Battling the closet : queerness in 1940s British literature

Abstract

In 1940s Britain, the upheaval of gender ‘norms’ during the Second World War destabilised the structures of the heterosexual matrix and generated a wartime climate that was, in many respects, queer. Critics working in the field have demonstrated how the literature from this turbulent decade of British history navigated the wartime definitions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ and the reversion to heterosexual ‘norms’ in the postwar. This thesis examines the queerness of 1940s British literature in its multiple configurations. Approaching the decade through queer theory allows for a more generous, playful, and capacious exploration of the literary engagement with gender, sexuality and desire throughout the 1940s, beyond the restrictive parameters of heterosexuality. To this end, the thesis is divided into three chapters that trace the presence of queerness across the decade from early war through to the postwar. The first chapter concerns ‘masculinity’ and the turn-to-war between 1938-41; it examines how the changing definition of legitimate wartime manhood met with queer resistance in the fictions of Patrick Hamilton and Henry Green. Chapter two takes 1945 and the decadent worlds of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford as its subject, considering how Camp provided war-weary readers with a much-needed dose of queer escapism – alongside the tantalising prospect of deviant desire. The final chapter looks at women’s postwar desires in novels by the two Elizabeths, Bowen and Taylor, analysing how these fictions resist the return of conventional heterosexuality by engaging in alternative queer fantasies of masochism, role-play, and kink. In every chapter, queer desire and pleasure exist in tension with the negativity associated with being queer within a ‘straight’ society; a juxtaposition that is explored throughout the thesis.