered dutiful. Carroll Smith Rosenberg’s ‘female world of love and ritual’ was ‘inverted’ only a few decades later.¹²¹ Body cultures, when concerned with heterosexual romance, kept an eye on the sporty Diana and female physical contact. Although Browne claimed she had ‘never met the normal woman’, she catalogued the female invert in terms of her body—especially the ‘athletic build’ of ‘the Diana type’.¹²² Case studies invoked classical imagery and modern psychology in this ‘aesthetics of embodiment’: Tall, and of the typical Diana build; long limbs, broad shoulders, slight bust, narrow hips. Decidedly athletic. Voice agreeable in tone and quite deep . . . Extremely energetic and capable . . . very dominating and managing.¹²³

The sexological Diana ‘type’ was interested in politics and public affairs, had a ‘logical and rationalistic bent of mind’, and saw herself as equal to men. Body-shape, however, was the visible identifier. Bodies were central to knowledge production. The physical attributes of pathological women were discussed in nineteenth-century criminology and ¹¹⁷ Erin G. Carlston, ‘A Finer Differentiation: Female Sexuality and the American Medical Community, 1926–1940’, in Rosario, Science and Homosexualities, 177–96. ¹¹⁸ Doan, ‘ ‘‘Acts of Female Indecency’’: Sexology’s Intervention in Legislating Lesbianism’, in Doan and Bland (eds), Sexology in Culture, 211. ¹¹⁹ G. Lombroso, The Soul of Woman (London, 1924); Wilhelm Stekel, ‘Frigidity in Mothers’, and Havelock Ellis, ‘Perversion in Childhood and Adolescence’, both in V. F. Calverton and S. D. Schmalhausen (eds), The New Generation: The Intimate Problems of Modern Parents and Children (New York: Macaulay Co., 1930). ¹²⁰ F. W. Stella Browne, ‘Studies in Female Inversion’, Journal of Sexology and Psychoanalysis, 1 (1923), 63. ¹²¹ Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1 (1975), 1–29. ¹²² Lesley A. Hall, ‘ ‘‘I Have Never Met the Normal Woman’’: Stella Browne and the Politics of Womanhood’, Women’s History Review, 6 (1997), 171–3. ¹²³ Stella Browne, ‘Studies in Feminine Inversion’, 63.


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sexology. Inversion was ‘visible’ to Havelock Ellis in female limbs—if her elbows could not touch when stretched in front, then ‘the feminine angle of arm’ was lost, due to her bodily masculinization. Earlier, Richard von Krafft-Ebing associated sexual perversion with gender transgressions, such as short hair and exercise: ‘the masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom, finds pleasure in the pursuit of manly sports.’¹²⁴ Physical attributes and leisure activities continued to engage ideas about gender and sexuality. Sport, science, and politics might indicate inversion, but physical appearances were in a process of creating categories of pathology and normalcy, although they were not coherent or stable. Global consumer culture focused on appearances, encouraging mutual looking. In medicine, the human eye maintained its role in distinguishing norms in bodies, behaviour, gender, and sexuality. Yet, in popular culture, there was still a great willingness to avoid notions of deviance. Magazines relied upon the camera and the image, linking visual culture with medical and civic bodies, and yet facilitating ‘queer possibilities’. Medical writers were obsessed with male more than female ‘self-abuse’.¹²⁵ Body cultures, however, linked masturbation to overeating and lack of fitness; it was a ‘bad habit’, partly medical and partly social. Etti Rout claimed female masturbation reduced the capacity for heterosexual arousal.¹²⁶ Occasionally, females were discussed in terms of perversion. Mothers were advised to ‘be alert’ to their daughters’ wandering hands, for even ‘innocent roaming or rubbing of an irritation on the clitoris . . . may lead to deviancy’. An innocent girl might scratch an itch with the severest of consequences. Surveillance and education would help to avoid ‘all unnecessary handling’. In the modern girl’s life there was ‘unlimited opportunity for excess’. Yet there was also sympathy about ‘bad habits’. Masturbating girls were not inverts but ‘victims’. It was only when left untreated, that the victim became deviant. Unable to control her impulses, masturbation ‘may even lead into a condition of sex perversion, which causes her to seek gratification through undue intimacy with others of her own sex’. However, instead of punishment, these potentially dangerous habits were understood as part of ‘the struggle of the race’ and civilization—common themes in post-war Anglophone society, reconstruction, and eugenics.¹²⁷ In the United States, Bernarr Macfadden recommended sublimating autoerotic impulses into physical culture, and that girls should police each other to prevent friends from leading them astray. Advice manuals trained young girls in quasimedical observation: appearances were significant in several directions. Still, only ¹²⁴ Ellis, ‘Studies in the Psychology of Sex’, ii (1897; 3rd edn, 1915), 54, 56; Richard von KrafftEbing, ‘Psychopathia Sexualis’ (1886; 1903), 47, in Doan and Bland (eds), Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). ¹²⁵ Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 239. ¹²⁶ Rout, Sex and Exercise, 14. ¹²⁷ Bernarr Macfadden, Woman’s Sex Life (New York: Macfadden Book Company, 1935), 60–6.

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a few body culturists mentioned female sexual deviancy; instead the strength and achievements of athletic women were emphasized. The armour of feminine accoutrements shielded women’s physicality.¹²⁸ Female play and physical contact in sport was healthy, glamorous, and fun. The physical education of women became a subject of gratuitous curiosity of, and marketing at, young women. Visions of Spartan women’s naked training, published by the German gymnast Alice Bloch in The Body Beautiful (1933), epitomized for English-speaking audiences the bodily freedom of German naturism. Anglophone body cultures admired German practices, self-consciously denying that nude gymnastics were erotic.¹²⁹ Admired in Britain and Australia, European models of Diana expressed physical freedom, but the focus on fitness legitimized spectacles of female embodiment. In England, Margaret Hallam agreed with Bloch’s ‘muscular grace’, advising that women’s ‘muscles should be firm and at the same time elastic’.¹³⁰ Instead of artificial corsets, Bess Mensendieck preferred ‘nature’s muscle corset’, the stomach muscles.¹³¹ British women, Bruce Sutherland declared, should learn ‘the lessons’ of ancient Greece, praising the Spartans for ‘subjecting’ their womenfolk to ‘thorough physical training’.¹³² Not all physical educators followed the disciplinary approach. British dancer, body culturist, and physiotherapist Margaret Morris saw women as sensual and athletic. Appropriating Diana in her ‘Dance of the Bow’, her technique involved classical posing and free-flowing movements. While performing at her countryside retreat in France after the war, Fred Daniels photographed her ‘poise’ (Fig. 5.3). Physical discipline was important for bodily training, but classical grace was fundamental to her vision of femininity as a healing force—discussed in more detail in the next chapter. The cultural currency of Diana—as muscular flapper and liberated woman— inspired writers and artists. Dorothy Thornhill’s painting of Resting Diana (1931) is a confronting allegory of ‘War’ as a masculinized nude (Fig. 5.4). The classical female body is imbued with menacing flesh, personifying both masculine blood lust and the erotic power of female muscularity. Diana is depicted as goddess of modern warfare: the modern shell explosive replaces the traditional bow and arrow. With its steely gloss, the phallic missile mirrors Diana’s hardened features. Empowered by sexualized flesh and ballistic technology, Diana is emotionally cool, dominating with her angular body. At once seductive and destructive, Diana occupies a world annihilated of men. With flapper haircut ¹²⁸ Pat Griffin, ‘Damaged Mothers, Muscle Molls, Mannish Lesbians and Predatory Dykes: One Hundred Years of Scaring Women Out of Sport’, in Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sport (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1998). ¹²⁹ Alice Bloch, The Body Beautiful: Physical Culture for Women, trans. Mathias H. Macherey (London: Kemp Hall Press, 1933). ¹³⁰ Ibid. 1; Hallam, Health and Beauty, 37. ¹³¹ Bess M. Mensendieck, It’s Up to You (New York: Mensendieck School, 1931), 193–4. ¹³² W. Bruce Sutherland, Physical Culture: The Bruce Sutherland System (London, Edinburgh and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1917), 40.


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Fig. 5.3 Margaret Morris, ‘Dance of the Bow’. In Margaret M. Morris, Margaret Morris Dancing (London: Kegan Paul, 1926), plate IV. Courtesy Fred Daniels and the International Association of Margaret Morris Movement.

and muscularity, Diana is formidable, strengthened rather than exposed by her nudity. Though ‘resting’, Diana’s pose is confident, arrogant, and tensely poised on the edge of imminent violence. This exceptionally aggressive version of Diana invokes the ambiguities of gender and sexuality during the ‘Golden Age of Woman’, when the female body was reconstructed as a social and physical force. The figure of Diana was popularized in modern art and commercial culture in the 1920s. American artist Paul Manship’s bronze Diana swept through the air with the kinaesthetic velocity of the Classical revival dancer; the work was revered in Europe and the United States.¹³³ The motion of flight is aided by the twisting action of Diana’s torso, combining classical form with the rhythm of bodybuilding.¹³⁴ Swiss artist Paul Thévanaz’s ‘Modern Diana’ had a slim, elongated body, with bow and arrow signalling female masculinity (Fig. 5.5). Dressed in the skimpy chemise of the Classical Revival dancer, however, femininity was sustained. Thévanaz described himself as a ‘Rhythmician’, linking music, classical dance, and visual art. The artist, he said, ‘should express in paint what he has learned in dancing’. Jacques Dalcroze’s ‘Gymnastique Rhythmique’ ¹³³ Paul Manship, Diana, 1925, bronze. The sculpture was completed in Rome in 1924; the companion piece Actaeon was completed in Paris. ¹³⁴ Harry Rand, ‘Paul Manship’, exhibition catalogue (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art and Smithsonian Institution, 1989).

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Fig. 5.4 Dorothy Thornhill, Resting Diana (1931). Courtesy Australian National Gallery.


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Fig. 5.5 Paul Thévanaz’s ‘Modern Diana’. In Vanity Fair (Feb. 1922), 31. Courtesy of Condé Nast publications.

influenced dancers and artists during the war. As a Swiss artist, he did not ‘go to the front like most of his associates’, but stayed in Paris to study ‘free movement’, music, and ‘controlled muscular obedience’. Involved with Cocteau and Stravinsky (he painted them both), ‘kinaesthetics’ crossed artforms in this period.¹³⁵ Thévanaz pursued a career in New York, appearing in Vanity Fair, the transatlantic purveyor of fashion.¹³⁶ Significantly, women wanted to look like Diana, whether playing sport, dancing, or fashioning their bodies into slim, hipless, and ‘boyish’ physiques. The link between artistic ideals in visual culture and the ‘rhetoric of signs’ in advertising qualifies the relationship between images and real lives.¹³⁷ Women’s bodies rarely fit the ideals they strive for, but the artistic and commercial resonance of the modern Diana prevailed. While Modern Diana signified physical liberty, modernity, and female masculinity, she was also associated with the flapper’s sexual libertarianism. The flapper was identified as a ‘comradely, sporting, active young woman’.¹³⁸ Just like the flapper, the Modern Diana was a commercial construction: bobbed ¹³⁵ Marie Louise Van Saanen, ‘Paulet Thevenas, Painter and Rhythmatist: Whose Cult Proclaims a Relation between Scultpure, Painting and Dancing’, Vanity Fair (Aug. 1916), 49. ¹³⁶ Charles Despiau, Diana —exhibited at the New York Brummer Galleries in 1928—featured bobbed hair, and appeared in Vanity Fair (Oct. 1928), 73. ¹³⁷ Roland Barthes, ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’, in Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (eds), Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), 22. ¹³⁸ Cameron, ‘The Flappers and the Feminists’, 258.

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hair, short tunics, slim, and liberated. Between 1926 and 1928, Vanity Fair featured Diana on front covers as an elegant symbol of youthful femininity. Paul Thévanaz’s ‘Diana’ wedded modern angles with decorous femininity; an image of bodily and personal independence. Although defying traditional standards of feminine behaviour, such figures were still attached to the dominant gender codes, spurred on by cosmetics and beauty culture.¹³⁹ Magazines that promoted flapper modernity have been seen as countering the feminist disruption of the political sphere.¹⁴⁰ The flapper has also been regarded as heteronormative. Yet, in the female fitness industry, the hyper-feminine flapper offset the potentially deviant image of the athletic woman. Modern Diana was a medical, artistic, and commercial figure. As a symbol for young modern women, however, she was adapted for the purposes of middle-class teenage heterosexual morality. Despite symbolizing sexual liberation, respectability remained crucial, and bourgeois attitudes were imposed on working-class sexuality in judging the flapper.¹⁴¹ The sexualization and androgyny of Diana, however, meant that she was a precarious figure that enabled a degree of agency in young women’s self-fashioning. Although body and beauty cultures encouraged sexual knowledge, sex was reserved for marriage, especially when interpreted through the lens of eugenics. Australian eugenist Marion Piddington advised body culture readers that women with ‘loose morals’ were likely to be ‘morons’.¹⁴² While birth control was advised in such cases, others commended the ban on contraceptives for unmarried people.¹⁴³ In Britain, Marie Stopes’ Mothers’ Clinic for Constructive Birth Control was established in 1921, with sixteen others by 1932.¹⁴⁴ Manuals for women who lived independently warned against premarital affairs, and promoted—ambiguously—the ‘pleasure of a single bed’ as the ‘most alluring’.¹⁴⁵ Many women found personal fulfilment in sexual alternatives and single life; war affected their willingness to commit to marriage. Despite statistics conjuring pitiable war widows and spinsters, for some women the war consolidated their agency: heterosexual marriage was happily exchanged for an independent, single life.¹⁴⁶ In body cultures, while erotic marriage was something chaste Diana enjoyed once she graduated to full womanhood, sexual liberation for single women ¹³⁹ Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). ¹⁴⁰ M. Pumphrey, ‘The Flapper, the Housewife and the Making of Modernity’, Cultural Studies, 2 (1987), 184. ¹⁴¹ Peiss, ‘ ‘‘Charity Girls’’ and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on Working-Class Sexuality, 1880–1920’, in Peiss and Simmons (eds), Passion and Power, 56. ¹⁴² Marion Piddington, ‘The Moron Mother’, Health and Physical Culture (May 1930), 12. ¹⁴³ ‘Birth Control’, Health and Physical Culture (1 Oct. 1930), 42. ¹⁴⁴ Fisher, Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage, 29. ¹⁴⁵ Marjorie Hillis, Live Alone and Like it: A Guide for the Extra Woman (New York Sun Dial Press, 1936), 81, 93; Porter and Hall, ‘Sex, Law, Politics and Pressure Groups’, The Facts of Life, 239. ¹⁴⁶ Katherine Holden, ‘Imaginary Widows: Spinsters, Marriage, and the ‘‘Lost Generation’’ in Britain after the Great War’, Journal of Family History, 30 (2005), 398.


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was mostly a discourse of modernity. Exercise, sport, and dance were the principal modes of acceptable bodily expression. Connected to the flapper, Modern Diana was a chic consumer, but more importantly she was conformist. However, Diana’s ‘boyish’ fashions and androgynous body offered freedom from the social pressure of marriage and motherhood, in a period when Anglophone societies were concerned with repopulation and the fitness of citizens. Alongside the Modern Diana, the complementary archetype of the New Venus featured in beauty and body cultures. Instead of youthful energy and gender ambiguity, the body of Venus associated female heterosexual maturity with sublime aesthetics and modern fashion. Venus was an enduring emblem of universal beauty, an essence of feminine sensuality: ‘perennial, eternal, universal, the goddess of every age’.¹⁴⁷ Physical culturist Ward Crampton described such perfection: [as] matters of epoch, race and the prevailing style . . . But beauty does not change . . . The one unchanging, perfect beauty of the world is the [Venus de Milo by] some supreme artist who gathered from all time the noblest conceptions of beauty, and embodied them in permanent, glorious symbol.¹⁴⁸

Venus indicated symmetry and beauty, and yet also modernity with her slenderized body, straightened hips, and reduced breasts. As with Diana, fashion, modern art, and design came to bear on this classical icon. Modernity did not compromise the timelessness of Venus. In a period of rapid change and economic instability, she continued to symbolize historical continuity, despite the fact that her body was remoulded. Indeed, in the trailer for Frank Tuttle’s romantic comedy about a beauty pageant, American Venus (1926), the detailed measurements of the statue’s body were provided, with the call that Paramount was seeking a ‘modern Venus’. Audiences were asked: ‘Girls are You the American Venus?’ Screen stars Esther Ralston and the ‘boyishbobbed’ Ziegfield Follies actress Louise Brooks paraded as ‘aspirants’ in bathing costumes.¹⁴⁹ The film also starred Miss America 1925, Fay Lanphier. The trailer promised an ‘eye-feast of beautiful women’, ‘75 Atlantic City bathing beauties’, and a ‘display of the latest styles’, since Modern Venus ‘wears the latest loveliest creations from Paris’. Critics noted its ‘eye-entertainment’, ‘display of feminine charms’, ‘beautiful fashion scenes’, and Technicolor to ‘delight the eye’; it also flaunted unprecedented nudity to ‘set some of the church folks on their ear’.¹⁵⁰ ¹⁴⁷ C. Ward Crampton, ‘Venus Anno Domini’, Withrow’s Physical Culture (May 1923), 215. ¹⁴⁸ Ibid. 248. ¹⁴⁹ Harold Heffernan, ‘The New Movies in Review’, Detroit News (7 Feb. 1926). ¹⁵⁰ ‘Photoplay Reviews’, Cincinnati Enquirer (11 Jan. 1926); Philadelphia Inquirer (12 Jan. 1926); Harriette Underhill, ‘On the Screen’, New York Herald Tribune (25 Jan. 1926); ‘House Reviews: Rivoli’, Variety (27 Jan. 1926).

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The coalition between cinema, fashion, and beauty culture revived Venus in the global magazine industry. So popular was the icon that Australian artist, Thea Proctor (an avid reader of Vanity Fair and the French fashion magazine, Femina), observed a craze in Europe and the United States for statuettes of the Venus de Milo.¹⁵¹ Figurines were made from ceramic or glass, and were exhibited and sold in Britain, Australia, and the United States. Steuben glassware exhibited their ‘Crystal Venus’ at the American glass art exhibition by the Society of Fine Arts, London, advertising in fashion magazines and selling in Anglophone stores. Fashion magazines reported on international trends, encouraging global markets. One letter to the editor hailed The Home magazine for ‘bringing many things into vogue in Australia’.¹⁵² Crafts manufacturers joined modern artists and graphic designers in revitalizing cultural interest in Venus. Inspired by Venus de Milo, Aphrodite Cyrene, and Venus Esquiline, modern artists transformed elite, classical beauty into popular, modern femininity. The New Venus sported a slimmer, muscular body. In a well-regarded bronze by American artist Arthur Lee, she was slenderized to the point of exposed ribs, despite the title Volupté. Purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 1925, fashion and beauty magazines acclaimed the sculpture.¹⁵³ In Britain, Barbara Hepworth combined modernism and classicism in Torso (1928), essentializing the female body. In Australia, Raynor Hoff ’s Australian Venus (1927) was both voluptuous and muscular, a fitting image for an active, national body born of the outdoor life and beach culture (Fig. 5.6). After the war, heroic images were defined as quintessentially ‘Australian’.¹⁵⁴ Hoff claimed her proportions were real, directly derived from an Australian life model. The swirling movement in the composition revealed the ethic of Australian beauty as a ‘care of the self ’ and national body: ‘we don’t allow our bodies to become flaccid and misshapen through stagnation . . . Hence we are active, virile and well’.¹⁵⁵ Vitalist ideals presented female sexuality as a spiritual and physical force.¹⁵⁶ The contours of Australian Venus were streamlined in keeping with Art Deco principles. Australian, British, and American artists contributed to the sexualizing and modernizing of the classical body. The international trade in modern art, fashion, and body culture created a coalition of influences that moved between artists and nations. European, American, and Australian sculptors such as Pablo Picasso, Emile Bourdelle, John Armstrong, Ivan Mestrovic, Paul Manship, Elie Nadelman, Dora Olfsen, ¹⁵¹ Thea Proctor, The Home (3 June 1922), 37. ¹⁵² Ibid. (1 July 1935), 30; ibid. (3 Apr. 1934), 15, 4, 23. ¹⁵³ Glenway Wescott, ‘Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi and Arthur Lee: An American Novelist Passes an Afternoon in a Sculptor’s Studio in New York’, Vanity Fair ( June 1925), 56. ¹⁵⁴ K. Saunders, ‘Specimens of Superb Manhood: The Lifesaver as National Icon’, Journal of Australian Studies, 56 (1998), 96–105. ¹⁵⁵ Rayner Hoff, 1931, in Deborah Edwards, ‘ ‘‘This Vital Flesh’’: The Sculpture of Rayner Hoff and His School’, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1999), 31. ¹⁵⁶ Ibid. 38.


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Fig. 5.6 Rayner Hoff, Australian Venus, 1927, marble. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

and Rayner Hoff and his students Barbara Tribe, Jean Broome-Norton, and Eileen McGrath, are just a few who revived the classical imaginary as well as appropriating ‘primitive’ forms. Modernism owed much ‘symbolic capital’ to indigenous and colonized cultures, but it was also indebted to the fantasy of classical bodies; both elided racial and body ideals with eroticism. Colonial thinking translated across European and New York art scenes, almost ignoring the 1920s Harlem Renaissance.¹⁵⁷ Brancusi’s marble portraits borrowed from the simplified geometry of Cycladic art, and his ovoid forms recalled the facial features of classical Greek sculpture. ¹⁵⁷ Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990); Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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Fashion gurus praised the New York sculptor Elie Nadelman’s ‘Venus of Today’ for its beauty, calm classicism, and ‘feeling of modernity’.¹⁵⁸ Described as a ‘somewhat new classical bust’, the forms were inspired by images of Venus from de Milo to Genetrix, as well as Amazons and nymphs on Greek pottery. In 1927, Lawrence T. Stevens won the American Prix de Rome with a modernist interpretation of the Greek nymph, Echo. Art Deco also inspired artists, as it was ‘dedicated to innovation through revival’.¹⁵⁹ Significantly, reproductions of these works regularly appeared in fashion magazines that defined beauty ideals for women. The coalition between art and commerce—and the play with tradition—transformed classical bodies into the vernacular of mass culture. Witty allusions were made between artistic interpretations and real women’s bodies: Olaf Trovagrod designed a ‘Vaulting Venus’ as a surfer; Marie Barkawitz’s ‘Venus’ had a spiralling body from a diet of pretzels.¹⁶⁰ Visual culture inflected issues about beauty, fad dieting, and obsessive exercising. Despite the satirical purpose of the cartoon, it appeared in Vanity Fair, a magazine dedicated to international fashion culture and the exposition of modern imagery. This paragon of fashion and modernity showed a deep awareness of the increasingly undifferentiated constructs of represented and real women. Image and reality were fusing. Even while professing the admirable concerns of health and fitness, body culturists were influenced by fashion and consumerism. One magazine affirmed with pride that, ‘every woman craves the Beauty of Venus’.¹⁶¹ Body cultures actually promoted the perfect form of the New Venus, calling women to improve their appearance. Writing on ‘The Physique Beautiful’, Australian gym proprietor Walter Withrow described visual art as a stimulus to perfection: the human body is a thing of beauty. . . . [and is] of distinct practical value to the man or woman who thinks. To enlarge the mental vision, to cultivate the sense of appreciation of the beautiful, and to enrich the mind . . . It can enable one to place a proper value on one’s body . . . as an incentive to improve one’s own physique.¹⁶²

Venus was a symbol of ‘idealized perfections’, used to teach women new levels of self-improvement and pride. The ‘truth about herself’ was a ‘knowledge’ shaped by commercial, medical, and fashionable discourses—the mechanisms of mass modernity. Illustrations, artworks, and photographs of women were crucial in producing that self-knowledge. ¹⁵⁸ ‘A Venus of Today—A Marble by Elie Nadelman: A New York Sculptor Achieves a Somewhat New Classical Bust’, Vanity Fair ( July 1925), 26. A similar style was conceived by French artists such as Aristide Maillol, Venus with a Necklace, 1918–28, as well as Italian artists with a distinctive fascisti stylism, such as Ubaldo Oppi (The Friends, 1924) and Pablo Gargallo (Small Torso of a Woman, 1925). See Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy (eds), On Classic Ground: Picasso, Leger, de Chirico and the New Classicism, 1910–1930 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990). ¹⁵⁹ Edwards, This Vital Flesh, 40. ¹⁶⁰ ‘Styles in Spring Sculpture’, 35. ¹⁶¹ Physical Culture (Aug. 1925), 8, 22. ¹⁶² Walter E. Withrow, ‘The Physique Beautiful’, Withrow’s Physical Culture (Apr. 1924), 2.


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Venus motivated modernity and self-knowledge. The ‘truth about herself ’ was an achievement gained through endurance, self-examination, and mutual comparison. The truth could also be measured. In 1933, Vogue magazine photographed a tall, thin, small-breasted, naked woman posing as the modern Venus de Milo; the model’s arms were visually obscured, emulating the amputated antique. Significantly, the model stood behind a modernist grid consisting of tape measures. Traditionally, the grid was a binding mathematical form in classical geometry, but it was also a basic element in modernism. The grid was a structure that stripped the body down; like peeling away facial bandages of cosmetic surgery and beauty therapies, it represented a continual process of rebuilding from ground zero—eternally recasting the past and present.¹⁶³ Magazines employed photographers and graphic designers to repackage visual traditions as new trends. The combination of Venus, measuring tape, and modernist grid fused classical ideals with modern body perfection identified with slimness. Fashionable modernity was measurable like waists, busts, and beauty. Couturier Madeleine Vionnet copied ancient Greek columns in her designs, and like many modern artists of the day, was influenced by Jay Hambidge’s description of Dynamic Symmetry (1920) in Greek vases, the Euclidean square, and the commensurability of parts.¹⁶⁴ The symmetrical grid prevented the flesh from straying outside what French couturiers called la ligne droite (the right line). Classical mathematics and architecture informed ideal female bodies too. Built in 420 bc, the Karyatids on the Erectheum stood as eternal symbols of architecture’s femininity. In one mass culture example, a female model was used as the karyatid, humanizing and bringing to life the form. With modern illustrated design, she was transformed into a magazine cover girl for The Home (Fig. 5.7). Graphic designer Hera Roberts thought the linearity of an ancient column was comparable to female perfection. The alliance between fashion and beauty exploited modern trends in classical imagery in the production of commodities. Beauty entrepreneur Helena Rubenstein regarded the New Venus as ‘the perfect type’ and ‘the ideal form’ for which women should strive. Rubenstein showed women how to apply her creams by demonstrating facial massage on a photograph of the Venus de Milo’s face (Fig. 5.8).¹⁶⁵ This was not a simple homage to natural beauty, but rather a message to women that perfection required a measure of artifice. Beauty products were often advertised with models staring up at Venus de Milo, yearning to achieve her heights of beauty. One American fashion magazine quoted the French symbolist and anti-colonial writer André ¹⁶³ Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths (1986; 9th edn., Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1994), 160. ¹⁶⁴ Jay Hambidge, Dynamic Symmetry: The Greek Vase (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1920); id., The Parthenon and other Greek Temples: Their Dynamic Symmetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1924). ¹⁶⁵ Helena Rubenstein, Beauty in the Making: The Stepping Stones Thereto (London: 1925).

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Fig. 5.7 Venus Cover Girl. Cover, The Home, 14 (8 Mar. 1933). Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

Gide: ‘our masters the Greeks knew well that Aphrodite was not born of a natural fecundation. Beauty will never be a natural product; it is obtained solely through an artificial constraint.’¹⁶⁶ Gide’s ideas were used to validate consumption and the goals of perfection. Appropriated for consumerist ends, the classical ideal compelled women to purchase a healthy image of inner peace. One young woman wrote to American Physical Culture recommending ‘How Venus Put Me in Tune’. Kathleen Worrell described the ‘absolute harmony . . . [of] the perfect body that has come down to us through the ages! This is how God intended us to be and this is what I am’.¹⁶⁷ Throwing aside shame, body culturists decried ‘Puritan reticence, Puritan gloom, Puritan aversion for the beautiful, and for the physical truth of life’, so that even in religious America, God was credited with the perfection of pagan beauty and ¹⁶⁶ André Gide, ‘Art and Artifice: A World for the Artists, Showing that the Best Periods of Art Always Demand the Strictest Forms’, Vanity Fair (Aug. 1928), 33. ¹⁶⁷ Kathleen L. Worrell, Physical Culture (Apr. 1920), pp. xliii, 4, 29.


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Fig. 5.8 Venus facial massage. In Helena Rubenstein, Beauty in the Making: The Stepping Stones Thereto (London: 1925). Courtesy of the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, New York.

with endorsing the project of female selfhood.¹⁶⁸ Ironically, the ‘physical truth’ required images to promote the idea that perfection was real and attainable. Just as Australian Alice Smith located the ‘the truth about herself ’ in bodily practices, American Kathleen Worrell showed the influence of consumerism and modern health in women’s lives; self-knowledge emanated from perfecting their bodies. Presented as a natural result of war work, and the trade-off with women enjoying masculine pursuits, the ‘Golden Age of Woman’—as it appeared in the icons of Diana and Venus—symbolized Anglophone women at the forefront of a new civilization, simultaneously attaching them to gendered conventions and beauty ideals. This apparent bodily freedom was, however, only symbolic of personal and sexual liberation. Although contemporary commentators thought the war had been good for women, clearly it was also good for the beauty and fashion industries.

TOWA R D S T H E S L I M C I V I L I Z AT I O N One of the ways in which women experienced their new physical freedom was by becoming, quite literally, lighter. Lightness was thought to facilitate physical ¹⁶⁸ Simeon Strunsky, ‘Pagan Qualities in the Puritans and the Growing Misapprehension about America among Foreigners’, Vanity Fair (Nov. 1920), 52 (my emphasis).

