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"For You May Touch Them Not": Misogyny, Homosexuality, and the Ethics of Passivity in First World War Poetry Author(s): James S. Campbell Source: ELH, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Fall, 1997), pp. 823-842 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030241 Accessed: 03-11-2016 00:37 UTC

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"FOR YOU MAY TOUCH THEM NOT":

MISOGYNY, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND THE ETHICS OF PASSIVITY IN FIRST WORLD WAR POETRY

BY JAMES S. CAMPBELL

One cannot be a good soldier and a good poet at the same time.

Siegfried Sassoon'

Perhaps, on the other hand, all these allusions to the ontological differences between the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and the feminine were the attribute of every human being. Could this be the meaning of the enigmatic verse of Genesis 1.27: "male and female created He them"?

Emmanuel Levinas2

Wilfred Owen's famous unfinished preface for his proposed first book of verse identifies his objective in writing war poems as ethical rather than aesthetic, describing it in terms of "pity": "Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.-"" Owen claims a certain moral value for passivity, so much so that Yeats's disapproval of such passivity formed the basis of his exclusion of Owen-and trench poetry in general-from the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Yet while Owen makes claims for passivity in the face of the technological destruction and mass death that had rendered nineteenth-century aesthetics inadequate, his poetry and its pity simultaneously engage in a bitterly misogynist polemic.4 When taking First World War poetry on its own terms, this misogyny has been easy to excuse, as women were by definition non-combatants and thus part of the complacent masses perpetuating the war through their lack of imagination. Those lacking in imagination form Owen's and Sassoon's putative audience, the sleeping masses that their poems were calculated to shock into consciousness. However, I do not want to take the poetry on its own terms. Instead, I propose two lines of questioning. First, I want to investigate Owen's and Sassoon's version of ethical passivity, comparing it to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, a thinker who

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also writes of ethics and passivity but from a perspective that I want to characterize, for purposes of comparison, as anti-humanist.5 Second, I want to question the ethics of the trench poets' essentialist assignment of passivity to the feminine in view of recent biographical research on Owen's and Sassoon's homosexuality and of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's examination of the different and contradictory ways homosexuality is figured in the twentieth century. Throughout the essay, I wish to join a philosophical and a grounded cultural concern in an investigation of gendered ethics.

Owen and Sassoon found themselves enmeshed in constructions of

gender that eventually discredit femininity as a moral force. Their understanding of their own homosexuality encouraged them to self- identify as essentially feminine beings with masculine bodies. Yet having appropriated the passivity that was integral to their poetic mission, they then denied this righteous, essentially feminine passivity to the women whom it formerly described. In fact, once they had appropriated this essentially defined femininity, it compounded the misogyny of their position, as it took redeeming characteristics traditionally assigned to women and reassigned them to the trench poets themselves. I want to question the ethics of such a move. Thus against the trench poets' version of an ethics of passivity based on the choice of a free human subject, someone who can elect to become passive and still retain a marked resentment toward those who do not so choose, I want to position Levinas's conception of ethics as a passivity beyond the di- chotomy of passive and active. Although I will ultimately question the gendered nature of some of Levinas's own explanations, I find his conception of ethics, as an asymmetrical relation between the same and the other, one that opens many possibilities in literary criticism. For Levinas, the other puts me into question-even accuses me-and thus makes the ethical situation unavoidable whenever we do not assume the

self-contained ego as subject. I am passive before the other, but this is a particular kind of passivity, which I will take up momentarily.

Passivity also assumes a particular meaning in the humanist ethics of Owen and Sassoon. Although passivity may well be the preferred moral state for the trench poets, it also carries with it an unbearable and paradoxical burden of simultaneous responsibility and resentment. The trench poet has passivity thrust upon him; though he may make a virtue of that necessity, the seared conscience of the conscientious objector remains, resenting his powerlessness, desiring to lash out against the non-combatants responsible for his untenable position, and embracing the duty to kill the enemy, despite their status as fellow sufferers. Thus

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if the trench poet embraces passivity, he does so hypocritically, by alternating his passivity with active violence. Passivity is simultaneously the highest ethical state and a bitterly resented yoke.

In a way (but a way that I will later qualify), if we take Levinas's exploration of the ethical seriously, having passivity thrust upon the subject without that subject's will is the condition that makes ethics possible; such a quandary is unavoidable in the sense that a passive responsibility for the other precedes any decision on the part of the subject as to whether to accept such a responsibility. Or, to use Levinas's more usual rendering, I am responsible for the other before I have any choice in the matter. Thus, because it is not a matter of choice, because

I do not will it, such responsibility is passive-more passive even than what we normally consider as the passivity that opposes activity. I am responsible for the other; the other persecutes me, holds me hostage. This condition, that I and only I can be responsible for the other, that I cannot demand such responsibility of any other, is the condition that defines me as a subject. Subjectivity is thus not defined by the will of a self-identified ego, but as the result of an always already established ethical condition of subjection and even persecution. This is a self "forgetful of itself .. . in this self, outside of essence, one is in a deathlike passivity! But in responsibility for the other for life and death, the adjectives unconditional, undeclinable, absolute take on meaning.""6

The trench poets' situation bears much in common with Levinasian responsibility: "To be oneself, the state of being a hostage, is always to have one degree of responsibility more, the responsibility for the responsibility of the other."' Such is the position of the trench poet or, more properly, his condition makes this condition more apparent. The officer poet takes on the persecutions of his men, suffering for them and being their hostage even as he takes responsibility for their pain and death, and above all remaining passive in such a condition. "This passivity deserves the epithet of complete or absolute only if the persecuted one is liable to answer for the persecutor," writes Levinas.s Such is indeed the case for the officer poet, who is responsible both for and to his men and their suffering. "Obsessed with responsibilities which did not arise in decisions taken by a subject 'contemplating freely,' consequently accused in its innocence, subjectivity in itself is being thrown back on oneself. This means concretely: accused of what the others do or suffer, or responsibility for what they do or suffer."'

