William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 18561890

Ingrid Hanson

Description

Offers a new and challenging reading of William Morris’s work, focusing on his representations of violence and arguing that the idea of regenerative battle is central to his literary and political vision.

‘William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890’ offers a new reading of Morris’s work, foregrounding his commitment to the idea of transformative violence. Hanson argues, contrary to prevailing critical opinion, that Morris’s work demonstrates an enduring commitment to an ideal of violent battle and that combat, both imaginary and actual, is represented as a potentially renewing and generative force in his writings, from the earliest short stories to the late propaganda poems and political romances.

Hanson examines Morris’s imagination of violence as a way of understanding the world and the self. The interactions of combat, work and play, of self-sacrifice and hope, class war and prowess in his writings draw together conflicting cultural narratives about individual and political identity in a way that complicates or reframes their meanings.

Moving chronologically through his works, the book discusses the philosophy and phenomenology of violence by which Morris delineates his ethical and aesthetic positions, as well as examining the ways in which they intersect with those of his contemporaries. It combines close readings of his work with historical and contextual analysis to suggest that Morris’s paradoxical commitment to violence as a means to wholeness shapes the form and style of his works as well as their content and reception.

Acknowledgements; Introduction: Warriors Waiting for the Word; Chapter One: The Early Romances and the Transformative Touch of Violence; Chapter Two: Knightly Women and the Imagination of Battle in ‘The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems ‘; Chapter Three: ‘Sigurd the Volsung’ and the Parameters of Manliness; Chapter Four: Crossing the River of Violence: The Germanic Antiwars and the Uncivilized Uses of Work and Play; Chapter Five: ‘All for the Cause’: Fellowship, Sacrifice and Fruitful War; Afterword: ‘Hopeful Strife and Blameless Peace’; Notes; Bibliography; Index 

Sujets

• Romance

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780857283238
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

