Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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The Politics of Commemoration: Britain and D-Day, 1984-1994
Get PDFCommemorations are about the present more than the past, as they reveal how different groups of people believed historical events should be understood within their own modern context. Both Margaret Thatcher in 1984 and John Major in 1994 were aware of the complicated political implications of British commemorations of D-Day. While Thatcher managed the potential international diplomatic traps that were thrust upon her in 1984, Major’s intentional efforts to use public festivities to boost domestic political support in1994 were far less successful
The Second World War Archives of the Institut Français du Royaume Uni, London
Get PDFLondon was the first capital city of Free France, the French external resistance movement led by Charles de Gaulle. This city also hosted a dynamic French community and since 1910 a French Institute. This piece reviews the Second World War archives held at the French Institute, with a focus on the documents of its then director, Denis Saurat, who was one of the first London French to rally to de Gaulle. However, by 1942 Saurat had become a leading anti-Gaullist and the French Institute archives allow scholars to add nuance to the history of Free France and wartime Britain
Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Monologue of a Faun’: A New Translation
Get PDFThe poem which eventually became L’Après-midi d’un faune was first conceived as a short play or intermezzo. ‘Le Faune, intermède héroïque’, written in the summer of 1865, was to have comprised three scenes: the ‘Monologue d’un faune’ (translated here), followed by a scene of dialogue between the two nymphs, Iané and Ianthé, and a final monologue, ‘Le Réveil du faune’, spoken by the Faun after his siesta. In a letter of June 1865, Stéphane Mallarmé mentions that the work is still in progress and nearing 400 lines long. Only around 200 lines of this material survives. The dialogue scene, and the Faun’s reawakening, exist only as heavily corrected and incomplete rough drafts. The Monologue is preserved in a much later fair copy, dating from 1873 or 1874, with the dedication ‘(copié pour le tyrannique Burty, par) – Stéphane Mallarmé’. Philippe Burty (1830–1890) was a French art critic, a supporter of the Impressionists and an advocate of Japanese art. The text of this fair copy cannot be identical with that of the lost original of 1865. The surviving fragments show that the three scenes would have been linked metrically. The Monologue was to have ended with the incomplete line ‘Adieu, femmes’ – the line being completed, and the rhyme fulfilled, by the opening words of Iané in the dialogue scene which followed
Letter to the Editors: Salomé Doesn’t Dance
Get PDFIn my essay on Alla Nazimova’s Salomé published in Volupté 2.2 (Winter 2019), I comment on the lack of camera movement in the film and make this observation: ‘Salomé was shot in January and February 1922, and it would not be until 1924 that Hollywood directors, most likely after coming under the influence of F. W. Murnau and other German directors, began to experiment with camera movement’. The source for the information about Murnau’s influence is Patrick Keating, The Dynamic Frame: Camera Movement in Classical Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), pp. 6, 292 n.3. The claim that Hollywood directors did not employ the moving camera or, more precisely, the mobile frame until 1924 is accurate as far as it goes but additional context is required. Recently, I finally made it all the way through D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) – not an easy film to watch – and saw that Griffith had his cinematographer mount a camera on some kind of motorized vehicle, probably the back of a truck, to film the ‘heroic’ members of the Ku Klux Klan riding at full gallop to rescue the fainting damsel Elsie Stoneman (Lilian Gish) from the clutches of the villainous mulatto Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), then saving a group of white southerners trapped in a cabin being attacked by a ruthless band of black soldiers. The camera is driven ahead of the charging Klansmen who are kept in frame because the speed of the vehicle matches the speed of the horses. This example could be multiplied many times to show that, indeed, filmmakers employed the mobile frame well before 1924
Halfway Home – The Rehabilitation of New Zealand Second World War POWs in Britain
Get PDFWhile suffering through monotony and deprivations, New Zealand Second World War POWs mentally escaped their confines by imagining their eventual return home. They envisaged returning to a world free from the woes of captivity and war. This paper examines their rehabilitation in Britain. While Britain was not New Zealand, the prisoners expected it to conform to their idealised version of home. However, this paper argues prisoners experienced difficulties during their rehabilitation, and they were destabilised when confronted with the continued presence of the war and captivity. 
Rachilde’s La Tour d’amour (1899): A Translated Extract
Get PDFRachilde’s La Tour d’amour tells a story of loneliness, guilt, and sexual obsession set in the perilous world of a lighthouse off the Brittany coast, creating a gripping psychological drama. Although this novel stands among Rachilde’s finest work, it remains relatively little-known and has never been translated into English. Rachilde, who was born Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1953), published the story in 1899. At this time, she was already well-known in Parisian literary circles as the author of several novels exploring non-conformist, fetishist, or obsessive sexuality, usually from the starting-point of a female protagonist. These early novels include those for which Rachilde is now best remembered, such as Monsieur Vénus (1884), in which a French noblewoman rejects her aristocratic male suitor in favour of a poor man whom she transforms into a ‘wife’, a culturally feminine figure, and La Marquise de Sade (1887), whose sadist female protagonist takes revenge on men for injustices she suffered as a child. These women, and those in many of Rachilde’s novels of the 1880s and 1890s, seek escape through unusual or cruel sexual behaviour from the identity and sexuality that society imposes on them. In this sense, La Tour d’amour is different: its protagonist is a young man, and he is drawn into a world of depravity rather than creating his own depravity in order to escape from the bonds of conventional society. This difference sets it apart and could perhaps explain why the novel is frequently omitted from accounts of Rachilde’s oeuvre, despite its quality
Tears of blood: War and Grief at the End of the 15th and the Beginning of the 16th Centuries
Get PDFContrary to what traditional historiography asserts, the expression of emotions was not absent from the narrative and literary sources that provide information on the condition of men of war at the turning point of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While the art of war underwent unexpected metamorphoses, tears manifested mourning and sadness, but also compassion, joy or anger. They demonstrated the changing sensitivity to death, to the necessary commemoration of officers of high birth, as well as to the more humble laments linked to the disappearance of a parent, a comrade-in-arms, or even a beloved animal. A symptom of a real emotional wounds, grief also sometimes lead to murderous fury and revenge. Tears then come along with emotions considered as an objective parameter of war
Primitive Passions and Nostalgia for Nature: Decadence and Primitivism in Maria Jotuni’s Work
Get PDFAn allegorical short story entitled ‘Luonto ja ihminen’ [‘Nature and Man’] (1905) by Maria Jotuni (née Haggrén, 1880-1943) depicts the ruin of the ancient union between Man and his beloved Nature. One day Man, who is wandering in the forest of life, is led towards a mysterious, misty bog. Intoxicated by the tranquillizing scent of the bog, Man encounters Culture, in the shape of a seductive femme fatale. When Man and Nature later reunite, ‘Hän oli väsynyt – silmäin kirkas kiilto himmennyt – ja pää oli painunut maata kohti’ [the Man was tired, the bright shining of his eyes was fading – and his gaze was lowered towards the ground]. Man admits his error and asks to return together with Nature again. She refuses and, shocked by the betrayal of Man, Nature freezes to death: ‘Ja tuli talvi ja peitti Luonnon kääreliinoihinsa’ [And then winter came and covered Nature with its shroud]
