Feminism, Pacifism and the Ethics of War: The Politics and Poetics of Alice Meynell's War Verse

Feminism, Pacifism and the Ethics of War: The Politics and Poetics of Alice Meynell's War Verse Sharon Smulders University of Lethbridge ALICE MEYNELL "differed from most of the advanced artists of the period," said G. K. Chesterton, "in the detail that she was facing the other way, and advancing in the opposite direction."r Paraphrasing Coventry Patmore, he called her "a Radical in her opinions and a Tory in her tastes."2 Ever the master of felicitous paradox, Chesterton identifies the astonishing conflux of apparently contradictory forces that distinguishes Meynell from her peers, both poetic conventionalists and modern experimentalists. Her radicalism compasses her feminism and, until the Great War, her pacifism. On the other hand, her toryism manifests itself in a relatively traditional approach to matters of religious faith and poetic form. The tensions that result are nowhere more apparent than in such avowedly political lyrics as "Parentage" and "A Father of Women." Of these two poems, "A Father of Women" represents the fullest expression of Meynell's political convictions. The product of mature reflection, it marks a return after twenty years to the problem of women and war first addressed in "Parentage," privately printed in Other Poems (1896) and published in Later Poems (1902). War in these lyrics not only describes national conflicts, but provides a matrix for Meynell's exploration of the sexual politics and generational dynamics of patriarchy. By 1914, however, she had submitted her radicalism to revision and so severed the connection between feminism and pacifism which lends 'Parentage" its power.3 Although World War I compelled her to resign her pacifism, it nevertheless revitalized her feminism. Thus, whereas the earlier poem offers a rather unsentimental apology for women's powerless complicity in imperial objectives and policies, "A Father of Women" yields the prospect, somewhat ironically, of women's accession to power as the logical consequence of war. Exami159 ELT 36:2 1993 nation of these two lyrics furnishes insight into the changes in Meynell's attitude toward war and the impact of these changes upon the development of her political consciousness during the early twentieth century. Her mediation of complex ideological constraints in these poems also sheds light upon her refinement of conventional poetic strategies to deal with the moral and aesthetic problems occasioned by modern warfare. No less strange and powerful for their admission of an ethical basis for war, her mature lyrics in both A Father of Women and Other Poems (1917) and Last Poems (1923) register a horror of martial conflict; but they refrain from overt condemnation of militarism, relying instead on the consolations of Christian belief to alleviate loss. Converting loss to gain in "A Father of Women, "Meynell uses the rhetoric of war to ennoble women's struggle for enfranchisement, political as well as aesthetic, and to persuade men of their moral obligation to acknowledge women's rights. In this way, she seeks to advance beyond the unresolved dilemma of 'Parentage." I Precisely because it advances in an opposing manner, "Parentage" has puzzled, sometimes estranged, the most sympathetic critics. For example , although Agnes Repplier approves of Meynell as "too essentially modern for ... vain retrospects," she yet betrays some consternation at the poem's unpatriotic disdain for the finer ends of war.4 "That strange pacifist poem," she writes, "exalts the childless man, the barren woman, over those stronger, simpler mortals whose sons go down to the sea in ships, or hold their country's gates against the oppressor. Dulce et decorum est pro patria morÃ-." 5 If the poem perplexed Repplier in 1923, it utterly mystified earlier readers who had as yet experienced neither the Great War nor even the Boer War. After reading Other Poems, George Meredith confessed, "all passes into my blood except Parentage '."6 Dismissing the poem as "a musical Diversion in pessimistic Pathos," he concluded, "It is not the voice of her soul."7 Meredith, admiring her essays on behalf of women, addressed Meynell often as Portia and once as the "pencilling Mama:—/The mother with the ready smile,/Who wages warrior fight the while." 8 He failed, however, to see that his Portia exhibits in this compressed lyric the same warrior spirit animating her...