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agility and velocity. Modern dynamic tempo was seen as a bodily experience. Freedom and modernity were linked directly to weight loss. The New Venus needed to shed the past, with its burden of fleshy curves and buxom breasts. Slenderized and straightened, reduced in hip and breast size, she was adapted to meet these new specifications. As a figure of beauty, she embodied impeccable form and symmetry. Slimness, health, and beauty were synonymous, and a desire to be slim was increasingly considered ‘normal’.¹⁶⁹ This relationship was pivotal to the modern use of classical aesthetics. Historian Susan Bordo has observed the body as both symbolic form and locus of social control. Discursive practices regulate, restrict, and then reconstruct women’s bodies.¹⁷⁰ Slimness as the ‘perfect feminine form’ was observed with irony by an Australian commentator: ‘once represented by the huge breasted woman with wasp-like waist, hips like a battleship, interminable coils of hair and an unassailable virtue. We recoil with a shudder from such an apparition nowadays.’¹⁷¹ Slenderness was equated with anti-Victorian modernity, and was cultivated by the fashion industry and body culture. Helena Rubenstein described the Victorian lady as stout, shapeless, and immobile, ‘stooping to torture, hips and bust enormous, unsightly, a nightmare . . . the person troubled with obesity is threatened with suffocation’.¹⁷² As the Metropolitan Opera ballerina Rosa Munde campaigned: physical culture offered a programme that turned her ‘from sickly and misshapen into Venus’.¹⁷³ Fatness covered the spectrum of being ‘misshapen’ to being ‘obese’, which was associated with illness, disease, and idleness—the antithesis of modernity. Fat hips and abdomens would lead to ‘general obesity of the whole body’, ‘especially a problem for women’.¹⁷⁴ Drawing upon the medical literature that pathologized larger bodies and the post-war concern for fit motherhood, beauty and body experts accused fat of endangering fertility and childbirth. Beatrice Macdonald, the Director of Australian Mothercraft, informed readers that fat was medically dangerous—surgeons dreaded operating upon ‘flabby women’, implying that caesareans were more successful on women with ‘tight and firm’ bodies.¹⁷⁵ Whereas toned muscles gave ‘character and contour’ to a woman’s body, prominent hips were evidence of laziness.¹⁷⁶ Readers were told ‘a flabby person moves heavily and slowly instead of being light and agile, and, so far as appearances go, the effect is deplorable’.¹⁷⁷ ¹⁶⁹ Frederick Webster and J. A. Heys, Slimming Day by Day: Exercises for Health and Beauty (London: John F. Shaw and Co., 1933), 1. ¹⁷⁰ Susan Bordo, ‘Reading the Slender Body’, in Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (New York: Routledge, 1990), 83–112. ¹⁷¹ The Home (1 Mar. 1929), 10, 3, 92. ¹⁷² Helena Rubenstein, Beauty in the Making: The Stepping Stones Thereto (London: 1925), 41. ¹⁷³ Physical Culture (Nov. 1922), 37. ¹⁷⁴ Webster and Heys, Slimming Day by Day, 39. ¹⁷⁵ Beatrice Macdonald, ‘To Make Weak Women Healthy and Strong’, Health and Physical Culture (Dec. 1929), 63. ¹⁷⁶ ‘Health Exercises for Women’, Withrow’s Physical Culture Annual (1920), 8. ¹⁷⁷ Withrow’s Physical Culture (Mar. 1923), 117.


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By contrast, athletic women were perfectly modern, since they aimed for ‘ideal proportions’ near to perfection, ‘because she is fully developed muscularly, while at the same time her activity’ prevented fatness. Women were blamed: ‘if a woman does not realise this degree of bodily beauty, it is her own fault’.¹⁷⁸ Marketing on medical and beauty grounds was shared across Anglophone fitness culture and fashion. Fat was not only visually unattractive, but it compromised the goals of rebuilding civilization. Ettie Hornibrook regarded women’s bodies as crucial to post-war reconstruction. Fat, especially ‘protuberant belly and the overhanging buttocks’, was one of the most ‘objectionable features to civilized humanity’.¹⁷⁹ In Australia, Robert Macdonald saw the ‘subtleties of slimness’ as a modern reaction against Victorian society. Rejecting ‘the lavishness of our fathers’, he mused: the reigning beauties of the past seem so frequently merely fat and homely. Bounteous Bouchers might satisfy . . . with their buxom curves, their heavy eyelids, their flashy lips . . . give them tridents in their plump little hands, to us they remain meat. For we are children of a reaction . . . We find more subtleties in slimness than in the lavishness of our fathers . . . a Dutch school beauty would be most impossibly laughable in the surf . . . Try to imagine the Pre-Raphaelite without her flowing lines of robes. She becomes a frump. Her fundamentally mid-Victorian figure is displayed. This is the day of a stark simplicity of line, of corners, angles, slimness, sharpness . . . In this time of ultra-civilization it is this mannered beauty that is admired.¹⁸⁰

The Modern Diana and the New Venus replaced Victorian bourgeois ideals of curved figures; the modern slim and fit body was needed to rebuild civilization and replenish the population. Medical and sexological reformers reshaped classical ideals, highlighting Victorian prudery to promote their own progressive attitudes.¹⁸¹ Slimness became the visible display of modern ‘ultra-civilization’. But it was also a feminine achievement, a striving for perfection. In the global context of economic downturn, and post-war adjustments to grief and disability, the dieting boom was not simply a consequence of mass culture and consumption. Dieting responded to bodily anxieties brought about by the war, seen through the mirror of women’s uncertain place and their apparent independence. Although, as Joan Brumberg shows, girls fasted in the nineteenth century to insure against ugliness, from the 1920s women were made to feel uncomfortable with their weight, which Peter Stearns refers to as ‘the misogynist phase’.¹⁸² Susan Bordo argues that while ¹⁷⁸ Dorothy Buchanan, ‘Exercise for the Hips’, ibid. (Aug. 1924), 18. ¹⁷⁹ Ettie Hornibrook, Restoration Exercises for Women (London: Heinemann, 1931), p. ix. ¹⁸⁰ ‘The New Feminine Beauty in which we Examine the Meaning of the Modern Moulds of Form’, The Home (1 May 1929), 10, 5, 27. ¹⁸¹ Simmons, ‘Modern Sexuality and the Myth of Victorian Repression’, 157–77. ¹⁸² Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Vintage, 2000); Peter N. Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), 72, 71.

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‘boyish body ideals’ symbolize new freedom—‘a casting off of the encumbrance of domestic and reproductive femininity’—they were accompanied by images of resurgent muscularity in male body-ideals, as discussed in the previous chapter. Slimness, as Bordo shows, ‘connotes fragility, defencelessness, and lack of power’.¹⁸³ Classical aesthetics shielded both the hyper-muscular male and the feminine ideal of slimness. In the hope of losing the Victorian image of weight, women often starved themselves. The conflation of health and slimness was assisted by organizations such as The Corrective Eating Society of New York, quoted in Bernarr Macfadden’s magazine saying that ‘weight control was the basis of health’.¹⁸⁴ Walter Withrow proposed that the ‘surest way to cure one’s self of any diseases is to quit eating’.¹⁸⁵ Beauty therapist Margaret Hallam noted that many women were ‘in perfect terror of becoming fat . . . to such an extent as to consider themselves too well covered if they have only a very moderate proportion of flesh on their bones’.¹⁸⁶ While diet ‘experts’ and body culture magazines promoted slimming, some distanced themselves from fads that pushed women’s bodily limits. Coy references to deaths from eating disorders or ‘self-starvation’ appeared, alongside complaints of irritability, fatigue, and melancholy, and over-use of laxatives and purging.¹⁸⁷ Educators were especially concerned with the proliferation of fad diets.¹⁸⁸ Florence Meredith, Professor of Hygiene at Tufts College in Massachusetts, associated excessive thinness in both women and men with poverty, failure, and lack of education. People who ‘get along well both in studies and in other activities’, she observed, were the ‘correct’ weight. There was a major difference, she argued, between ‘being slender at the normal weight, and being scrawny at a lower weight’. Although insurance companies and medical authorities issued statistics about health standards and life expectancy, the Body Mass Index (BMI) was not in use until the 1970s. Instead, women looked to images and consumer culture for advice on body standards. Despite college women’s educational aspirations, they were profoundly affected by the new body ideals of slimness; dieting and self-regulation became ordinary practices.¹⁸⁹ Meredith affirmed the importance of visual perception in measuring fat and thin. While extreme thinness was seen as a problem with social consequences, fatness (at times referred to by the medical term ‘obesity’) was the result of ¹⁸³ Bordo, ‘Reading the Slender Body’, 86. ¹⁸⁴ Physical Culture (Feb. 1920). ¹⁸⁵ ‘Health Pointers’, Withrow’s Physical Culture ( Jan. 1926), 7. ¹⁸⁶ Hallam, Health and Beauty, 84. ¹⁸⁷ Webster and Heys, Slimming Day by Day, 3; Roberta Pollack Seid, Never Too Thin: Why Women Are at War With Their Bodies (New York: Prentice Hall, 1989), 96. ¹⁸⁸ Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat (New York: Free Press, 1986). ¹⁸⁹ Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Margaret Lowe, Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875–1930 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).


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both overeating and disease, making a person ‘sluggish and sleepy . . . lazy’. Most significant for educators and young college women was the belief that a fat person was likely to be ‘slow witted’.¹⁹⁰ Like a wayward child, unruly bodies had to be disciplined. Many young women discovered personal strength in their own self-discipline, as well as a group solidarity afforded by conforming to the pressure for slim, fit bodies.¹⁹¹ Australian commentator C. B. Cochran wryly observed young women’s desire for self-mastery. In an article ‘What to do with our Curves’, he proclaimed, ‘Girls you may eat’, noting that: there are absolutely no signs of Australian women relinquishing their efforts to obtain the slim line . . . [so as to] accentuate their greyhound appearance . . . Sometimes a few bones are permitted across the diaphragm—that unruly portion of the anatomy that needs so much disciplining.¹⁹²

In the global culture of fashion and slimming, Anglophone women shared these desires, which were informed by medical and fitness spokespeople. Although warning against malnutrition, American dietician and anatomist John Sutherland advocated the Greek ideal for both ‘ancient and modern people’, as it ‘excels in attractiveness of outline, of symmetry, graceful form and strength’.¹⁹³ The logic of weight-reduction, health, and perfection was wrapped up in classical idealism, which made them seem rational and beautiful. In Britain, Mary Bagot Stack’s League of Health and Beauty felt the slimline Venus was the ‘right desire of every normal woman’, as though it was unfeminine or abnormal not to want physical perfection. Bagot Stack suggested exercise to achieve the ‘perfect feminine form’, rather than ‘amateur dieting’.¹⁹⁴ The pathologization of fat by the medical profession began in the late nineteenth century, but by the 1920s it was consolidated in the mass media, as well as health and fitness cultures.¹⁹⁵ Boundaries between normal and abnormal body weights were in the process of being redefined. Hence, Bagot Stack could eschew dieting, at the same time advising the ‘abnormally fat’ to starve themselves in bed for two days, every two weeks for one month.¹⁹⁶ How women were to determine what was abnormal and normal was not clear. Rather than turning to doctors, women sought advice from diet manuals and popular magazines, which sometimes procured the services of medical experts, such as Cecil Johnson, Diet For Women (1922), Ida Allen, Foods and You, or the Role of Diet (1926), Frederick ¹⁹⁰ Florence L. Meredith, The Health of Youth (Philadelphia, Pa.: Blakiston’s Son and Co., 1928), 88–94. ¹⁹¹ Debra Gimlim, ‘The Anorexic as Overconformist: Toward a Reinterpretation of Eating Disorders’, in Karen A. Callaghan (ed.), Ideals of Feminine Beauty: Philosophical, Social and Cultural Dimensions (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994). ¹⁹² C. B. Cochran, The Home (1 June 1929); ‘The Passing of the Helpless Woman’, 262. ¹⁹³ John Preston Sutherland, Malnutrition: The Medical Octopus (Boston, Mass.: Meador, 1937), 221. ¹⁹⁴ Bagot Stack, Building the Body Beautiful, 12. ¹⁹⁵ Forth and Carden-Coyne, Cultures of the Abdomen. ¹⁹⁶ Bagot Stack, Building the Body Beautiful, 69.

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Annesley Webster, Slimming Day By Day (1933), and Milo Hastings Reducing and How (1930). The proliferation of diet manuals in the 1920s and 1930s was confusing, oscillating between nutrition and ‘economy in diet’. Significantly, this global phenomenon was spurred on by the magazine industry even during times of economic hardship. Following Bagot Stack’s approach in Britain, Thea Stanley Hughes’ League of Health in Sydney appropriated the dictum that ‘there is no perfect gift without great suffering’.¹⁹⁷ Women were chastised for not making enough ‘effort to perfect themselves physically’.¹⁹⁸ The fashion industry, beauty culture, and the burgeoning trade in cosmetic surgery, associated self-mastery with feminine achievement and class success. Perfection—rather than normality—was increasingly contrasted with ‘abnormality’. Magazines solicited visual experts to position fashion models as perfect female types to which average women should aspire. Classical proportions were brought into play in both the fashion and beauty industries. Arnold Genthe, the fashion photographer of the female nude, declared that mere facial beauty and symmetry were not enough but that ‘the ideal woman’ must possess a ‘well proportioned, strong body, distinguished by length of limb, and approaching the Greek ideal’. The editors of Vanity Fair asked a group of men from the visual and performing arts to offer their perspectives on ‘the Perfect Woman’. Theatre impresario Florenz Ziegfeld proposed body weight as a primary factor. The girls in his ‘Follies’, he said, weighed 95 to 110 pounds (6 stone 11 pounds to 7 stone 12 pounds or 43 to 50 kg); and a girl with this weight had ten times the chance of marriage than if she weighed 135 pounds, and twenty-five more chances than if she weighed 150 pounds. Ziegfeld was regarded as the man who introduced sex to the stage: his views transferred the weight-consciousness of the professional dancer to the average woman. The ideal woman should be symmetrically proportioned, but also muscular, ‘vigorous’, and thus marriageable.¹⁹⁹ Women were stuck between moral crusaders against bodily display, class ideas of respectability, and the visual culture of cinema, fashion, and theatre production, which were narrowing body sizes and beauty ideals.²⁰⁰ Fit motherhood was never far from the logic of the slim civilization. Compulsory slenderness meant that women who bore children were not meant to look as though they had. War exacerbated Anglophone anxieties about population decline. British pronatalists equated motherhood with war service, rearing children as ‘future soldiers’. While local government and the Women’s Cooperative Guild established maternity centres and lobbied for state endowments especially for mothers working in munitions industries, ‘war babies’ were nevertheless ¹⁹⁷ Thea Stanley Hughes, Adventure in Movement: A New Approach to Physical Training (Sydney: Women’s League of Health, 1953), 43. ¹⁹⁸ Webster and Heys, Slimming Day by Day, 78. ¹⁹⁹ ‘The Ideal Woman: Yessir, That’s My Baby!—Wherein Several Experts Define the Perfect Female’, Vanity Fair (Aug. 1926), 52–3. ²⁰⁰ Latham, Posing a Threat, 104.


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stigmatized. As Susan Grayzel writes, ‘immorality divided feminists, social workers, and politicians’, but soldiering and mothering were the core of British national identity.²⁰¹ In some quarters, traditional sexual differences were asserted in reconstructing post-war societies, evidenced in legislation to remove women from ‘men’s jobs’ and the promotion of maternal services through the Maternity and Child Welfare Act (1918).²⁰² Susan Kinglsey Kent argues that returning British women from work to the home and family signalled a ‘sexual peace’. Fashion and body cultures, however, celebrated blurred gender roles and the sexual ambiguity of ‘boyish women and effeminate men’, at the same time as promoting eugenic ideals of fit motherhood.²⁰³ Rather than advocating wholesale population replenishment, eugenists instructed on middle-class practices of family limitation and baby spacing. Body cultures filtered these ideas through discussions of fitness, claiming that exercise defied the effects of age, marriage, and childbirth, while positing them as the ultimate feminine goal.²⁰⁴ In the United States, too, women campaigned for ‘New Deals’ on childcare services for working mothers, and in Australia women battled for Maternal Allowances on the grounds of their embodied citizenship in providing future citizen-soldiers. Indeed, women used military and bodily discourses in their attempts to transform motherhood from private duty to public policy.²⁰⁵ In body cultures, however, it was middle-class aesthetics rather than policies for working-class mothers that concerned women’s security in marriage. Connecting beauty to a woman’s chances of marriage as an attractive and capable companion rendered the ‘superwoman’ in middle-class terms—goddess, entrepreneur, and high achiever. As one Australian body culturist insisted: Woman should be a competent bread-winner . . . standing shoulder to shoulder with men in many of the professions . . . or . . . winning laurels in the athletic field, in the commercial world, and in the realm of art and letters . . . It’s the girl who . . . keeps up with him, physically and mentally, that the man of today invites to join hands with him in the game of life.²⁰⁶

Women were caught in a double bind in the femininity stakes, expected to be slim, muscular, beautiful, attentive, and clever in order to provide partnership in marriage.²⁰⁷ After the First World War, the notion of a companionate, romantic, ²⁰¹ Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War, 103–19. ²⁰² Deborah Dwork, War is Good for Babies and other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1898–1918 (London: Tavistock, 1987), 212. ²⁰³ Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990, 287 (London: Routledge, 1999), 297–8. ²⁰⁴ Lois Banner, In Full Flower: Ageing Women, Power and Sexuality—A History (New York: Vintage, 1993). ²⁰⁵ Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origin of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993). ²⁰⁶ ‘The Passing of the Helpless Woman’, 259. ²⁰⁷ Ben B. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Companionate Marriage (New York: Boni and Liverwright, 1927).

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and sensual marriage gained greater acceptance, which some women resisted while others embraced.²⁰⁸ While body cultures promoted body awareness and self-possession, new forms of courtship had arisen in personal columns and friendship advertisements in popular magazines.²⁰⁹ With popular belief in the ‘man shortage’ after the war, beauty cultures positioned women as competitors in the marriage ‘market’ of fit and healthy men, for which they required commercial assistance. Body and beauty cultures were aligned in their focus on attracting sexual attention, assumed to be male. Advising on how to ‘win a man’, one Australian female body culturist suggested ‘present yourself always in the best light’. Affirming the role of visuality, women were advised never to be ‘seen at a disadvantage’ in the ‘marriage game’. A woman should make herself not only as attractive as ‘her means will allow, but as attractive as she knows her man would desire her to be’. Compulsory beauty within marriage required income and commitment, and was therefore loaded with the tensions of aspiration and privilege. Body cultures told women that ‘failing’ beauty risked their relationships; more attractive rivals would tempt boyfriends and husbands.²¹⁰ Nevertheless, slimness and the masculinization of female bodies were associated with health, modernity, and personal fulfilment. Although heterosexual marriage and motherhood were social concerns, body cultures offered a range of ‘queer possibilities’ at a time when reconstruction encouraged peace in the gender wars.

GREEK IDEALS AND T H E R E C O N S T RU C T I O N I N D U S T RY Reconstruction was an international language of repair and transformation. Although political in origin, commercial industries exploited its rhetoric through mass marketing across the Anglophone world. Beauty culture even appropriated political ideals of world harmony in its vision of personal equilibrium; consumerist classicism inflected peace despite the economic uncertainty. Women played an important role in commodification—as consumers and as embodied symbols. The commerce of a specifically female reconstruction was layered with classical imagery. Never before had such a profusion of beauty aids been available to the middle, aspirational, and working classes, who purchased this new femininity. ²⁰⁸ Katie Holmes, ‘ ‘‘Spinsters Indispensable’’: Feminists, Single Women and the Critique Of Marriage, 1890–1920’, Australian Historical Studies (1998), 29, 110, 68–90. ²⁰⁹ Harry Cocks, ‘ ‘‘Sporty’’ Girls and ‘‘Artistic’’ Boys: Friendship, Illicit Sex, and the British ‘‘Companionship’’ Advertisement, 1913–1928’, Journal of the History of Sexuality (2002), 11, 3, 457–82. ²¹⁰ ‘How Any Girl Can Win the Man She Wants’, Health and Physical Culture (1 Sept. 1930), 13, 55.


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Unemployed and poor women also adopted its forms. Meagre incomes did not preclude small luxuries of make-up and other cosmetics.²¹¹ In Britain, young people were in full-time education but most entered the labour force at fourteen, generating affluence, fuelling consumerism and youth culture, and stimulating the sexualization of self-identity.²¹² Women were instructed on the need for correction, and an array of beauty aids, cosmetics, and surgical procedures were offered. Never before had women been encumbered with such an industrydriven insistence upon physical perfection. American cosmetics manufacturing grew exponentially between 1914 and 1919, profits increasing from seventeen to sixty million dollars.²¹³ Although women were the objects of market research, advertising campaigns, and consumer information, they were also active agents in the patterns of consumption, despite the way that sales literature positioned them as impulsive and instinctual.²¹⁴ Women proved the willing purchasers of face creams, cosmetics, hair waving fluids, skin soaps, vanishing creams, freckle removers, deodorants, hair removers, perfumes, nose straightening contraptions, fat reducers (from potions to medicated rubber garments), hip reducers, laxatives, diets and exercise programmes, vibration and electrolysis treatments. These body-perfecting aids were often advertised with an image of a modern ‘Venus’ or ‘Diana’. Boasting that it produced the second-largest selling soap in Paris, Palmolive soap in Australia offered the physical perfection of Venus de Milo when washing.²¹⁵ Beauty products packaged and advertised with classical themes were adapted to meet modern consumer demands. Female modernity entailed self-sufficiency, glamour, and hygiene. It might also involve punitive regimes of dieting, exercise, beauty treatments and body contraptions, and purification from undesirable hair and odours. As women were seeking to define themselves, the beauty industry associated one’s ‘look’ with an essential, female identity.²¹⁶ Ideas about perfection, civilization, and hygiene had particular meanings for femininity. In Britain, Mary Bagot Stack emphasized these imperatives as the responsibility of womankind, asking: ‘Cannot we modern women do as well as the Greeks . . . we can and we will . . . a new civilization is dawning . . . on these foundations can arise this great Temple of Beauty.’²¹⁷ The impact of ²¹¹ Sally Alexander, Becoming a Woman and other Essays in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Feminist History (London: Virago, 1994). ²¹² Todd, ‘Flappers and Factory Lads: Youth and Youth Culture in Interwar Britain’, History Compass, 4 (2004), 715–30. ²¹³ Peiss, ‘Making Faces: The Cosmetics Industry and the Cultural Construction of Gender, 1890–1930’, Genders, 7 ( The Politics of the Sexual Body, Special Issue) (Mar. 1990), 148. ²¹⁴ Erica Carter, ‘Alice in the Consumer Wonderland’, in Gray and McGuigan, Studying Culture, 107; Gail Reekie, ‘Impulsive Women, Predictable Men: Psychological Constructions of Sexual Difference in Sales Literature to 1930’, Australian Historical Studies (Oct. 1991), 359–77. ²¹⁵ ‘Ideals of Beauty’, The Home (1 Apr. 1927), 8, 4. ²¹⁶ Peiss, ‘Making Faces’, 165. ²¹⁷ Bagot Stack, Building the Body Beautiful, 3.

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these ideas was rapidly confirmed through the machinations of consumer culture and advertising. Odo-ro-no deodorant claimed that the first quality that men demanded in women was ‘perfect daintiness’, threatening women to take up their sanitary, hygiene, and beauty regimes or risk the consequences of being a social outcast, or worse, an unmarried woman.²¹⁸ Guerlain perfume conjured up an overtly sexualized encounter with a classical god: ‘translucent twilight, hour of celestial blue, tender and romantic hour when Phoebus Apollo plunges his shining chariot into the welcoming sea’.²¹⁹ Beauty products added to the cultural trade in women’s value. They demonstrated to women what medical and social reformers, as well as the body and fitness industries, told them: that heterosexual congress was important in marriage. Although marital success was bargained through an alluring perfume, here, it was sold with the integrity of classical values. The modern sexual outlook appeared traditional and beneficial. Sex in marriage was the healthy pursuit of a normal and beautiful woman. Underscoring the commercial appeal of perfumes was a social code that a woman’s scent made her marriage successful. Alongside winning aromas, sanitary products such as Kotex and Menex scornfully reminded menstruating women that, ‘no one is free from the fear of offending others’.²²⁰ Body cultures reiterated modern education on menstruation, rejecting older medical discourses of illness and disability, and yet insisting on ‘discretion’.²²¹ Hygiene was synonymous with sterile classicism. Women’s freedom was located in physical mobility. Light sanitary products meant menstruating women could maintain their femininity, and continue to wear the ‘flimsiest of flimsies’, referring to the fashion for dress designs modelled on classical drapery at this time.²²² Alongside freedom from menstrual curses, the dread of motherhood was also rescued. Birth control devices—disguised as vaginal hygiene douches ‘used in women’s hospitals all over the continent’, were recommended.²²³ Eugenists in Britain and the United States financed birth control research in the interwar period, although there were clear tensions between conservative, feminist, socialist, and secularist agendas.²²⁴ Anglophone body cultures recognized female desire, but harnessed it too, advocating birth control as part of eugenic motherhood. This concurred with their attention to bourgeois morality and the civic duties ²¹⁸ The Home (1 Mar. 1929), 10, 3, 10. ²¹⁹ Ibid. (1 Oct. 1929), 10, 91. ²²⁰ Ibid. (2 Jan. 1929), 77; ibid. (Dec. 1929), 10, 12, 6. ²²¹ Julie-Marie Strange, ‘The Assault on Ignorance: Teaching Menstrual Etiquette in England, 1920s to 1960s’, Social History of Medicine, 14 (2001), 247–65. ²²² The Home (2 Jan. 1929), 77. ²²³ Advertisement for ‘experator syringe’ douche, in Health and Physical Culture (Sept. 1930), 64. ²²⁴ Richard Soloway, ‘The ‘‘Perfect Contraceptive’’: Eugenics and Birth Control Research in Britain and America in the Interwar Years’, Journal of Contemporary History, 30 (1995), 637–64; Hera Cook, ‘Sexuality and Contraception in Modern England: Doing the History of Reproductive Sexuality’, Journal of Social History, 40 (2007), 915–32.


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of ‘hygienic living’ and fitness—part of ‘embodied citizenship’—reiterated, for instance, by the New Health Society, England.²²⁵ Significantly, hygiene discourses merged with the marketing of femininity, so that social prejudices were invoked to create new patterns of consuming beauty. In Australia, Hera Roberts, art director for The Home magazine, saw it as an urgent matter for the individual woman competing in the modern world: ‘More than ever is the search for personal beauty essential in the modern world where Beauty is demanded on every side—the underlying motif for comfort and harmony’.²²⁶ The ‘latent social functions’ of retail capital saw Anglophone women purchasing modern ideals of classical beauty, conforming to the social conditions of femininity bound to the political values of reconstruction; women’s desires were promoted while their bodies were sexualized.²²⁷ In this exchange, classical aesthetics and respectable femininity became synonymous with consumption.²²⁸ Commerce reoriented reconstruction so that civilized humanity informed ideas about social acceptance through beauty. Removing body hair was a visible way of demonstrating the values of reconstructed civilization. The company Veet promoted the sculptural quality of limbs via the removal of ‘embarrassing’ and ‘disfiguring’ superfluous hair, which ‘mars the smooth perfection of the skin’.²²⁹ Sporty Diana types were assured ‘active girls need freedom’, and that dark hair-ends shadowed ‘the whiteness of the skin’.²³⁰ Women should aim for the smooth, white, marble skin, like the perfection of Greek statues. Although tanning was popularized in this period in Europe and the Anglophone world, the line between a ‘healthy glow’ and dark skin was contested, as whiteness was still valued as a marker of class, race, and civilization. Beauty experts also thought the ‘hairlessness’ of Greek art indicated civilization. Women with armpit hair were deplored, as sleeveless dresses exposed the limbs.²³¹ The aim of rebuilding civilization fostered an association between hair and the regressive primitivism of simian ancestry. As one Australian commentator put it, ‘human hair remains as a rather vulgar reminder of an origin which I sincerely trust we are all doing our best to forget’.²³² Hairlessness was becoming a condition of modern civilization, and an ‘aesthetic of normalizing embodiment’. Veet promised women there would be ‘no more disapproving critical glances’.²³³ ²²⁵ Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Raising a Nation of ‘‘Good Animals’’: The New Health Society and Health Education Campaigns in Interwar Britain’, Social History of Medicine, 20 (2007), 73–89. ²²⁶ The Home (2 Dec. 1929), 10, 12, 67. ²²⁷ Rob Shields, ‘The Individual, Consumption Cultures, and the Fate of Community’, in Rob Shields (ed.), Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption (London: Routledge, 1992), 101. ²²⁸ Lauren Langman, ‘Neon Cages: Shopping for Subjectivity’, ibid. 57. ²²⁹ The Home (2 Jan. 1928), 9, 1, 74; ibid. (2 Jan. 1929), 10, 1, 77; ibid. (1 Feb. 1929), 10, 2, 83; ibid. (1 Mar. 1929), 10, 3, 92. ²³⁰ Ibid. (1 Feb. 1929), 83. ²³¹ Redgrove, Cream of Beauty, 176. ²³² ‘Bald Statements’, The Home (2 Dec. 1929), 10, 12, 92. ²³³ Veet advertisement, ibid. (1 Mar. 1927), 92.

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One English beauty expert said women with ‘hairy growth on their upper lip and chins’ were ‘abnormal and pathological’, citing cases where the hair growth ‘resemble[d] apes rather than human beings’.²³⁴ The common trope of civilization at war—primitive beasts engaged in ugly battle—appeared in literature and political rhetoric, and was refracted through commercial and popular culture.²³⁵ The beauty and body industries claimed to promote peace for civilization; classical beauty equated with social harmony. For men, the removal of ‘superfluous’ body hair was not only imperative for cleanliness and hygiene, but was a measure of civilization after war.²³⁶ Prolific war memoirist and Vanity Fair writer Compton Mackenzie deliberated upon women’s hostility towards men with hair, lamenting a hairy man’s inability to attract a woman. He imagined a future parliament of women decreeing Victorian beards and whiskers illegal. If women were forced to abandon the shingle, he retorted, ‘it would mean a tremendous set back to feminine liberty’.²³⁷ Although a flippant article, it nevertheless showed that male and female bodies were the new battleground upon which wars would be fought in peacetime. When Helena Rubenstein claimed to be waging ‘a war against superfluous hair’, she inadvertently exposed the tension in blurring gender lines and the role of consumer culture in social reconstruction. British beauty leader Mary Bagot Stack saw the war as splitting bodies and minds, which classicism aimed to heal: man is in conflict with himself. The flesh against the Spirit, or the Spirit against the Flesh . . . when the body and mind are definitely at variance, we get the greatest tragedy of all, as in the Great War, where men were forcing their bodies to do what their minds detested. That was the real horror of the whole ghastly business.²³⁸

Violence and grief underpinned this schism, creating a feeling of uncertainty. Many Anglophone war brides had become war widows; sweethearts lost fiancés; and thousands of husbands and sons became dependants. In Britain in 1921, there were twice as many widows aged between 20 and 33 than before the war. Like widows, spinsters were symbols of loss, but as unmarried women they were feared as a potential social problem.²³⁹ Alongside widows’ increased burdens were anxieties about financial welfare and pensions. In Australia, widows campaigned for compensation and better living standards, but had to prove their ‘moral worth’. Like their British counterparts, they also felt humiliated at receiving what Sylvia Pankhurst called ‘blood money’. Although widows occupied an ambiguous sexual position, transgressing categories of young modern woman or married ²³⁴ Redgrove, Cream of Beauty, 174. ²³⁵ Anthony Bonadeo, Mark of the Beast: Death of Degradation in the Literature of the Great War (Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1989). ²³⁶ ‘Bald Statements’, 58. ²³⁷ Compton Mackenzie, ‘Strong Men and Refined Women’, Vanity Fair (Oct. 1928), 130. ²³⁸ Bagot Stack, Building the Body Beautiful, 2. ²³⁹ Holden, ‘Imaginary Widows’, 394.


