The Deadliest Century: Gender and Modernism in the Age of Total War, 1895-1981

This dissertation explores connections between the gender politics of British, Irish, and German Modernist drama and novels and total war discourse. A historically contested term, total warfare is chronicled here from Britain’s late-nineteenth century New Imperialism to Europe in the decades following the Second World War. Furthermore, its impact extended far beyond the battlefield with civilian collateral damage on a massive scale, through air raids, concentration camps, forced labor, and other means. Establishing this timeline and parameters for total warfare allows for a closer look at its significance beyond a typical “war literature” canon.

The first of the dissertation’s parallel narratives about gender and war examines the female body as a contested site in performance and dance theatre, at once embodying political complicity and subversion. Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895) sets the precedent for this dilemma with a woman whose threatening gestures not only confirm male anxieties of the era, but also revealed the hypocrisies of British imperial ideology. The premiere of W.B. Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones (1931) and Mary Wigman’s extravaganza Totenmal (1930) align female physicality with modern dance for different political ends, respectively seeking freedom from censorship and espousing an authoritarian aesthetic. Samuel Beckett’s answer to this dilemma is confinement and contraction, reducing the female figure to a disembodied Mouth in 1972’s Not I.

The second arc within this dissertation explores how Modernist novelists transform generic conventions when faced with total warfare. Works such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) turn to nineteenth-century domestic fiction, including the marriage plot and comedy of manners, to depict young women’s struggles for autonomy during and in the aftermath of conflict. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake instead turns to medieval history and legend, adding familial dysfunction and sexual objectification to heady gender politics. In combining focus on a domestic interior and pre-Christian ritual, Samuel Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) mediates between these confrontations with history and literary form.