Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War
Cedric Van Dijck
Published:
2023
Online ISBN:
9781399507882
Print ISBN:
9781399507868
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Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War
Cedric Van Dijck
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Cedric Van Dijck
Pages
88–127
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Published:
August 2023
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Van Dijck, Cedric, 'Monuments in Virginia Woolf and Hope Mirrlees', Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War (
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Abstract
In modernist writing, this chapter argues, mourning the loss of the war dead was presented as a tangible process. Through embodied encounters with memorial objects such as gravestones, statues and commemorative volumes, memories of the fallen were evoked. My first case study is Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, which portrays its protagonist as a statue in a gesture anticipating his death on the battlefield. If solid stones come to occupy the place of ephemeral lives, then it is the women in the novel, left behind, who engage with them most viscerally. These gendered moments of contact with statues and graves – we also find them in Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem – trigger ‘fresh shock[s]’ of memory as well as more critical notions of the glorification of sacrifice. In a second step, the chapter asks how the war informed a way of thinking of books themselves in such tangible terms, as solid objects made not from stone but from paper. This material existence of the book was put to good use in the memorial culture that developed in the war’s wake: commemorative books, like statues and gravestones, became tools for memory, standing in the place of the war dead and picked up from the shelf in order to remember.
Keywords: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees, memorial culture, tombstones, statues, Paris: A Poem, Jacob’s Room, Kew Gardens, Poems by C.N. Sidney Woolf
Subject
Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
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