This condition is part of the Levinasian idea of substitution, the substitution of me for the other. When I am responsible for the persecution of the other, in both the sense that I am responsible for the

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other's suffering, and I am responsible for my own suffering as a result of the persecution that the other inflicts on me, then I substitute myself for the other. Is this not the condition of the officer poet? Is this not what it means to be a lieu-tenant-to stand in the place of an other? The place that the lieutenant holds, substituting for another, is indeed the place of ethics; this explains the foregrounding of ethics, of passivity, of pity, and of suffering in the officer poets' texts.

However, there is a sense in which the passivity beyond passivity that is outlined by Levinas is not synonymous with the passivity as highest moral state as found in the poetry of Owen and Sassoon. For Levinas, as I mentioned above, passivity is not a choice, not a decision that can be deliberated over by a freely acting humanist subject: "Responsibility for another is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom, in which a commitment to another would have been made. I have not done anything and I have always been under accusation-persecuted."111 But the trench lyricists' passivity does not posit such a subject; rather, both Owen and Sassoon choose, consciously and freely, to take up this burden of passivity. I mean this in both the literal and biographical sense in that they not only volunteered for military service, but also chose to return to combat, resulting in wounds (Sassoon) and death (Owen) when each had a fairly good chance of spending the rest of the war on home service. I also mean this in the sense that both Sassoon and Owen saw their passivity, not necessarily as a choice that they had freely made, but as an onus (albeit a highly moral one) which had been thrust upon them because others had the option to remain active. In other words, even if they had little personal choice, their passivity was still a condition to which a self- identical humanist ego found itself subjected. Inasmuch as their passiv- ity partook of ethical passivity, of substitution, of persecution borne for the other, it was the highest moral state, but insofar as it was a foreign condition actively inflicted upon them by an outside force, not con- ceived of but necessarily respected as an other, passivity became the most abasing and ignominious of conditions.

In order to clarify this point, lets us characterize the Levinasian conception of alterity as radically asymmetrical in that the same is called into question by the other while the reverse is never true. We cannot say that the same calls the other into question, for the same does not have the right, or even the option to do so. Likewise, the trench poem's construction of alterity is asymmetrical, but it reverses the terms. In many ways, the officer trench poet-that is to say the same, the writer, the subject-calls into question the other, especially (but not always)

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when that other is particularized as non-combatant. The poet controls the moral high ground, thus negating Levinasian ethical alterity. Yet ultimately the poetry's implied ethics are more complicated. The trench poem operates under both asymmetries at once: it wants to plead the case of the passive other through the voice of the passive poet, but it also resents this passivity because it assumes a humanist subject who can choose whether or not to take responsibility for the other.

The other in the trench poem is often gendered, which brings us to address Owen's and Sassoon's views of sexual difference. Since the

publication of Siegfried Sassoon's Diaries in 1983 and Dominic Hibberd's Owen the Poet in 1986, most scholarship on either poet has at least mentioned their homosexuality." Nonetheless, with the notable excep- tion of Adrian Caesar's Taking It Like a Man, none of the subsequent scholars foregrounds the effects of sexuality on the trench lyricists' texts. Instead, they offer an understanding, liberal admission that Sassoon and Owen were homosexual, then go on with their work. They question neither what it means to refer to someone as homosexual, nor how this

should affect our reading of the texts. In taking up these issues, I want to demonstrate how the trench poets found themselves in an epistemo- logical bind in which sexual difference itself became a battleground.

In order to establish the stakes in the trench poem's erotics, I turn to

Epistemology of the Closet, in which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies two different and contradictory ways in which homosexuality can mean. Sedgwick holds that much of Western culture in our century has held these contradictory views simultaneously: "Enduringly since at least the turn of the century, there have presided two contradictory tropes of gender through which same-sex desire could be understood.""12 One trope, that of inversion, identifies the homosexual (of either gender) as a borderline subject who combines characteristics usually associated with the opposite. The other trope, gender separatism, assigns to the homosexual the role of paragon of his or her own particular gender. The homosexual male is thus the most masculine of men, without the desire

to cross the boundaries of gender that the competing trope assumes. Moreover, Sedgwick demonstrates that either of these tropes continues to work whether we assume that homosexuality is an in-born biological state or a culturally created situation (itself a dichotomy in which our culture embraces both views).