William Morris and the Uses
of Violence, 1856–1890William Morris and the Uses
of Violence, 1856–1890
Ingrid HansonAnthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2013
by ANTHEM PRESS
75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Ingrid Hanson 2013
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested.
ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 319 1 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 0 85728 319 7 (Hbk)
Cover image: William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain (Hammersmith:
Kelmscott Press, 1894). © The British Library Board. C.43.f.8, f.152
This title is also available as an eBook.CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction Warriors Waiting for the Word ix
Chapter One The Early Romances and the Transformative
Touch of Violence 1
Chapter Two Knightly Women and the Imagination of Battle in
The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems 31
Chapter Three Sigurd the Volsung and the Parameters of Manliness 65
Chapter Four Crossing the River of Violence: The Germanic
Antiwars and the Uncivilized Uses of Work and Play 97
Chapter Five ‘All for the Cause’: Fellowship, Sacrifice
and Fruitful War 131
Afterword ‘Hopeful Strife and Blameless Peace’ 167
Notes 173
Bibliography 203
Index 223ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Parts of Chapter One have appeared, in an earlier form, in the Review of
English Studies prize essay ‘“The Measured Music of our Meeting Swords”:
William Morris’s Early Romances and the Transformative Touch of Violence’,
Review of English Studies 61 (2010): 435–54; parts of Chapter Two have been
published, in an earlier form, in ‘“Bring me that Kiss”: Incarnation and Truth
in William Morris’s The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems’, English 59 (2010):
349–74. Part of Chapter Five has been published in Reading Historical Fiction:
The Revenant and Remembered Past, edited by Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). I am grateful to the publishers in
each case for permission to reproduce the material here.
Much of the research for this book was facilitated by funding from the
University of Sheffield and sundry research expenses were covered by the
William Morris Society’s Peter Floud Memorial Prize, 2008. I have also
benefited from the intellectual enrichment and specific critiques of many
colleagues and friends who have read parts of this work or discussed it with
me at earlier stages, and to all of them I’m very grateful. Particular thanks are
due to Marcus Waithe for careful reading, generous intellectual support and
incisive comments over the years of my doctoral research and subsequently,
and to Matthew Campbell, Daniel Karlin, Samantha Matthews and Tony
Pinkney for their encouragement and advice at various points. I owe an
enormous debt of gratitude to Richard, Jess and Isaac Hanson, whose love,
support and various senses of humour sustain me always.Introduction
WARRIORS WAITING FOR THE WORD
In an 1896 obituary, the socialist writer Edward Carpenter recalled the last
time he had seen William Morris, at the Paris Congress in 1889. He described
how he watched him, ‘fighting furiously there on the platform with his own
words (he was not feeling well that day), hacking and hewing the stubborn
English phrases out.’ His speeches, Carpenter averred, were ‘a trump of battle’,
and he himself a ‘brusque, hearty, bold and manly form’. He ‘stood up from
the first against the current of ugly, dirty commercialism […] like a captain in
the rout of his men withstanding the torrent of their flight and turning them
1back to the battle’. Walter Crane uses similar metaphors in his ‘Sonnet on
the Death of William Morris’, calling him a ‘skilled craftsman’ in both art and
song, ‘Whose voice by beating seas of hope and strife / Would lift the soul
of Labour from the knife’. The poem laments that Morris should die ‘while
2yet with battle-cries the air is rife’. Both the language of battle and Crane’s
emphasis on the combination of craftsmanship, orality, hope and strife draw
on Morris’s own characteristic language, picking up images and ideas that run
prominently through his writings and shape his personal, political and artistic
vision.
They are ideas clearly articulated in Morris’s poetic Prologue, ‘Socialists at
Play’, written for a gathering of the Socialist League at South Place Institute
in 1885, and recorded by May Morris in her memoir of her father:
War, labour, freedom; noble words are these;
But must we hymn them in our hours of ease?
3We must be men.
In these few lines Morris draws together the important relationships that
I examine in this book. The multiple interactions of war, labour and freedom,
and the idea of the nobility of certain kinds of war and violence are central to
his writings, from the earliest romances to the socialist works of the 1880s and
1890s. The question of what it means to be manly, or as Herbert Sussman puts
it, how a man ‘shapes the possibilities of manliness available to him within his x WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE USES OF VIOLENCE, 1856–1890
cultural moment’ intersects with these ideas, and I will consider the ways in which
Morris’s literary and political constructions of masculinity shape and are shaped
4by his understanding of violence. Morris’s work is representative of his age in its
preoccupation with questions of masculinity, violence and identity in relation to
society as a whole. However, it deals with them in ways that not only complicate
well-established critical views of his work, but also undermine a simply stratified
reading of political or artistic movements in the second half of the nineteenth
century. His work tracks a trajectory in national life by its consistent, deliberate
opposition to prevailing social, cultural and political narratives, but in order to
oppose those narratives it draws on them and sometimes echoes them closely.
This book suggests a way of rereading Morris but also, in doing so, gestures
towards ways of rereading the breadth, complexity and range of uses of the
idea of battle violence in Victorian literature and culture.
As J. Carter Wood points out, ‘while we may always have violence, we do not
5always have the same violence: its meanings are continually fluctuating.’ This dual
emphasis on the continuities of violence and the constructed nature of its meanings
is an important one in the chapters that follow: I argue that the violence in Morris’s
writings reads, reflects, distorts and participates in discourses of violence and war
that are historically contextualized but draw on the mythical and transhistorical.
While the Victorian period has sometimes been seen as one which, as John Peck
puts it, ‘seemed to ignore the existence of war’, at least until the 1880s, this book
contributes to a growing body of work discussing, instead, the ways in which ideas
of war and combat (different though these may be) as foundational elements of
national and individual identity run through the literature and culture of the period.
Morris’s writings contribute to complex and conflicting understandings of violence
and combat, identity and change across the second half of the nineteenth century,
from the representations of chivalry in Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting to the
6adventuring wars of fin-de-siècle romances.
The Prologue goes on to urge its audience of socialists to join together in
singing the ‘Marseillaise’, ‘that glorious strain that long ago foretold / The
hope now multiplied a thousand-fold’ (626), highlighting, in the invocation
of this song, the importance of the poetic rendering of the battles of the past
and the potential for their ideological uses in the present. Finally, it calls up
two pairings that are central to Morris’s lexicon: work and play, which are
often synonymous or complementary, but certainly not set in opposition to
one another; and strife and peace, the latter consistently framed as the fruit
of the former. Together they form an image of the life of the ‘warrior’ Morris
presents to his listeners:
So through our play, as in our work, we see
The strife that is, the Peace that is to be. WARRIORS WAITING FOR THE WORD xi
We are as warriors waiting for the word
That breaks the truce and calls upon the sword:
Gay is their life and merry men they are,
But all about them savours of the war.
How far the image of ‘warriors waiting for the word’ is simply figurative, and
how far it might cross over into personal or political reality, and what this
might mean, is of c