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mother, and spinsters were either worryingly unattached or ‘imagined’ as widows, body cultures did not exclude them. Post-war societies emphasized heterosexual intimacy and marriage, for which single women often yearned. English novelist Rosamund Lehmann wrote that ‘virginity, like a malignant growth, gnawed at her mind and body’.²⁴⁰ Gaining control over the body and marriage (or remarriage) offered a degree of personal security and social acceptance. Bagot Stack’s awareness of women’s plight after the war motivated her to establish the Women’s League of Health and Beauty. She promoted classical ideas to redress the imbalance of mind and body, of man’s ‘conflict with himself’, that women, too, had suffered. Despite the ideals of classical holism—the soul inseparable from the body—it was Cartesian dualism—the mind split from the body—that underpinned most western thinking about bodies, in medicine as well as popular culture. Susan Bordo writes that when the body is separate from the ‘true self ’, women are ‘weighed down’ by the gendered scheme of dualism and its ‘wide-ranging institutional and cultural expression’.²⁴¹ Concentrating upon women’s physical and mental stability, however, encouraged a collective social anxiety whereby women had to patrol their own physical borders. As one expert declared, ‘your most reliable critic is your mirror’.²⁴² Helena Rubenstein insisted that beauty culture could overcome any blemish, by providing ‘relief’ for women’s physical ‘tragedies’ and ‘sad disfigurements’, such as ‘wrinkles and furrows in the skin, and many other gross weeds in Beauty’s Garden’.²⁴³ With the focus on youthful beauty and procreative sexuality, ageing women were framed as diseased and dysfunctional, especially if they were past reproductive age. Beauty experts pronounced that, ‘disease is ugly, and most ugliness is a sign of disease’.²⁴⁴ Rubenstein said, ‘the loss of a woman’s complexion is her first death’. Was the loss of a husband the second death? Women without perfect beauty were rendered socially and personally bereft: ‘life has nothing but grief and tribulations to offer to plain looks’.²⁴⁵ In a period of intense concern about marriage and repopulation, male virility and disability, these anxieties about beauty were exploited; it was ‘in every woman’s power to remedy the defect’.²⁴⁶ Although many women were grieving for dead husbands and boyfriends, marriage appeared to rest with reinventing themselves and rejuvenating their appearance. The sexual politics of female reconstruction permeated women’s lives from the cradle to the altar. ²⁴⁰ Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 71–3; Invitation to the Waltz (1932), in Holden, ‘Imaginary Widows’, 396. ²⁴¹ Susan R. Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997), 5, 13. ²⁴² ‘Art of Attraction—Secrets of the Vamp Revealed’, Health and Physical Culture (Oct. 1930), 15–16. ²⁴³ Rubenstein, Beauty in the Making, 51. ²⁴⁴ C. Ward Crampton, ‘Venus Anno Domini’, Withrow’s Physical Culture (May 1923), 245. ²⁴⁵ Rubenstein, Beauty in the Making, 5, 9. ²⁴⁶ Willi, Facial Rejuvenation, 21.

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Beauty experts not only peddled cosmetics and creams, but also suggested surgery.²⁴⁷ British plastic surgeon John Bell commended the advances in cosmetic repair developed as a result of the ‘vast numbers of face wounds and disfigurements’ during the war. Although acutely aware of the suffering of soldiers in the recent war, he nevertheless considered facial spots, freckles, moles, and birthmarks similar ‘morbid conditions’ requiring practical cures.²⁴⁸ In peace as much as war, it seemed, surgical remedies reinforced the pursuit of perfection. One army physician trained in reconstructive surgery explained to body culture readers his work in ‘remaking faces of soldiers, shattered and deformed by the wreck and ravage of war’. He despaired at the proliferation of ‘quack beauty specialists’.²⁴⁹ Spurred on by fears of losing husbands, some women incurred terrible disfigurements from botched cosmetic surgery.²⁵⁰ War surgeons who migrated to the United States had helped to found the American Association of Plastic Surgeons (1921). Levels of expertise ranged widely, however, and the extent to which field surgery could be transplanted to civilian circumstances was problematic. By 1925, John Bell reported that much of his work involved repairing cosmetic surgery bungles in three out of every five of his female patients. He found that 50 per cent of them were beyond the help of plastic surgery. He knew of one woman who paid 1,000 US dollars for a rhinoplasty of a Classical ‘Grecian nose’.²⁵¹ Surgeons blamed women for the ‘quack’ industry. Yet beauty therapists supported the use of cosmetic surgery: Helena Rubenstein said ‘art can correct nature’. Plain women could become ‘good looking’, snub noses could be straightened, and hooked noses could be metamorphosed into classic Greek ones.²⁵² Beauty experts noted the popularity of statues such as Apollo, Venus, and Diana and that ‘modern people’ wished to imitate their ‘refinement and sensuality’.²⁵³ While Rubenstein demonstrated her beauty techniques on the Venus de Milo, the plastic surgeon George Sava corrected the nose of a sculpture of the Hellenistic Queen, Cleopatra. Modern cosmetics and surgery improved the most perfect of ancient models. Sava’s mentor and teacher, Professor Pierre Marie, attested to the penchant for the ‘straight’ Greek nose amongst the ‘white races’.²⁵⁴ Others felt ²⁴⁷ Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). ²⁴⁸ John C. Bell, Natural Beauty (London: Vacher and Sons, 1927), 20, 28. ²⁴⁹ Physical Culture (Sept. 1925), pp. liv, 3, 31; Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 17–90. ²⁵⁰ Carolyn Ward Comiskey, ‘ ‘‘I Will Kill Myself . . . If I Have to Keep My Fat Calves!’’: Legs and Cosmetic Surgery in Paris in 1926’, in Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier (eds), Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005), 247–63. ²⁵¹ Physical Culture (Sept. 1925), 31. ²⁵² Helena Rubenstein, The Art of Feminine Beauty (London and Southampton: Camelot Press, 1930), 249, 276. ²⁵³ Willi, Facial Rejuvenation, 100. ²⁵⁴ George Sava, Beauty From the Surgeon’s Knife (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 151.


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‘horror’ at yellow skin or the ‘disfiguring’ double chin, preferring the perfection of ‘classical’ features.²⁵⁵ Straight noses were beautiful, but they also met ideals of white, physical superiority. The nose was regarded as a visual demonstration of a person’s race, class, and ‘strength or weakness of character’.²⁵⁶ The Grecian nose delivered the message of civilization and racial evolution. In the ‘aesthetics of normalizing embodiment’, quack surgeon Henry Schireson defined the Grecian nose as a ‘compulsory’ feature of high standards in the ‘urge for human betterment’. The perfect American nose, he said, followed that of the Venus de Milo, only ‘improved’ by an upward angle of one degree.²⁵⁷ Although many innovations in plastic surgery benefited war injuries, cosmetic surgery was convened as a technique of feminine perfection.²⁵⁸ War may have ruined men’s bodies, but some wealthy women, actresses, and screen stars reconstructed theirs by procuring the services of former war surgeons. When training to become a physician in Italy, George Sava visited a sanatorium for disabled soldiers with severe mutilations. Emotionally overcome by the sight of these men, Sava despaired that ‘No medieval dungeon, no torture chamber could have revealed sights so terrible. Only the twentieth century could have produced anything so heartrending and so repulsive’. Shocked by their grisly wounds, the experience ‘lived in my memory as the most dreadful nightmare’.²⁵⁹ Later Sava witnessed a woman disfigured in a car accident, and was reminded of the disabled soldiers he met as a student. Plastic surgery, he thought, was not just ‘another aspect of the modern craze for beauty’, but also the restoration of normality to victims’ lives, as surgeon Harold Delf Gillies and medical illustrator Henry Tonks had said. Comparing art, war, and life, he saw the plastic surgeon’s role as a ‘sculptor in human flesh . . . in the battle for normality’.²⁶⁰ As with many educated people working in reconstruction industries, classical art played an important part in his training and life. He greatly admired Graeco-Roman art and architecture, having worked as an artist’s model at the Academia Delle Belle Arti, Italy. Emulating bodybuilders, he posed as Perseus, flexing muscles to express embodied masculinity.²⁶¹ While Sava admired ‘the Golden Age of Greece’ for its beautiful art and democratic institutions, he chastised modern civilization for perpetuating ancient prejudices against disabled people. Disfigured veterans were often shunned, banned from public spaces, or hidden away. Since social and cultural rebirth ²⁵⁵ Bell, Natural Beauty, 37. ²⁵⁶ Willi, Facial Rejuvenation, 98. ²⁵⁷ Henry J. Schireson, As Others See You: The Story of Plastic Surgery (New York: Macaulay Co., 1938), pp. viii, 71, 33. ²⁵⁸ Aiken, Venus Envy, 19. ²⁵⁹ Sava, Beauty from the Surgeon’s Knife, 10. ²⁶⁰ Ibid. 10–21. See also Hygeia (1931)—‘Like the sculptor, the plastic surgeon works from a model’, in Aiken, Venus Envy, 222. ²⁶¹ Sava, The Healing Knife: A Surgeon’s Destiny (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), 142.

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was premised upon visions of beauty and perfection, there was little room for ‘un-beautiful’ people. Sava found a beach placard that warned ‘Deformed and Crippled Persons not Admitted’, and questioned the modern obsession with perfect classical body form: ‘Will our Golden Age perish too like the Greeks because of our lack of sympathy and ability to right these physical wrongs?’²⁶² These heartfelt questions struck at the core meaning of total war, rehabilitation medicine, and the politics of reconstruction, troubling Anglophone societies at the time. A consumerist ‘Golden Age’ seemed a far cry from the reality of many people’s lives. Yet the war amputee and artist Mervyn Napier Waller painted his classical utopia without any imperfect bodies, suggesting the complex dynamic between personal experiences and cultural production. Waller’s reconstructed civilization, like many women striving for perfect bodies, showed that reality and representation were embedded in the post-war coalition between visual, medical and commercial cultures. If the touchstone of humanity was the flesh, how could western civilization progress in the wake of the war? Modern war tested surgeons to the limits of their profession. In 1916, Henry Kaye confessed in his diary: ‘I feel more and more often and more strongly that it is a real effort to make up one’s mind to pull back the blanket or muddy overcoat and look at the horrible mess you know awaits you on the filthy blood stained stretcher.’ Despite medical training, it was impossible ‘to ‘‘get used’’ to the horrors of war’.²⁶³ Still, the expertise gained under the strains of combat was channelled into the cosmetics industry. George Sava felt that ‘the preservation of beauty means the preservation of civilization at large. There is nothing closer to humanity than its body’.²⁶⁴ As discussed in Chapter 2, wartime plastic surgeons such as Sir Harold Delf Gillies became cosmetic surgeons in the 1920s. Both Gillies and Sava felt like artists enhancing classical, humanist ideals: ‘the plastic surgeon operates in the spirit of an artist. He has an artist’s eye and a delicate artistic touch, and he believes that in restoring beauty and in removing facial blemishes he is doing good work for humanity.’²⁶⁵ Beauty and surgery, although informed by idealism and commercialism, was also aimed at social healing. Defying horrific injuries and environmental damage, classical beauty provided hope and the promise of healing. While reconstruction required effort and opportunity, it also demonstrated belief in human resilience. What were the lessons of the war? Beauty expert Charles Willi concluded: ‘we have learned to assimilate our dead past and build of it our present . . . It is to the rebuilder as much as the builder that we owe the presence of beauty and culture.’²⁶⁶ ²⁶² Sava, Beauty from the Surgeon’s Knife, 48–9. ²⁶³ Henry Wynyard Kaye, Royal Army Medical Corps, war diary, 8 Feb. 1916, 127; 23 Sept. 1915, 189. RAMC 739/7, Wellcome Collection. ²⁶⁴ Sava, Beauty from the Surgeon’s Knife, 257. ²⁶⁵ Willi, Facial Rejuvenation, 146–7. ²⁶⁶ Ibid. 257.


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While war surgeons transferred their ‘rebuilding’ skills to cosmetic, civilian practices, the beauty industry exploited the sentiments of post-war reconstruction, formulating a compelling rationale of physical healing and emotional recovery. Wartime surgery inspired commercial approaches to beauty, producing a commercial reconstruction industry spanning Britain, Australia, and the United States. Defending beauty against political critique, Elaine Scarry argues, in On Beauty and Being Just, that the perceiver of beauty is ‘led to a more capacious regard for the world’, which can ‘press us toward a greater concern for justice’. The reconstruction of classical beauty into a modern ‘aesthetics of healing’ after the First World War fits Scarry’s description of the past and present continuously in dialogue when rediscovering beauty.²⁶⁷ Yet, despite the utopian visions of surgeons, memorial officials, and beauty therapists, increasingly consumerism and perfectionism—rather than justice and healing—motivated men and women to extravagant forms of beautiful embodiment in the name of humanity. C O N C LU S I O N Bombarding readers with images of beauty, magazines exploited the uncertain borders of the sex and gender order, promoting the ‘aesthetics of normalizing embodiment’, with its standardizing but not yet fixed techniques. At times, the strict differences between men and women were challenged, adding to anxieties about social, domestic, and working life. Muscularity cultivated ‘boyishness’ and female masculinities, and men’s compensation for this was hyper-sexualized. Slimming crazes added a further complexity to the gendering and sexualizing of bodies. Feminine beauty required symmetry, which now included slimness. Strict form was cultivated as an aesthetic idea as well as a physique. The values of strict forms within modern art had a corollary in the idea that true beauty was an absolute and eternal value—it was mathematical, measurable, but never natural. War placed beauty on the reconstruction agenda. With more than twelve million men’s lives claimed, and thousands maimed, replenishing civilization was political, but also deeply felt. Classical discourses formed a bridge between the impact of war and the hope for the future, providing images of healing and transformation. The ‘Golden Age of Woman’ generated new avenues for female liberty, and new ways of exploring gender and sexuality. Increasingly, however, it meant becoming a ‘perfect woman’: financially independent, socially competent, and physically attractive. Despite the fulfilment of self-expression, marriage was not far from these Anglophone conversations. Reconstructing the ²⁶⁷ Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 46–8.

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female body was the ideal and the object in the eyes of global commerce. For women, it was an uplifting vision of female modernity that merged the boundaries of reality and representation. The ‘Golden Age of Woman’ offered ambiguity and agency, and yet it was bound to appearances and to the social aims of reconstruction.

6 Performing the New Civilization It was the early Greek civilization that first began that great cult of the physical ideal of perfect proportion, health and beauty of the body, which eventually, through its perfect coordination with mind and spirit, led to one of the sublimest things in Greek art and life—the equal development of mind and body for the purpose of service to God and State. Marjorie Duncombe, ‘The Revived Greek Dance’, 1933.

Equilibrium of the mind and body was the philosophical foothold from which classical body and beauty cultures propelled their commercial endeavours. Allied with these enterprises, Classical revival dancing achieved parallel popularity across Europe, the United States, and Australia following the war. Classical revival dance interpreted movement from ancient Greek art and architecture, with its embodied qualities appearing to generate centrifugal force. Dancers emphasized physical coordination and rhythm while parading modern ideals of fitness and beauty. Similar to body cultures, the physicality of Classical revival dancing was interpreted as both feminine and masculine. Targeting young, modern women, dance teachers instructed them to harmonize their bodies and minds with expressive, sensuous choreographies. Yet, behind this staging of female bodily performance, the spectre of war and the fate of civilization preoccupied many dancers. Translating the female body’s essential language, they sensed an important role for dance at this painful juncture in western history. Dancers wondered: how could civilization be brought back from the abyss? What special role should women play in this endeavour? Symbiotically, ancient dances remodelled for modern women’s bodies could reveal the secrets of healing to the world. On stages, in theatres, and outdoor workshops, female dancers bounded about in bare feet and thin chemises. Floating through the air, dancers believed that with their bodies they were ushering in a future of hope and serenity, inspired by the exquisite beauty of the ancient past. Dressed as nikes, nymphs, and sylphs, and other classical figures, leaping effortlessly in transparent drapery, women who performed Classical revival dance expressed the sentiments of reconstructing civilization. Dancers called this flight through the air ‘soaring’, while others knew this embodied philosophy as ‘the

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winged ideal’; both terms expressed the uplifting beauty of a free, female body. Unencumbered by time, space, and gravity, the female body cutting through space symbolized new directions in society. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of war, the classical dancer elevated society from despair. Female flight represented escape from suffering and the journey to a future not yet realized, a Golden Age of peace and sensual truth. Only free minds and bodies could reach these heights. Most of all, it was women who led the migration, navigating civilization towards the blissful future. Symbolic flight had special significance for the politics of women’s bodies. Dance teachers understood the ‘winged ideal’ as a performance of female independence. At the same time, the structure and ideology underpinning the dances signified women’s physical and mental commitment to reconstruction. Freedom and flight were lofty ideals, and yet real women’s lives were earthbound. Gestures of freedom central to Classical revival dance were part of an ideal about classical civilization and democratic culture promulgated in the United States, Britain, and Australia in a period weighed down by domestic unrest, economic distress, and tense international relations. This chapter explores several aspects of Classical revival dance. First, it discusses the diversity and modernity of dancing in the Anglophone world, and places it within the wider international context. Second, it explores how dancers responded to the war and the social changes disrupting the sex/gender order. Third, the celebration of peace is considered as a physical sensation translated into movement. Exploring the theme of ‘the winged ideal’, the symbolic meaning of female flight through the air is discussed. Flight was seen as an enactment of women’s freedom and success, but it also restated the goals of femininity in a period when gender boundaries were being renegotiated. Women embraced their industry-driven sexualized image as a mode of selfexpression. Their desire to perform erotic subjectivity within the discipline of Classical revival dance is a specific point of contention. One of the major conflicts stirred by celebrating bodily freedom and sexual selfhood was the contest between autonomy and reconstruction ideals of fit motherhood. Performing their dances, women trod carefully around the social framework of ‘biological destiny’ that permeated reconstruction discourse. C L A S S I C A L R EV I VA L D A N C E A N D T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L C O N T E X T Unlike the national character of many European sports and gymnastics, Classical revival dance was a truly international movement of physical expression for women. Under its various titles and descriptions, Classical revival dance, la danse grecque, Grecian dance, Revived Greek dance, eurythmic and aesthetic dancing, had been practised in Europe and the United States since the nineteenth century.

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A range of antecedents influenced the multitude of post-war Greek dance styles. The French performance ‘aesthetics’ of François Delsarte were disseminated by his American student, Steele Mackaye in the 1870s, and then developed by his student Genevieve Stebbins into ‘harmonic gymnastics’.¹ Delsarte was a professor of singing; although working with voice and gesture, he also taught antique posing of ‘Living Pictures’. Mackay applied Delsarte’s laws of gesture to a disciplined body through physical culture. Actors and orators benefited from the performance techniques of ‘Harmonic Gymnastics’. Delsartean performance was based on the idea that emotion produced bodily movement, which was the mainstay of modern expressionist dance. Swedish gymnastics pioneered by Pehr Henrik Ling, a great admirer of the Greeks, was influential in Classical revival dance, rehabilitation, and orthopaed´ ics.² In Hellerau, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze’s Institute of Eurythmics created freer movements, liberating the body from gesture. In 1911, Dalcroze pupils performed in St Petersburg. Nijinsky and Diaghilev visited the following year, a turning point for the development of the Ballets Russes’ style. Modernism was emphatic in the belligerent, rhythmic dissonance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) and Nijinsky’s choreography of pagan ritual and orgiastic sacrifice. Modris Ecksteins translated ‘The Rites of Spring’ to equate modernism with ‘the violence associated with regeneration’. This theme he extended for the next world war, as the ‘urge to destroy was intensified; the urge to create became increasingly abstracted’.³ Touring internationally in the 1920s, the ballet’s themes resonated with audiences, especially given the Russian Revolution and a degree of fascination with the brutality of the First World War. In the ‘pleasure culture’ of war—seen in literature and visual culture—the primitive and the classical were bound together as Europeans redrew the boundaries of civilization. Radicalism and chic consumerism defined the Ballets Russes, coexisting with conservative reactions rooted in the trauma of France’s war experience.⁴ Reaching beyond the avant-garde Ballets Russes, Dalcrozian ideas were popularized in commercial dancing and leisure circles.⁵ Concurrent with Dalcroze, ¹ Ted Shawn, Every Little Movement: A Book about Delsarte (New York: Pace Horizons, 1954), 1; Nancy Lee Chalfa Rutyer, ‘Antique Longings: Genevieve Stebbins and American Delsartean performance’, in Susan Leigh Foster (ed.), Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power (London: Routledge, 1996), 73; Judy Burns, ‘The Culture of Nobility/The Nobility of SelfCultivation’, in Gay Morris (ed.), Moving Words: Re-writing Dance (London and New York, Routledge, 1996), 203–26. ² Niels Bukh, Primary Gymnastics: The Basis of Rational Physical Development (London: Methuen, 1925), 2–8. ³ Modris Ecksteins, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (London: Black Swan, 1988), 70, 435. ⁴ Lynn Garofola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 60–1, 64, 121. ⁵ Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, ‘Eurythmics and its Implications’, Musical Quarterly, 16 (1930), 360; quoted Hillel Schwartz, ‘Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century’, in Johnathon Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 73.

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Isadora Duncan and a subsequent generation of pupils performed holistic movements.⁶ In both dance and medicine, ideas of the unified body, mind, and soul were renewed after the war. Duncan’s system spread the idea of classical grace and symmetry as an embodied female performance, inspired by static antiquities of iconic female figures. Barefoot dances became synonymous with the idea that modernity liberated the female body from physical and social constraints. Essential femininity was linked to the serene beauty of the natural world. ‘Spring’ was, therefore, not sacrifice before rebirth; it was eternal life. Although Duncan’s conventions were sensual, some dancers pursued dance as an explicitly sexualized movement. In Berlin, Grit Hegesa thought Duncan’s Grecian dances too ‘ladylike’ and deprived of eroticism. In Britain, Margaret Morris developed the erotic aspects of classical dance; Duncan would have disapproved. Classical motifs such as nymphs and dryads were maintained, but they became increasingly coquettish and spectacular. Classical revival dance influenced other styles of physical expression, such as Bernarr Macfadden’s American ‘aesthetic athletics’, combining formulaic movements with graceful exercises. Dance pioneers Rudolph von Laban and Kurt Joos turned German expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz) into the driving force behind many European styles. They influenced German nudist dance and exercise (Nacktkultur and Freikörperkultur), which also inspired Anglophone versions of classical dance, indicating the cultural exchange derived from performance tours, dance magazines, and international exposure in fashion. Similar to body cultures, the nude female body was associated with modern liberated identity.⁷ In Britain, the Women’s League of Health and Beauty taught Classical revival dance. League Director Mary Bagot Stack advised that ‘private nudity’—euphemistically termed ‘skin-airing’—was inoffensive. German dancer Mary Wigman turned ‘Greek style’ into energetic movements. Wigman—a student of Laban—was an innovative choreographer of the modern ‘kinaesthetic imagination’.⁸ Derived from the ancient Greek words for motion (kinein) and sensation (aisthesis), kinaesthetics developed sensory self-awareness through movement. By the 1930s, Wigman was renowned internationally, and the mainstream press reviewed her work.⁹ Unlike Classical revival dance, she was concerned with bodily force and gravity, challenging conventional choreographies as whimsical, sensual spectacles to which ⁶ In Shawn, Every Little Movement, 80. ⁷ Karl Toepfer, ‘Nudity and Modernity in German Dance, 1910–1930’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 3 ( July 1992), 58–108. ⁸ Dee Reynolds, Rhythmic Subject: Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham (Alton: Dance Books, 2007). ⁹ John Martin, ‘The Dance: Mary Wigman’s Art’, New York Times (3 Aug. 1930); ‘Triumph in Dance by Mary Wigman’, ibid. (29 Dec. 1930); ‘Cordial Reception for Mary Wigman’, ibid. (11 Dec. 1931); ‘Festival of Dance opened by Mary Wigman’, ibid. (26 Dec. 1933); Walter Sorell (ed.), The Mary Wigman Book (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1975); Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993).


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men responded.¹⁰ Wigman ‘tied conditions of ecstatic liberation to conditions of heroic sacrifice’, feminizing traditionally male constructs and reflecting the emancipatory discourses that travelled across artistic and national boundaries after the war.¹¹ Although Wigman’s dances were idiosyncratic, she nevertheless shared common ideals about female movement and modernity. Many dancers appropriated the classical past in ways that simultaneously idealized and transmuted its forms. Classical revival dance allowed women to participate in strenuous activity without compromising their feminine allure. With their bodies, dancers explored traditions and gender norms, often extending the boundaries of modern physical expression. M O D E R N I T Y A N D C L A S S I C A L R EV I VA L D A N C E Classical revival dance crossed the globe; its transnational character was informed by ideals of world harmony, modernism, and cultural diversity. While expeditious to describe it as a movement with some shared techniques and principles, dancers approached classical forms and motifs with pluralism. The influence of body culture, fashion, and the media, as well as the role of medicine and sexology, shaped the range of dance styles; some were more self-consciously ‘modern’ than others. Dancers found grace, symmetry, and perfection in classicism, while at the same time using it as a basis for their own interpretations. Most women were striving for something new and essentially female. Instead of imitating the classical past, dances were modernized and popularized. Dances were conducted on beaches, in parks, in gymnasiums, homes, studios, schools, and all-female retreats across Europe, the United States, and Australia. The explosion of ancient ‘Greek-styles’ influenced the modelling of feminine corporeality in ‘haute couture’ on the catwalks of Paris, such as in Madeline Vionnet’s designs. Like many cultural forms, Classical revival dance absorbed the anxieties and social problems of the period, at times mirroring the values of reconstruction and post-war healing. Similar to body and beauty culture, programmes aimed to rebuild the female body. Devotees of Classical revival dancers shared some ideas with physical culture, advertising in its literature, and drawing from the same client base. A strong belief in transformation informed their practices. Tailored for the female body, dances were also a conduit for racial and social regeneration. The terms of building a new civilization negotiated female sexuality and subjectivity, which Classical revival dancers styled in various ways. Within the ‘dance craze’ of the post-war reaction, Classical revival dance—like jazz—was promoted as a pleasurable activity. Internationally, jazz was regarded ¹⁰ Dee Reynolds, ‘Dancing as a Woman: Mary Wigman and ‘‘Absolute Dance’’ ’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 35 (1999), 297. ¹¹ Toepfer, Empire and Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997), 2, 110.

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as the erotic dance of young people, people of colour, and the depraved. The new jazz emerging from New Orleans was ‘hot’, ‘eccentric’, and ‘violent’. Attesting to its increasingly mainstream character, the city of Sydney staged a ‘Jazz Week’, sponsoring debate about racial hygiene and female sexuality by screening an alluring film, Does Jazz Lead to Destruction?¹² In contrast to classicism’s claim to whiteness and civilization, jazz was black and identified with libidinal desires and social disorder. Dancing exposed tensions in rebuilding civilization, especially where female sexuality was concerned. Some dancers felt they had to compete with the popularity of jazz; others dismissed it as an ‘orgasmic working toward self-oblivion’.¹³ Some were more concerned with the issue of social benefit, questioning the purpose of self-gratifying, erotic movements. True freedom could only be achieved through training and discipline. Unlike the staccato, jarring movements of jazz, classical styles offered centrifugal movement and the dissipation of the body in space. Importantly for women, these dancers believed that deep, self-realization came from the vibrant combination of skill and passion. Classical revival dance was a personal project with social ends. While jazz signalled primitive sexuality and moral chaos, Classical revival dance claimed to protect young women from sexual or racial impropriety. Jazz dances and the whirling two-step were mixed-sex, which crossed racial, class, and gender boundaries. The image of young men and women dancing together with abandon was shocking. In the United States, even progressive Vanity Fair expressed outrage. Corey Ford referred to the ‘moral laxity’ of mixedsex dancing, with innocent debutantes lured into ‘vulgar’ and ‘unprincipled’ movements. Moreover, ‘brazen and unblushing’ pairing ‘will tempt the virginal mind into unworthy thoughts’. Instead, Ford imagined the ‘more soulful rhythms of the classic dance’, in female-only classes.¹⁴ When men were spectators rather than participants, respectability remained intact. In the 1920s, women’s appearances were increasingly scrutinized in relation to morality. The merging of eugenics and sexual psychology, and the coalition between commerce and social reform, informed how single, working women—with a degree of autonomy over their finances and leisure time—were regarded as a problem. Significantly, Classical revival dance legitimized pleasure seeking, celebrating white, civilized, embodiment through an erotic capacity that appeared modern in attitude, and more respectable than ‘oriental’ or ‘black’ dances. Classicism was elevated by its whiteness and concern with symmetry. As seen in Chapter 1, the war’s violence provoked anxiety about white civilization, which reconfigured its elevated, middle-class, cultural values. While claiming ¹² Jill Julius Matthews, ‘Dancing Modernity’, in Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle (eds), Transitions: New Australian Feminisms (St Leonards, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 79. ¹³ Louis Horst, ‘A Preface to Pre-classic Dance Forms’, Dance Observer, 1 (Feb. 1934), 9. ¹⁴ Corey Ford, ‘Aesthetic Dancing For Ladies: Milady Joins the Devout Handmaidens of the Muse of Terpischore in Search of Grace and Charm’, Vanity Fair ( Jan. 1928), 74.


