Maternal Relations: Moral Manliness and Emotional Survival in Letters Home during the First World War

This chapter in the 2004 edited volume Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History explores the changing historical construction of male subjectivity through an analysis of the compulsion to re-tell experiences of soldiering by a British officer, Lyndall Urwick (1891-1983), fighting in World War I. In Soldier Heroes (1994), Graham Dawson stresses the importance of war stories in the subjective composure of masculinity. A focus on one man’s experience of a single event in the First World War, and how his narration of that event changed in a succession of accounts written between 1914 and the 1970s, shows the significance of soldiering as a culturally vaunted means of narrating a man’s life.