Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Twentieth-Century British Fiction (review)

Through detailed and carefully balanced analysis, Judy Suh maps the various ways writers of the 1930s to the 1960s engaged with the rise and fall of fascism in Britain. Her introduction highlights the distinctiveness of the British historical and political context from that of continental Europe, and throughout her discussion she makes connections between the different phases and the specific turning points in the development of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), examining literary engagements with the BUF’s attempts to represent itself as a popular national movement attuned to the changing social situation in relation to class and gender. Offering a corrective to the more typical critical focus on the impact of fascism on the work of male high modernists, Suh’s study takes primarily middlebrow women writers as its focus. This decision not only enables an exploration of the different attractions and repulsions fascism offered to “would-be feminists and domestic women” alike but also simultaneously posits middlebrow fiction as an apt political vehicle for the articulation of “the anti-revolutionary face of fascism” in which fascism “attempts to cast itself as an ordinary and natural outgrowth of modern British culture” (pp. 8, 5, 1). Drawing productively on a range of theoretical and philosophical ideas, Suh convincingly argues that middlebrow “novelists’ revivals of long literary traditions,” their employment of familiar genres and domestic settings, and the “special quality of topicality” attributed to this fiction create a key site for “mak[ing] visible British fascism’s consensus-building mechanisms” and for staging both overt and more subtle attacks as well as pro-fascist perspectives (p. 10).

Wyndham Lewis is the only male novelist discussed in detail, and as with all the novels considered here, his The Revenge for Love (1937) is read alongside the fluctuating responses to and contradictory strategies of British fascism. In the context of what was perceived by many as a polarized and “seemingly inevitable choice” between communism and fascism, Lewis’s novel advocates sympathy for fascism as a “contradictory means of achieving peace” (pp. 15, 18). Although the novel seems to privilege women’s domestic training and love as a form of “political intelligence,” fascist misogyny ultimately surfaces through the satirical attack on its heroine (p. 19). More radical in terms of voicing working-class views than Lewis’s novel, Olive Hawks’s What Hope for Green Street (1945) “explicitly defends fascism as a politics that prioritizes the interests of modern British women” (p. 45). Ultimately, however, this novel also dismisses an active political role for women as it advocates marriage and unpaid domestic labor as “the best route for female authority” and as the only viable option for women to contribute to the British nation in accordance with “the bio-political values” that underlie British fascism (pp. 51, 59). Suh’s analysis tellingly reveals the rhetorical and political strategies at work in this novel in which “fascist propaganda” is “overla[id]” (and made more palatable) by “a set of familiar British cultural and literary codes” (p. 54).

In contrast, political activist and best-selling novelist Phyllis Bottome employs middlebrow literary strategies, particularly romance and rural settings, to powerfully expose and criticize fascism’s anti-Semitism, misogyny, violence, elitism, and atavistic irrationality and psychological pathology. Bottome’s The Mortal Storm (1937) was made into a Hollywood film in 1940 and, unlike the novels of Lewis and Hawks, asserts liberal bourgeois “private families and individualism as the best defenses against fascism” (p. 77). Bottome privileges the family over the state but similarly opens up debate about masculinity and authority in the patriarchal family, insisting that women have both a valid domestic and public role, thus usefully reconciling the divergent strands of interwar feminism. Her wartime fiction also privileges a more open concept of family articulated through “the ‘open house’ narrative” common in much women’s writing of this period (p. 83). With their emphasis on “‘hospitality, tolerance and community,’” such narratives work to counter familial...