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their personal liberty, women’s bodies were implicated in reconstruction politics. The social and cultural impact of the war was the core dynamic in the balancing act that women performed. Modernism underpinned Classical revival dance’s claim as an alternative to conventional ballet, self-consciously linking with fashion, photography, and consumerism. At the heart of its modernity was the belief that female bodies were unique and liberated. Isadora Duncan had long favoured ‘natural rhythms’ over ballet’s subjugating techniques and mechanical rhythms.¹⁵ Classical revival dancers endowed the body with strength and spontaneity. In contrast to traditional ballet, Classical revival dance offered an array of movements accessible to women and children of any age. Special classes were provided for ‘business women’ and children, and were held outdoors or by the sea to enhance the sensation of liberation. Nevertheless, there were mixed attitudes to ballet within the wider dance scene. The Marion Morgan troupe in New York rejected Doris Humphrey because she was ballet trained.¹⁶ Humphrey joined Ruth St Denis’ troupe instead. In Britain, Margaret Morris was critical of Italian ballet, and yet grateful she had learnt its discipline. Most Revival dancers believed they gave students mental and physical freedom in contrast to ballet, considered restrictive and too codified. Bodily freedom was the philosophical and commercial ideal in classical dance’s pursuit of the ‘modern spirit’. Together, tradition and modernity were promulgated in Anglophone dance schools. In the United States, Helen Moller, Alys E. Benthy and Ruth St Denis contributed to the elaboration of the Greek style and the development of modern dance.¹⁷ St Denis studied Delsarte under Madame Pote, a pupil of Steele Mackaye’s, and attended a demonstration of the ‘science of expression’ by Delsarte’s pupil, Genevieve Stebbins. In 1915, St Denis married Ted Shawn, an expert in Delsarte, together forming the Denishawn Dancers, touring Europe and the United States. They influenced students Marguerite Agniel, Doris Humphrey, and Martha Graham (later dubbed the ‘mother’ of modern dance), who opened their own schools.¹⁸ In Britain, Ruby Ginner and Irene Mawer, as well as Margaret Morris, popularized varieties of Greek dancing, also taught at the Women’s League of Health and Beauty.¹⁹ In Sydney, Thea Stanley Hughes’ League of Health and Beauty taught Greek dancing, following the techniques of Ginner-Mawer. Once a stage actor with Sybil Thorndyke, the young Irene Mulvaney Gray came to ¹⁵ Helen Moller, Physical Culture (Nov. 1919), 5, 39; and ( Jan. 1919), 11. ¹⁶ Doris Humphrey, New Dance: An Unfinished Autobiography, Dance Perspectives, 25 (1966), 38. ¹⁷ Physical Culture (Nov. 1919), 5, 39; ibid. ( Jan. 1922), 11. ¹⁸ Ted Shawn, Ruth St Denis, Pioneer and Prophet (San Francisco, Calif.: John Howell, 1920); Walter Terry, Miss Ruth: The ‘More Living Life’ of Ruth St Denis (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1969), 9–10. ¹⁹ Ruby Ginner, The Revived Greek Dance: Its Art and Technique (1933; 2nd edn, London: Methuen, 1936).

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Sydney from the London school to teach Ginner-Mawer, and Mildred Peters established schools in New Zealand.²⁰ There were many little known schools too. The versatility of Classical revival dance, and its connection to modern expressive dance enhanced its popularity. It was a global dance form with local variations and a range of inspirations. In this period, however, Revival dance developed within the wider cultural response to the war and reconstruction. Originating in Europe, Classical revival dance quickly disseminated across the Atlantic and Pacific performing arts scene. The Ginner-Mawer School developed rapidly after the war; by 1923 it became necessary to form an Association of Teachers of the Revived Greek Dance. In the United States, growth in the dance movement occurred too. Dances revealed European trends, simultaneously developing nationalist and individualist sentiments. The victorious American democracy was celebrated through dances drawing upon classical mythology. As Paul Love, journalist for the Dance Observer, wrote: ‘we can only say at the moment that they were working toward abstraction, toward classicism, toward a consciousness of America’.²¹ Modern American classical dance imagined a forward-looking, prosperous society. Bodies were simplified, sentimentality gave way to formalism, and subjective interpretation was encouraged. Aiming to harmonize opposing theories of the modern and classical, dancers also framed their movements as an innovative, national psychology. Dancer Helen Moller declared, ‘we are temperamentally incapable of slavishly copying from any model. Our ancient Greek dancing is Greek plus American adaptability and creativeness’.²² Ancient Greece was a springboard for the modern dancer, from which she could physically express American modernity. Ancient Greece provided models, but as Ruth St Denis said, it was also ‘a state of mind’.²³ Critics, however, thought Greek dancers’ minds were ‘unhinged’. Commentators poked fun at their public performances, near-naked states, and seemingly uncontrolled movements. Did they appear too neurasthenic—presenting a ‘convulsive beauty’ reminiscent of André Breton’s surrealist project (1928) instead of classical harmony? Were athletic performances of female passion too confronting? Writing for Vanity Fair, Nancy Boyd responded to the Greek dance with a ‘Chorus of Hate’, wittily countering with a ‘Spirited Protest against Executing Lyrical Hop-scotches in Cheese-cloth Chemises’.²⁴ Others quipped against its mass-culture appeal, as ‘Greece having ²⁰ ‘Reviving the Greek Dance in Sydney’, The Home (1 Aug. 1927), 8. ²¹ Paul Love, ‘Approach’, The Dance Observer (1 Feb. 1934), 6. ²² Helen Moller, Dancing with Helen Moller (London: John Lane Co./Bodleigh Head, 1918), 33. ²³ Open letter from Ruth St Denis about Isadora Duncan, Duncan Magazine, 11 (Nov. 1966), 26. ²⁴ Nancy Boyd, ‘The Greek Dance—A Chorus of Hate: A Spirited Protest against Executing Lyrical Hop-scotches in Cheese-cloth Chemises’, Vanity Fair (Aug. 1921), 16, 6, 47.


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been dead so long is common property’.²⁵ Countering critics, Lily Wallace stated, ‘Dancing has obeyed the eternal reaction—it has disappeared and burst forth again into new life’.²⁶ New life came from modern art and fashion—dancers often appeared in Vogue and Vanity Fair in the United States, The Home in Sydney, Tatler and the Graphic in Britain, and Femina in France. Dancers were revered for their fashion sense, bodily control, and idiosyncratic interpretations of the antique past. In vaudeville theatre, elements of the classical revival appeared in shows by the Marion Morgan Dancers, the Folies Bergère, and the Ziegfeld Follies. Morgan worked in the Physical Education Faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles, and was interested in educating modern bodies and minds. Yet she was not confined to the academy, performing in The Flight of the Sabine Women and The Eruption of Vesuvius (1918) to packed vaudeville houses; her dancers regularly appeared in Vanity Fair. Denishawn choreographer Doris Humphrey recalled being inspired by a Morgan performance in Chicago: ‘They were beautiful, long-limbed California boys and girls, who danced barefoot some Bacchanalian sort of dances, full of leaps and runs. I loved and envied them.’ Humphrey was impressed with the fast-paced, less esoteric aspects of the popular theatre, and felt that Classical revival dance could learn from the ‘rough-and tumble, tried-and-true aspects’ of vaudeville.²⁷ In 1927, when Shawn and St Denis began a tour with Ziegfeld Follies, Humphrey became Director of the school (with Charles Weidman), a role that encouraged her originality. Alongside this vaudeville history, music was pivotal in dance expression. Ruth St Denis and Duncan enjoyed the Dalcrozian ‘synchoric orchestra’, where dancers performed as actual instruments, and created ‘music visualizations’ of the body in an ancient Greek style, wearing transparent tunic costumes.²⁸ St Denis danced ‘From a Grecian Vase’ in the vaudevillian Orpheum (1916). Revival teachers used modern compositions, as well as traditional orchestral music. In 1927, New York dance journalist Virginia Darrow commented upon the number of contemporary composers writing for dancers, who preferred artistic symbiosis rather than forced musical interpretations. Purpose-designed music would unlock the inner self; ‘feeling’ the music enabled the dancer to portray moods and emotions. Darrow wrote, ‘the dancer must feel the harmonic theme and the rhythm of music used, for then, and then only, the development of ²⁵ Ibid. 47. ²⁶ Lily Wallace, ‘The History of Dancing’, Withrow’s Physical Culture ( Jan. 1926), 26. ²⁷ Humphrey, New Dance, 38, 47. ²⁸ Jane Sherman, Soaring: The Diary and Letters of a Denishawn Dancer in the Far East, 1925–1926 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 23; Jo Pennington, The Importance of Being Rhythmic: A Study in the Principles of Dalcroze Eurythmics Applied to General Education and to the Arts of Music, Dancing and Acting (New York and London: Putnam and Sons, 1925), 80.

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her personality takes place’.²⁹ For ensemble performers, new music brought new visual languages to classicism, affording greater bodily and personal liberation.³⁰ Music enhanced the holistic embodiment of Classical revival dance more than exercise. Marjorie Duncombe, dance teacher for the League of Health and Beauty, urged women: ‘to come out of your shell, banish that wretched self-consciousness, forget everyone in the room, relax your body, and as the music turns to sorrow, hope and joy, you will find yourself expressing these with your whole being.’³¹ Music and movement together cultivated women’s corporeal self-expression for their inner beings. Margaret Morris danced to music by Eugene Goossens, who offered composition classes and critiqued students’ work. Morris valued his input, as he understood ‘the great analogy between all the arts’.³² American composer Louis Horst became the Musical Director of the Denishawn School; the company performed his scores among others, such as Debussy and Satie.³³ Dance improvisations to music encouraged free movements and spontaneous creativity. The class dynamics of Classical revival dance were also significant. Dancers were artists, teachers, and often successful business women who ran their own schools, developed their own marketing schemes, and published literature to promote their individual philosophies and styles. The movement was largely middle class, but made consistent appeals to working women, especially shop and office employees, as well as students, offering classes at special times and with discount rates. Classes were affordable, and schools offered benefits to their magazine subscribers. The Women’s League of Health and Beauty charged seven guineas for ten lessons, at a time when shop and office women earned around £3 a week. After only three months in operation, membership rose to 1,000 students.³⁴ Like body and beauty culture, it was aspirational to the extent that consumerism and market share could override class distinction. Mutual reinforcement came from fashion, theatre, beauty, and fitness culture. There were club memberships, dance magazines, and costumes to be bought, which required disposable income and fashion sensibility. There was, however, tension between what Jill Matthews describes as ‘an older, class-bound, service-motivated femininity and a more modern, mass, commercial style’ running through the organization.³⁵ Across schools in Europe, Australia, and the United States, Revival dancers constituted ‘the younger set’ from this ²⁹ Virginia Darrow, ‘Music is Necessary to Dancing’, American Dancer, 12 (Nov. 1927). ³⁰ Ruth St Denis, An Unfinished Life: An Autobiography (New York and London: Harper and Bros., 1939), 216. ³¹ Marjorie Duncombe, ‘The Revived Greek Dance’, Mother and Daughter, 1 (1933) (Magazine of the League of Health and Beauty), 13, 10. ³² Margaret M. Morris, Margaret Morris Dancing (London: Kegan Paul, 1926), 59. ³³ Louis Horst, Modern Dance Forms (New York: Dance Horizon Books, 1961). ³⁴ Matthews, ‘They had Such a Lot of Fun: The Women’s League of Health and Beauty between the Wars’, History Workshop Journal, 30 (1990), 26. ³⁵ Ibid. 27.


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modern consumer-oriented group. While targeting working women, fashion magazines accentuated the beauty and grace of girls posing as Revival dancers. Similar ideals were shared with beauty culture and fused into the corporeal expression of femininity. Beauty therapist Helena Rubenstein commented that the benefits of Classical revival dance were as an aesthetic, mental, and physical outlet for women.³⁶ Across the range of styles, Classical revival dancers aimed to extrapolate modern dynamic movement from classical motifs, inspiring women to passionate and free movements with their bodies.

F L I G H T F RO M WA R TO T H E E C S TA S Y O F PE AC E Scholars have underestimated the female desire for free movement as a response to war and social change. Revival dancers celebrated the sensual body as part of an overall strategy for recovery through beauty. Performances drew upon ideals of Graeco-Roman art and architecture, finding serenity in antiquity. Classical revival dancers saw themselves as agents of physical and social restoration. Australian dance teacher Mary Whidbourne’s students gave public recitals to demonstrate the ‘Greek ideal of bodily movement’ in harmony with music. Although movement had been cast as an instrument of social cohesion since the late nineteenth century, in this period bodily harmony was regarded as beneficial to the individual and society.³⁷ Poignantly, the proceeds from Whidbourne’s concerts were donated to the Citizen’s Distressed Soldiers’ Fund.³⁸ Between 1917 and 1918, Margaret Morris established summer schools for open-air study in England, France, and Belgium, which became resting places after the war.³⁹ During the war, she ran the Margaret Morris Club in London to allow women to come and go freely and respectably, as men did from public bars. The Club was a café that met three times a month, entertaining guests with performances, poetry readings, and songs. While also popular with French Army and Navy officers, Morris banned politics and religion from discussions. Members of the diplomatic corps attended the Club, along with modern artists Jacob Epstein, Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis, and writers Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound, and Middleton Murray. Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a regular visitor and became her great friend. Establishing a school in Paris in the late 1930s, Morris appointed James Joyce’s daughter Lucia as a teacher. Morris’ life and work was closely bound to the vanguard and centre of British modernism, which influenced her interpretation of classic ³⁶ Helena Rubenstein, The Art of Feminine Beauty (London and Southampton: Camelot Press, 1930), 206. ³⁷ Nina Lara Rosenblatt, ‘Photogenic Neurasthenia: On Mass and Medium in the 1920s’, October, 86 (1998), 58. ³⁸ ‘Eurhythmics at Frensham, Mittagong’, The Home (1 Sept. 1922), 38. ³⁹ Margaret M. Morris, My Life in Movement (London: Peter Owen, 1969), 32, 63–9.

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dance. As well, she developed creative synergies with specialists in orthopaedics and rehabilitation medicine. Morris believed that knowledge of medicine and aesthetics was important. In 1925, she gave a demonstration to a group of eminent surgeons and doctors at St Thomas’, marking the beginning of a new direction in bodily movements she called ‘Doctor Dancing’ or remedial dance. Writing for the Dancing Times (1933), Morris recalled her aim of improving health through artistry, which was further developed by working with crippled children at the Heritage Craft School for Cripples, Chailey, Sussex—a school that placed disabled boys and soldiers together for rehabilitation. The ‘aesthetic side of life’ was for everyone—‘young, old, crippled or deformed’.⁴⁰ The war profoundly influenced Morris as a modernist, a dancer, and a humanist. Witnessing thousands of wounded and disabled men around her, Morris took action. Closely connected with the author and disabled veteran advocate John Galsworthy—who edited the Ministry of Pensions journal Recalled to Life, transforming it into a ‘minor literary event’ as Reveille, with contributions from Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Graves⁴¹—Morris adapted her Classical revival dance technique into physical therapy. Envisaging the ‘remedial side’ of dance as part of ‘an aesthetic whole’, Morris wanted to help wounded and disabled soldiers, and people recovering from surgery. Besides the physical benefits, dance aimed to assist psychologically injured men as a normalizing technique: I realize that the more normal you could make people feel the more normal they could become. They could not grow a missing arm or leg, but the more they take part in normal physical activities, the happier they would be.⁴²

Movements considered ‘feminine’ were translated into exercises for disabled men. Through classicism and modernism, the ‘aesthetics of normalizing embodiment’ were applied to male and female bodies, underscored by the logic of Anglophone reconstruction. Physical and mental ability, appearances, and inner health were all connected. As therapy, dance would restore confidence and balance to the whole person—important for male bodies recovering from amputations and learning to walk again on awkward prosthetic legs. Bodies may be mutilated; however, inner life could be given an artistic outlet that was therapeutic. At Sir Robert Jones’ celebrated orthopaedic hospital St Thomas’ in London, Sister Randell selected patients for Morris’ dance-exercise classes. Morris felt she was bringing ‘the aesthetic point of view to bear on the question [of recovery]’, and collaborated with the Massage Department to devise exercises ‘that were ⁴⁰ Id., ‘Doctor Dancing: The Remedial Side of the Margaret Morris Movement’, Dancing Time (Dec. 1933), 275–8. ⁴¹ Seth Koven, ‘Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children, Wounded Soldiers and the Great War in Britain’, American Historical Review, 99 (1994), 1167. ⁴² Margaret M. Morris, My Life in Movement, 53.


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aesthetic as well as scientific’.⁴³ Some exercises combined Classical dancing with Hatha yoga to enhance the remedial effect. Others adapted her dances into a programme for joint massage and remedial exercise. Crucially, Morris later developed the exercises used for wounded soldiers into exercises for pre- and post-natal women, linking reconstruction of male and female bodies with the therapeutic role of dance. Dance therapy was not intended to be arduous or even a social duty. Morris, along with many body culturists and beauty therapists, emphasized the sheer pleasure of recovery, and indeed the resulting happiness gained from self-transformation, which concurred with the prevailing discourse of ‘overcoming’ disability. Still, given that disabled veterans might resist the disciplined interventions of military medicine, Morris’ non-medical, non-vocational approach may have been more encouraging. Her exercises were qualitatively different from those used in medical rehabilitation, which aimed at speedy recovery and return to the front or employment retraining. Economic imperatives were used to motivate patients, to push disabled men into new types of work. In contrast, Morris saw the personal and physical aspects of rehabilitation as therapeutic. Morris believed that ‘art and healing . . . should be united . . . corrective work should be done with the eye of the artist, creator’. From 1925, Morris conducted remedial dance demonstrations for physicians at St Thomas’. Leading British orthopaedic surgeon, Sir Robert Jones, was ‘completely converted to the aesthetic approach to exercise for the disabled’.⁴⁴ In turn, she undertook formal allied medical training. Morris trained in massage for three years passing her Conjoint Exam in 1930 with distinction. Although doctors and orthopaedic surgeons supported Morris, the Society of Physiotherapists complained that her work set a dangerous precedent for unqualified persons to treat hospital patients. Undeterred, Morris continued her work and wrote two articles for the Journal of Army Training, and was in frequent contact with disabled advocates such as John Galsworthy. By 1933, Morris was a certified member of the Chartered Society of Massage and Medical Gymnastics (Physiotherapy), and with ‘my own patients’ Morris claimed dance exercises gave them a ‘confidence’ and ‘happiness’ that ‘quickens their physical progress’. Crippled patients strengthened muscles and achieved ‘balance and harmony’ through rhythmic movements, partly borrowed from the ‘Greek positions’ of Raymond Duncan, brother of Isadora.⁴⁵ Morris’ innovative use of Classical revival dance as a way of rehabilitating children, veterans, and women was particularly salient in Britain, where the impact of the war was deeply felt. The idea of pleasurable aesthetics was remarkable for its promise of emotional and physical recovery from war. Another dance teacher, Doris Humphrey, recalled that before the war dying had seemed beautiful to everyone, especially dancers, who ‘loved to suffer’ and ⁴³ Id., Maternity and Post Operative Exercises (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. x. ⁴⁴ Id., My Life in Movement, 54–5. ⁴⁵ Id., ‘Doctor Dancing’, 276.

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‘wallow in tragedy’. Afterwards, Humphrey warned, the ‘death motif ’ alienated audiences. Instead, dances should be happy, so that ‘pleasant people and things’ can be enjoyed.⁴⁶ The popularity of Classical revival dance was fuelled by desire for frivolity. One dance commentator declared that this craze followed ‘a tidal wave of religious mysticism which swept over this country a generation ago—a manifestation, perhaps, of the desire to get all the pleasure we can out of life . . . Depressing as this may be to moralists, its truth must be acknowledged’.⁴⁷ In Britain, middle-class retreat to the domestic occurred on one level, and yet war-shocked societies also turned to mysticism, paganism, individualism, and pleasurable moments.⁴⁸ Dancers and body culturists alike often promoted nudity as a ‘modern, pagan’ ideal. This was part of a self-conscious reaction against what was perceived as out-of-step Victorianism, with its values of piety, chastity, reverence for authority, and physical and emotional self-control, derived from Christianity.⁴⁹ Praising the medical hygienic aspect of nudism, dancer Helen Moller condemned ‘the smug, squeamish, hypocritical [people of the] Victorian Age’.⁵⁰ Even those who believed in Christian propriety, like Ruth St Denis, still found use for the classical past, at the same time engaging with new sexual attitudes to the body. Part of the ecstasy of peace was the celebration of the female body. This notion was grounded in the discourse of reconstruction. Where war had damaged bodies and terrified minds, Classical revival dance promoted equilibrium and dynamism—ideals of the body that were to restore humanity. Combined with modern sensuality, society would be imbued with hope through rebirth. Although male bodies were broken in the war, female bodies were being presented as the vital reconstruction energy. Admiration for antiquity and historical pleasures distanced the war. Classical myth and symbol set aside the reality of grief and mourning. War’s impact upon the pioneers of the movement was in bringing ‘a new message of beauty to modern civilization’.⁵¹ The violent impulses of man had been exposed, wreaking their disfiguring havoc. Now Classical revival dance, with its beauty and grace, was ‘the active enemy of all that is false and ugly’.⁵² Morris wanted to rebel against ‘dullness and ugliness . . . which is essentially anti-creative and anti-life’. Provoking action where there was malaise, dancing inspired creative energy in place of melancholy. Dancers like Morris felt part of something beautiful, ⁴⁶ Doris Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 40. ⁴⁷ Joseph Collins, ‘The Dance ‘‘Mania’’: Some Explanations of America’s Present Most Popular and Persistent Diversion’, Vanity Fair (Feb. 1926), 68. ⁴⁸ Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 9. ⁴⁹ Christina Simmons, ‘Modern Sexuality and the Myth of Victorian Repression’, in Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (eds), Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1989). ⁵⁰ Moller, Dancing, 27. ⁵¹ Ivan Navodny, ‘Introduction’, ibid. ⁵² Ibid.


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arousing emotions and encouraging self-expression.⁵³ Others felt it was ‘the essence of life, love and laughter . . . which is refreshing and unexpected’.⁵⁴ After the war, Classical revival dance was seen as agent of healing through beauty, civilization, and symmetry. It is no coincidence that Martha Graham was influenced by Classical revival dance and its reactions to reconstruction, developing a distinct modern style of both mourning and joy. In 1930, she performed Lamentation, which the musical director Kodaly described as the ‘personification of grief itself’. The main characters of the dance were ‘bereft enduring mothers’, the agonized souls who suffer in the containing chrysalis of their bodies. By contrast, Ekstasis (1933) and Celebration (1934) expressed ‘the intense inner excitement we feel in the face of great events’.⁵⁵ The dances included Graham’s modified ‘leap’, appropriated from Revival dance. Far removed from its light movements, however, Graham’s ecstasy was tinged with a manic sadness, an aching interiority. Greek themes from tragedy and myth, and even the Greek chorus, were integrated into her dances. Sexualized classical motifs were included, such as Bacchanale (1931), Desir (1926), Tanagra (1926), Gnossiene (1926), Dithyrambi (1931—a Dionysian, erotic frenzy), and Three Choric Dances for Greek Tragedy (1933). With her gendered choreographies of passion edged with pain, Martha Graham was inspired by two important American dancers of the Classical revival tradition: Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn. War and the fear of loss ignited their passions and choreographies. Ruth St Denis had spent much of the war worrying about her husband Ted Shawn, while he was at an Army training camp waiting to be shipped to Europe. She railed against the ‘appalling evidence of this war that is filling our minds with its sinister terrors’. Although continuing with her duties in the school, St Denis described a ‘mounting sense of the terror and uncertainty of the war’.⁵⁶ While Shawn was away, St Denis devised an interpretation of Chopin’s ‘Revolutionary Etude’, with herself as the ‘Spirit of Freedom’ (Fig. 6.1), adorned in classical drapery with a ‘Wreath of Peace’ around her head. Accompanying her was a female student performing as a Victim of War. War preoccupied teachers and students alike; dances conjured doom and grief. St Denis channelled her anxieties about the possible death or wounding of her husband through the creative process, finding solace in the classical origins of ‘freedom’. Appropriating classical females such as the fifth-century effigy of Athena Parthenos, she transformed its military symbolism into a celebration of freedom and comfort in a period of post-war mourning. Similarly, dancer Doris Humphrey wrote of the loss of an English friend, Claude, in the war. There is a deep pathos in her tone as she records their ⁵³ Margaret M. Morris, Margaret Morris Dancing, 23. ⁵⁴ Wallace, ‘The History of Dancing’, 26. ⁵⁵ Barbara Morgan, Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941). ⁵⁶ St Denis, An Unfinished Life, 201.

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Fig. 6.1 Ruth St Denis as ‘The Spirit of Freedom’ (1918). Courtesy of the Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library. Photo by Nickolas Muray, copyright Nickolas Muray Photo Archives.

last meeting: ‘I waved goodbye gaily to Claude, whom I was never to see again, and who was swallowed up by the First World War. I climbed into the buggy alone, and cried all the way home’.⁵⁷ Like Mary Bagot Stack and her League of Health and Beauty, Ruth St Denis and Doris Humphrey attempted to transform the pain of war into movements of social healing through the physicality and aesthetics of dance. St Denis’ husband returned from war unscathed. He was still in training on American soil when the war ended, and never encountered the dangers of the front. Still, St Denis regarded his return not as luck or coincidence, but the result of her faith. The war had had less impact on the United States than on Europe, and yet there were distinct reverberations in society and culture. St Denis expressed many of the same concerns about war as Mary Bagot Stack in ⁵⁷ Humphrey, New Dance, 37.


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Britain. For St Denis, the war spurred on her spiritual and Christian convictions. She was acutely aware that her husband had escaped the war’s brutality, and was deeply grateful that he ‘did not have to share in that carnage abroad, and he did come back to me and to life’. Considering herself a ‘metaphysician’, she spent much time thinking about the war and its ‘mesmerizing’ effects. She saw her war work and the thousands of dollars worth of bonds she raised as part of the ‘tonic of disaster’, a way of relieving her anxiety that Ted would be killed. Once the war was over, she reconsidered her position in light of ideas about rebuilding civilization: I believe that instead of the tonic of war there lies in every living soul an ideal which can be as great a challenge to the ultimate reserves of his being . . . [We] can work instead for the building of this ideal.⁵⁸

Peace, she thought, should be performed in the movement and rhythm of female bodies. The world could be recreated, building a new cosmos not of ‘petty mortal image’, but the spirit of social cohesion. Expressing the ‘delirium of joy and relief ’ at the war’s end underscored St Denis’ creative approach. The classical past was the inspiration from which she embraced post-war reconstruction as a search for universal peace. This ideal she performed through the body. For her, the female body fostered the hopes of an imagined, global community.

THE WINGED IDEAL The war generated deep, philosophical musing on humanity and beauty. It also aroused the strong desire both to escape the consequences and resist being overwhelmed by suffering. Dancers incorporated this into the prolific symbol of ‘the leaper’, who featured in body and beauty culture, and fashion too. Leaping expressed the ‘winged ideal’. Soaring through the air, the classical styling of the modern female body signified flight from a masculine, Victorian past into a modern, feminine future. Some modernists called it ‘wing worship’ as though the veneration of flight proposed a new civic religion of female bodily freedom. Photography captured women’s ‘wings’. In 1927, Australian Dorothy Wilding’s photograph of the ‘wing worship’ appeared in the Kodak Exhibition of Pictorial Photography, and was republished in the popular Home magazine.⁵⁹ A young, naked woman with a flapper hairstyle held up to the sky a small bird in her hand. Flight was an emblem of social and cultural renewal; the dancer soared towards the new civilization she was helping to create. Leaping symbolized female energy, fitness, and kinaesthetics. The leaper became a symbol of reconstructive ⁵⁸ St Denis, An Unfinished Life, 196, 197.

⁵⁹ The Home (Oct. 1927), 43.

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values in post-war society, representing both a flight from the horror of the immediate past and a flight to a time and space of lasting peace. Flight was a major theme in ancient Greek art that dancers emulated as a ‘performative’ display of female liberation. Marguerite Agniel declared that body exercises must have rhythm and artistry in order to appeal to the modern woman.⁶⁰ Movement was thought to flow through Greek sculpture, even in standing poses, and this inspired Classical revival dances. The desire for the body to translate the dynamic flow of energy through movement was one of the most powerful ways in which Classical revival dance embraced its modernity. Mary Bagot Stack exclaimed, ‘Movement is life. Stillness is the attribute of death’.⁶¹ The impact of ‘the leaper’ cutting through space lay in its ‘performative’ association between the female body and bold notions of a woman-centred regeneration. I am borrowing here from Judith Butler’s analysis of the relationship between sex and gender, and the notion of sex not as a static condition but an ideal construct that is materialized. Female sexuality was materialized in Classical revival dance. Women performed sexed and gendered difference through their bodies, at a time when it was spectacularized in consumer culture and magazine photography. Butler’s concept of ‘performativity’ illuminates women’s search for sexual agency in the social conditions and discourses surrounding Classical revival dance.⁶² If gender is a ‘corporeal style’, as Butler states, and its performance is contingent on constructions of meaning, then the body of the Classical revival dancer was a discursive energy.⁶³ Performance of ‘the winged ideal’ was indicative of these historical connections between femininity, discourse, and bodily movement. This ideal was appropriated from a recurring figure in Greek art, modern fashion, and war memorials—the nike. In particular, the Nike of Samothrace, perched on the grand staircase of the Louvre, was the principal image of flight referred to by modern artists, dancers, and body culturists.⁶⁴ Classical revival dancers appropriated the physical action of the nike. The original Samothracian nike was a goddess of Victory, whose body was thinly covered by wind-swept drapery. Twisted hips and contoured wings made the dramatic impression of dynamic torsion. This ‘kinaesthetic’ or torque was a twentiethcentury development, with origins in Delsarte and Dalcroze eurythmy, and the dances of Duncan, St Denis, and Moller. Scholar Hillel Schwartz has posited ‘the emergence of a new kinaesthetic that insists upon rhythm, wholeness, fullness, fluidity, and a durable connection between the bodiliness of the inner ⁶⁰ Marguerite Agniel, The Art of the Body: Rhythmic Exercise for Health and Beauty (London: Batsford, 1931), 3. ⁶¹ Mary Bagot Stack, Building the Body Beautiful: The Bagot Stack Stretch and Swing System (London: Chapman and Hall, 1931), 7. ⁶² Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. xi, 3, 15. ⁶³ Id., ‘From Interiority to Gender Performatives’, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 139. ⁶⁴ ‘Nike, Winged Victory of Samothrace’, Greek (fifth-century), Louvre Museum, Paris.


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core and the outer expression of the physical self ’.⁶⁵ Dancers reproduced this kinaesthetic across Europe and the Anglophone world. Marguerite Agniel, for instance, performed ‘nude kinaesthetics’ while wearing bodypaint. Bodily torque was appropriated from the centrifugal corporeality of the imposing Hellenistic figure of the Nike of Samothrace. Its potent torsion inscribed the monument with historical dynamism, a triumphant emblem of victory in ancient times and succour after the First World War. Female success was also apparent in the ‘winged ideal’. Influenced by feminism, the role of the female leaper was applied in the wider social scene. With its emphasis upon education and political representation, liberal feminism also shifted attitudes to the female body. The female body was celebrated as a tool for emancipation and self-realization. The nike’s dynamism performed female liberation and women’s presence in the world. Cutting through space, defying her mass and making light of her monumentality, the nike was translated into a modern form of corporeality and a symbol of the modern woman’s role in the new civilization. The leaping nike’s penetration of space has been a theme in both ancient and modern art.⁶⁶ The nike’s force compares with the charging masculine body of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1912). As a figure defiant of space and time, Boccioni’s Futurist body was emblematic of masculine action. The flesh appears to fly off the bronze body as it charges to claim new territory. The belligerence of masculine dynamism conquers space and time, and demands attention.⁶⁷ Masculine speed is hurried, temporary, and continuous, while the body is firmly attached to the ground. Boccioni’s Forms is the angriest of young men, representing the self-conscious arrogance of Futurism’s machismo. Yet it captures the way that physical rhythms could possess strident forces. This was a masculinity that the Nike both compared and contrasted with in its graceful evocation of flight. Significantly, after the war the ancient nike made a greater impact in the arts, commerce, and the fashion industry than Boccioni’s pre-war Forms. While the masculine figure utilizes mass, the female nike transcended it. As an ancient model for modern femininity, the nike was nevertheless ambiguous. Puncturing time and space, her levitating body seemed ephemeral and whimsical. Female mobility and success were choreographed as ungrounded and fleeting. Against the masculinity of war, the Classical revival dancer advocated peace and sensual harmony, with a playful and ecstatic modernity. ⁶⁵ Schwartz, ‘Torque’, 104. ⁶⁶ Anthony Bond, ‘Leaping, Puncturing, and Levitating’ in ‘Embodying the Real’, ‘The Body’, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Bookman Schwartz, 1997), 52–5. ⁶⁷ Tim Mathews, ‘The Machine: Dada, Vorticism, and the Future’, in Jana Howlett and Rod Mengham (eds), The Violent Muse: Violence and the Artistic Imagination in Europe, 1910–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 124–40; Naomi B. Segal, ‘Who Whom? Violence, Politics and the Aesthetic’, ibid. 146–9.

