Manchester University Press
9 The ventriloquised corpse and the silent dead
Abstract
During both World Wars, the British government sought to minimise signs of civilian and combatant death. Yet the dead nonetheless had a vital presence within national discourse. Throughout both Wars, there was substantial popular and government appetite for the trope I have called the ‘ventriloquised corpse’, ‘in which, in the imagination of the living, the dead declare that their sacrifice was willing and worthwhile’. This chapter examines literary engagements with this problematic trope, then troubles this cultural narrative through texts using a Gothic mode to disconcert state-sanctioned narratives of national commemoration of war death. Existing criticism within Gothic studies has considered the soldier revenant who resents their sacrifice and bears malice toward the living. This present chapter, too, shows how Gothic representations may undercut national stories of war, but I explore this with a different emphasis, stemming from taking, as my focus, war graves and burial places – including of burial alive –and other sites where the dead were taken into the earth. The concept of interment becomes a fulcrum on which, in the writing of the time, trenches and bombed streets edge towards ‘grave’. Rather than the speaking spectre, this chapter concerns the silent corpse – rotting and speechless, it, too, cannot be recruited to narratives of national glory. Adapting Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire and Nancy Wood’s concept of lieux d’oubli, I consider how these works examine sites of selective forgetting. More precisely, I suggest these works offer lieux d’oubliés, sites of the forgotten, insofar as they attend to the decay of particular bodies and refuse to elide the material impact of war. Texts explored include work by Frederic Manning, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Mervyn Peake, Rose Macaulay and John Piper.
Abstract
During both World Wars, the British government sought to minimise signs of civilian and combatant death. Yet the dead nonetheless had a vital presence within national discourse. Throughout both Wars, there was substantial popular and government appetite for the trope I have called the ‘ventriloquised corpse’, ‘in which, in the imagination of the living, the dead declare that their sacrifice was willing and worthwhile’. This chapter examines literary engagements with this problematic trope, then troubles this cultural narrative through texts using a Gothic mode to disconcert state-sanctioned narratives of national commemoration of war death. Existing criticism within Gothic studies has considered the soldier revenant who resents their sacrifice and bears malice toward the living. This present chapter, too, shows how Gothic representations may undercut national stories of war, but I explore this with a different emphasis, stemming from taking, as my focus, war graves and burial places – including of burial alive –and other sites where the dead were taken into the earth. The concept of interment becomes a fulcrum on which, in the writing of the time, trenches and bombed streets edge towards ‘grave’. Rather than the speaking spectre, this chapter concerns the silent corpse – rotting and speechless, it, too, cannot be recruited to narratives of national glory. Adapting Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire and Nancy Wood’s concept of lieux d’oubli, I consider how these works examine sites of selective forgetting. More precisely, I suggest these works offer lieux d’oubliés, sites of the forgotten, insofar as they attend to the decay of particular bodies and refuse to elide the material impact of war. Texts explored include work by Frederic Manning, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Mervyn Peake, Rose Macaulay and John Piper.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures ix
- List of contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xv
- Introduction 1
- 1 The Gothic churchyard in graveyard poetry 18
- 2 Graveyard pleasures 32
- 3 The last days of the urban burial ground 47
- 4 De-Gothicising the Victorian Gothic graveyard 61
- 5 Relics and ruins, photographs and fellowship 77
- 6 The colonial Australian Gothic and the grave 96
- 7 Weirding the Gothic graveyard 111
- 8 Graveyards in Western Gothic cinema 125
- 9 The ventriloquised corpse and the silent dead 140
- 10 Home among the headstones 155
- 11 The graveyard in neo-Edwardian fiction 169
- 12 Unstable coordinates 183
- 13 Conversations with spectres 196
- 14 Monsters of history 208
- 15 Indian burial grounds in American fiction and film 223
- 16 Adolescent existence and resistance 238
- 17 The graveyard level 252
- Coda 268
- Index 279
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures ix
- List of contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xv
- Introduction 1
- 1 The Gothic churchyard in graveyard poetry 18
- 2 Graveyard pleasures 32
- 3 The last days of the urban burial ground 47
- 4 De-Gothicising the Victorian Gothic graveyard 61
- 5 Relics and ruins, photographs and fellowship 77
- 6 The colonial Australian Gothic and the grave 96
- 7 Weirding the Gothic graveyard 111
- 8 Graveyards in Western Gothic cinema 125
- 9 The ventriloquised corpse and the silent dead 140
- 10 Home among the headstones 155
- 11 The graveyard in neo-Edwardian fiction 169
- 12 Unstable coordinates 183
- 13 Conversations with spectres 196
- 14 Monsters of history 208
- 15 Indian burial grounds in American fiction and film 223
- 16 Adolescent existence and resistance 238
- 17 The graveyard level 252
- Coda 268
- Index 279
