Author Archives: Jessica

Do I dare?

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I don’t normally watch Who Do You Think You Are? unless I have a particular interest in the person investigating their past (so Nigella Lawson, Jeremy Irons, Patrick Stewart and not many more).  But tomorrow night’s show features Hugh Dennis (the Dennis of Punt and Dennis and one of the creators of Radio 4’s The Now Show, a weekly favourite in our household.)  According to the previews, he will exploring the First World War experience of his grandfathers, one a former miner who was commissioned, the other a survivor of an attack that decimated his battalion.  A clip of the programme can be found here.

Normally I would be very interested in watching this, but at least one preview I have read quotes Dennis as saying ‘It was just a sort of muddy, bloody, horrifying mess.  I’m glad now understand the landscape.  I have a better feeling for what it was like and how awful it was.  I now understand entirely why neither of my grandfathers wanted to talk about the war.  It was unremitting in its awfulness.’  This is as clear a description of ‘mud, blood and futility’ view of the war as you could hope to find.  As someone who has spent most of her career arguing that this view of the war is a very limited one and that most men who fought had a more complex and nuanced view of their experiences, just reading this is enough to send my blood pressure up.  At the same time, one quotation from one preview is probably not enough evidence to go on (although I do also have the evidence of popular British television’s previous form in its portrayal of war experience).

So the question is, do I watch the programme and risk annoying my husband by shouting at the television by doing so?  Or do I give it a miss for the sake of domestic harmony and potentially fail to challenge my own prejudices about programmes about the war? What to do?

Parade’s End

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OK, hands up, who is loving Parade’s End on the BBC?  Yes, that would be me, and not only because of the presence of not just the amazing Benedict Cumberbatch but, for two glorious episodes, Rufus Sewell as well.  All the acting is excellent, especially Cumberbatch (as I knew he would be from the moment the casting was announced) and the luminous Adelaide Clemens as Valentine. The visuals are also superb, especially the use of Vorticist fracturing and mirroring to portray movement and multiple perspectives. But what I am really loving is how brilliantly the production is evoking all the emotions I felt when reading the books – fury at the hypocrisy of society, the humour of the golf course scene, the huge affection that Tietjens and Valentine engender, despite him being, on the surface, an extremely irritating individual, the pity and horror of Tietjen’s father’s suicide.  I haven’t read the books in years, not since I wrote my undergraduate thesis on them, but it is testament to the power of both the original source and the adaptation that I am feeling such vivid sensations of recognition with every episode.

At the moment, my only quibble, and it has the potential to be quite a serious one, is with the characterization of Rebecca Hall’s Sylvia Tietjens.  I initially thought that it didn’t work because of the need to focus so much on Sylvia’s back story in the first half hour of the first episode, a section not lifted directly from the book’s fractured narrative.  To me this was the weakest part of the production so far, although the introduction of Tietjen’s love for Michael was beautifully done.  Reading an interview with the director, Susanna White, however, I have discovered that she has chosen deliberately to portray Sylvia as more vulnerable and sympathetic than in the book, a decision that I am not sure works.  In the books, Sylvia is a first class bitch with no redeeming features and is recognized as such.  Any inconsistencies in attitudes and behaviours can be attributed to her personality.  By making her more sympathetic, White and Hall have also made Sylvia harder to understand and have undermined her ability to power the narrative.  When set alongside the fabulously hypocritical and vicious Edith Duchemin (now MacMasters), she fades as a character, which makes it that much harder to understand the hold she has over both Tietjens and the rest of her male attendants.  Next week, however, we have A Man Could Stand Up – where her relationship with Tietjens takes precedence over his with Valentine, so maybe my doubts will be laid to rest.  I do hope so, because there are so many reasons why this is the best dramatization of British society in the First World I have ever seen, which I will be discussing in a future post.

Amanda Vickery on … Men

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I have been listening to this BBC Radio 4 programme on iPlayer for the past few weeks and more or less enjoying it.  The premise is that the historian Amanda Vickery examines six archetypes of masculinity, the knight, the gentleman, the lover, the sailor, the explorer and the suits, through a combination of historical experts and readings from primary sources.  This past week, the explorer, was especially fun for me as it included contributions from Max Jones, my former PhD supervisor, and John Tosh, with whom I have worked.

In general, the programme works well, although the conclusion at the end of episode two, that men defined themselves as much in relation to other men as to women was something of a ‘duh’ moment for me, although that is me talking as an historian of masculinty.  There are, however, some bigger problems with I am having with the programme.  The first of these is the association of each archetype with a particular period in history: the knight with the middle ages, the gentleman with the Renaissance, the lover with the eighteenth century, the sailor with the early nineteenth century, the explorer with the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and the suit with the mid-twentieth century.  Archetype does, of course, refer to the prototype, the original pattern on which all subsequent types are based, so examining the period of emergence is what the programme sets out to do.  But surely to understand the significance of any one archetype to our current view of masculinity we need to see how the pattern developed over time?  In other words we should probably think about the reimagining of the knight and courtly love in the nineteenth century to grasp the full significance of the twelfth century model to our ideas about masculinity and its cultural significance.

My second gripe is about the archetypes chosen for discussion.  All of them are archetypes of public masculinity, with the possible exception of the lover, the discussion of which included the most fabulous diary of a Manchester wigmaker who noted down every time (and position) he had sex with his wives (there were four in total).  Given the argument that men have, over time, defined themselves as much in relation to other men as to women, it seems odd not to have looked at what those other types of masculinity might be.  Especially in light of John Tosh’s contribution this past week, where he argues that the explorer was a form of escape from the domestic, why have we not heard about the archetype of the husband and father or patriarch?  For that matter, after the knight and the sailor, where are the scholar, the craftsman or engineer, the administrator?  Above all, if you are going to discuss the lover as a masculine archetype that is defined against woman, why is there nothing on the householder, the ultimate archetype of mature masculinity that separates the man from the boy throughout modern history? As far as I can see, the archetypes have been chosen to illustrate the thesis that men define themselves primarily within all-male hierarchies, a reasonable argument but definitely not the whole story.  So, here is to the return of an interesting series with an expanded cast of men (and their others) in the future.

Hello!

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Welcome to Arms and the Medical Man, a record of my thoughts and ideas on the history of gender, medicine and warfare.  Much of what I will be writing about will relate to my current, Wellcome Trust-funded research project on the experience and identities of men who served in medical support and paramedic roles with the British armed forces during the First World War.

My other interests include, but are not limited to, the history of gender, particularly masculinity, the history of disability, especially psychological war disability, the history of popular and middlebrow literature, mainly detective and adventure fiction, and the social and cultural history of warfare.

As the mother of two young children, I am also becoming increasingly interested in the teaching of the history of the First World War and the representation of the war in popular culture. All these topics will form the subject matter of this blog, along with musings on academia and working motherhood in present-day Britain.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I expect to enjoy writing it.