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The figure of the Nike was a source of inspiration and a symbol of femininity in dance, body cultures, advertising, and modern art. Pablo Picasso’s leaping goddesses on the beach, painted on the stage curtain of Jean Cocteau’s play Le Train bleu (1922, with costumes by Coco Chanel), depicted female figures leaping to the modern future with the monumental power of the classical past pushing them forward through space, their flight defying their mass.⁶⁸ Their bare breasts and their heads thrown back with abandon added sensuality. Picasso’s vision was perhaps drawn from memories of his own beach holidays. Women were often seen in magazines as the ‘Three Graces’, leaping through the air on the beach, demonstrating their lithe physiques and dynamic movement. Shared female experiences were represented as joyous, playful and healthy. Young athletic women, running and leaping in joyous abandon, were identified as ‘beautiful physical culture girls’ and ‘types of modern girlhood’ who had ‘hit on the ideal beauty culture’ (Fig. 6.2).⁶⁹ Leaping on the beach was a common practice of body culturists and Classical revival dancers. Mabel Hollander from Sydney was described as a ‘vivacious nyad desporting on the beach’, as she leapt towards the camera with a dancer’s veil flowing behind.⁷⁰ Hollander’s photograph is closer to the abandon in Picasso’s leapers, and recalls the sensual flight of the fifth-century Nike of Paionios, which was slight of frame, unlike the Samothracian goddess with her commanding power. Australian women followed French fashions and trends in beach culture, as stories and photographs were published in local magazines.⁷¹ American students of Helen Moller performed the leap on the beach, arms outstretched to the sun (Fig. 6.3), in a general celebration of ‘sunseekers’ and ‘sun worshipers’. Dancers concurred with the beach pleasure cultures featured in fashion magazines. They celebrated the sensual experience of the sun and the dynamic flow of air around the body cutting through space. Beach leaping combined ‘grace and action’ as well as sensuality, as seen in the ‘Dance of the Sun Maidens’.⁷² These female leapers were slight and lithe. When on retreat in the South of France in 1925, Margaret Morris’ students applied the ‘winged ideal’ while diving off a cliff. Pleasure and action, sun and sea transferred the movements of Classical revival dance from the gymnasium and dance studio to the intimate experience ⁶⁸ Pablo Picasso, Le Train bleu (1922), gouache sur contreplaque, Musée Picasso, Paris, Also known as Deux femmes courant sur la plage. ⁶⁹ ‘Three Graces’, Health and Physical Culture (Mar. 1930); ‘Two Beautiful Physical Culture Girls’, ibid. ( July 1930), 33. ⁷⁰ Mabel Hollander, ‘A Vivacious Nyad’, Health and Physical Culture (Dec. 1929), 29. ⁷¹ ‘Western Europe on the Wing to Deauville’, The Home (1 Dec. 1925), 31; ‘Pleasuring Along the Peninsula Plages’, ibid. (1 Mar. 1927), 18; ‘When the World Flocks to Water’, ibid. (1 Jan. 1927), 24; ‘The Lido is Vivid’, ibid. (1 Jan. 1927), 25; ‘Where Paris Wets Her Feet: Some Attractive Groups of Sun-seekers At Deauville’, ibid. (1 Jan. 1927), 28. ⁷² ‘Spirit of the Tide’ and ‘Dance of the Sun Maidens’, Health and Physical Culture (Nov. 1929), 30.


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Fig. 6.2 ‘Two Beautiful Physical Culture Girls’, Health and Physical Culture ( July 1930), 33. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

of the outdoors. Women’s bodies appeared free and unencumbered, as they performed such spectacular demonstrations of the feminine body, athletic but graceful. Scholars situate outdoor dances within the ‘back to nature movement’, a response to the stresses of urban living and the sedentary conditions of office work.⁷³ Yet dancers embraced naturism as well as urban life, and the city or home gymnasium. Sculptural figures such as the Nike of Samothrace provided powerful metaphors for feminine fitness and weightlessness. The 1920 cover of Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine shows a woman dressed in chemise ‘working out’ at home. While performing the classic nike posture, she builds her muscles using hand weights (Fig. 6.4). An extraordinary image, it combines the symbolism of ⁷³ Judith Alter, Dance-based Dance Theory: From borrowed Models to Dance-based Experience (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).

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Fig. 6.3 Helen Moller’s students leaping on the beach (1918). In Helen Moller, Dancing with Helen Moller (London: John Lane Co./Bodley Head, 1918). Courtesy of the British Library.

classical mythology with the athletic woman. This figure is no museum piece or statuesque tradition. Instead, she is a combination of the real and the ideal; a feminine type presented as an ordinary woman who keeps fit and slim at home. The affectation of the leaping nike was found in triumphant images of ‘the sporty type’ of modern girl, gracing the covers of fitness magazines. Some referred to ‘feminine’ sports, such as waterskiing, volleyball, or skipping; others transformed the nike into a female footballer jettisoning into the ether catching a ball (Fig. 6.5).⁷⁴ ⁷⁴ ‘Female Footballer’, Physical Culture (Dec. 1920); ‘Female Water-skier’, ibid. ( June 1924). Similarly, ‘Female Beach Volleyballer’, Physical Culture (Oct. 1925); ‘Woman Skipping’, Health and Physical Culture ( July 1930).


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Fig. 6.4 Nike. Cover, Physical Culture (1920).

‘Cover girls’ displayed the balance of fitness and grace admired in classical art, while presenting sport in a positive light. Speed, sweat, and shorts that exposed muscular legs did not compromise femininity. In special pictorials, the ecstasy of sport was also portrayed in the act of leaping. Doris Gray was photographed in mid-flight as an expression of ‘the joy of life’.⁷⁵ Described as an ‘ardent sports girl’, Doris’ leap through the air signified her athleticism and yet also an erotic pleasure derived from female bodily expression. Women’s passion for sport, rather than demonized, was presented as an erotic embodiment, and a signal of modern values of hygiene, civilization, and the liberation of women from prudery as ideal bourgeois femininity. In a period when frigidity was increasingly medicalized as deviant, sporting passions were embraced as healthy, modern, ⁷⁵ ‘The Joy of Life: Miss Doris Gray of Victoria, who is an Ardent Sports Girl’, Health and Physical Culture (Sept. 1929), 33.

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Fig. 6.5 Female footballer leaping. Cover, Physical Culture (Dec. 1920).

and sensual. Thus, although ‘athletic feminism’ supported women in sport, contesting the male domination of the industry, body cultures also eroticized their image.⁷⁶ Miss Peggy St Lo famously performed ecstatic leaping; the Women’s League of Health and Beauty prized her graceful flight with the title of ‘Perfect Girl’ (Fig. 6.6).⁷⁷ The ‘winged ideal’ of leaping through air expressed the rapture that some women found in dance, athletics, gymnastics, and weight-bearing exercise. Agile movements disguised lunging actions. Throwing necks and arms backwards with legs astride and air passing around their bodies, whimsical flight was an exciting sensation for women. Spectacular embodiment was legitimized as feminine movement. The ‘winged ideal’ promised strength, beauty, and ⁷⁶ Michael A. Messner and Raewyn Connell, Out of Play: Critical Essays on Gender and Sport (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 35. ⁷⁷ Peggy St Lo, the ‘Perfect Girl’ of the ‘Winged Ideal’. Women’s League of Health and Beauty, England.


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Fig. 6.6 Peggy St Lo, the ‘Perfect Girl’. League of Health and Beauty, England. In Mary Bagot Stack, Building the Body Beautiful: The Bagot Stack Stretch and Swing System (London: Chapman and Hall, 1931). Courtesy of the British Library.

fashion. Although emphasizing graceful balance and feminine fitness, women were afforded new experiences with their own bodies. Significantly, the ‘winged ideal’ encompassed questions about women’s reproductive capacity. On the 1920 cover of Physical Culture, the nike exercising at home is associated with women’s concerns about their body. The leading article described the dilemma of the modern maternal body. In ‘How Five Children Left My Figure Unspoiled’, women were said to aspire to slim bodies after childbirth. Attempting to convince women that pregnancy did not compromise youth, slimness, or beauty, the editor associated the image of the nike with the ideal of pre- and post-maternal body image. While classical dancing touted the values of equilibrium and freedom from constraint, its association with beauty culture and vaudeville led to the influence of mass-market body ideals. Ruth St Denis admired Marion Morgan’s troupe for being ‘splendidly trained Greyhounds’.⁷⁸ In the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, Peggy St Lo’s title of ‘perfect girl’ derived from the way her thin, waif-like body gave the impression of weightlessness as she leapt through the air. As Susan Leigh Foster suggests, choreographing the ‘winged ideal’ asserted gender ideals and social pressures to conform to bodily ideals and modes of movement.⁷⁹ Late fifth-century Greek sculptures of semi-nude women and goddesses in wind-swept drapery were admired as paradigms of technical artistry in feminine grace. The Nike of Paionios (fifth century, Olympia) inspired sports cover girls ⁷⁸ St Denis, An Unfinished Life, 248. ⁷⁹ Foster, ‘Choreographies of Gender’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 24 (1998), 1–33.

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in body culture magazines, and dancers such as Ruby Ginner. Leaping in a Greek-style tunic, Ginner hoped to emulate the sensuality of the nike’s body, enhanced by thin drapery thrust against her torso, the wind discreetly revealing her breast and leg. The movement was forceful and graceful, at once free and controlled—arms outstretched but relaxed, while leg muscles were contracted. In contrast, the female footballer was extremely poised. Her leg muscles are tight. Yet the free play of her hands in balancing the ball symbolized the balance between controlling and freely expressing the body. Whether in sport or dance, the female body played out this paradoxical position through the aesthetic discourse of classicism. Female masculinity, however, was also ‘choreographed’ embodiment; although it defied the gendered proscriptions of mobility and performance, the maintenance of grace was still a determining factor. The meaning of feminine and masculine movement and physical expression was unstable, enabling gender ambiguities to continue. Indeed, Helen Moller characterized the Classical revival dancer in terms of female masculinity, revolting against gender stereotypes: she doesn’t care! Let them call her a ‘tomboy’ if they like. Off come her shoes and stockings . . . every article of clothing she can modestly dispense with—and away she goes! She is expressing her sense of beauty and developing her capacity for happiness.⁸⁰

The visual effect of the ‘winged ideal’ nevertheless conveyed the beauty and grace of women’s independence when exercising, playing sport, or dancing. Leaping and reaching for the sky, women’s bodies seemed unbounded by time and space. In ‘Anatomy of a Sylph’, French dance journalist André Levinson defined this action as a ‘line that loses itself in infinity . . . [and] expresses the final moment of hesitation before apparently taking flight into the empyrean’.⁸¹ Arms flung backwards aided the speed with which the body soared through the air. Throughout the 1920s, the Denishawn company’s signature piece, Soaring, captivated audiences with dances expressing the ‘winged ideal’. The protagonists were five nymphs who lived in a cloud, and completed many graceful leaps through the air during the course of the piece. Dancers wore skin-coloured costumes, simulating nudity and weightless flight. Jane Sherman wore the infamous costume known as the ‘soaring suit’. Dancers leapt through the air with ecstasy, thrilling audiences with their ‘sublime motion’.⁸² Exhilaration came from the litheness and speed of the body, or, as Ginner put it, ‘a feeling of space and air, a vision of blue, windy skies’ that elevated the dancer on to a sensual plane.⁸³ Women revelled in such expressions and experiences of their own bodies. ⁸⁰ Moller, Dancing, 101. ⁸¹ André Levinson, The Anatomy of a Sylph, in Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola (eds), André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1991), 86. ⁸² Providence Journal (Providence, RI) (13 May 1924), in Humphrey, New Dance, 48. ⁸³ Ginner, Revived Greek Dance, 114.


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Alongside the physical benefits of the ‘winged ideal’, women claimed dancing was mentally therapeutic. Defying gravity in expressive dance set the female body on a liberated plane, allowing freedom from thoughts or anguish. As young student Jane Dixon remarked, the dance ‘lifts the body from bondage and makes of it a gorgeous free agent. And [it] gives wings to the mind’.⁸⁴ Freeing the mind while maintaining the slim and fit body was equilibrium for which Classical revival dancers strived. Set against this balanced, holistic experience was ‘the grovelling mind dwelling in a flabby, cringing envelope’, according to Helen Moller. Leaping encouraged the ‘wings of the mind’ to cut through mental space, alleviating the stress of everyday life brought about by post-war hardships. Leaping illustrated the principle of ‘open-free unaffected movement of the entire body even in moments of muscular stress’.⁸⁵ While physicians treated neurasthenic women with bed rest or psychotherapy, Moller presented dance and exercise as the cure. Ruby Ginner agreed that it alleviated women’s ‘nerve-tension’.⁸⁶ The physicality of the ‘winged ideal’ gave women self-confidence, a quality inalienable from their bodies. The dancer who ‘aspires to the skies’, Helen Moller declared, ‘walks like a superior being, surrounded by an atmosphere of personal triumph . . . [and] she is never handicapped by the inhibitions of depressed spirits’. Prunella Stack, daughter of Mary Bagot Stack, said it cheered women up.⁸⁷ Dancers, teachers, and students had insight into women’s lives, evoking fun and escapism in bodily self-expression.⁸⁸ Some framed self-fulfilment in feminist terms, and drew on feminist language to inspire women to the dance. Helen Moller used role play and fantasy in this way: ‘the moment you enter into the characters of an ancient Greek nymph or Naiad, daughter of a River God, you are emancipated from all that reminds you of the environment of your modern conventional existence’.⁸⁹ The ‘winged ideal’ promoted self-transformation and escape from working life, sweeping women off their feet, into the fantasy of an alternative existence. As Moller declared: ‘the Greek dancer’s body appears to have no weight . . . She is more of the air than of the earth . . . in her own sense of delightful buoyancy’.⁹⁰ To escape the pressures of modern life, dancing offered women temporary relief from earthly burdens. Work was seen as one such burden for women. While war had created both pressures and opportunities for women, there were also obstacles to negotiate in the post-war employment market in Britain, the United States, and Australia, as discussed in Chapter 5. Classical revival dance addressed working women, especially those in the confined space of the modern office. American Physical Culture magazine celebrated ‘business girls’ dressed in transparent chemises ⁸⁴ Jane Dixon, ‘Girl Dancer Gave up Parties to Win Tour Around the World’, Telegram (New York) (23 July 1925), in Sherman, Soaring, 30. ⁸⁵ Moller, Dancing, 98, 99. ⁸⁶ Ginner, Revived Greek Dance, 14. ⁸⁷ Mother and Daughter, 1 (1933), 29. ⁸⁸ Matthews, ‘They had Such a Lot of Fun’, 27. ⁸⁹ Moller, Dancing, 89, 111. ⁹⁰ Ibid.

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practising Greek dancing in Central Park. Photographs were accompanied by such statements as: ‘No these are not nymphs or woodland sprites, but sensible New York stenographers and business girls who enjoy a half hour of this delightful rhythmic exercise each morning before going to business’. In Australia, ‘city girls’ were said to resort to the ‘terpischorean way’ when holidaying.⁹¹ Readers were assured that women’s state of undress—usually associated with madness—was ‘sensible’. Losing oneself in the dance could be an act of personal oblivion, but also an attempt to throw off the pressures of modern womanhood. Despite support for female athleticism and health, women’s pleasure in feeling sensuous cloth drifting over their bodies generated speculation. The ‘winged ideal’ had currency in modern fashion, the visual arts, cinema, and consumer culture, heightening the spectacle of the sexualized, female body. Magazine writer Corey Ford opined, ‘who has not longed to toss silly cares aside, strip herself of all responsibilities and, with eyes sparkling and lips parted and a good strong pair of gymnasium bloomers, lose herself in the lissome windings and artistic convolutions of the dance’.⁹² On the one hand, women were regarded as burdened by work, potentially suffering from nerve tension and needing relief, and on the other hand, the spontaneous body veered dangerously towards impropriety. In contrast to the Revival dance or Morris’ ‘free dance’, André Levinson thought the Paris music hall ‘girl acts’ were like a ‘disciplined and determined army’. Mass bodies were moulded into a single unit like a ‘caterpillar with thirty-two feet’. Women moved in formation like tank-treads locked in forced motion. Trudi Tate argues that the tank was culturally significant during the war, with an imaginative and physical presence. Tanks were displayed in British towns for fund-raising campaigns, transforming military hardware into popular entertainment and effigies of British modernity. As part of the ‘pleasure culture of war’, tanks helped to ‘manufacture consent’ for the war.⁹³ Similarly, the presence of women in paramilitary uniforms was an ‘outward and visible sign’ of female patriotism: clothing, war work, and drill performances masculinized and militarized women’s appearance.⁹⁴ After the war, these ‘pleasurable’ associations were seen in drill dancing. Levinson, however, did not appreciate the uniformity and forcefulness of this style. Too calculated in movement, drill dance reproduced the destructive rhythms of modern industrial warfare.⁹⁵ By contrast, classical dancing, he thought, offered liberation from bodily constraint and encouraged individual ⁹¹ ‘Physical Culture Pictorial’, Physical Culture (US) ( Jan. 1920), 17; ‘City Girls Resort to the Terpischorean Way to Health while Holidaying in the Granite Belt of New South Wales’, Health and Physical Culture ( Jan. 1930), 30. ⁹² Ford, ‘Aesthetic Dancing for Ladies’, 74. ⁹³ Trudi Tate, Modernism, History, and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). ⁹⁴ Susan Grayzel, ‘ ‘‘The Outward and Visible Sign of Her Patriotism’’: Women, Uniforms, and National Service during The First World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 8 (1997), 145–64. ⁹⁵ Levinson, Theatre Arts Monthly (Aug. 1928), in André Levinson on Dance, 89.


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expression. Historian Jill Matthews has argued that participants in the dance craze negotiated their modern subjectivity by ‘pursuing happiness and seeking self-respect and fulfilment’.⁹⁶ Revival dancers—as figures of peace and the rebuilding of civilization—negotiated their subjectivity through these wider discourses that entwined reconstruction, female identity, and commercialized modernism. Dancers became important symbols in rebuilding society after mass mobilization, industrial war, and the destruction of individualism, which was now regarded as crucial for capitalist reconstruction.

B E AU T Y, S E X UA L I T Y, A N D C L A S S I C I S M The fashion and beauty industries commodified female sexuality in this period, influencing Anglophone dance culture. Youthful beauty was touted as the main factor in sexual appeal. The Marion Morgan School promised that women could regain their youth through sculptural emulations of feminine grace, beauty, and sensuality. The emphasis on beauty after the First World War comprised deeper social fears about the effects of war than the surface aesthetics of commerce and consumption suggested; they were entwined in the fleshed experiences of war and the social suffering to which culture responded. Classical beauty was never a static notion or a complete experience, despite its claims to universality and timelessness. At this juncture, it bore the scars of war. Classical motifs such as the nymph and dryad were supplied as models of nubile sexuality. Revival dancing encouraged women to tap into their sexual sensibilities; the biological norm they were destined to fulfil in marriage. ‘Nature’ was eroticized beyond fecundity towards desire, concurring with Marie Stopes’ popular sex advice, which framed the ‘natural’ rhythms of women’s desire around ovulation or ‘the love season’.⁹⁷ Dancers, too, became ‘maids’ responding to ‘the venal urge’, as Spring produced the ‘urge of the sublime passions’.⁹⁸ The sexualization of nature related to the environmental aspect of reconstruction. Margaret Morris, Marguerite Agniel, and Dorothy Woolley portrayed dryads in their dances. At Morris’ Château des Deux Rives Summer School at Dinard in Bretagne, students were taught to imitate dryads in the gardens, impishly dancing around trees with sensual movements. Outdoor classical dancing was invested with sexuality, redolent with beauty and pleasure. Dancing women were often much more overt about the sensuality of naked or semi-naked flesh when dancing outdoors. In 1931, Marguerite Agniel published images of her ‘Outdoor Study’, with her semi-nude (and extremely thin) body bathed in ⁹⁶ Matthews, ‘Dancing Modernity’, 76. ⁹⁷ Marie Stopes, ‘Married Love’ (1918), in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology Uncensored: the Documents of Sexual Science (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998), 560. ⁹⁸ Withrow’s Physical Culture Annual (1929), 19.

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sunlight. She appeared sensual and healthy in a scene of bucolic bliss. In her self-portrait as a ‘Dryad’ she propped her naked body against an old tree and a flowing river. The contrast between her white flesh and the dark rock signalled this nymph’s ease in a mystical environment. Throughout the 1920s, such motifs became increasingly erotic in staged professional photographs, fashion, and fitness literature.⁹⁹ Nymphs and dryads symbolized youthful sexuality. Dancing was advertised as the ‘secret to youth’, as female sexuality was commodified in the global, cultural transactions between consumer industries and post-war reconstruction.¹⁰⁰ The relationship between Eros (the rapacious figure of Greek mythology) and the nymph implied that sexual play was an intrinsic element to Revival dance. Ivy Filshie, the second wife of Australian bodybuilder Clarence Weber, designed a classic dance called ‘La Coquette’ for students, performed publicly in 1925.¹⁰¹ Widowed in 1930, Filshie raised eleven children from both their marriages, and became an elected, independent parliamentarian, campaigning on the maternalist agenda of ‘Mother, Child, Family, Home, and Health’. Dancing and procreative sexuality were linked in Anglophone dance and fitness cultures. In American Dancer magazine, young women struck sexually provocative poses, acceptable as performances of ‘Spring’. Belief in the female body’s regenerative power blurred heterosex with reproduction.¹⁰² Classical revival dance took centre stage in women’s personal happiness through heterosexual fulfilment. At the same time, the tacit influence of both eugenic and pronatalist rhetoric within reconstruction discourses made an impact on fitness and dance culture. After the war, with the supply of available young men depleted, sensational narratives appeared regarding sexual competition between women. As discussed in Chapter 5, this rhetoric exploited women’s fears of loss and rejection. Vanity Fair ran Mildred Cram’s short story on the sexual appeal of the Classical revival dancer—one of the stock-in-trade narratives of youth and sustainable marriage. Typically, a woman feared growing old and losing her husband to another, younger and more beautiful, woman. The ‘other’ woman was represented as a young dryad or classical dancer.¹⁰³ Unfit women were told they risked losing their husbands to slimmer women, reflecting medical and social discourses about obesity, the growth in sales of ⁹⁹ ‘The Release of the Hamadryad’, photographed by Karl Struss, Vanity Fair (Dec. 1920), 63; ‘Dance of the Nymphs and Dryads’, photographed by Arnold Genthe, ibid. (Sept. 1918), 40; ‘Modern Interpretations of Ancient Hellenic Art: The Eternal and Ever Youthful Spirit of the Classic Dance’, ibid. (May 1919), 28. ¹⁰⁰ Dolee Brooks, ‘While Ever You Dance You’ll Stay Young’, Health and Physical Culture (1 Nov. 1930), 24–5. ¹⁰¹ Weber and Rice Health and Strength College Souvenir Programme, Twenty-third Annual Health and Strength Demonstration (Melbourne: Wirth’s Olympia, 26 Mar. 1925). ¹⁰² ‘Spring’ by Charles Payzant. Cover: American Dancer, 1 (Mar.–Apr. 1928). ¹⁰³ Mildred Cram, ‘Jealousy—The Snake that Revels in Every Woman’s Garden of Years’, Vanity Fair (Feb. 1921), 59.


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beauty culture products, and the commodification of women’s bodies across the global industries of beauty, fashion, and cinema. Alongside physical culture, Classical revival dance was suggested as a solution. Sensual and erotic movements combined with skimpy costumes of transparent silk imbued the dancer with sex appeal. Perhaps it suggested dancers had physical and sexual talents beyond ordinary women. Paradoxically, the classic dancer was at once the cause of, and the solution to, marital breakdown. Cosmetic companies added to these fears by associating the dancer or dryad’s sexual allure with beauty products, such as in a Guerlain perfume advertisement in which the female body was revealed through a transparent chemise.¹⁰⁴ Ostensibly, the perfume endowed women with the fragrant charm that set the dancer apart from other women. With her chic and sexual appeal, the classic dancer became role model, cultural symbol, and commodity. Representation and reality were merging, as sexualized embodiments were marketed at, and reinterpreted by, women. In magazines, famous dancers recalled the bucolic creatures of Greek myth, the nymphs and dryads, at the same time striking erotic poses. Overturning the asexual classicism of the nineteenth century, modern femininity was reframed as corporeal pleasure. In 1920s New York, Margrethe Mather and E. Weston described their characters as the ‘Sisters of Narcissus’, placing sexuality and nudity at the centre of their feminine display.¹⁰⁵ Marion Morgan’s troupe emulated classical sculptures, posing semi-nude with only thin chemises (styled as Greek chitons) clinging to their bodies.¹⁰⁶ By 1928, Ruth St Denis featured in Vanity Fair swathed in transparent material, revealing the form of her breasts and thighs.¹⁰⁷ Marguerite Agniel eroticized Greek art posing, bronzing her naked body and striking gestures such as ‘Allure’. Transforming static sculpture into embodied action, Agniel captured movements in ‘sculptural poses’ disguising their overt sexual content. Like posing, Greek dance offered both pleasure and sensuality through nude and semi-nude movement. In Marion Morgan’s ‘Greek Art Tableau’, dancers remained arrested in titillating poses.¹⁰⁸ Stills from her Fox screen production were advertised in beauty and fashion magazines, in keeping with the cross-over between artistic and consumer cultures in Anglophone globalized industries. Classical revival dance projected a public image of female liberation in the media, theatre, and public exhibitions. Part of this feminist persona associated nudity with independence. However, it also invested in spectacles of exposed ¹⁰⁴ Guerlain Parfumeur advertisement: Vogue (Oct. 1930). ¹⁰⁵ ‘Hamadryads and the Sisters of Narcissus’, Vanity Fair (Feb. 1920), 15, 6, 60. The inside cover of the Feb. 1920 edition depicts eminent classical dancers and a drawing. ¹⁰⁶ ‘In Living Reproductions of Old Greek Frescoes’, ibid. (May 1919), 29; Marion Morgan Dancers, ibid. (Feb. 1920), 60. ¹⁰⁷ St Denis, ‘Mirror of the Dance—Ruth St Denis’, Vanity Fair (Aug. 1928), 40. ¹⁰⁸ Agniel, The Art of the Body; Marion Morgan Dancers, ‘Greek Art Tableau’, Fox studios, American Dancer, 1 (1927), 15.

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Reconstructing the Body Fig. 6.7 Gertrude Cahill, Greenwich Village Follies, Physical Culture (Mar. 1924), 42.

flesh and sexualized bodies. In fashion and body culture magazines too, erotic posing was becoming an acceptable representation of dancers, but also normative femininity. Gertrude Cahill—a popular dancer in the Greenwich Village Follies—appeared in the American publication Physical Culture. Yet her ‘beauty and grace’ is barely discernible from her near-naked, coquettish posturing. With her hands clasped behind her head, and breasts pointed at the viewer, she appeared as a young girl in erotic abandon (Fig. 6.7). Music Box Revue dancer Diana Gordon struck provocative poses, and was described as the ‘charming and beautiful’ descendant of ‘the Diana of Greek mythology’.¹⁰⁹ Photographs of semi-naked dancers striking coquettish poses ‘in the Greek style’ of transparent chemise advertised vaudeville shows, but were also role models of embodied femininity. Photographs were accompanied by captions describing the dancer’s classical, and implicitly sexual, beauty. American Madelyn Killeen and Canadian Marie Prevost compared favourably with a Grecian marble; Prevost was a screen star and Mack Sennett Comedies performer (Fig. 6.8).¹¹⁰ Alongside starlets, dancing girls, and beauty queens, ordinary women such as Mary O’Connor from Australia ¹⁰⁹ Gertrude Cahill, Greenwich Village Follies, Physical Culture (Mar. 1924), 42; Diana Gordon, Music Box Revue dancer, ibid. (May 1924). ¹¹⁰ Madelyn Killeen and Marie Prevost, ibid. (Oct. 1924), 43.


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Fig. 6.8 Madelyn Killeen and Marie Prevost, Physical Culture (Oct. 1924), 43.

posed seductively for the camera, sending their photographs into a popular health magazine for publication (Fig. 6.9).¹¹¹ Far from being embarrassed, female readers of Anglophone health and fitness magazines were undaunted if photographs were interpreted as risqué.¹¹² Both post-war reconstruction and consumerism sponsored women’s desire to display their bodies, rejecting class and gender conventions. Commentators situated this as a post-war effect: Revival dance was seen as a positive reflection of women’s social advancement, as they were ‘always, so to speak, one leap ahead of him’. Still, some were disturbed that dancers looked like they ‘really ought to have on their bedroom slippers’.¹¹³ Classical revival dance risked lewdness, which might compromise progress. Chemises that barely covered the female form incited older fears of uncontrolled female sexuality. The fashionable illusion of sexual liberation facilitated the popularity of Classical revival dance. The erotic experience of the performer, however, must be distinguished from that of the spectator, whether concerned by—or responding positively to—the dance’s sexual elements. Critic Hugo von Hofmannsthal ¹¹¹ Mary O’Connor of New South Wales, Australia. Health and Physical Culture (Aug. 1929), 8; Miss Ellen Richardson of Tasmania, ibid. (Sept 1929), 11; Miss Rena Gregory, ibid. (Oct. 1929), 33; Miss Ethel Swanston of Tasmania and Miss Zita Mallington of Singapore, ibid. (Nov. 1930), 33. ¹¹² Marilyn Story, ‘Comparisons of Body Self Concept between Social Nudists and Nonnudists’, Journal of Psychology, 118 (1984), 100–32. ¹¹³ ‘Mystery of the Barefoot Dance’, 51.