Owen and Sassoon were also caught within this contradiction of tropes. Both were influenced by Edward Carpenter's theories of homo- sexuality which, as we can discern from the title of his primary text on the subject, "The Intermediate Sex," fall decidedly within the gender

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inversion trope. For Carpenter, the homosexual, or Intermediate (also Uranian or Urning, after the heavenly, spiritual nature of such love), results from an intermixture of the body of one sex with the psyche of the other. The male Intermediate's mind is thus essentially feminine, in that it works primarily through intuition and instinct, thus fitting well with Romantic conceptions of the Poet. Although the extreme male Intermediate demonstrates an extreme, which is to say feminine, passivity, "clinging, dependent and jealous, as of one desiring to be loved almost more than to love," "the more normal type of the Uranian man ... while possessing thoroughly masculine powers of mind and body, combines with them the tenderer and more emotional soul-nature of the woman."'3 The attachments of these normal Intermediates are often

more spiritual than sensual, representative of "the love sentiment in one of its most perfect forms."'4 Moreover, as might be expected of one so endowed, the male Intermediate contains within himself "the artist-

nature, with the artist's sensibility and perception."'5 Not coincidentally, Carpenter was perhaps most famous for acting as an English apologist for that most Intermediate of American poets, Walt Whitman. Clearly for him the male Uranian combination was uniquely suited to the call of poetry; such views were immensely influential on the young Sassoon and Owen.'"

As might be expected, Carpenter holds that Intermediate men have considerable sympathy with women. They demonstrate "a singular appreciation and understanding of the emotional needs and destinies of the other sex.""7 Contrary to this view, however, Sassoon and Owen were both admittedly misogynist in their personal lives. For instance, Sassoon's diary entry for Christmas Eve 1916 avows that women are "outside my philosophy" (D, 106), and he later accuses them of hypocritically loving war despite "all their lamenting over the sons and lovers" (D, 121), while Owen, writing to his mother from France before the war, states that "All women, without exception, annoy me" (L, 234). This is not the sort of fellow feeling we might expect from feminine souls in men's bodies."18 Nor, for that matter, is volunteering for the exclusively masculine army behavior indicative of a wholehearted belief in the gender inversion trope. Indeed, Sassoon's and Owen's homosexualities have a hyper- masculine, anti-feminine quality to them that sets well with the gender separatism trope. As I will explore momentarily, this factor has a major impact on their poetry. But first, I will further explore how sexual difference becomes such a contested area during the First World War.

Elaine Showalter has developed an important idea first introduced by Eric Leed: that shell-shock is a combat-induced masculine version of

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hysteria, a heretofore feminine psychological affliction.'9 Moreover, the extent of war neurosis among combatants in the First World War is a direct result of a tension between the offensive personality which the Western European military commands attempted to instill in their troops and the defensive personality required to survive the reality of trench warfare.2" "The dominance of long-ranged artillery, the machine gun, and barbed wire had immobilized combat, and immediately necessitated a passive stance of the soldier before the forces of mechanized slaughter.""' This enforced passivity, this powerlessness in the face of danger when the accepted form of conduct was the aggressively masculine attack, produced the masculine hysterical symp- toms that came to be known, erroneously, as shell-shock. As Showalter puts it, "when all signs of physical fear were judged as weakness and where alternatives to combat-pacifism, conscientious objection, deser- tion, even suicide-were viewed as unmanly, men were silenced and immobilized and forced, like women, to express their conflicts through the body.""22 Sassoon and Owen met while in Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh; both were undergoing treatment for shell-shock.23

Sandra Gilbert claims that many men involved in the First World War, including most combatants, resented what they perceived as women's ability and desire to take advantage of their loss.24 The First World War represented a great opportunity for women in society, in the

work force, and in culture generally, according to Gilbert.5 The absence of men allowed women unprecedented freedom, while it simulta- neously deprived combatant men of their former masculine preroga- tives, such as job choice, physical well-being, virility, and life. Thus many men came to blame women not only for taking advantage of men's predicament, but of somehow inflicting the damage themselves. Gilbert thus explains the misogyny of much war and post-war men's literature, citing Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End trilogy and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as examples. The officer's trench poem, especially the poetry of Sassoon and Owen, is also marked by an obvious misogyny, which fits in well with Gilbert's construction of the war's effect on

conceptions of gender. I contend that combatant men resented and blamed non-combatant

women because the men had a passive role thrust upon them. This remains the case even if such blame defies available cultural data; indeed, if the First World War did not actually aid the cause of women's emancipation, then the men's resentment of women points out the psychological and irrational basis of the combatants' complaints. As I have already stated, the trench poem is a poetry of passivity. In this it

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finds its justification: passivity is the ethical high ground. Yet passivity is also untenable: the responsibility for both inflicting and articulating the suffering of his men often becomes more than the officer-poet can bear. The result is active violence against the enemy (both Sassoon and Owen were decorated war heroes) and verbal violence against the non- combatants. Moreover, some of the most direct attacks against non- combatants are aimed specifically at women. For women are the exemplars of passivity. When the war forces men to be passive, it forces them to be womanly.

