Witnesses to war, discourse and community in the correspondence of Vera Brittain, Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor Richardson, 1914-1918

Abstract

Th e correspondence exchanged among Vera Brittain, Edward Brittain, Roland Leighton, Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor Richardson presents a unique opportunity to study the influence of World War 1 on a network of middle-class young people during World War 1. To read Vera Brittain's most famous work, Testament of Youth, without a knowledge of the context of Brittain's war life as part of this close-knit community is to misunderstand the complexity and contradictions of the discourses, voices and attitudes that permeate it.

This dissertation examines the correspondence and diaries contained in the Vera Brittain Archive by using Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of communication as dialogic, exploring strategies of reading, mis-reading, appropriation, assimilation and endurance throughout the stages and events of the War as seen in the correspondence. Additionally, I use Pierre Bourdieu's theory of language to argue that the declaration of war sharpened cultural, social and linguistic pre-war practices, including gender roles, imposing military discourse as the legitimate language with its accompanying ideologies. In turn, I examine exchanged negotiations about the legitimacy of knowledge in wartime, the politicization of mourning, the rapid linguistic transitions and accompanying hypercorrections of wartime discourse, and the role of authoritative texts and the definitions and heroism in enduring the War and its events. I conclude that the wartime correspondence becomes Bakhtin's authoritative text for Brittain, who uses the correspondence as a driving rhetorical device to recreate this wartime community in Testament of Youth, thus legitimating women as war participants, creating a chorus of individuality that condemns the War and war, and responding to the attitudes and values demonstrated in the lost community of the correspondents. Testament of Youth, through its Bakhtinian assimilation of the values of the wartime correspondence, and its partial rejection of the dominant war ideologies, becomes a response to the question that the young men could not answer because they died too soon: "Was the sacrifice of our lives worth the outcome?" Brittain's answer, on their behalf as well as her own, is an unequivocal "No."