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Fig. 6.9 Mary O’Connor of New South Wales, Australia. Health and Physical Culture (Aug. 1929), 8. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

praised St Denis for arousing the sensual curiosity of men, despite her denial of this affect.¹¹⁴ The proprietors and clients of dance studios were mainly middleclass women, who were concerned about respectability. Erotic experiences, at first glance, may appear to be inconsistent with such values, especially given concerns with declining birth rates and immorality during the war. The 1920s and early 1930s saw a proliferation of social and medical discourses on female sexuality and its link to the quality and quantity of the races. Despite these pressures, Anglophone women throughout this period continued to seek out opportunities to express their sexual subjectivity in bodily movement. Despite reconstruction’s emphasis on sexual morality, space was provided for legitimate erotic subjectivity to be developed. Margaret Morris’ Poise (1926)—a ¹¹⁴ St Denis, An Unfinished Life, 90.


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Fig. 6.10 Margaret Morris, Poise (1926). In Margaret M. Morris, Margaret Morris Dancing (London: Kegan Paul, 1926). Courtesy Fred Daniels and the International Association of Margaret Morris Movement.

still from one of her dance films—performs corporeal rhythm and athletic balance captured in a moment of ecstasy (Fig. 6.10).¹¹⁵ Her body braces itself with passionate energy against the rush of wind. Similarly, Marguerite Agniel’s ‘Nude Kinaesthetic Dance’ demonstrates the erotic torsion of the naked female body.¹¹⁶ The camera catches her body between time and space—modern, energetic, and sexually dynamic. Agniel’s nude body was bronzed to create the ‘sensation’ of antiquity, and enhance women’s erotic capacity. In ‘Allure’, and other images by fashion photographer Arnold Genthe, Agniel enjoyed the spectacle of her own body. Dancers performed in varying states of undress. Since nudity was controversial, dancers rationalized this sexualization as bodily freedom. Dancers even harnessed support from traditional ballerinas, such as the internationally revered Anna Pavlova. Defending the artistic practice of nudity in an Australian body culture journal, Pavlova described the dance as the poetic action of the moving human ¹¹⁵ In Margaret Morris Dancing. ¹¹⁶ Agniel, ‘Nude Kinaesthetic Dance, 1931’, The Art of the Body.

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form. Once condemned to shame for its carnality and bodily freedom, now the classic dance may: ‘regain for the body love, admiration and respect, a reinstatement as the fit companion, the vital complement, the caretaker and spokesman of the soul. Nudity demands the worship of bodily form, the dance of bodily motion.’¹¹⁷ Erotic movement was legitimized when it looked like classical art, but it was no longer just for the benefit of the spectator, it was convened as an activity of female empowerment. Alongside bare feet and transparent chemises, gestures towards nudity were increasingly made. The densely woven cloths worn by Isadora Duncan and Genevieve Stebbins were regarded as remnants of the Victorian past.¹¹⁸ The shift from turn-of-the-century Classical dancing to post-war styles was evident in changes to the costuming and attitudes to movement. When she was eleven years old, Ruth St Denis saw Stebbins perform, and was inspired by her to dance. As an adult dancer, she thought Stebbins too conservative since she did not ‘abandon’ her body to the rhythm.¹¹⁹ In addition, the transparency of costumes was exploited in photographs employed by dance schools to advertise the sexual modernity of Revival dance. This generated some anxiety about the ‘Dionysian’ content and perverse potential of the dances. The fact that male partners were not part of the dance may have contributed to their sense of freedom, but it also alerted onlookers to the potential danger of physical, sometimes naked, activity in a homo-social environment. In other forms of dancing, men were regarded as professionals or leaders, while women were merely the partners. In Revival dance, however, women performed as equals and enjoyed considerable autonomy over the choreography.¹²⁰ In arguing the value of antique dancing, scholar Maurice Emmanuel said the dancer’s body ‘is not, like ours, content with a passive role’.¹²¹ Yet female empowerment over the body could be easily ridiculed through the spectre of sexual and mental disorder: ‘when a number of assorted women run excitedly about the stage, drop to their knees and bow their heads to the earth, [the author] is all at sea as to whether they are interpreting the Changing of the Spring or the Changing of the Tire.’¹²² A woman changing the tyre on her car was a typical image of modern female independence seen through the prism of wartime service and gender inversion as much as unbridled female sexuality.¹²³ The idea of half-naked nymphs rushing about in a chaotic frenzy—proselytizing at Nature—recalled the dangerous, chthonic sexuality in Homeric myth. Circe’s community of devouring females ¹¹⁷ Anna Pavlova, ‘The Classic Dance and its Message’, Withrow’s Physical Culture ( June 1923), 295. ¹¹⁸ Rutyer, ‘Antique Longings’, 70–89. ¹¹⁹ Terry, Miss Ruth, 13. ¹²⁰ Matthews, ‘Dancing Modernity’, 86. ¹²¹ Maurice Emmanuel, The Antique Greek Dance after Sculptured and Painted Figures (London: John Lane/The Bodley Head, 1927), 68. ¹²² ‘The Mystery of the Barefoot Dance’, Vanity Fair (1930), 51. ¹²³ Laura Doan, ‘Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War’, Women: A Cultural Review, 17 (2006), 27.


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might have consumed men for sexual pleasure, but it was also interpreted as a sign of sexual deviance. Since the ancient Greeks, female passions were linked to mental derangement or reproductive disorder. In the nineteenth century, non-reproductive sex or masturbation placed women in the categories of prostitute, nymphomaniac, or predatory ‘invert’. Medical practitioners believed that nymphomaniacs tried to satisfy their desires in such ways. Passionlessness was a cornerstone of bourgeois respectability; nymphomaniacs could be contradictorily cast as oversexed or frigid.¹²⁴ Too much sexual desire by a wife was threatening in nineteenthcentury Britain, fears that continued during the First World War as girls with ‘khaki fever’ and working-class munitions workers were policed.¹²⁵ By the 1920s, the erotic physicality of the Classical dancer was aligned with the promiscuous flapper, and fears that uncontrolled sexuality would lead to women’s rejection of their biological duties. As discussed in Chapter 5, flappers were characterized by muscular bodies and moral suspicion.¹²⁶ After the war, female biological essentialism assumed new guises in social arenas like dancing, due to popular ideals of rebuilding society through social engineering. The pathologization of women gained discursive force as the biological underwriting of psychological disorder widened.¹²⁷ Stella Browne’s studies of ‘female inversion’ speculated about female masturbation, the boundaries of female sexuality, and women’s relationships with each other.¹²⁸ Significantly, one of Browne‘s ‘female inverts’ was labelled as such because of her athletic body type or ‘Diana build’.¹²⁹ Although fashionable modernity encouraged female masculinity, Browne was following the assumptions of sexual psychology; Havelock Ellis stated that the masculine female invert will ‘emphasize the masculine athletic habit’.¹³⁰ Increasingly, muscular dancers had to be incorporated within the rhetoric of biology or risk the stigma of deviance. ¹²⁴ Nancy Cott, ‘Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 4 (1978), 219–36; Carol Groneman, ‘Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality’, ibid. 19 (1994), 337–67. ¹²⁵ Angela Woollacott, ‘Khaki Fever and its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29 (1994), 325–47; Janet K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. ¹²⁶ Barbara Cameron, ‘The Flappers and the Feminists: A Study of Women’s Emancipation in the 1920s’, in Margaret Bevege, Margaret James, and Carmel Shute (eds), Worth Her Salt: Women at Work in Australia (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982), 261–3. ¹²⁷ G. Lombroso, The Soul of Woman (London, 1924); Wilhelm Stekel, ‘Frigidity in Mothers’, and Havelock Ellis, ‘Perversion in Childhood and Adolescence’, both in V. F. Calverton and S. D. Schmalhausen (eds), The New Generation: The Intimate Problems of Modern Parents and Children (New York: Macaulay Co., 1930). ¹²⁸ Erin G. Carlston, ‘A Finer Differentiation: Female Sexuality and the American Medical Community, 1926–1940’, in Vernon A. Rosario (ed.), Science and Homosexualities (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 177–96. ¹²⁹ Stella Browne, in Bland and Doan, Sexology Uncensored, 63. ¹³⁰ Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, ii. 223.

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The reproductive aspect of reconstruction meant that Classical revival dance, like women’s sport, was developed partly as a social means to a biological end. As Pat Griffin argues, advocates of women’s sports claimed that it enhanced heterosexual appeal and prepared women for their roles as wives and mothers.¹³¹ The association between health, reproduction, and repopulation was made across Anglophone fitness and dancing circles. Classical mythology was deployed in the negotiation of female sexual identity and its increasing focus on reproduction. Rampant female sexuality in dancing, some argued, should be curtailed, while female masturbation was discussed amongst Revival dancers and body culturists alike.¹³² Despite the celebration of female autonomy, Helen Moller advised moderation in dancing, so that the romp of a ‘Grecian Bacchante’ should only be ‘mildly exhilarating’, and never descend into a drunken Roman orgy.¹³³ Her warning indicated the potential for women’s sexual transgression into the ‘abnormal’ or ‘deviant’, which single-sex Classical dances might encourage. Discourses of bodily order and muscular control in Revival dance offset the erotic elements, distinguishing it from the jazz dancing of Josephine Baker and Florence Mills (a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance). Historian Patty O’Brien argues that Baker’s ‘primitive’ dancing was antithetical to the ‘civilized values’ of western tradition.¹³⁴ Indeed, Isadora Duncan was highly critical of jazz, regarding it as obscenely primitive and inappropriate for civilized Americans interested in spiritual and emotional connections with their bodies. Attitudes to sexuality and nudity differed from dancer to dancer rather than from generation to generation. Although in Britain Margaret Morris used jazz compositions and encouraged erotic expression, others scolded young dancers for this behaviour. Penelope Spencer, who studied under Morris, admired the ‘loose-limbed’ rhythms ‘common to all negro dancers’, but chastised young dancers for seizing upon the ‘purely physical aspects’, ‘so unsuitable for the white’. Spencer specialized in tableau de genre, combining Greek dance and adapting some of Florence Mills’ work as well as American barn dance. Her dances included The Immortal Hour and Alcestis (1919–21), Medea, The Trojan Women, and Hippolytus (1924–8, with Sybil Thorndyke). Spencer was an apologist for jazz and ‘negro dancing’, but also criticized white imitation for racialist reasons; it was absurd, she felt, for a black person to dance Swan Lake or Les Sylphides.¹³⁵ Among Classical ¹³¹ Griffin, Strong Women, 34. ¹³² Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); id., ‘Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: the New Woman, 1870–1936’, in Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr (ed.), Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New American Library, 1989), 264–80. ¹³³ Moller, Dancing, 114. ¹³⁴ Patty O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2006). ¹³⁵ Arnold Haskell, Penelope Spencer, Creative Artist and other Studies (London: The Artists of the Dance, British Continental Press, 1930), 18, 24.


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revival dancers, then, sexuality was variously celebrated and feared; it had to be managed so that eroticism did not erupt into a wild display of ‘blackness’ or ‘inversion’. Sexuality was therefore encouraged on one level, but contained on another. Bodily restraint within the dance, however, must have been difficult to regulate and police. Dance teachers often publicly denied the sexual character of their performances, although students and reviewers were more candid. While Ruth St Denis’ Elektra was praised for arousing the sensual curiosity of men, St Denis herself maintained that the dance was chaste. Although it was ‘consecrated to the senses, [it] is a symbol of something higher. It is wild but bound by external laws.’¹³⁶ Eroticism in St Denis’ dance was supposedly tempered by its spiritual intentions and by her adherence to universal laws of classicism evident in such works as Theodora and Greek Veil Plastique. Nude dancing outdoors emphasized the spiritual connection between the body and nature. Although she insisted that the Denishawn dancers wear body paint made from powdered zinc, glycerine, and witch hazel, even in the searing heat, St Denis maintained that nudity was a form of purity. When choreographed, the nude body expressed spiritual essence. Similarly, Helen Moller said clothes—not the body—were suggestive, provoking improper thoughts.¹³⁷ Despite denials of the sexual content, St Denis, as other dancers, allowed her students to be photographed naked, albeit ‘tastefully’ with shadows and soft light; Arnold Genthe photographed Jane Sherman ‘without costume’.¹³⁸ Genthe was famous for his sensual portraits of Isadora Duncan, Sarah Bernhardt, and Greta Garbo. He also photographed Marguerite Agniel semi-nude; she often appeared in Vanity Fair. Sherman’s mother accompanied the schoolgirl to every session, during which Genthe arranged the poses and lighting. Sherman’s nudity was presented as a matter of great art. Although the war was not long over, Jane Sherman (and her parents) did not seem to mind that Dr Genthe ‘stomped’ around ‘muttering’ in German, feeling honoured that a famous photographer would take her picture. Sherman was only fourteen at the time, but she was swept up in the passion of being photographed, describing it as a ‘heady experience’.¹³⁹ Regardless of what dancers and teachers admitted or denied, the erotic aspect of Classical revival dance was apparent. Arguably, it was socially pragmatic to shape the dance as respectable. In her autobiography, Ruth St Denis chastised herself for not being more ‘awakened’ to the ‘deeper physical significance of love’. She claimed that despite her passionate nature she was sexually immature, five or six years behind the ‘normal woman’s developing sex life’. The continuing power of her mother’s Protestantism and the influence of ¹³⁶ Hugo von Hofmannstahl’s review of St Denis’ Elektra: The Incomparable Dancer, in St Denis, An Unfinished Life, 90. ¹³⁷ Sherman, Soaring, 5; Moller, Dancing, 43. ¹³⁸ Sherman ‘Without Costume’, by Arnold Genthe, 1925, Soaring, 27. ¹³⁹ Id., Soaring, 25.

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Christian Science, St Denis insisted, meant that she pursued her art form with an ‘uncompromisingly . . . sexless quality of mind’.¹⁴⁰ Her public and private persona converged inconsistently; she was anxious to preserve the reputation of the School, yet she and her husband Ted had a romance with the same male dancer, contributing to their marriage breakdown. In the School, however, Jane Sherman testified to St Denis’ concern for respectability and decorum. On tour, for instance, she insisted that girls not smoke or drink, that they wear hats whenever outdoors, and pink cotton underpants even in their own dressing rooms. Stockings had to be worn in all temperatures. Girls could not accept invitations unless they were chaperoned or in a group of at least four. Although, as Sherman acknowledges, these rules were often bypassed, it was precisely because of its ‘strait-laced’ reputation that Sherman’s parents allowed her to study at the New York school at the age of fourteen, and then to tour Asia at seventeen.¹⁴¹ Curiously, then, while St Denis maintained the ‘sexless quality’ of her dances, she acknowledged her sexual frustration at having awakened the ‘urgent joy of the senses’.¹⁴² Her later biographer, Walter Terry, states that she enjoyed sex and was passionate about her art, but since she was God-fearing ‘kept doing penance to one or the other for her faithlessness’. Despite her Christian beliefs, she wrote that love should be ‘free and beautiful and in no way bound’, reflecting awareness of the ‘free love’ experiments conducted in artistic and medical circles in this period.¹⁴³ The paradox in St Denis’ life was reflected in press reports about her work. Never accused of vulgarity, St Denis could turn paganistic, physical desires into a theatrical art through her classical motifs and forms. This strategy made her ‘eastern’ dances respectable too.¹⁴⁴ Ruth St Denis’ contradictory attitude towards sex and dancing demonstrates the sinuous relationship between modernism and classicism in this period. There was a search for spiritual truth, through the appropriation of the classical past, and yet also an urgency within post-war life, a desire for beauty and perfection, for freedom and individual expression, driven especially by increased sexual openness. In her autobiography, St Denis admitted her desire for a British admirer, Walter Schuster: Such a wild stirring of subtle suggestion possessed me, such deep calls to the profoundly sensuous, hedonistic qualities of my nature, which no amount of metaphysics could dissipate . . . This man invaded my deepest impulses of pleasure and sensuous delight, and I was frightened.

Sexual desire enveloped her, yet filled her with fear. Great turmoil existed between her ‘biologic self’, as she called it, and the artist striving for spirituality. It was ¹⁴⁰ St Denis, An Unfinished Life, 103. ¹⁴¹ Sherman, Soaring, 18–19. ¹⁴² St Denis, An Unfinished Life, 103. ¹⁴³ Terry, Miss Ruth, 3, in St Denis, An Unfinished Life, 165; George Robb, ‘The Way of All Flesh: Degeneration, Eugenics and the Gospel of Free Love’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6 (1996), 600. ¹⁴⁴ Terry, Miss Ruth, 53.


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perhaps this very conflict that charged her dances with excitement, and made them appealing.¹⁴⁵ Through the life story of Ruth St Denis, it can be seen that Revival dancers negotiated their sexual drives, finding class, religious, and moral conventions difficult to dismantle at the same time as asserting their modernity through bodily expression. Together, dance and biology were immersed in reconstruction discourse and the social politics of post-war classicism. Desire was increasingly presented as heterosexual and biological. And yet, the potential chaos of the female body, and its seasonal sexuality had to be disciplined. The relationship between order and freedom, discipline and experimentation, within the dance exposed the tension within the ‘healing aesthetic’ of post-war classicism. Part of this tension arose from the search for an impossible equilibrium. The urgent (even carnal) desires of bodily and individual ‘freedom’ conflicted with restraining conventions of bourgeois propriety and the lingering influence of Edwardian medico-morality. Classical revival dance encouraged erotic expression while at the same time requiring control over the passions and desires, directing them towards procreative duties. Classical revival dance offered self-expression as a reward for discipline. As the impact of reconstruction discourses filtered through its practices, women’s bodies came under further programmes of training for fit motherhood. Compelling muscular and sexualized bodies into motherhood was an important strategy of social control and national replenishment across the three Anglophone societies. Soon the erotic subjectivity of women would be reined in.

‘A RC H I T E C TS O F T H E F U T U R E ’ : D A N C I N G F O R N EW L I F E While sexuality was celebrated, reconstruction discourse filtered both eugenic and pronatalist rhetoric into Classical revival dance. Post-war reconstruction assigned a special role to women’s bodies to increase fitness and replenish the population. Encountering these pressures, women negotiated their physical and social autonomy. Foucault’s notion of the process of becoming a subject is relevant in this period. Autonomy, he says, cannot occur without becoming subjected to a power; ‘subjection’ implies a radical dependency. This process of ‘subjectivation’ takes place through the body, as it suffers from a mixture of guilt, normalization, and transgression.¹⁴⁶ In Anglophone societies after the war, extraordinary pressures were exerted through medicine and social policy, but also through the media and ¹⁴⁵ St Denis, An Unfinished Life, 123, 124. ¹⁴⁶ Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 2, 83–105, 206–9.

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the body, beauty, and fashion industries, some of which were aligned to both medicine and popular health. These factors mitigated women’s achievement of autonomy. In the dancing circles of Britain, Australia, and the United States, positive eugenics merged with pronatalist efforts to increase the white middle-class birth rate. Emphasis on eugenic motherhood and sexual reform shaped Revival dance. Maternal fitness revealed the concerns of racial and national regeneration. These alliances, having lent support to women’s erotic self-knowledge, also regulated female erotic expression. Eugenics and sexology also filtered the post-war reconstruction discourse of Classical revival dance. In his book The Dance of Life (1923) Havelock Ellis saw dance as an expression of love, intimately connected with all human traditions, such as war, labour, education, and pleasure.¹⁴⁷ In the animal world, the eroticism of dancing was traditionally associated with the selection of sexual partners who would make the best progenitors of the future race. Ellis related this to the human world; dancing was sexual and procreative.¹⁴⁸ Eugenics underpinned his conceptualization of Classical revival dance as an ‘act of life’; no mere translation or abstraction, dancing was life itself. Ellis’ ‘dance of life’ reflected the wider concerns of rebuilding civilization and increasing the fit population.¹⁴⁹ While the ‘New Civilization’ was utopian, it also categorized the unfit and feeble-minded based on a corporeal hierarchy. A proliferation of articles in Anglophone dance and body culture magazines reiterated eugenic fears about morons and ‘white racial suicide’. Influential in dance circles, Marie Stopes—liberationist and sexual reformer— declared women responsible for preventing an ‘ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded, and unbalanced . . . who devastate our customs’.¹⁵⁰ Stopes, like many Revival dancers, shared the belief that women were ‘creating the future’, as builders of ‘a new and irradiated race’. The importance of the female body in ‘radiant motherhood’ was said to empower women socially, ‘for the power of the mother, consciously exerted in the voluntary procreation and joyous bearing of her children is the greatest power in the world’.¹⁵¹ Dancers and fitness entrepreneurs agreed. Mary Bagot Stack said women are the ‘architects of the future’, emphasizing Greek dance for body training, since ‘women are the natural race builders of the world’.¹⁵² Female power was exterior and interior: beautiful faces and slim figures, but also reproductive capacity. As Susan Grayzel states, repopulation in Britain was ‘the key to post-war recovery’, and women’s bodies continued to have ¹⁴⁷ Ellis, The Dance of Life (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1923), 37. ¹⁴⁸ Ibid. 47, 48; id., Studies in the Psychology of Sex, iii Analysis of the Sexual Impulse (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1919), 29. ¹⁴⁹ Id., Dance of Life, 65–6. ¹⁵⁰ Marie Carmichael Stopes, Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those who are Creating the Future (1920; 4th edn., London: Putnam and Sons, 1926), 219. ¹⁵¹ Ibid. 216. ¹⁵² Bagot Stack, Building the Body Beautiful, 3.


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enormous political, social, and cultural significance.¹⁵³ Women possessed innate talents as bodily architects of civilization, and their sexuality was crucial in harnessing this power to create and build. Regeneration of the civilized western world required a community of women willing to equal the sacrifices of men in war by sacrificing their bodies to eugenic and pronatalist ends. Negative attitudes towards female bodily disorder were just as prevalent as the scrutinizing of the maimed soldier; both performed an ‘aesthetics of normalizing embodiment’. Alongside white racial and eugenic ideas, repopulation focused on female fitness and, conversely, sexual disorder. Body cultures warned against female masturbation and frigid marriage.¹⁵⁴ Women’s sexual ‘problems’ were linked to their mental stability. Like bodybuilding for men, Classical revival dance was meant to assist women afflicted with sexual and mental disorders. Dancer Marguerite Agniel insisted that functional and psychological conditions could be corrected. The significance of body symmetry and movement stemmed from eugenic anxiety about regressive primate tendencies.¹⁵⁵ Classical revival dance claimed to correct spinal deficiencies and reproductive problems, preparing women’s bodies for childbearing. Instruction on posture and exercise was fundamental to many dances and rhythmic exercises. Vienna-based American physician Bess Mensendieck was concerned with building fit mothers for the future civilization, and equated intelligence with the ‘civilized form’ of upright walking, as opposed to the stooping of simian ancestry. Mensendieck declared that, ‘we have only to compare our modern civilization with that of the Greeks, to realize how deficient we are in all-round bodily perfection’. She advised corrective exercises to build stomach and uterine muscles. Women should be exercising to keep their figures fit even after childbirth, and should strive for the ‘marvellous store of female strength’ typified by the Venus de Milo.¹⁵⁶ Mensendieck can be seen as part of the feminist Nacktkultur movement, emphasizing female education in body consciousness.¹⁵⁷ Influential with European and American gym instructors, she criticized fat women and especially mothers: The picture is a pitiful one. There is a loss of beauty in the skin, and in the shape, firmness, and position of the breasts; in the abdomen, whose smooth surface is unnecessarily destroyed by childbirth—its contour either formlessly overfat, or pendulous and slack. ¹⁵³ Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 241. ¹⁵⁴ Bernarr Macfadden, Woman’s Sex Life (New York: Macfadden Book Company, 1935); Steckel, ‘Frigidity in Mothers’, Calverton and Schmalhausen, The New Generation, 32. ¹⁵⁵ Agniel, The Art of the Body, 93, 13. ¹⁵⁶ Bess M. Mensendieck, It’s Up to You (New York: Mensendieck School, 1931), 193–4. ¹⁵⁷ Toepfer, Empire and Ecstasy, 39.

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In some cases, huge cushions of fat have accumulated on the hips and buttocks, and rolls of fat have formed under the breasts.¹⁵⁸

Mensendieck’s students—Fritz Giese, Hedwig Hageman, Dora Munzler, and Dorothee Gunther—criticized her ‘cold attitude’ to the female body, and established their own school with modified methods. Although Mensendieck’s influence in Germany waned after 1926, she continued her work with schools in Austria, Holland, Denmark, and Czechoslovakia. Mensendieck’s book It’s Up to You spread her ideal of bodily discipline to Britain and the United States, and was adopted by dancers and mothers.¹⁵⁹ Trained by Revival dancer Genevieve Stebbins, Mensendieck’s adaptation of Greek dance techniques was considered a sound basis for maternal fitness and exercise. Some followers expanded this idea of dance as exercise, rather than self-expression or erotic self-fulfilment. As ideals of body perfection developed to meet the demands of the new civilization, there was less room for individuals in some dance circles. Increasingly, the ideal Classical revival dancer was a woman who followed the ‘Greek cult of perfection’. By the 1930s, her perfectly balanced mind and body was being ‘submitted’ to the ‘service’ of the state, as suggested in the opening quotation from Marjorie Duncombe, dance teacher for the English League of Health and Beauty.¹⁶⁰ During the war, British and French mothers were regarded as providing ‘raw ammunition’ in producing sons as soldiers for the state. Although motherhood was woman’s ‘sacred duty’, moral and sexual anxieties led to increased social controls; maternal bodies became the focus of family policy and state regulations. Separation allowances were paid to unmarried mothers, but this led to fears about ‘war babies’. After the war, motherhood continued to have ‘redemptive power’ for the state—in commemoration, welfare policies, and repopulation efforts—but pronatalism was also used to restore the gender order.¹⁶¹ In the dancing community, careers for women were important but they were not to interfere with marriage and motherhood. Mary Bagot Stack advertised in her magazine that teaching dance and physical culture was a suitable career for a young woman. Although the modern girl did not depend on marriage and motherhood, dancing enhanced her ‘physique and mental alertness’, important for when she did marry and have children, and ‘the first glamour of independence has worn off’.¹⁶² Classical revival dance attracted young students as it legitimized independence and female masculinity only to have that redirected ¹⁵⁸ Mensendieck, It’s Up to You, 193. ¹⁵⁹ Toepfer, Empire and Ecstasy, 41. ¹⁶⁰ Duncombe, ‘The Revived Greek Dance’, 13. ¹⁶¹ Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 87, 227. ¹⁶² Mary Bagot Stack, ‘Careers for Girls: A Fascinating Career’, Beauty ( June 1933) (Magazine of the League of Health and Beauty), 21; repr. Mother and Daughter (Aug.–Sept. 1933), 35.


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into motherhood. Factored into the spirit of liberated dance was the belief that women’s bodies were necessarily procreative. Classical revival dances were increasingly natalized. By the mid-1930s, Margaret Morris adapted her dance exercises for wounded soldiers into pre- and post-natal exercises used at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, and Edinburgh Maternity Hospital. Morris eventually published a book for nurses, midwives, and masseuses on Maternity and Post-operative Exercises (1936). Appropriated from Classical revival dance, these exercises were declared by one medical expert to assure women of safer and less painful childbirth, and quicker postnatal recovery. Most importantly, a woman would be ‘adopting the best means to preserve her figure and vitality’.¹⁶³ Physical culturists recommended dancing and exercising as post-natal fitness.¹⁶⁴ Morris felt women dreaded motherhood, afraid of losing their figures and good looks. She blamed lack of exercise and willpower if this occurred. Motherhood, she insisted, is a ‘wonderful experience’, and every woman has ‘the power to become better looking both in the face and figure, after the event than she was before’.¹⁶⁵ Beauty and body ideals fused individual self-worth with state duties and notions of domestic bliss. Self-improvement was both a medical and an aesthetic concern. Women had to take responsibility for their health and fitness. The rhetoric of motherhood in Anglophone reconstruction regulated the possibilities of sexual expression in the performance of Classical revival dance. Eugenic ideas about female sexuality infiltrated the dance, educating women in ‘racial efficiency’ for the new civilization.¹⁶⁶ Women with ‘physical impulses and appetites’ were increasingly directed into heteronormative and eugenic procreation through body cultures. Pleasure was centred on marriage and reproduction. In dancing, as Morris professed, women were creating ‘lives in movement’; not just for their own pleasure but also for the new lives they would create as mothers.

C O N C LU S I O N Classical revival dance was a crucial mode of feminist performance responding to post-war reconstruction and its relation to classicism and modernism. The dance aimed to facilitate women’s personal expression, consumerist rights, and increase access to their own bodies. Dancers performed the new civilization, believing that women’s bodies should play a leading role in rebuilding humanity after the war. Dancers of the Classical revival imagined the ‘life-affirming’ quality ¹⁶³ R. W. Johnstone, ‘Introduction to Maternity Exercises’, in Morris, M. Margaret, Maternity and Post Operative Exercises (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. xii. ¹⁶⁴ ‘How Five Children Left My Figure Unspoiled’, Physical Culture (1920). ¹⁶⁵ Morris, M. Margaret, Maternity and Post Operative Exercises, 1 (my emphasis). ¹⁶⁶ Better Health and Racial Efficiency through Diet, Hygiene, Psychology and Physical Culture (Melbourne: Horticultural Press, Aug. 1925), 6.

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of classical beauty, as Elaine Scarry powerfully suggests in On Beauty and Being Just; they, too, saw it as heightening ‘aliveness’, healing injustice, and raising human expectations of equality and liberty.¹⁶⁷ Peace and hope for the future, it seemed, could be delivered through the sensual rhythms of the female body. For these dancers, beautiful bodies were the crucible of justice after war, inspiring humanity with their utopian visions of embodied freedom. Engaging with body and beauty culture, cinema, and theatre, Classical revival dance encouraged female bodily expression and the performance of erotic subjectivity. Mass consumption of sexualized female bodies enhanced this scene. Classicism offered typologies of embodiment that gave visual and sensual meaning to the conflicts of subjectivity and identity in the context of war and social change. Some of those conflicts responded to questions about the relationship of women’s place in the world, individual rights compared with social duty, and the role of bodies in society. Medical and social reformers asked these questions, informing dance and body culture. As well, the mass media shaped how Classical revival dance cultivated the female body and sexuality. Nevertheless, by targeting middle-class and aspirational women, there was a price to pay for beauty and freedom. Compulsory heteronormative and reproductive sexuality influenced dancers in different ways, and women negotiated their subjectivity through these forces. Fantasies of bodily independence and female masculinity were performed and displayed in Revival dance. Erotic subjectivity was expressed and enjoyed; however, the right to sexual pleasure was contained within marriage. Eugenic ideas about white race protection and maternalism slowly infiltrated Classical revival dance. Liberation was turned into a quest for middle-class motherhood. The emphasis upon physical discipline and maternal fitness tended to contain subjectivity and self-expression. ‘Leaping’ into the future, the freedom of ‘the winged ideal’ was an emblem of female mobility, empowered with sexuality and embodied self-realization. Dancers generated both popular admiration and anxiety about female bodies and autonomous sexuality. Women negotiated the political and social concerns of reconstruction that filtered through Revival dance’s contradictory attitudes to freedom and discipline. Yet ultimately Classical revival dance did not deliver on its promise of female liberation, restating instead women’s essential biological destiny. The project of female selfhood in Anglophone dance cultures struggled under the tutelage of this beautifully choreographed embodiment. This paradox of free beauty and social engineering struck at the heart of the post-war negotiation of genders and sexualities, as women performed the new civilization with their bodies. ¹⁶⁷ Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 46–8.