It is important to keep Sassoon's and Owen's sexuality in mind here. I do not mean the mere fact that they were homosexual for, more than the identity politics of heterosexual versus homosexual, it is vital to consider the epistemological bind created by contradictory gender identity tropes of homosexuality as exacerbating the poets' impossible situation. Not only were they caught between the irreconcilable conditions of poet and officer, passive and active, but also between the two available figurations of homosexuality: the gender inversion theory of Carpenter and the gender separatism of hyper-masculinity. Moreover, all three dichotomies are intimately related. The active role is that of the military hero, the killer who takes pride in his violent work. There is no direct relation of this attitude in the poetry (although it is present in Owen's letters and Sassoon's diaries) because poetry itself is defined as passive and therefore the proper medium through which to express ethical passivity. Poetry is also artistic, therefore feminine; in Carpenter's definition of the Interme- diate as a female psyche in a male body, the attraction to art is a product of the feminine nature. By this scheme, then, poetry is related to passivity is related to femininity, a combination that fits rather well with Edwardian preconceptions (if we allow poetry to mean the approximate opposite of rational, empirical discourse). On the other hand, military violence is related to activity is related to masculinity. Again, no surprises.

The difficulty occurs when trying to combine these dichotomies within one person. "War poet" becomes a logical contradiction. Evi- dence of this bind can be found in Sassoon's diary. In the early war (4 April 1916) he seeks out death for the sake of poetry: "If I get shot it will be rotten for some people at home, but I am bound to get it in the neck sometime, so why not make a creditable show, and let people see that poets can fight as well as anybody else?"(D, 53); on 15 June 1918: "I am beginning to realize the difficulties of combining the functions of soldier and poet" (D, 270). The mind-set that considers passivity at once the supreme ethical blessing and an unbearable curse likewise considers its own configuration of essential femininity/passivity as ethically ambigu-

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ous. Inasmuch as Sassoon and Owen see themselves as members of an

intermediate sex, their role as pleaders, protectors, and poets is secure and logical. But insofar as they are soldiers, feminine weakness and passivity is the antithesis of military heroism. Trench soldiers are forced into passivity, which is to say the feminine role. They are, as presented by the officer-poet, powerless but uncomplaining. But the trench poet must throw off this passivity and actively accuse in order to articulate. He resents femininity as he resents passivity, in spite of his claims of its ethical superiority. At once gender inverter and gender separatist, he simultaneously embraces his own role as mother and lover of his men and castigates the very women from whom he appropriates his role. Ethics thus becomes for the trench lyricist a kind of zero-sum game in which gaining passivity for men necessarily and mathematically elimi- nates the possibility that women could retain it. Once he has appropri- ated passivity from women and they have lost their ethical importance, he can no longer accept them as Others in Levinas's sense.

In order to demonstrate this gender bind, I will now turn to several trench poems. Sassoon's most overtly misogynist poems are the products of his stay at Craiglockhart War Hospital, that period of passivity when he lacked enlisted men to order and protect, and his meditations on war and aggression were medically sanctioned. The first, "Glory of Women," accuses women of romanticizing the war, of uncritically mouthing the vapid jingoism of Victorian imperialism."6 The speaker declares:

You love us when we're heroes home on leave, Or wounded in a mentionable place. You worship decorations; you believe That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace. You make us shells. You listen with delight, By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. You crown our distant ardours while we fight, And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.

You can't believe that British troops "retire" When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses-blind with blood.

O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Sassoon manages to launch a remarkable number of salvoes at his targets. The women evoked here are blind supporters of militarism and the principal audience for stories of heroism. Significantly, they assist the war effort, if not exactly passively, then at least without direct experience of combat, by working in munitions. And, perhaps most importantly, the

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first two lines, when read in the context of women's excitement at being the passive recipients of tales of bravely aggressive deeds, point toward Sassoon's primary objection to women. Sassoon's diary makes it clear that he associates women with a lustful and dirty sexuality: "Do not the women gloat secretly over the wounds of their lovers? Is there anything inwardly noble in savage sex instincts?" (D, 175).27 The "fond thrill" is a sexually charged one. Hence the stipulation of "wounded in a mentionable place": not only because genital wounds are not fit subjects for mixed company, but also because they rob the soldier of the source of his attraction to those savage feminine instincts. Castrated soldiers would be feminized soldiers, and women, according to Sassoon, want their soldiers potent, whole, and heroic, which is to say, masculine. Only the officer trench poet understands that the men are really essentially passive. Rather than outdoing the foe in puissant feats of arms, they eschew violence, retreat, and damage only an already dead and supine enemy.

A similar point is made in Owen's "Disabled" (C, 175-77). In this case, a young man returns crippled from war to find himself a sexual outcast. The under-aged soldier had joined the army to satisfy his masculine vanity and to impress the local girls ("Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts, / That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg, / Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts / He asked to join"). Now that he is severely wounded, however, the girls' "subtle hands . . . touch him like some queer disease," while their "eyes / Passed from him to the strong men that were whole." His wounds, moreover, have a strongly sexual dimension to them. He has lost, along with an arm, both of his legs, in a maiming that has drained him of virility: "And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race / And leap of purple spurted from his thigh." "Thigh" may well be a mentionable word for an unmentionable wound, an impres- sion underlined by the rather masculine orgasmic diction of "hot race, "leap" and "spurted." Again we have a castrated soldier championed by the officer trench poet even as he is rejected by women and their savage sex instincts. Left with passivity and femininity that women refuse to share, he sits and waits for his attendants.

