Abstract
Death, as Lucy Noakes argues, matters. Nowhere is this truer than in a wartime democracy, where public consent – so vital to the democratic state's ability to wage war – depends upon citizens’ ability to accept and cope with death. The study of death, grief, and war is by no means novel; notably, Jay Winter's classic work on the intersection of these themes with the Great War is now over 25 years old. Until now, however, there had been no such dedicated study of grief and death in Second World War Britain. Noakes’ meticulously researched and incisively written book thus addresses a longstanding lacuna.
The term ‘emotional economy’, deployed to convey the value of certain emotions within society and the labour entailed in their expression, is key to this work. The first three chapters of Dying for the Nation trace the emergence of an emotional economy which valued stoicism and self-restraint, outlining its development from the mid-nineteenth century up until 1939. For Noakes, understanding grief and bereavement in the 1940s requires us to examine first the proliferation of new rituals and commemorative practices after the Great War, and the promotion of emotional self-management during the interwar period.
Chapters four to seven are largely dedicated to the question of how Britons coped with the threat – or actuality – of death during the war itself. In chapter four, Noakes highlights the importance of both traditional religion and heterodox belief systems (such as spiritualism) for those who sought to manage their emotional responses to death. As Noakes goes on to show in chapter five, civilians and combatants alike faced a loss of control over their own bodies during wartime as they became vulnerable to violent, and often seemingly random, death. Belief functioned alongside the emotional economy, helping Britons to cope by allowing them to retain a sense of agency in spite of this loss of bodily autonomy.
Chapters six and seven turn to the aftermath of death: the processes of burying and grieving. The state was keenly aware of the impact that mass death could have on morale if the bodies of the dead and the emotions of the bereaved were not appropriately managed. If bodies were seen to be treated reverently by the state and interred in a manner which reflected their emotional value to the bereaved, then they could act as symbols of unity and sacrifice. However, if this mark was missed, bodies could not be imbued with such symbolic significance, and the emotional control of the bereaved could be threatened.
The state's careful approach to the dead was one way in which unrestrained grief, and its feared effects on morale, were managed. Also highlighted, however, is the role of various cultural texts – including films, novels, and magazine advice columns – in this process. These texts framed grief as inappropriate in a nation at war, and provided model examples of bereavement which emphasized self-management and a continued commitment to the war effort. Here, as elsewhere, Noakes is sensitive to the nuances of such discourses. We are reminded that grief, and the attempts to manage it, were classed, gendered, and subject to regional variances. Whilst the cultural texts cited by Noakes indicate the pervasiveness of stoicism and restraint as emotional ideals, it is made clear that such ideals were constantly contested and renegotiated by contemporaries, rather than blindly followed. Moreover, whilst Noakes draws on a wide array of sources in order to demonstrate the various levels at which the wartime emotional economy operated, we are never left in doubt as to the centrality of the individual. Grief may have been shaped by larger social forces, but this did not make it any less keenly or personally felt.
Finally, chapter eight offers an insight into the post-war legacies of death and bereavement. As Noakes shows here, wartime emotional codes continued to shape the testimony of those who lived, and the commemoration of those who died, far beyond 1945. Just as uncontrolled grief had been constructed as a danger to the war effort, so now was it presented as a threat to the nascent processes of reconstruction. Indeed, one of the greatest strengths of this book lies in its insistence that the demarcations traditionally used to carve up the twentieth century – First World War, interwar, Second World War, and post-war – falter when pursuing a history such as this. Grief ‘refused to be contained by political chronologies’ (p. 266), living on in the aftermath of conflicts, whilst also, simultaneously, being shaped by those that were yet to occur.
Readers seeking to find references to specific themes in Dying for the Nation may find the somewhat sparse index lacking for this task. However, Noakes’ holistic approach makes this a book which merits being read through it its entirety. There is much here to interest scholars working on death and grief, and conceptions of selfhood or citizenship, as well as those working more generally on social, cultural, and emotional histories of modern warfare. At the current moment, as many individuals and communities continue to grapple with the ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic, others may also find Noakes’ poignant history of what it means to live through periods of crisis and mass bereavement well worth a read.