Getting the Frame into the Picture: Wells, West, and the Mid-War Novel (2012)

Through/Behind the WindowIt's one of the most iconic images of the Great War: two women support each other as they stare out a window, a child beside them, clinging. Outside, rolling hills, lushly green, and the end of a uniformed troop of soldiers, marching out of the frame: the caption is Women of Britain Say- 'GO!' Created by the artist E. V. Kealey for the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee 1915, the poster spawned imitations during the war itself, and has since become one of the most frequently cited visual texts academic disputes about the significance and effect of Great War (Figure 1).Yet whether we deem such posters, as Jay Winter's view, part of a grammar of consent that reflected existing and powerful consensus (38,42), or see them as rhetorics of shame and coercion (Albrinck 323), we cannot help but acknowledge the way which viewers are implicated the poster's perspective. As viewers, we stand behind the women, in the interior space; the window frames our glimpse of the marching column. But the poster also makes available a species of double vision-one rarely acknowledged analyses of its significance as part of the gendered regime of Great War discourse. If the framing within the poster delineates, as Meg Albrinck has suggested, gendered spaces and behaviors-locating the viewer a noncombatant posture from which she will or will not assent to (and he be shamed by) the caption's exhortation-the double framing by window and poster's edge, the framing of the act of framing-simultaneously exposes these processes. Far than other gendered exhortations (Daddy, what did YOU do the Great War? and the like), Women of Britain Say-'GO!' operates as a self-conscious media artifact, commenting on the very construction of the viewer that it performs.In its employment of and attention to the animating tropes of gendered propaganda, the poster thus implies two different reading practices, two different models for negotiation between the individual and the apparatus of manipulation-one that involves assent or disputation within the formal and ideological frame, and the other that resists (as far as possible) such by exposure of its terms. If, as Mark Wollaeger has argued, the unprecedented British apparatus of the Great War helped precipitate a crisis of information control to which modernist form multiply represents both symptom and response,1 Women of Britain Say-'GO!' demonstrates such multiple negotiations already at work during the war itself.The poster's tension between what one might call a diegetic, integrative relation to the message (engaging it within the frame) and an extradiegetic, metacritical one (engaging with the act of framing)2 fact reflects and illuminates the intertextual relations between two important wartime novels, H. G. Wells's Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916) and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918). Though both novels are deeply concerned with limning the pervasiveness of propaganda, both and unofficial, on the home front, Wells treats it as overt subject, measuring it through the disillusion of his protagonist, whose sloganeering must be revised by circumstance-yet he himself both reproduces without comment many gendered tropes, and structures the conclusion of his novel such a way as to keep its revelations strictly, as it were, within the frame. West, by perhaps deliberate contrast, slips both acknowledged and unacknowledged imagery from wartime into the consciousness of her unreliable narrator to expose the broader operations of what Wollaeger, using Jacques Ellul's term, calls integration propaganda.As Wollaeger explains, includes not just the state manifestations of official war culture,3 but also more diffusely constellated organizations and institutions, such as advertising, public relations, and popular films, whose interactions effectively reinforce political propaganda (9). …