Of Sassoon's poems, two require further, if brief, comment. "Return of the Heroes" (W, 146) portrays women watching a post-Armistice parade, admiring the generals' uniforms and imagining that the men "must feel sad to know they can't win anymore / Great victories!" Sassoon mocks women for their misunderstanding of what the end of the war means to combatants.28 "Their Frailty" (W, 101) accuses "mothers and wives and sweethearts" of ignoring the plight of soldiers in general as long as their particular man is safe. Implicit within such an accusation

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is a comparison of the love of women to the love of the officer-poet. The latter loves all his men, irrespective of their identities, for their suffering and passivity. Women, on the other hand, love men individually and thus cannot fully understand the extent of suffering in the trenches.

The love of officer for men is the central theme of two of Owen's

most famous, and most misogynist, poems, "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo" (C, 124-25) and "Greater Love" (C, 166-67). The former rejects heterosexual love in favor of the comradeship between men at arms:

I have made fellowships- Untold of happy lovers in old song. For love is not the binding of fair lips With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,

By Joy, whose ribbon slips,- But wound with war's hard wire whose stakes are strong; Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips; Knit in the webbing of the rifle-thong.

The masculine camaraderie of war produces a love surpassing all others, a theme made more overt in the next poem we will take up. Yet, lest we mistake his intent, Owen qualifies the above in the final stanzas of the poem, perhaps the most eloquent and succinct articulation of combat elitism to come out of the war:

Nevertheless, except you share With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell, Whose world is but the trembling of a flare And heaven but as a highway for a shell,

You shall not hear their mirth: You shall not come to think them well content

By any jest of mine. These men are worth Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.

Women, of course, cannot by definition "share the sorrowful dark of hell." They must perforce remain outside of this love, relegated to the heterosexually erotic, the secondary.

Much the same can be said of "Greater Love." It is more directly an attack on women specifically, as it is addressed to a fictive female lover whose charms cannot compete with the sacrificial, Christ-like, passive and thus, by the terms of my argument, feminine, attractions of combatant men.

Red lips are not so red As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

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Kindness of wooed and wooer

Seems shame to their love pure. O Love, your eyes lose lure

When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

We are approaching Sassoon's attitude here, although couched in Owen's more distinctive style. The sexual desire of women for active men is "shame," while the passive love of those who lay down their lives for their friends is "pure." And I do not think that we can doubt that the "wooed and wooer" are female and male, respectively, passive and active. Wooing, the active and encouraged pursuit of women by men, is blasphemy to the sacrificial love of passive men for one another.

Owen continues in a vein reminiscent of the erotics of "Disabled":

Your slender attitude

Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed, Rolling and rolling there Where God seems not to care; Till the fierce love they bear

Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude.

Here is Sassoon's attitude pushed to its furthest extreme, logical or not. Death in combat, specifically the passive (skewed by whom?) death of a man, is purer than sexual desire between the genders. The orgasmic "fierce love" of a dying soldier penetrated by a bayonet is morally preferable to feminine desire. For, as much as "war poet," should not "feminine desire" also constitute an oxymoron? The feminine, as passivity, should not have active desire, for such would be an essentially masculine attribute.

Finally, as in his letters and "At a Calvary Near the Ancre" (C, 134), Owen links the passive love of soldiers to that of Christ's Passion:

And though your hand be pale, Pale are all which trail

Your cross through flame and hail: Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

Your cross: the non-combatant's, but specifically the woman's cross. As in "Apologia," the soldier's passive death is a sacrifice for the sake of others, and those others are given no chance to escape their unworthi- ness. This noli me tangere is an accusation, and "touch," of course, can be read several ways: you may not go physically near them, you may not emotionally affect them, you may not legitimately desire them sexually. In any case, this sacrificial death is an erotically charged one (as are the deaths in "I saw his round mouth's crimson," "S. I. W.," and the final

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stanza of "The Last Laugh" [C, 123, 160-61, 168]) in which young men are sacrificed for the (sexual) sins of women. Furthermore, all of this

blaming of women for the deaths of young men greatly confuses the trench poets' appropriation of such feminine attributes as poetic plead- ing and passivity.

The trench poet takes on such passivity/femininity yet, as I have said before, he also resents it. He rejects women for thriving on the masculine aggression that perpetuates the war. He pleads the soldier, not as a traditional hero, but as feminized, passive victim. His version of the soldier is too passive and feminine for women, or at least for women as he sees them. Only the trench poet himself, with his combatant experience and poetic sensibility, can truly appreciate it. But he cannot fully participate in it for, on the one hand, he is still an officer and thus one who kills and leads others in killing; on the other hand, as a poet, he must compromise his passivity enough to plead, even to protest. But not to protest the war. To protest what, then? The passivity of his troops, the suffering they must silently bear, their feminization. His theme, their victimage, their castration, is what allows him to speak out, to write the trench poem. Herein lies the epistemological bind: the officer trench poet resents the very state that he pleads even as this state allows him the articulation that is the trench poem.