7 Healing and Forgetting This book has pondered the impact of the First World War on the body and memory through the modern re-imagining of classical beauty. Elaine Scarry proposed that the body in pain unmakes the world, defying language, vision, and communication—but that beauty can remake our world, transform our sense of justice, and offer political hope. Scarry frames both pain and beauty with transcendence, while Julia Kristeva saw abjection edged with the sublime in describing the ‘power of horror’.¹ This book saw these ambiguities in post-war reconstruction, pursuing such questions by considering classical beauty’s impact on the cultural memory of war: was the utopian ideal of the ‘aesthetics of healing’ distorted by the institutional politics of post-war reconstruction? Did beauty erase the memory of violence? Paul Ricœur’s Memory, History, Forgetting proposes that ‘cultures of memory’ are created in the absence of effective institutions for forgiveness and the resistance of forgiveness to institutionalization. Justice should be enacted, but forgiveness is more elusive. A pilgrimage to an enemy’s grave is an example of nonmarket ‘asymmetrical exchange’, and an effort to achieve forgiveness.² Recently, ‘battlefield tourism’ to Vietnam has assisted some veterans and nurses ‘come to terms’ with their experiences. In 1920s Europe, however, compatriots’ graves were visited for the purposes of mourning and yet also the developing commerce of the ‘pleasure culture’ of war. Beautiful cemeteries and classical memorials institutionalized mourning rituals, informed by officially sanctioned discourses of reconstruction. Notions of duty and sacrifice promoted social healing and community re-bonding, but also aimed to contain emotions. Ricœur places the ‘gift of forgiveness’ at the heart of selfhood, but also its relationship to forgetting and the desire for peaceful memories. Despite the pervasive ideals of rebuilding civilization after the First World War, commemoration was never geared towards forgiving enemies. Instead, forgiveness was socially self-reflexive, concealing the role of the state and communities in sending young men to war. Classical memorials were especially powerful ¹ Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 46–8; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Rudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). ² Paul Ricœur, History, Memory, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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in orchestrating self-forgiveness while aiming to build ties between religions, races, and classes. They also had significant gendered meanings; classical motifs reflected post-war social engineering. Life and peace were regarded as feminine achievements. Death—an act of noble sacrifice—was reserved for masculine heroes. Yet life and death were presented as a natural cycle, a partnership symbolized in classical aesthetics. The classical tradition offered a familiar and yet non-denominational assimilation of death. Historical continuity reinforced belief in human resilience and the potential for peace; memorial imagery was gendered and sexualized, linked to the goals of rebuilding community and repopulating society. Healing was immersed in the political strategies of reconstruction, which focused on the body and sexuality. Classicism aimed to transform ‘sites of mourning’ into sites of healing; however, its capacity for temporal distancing sponsored—and naturalized—a degree of forgetting.³ Anthropologist Marc Augé has argued that ‘memory and oblivion’, like life and death, are defined in relation to each other, a constraint seen in the role of sacrifice—‘the life of some needs the death of others’.⁴ That sacrificial death could be ‘beautiful’ was a major discourse in the commemoration of the First World War borrowed from the heroic ideal of the classical warrior. Yet this did not engender oblivion—a total forgetting. Violence and suffering were continually rearticulated across cultural forms; some narratives became pleasurable and entertaining, fuelled by a growing consumer culture. Wounding was a fascinating spectacle, whether the war-disabled were heroized or shunned. War, then, could never be fully ‘cleansed’ from memory. Classicism reframed through modernism drove reconstruction and made the ideals of overcoming and perfecting not just socially useful but personally appealing. This book has shown how rituals, objects, and spaces of commemoration shaped emotions. But it also questioned whether commemoration performs a further process of deferring deep reflection about the consequences of war, and thus its social and personal responsibilities. Do classical and collective rituals prevent us from facing the disturbing feeling that men have killed and been killed, have had limbs severed and minds broken—in vain? Does the state compensate family loss by conferring on the dead the status of warrior hero or is this the exploitation of the ‘beautiful dead’? This book has considered whether the containing practices of commemoration are the tools of political and psychological evasion. Discussing classical memorials, emotional containment was queried; while respecting the dead, do commemoration rituals facilitate the conduct of wars at other times? The evidence suggested that private mourning could be politicized in public rituals, and that the ³ Jay M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1995. ⁴ Marc Augé, Oblivion (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 14.

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grief-stricken, whose kin died for this abstract construct of ‘the nation’, could be exploited in official ceremonies. Can mourners of the war dead be co-opted by the state? This book has asked whether official remembrance rituals instituted political malaise by formularizing emotions, and directing the performance of mourning. The First World War democratized heroes into archetypal Tommies, Doughboys, and Anzacs, reflecting how working-class citizens bore the brunt of mass warfare, and on the indiscriminate character of death in modern war. Democratization plunged representation not just into Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘political world of images’, but also into emotional spaces linking the mourner to the state. Collective heroism also lent legitimacy to the state. Entwining individual death with national security resulted in emotional outpouring in remembrance activities; modern revisions of classicism prevented the categories of warrior and hero from becoming meaningless from technological annihilation. Monumentalism, simplicity of form, and emotional restraint contained grief in designated spaces. Public mourning rituals were connected to grand themes and universal narratives, privileging the chronicle of history over individual lives. Heroic discourses were not shattered but transformed by modern war. Overcoming adversity promised a new kind of heroism: the triumph of the individual over the anonymity of mass warfare and stoically recovering from wounds. Normalizing the disabled body meant denial of pain, a common approach in European and Anglophone rehabilitation. Government agencies and military medicine encouraged veterans not to see themselves as victims or even survivors. Instead, they were cast as heroes and self-sacrificing warriors. In war memorials, masses of names were highlighted for this identification. In body cultures, masculine performance and sexualization endorsed military manhood, at the same time as debating national service, gesturing empathy to veterans, and providing an alternative, homosocial community. Classical memorials and remembrance ceremonies were underscored by reconstruction efforts to limit government responsibility for the care of the ill and anguished. Even after the crash of 1929, Anglophone governments, the military, and commercial industries continued to employ reconstruction discourses to enforce self-transformation, with little recognition of the economic and social realities or the poverty experienced by soldiers and their families. The ‘land fit for heroes’ became a topography of empty tombs and promises. Pensions were inadequate and commemoration offered platitudes of noble sacrifice in place of social welfare. Yet, in the face of disablement, unemployment, ongoing pain, widowhood, and the economic pressures of survival, classicism’s ‘peace-complacency’ (in the words of Siegfried Sassoon) underscored a horrifying reality. The totalizing effect of modern war was its containable and comprehensible emotional affect. War and peace were locked together: naturalized and normalized. This book explored the contradictory responses to war; suffering and violence were inseparable from narratives of transformation articulated in classical images that provided a ‘healing aesthetic’ in order to reconstruct civilization.

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Exploring the individual, social, and cultural impact of war, this book has discussed whether trauma studies can contribute to a deeper understanding of the diverse and complex consequences of the First World War. It has argued that caution is necessary since the notion of trauma is contingent upon complex diagnostic, social, and political histories. Yet the words of patients and the visions of artists show vivid attempts to communicate their suffering, to speak for others in pain, and to expose the nightmares of the shell shocked. Military hospital patients published poems describing ‘the tragic spell’ of memory, and to ‘share once more their glimpse of Hell’, as one soldier wrote from his bed.⁵ Such glimpses shaped the cultural memory of the war. Through visual culture and language, the war reached beyond the individual to the family and to the wider society. Cultural forms visualized the shocking effects of war, interacting with individual experiences and belief systems, but also supplying communities with ways of comprehending the war. In the search for meaning, ‘culture shock’ reverberated through the ‘visual memory’ of the trope of the ‘war-wrecked body’. Not only did it help people to frame the ‘truth’ about violence, but it created a ‘pleasure culture’ in war art, cinema, and literature. Visions of mutilated bodies became sensational elements in the fictionalized drama of personal experiences. Confronting the reality of death and wounding was precariously balanced by attempts to contain the impact. Visions of bodily violation influenced why corporeality required reconstruction through the classical imaginary. Throughout this book the medical, government, and commercial uses of the classical and modern have been shown within reconstruction practices aimed at healing society. Greek civilization was—as the classicist and statesman Gilbert Murray said—a ‘shining light’ against ‘the surrounding barbarism’.⁶ Classicism gave a wide-ranging cultural boost to societies exhausted by war. The significance lay not only in its message of recovery, the inalienable belief in the resilience of humanity, but the cultural persuasiveness of that message disseminated through rehabilitation practices, body industries, visual cultures, and the performing arts. First and foremost, however, was the bargain that their protagonists struck for the human body and sexuality, through the transformation of art into life with the ‘healing aesthetic’ of classicism. To understand classicism and its fundamental link with the human body, this book drew from scholarship that saw the body as a central political motif in both ancient and modern cultures. After the First World War, the classical body continued to be relevant in social, political, and cultural life. In some contexts, classicism merged with modernism, in others it remained distinct. ⁵ Leicestershire, ‘Convalescence’, Summerdown Camp Journal (15 Aug. 1917), 2. ⁶ Arnold Toynbee, ‘The Unity of Gilbert Murray’s Life and Work’, in Jean Smith and Arnold Toynbee (eds), Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography with Contributions by his Friends (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), 213.


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Relationships between classical ideas and forms and modern ones have been significant in the story of the reconstructed body. The classical articulation of ‘the western body’—white, marble, muscular—was offered as the paradigm of what I term a ‘healing aesthetic’. It assumed the power to transform the suffering and the chaos of the present with the steadying line of historical continuity. Across the Anglophone world, classical motifs functioned politically to deliver messages of restoration and resilience. Impressive symbols of beauty and prosperity aimed to repair peoples as well as nations. For the victors, it was also politically useful to embody concepts of universalism, western unity, and democratic tradition amongst nation-states—while at the same time inflicting severe punishments on Germany. Peace rhetoric often borrowed classical tropes in order to construct a singular unity for western identity. Classicism featured in Anglophone reconstruction networks, in matters of human physicality, war surgery, commercial imagery, and memorial landscapes, informing personal philosophies, as well as political and professional ideals. From the civic religion of war memorials to the commercial arena of pleasure and leisure, this book has argued that there was a wide visual field in which the classical and modern rebuilt bodies and offered sexualities new modes of expression after the war. Significantly, as the visualization of war was highlighted, so too was the central conundrum of modernity. Modern technology produced machines to maim the body horrifically, and yet also generated technical innovations to keep the wounded body alive. Film and photography brought to life the spectacle of wounding and the image of repair. These paradoxes of modern war made the role of classicism poignant and compelling. Renewed interest in classicism came at a time when modern ideas and forms were no longer avant-garde and were becoming mainstream. Since the late nineteenth century, modernism had involved experimental approaches to art and literature, based upon a philosophy of constant newness and a radical overturning of the classical tradition. Concepts of time, the new, and modern were being continually revised, influenced by mathematics, philosophy, and scientific management.⁷ The modern body appeared more robust and futuristic with its new prosthetic image, a direct outcome of the war. Gestures to the classical served a range of functions, some rooted in the Victorian conventions of the war generation’s childhoods, while others were used to reject any such codified meanings. Those coming of age after the war cared less for the radical politics of modernism, responding instead to the appeal of the classical reconfigured by modern consumer culture, especially the beauty ⁷ Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Mark Antliff, ‘The Politics of Time and Modernity’, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

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and body market from companies such as Guerlain, or Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, or in numerous commercial gymnasiums, as well as health and beauty clubs. From the 1920s, modernism was popularized, thriving especially in visual fields of mass media and consumer culture. Magazines used modernist forms in graphic design and illustration, as well as in photographing and marketing couture fashion and beauty therapies. Modernism shaped these new classical aesthetics. This dynamic relationship was intrinsic to its broader appeal. In some cases, especially the fashion, beauty, and magazine industries, the modernizing of the classical aesthetic dislocated it from its historical connection to traditional high art. In war memorial design, bodybuilding, and Greek dance, classical images were appropriated in more familiar ways. Such was the interaction between the classical and modern that its traditional opposition was redefined in this period of vibrant cultural redevelopment. This book has unravelled the complex relationships between classicism and modernism in a range of cultural activities from commemoration to consumerism, demonstrating that the schism between traditional and progressive cultural practices is difficult to uphold. The classical and modern had been set in opposing positions, one nostalgic and reactionary, the other innovative and progressive, one fascist and totalizing, and the other Anglo-French and democratic. This political dichotomy was heavily contested in European art history, but this book has challenged the slippage between the classical, the reactionary, and the totalitarian by highlighting diversity in bodily practices in relation to visual culture.⁸ Anglophone classicism was not simply a retreat to the safety of the past and familiar, comforting traditions after the war. This book located the diverse impact of reconstruction in medical, commercial, and cultural networks across the Anglophone world. In the 1920s and early 1930s, classicism and modernism were at the centre of how the body recovering from war was visualized and performed, which shaped how the memory of the war’s violence was framed. This book has drawn broad conclusions about the impact of modern war and reconstruction on Anglophone cultural networks through the dynamic of classicism and modernism. I have argued that reconstruction was not just political rhetoric, depriving individuals of their agency. Reconstruction permeated Anglophone medicine, cultural forms, and commercial spectacles—but it also spoke to individuals and to wider social needs for reprieve and hope. Despite the terrible suffering of the war, many people renewed life and found a new sensation of ‘truth’ through their bodies. ⁸ Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Christopher Green, Leger and Purist Paris (London: Tate Gallery, 1970); id., Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1987); Peter Bürger, The Decline of Modernism, trans. Nicholas Walker (Pennsylvania, Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992), 34, 35.


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Reconstruction motivated people to forget the violence and carnage, even while visualizing it repeatedly in literature, film, and visual culture. The responsive continuum between these cultural forms revealed that mutilation and reconstruction—disabled and enabled bodies—were locked together in the search for meaning and healing. Violence was to be cleansed by classicism’s ‘healing aesthetics’. Certainly, reforming the body, making it spectacular and sexual, glossed over the damage. At times light-hearted and joyously celebrating life, the appeal of the classical within leisure and pleasure markets attested to the power of what I called ‘therapeutic consumption’. Visual knowledge distributed through photography and the mass media was inextricably linked to the success of these strategies in modern marketing. Anxiety about disfigurement, the despair of patients, and the boundary between the normal and pathological shaped classicism as an ‘aesthetics of normalizing embodiment’. Focus on youth and beauty through consumption diverted attention from the realities of the war. At the same time, the presence of unique and ‘extraordinary’ bodies—queer and disabled bodies—meant that normalization was not as powerful as assumed, and that diversity was the hallmark of post-war embodiment.⁹ Physical and mental disablement underpinned the precariousness of embodiment, and yet reconstruction was a pervasive response. Modern war had aimed for mass killing, while creating bureaucracies to manage the wounded and the dead. The lives of many families were changed. Evidence of death and injury appeared on casualty lists and public memorials, but also in the plethora of newspaper reports on hospitals and medical improvements, in the vast array of rehabilitation propaganda, and especially in the mass publication of pamphlets, posters, and photographs to comfort the public that wounded men received the best care and had equal access to scientific treatments. Despite the drive for normalcy, disability did not always confer the status of war hero. Newspapers reported on veterans suspected of petty crimes, alcoholism, political agitation, malingering, and fraud. Under the pressures of recovery and the quest for continuity, the reconstruction of men as civilians and fathers was imperative. Campaigns aimed to position the disabled within the realm of the everyday, at the same time obsessing over their role in, and burden upon, society. Modern warfare created a spectacle of death and disfigurement, pervading visual culture at the time. Yet society expected men—and women—to overcome their problems. Living with the consequences of war required processes of assimilation. Reconstruction was directed at healing bodies, minds, and memories through physical and cultural practices. Reconstruction could be imbued with a redemptive spirit, harnessing the traditions of western history, modern technology, and the ⁹ Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Rosemary Garland Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

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renewing spirit of sexuality. To restore, rebuild, and repopulate was good for people as governments became preoccupied with economic pressures and budget restrictions. Turning the disabled into productive and enabled citizens was a major sign of recovery—a refusal to mourn for lost limbs and intended to inspire all men. Reconstruction implemented a motivational rhetoric of transformation, permeating military, medical, and commercial arenas, as well as commemoration. Classical representations were placed at the epicentre of reconstruction politics and practices in the wake of the First World War. Women’s search for bodily freedom and sexual expression came at a time when the social experiment of war work had come to an end. After appropriating male jobs and uniforms, some women claimed to have found ‘a new truth’ about themselves in practices of bodily expression, forms of dance, sport, and physical culture. Participants and organizers of such pursuits saw them as making a project of the self, which had the potential to bestow fresh value upon individual lives. This book investigated the sexual and biological essentialism underscoring the social engineering of body and beauty cultures. At the same time, it considered how women negotiated their own erotic subjectivity within and outside that sphere of influence. Disability affected how enabled citizens viewed their own bodies. Individuals often internalized public and medical discourses through notions of beauty and sexual success. Shifts in attitudes to the body and sexuality occurred alongside new relationships between self and body. Conditions and approaches to disabled bodies, and veterans’ health more generally, affected all men. War transferred fears and hopes about soldiers’ bodies onto the fathers and soldiers of the next generation. Population politics, concern about racial stock, and the military standard of recruits were significant areas of government activity, and influential in popular culture during this period. Similar to the war-disabled, women’s bodies were influenced by what I termed the ‘aesthetics of normalizing embodiment’ in health, fitness, and beauty culture, and its relationship to marriage and motherhood. The body became a site of suspicion and failure. Fostering defensive strategies, the body was technologized and privileged as social fitness. Competition between bodies was fuelled by reconstruction rhetoric and consumption; the thirst for physical improvement went unquenched. Post-war classical ideals of the body underpinned this thinking. Classical revival dance mirrored the troubled social conditions within which gender and sexuality were reconstructed during the post-war years. The visible presence and self-determined image of working women fuelled the myth of the carefree, sexually liberated flapper. While commentators often characterized her as frivolous, consumerist, precocious, and morally compromised by an indulgent mother, the body and beauty industries exploited her by promoting and profiting from her marketability. Token appreciation of women’s achievements in traditional male areas such as employment, politics, and sport constructed a picture of female independence and social freedom. Classical revival dance—and


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beauty culture—borrowed flapper imagery and other European models, such as the fashionable ‘la femme moderne’, the New Venus and Modern Diana, creating appealing typologies of femininity. Like flappers, dancers enjoyed the performative display of sexuality and bodily confidence. They joined industries that mythologized women’s independence by demonstrating freedom in physical activity and erotic subjectivity. This book located common strategies of bodily reconstruction in Britain, the United States, and Australia. Despite the state’s intervention in remembrance and rehabilitation, the management of healing was often left to individuals. Medical authorities maintained a classical humanist philosophy whereby ‘all peoples are interdependent’ and reconstruction would bring ‘the equality of nations, the brotherhood amongst men’. While praising French ‘ideals’, however, they praised German notions of will power.¹⁰ Attitudes more than resources shaped how disabled people were regarded; soldiers were accused of indulging or faking their pains. Disability was to be overcome by physical exercise. Yet body culture stepped in where military medicine often judged. Nevertheless, acceptance of failure was discouraged. Reconstruction was both culturally constructed and politically managed. Modern life demanded renewal. Citizenship was not only gendered, but also ‘embodied’ and sexualized—a biological and social commitment for men and women. The classical past evoked beauty as therapeutic transformation for individuals and the collective. Rehabilitation meant recovery from injury and social healing. Focus upon the breadwinner, fit mother, or healthy child fostered individualism and even self-obsession. This book considered military-medical and commercial pressures that stereotyped masculinity and femininity. Private energies and economies were spent on acquiring beautiful bodies; pleasurable achievements chimed with the culture of recovery. When remembering war in memorials, even death became ‘beautiful’. Despite all the pain and suffering of the war, human beings demonstrated a remarkable capacity to forgive themselves for the carnage, to reconstruct their bodies, and to reshape their memories of violence through modern visions of the classical imaginary. ¹⁰ John Todd, ‘The Meaning of Rehabilitation’, Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science (Nov. 1918), 2–3.

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Torgovnick, Marianna, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990). Tremain, Shelley (ed.), Foucault and the Government of Disability (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Michigan University Press, 2005). Tylee, C., The Great War and Women’s Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writing, 1914–1964 (London: Macmillan, 1990). Ursano, Robert J., Brian G. McCaughey, and Carol S. Fullerton, Individual and Community Responses to Trauma and Disaster: The Structure of Chaos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Ware, Fabian, The Immortal Heritage: An Account of the Work and Policy of the Imperial War Graves Commission during the Twenty Years 1917–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937). Warner, Marina, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985). Watson, Alex, ‘Self Deception and Survival: Mental Coping Strategies on the Western Front, 1914–1918’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (2006), 247–68. Watson, Frederick, Civilisation and the Cripple (London: John Bale, 1930). Watson, Janet K., Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). West, Francis, Gilbert Murray: A Life (London: St Martin’s, 1984). Whaley, Joachim (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981). White, Kevin, The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York and London: New York University Press, 1993). Whorton, James C., Crusaders for the Fit: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). Winter, Jay M., The Experience of World War One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). ‘The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the ‘‘Memory Boom’’ in Contemporary Historical Studies’, German Historical Institute Bulletin, 27 (2000) . The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Studio, 1996). ‘Military Fitness and Civilian Health in Britain during the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 15 (1980), 211–44. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2006). Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). and Emmanuel Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). and R. Wall (eds), The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Wolff, Janet, The Social Production of Art (2nd edn, New York: New York University Press, 1993).

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Index Acrobats in the Circus (1918) 187 Advanced Dressing Station, An (1918) 91 aesthetics of normalizing embodiment 219–20, 234–5, 263, 307, 317–18 After Treatment of Wounds and Injuries, The (1919) 106illus. Aftermath 80 Agniel, Marguerite 271, 282–3, 293–4, 299, 303, 307 Alcestis (1919–21) 302 Alfred J Briton’s Physical Culture Institute 167 All Quiet on the Western Front (film, 1930) 84, 87 All Quiet on the Western Front (novel) 50 Allen, Ida 251 Allen, Maud 233 Alvarez, Lili de 223, 233 American Venus (1926) 215, 241 Anderson, Benedict 54 Anderson, Maxwell 83–4 Anderson, Wallace 121, 139 Angels and Amazons 232 anthropology 46–8, 53 Anzac Memorial (Sydney) 121–2, 139–41illus., 142–8, 152–3 Apollinaire, Guillaume 36–7 Arden, Elizabeth 107–8 Arlington Memorial Amphitheatre 135 Armstrong, John 242 Arras, Bishop of 114 art and artists see also autobiographies, diaries and memoirs; literature and films war paintings 59–60, 88–93 Art Deco 122, 131, 139–42, 244 Art in Australia 227 artificial limbs see prostheses Artificial Limbs and Amputation Stumps: A practical Handbook (1922) 193illus., 194illus., 197 Ashworth, Private W 95–6illus., 97illus. Association of Moral and Social Hygiene 214 Association of Teachers of Greek Revival Dance 272 Atherton, Gertrude 77 Atlas, Charles 166, 182, 226–7 Atlas: feminization 225–6 Augé, Marc 312 Australian Army Medical Corps (AAMC) 71

Australian Venus (1927) 242–3illus. Australian War Memorial (Canberra) 199 autobiographies, diaries and memoirs 60–1, 67, 74–6 see also art and artists; literature and films cross-influences 79–80 medical 72–5 Bacchanae (1931) 279 Bagot Stack, Mary see Stack, Mary Bagot Baker, Sara Josephine 78, 302 Baker, Sir Herbert 121 Ballets Russes 267 Bamji, Andrew 99 Banks, H Stanley 104 Barkawitz, Marie 244 Barron, Colonel Netterton 163 Barton, James W 206 ‘Battle Dreams’ 59–6 Battle of Mons, The (1926) 85 Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of Tanks, The (1917) 86 Battle of the Somme (1916) 85–7 Bean, C E W 121, 141, 152, 180 beauty culture 26, 107–8, 218, 223–30, 245–6, 254–64, 319 classical influences 227–8, 246 diet manuals 251–2 exploitation 263 magazines 229–30, 240, 242, 244–5, 252, 258, 272–3, 294, 303, 316 Venus facial massage 247illus. Bell, Clive 35 Bell, John 260 Benjamin, Walter 113–14, 129 Benthy, Alys E 271 bereavement practices 153, 154, 311 see also commemoration of the dead national mourning 28 private 28, 312–13 public 54–5, 312–13 sites of mourning 116–23, 140, 311 (see also pleasure culture of war) Bergson, Henri 45 Berlie Review: A Magazine of Hopeful, Helpful, Human Service, The 227 Berman, Marshall 161 Bernhardt, Sarah 303 Berwick Memorial (Northumberland) 144 Bhaba, Homi K 55, 56

334

Index

Big Parade, The (1925) 84, 87, 209 Binyon, Laurence 154 Birth of Tragedy 48 Black, Catherine 69 Bloch, Alice 236 Blois War Memorial (Loiret-Cher, 1923) 147 Blomfield, Sir Reginald 121–2 Blumenbach, Johann 53 Blunden, Edmund 74–5, 80–1, 124–5 Blundstone, Ferdinand 145 Boas, Franz 47 Boccioni, Umberto 36, 208, 283 body see beauty culture; body culture; men’s bodies; reconstruction; rehabilitation; women’s bodies Body Beautiful, The (1933) 236 body building see body culture body culture 26, 33, 163–4, 166–89, 199–211, 218, 314, 319 see also beauty culture; magazines appeal of 160–6 body beautiful competitions 230 and classical tradition 26–7, 32–6, 173–6 diet manuals 251–2 influence of military medicine 188–9 nudity 278, 283, 300, 302–3 physical culture girls 284 physical exercise 162–3 racial meanings 29–30 sexualization of boys 201–2 therapeutic authority 169–70, 178–83 transformation and recovery 173, 210 Book of the Anzac Memorial 152, 154 Borden, Mary 176 Borden, Sir Robert 88 Bordo, Susan 173, 206, 248–50, 259 Botticelli, Sandro 49 Bourdelle, Emile 242 Bourke, Joanna 99–101 Boyd, Nancy 272 Bradshaw, Charles 122 Brancusi 243 Braque 36 Breton, André 272 Brighton Memorial (1922) 122 Bristol Memorial (1932) 128 British Classical Association 41, 44 British Schools (Athens, Rome) 40 British War Art Collection 89 British War Memorial Committee 91 Briton, Alfred 173, 189, 207 Brittain, Vera 76 Brooke, Rupert 79, 182 Brooks, Louise 215, 241 Broome-Norton, Jean 243 Browne, Stella 216, 301 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 29

Brownsword, Harold 144 Brumberg, Joan 249 Bürger, Peter 32 Burke, Seamus 113 Burnet, Sir John 121 Burnley Cenotaph (1926) 119 Bushey Memorial (Hertfordshire) 147 Butler, Judith 16–17, 140, 282 Buttes New British Cemetery 122 Cahill, Gertrude 296illus. Callister, Sandy 99 Calverly Memorial (Yorkshire, 1922) 144 Carlton, Grace de 226 Carne, Percival 166 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 44 Carrick, Alexander 144 Caulfield Hospital (Melbourne) 185 Celebration (1934) 279 Cendrars, Blais 36 Cenotaph and Stone of Remembrance (Manchester, 1924) 117illus., 121–3, 129–30, 155 Cenotaph (London, 1919) 133, 154 cenotaphs see commemorative architecture Chateau des Deux Rives Summer School (France) 293 cinematized prostheses 196–7illus., 199 see also prostheses Circle War Memorial (Brisbane) 122 civic duties 256–7 Civilisation (1916) 86 civilization see also reconstruction boundaries of 30 and the classical tradition 43 crisis of 28 hope for 124 implosion 23 paradox of 315 reconstructing 22–35, 51–8 Civilization and the Cripple (1930) 22, 169 Classical revival dancing 265–6, 318–19 as an agent of healing 275–81 eroticism 301, 303–5 international context 266–9 modernization of 269–75 and the reconstruction agenda 305–9 and sex appeal 293–305 tensions within the movement 274–5 the winged ideal 281–93 and women’s self-hood 309–10 classical traditions in the west 13, 27, 29–31, 34, 38–51, 150–1, 206 aesthetics 26, 30, 133 and education 40–5

Index healing aesthetic 50, 60, 102, 109, 112–13, 123–7, 130, 137, 163, 305 monumental 112–13 new 31–2 politicization 43 and racialized thinking 47 revival 28 (see also classical revival dancing) Clayton-Le-Moors Memorial 144 Clemenceau, Georges 24 clinical photography see medical illustration Cochran, C B 251 Cocteau, Jean 38–9, 284 Cohen, Deborah 56 Cole, Herbert 100 collective amnesia see memory College of Physcultopathy (Chicago) 166 Collett, F 210illus. Collis, George A 202 commemoration of the dead see also bereavement practices battlefield war graves 113 (see also Imperial War Graves Commission) gendered 137–58 importance of public ceremonies 130–3 inscriptions of names 115, 128–9, 313 of non-whites 46–7, 54 sculpture 102, 137–51, 139 commemorative architecture 91, 118–19, 121–3, 133, 311–12, 315 cenotaphs 119, 129–33 and classical aesthetic 111–15, 120, 127–37, 150–1 commissioning of 119, 121–3 design 50 expense 116–17 function 153 gravestones 120 inauguration ceremonies 151–4 inscriptions 115, 128–9, 151, 313 references to the body 127–37 and religious sensitivity 122–3 sculpture 91 Tombs of the Unknown Warrior 134–7 Commonwealth War Graves Commission 46 Congress of International Progressive Artists (1922) 37 Conor, Liz 207, 230 Constructivism 40 consumer culture 218, 222, 235, 246, 312 classical influences 315–16 and commodification of the body 33, 254–63 and social reconstruction 258 contraception 240, 256 Corbie Communal Cemetery 127 Corrective Eating Society of New York 250 cosmetic surgery 103, 107, 260–3

