World War I

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This poster lacks the vividness as well as a clear picture to any passerby on the street in 1917.  Two requirements which were ranked by James Pearl for a successful poster are not in this picture; there is not much color or brightness to motivate people; and it doesn’t have a clear or specific design. Instead the poster has mainly two colors, white and multiple shades of brown, as well as a rough sketch of the two soldiers in the midst of war.

This poster does hit the emotions of many just because it lacks the usual ‘bright/clear design’ of most of the WWI posters.  The imagery of a brave soldier holding his wounded comrade in the trench sends a chilling realization of the dark and dreary conditions which these men are living in. The only thing the poster asks, of the American citizens at home, is to ration the food for the soldiers; as well as to not waste any food that the citizens have. This was another method used by the artist behind the making of each poster [they] “should be single, clear, specific and must appeal to the emotions rather than to the intellect.”  In my opinion, that is exactly what the poster ‘Blood or Bread’ portrays; eat what you must, send the rest to the soldiers so that they have nutrients to finish the war, and less lives will be taken in the long run.

This poster has many elements which would be tied in with Vera Brittain’s ‘A Testament of Youth’. The most obvious being, the wounded soldier has lost or has been severely injured to the eyes, much like Victor.

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    I think this poster should be interpreted according to Meg Albrinck's definition of posters as "instruments of coercion" (James 23). Albrinck says the propaganda poster shaped rather than reflected public opinion, as the government used the medium to present public arguments for patriotic behavior. Each poster thus becomes a distinct rhetorical argument for the continuation of the war, and close examination of a poster's imagery and language can reveal the unique persuasive strategies of the wartime governments.

    Albrinck's definition is particularly useful for this poster because she constructs it in relation to "a gendered rhetoric of shame in British war posters"; the "Here he is" poster reveals a parallel rhetoric in American propaganda. The image of a woman shaking Uncle Sam's hand as she leads her male friend/relative to enlist in the navy creates a powerfully gendered rhetoric of obligation and responsibility which targets both male and female viewers. Overtly, the poster places responsibility for enlistment on American women as well as American men; the woman's role as an intermediary in the enlisting process is rewarded with a firm handshake and an avuncular pat on the back from Uncle Sam himself. The text beneath the message ("We need him, and you too!") is explicitly aimed at drawing women into the war effort. 
    This poster also reaches out to male viewers through the aformentioned gendered rhetoric of shame. While the man in the poster is the picture of strapping American masculinity, he is belittled and rendered subservient within the context of the poster; his hat is off, his posture is shifted slightly forward in supplication, and his arm is inextricably bound up in the dominating grip of the female figure, who herself is subservient to Uncle Sam. The artwork and text objectify the male figure, casting him as a commodity which must be herded into patriotic service. And while the female figure recieves a hearty thanks from Uncle Sam, the man in the poster is left out in the cold from the exchange. While the poster seems to be primarily aimed at female viewers, the message for men is clear: enlist now, before you suffer the shame of being dragged to the recruiting office by a more patriotic female relation. 

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The poster “The Greatest Mother in the World” possesses many attributes that fit with James’ portrayal of war posters. For example, it plays to the emotions of the viewer. Motherhood is an emotional topic, one that causes feelings of nostalgia and sentimentality. Calling a Red Cross nurse “the greatest mother in the world” plays to a woman’s sentimental desire to nurture and care for others. This poster also contains what James calls a “Janus-faced image.” The woman portrayed as a loving mother instantly reminds the viewer of the traditional beauty of motherhood, valued so highly during the Victorian Era. At the same time, this poster presents a view of a woman outside of the home, working as a nurse. In “The Greatest Mother in the World,” Victorian and Modern ideas of womanhood meet and mesh together.

I think a poster like this would have greatly appealed to Vera Brittain during the early years of the war. In fact, perhaps a poster like this did influence her to become a war nurse. As we know from her autobiography, she desperately wanted to assist in the war effort and nursing made this possible. However, her experience of nursing was not at all the same as that of the heroic, goddess-like woman portrayed in the poster. This poster is just one example of the glamorization of World War I and how it starkly contrasts with actual experience.

This poster uses both the image of the sword and the words, "Take up the sword of justice", to portray military service as heroic in order to persuade young men to join the military. The sword here is especially important to the audience the poster is appealing to. This poster, aimed at a British audience, uses the sword in order to draw to mind images of England's chivalric past. This iconography, combined with the phrase, "Take up the sword of justice", frames WWI in a heroic light, making the conflict appear to be the sort of heroic struggle found in the tales of King Arthur. This very much the same attitude toward war which Roland is shown to at first believe in, and later become critical of, in Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth."