Perhaps the best example of this bind is Sassoon's "The Hero" (W, 49). At first glance, this is another one of Sassoon's ironic moralisms:

"Jack fell as he'd have wished," the Mother said, And folded up the letter that she'd read. "The Colonel writes so nicely." Something broke In the tired voice that quavered to a choke. She half looked up. "We mothers are so proud Of our dead soldiers." Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out. He'd told the poor old dear some gallant lies That she would nourish all her days, no doubt. For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy, Because he'd been so brave, her glorious boy.

He thought how "Jack," cold-footed, useless swine, Had panicked down the trench that night the mine Went up at Wicked Corner; how he'd tried To get sent home, and how, at last, he'd died, Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care

Except that lonely woman with white hair.

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Read in a more or less traditional manner, that is to say in the context of war poetry criticism that stresses realism, witness, and protest, the poem is fairly straightforward and in line with the majority of Sassoon's bitter satires. It presents a woman, exempt by the irrefutable conditions of gender and age from any kind of war service, who maintains her irresponsible and dangerous assumptions about the glory of war and thus consoles herself for her son's death. If the combatant masculine

figures in the poem, the Colonel and the Brother Officer, purposefully shield her from the reality of the situation, this is less deceit than a realization of the supposed limitations of civilian empathy. If only those who have experienced the trenches can understand them, there is little point in an attempt to educate this ignorant old woman. She is incapable of comprehending the truth, so she and her generation are given an elegy in every sense consolatory.

But Owen's Preface states, immediately after "The Poetry is in the pity," "Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory" (C, 535). The ostensible raison d'?tre for the trench poem is to educate a willfully ignorant civilian populace about the suffering of innocents. This poem does that, yet in a very strange way. Because we have access to the Brother Officer's thoughts, we know the extent of his lie, but the lonely old woman within the poem is left to her ignorance by the only initiates who could enlighten her. Like Conrad's Marlow with the Intended, the male figure lies to a woman after averring his hatred of lies. He chooses to allow, even to actively maintain, the feminine ignorance that he bemoans. It is possible that Sassoon's spokesman feels pressured by the military authority represented in the Colonel's letter to support its facade. After all, high ranking, rear-echelon officers such as colonels are rarely objects of much sympathy in Sassoon's work. Yet I think there is more than that operating here.

We find remarkably little of the much vaunted pity for the innocent sufferers within this poem. Instead, the enlightened know that "Jack" is a bad soldier and thus deserves no sympathy. And I think that the hatred of Jack in the poem, so vehement that "at last" in line sixteen sounds almost like a sigh of relief, is due primarily to his being, not merely a bad soldier, but a bad officer. The term "Brother Officer" itself is ironic, but

not because Sassoon questions the sacred fraternal bond between comrades. Rather, Jack has betrayed this bond by being a poor officer. An inept enlisted man who tried to get sent home would never have to bear the brunt of this barbed attack. It is Jack's status as a junior officer, a potential trench poet who pleads his own case instead of his men's,

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that makes him such a target. This is the irony behind his mother's believing him a hero.

And what of the bereaved old woman, Jack's only mourner? What does this reading have to say about her? The poem certainly asks us to blame her for her ignorance, her pride on behalf of all mothers for their dead soldiers, as if there were no reason to have pride in the ones who yet lived. But, without a rather detailed Freudian work-up, the Mother does not easily fit into Sassoon's condemnations of feminine sexual instincts. Her evaluation of Jack, unlike the Brother Officer's, remains based on a familial relationship. As in "Their Frailty," women, whether mothers, wives, or sweethearts, are concerned only with their own particular men. They, unlike the trench poet, have not sufficient compassion to embrace the men as a totality.

Thus the gender bind becomes complete. Men, or more specifically junior officer trench poets, take upon themselves the compassion for men that had previously been the milieu of women, leaving women to care only for the heroic lies, not the men behind them. As a poet, Sassoon appropriates the compassionate passivity formerly preserved for women, leaving them only the passivity of complacency. As an officer, however, his contempt for women is matched by his contempt for other junior officers who do not measure up according to military standards of active masculinity. Thus the trench poet can hate the passive while embracing it: he divides passivity into a moral, poetic, and all-compassionate province, and a correspondent immoral, cant-filled, complacent version. Doing so allows him to have his passivity and hate it too, the only price being the extreme misogyny that follows from associating the latter type of passivity exclusively with the feminine.

Of course in such a move the relation between "the" feminine and

passivity is assumed rather than proved or even, for that matter, investigated. Women are passive because it is their nature to be so. As Luce Irigaray puts it, the woman in such a scheme remains "passive within the field of activity of a subject who wills himself to be the sole master of desire."29 Here and elsewhere, she interrogates the sexual assumptions of the latter part of Levinas's Totality and Infinity."° Levinas constructs love as the concern of "the lover" for a Beloved or,

more specifically "I'Ainm qui est Aimde,"31 which Alphonso Lingis translates as "the Loved, who is the Beloved" losing the implied gender of the terms. "L'Airne" is masculine, along with "l'anant," while "l'Aimde" is feminine. Thus the lover, always masculine, concerns himself with the loved who by being loved (passive voice) becomes feminine-from

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l'Aimd to l'Aimde. Levinas thus preserves the essential passivity of femininity, maintaining the masculine as the active position and the feminine as the passive receiver: "to define the loving couple as a male lover and a beloved woman already assigns them to a polarity that deprives the female lover of her love."32 And that "female lover," as opposed to the beloved woman, is "amante," a word entirely foreign to polarizing conceptions of Eros.

