War in the 20th Century: Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf

1900-1953. The period of time covered by the second of my two 2nd-year English modules, entitled "Shock of the New". A time covering just over half of the 20th Century, incorporating some of the world's most important developments. Aircraft, cars, music, modern art, you name it. It's also a period incorporating some of the most important and most destructive wars the world has known. So it's no surprise that war is one of the main themes in much of the literature of the time. The early twentieth-century saw the rise of the war poet, with people desperate to learn what it was actually like in the battle-fields. Two of the most interesting writers of this period, in my opinion, with regards to war, are Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf.

Thomas Hardy's poetry is littered with references to the wars he saw in his lifetime. Namely, the Boer War and, of course, World War I. However, as Samuel Hynes notes, "when critics write about modern war poetry, they rarely mention Thomas Hardy" ('Hardy and the Battle God', in Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in honour of Michael Millgate. ed. K. Wilson. Toronto: UTP. 2006. pp.245-261). But why is this? Why, when Hardy lived through two of the most important wars (for Britain) in the 20th Century and wrote many poems about them, is he not regarded among critics as a war poet? Samuel Hynes goes on to clarify: "In our time [...] we take 'war poet' to mean a poet who was a soldier first, who learned about war by fighting before he wrote about it." You know the types, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen. The guys who really experienced war as it happened. Hardy never saw a war, only heard reports of them. But why should that mean that his poems carry any less weighting? For me personally, when I hear "war poem", one of the first poems that springs to mind is Hardy's 'Drummer Hodge', not least for its poignancy and relevance to not just the Boer War, but all wars. Hodge, one of the youngest soldiers in the war, as a drummer, is carelessly "thrown" into his war grave "just as found", not given a dignified funeral, but simply a part of the process of war. He is now destined to remain forever on foreign soil, away from home, underneath "foreign constellations". I first came across this poem as a schoolchild, and it has honestly stayed with me ever since. And Hardy's other war poetry is no less poignant. Hardy was harshly critical of modern war: how war had evolved from the romantic tales of his youth. He said himself in a letter that "I constantly deplore the fact that 'civilized' nations have not learnt some more excellet and apostolic way of settling disputes than the old and barbarous one...". In his poem 'The Sick Battle-God', Hardy begins with remembering the romantic times wen "men found joy in war", a time when war involved majestic kings and "storied hero[es]". This romantic ideal is broken with the "modern meditation" that "broke/His [the god's] spell". The tone of the poem changes from romantic and idealistic to harsh and despondent, the final stanze portraying the melancholy truth of modern warfare:

Let men rejoice, let men deplore,
The lurid Deity of heretofore
Succumbs to one of saner nod;
The Battle-god is god no more.

Hardy may not have seen war first-hand, he may not have experienced the horror of the trenches or heard the deafening gunfire from 100 yards away, but this does not mean that his war poetry is any less significant for understanding the trauma of war.

Similarly, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway does not explicitly portray war. The impact of war, and notably the First World War, stretched far beyond its end date in 1918. Soldiers came back traumatised, with severe mental health problems that would not be fully understood by psychotherapists for getting on for half a century. Mrs Dalloway is one of the texts that really makes it possible, in my opinion, to understand, even just a little bit, the pain that returning home from the war could cause. Karen DeMeester, is seems, holds a similar view (here for link to article): "[Woolf's] modernist narrative form brilliantly mirrors the mind of a trauma survivor like Septimus". She goes on to explain a little about the effects of post-war trauma:

"The survivor's traumatised mind apprehends the traumatic event as ever-present, and his memories of the event often exist in the present consciousness"

This is certainly evident in Septimus. At the time of the one, haunting trauma that befell him, when his friend Evans was killed, Septimus "congratulated himself upon feeling very little" (p.73). But it is this lack of feeling that continues to haunt him after the war is over. Just a page later it is stated that "he could not feel", and he admits himself that when "his wife was crying [...] he felt nothing" (p.77). Septimus brings back with him not just horrific flashbacks and hallucinations regarding his past ("he saw things, too - he had seen an old woman's head in the middle of a fern"), but a terrifying numbness that neither he, nor anybody else, can explain. Mental health was not yet a recognised medical issue, insofar that doctors could not explain away such symptoms, and so being unable to give meaning to the traumatic events or the daily hauntings Septimus goes through, he eventually drives himself into the panic that leads to his tragic death.

Virgina Woolf does not explicitly deal with the theme of war in her novel. She does not, except on a few occasions, mention the fighting, the impact on the world at home, how terrible it had all been. But in including Septimus in her "stream-of-consciousness" novel, she gives light to a whole new side to the tragedy of war. Like Hardy, who could not talk about war from personal fighting experience, "the customary trappings of war are all missing" (Hynes) from Woolf's novel, too. But this, if anything, provides a more poignant and more relatable experience of one of the most horrific events of the 20th Century.