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This poster appeals to a sense of adventure and victory.  The man in the image is depicted as smiling triumphantly, holding several German helmets.  This image is in the minds of many young men who want to enlist in the military, and plays to their emotions.  It encourages them to join the war effort and prove that they can fight, and in a way prove their worth to whomever they think is watching.  They want the glory of coming home with minor bandaged wounds, a smile on their face and the helmets of their enemies in their hands.  According to this poster, after all, the worst that could have happened would be a scrape on the head or arm, with no permanent damage.  In the world of this image, there are no amputations, no fatal head wounds, and everyone comes home smiling.  It is a bright day in the image, possibly a sunset.  This adds to the feeling of unreality and superiority, being illuminated as though on a pedestal.  I think this kind of poster would have had a strong influence on independent people like Roland, who wanted to earn medals and be recognized as heroes.

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In this English poster, boys are encouraged to enlist for the war effort. The four boys depicted in the poster are all smiling, walking in perfect formation, and look like a big, 8-legged monster. Their bodies seem to blend together into a single conglomeration of uniforms. In contrast to certain posters, like those of Lord Kitchener, which point directly at the viewer, singling him out, this poster makes the viewer imagine himself as part of a unit of other boys just like himself. This takes away from the apprehension he might feel at enlisting by himself, because he will become part of a unit just as soon as he enlists. James writes that "Posters 'should be single, clear, specific' and 'must appeal to the emotions rather than to the intellect' (20). The image of all the enlisted boys walking happily side by side appeals directly to the 'emotions' of the viewer, turning the act of enlistment from a dreaded duty into a fun adventure.

This poster would easily appeal to the spirit of someone like Roland, who was determined to earn medals for his valor. It is easy to see how some young men and boys may have gone to the front expecting the army to be not much more than playing a pretend-war with the other boys in the neighborhood. The most insidious part of the poster is how it directly addresses the fact that boys (not mature men) are being enlisted into the army; it does it so directly, and presents such a positive image to be associated with it, that the viewer may believe that the deployment of boys may not only not be a bad thing, but that it may be a beneficial experience that appeals to a young boy's sense of adventure (as well as his naivete).

Earlier tonight I had to write an email to my dad consoling him about not landing a job that he had been hoping for. I know that this is a part of being a loving family member, and that it was not exactly a calamity that we were dealing with. But it is an uncomfortable position to be in; because I am so much younger than my father, because I have never had to provide for a family, because I lack experience with this particular kind of frustration, because I received the bad news in offhand fashion through a text message and have no idea of his precise feeling about it, because I need to optimistically reassure him regarding a future that I know nothing about, and must sound either naïve or callous in doing so because I spend so much time vocally fretting about my own occupational/financial future. My experience of what it means to love another person largely involves distress at their discomforts and disappointments combined paradoxically with a total insensitivity about confiding mine in them. I’m accustomed to my own anxieties, but totally freaked out by other people’s. The moment when a young man has to learn to comfort his father across the gulf of years and experiences and disappointments is always, I suppose, a difficult one.

All that stuff is the subtext to my terse, inadequate message to my dad, yet it would have felt unnatural for me to spell it out. But not, I would guess, for Vera Brittain in World War I. The tone of her letters to Roland is fascinating and utterly alien to me. We’ve discussed already the way that the invention of the telegraph, and the expectation of prompt replies, may have precipitated the tension which led to the development of the conflict, in much the way that the existence of text messaging gives rise to new social anxieties and misunderstandings. But most texts or emails that we send today are banal and say nothing, qualified as they are by the certainty that we can contact our loved ones and associates at any time. Metaphorically, the prime mode of correspondence has devolved from the letter to the postcard – the kind that says simply “Wish you were here,” with the unwritten reminder: “I still am.” Roland and Vera, in their letters, are charged with the urgent feeling that they must say everything. Yet this doesn’t necessarily make their communications profound, since they so often resort to the breathless clichés of love letter-writing that we expect from romantic novels. The possibility of Roland’s death, the delay between the sending and receiving of a letter, the passion into which war whips them, and their shared inundation in the literary realm, all contribute to give some of the letters, in my view, a quality of stately but empty ritualism: “I can only express the feeling that this deserted house gives me to-night by the world désolée—it was something less passive than depression and more active than loneliness…. I am trying to recall the warmth and strength of your hands as they held mine on the cliff at Lowestoft last night. So essentially You. It is all such a dream. Often as I have come home by the late train I have seen the moonlight shining over the mountains, but it has never looked quite the same as it did to-night…” (190-191). The French, evocation of nature, the ornate metaphors (“I feel as if someone had uprooted my heart to see how it was growing” p. 193), the recourse to “It is all such a dream…” We recognize this type of language. Comparing it to my own correspondences, my first instinct was to write about how the expediency of technology has decayed the passionate openness of war letters. But in fact, there’s something actually cold and impersonal about Vera’s letter as well; it is the language of courtship, not that of human interaction. And when Vera and Roland are together, their interaction is surprisingly awkward and troubled; without the buffer of print and post, the inexpressible, the murky complexities of emotion, become palpable and immediate. The peril of war and the distance – physical, verbal – that it creates between the two changes their relationship fundamentally. They become memories, ideals, archetypes described in other people’s poetry. Vera writes about “the grey and tragic present” (155), suggesting a pervasive deadness which typifies her age. And I’m put in mind of Nietzche, who said “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” The greatest speakers and writers have put the lie to this, but it seems to be sort of true for most of us mere mortals most of the time. The love between Vera and Roland, and the pain of their separation, must have lived fiercely in their hearts, but on the page it seems genericized. Their need to say everything proves as destructive to communication as is our modern custom of saying nothing. I think that their letters testify to the inadequacy of this form of communication to dealing with the reality of war. They suggest that there is a sense in which their own verbal expression has been “submerged” by “the high tide of war” (161); that the language of intimacy, of individualism, has been made another casualty.