Irigaray's objection to Levinas' terms are based on his own primary concern of ethics: "Beloved woman. Not female lover. Necessarily an object, not a subject with a relation, like his, to time.""33 Such terms remove the feminine other from ethics by objectifying her, removing her alterity.

She divests herself of her own will to love in order to become what

is required for his exercise of will. Which assigns her to the place of nonwilling in his ethics. Her fall into the identity of the beloved one cancels out any real giving of the self and makes her into a thing, or something other than the woman that she needs to be.:14

The amant thus destroys the aimne's status as an other without which, in Levinasian terms, there can be no ethics.

This analysis marks the end of my erotics of the trench poem. Although apparently so exclusively masculine, I hope I have shown to what extent sexual difference lies at the heart of such concerns as

passivity and suffering, concerns that in turn lie at the heart of the trench poem. The trench lyric's appropriation of feminine passivity begs the question of whether the feminine is essentially passive. By keeping the passive stereotype of the aimde intact and thus denying the active and feminine anante, the trench poet denies on a heterosexual level the very ethics he preserves on a homosexual one. He can maintain his own ethical stance as a pleader of passivity by appropriating the amant- ainmde dichotomy, leaving no room for an arnante, a feminine lover. Or, more properly, if a trace of the amante remains, the trench poet assigns it to feminine "savage sex instincts." The feminine must remain essen- tially passive, for only then can the trench poet differentiate himself from the lethal masculine aggression of the old warriors who slaughter their sons. On the other hand, once that feminine passivity has been usurped, a logical bind results. By the logic of the essential identifica- tion, passive woman cannot be an amante; however, now that she has lost her passive pity, her role as aimde becomes radically qualified. Men suffer, men plead for that suffering-women enjoy its fruits.

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Let us turn once more, briefly, to Owen:

She sleeps on soft, last breaths; but no ghost looms Out of the stillness of her palace wall, Her wall of boys on boys and dooms on dooms.

She dreams of golden gardens and sweet glooms, Not marveling why her roses never fall Nor what red mouths were torn to make their blooms.

The shades keep down which well might roam her hall. Quiet their blood lies in her crimson rooms And she is not afraid of their footfall.

They move not from her tapestries, their pall, Nor pace her terraces, their hecatombs, Lest aught she be disturbed, or grieved at all.

This is "The Kind Ghosts" (C, 181), one of Owen's more obscure poems, in its entirety. John Stallworthy's editor's gloss offers some textual evidence for assuming the woman in the poem to be Britannia, but whatever her identity, she is undoubtedly female and undoubtedly protected, even isolated, both by and from masculine mass death. "She" rests, even retires, on the deaths of men, young men specifically, young dead bodies heaped in close physical (erotic?) proximity: "boys on boys." She lives in a cloister of young masculine flesh, not even realizing the deaths that sustain her, even her roses feeding on boys' blood. The sexuality of the image, irrespective of any political allegory, clarifies the misogyny of the trench poem. Woman's complacent passivity is enabled, even created, out of masculine suffering, and most men retain the moral passivity to allow women their illusion. No ghosts haunt this woman, for they are kind even in their death.

But the trench poet in pointing out their kindness compromises his own. She should be haunted, obviously enough, according to Owen. If the ghosts are too kind to place blame, the poet is not. He will hate her, even if her victims remain compassionate in their passivity. So he betrays the ethical by accusing the other, the feminine other who is the ainme, not the amante.

Ethics remains, I contend, at the heart of the trench poem. The claims of Sassoon and Owen are nothing if not ethically based and justify the phrase "the Poetry is in the pity." But their unquestioned assignment of passivity to femininity, even after having appropriated passivity to their cause, qualifies such pity by denying it to female Others. That they claimed passivity for men is in itself remarkable and goes a long way

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towards explaining, I think, Yeats's overly defensive objection. Never- theless, having claimed it for men, they wished to make the claim exclusive. They did not wish to say that only men could sustain passivity, but that only men could be ethical. As Irigaray puts it, "What would men and women have in common? Both conception and perception. Both. And without any hierarchy between the two. Both would have the capacity to perceive and conceive. To suffer and to be active."33 To both suffer and be active is precisely what the trench poem's construction of passivity will not allow to either sex, but only to itself.

University of Central Florida

NOTES

1 Sassoon, Diaries 1915-1918 (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 271. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text and abbreviated D.

2 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, tr. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1985), 68-69. 3 Complete Poems and Fragments, ed. John Stallworthy, 2 vols. (London: Chatto and

Windus, Hogarth Press and Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), 535. Hereafter cited parentheti- cally and abbreviated C. Copyright 1963 Chatto and Windus Ltd. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

' In a letter to his mother written from hospital, Owen addresses moral passivity in these terms: "I am more and more Christian as I walk the unchristian ways of Christendom. Already I have comprehended a light which will never filter into the dogma of any national church: namely that one of Christ's essential commands was: Passivity at any price! Suffer dishonour and disgrace; but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed; but do not kill" (Collected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967], 461. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text and abbreviated L).