335

Cottrell, May 216 Courbetin, Pierre de 27, 170 Cowlishaw, W H 127 Crampton, Ward 241 Crane, Dr Frank 203 Cripples Journal (1924–30) 22 Crombie, Captain John Eugene 91 Cross of Sacrifice 121, 122 Croydon Hospital 183–5 Crucifixion of Civilization 1914, The (1932) 148–9illus. Cubism 38 cultural nostalgia 35–40, 52 cultural politics 27–8 Culture of the Abdomen, The (1924) 218 Curie, Marie 45 Cyr, Louis 167 Cyriax, Edgar 185–7 Dada movement 24 Dalcroze, Emile-Jacques 237, 239, 267 eurythmics 282 Dance of Life, The (1923) 306 ‘Dance of the Bow’ 236 dance/dancers 26, 39–40, 201 see also classical revival dancing cross-cultural influences 268 and procreative sexuality 294 remedial 276–7 Dancing with Helen Moller 286illus. Daniels, Fred 236 Danks, Alfred 166 Darrow, Virginia 273–4 Darwin, Charles (Darwinism) 47, 172 Dawson, Graham 162 Dead Man’s Dump 79 Deane, Colonel 183–5, 187 Dearden, Captain Harold 72–4 Debors, Guy 203 Delit, Bruce 121–2 Denishawn Dancers 271, 273–4, 290, 303 Desir (1926) 279 Despiau, Charles 39 Devaney, Jack 173, 203 Diaghilev, Sergei 267 Diana (Paul Manship) 237 diaries see autobiographies, diaries and memoirs Dick, William Reid 147 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes 112–13 Diet for Women (1922) 251 disabled and disfigured veterans 56, 82, 99, 157–8 see also men’s bodies; rehabilitation anxiety about 219 depersonalization 68–9, 76 emotional wounds 78–9 heroic qualities 191, 197

336

Index

disabled and disfigured veterans (cont.) lack of commemoration 136–7 overcoming 211–12 responses to 73, 100–1, 103, 261–2 return to workforce 192–8 and sexual inadequacy (see men’s bodies; rehabilitation) shell-shock (see trauma) in war literature 73–82 Dithyrambi (1931) 279 Dixon, Jane 291 Doble, Gilbert 144 Dobson, Frank 39 Doctor, The 89–90illus. Downing, Walter 74 Duhamel, George 60 Duncan, Isadora 49, 267, 271, 273, 300, 302–3 Duncan, Raymond 277 Duncombe, Marjorie 274, 308 Dunning, O W 180 Dynamic Symmetry (1920) 245 Echo (1927) 244 Ecksteins, Modris 267 Eder, David 177–8, 181–2 Einstein, Albert 45 Ekstasis (1933) 279 Elektra 303 Ellis, Havelock 216, 235, 301, 306 Elmslie, Dr R C 105–6illus., 192 Emmanuel, Morris 300 Enemy, The 86–7 English League of Health and Beauty 219, 308 Epstein, Jacob 275 Erotic Rights of Women (1918) 216 Eruption of Vesuvius (1918) 273 Etaples Military Cemetery 127 eugenics/eugenicists 31–2, 34, 38–9, 47, 166, 189, 203, 218, 253, 256–7, 270, 294, 305–9 Evans, Arthur 41 Exposition Nationale de la Maternité et de l’Enfance (1921) 38 Fascism 31 Femina 273 Fighting for Life (1939) 78 Filshie, Ivy 175, 294 flappers 215, 220, 233, 239, 301, 318–19 see also Modern Diana Flight of the Sabine Women, The (1918) 273 Folies Bergère 273 Folkestone Memorial (1922) 145 Follett, Evelyn 224 Foods and You, or the Role of Diet (1926) 251

‘For the Fallen’ 154 Ford, Corey 270, 292 Ford, S Gertrude 80 Forgotten Dead, I Salute You 78 Foster, Susan Leigh 289 Foucault, Michel 228–9, 305 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) 87 Frazer, James George 45–6 Frederick, Pauline 219 Fresnaye, Roger de la 36, 38 Freud, Sigmund 28, 40–1, 62–3, 125–6, 184, 191 Fussell, Paul 175 Futurism 36, 40, 283 Futurist Manifesto (1909) 37 Gagen, Wendy 190 Galsworthy, John 168, 276 Galton, Sir Francis 31 Gance, Abel 24, 88 Garbo, Greta 303 Gassed (1918) 92 Gassed and Wounded (1918) 89 Gaudier-Breszka, Henri 36, 38 Gehmann, Jesse 208 Gellert, Leon 152 gender see also men’s bodies; women’s bodies ambiguities 237 blurring the boundaries 225, 232, 253, 258 expectations 214 female masculinity 233–4 relations 22 renegotiation of roles 213–18, 222–3 roles 231, 266 sexual politics 259 and social engineering 218 transgressing the boundaries 232 Genthe, Arnold 252, 303 George Beattie’s School 167 George V, King 86, 93, 113 Gertler, Mark 102 Gibbs, Philip 73 Gide, André 245–6 Giese, Fritz 308 Gill, Eric 39 Gillies, Harold Delf 44, 69, 96, 99–100, 103, 107, 261–2 Ginner, Ruby 271, 290, 291 Ginner-Mawer School 271–2 Girls’ Cinema 219–20 Gleizes, Albert 38 Gnossiene (1926) 279 Golden Bough, The (1890) 45–6 Goodbye to All That (1929) 73, 83 Gordon, Diana 296 Goossens, Eugene 274

Index Graham, Martha 271, 279 Graphic 273 Graves, Robert 73, 83, 276 Graves Registration Commission 114 Gray, Doris 287 Grayzel, Susan 253, 306–7 Greek Veil Plastique 303 Grey, Irene Mulvaney 271–2 Griffin, Pat 302 Gris, Juan 36 Guards Memorial (St James’s Park, 1926) 139 Guerlain 316 Gunther, Dorothee 308 Gurney, Ivor 76–7, 81 gymnasiums (commercial) 163, 166–89, 204, 232illus., 316 homo-social environments 300 gymnastics 267 ‘Gymnastique Rhythmic’ 237, 239illus. Hackenschmidt, Georg 166 Hageman, Hedwig 308 Haig, General Alexander 92 Halberstam, Judith 222 Halbwachs, Maurice 64 Hall, Lesley 176 Hall, Radclyffe 223, 232–3 Hallam, Margaret 236, 250 Hambridge, Jay 49, 245 Hamilton, General Ian 139 Happy Hospital, The (1918) 74 Hardy, Thomas 276 Hargreaves, Jennifer 233 Harrison, Jane 48 Hastings, Milo 252 Hastings, Thomas 135 Havelock, Henry 56 Haynes, Inez 232 health and fitness 39–40 Health and Physical Culture 201illus., 210illus., 223, 225illus., 285 Health and Strength 166, 169–70, 205 Hegesa, Grit 268 Helen Moller Dancers 286illus. Hendry, H A 208 Hepworth, Barbara 242 Heritage Craft School for Cripples (Sussex) 276 heroism, discourses of 42, 99, 126, 170, 191, 197, 313 maternal 142–3 myths of the war experience 83 Hewart of Bury, Lord 50 Hippolytus (1924–8) 302 Hirschfeld, Gustav 41 Hockey, Norman 201illus.

337

Hoff, Rayner 39, 121–2, 142–3, 148, 182, 242–3 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 297–8 Holden, Charles 121–2, 127 Hollander, Mabel 284 Home, The 231, 245–6illus., 257, 273 Homecoming, The (Cambridge, 1922) 139 Hooley, Teresa 84–5 Hornibrook, Ettie Rout 214, 217–18, 235, 249 Hornibrook, Fred 218 Horrors of War, The (1916) 86 Horst, Louis 274 Hoylake and West Kirby Memorial 148 Hudson, Philip B 121, 122 Hughes, Basil 75, 104 Hughes, Thea Stanley 271 Hulls, Major Alfred 94 Human Sacrifice (1918) 91 humanism 34, 44–5, 48–9, 55, 92–3 Humphrey, Dorothy 271, 273, 277–80 Hunt, W G 166 Hutley, Charley 208 Huxley, Aldous 218, 222 Huyssen, Andreas 109 Hynes, Samuel 118 Hyson, Arthur 166, 167 I was a Spy (1933) 87 Iliad 42 Imagists 84 Immortal Hour, The (1919–21) 302 Imperial War Graves Commission 50–1, 54, 80, 111–12, 114, 121–5 Impotence in the Male (1927) 175–6 Ince, Thomas 86 Inch, Thomas 166 Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men 195–6 Institute of Eurythmics 267 International Museums Office 115 International Style 122 inversion, female see sexuality Isles, Gwen 230 It’s Up to You (1931) 308 J’accuse! 24, 88 Jagger, Charles Sargeant 139, 148, 156–7 jazz 269–70, 302 John, Augustus 275 Johnson, Cecil 251 Johnston, Amy 223–4 Jones, Sir Robert 276–7 Jones, Thomas Hudson 135 Journal of Army Training 277 Journey’s End (1929) 83

338

Index

Joyce, Lucy 275 Jünger, Ernst 202 Karl Saxon’s Physical Culture College 167 Kaye, Captain Henry 72, 130, 262 Kellogg, J H 171 Kemp, Al 205illus. Kennington, Eric 89 Kent, Rockwell 199–200 Kent, Susan Kingsley 253 Kenyon, Sir Frederic 42, 50–1, 111–12, 121 Killeen, Madelyn 296–7illus. King’s Lancashire Military Convalescent Hospital 23 Kipling, Rudyard 80, 129 Knight, Dame Laura 38–9 Koselleck, Reinhart 313 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 235 Kristeva, Julia 125–7, 311 La Motte, Ellen 68–9 LaCapra, Dominick 63 Ladd, Anna Coleman 138–9 Lady Chatterly’s Lover 176 Lambert, George 155 Lamentation (1930) 279 Lane, Sir Arbuthnot 169 Lanphier, Fay 241 Lanteri, Edouard 139 Laocöon 29, 30, 174 Laqueur, Thomas 134 Lausanne, Treaty of 230 Lawrence, D H 176 Le Blessé (1917) 199 Le Bon, Gustav 27 Le Méchanicien (1920) 199 Le Sacre du Printemps 267 Le Touret cemetery 122 Le Train bleu (1922) 284 League of Health and Beauty (Sydney) 251, 271, 274, 280 League of Nations 24, 45, 55, 112–15, 120 Ledward, Gilbert 137, 139 Lee, Arthur 242 Leech, Edward 23 Lefèvre, Jules 218 Léger, Fernand 36, 38–9, 187, 196, 198–9 Lehman, Rosamund 259 Leicester Memorial (1925) 127 letters 75–6, 78, 80 Letters by Fallen Englishmen (1930) 80 Levinson, André 290, 292–3 Lewis, Wyndham 37–8, 89, 102, 275 Lhote, André 38 L’Hotelier, Private A 59–6, 65 Light, Alison 217

Lindsay, Daryl 98 Ling, Pehr Henrik 267 literature and films 59, 317 cross-pollination 85 films and film-makers 59, 85–7 medical 94, 235 plays 36, 75, 83–4, poetry 73–5, 80–2, 84–5, 124–7, 152, 154 war stories 50, 61, 73–82, 116, 124, 126 by women 77–9, 84–5 Little, E Muirhead 185, 193 Liverpool Memorial (1930) 123 Living Present: French Women in Wartime, The (1917) 77 Lloyd George, David 86, 162 Lobley, John 93 Longstaff, John 88 Lorimar, Sir Robert 121 Lowry, Gerald 60–1, 64–5 Lutyens, Sir Edwin 117, 121–3, 127, 129–30, 133, 155–6 Lyons, Walter J 203–4illus. Macaulay, Rose 79 MacColl, D S 102 MacDonald, Beatrice 248 Macdonald, Robert 249 Macfadden, Bernarr 166–7, 173–4, 201, 204, 210, 235, 250, 268, 285 Machine Gun Corps Memorial (London, 1925) 137–8illus. Mack Sennet Comedies 296 Mackail, J W 43 Mackay Worker’s Arm 194illus. Mackennal, Bertram 144 Mackenzie, Compton 258 Mackenzie, Tait 139 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie 275 MacLaren, Angus 165 magazines: body and beauty culture 39, 166–7, 178–82, 202–7, 219, 229–30, 240, 242, 244–5, 251–2, 257, 263, 273, 294, 303, 316 dance 272–3, 276 fashion 274–5 rehabilitation 276–7 Maguire, Tom 167 Makins, Major-General Sir George 71, 88, 94 Malinowski 46 Malvern, Sue 38 Mansfield, Katherine 275 Manship, Paul 237, 242 Manual of War Surgery 94 March, Major General Peyton C 135, 136

Index Margaret Morris Club (London) 275 Marie, Pierre 260 Marinetti 37 Marion Morgan Dancers (New York) 271, 273, 289, 293–4, 294 Married Love (1918) 217 masculinity see also men’s bodies; rehabilitation discourses of 30–1, 190, 202, 220 female 223–30 Massacre of the Fourth Cavalry, The (1915) 86 maternalism see population politics Maternity and Child Welfare Act (1918) 253 Maternity and Post-operative Exercises (1936) 309 Mather, Margrethe 294 Matthews, Jill 274, 293 Maugham, Somerset 110–11, 218 Mawer, Irene 271 Mayo, Daphne 122 McDowell, Thomas 187–8 McGrath, Eileen 243 McMurtrie, Douglas 23, 169, 195–6 Medea (1924–8) 302 medical illustration 95–102, 104 clinical photography 88, 95, 97, 99, 103, 176–7, 183–4 Medicine and Duty (1928) 72 Meesha Carruthers’ School of Physical Culture (Melbourne) 167 memoirs see autobiographies, diaries and memoirs Memorial to the Missing of the Marne 127 memory 50, 62, 64–9, 109 collective 64–5 cultural 60, 62, 69, 80, 82–93, 99–100, 102, 108, 222, 314 displacement 126–7, 140 short-term visual (STVM) 68 social 49 traumatic 62, 68, 120 triggers 74, 83–5, 108, 128 visual 67–8, 73–82, 314 Memory, History, Forgetting (2005) 311 Menin Gate 121 Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing (Ypres) 128–9 men’s bodies see also body culture; rehabilitation; war-wrecked body classical images of 164 commodification 200–11, 207 emasculated in war 175–9 empowering 33 as machines 190–200 new models of 32–3 objectification of 39, 208 performing 33

339

restoration 261 under scrutiny 161–2, 168, 206–9, 211 sexuality 29, 33–4, 161, 173–6, 189–200 penis enhancement 210–11 as spectacle 203–11 symbolism in war 54 transformations 162–3, 170–1 women’s knowledge of 213–14 Mensendieck, Bess 236, 307–8 Meredith, Florence 250–1 Mestrovic, Ivan 242 Meyer, Baron Adolf de 107 Middlebrook, J B 75–6 Midland Railway Memorial (Derby, 1921) 130 Milestone, Lewis 87 military medical services 93–4 hospitals 183–7 psychiatry 177–8 wound treatments 60–1, 72 military surgery 71–2 see also rehabilitation before-and-after case studies 187 challenge of multiple injuries 176 complexities of injuries 71–2 debridement 71 experimental 95, 99 impact of war 177–8 orthopaedics 105–6illus. priorities 104 surgical skin map 101illus. transferred to civilians 263 Millard, Ralph 95 Mills, Florence 302 Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (1926) 223 Modern Diana 230–41, 249, 255, 319 ‘Modern Diana’ (1922) 237, 240 modernism see also classical traditions in the west and classicism 26–8, 32–3 and cultural nostalgia 35–40 lesbian 206 and technology 36 Moller, Helen 271–2, 278, 290–1, 302–3 Mondrian 37 Montford, Paul 144–5 Moriarity, Catherine 129, 134 Morris, Margaret 236, 271, 274–9, 284–5, 293, 298–9illus., 302, 309 Mosse, George 150 Mother and Daughter 219 Mother and the Law, The 86 Mothers’ Clinic for Constructive Birth Control 240 Mott, Colonel Frederic 178, 181–2 Mourning and Melancholia (1917) 125 mourning rituals see bereavement practices Muir, Ward 74

340

Index

Munde, Rosa 248 Munzler, Dora 308 Murray, Gilbert 42, 44–6, 48, 50–1, 54–5, 114–15, 123, 314 Murray, Hubert 46 Murray, Middleton 275 Museum of Modern Art (New York) 37 Nacktkultur movement 307 Nadelman, Elie 242, 244 Napier, Elliot 152 Nash, Paul 88–9 National Council of Women (Australia) 143 Neff, Wanda Fraiken 233 New Book of Martyrs, The (1918) 60 New Health Society 169, 257 New Venus 230, 241–7, 255, 319 Newnes’ Illustrated 66illus. Newtown, Annie 225 Niblo, Fred 86–7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 31, 33, 48 Nietzschean superman 172 Nijinsky, Rudolf 267 Nike of Paionos 41, 284, 289–90 Nike of Samothrace 143–8, 285, 287illus. and classical revival dance 282–6 maternalization 147 ‘No Man’s Land’ (1918) 75 Nochlin, Linda 133 Non Combatants and Others (1916) 79 Nora, Pierre 120, 126, 140 Norman, Dr Albert 99 O’Brien, Patty 302 O’Connor, Mary 296, 298illus. ocularcentrism 119 Of Human Bondage (1915) 110–11 Olfsen, Dora 242 Olympism 27, 38 On Beauty and Being Just (2001) 263, 310 ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’ 126 On the Origin of Species (1859) 47 On the Usefulness of Parts (Galen) 164 Open-air Roof Gymnasium 232illus. Orlando (1928) 233–4 Orpen, William 91–2 Osler, Sir William 42, 44–5, 61, 92–3 overcoming, culture and discourses of 56, 108, 162, 169–73, 313, 317–18 beautiful death 154–8 disability 61, 169–70, 211–12, 277 grief (see bereavement practices) masculine vulnerability 171–3 sacrifice 50, 162, 182–7 self-transformation 277

Owen, Wilfred 36 Ozenfant, Amédée 38, 49 Pallasmaa, Juhani 119 Pankhurst, Sylvia 258 Paris Peace Conference 230 Partington, T Bowen 166 Pastoral Pursuits of Australia (1927) 199–200 Pater, Walter 30, 33 Paths of Glory 89 Pavlova, Anna 299–300 Peace After Victory 199–200 peace discourses 34, 44–5, 52, 108, 114–15, 120 and body and beauty culture 258 feminization 147–8, 283, 312 rhetoric of 315 peace-complacency 313 Pegram, Henry 131–2 Pendleton, Nat 207 Percival, Captain Theodore 80 ‘Perfect Girl, The’ 288–9illus. performing arts 266–301, 314 photography 33, 164, 267 see also medical illustration clinical photography 88, 95, 97, 99, 103, 176–7, 183–4 and physical culture 178–80, 204–6 and reconstruction 202–11 of revival dancers 303 Physical Culture 174, 181, 246, 285–6, 287illus., 288illus., 289, 291–2, 296 physical culture schools see gymnasiums (commercial) Picasso, Pablo 32, 36, 38–9, 242, 284 Pickerill, H P 100, 105–7 Piddington, Marion 184, 240 Pilgrimage (193) 87 Pinnacle, The (1929) 199–200illus. plastic surgery see cosmetic surgery; reconstructive surgery Plastic Surgery of the Face (1920) 96illus., 100–2 surgical skin map 101illus. pleasure culture of war 66–7, 82–3, 87–8, 108–9, 117–18, 162, 267, 292, 311–12 see also bereavement practices Ploegsteert Memorial 122 Plumes 84 Poise (1926) 298–9illus. Polygon Wood cemetery 129 population politics 38–9, 209, 214, 221, 302, 318 depopulation 38–9 maternalist discourses 34, 145–6, 253 pronatalist discourses 38, 202, 214, 221, 252–3, 259, 294, 305–9

Index Pound, Ezra 275 Power, Hiram 29 Pozières Memorial to the Missing 127 Pratt, Ambrose 151–3 Preston Memorial (1926) 131–2illus. Prévost, Marcel 213 Prévost, Marie 296–7illus. primitivism 45–6, 48, 172 Proctor, Dod 39 Proctor, Thea 242 pronatalist discourses see population politics propaganda 66 films 86 military-medical 93–5, 101, 103–5, 107 prostheses 106, 193illus., 194illus. see also cinematized prostheses; disabled and disfigured veterans; reconstruction; rehabilitation facial disfigurement masks 97–8, 103, 107, 137–9, 157–8 and sexual confidence 189–200 Proust, Marcel 49 Pruette, Lorine 214 Psychology of Revolution, The (1895) 27 Pullum, W A 166 racialized thinking 30, 46–7, 53, 270 Ralston, Esther 241 Recalled to Life/Reveille 276 Reconstructing the Crippled Soldiers (1918) 23 reconstruction 319 see also civilization; gender; population politics; rehabilitation aggressive normalization 165 and commodity culture 200–11, 203 discourses of 56, 99–100, 162, 195, 278, 311–12, 317–18 healing aesthetic 50, 60, 102, 109, 112–13, 123–7, 130, 137, 163, 305 of national life 43 and social mores 214–15 reconstruction surgery 93–108 and classical aesthetic 102–3 inadequate outcomes 100–1 maxillofacial 95–100, 105–6 surgical skin map 101illus. Recumbent Figure (1930) 155 Reducing and How (1930) 252 rehabilitation 22–3, 26, 67, 106–7, 160–6, 314, 319 see also body culture; magazines discourses of 163–5, 167–8, 189, 259, 302 disempowering 169 heroic ideals 168 influence of body culture 188–9 mechano-therapeutics 185–7 remedial activities 183–7, 184illus., 276–7 sexual 165, 175–6, 209, 211–12

341

therapeutic value 277 vocational re-skilling 106 Relwyskow, George de 166 Remarque, Eric Maria 50 Resting Diana (1931) 236–7illus., 238 Resurrection of the Soldiers (1928–32) 88 Return of the Soldier 63, 84 Ricco, Ulysses A 135–6 Rice Dieting Institute (Houston) 174 Rich, Lorimer 135–6 Richardson, Dorothy 222 Rickword, Edgell 76 Ricoeur, Paul 311 Rivera, Diego 195 Rivers, W H R 46 Roberts, Hera 245, 257 Roberts, William 39, 89 Rodin, Auguste 26 Roll of Honour films 86 Rosenberg, Carroll Smith 234 Rosenberg, Isaac 79 Rout, Ettie Hornibrook see Hornibrook, Ettie Rout Royal Airforce Memorial (Runnymede) 122 Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) 71, 93–4, 177 Royal Artillery Memorial (London, 1925) 156illus., 157illus. Rubenstein, Helena 245, 247, 258–60 Ruskin, John 30, 49 Sacrifice 182 Sacrifice, The (1931–4) 142illus. Safe Marriage: A Return to Sanity (1922) 217 Salmon, Lucy 41 Salome 233 Sandow, Eugene 166–7, 171 Sanger, Margaret 34, 218 Sargent, John Singer 92 Sassoon, Siegfried 50, 74, 80, 126–7, 129, 182, 276, 313 Sava, George 260–2 Saxon, Karl 167 Scarry, Elaine 108, 127, 155, 192, 263, 310–11 Schliemann, Heinrich 40 Schuster, Walter 304 Schwartz, Hillel 208, 282–3 Scott, Giles Gilbert 131–2 Scott, James Brown 44 Scott, Kathleen 102 Segal, Harold 170 Select Committee Inquiry into Classical Education 45 ‘Sentry’ (Britannia Hotel, Manchester) 139

342

Index

‘Seven and Five Society’ 37–8 sexology 306 Sexual Variety and Variability Among Women (1915) 216 sexuality 214 see also gender; rehabilitation androgyny 220, 230–4 changing attitudes 33, 318 discourses of 32–4, 176 eroticism 298–9 female inversion 232–6, 301 heterosexual virility 33, 200–11 homoerotic 203–7, 220, 222 homosexual counter discourses 30–1 impact of war 213–18 inversion 226 Shawn, Ted 201, 271, 273, 279–81 Shell Shock (1916) 60–1illus. shell-shock see trauma Sherman, Jane 290, 303–4 Sherriff, J C 83 Shrine of Remembrance (Melbourne) 121–2, 144–6, 151–3 Signallers, The 89 sites of mourning see bereavement practices Smith, Colonel Maynard 71 Smith, G H Tyson 123 Smith, Helen Zenna 176 Soaring 290 Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 30–1, 40 Society of Physiotherapists 277 Soldier Addresses his Body (1991) 76 ‘Soldier on the Defence’ (Hoylake and West Kirby Memorial, 1922) 139 Sontag, Susan 64, 202 Sorine, Savely 39 Soul of War (1915) 73 Southampton Memorial (1920) 155 Spedding, Captain Q S 107 Spencer, Penelope 302 Spencer, Stanley 88, 102 ‘Spirit of the American Legion, The’ 148 St Anne’s Memorial (Lancashire) 147 St Denis, Ruth 201, 271–3, 278–81, 280illus., 289, 294, 300, 303–5 St Lo, Peggy 288–9illus. St Mary’s Cathedral Memorial (Sydney) 155 Stack, Mary Bagot 219, 251, 255, 258–9, 268, 280, 282, 289, 306, 308 Stack, Prunella 291 Stallings, Laurence 36, 75, 83–4 Stalybridge Memorial (Lancashire) 145–6illus. Stancliff, Fred 174 Stashak, Dr Joseph 180–1illus. Stearns, Peter 249 Stebbings, Lionel 166 Stebbins, Genevieve 267, 271, 300

Stekel, Wilhelm 175 Stevens, Lawrence T 244 Stevenson, Frances 86 Stoicism 66 Stones of Remembrance 129 Stopes, Marie 217–18, 240, 293, 306 Stravinsky, Igor 267 stripped classicism 121–3, 127, 131, 134, 140 Strongfort, Lionel 166–7, 180, 207–9 Stuart, Muriel 78 Summerdown Camp (Eastbourne) 27, 82 Surgery in War 94 ‘Survivors Ghosts, The’ (1936) 80 Sutherland, Bruce 166 Sutherland, John 251 Swedish War Hospital 185–7 synchoric orchestra (Dalcroze) 273 Symonds, Aldington 30 Tanagra (1926) 279 Tarring, Sir Charles 214 Tate, Trudi 188, 292 Tatlin, Vladimir 36 ‘Tenth Armistice Day, The’ 80 Terrell, Kenneth 205illus. Terry, Walter 304 Theodora 303 Thévanez, Paul 237, 240 Third Ypres 74–5 Thomas, Edward 105 Thompson, Muriel 68 Thorndyke, Sybil 45, 271, 302 Thornhill, Dorothy 236–7 Thornton Memorial (Yorkshire, 1922) 144 Three Choric Dances for Greek Tragedy (193) 279 Three Comrades (1920) 196 To His Love 76–7 To the Last Ridge (1998) 74 To the Unknown British Soldier in France 91–2illus. Tom Maguire’s School of Boxing and Physical Culture (Newcastle) 167 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Arlington, Va) 135–6 Tonks, Henry 91, 96–7, 101–2, 261 Torso (1928) 242 trauma see also memory; rehabilitation discourses of 63, 108 Freudian theory 62–3 language of 67, 68 and memory 62, 68, 120 responses to 69 survivors’ 80–1 theories of 60–4, 314 of war 59, 63–4 of wounds 69–73

Index Tribe, Barbara 243 Trojan Women, The (1924–8) 302 Trovagrod, Olaf 244 Truelove, J R 122 Tuttle, Frank 241 Undertones of War (1928) 124 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1912) 208, 283 utopia 1, 25, 111, 138, 158, 163, 182, 199–202, 218, 220, 226, 262 Valéry, Paul 28 ‘Vaulting Venus’ 244 ‘Venus’ 244 Venus de Milo 242 ‘Venus of Today’ 244 Versailles, Treaty of 23–6, 53–5 Vionnet, Madeleine 49, 245, 269 Virgil (1922) 199 visual culture 101, 108–9, 314, 317 importance to non-combattants 76 visual knowledge 10, 76, 89, 198, 200, 207, 211, 317 visual language 69, 73, 79–80, 83–4, 92, 108 visual memory 67–8, 73–82, 314 cleansing 123–7 Vitalism 39 Volupté 242 Vorticism 36, 89 Waldron, Corporal W 98illus. Wallace, Cuthbert 70 Wallace, Lily 273 Waller, Mervyn Napier 36, 163, 182, 199, 262 war see also pleasure culture of war destructive capacity 60–1, 69–70, 91 ‘War Film, A’ 84–5 War Nurse (1930) 77 War Surgery From Firing Line to Base (1918) 104illus. Warburg, Aby 48–50 Wardrop, James H 121–2 Ware, Fabian 46, 50–1, 114, 120 Warren, Major Edward 121 war-wrecked body 125, 314 see also military surgery; rehabilitation complexities of injuries 71–2 and visual memory 73–82 Waters, J C 118, 125, 128–9 Watson, Frederick 22, 169 Watson, John 184 Weber, Clarence 174–5illus., 294

343

Weber and Rice Health and Strength College 167, 174 Webster, Frederick Annesley 251–2 Well of Loneliness 232–3 Wells, H G 34, 218 West, Andrew 42 West, Rebecca 63, 77, 84 Weston, E 294 Wharton, Edith 276 What Price Glory ? (Anderson & Stallings, 1924) 83–4 Whidbourne, Mary 275 Wiedman, Charles 273 Wigman, Mary 268–9 Wilde, Oscar 30 Willi, Charles 228, 262 Williamson, Harold Sandys 91 Wilson, Woodrow 24, 53, 55, 135 Winckelmann, Johann 29, 33, 48 Windeyer, Lois 223 Winged Victory (Marrickville, 1919) 144 Withrow, Walter 173, 180, 195, 244, 250 Withrow Athletic Club and Physical Culture Institute (Sydney) 167, 173 Withrow’s Physical Culture 203–4illus. Women of the Aftermath 176 women’s bodies 34 see also Modern Diana; New Venus androgyny 220, 230–4 artistic representations of 39–40 as Atlas 225illus beauty and body consciousness 219–23 body culture 216–17, 223–31, 253–4, 284–5illus. celebration 278 changing attitudes 283 classical stylization 39 and discourse of hygiene 256–8 employment 221 eroticization 288 ideals of 38–9, 230, 245–6illus., 247–54 liberated 213–18, 221, 223–32, 239–41, 247, 266, 268, 271, 281–94, 318 masculinized 220, 223–30, 232 performative femininity 230, 266 and the reconstruction agenda 39, 49, 249, 271, 289, 305–9 refeminizing 222 scrutiny of 245, 270 selfhood 218 self-scrutiny 259 sexual deviance 300–2 sexuality 33–4, 213–18, 239–41, 270, 293–305 sexualization of 256–7

344 women’s bodies (cont.) sporty 286 transgressing masculine sphere 231–3 visibility 220 Women’s League of Health and Beauty 259, 268, 271, 274, 288–9 Wood, Derwent 97, 98 Wood, Francis Derwent 137–8 Woolf, Virginia 35, 233–4

Index Woolley, Dorothy 293 Worrell, Kathleen 246 Writer’s Manifesto, The (1914) 42 York and Lancaster Regiment Memorial (Sheffield) 144 Ziegfeld, Florenz 252 Ziegfeld Follies 273

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