As I was reading the assignment for this Thursday, I came across this line on page 236, at the very end of Chapter V Part 7, "....walking up and down the promenade, watching the grey sea tossing rough with white surf-crested waves, and wondering still what kind of crossing he had had or was having."  I found the end of this line, which I have italicized here, to be especially interesting because it made me think of the crossing of the river Styx, which separated the world of the living from the world of the dead in Greek mythology.  As Roland had just died, his soul would therefore be crossing into the afterlife, unbeknownst to Vera at the time, as she waited for his arrival.

I think Brittain chose her words very carefully in this section, and while I merely intend to make an observation, I wanted to see if anyone else noticed anything similar or equally interesting in regards to the deaths of Roland and the other men in Vera's life.

I began reading Testament of Youth from the very beginning page because after reading the Foreward I was hooked.  This is an outstanding recording of the author's pre war and war years during WWI.  I am amazed at the depth of detail she includes, especially conversations had years before.  Of course, that generation used letters to communicate with each other and those precious letters were saved and poured over which were a great source of inspiration and remembrance.

I especially enjoyed reading the trials and tribulations of young Vera in her earnest desire to attend Oxford. This illuminated for me the idea that the war itself was simply a disruption for most of the people at the time who lived in England.  Since there was no conscription at the very outset only a small percentage of people and families were affected.  After many months of tutoring and exams Vera finally reaches her goal to attend Oxford where she enjoys a successful first year.  Since the war had begun that year her attitude changes and we see her change into a more mature pragmatic citizen who wants to help out as a nurse so as to feel closer to Roland who is serving in France.  She realizes that practical experience and physical labor is what she needs then not to be tucked away in an ivory tower.

The War did disrupt her life in many real and awfully sad ways.  She lost almost everyone who meant anything to her especially Roland and Edward.  What terrible tragedy to experience the loss of these two brilliant men which was quite depressing to read.  

At some point in class last week, squirming in shame over my failure to get my shit sufficiently together to accomplish even something as simple as the first assigned blog post, I scribbled a couple lines to myself at the top of my notes, the concluding couplet of a soliloquy which some of my friends will have tired of hearing by now but which endures anyway as the definitive procrastinator’s credo: “I’ll so offend to make offense a skill, redeeming time when men think least I will.” Hal, that most princely hypocrite, is something other than an admirable figure, but he is one with whom I feel a profound – and disquieting – kinship. And it’s not surprising that I would be clinging to these words at this early point in the semester, when I traditionally must struggle with myself not to daff the world – that is, schoolwork – aside and bid it pass. Prince Hal does not mean the same thing when he speaks these words that I perceive when I apply them to my own life, of course. After all, he will do exactly as he professes, and his speech is a revelation of chilly pragmatism rather than an exercise in rationalization. But that is the miracle of Shakespeare: the fact that 16^th century words imagined in the mouth of a 15^th century prince offer the gift of self-understanding to a 21^st century college student. This kind of eternal resonance, this power of language to open avenues of reflection on my own life and perhaps to expand the horizons of my own nature, to help me become a better person by giving words to my faults, is a large part of what I seek in literature, and why I’m an English major. I find it in abundance in Shakespeare, of course. Right now I’m finding it in Dr. Jackson’s class, in The Sound and the Fury, albeit with much intellectual frustration along the way. I find it in countless films, as well (my other major), and admittedly my junkie-like movie-watching habits have much to do with my mediocrity as a student. Though there are worse ways to procrastinate. I’m a kind of student of modernism, which is essentially what drew me to this class. I understand that the trauma of World War I was so shattering that it demanded new forms of literary expression, precipitating much of what we think of as modernism: new ways of conceiving narrative, technology, history, selfhood, memory – and time. Dr. Latham used to say that modernity was about “redeeming time.” Prince Hal had the same idea, and so did the Bible – “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” That was the project of World War I literature, I guess. I still haven’t learned how to redeem my own time, to make the passage of hours and days meaningful. Else I wouldn’t be up at this hour, muddling through this post. I already feel thoroughly embarrassed to submit it, even without having to admit that I’m not quite done playing catch-up in this class (or others) yet. I also know that Lauren will read it and remind me of how pretentious she thinks I am. Oh, well. As an “intellectual introduction,” and a kind of apology, I hope that it will serve okay, for the moment.