5 The question of Levinas's relation to humanism and what he calls "modern anti- humanism," which centers largely on a differentiation between the subject and the ego, is explored in "Humanism and An-archy" and "No Identity" (Collected Philosophical Papers, tr. Alphonso Lingis, Phaenomenologica 100 [Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987], 127-39, 141-51).

6 Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 115, 124.

7 Levinas, Otherwise, 117. 8 Levinas, Otherwise, 111. 9 Levinas, Otherwise, 112. 10 Levinas, Otherwise, 114.

11 Douglas Kerr accepts a homosexual community as one of the Bakhtinian social discourses, or voices, which he analyzes (Wilfred Owen's Voices: Language and Community [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993]), while Sassoon's homosexuality is a background to Sanford Sternlicht's Siegfried Sassoon (Twayne's English Author Series 500 [New York: Twayne, 1993]), and Patrick Quinn's The Great War and the Missing Muse: The Early Writings of Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon (Selinsgrove:

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Susquehanna Univ. Press, 1994). Moreover, Sassoon's sexuality is also a matter of concern in Pat Barker's trilogy of novels, Regeneration (London: Viking, 1991), The Eye in the Door (New York: Dutton, 1994), and The Ghost Road (New York: Dutton, 1995),

all of which center on W. H. R. Rivers, Sassoon's shell-shock psychologist, also portrayed as homosexual. Two exceptions to this trend, both less thoroughly researched texts than those cited above, are Kenneth Simcox's Wilfred Owen: Anthem for a Doomed Youth (London: Woburn Press, 1987) and Merryn Williams's Wilfred Owen (Border Lines Series [Bridgend: Seren-Poetry Wales Press, 1993]). Both resentfully deny sufficient evidence to assert such a contention; both, I think, continue to regard the assertion as an accusation (Simcox, 21-22; Williams, 20).

12 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 87.

13 Carpenter, "The Intermediate Sex" in Love's Coining-of-Age: A Series of Papers on the Relations of the Sexes (New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1911), 133, 135.

14 Carpenter, 136. 15 Carpenter, 135.

"6 See Caesar's Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality, and the War Poets: Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Graves ([Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1993], 65-77, 161) for Carpenter's influence on the poets named.

17 Carpenter, 137.

18 Carpenter himself, however, though an ardent feminist and supporter of equal rights for women, was capable of a similar wholesale rejection of the sex. (See Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Hoinosocial Desire [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985], 212-17 for a brief overview of his attitudes.)

19 See Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830- 1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

20 Leed, No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).

2' Leed, 164, emphasis mine. 22 Showalter, Female, 171.

23 Sassoon's psychologist during this time was W. H. R. Rivers, who is the focus not only of Barker's recent novels, but also Showalter's chapter on the First World War ("Male Hysteria: W. H. R. Rivers and the Lessons of Shell Shock," Female, 167-94), as well as an article more specifically devoted to Sassoon ("Rivers and Sassoon: The Inscription of Male Gender Anxieties" in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987], 61-69). Both Showalter and Caesar (87-94) are much less sympathetic to Rivers's wartime psychological projects, including his treatment of Sassoon, than is Barker.

24 Gilbert and Sandra Gubar, Sexchanges, vol. 2 of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Centuryj (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press), 1989.

25 In "The Asylums of Antaeus: Women, War and Madness: Is There a Feminist Fetishism?" (The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory, ed. Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker [Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989]), Jane Marcus violently disagrees with Gilbert's argument as expressed in the article version of "Soldier's Heart" (published in Signs in 1983), claiming that Gilbert misrepresents women's history at the time of the First World War and that the war, instead of strengthening women's social position, "in fact wiped out women's culture" (54). Although I think much of Marcus's

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article is right, Gilbert's point that men may have felt themselves victimized by women, despite the cultural data, remains valid. It is this point which is germane to my argument.

26 Sassoon, The War Poems, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber and Faber: 1983), 100. Hereafter cited parenthetically and abbreviated W. "Glory of Women," and "The Hero," from Collected Poems5 of Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon. Copyright 1918, 1920 by E. P. Dutton. Copyright 1936, 1946, 1947, 1948 by Siegfried Sassoon. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin USA. All other works reprinted by permission of George Sassoon.

27 Sassoon's diary also stresses the cleanliness and purity of his own desires and actions, as opposed to those of his heterosexual officer peers: they spend their leaves in lusting after unclean female whores while he pursues music, conversation, and poetry. Writing of himself in the third person, he states "At any rate his body was strong and healthy; he wouldn't be 'fading away' to the Venereal Hospital like so many of the 'reinforcements,' unlucky victims of a 'last night on the town' before 'going out"' (D, 136).

28 A similar theme operates in "'Blighters"' and "Supreme Sacrifice" (W, 68, 81), both of which specifically target women in their anti-civilian polemic.

29 Irigaray, "The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, and 'Phenomenology of Eros'" in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, tr. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), 185-217.

30 For another critique in a similar vein see Irigaray's "Questions to Emmanuel Levinas" in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991). For an excellent overview of Levinas's treatment of femininity, see Tina Chanter's "Antigone's Dilemma" in the same collection.

31 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 256. 32 Irigaray, Ethics, 205. 33 Irigaray, Ethics, 194. 34 Irigaray, Ethics, 198. 35 Irigaray, Ethics, 93.

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