Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 12

(To see Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 in this series, click on the links.)

Doing fathering at a distance, and re-creating ‘home’ in words

In this post I’ll share my first thoughts about the letter from my great grandfather to my grandfather that I reproduced in the last post.

There are many aspects of this letter that are reminiscent of the first letter in the sequence. The structure is very similar, beginning with apparently trivial practical matters (‘I received your letter yesterday acknowledging the Undershirt’) and a complaint about Arthur not coming home on leave, but moving quite quickly into spiritual exhortation, then returning briefly to practicalities before a final blessing and signing off. As before, the spiritual life is represented as a constant battle against temptation, a battle that requires persistence, courage and hard work.

Just as in his first letter, Charles Robb makes frequent use of what look like direct quotations from scripture and hymns to reinforce his fatherly Christian advice: this is reflected in the use of capitals in the middle of sentences, suggesting that these phrases have been ‘lifted’ from elsewhere. At one point, towards the end of the letter, it’s as if the writer actually breaks into song, reproducing lines from a familiar Methodist hymn (‘Shun evil companions. Bad Language Disdain’). It’s as though Charles is trying to re-create the familiar world of church for his distant son, in an effort to keep him on the right, Christian track.

However, there’s a sense of crisis pervading this letter, and this marks it out as different in tone and mood from the first example in the series. In that first letter, the unity of Christian and military vocations appeared to be accomplished quite quickly and easily. Here, the final resolution is similar – the letter ends with a familiar identification between serving ‘King and Country’ and serving Christ – but it seems much harder won, and takes much more time and effort to achieve.

A tension has opened up, for the writer of the letter, between his son’s military and spiritual callings, and he is patently beginning to wonder whether his son’s soldierly mission might actually undermine, rather than strengthen, his Christian vocation. (It can be argued that this is the perpetual struggle of the Nonconformist, seeking acceptance by an Establishment whose values s/he suspects are, at the end of the day, inimical to his/her own. A certain kind of Marxist analysis would suggest that the ‘respectable’ working-class conservative – a description that certainly fits my great grandfather – is caught in a similar bind.) A mood of anxiety pervades Charles’ references to the reputation of Arthur’s regiment, and to those familiar ‘sins’ (to puritanical Methodist eyes) of drinking and gambling.  My great grandfather tries a number of gambits to bring his son into line and remind him of his Christian commitment.

First he uses the strategy of referring to the impact on Arthur’s family, urging him to avoid temptation ‘not only for your sake but for my sake and all your Brothers and Sisters.’ This emotional blackmail is reinforced later on when Charles slips in the information that he himself has ‘not been at all well’ and that his life at home has been ‘quiet and lonesome’. Then he reminds Arthur that there is a ‘Higher Sake’ to consider and that he also owes a debt to Jesus for his salvation of sinners.

As well as the imminent threat of spiritual backsliding, this later letter is also shot through with an irritable, testy tone that is absent from the earlier letter. Charles is only halfway through the first sentence when he starts to express disapproval of Arthur’s failure to come home on leave, and to suggest that all is not well with his son’s behaviour: ‘it does not appear to be altogether as it should be with you’.

The whole letter highlights for me the difficulty of ‘doing fathering’ at a distance, especially when you perceive that your own values – the values which you hope you have inculcated in your child – are at variance with those of the world with which s/he is now engaged. Charles tacitly admits in this letter that the influence of Arthur’s peers, who are with him every day, may be more powerful than that of his geographically remote father and family.

Charles’ strategy for dealing with this difficulty is, as I’ve suggested, to ‘make present’ to Arthur, through his writing, the world of home and the values and way of life that it represents. The mini-sermon in the middle of the letter, complete with its scriptural quotations and almost audible hymn extract, attempt to dramatically reconstruct the familiar routines and values of church, Sunday school and Scouts that Charles referred to in his first letter. And the appeals to family feeling, including the reminder to Arthur to write to his convalescing sister Carrie, widen this re-presentation to include the world of home and family. Even the apparently trivial mention of the undershirt right at the outset can be seen as part of this strategy: its very physical presence, as an object sent from home, making it a tangible token of that familiar world.

Charles opens his letter with an irritable question as to why his son hasn’t been allowed home on leave. The letter itself can be seen as a response to that absence: if Arthur won’t come home, then Charles will bring ‘home’ to Arthur through his writing, in the hope that its re-creation in words will be powerful enough to overcome the influence of the seemingly sinful environment into which he has fallen.

Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 11

(To see Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 in this series, click on the links.)

A later letter

Having used my great grandfather’s first letter to his soldier son as the basis for the first few posts in this series, I want to move on to discuss a later letter in the series, and the way it both reinforces features I’ve already highlighted, and at the same time raises some quite different issues.

The letter I’ve chosen as a focus is the fifth in the sequence of eight letters from Charles Edward Robb to Arthur Ernest Robb. It was sent on 6th February 1916 from the same address as before (50 Rosebery Avenue) to the same destination (Corunna Barracks, Aldershot). I’ll discuss the letter in detail in the next post, and I’ll use the remaining space in this post to reproduce the letter itself. Once again, I’ve tried to be faithful to the original spelling, punctuation and formatting:

My Dear Arthur

I received your letter yesterday acknowledging the Undershirt but was rather surprised to hear that you were not coming for the week end. I do not know under what rule or regulation the passes are given in your section but I do hear that in most sections they are allowed by the Officer in Charge to a certain number of the best behaved and most attentive to duty during the week

If this is the case in your section it does not appear to be altogether as it should be with you otherwise I am sure that you would have been able to obtain leave by this time.

I have been making enquiries from two or three who are able to inform me about the Fusiliers and they have made me almost to wish that you had not joined in that Regt.

Dear Arthur do take some advice from me, before you left home I begged of you not to associate yourself with bad companions Remember you are an abstainer from all alcoholic drinks. Stick to the Temperance whatever it may cost you, likewise avoid in every way card playing or gambling   betting and every means of dishonesty. I have not the least doubt that you will often find it rather difficult to avoid some or all of these Temptations. If the comrades with whom you are placed are mostly used to these things then not only for your sake but for my sake and all your Brothers and Sisters. There is still a Higher Sake for you to consider. Do try and Remember that you have always been taught the Supreme Great Truth that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners and that all through Him might be saved. Again I beg of you Arthur do not be led into following these awful Soul destroying habits. I am very much afraid that you have not at all times enough courage to say No when you are surrounded by Temptation You must Pray and Pray sincerely and earnestly and keep a Watchful eye wide open so that you can clearly see there is Temptation and do not be in the least afraid to meet it and Resist. Not alone in your own strength but keep your memory clear that God is Omnipresent always near you, always ready to hear your Prayer, always willing and anxious to Help you to persist. So I beg of you Arthur not to be negligent with Prayerfulness and Watchfulness. You are not praying alone. I have promised that I will always Pray for you, that promise is to me a Solemn Vow to God so when you find you feel weak Let God know all about it and remember that I too am praying for you.

If you cannot think of words at the moment that you feel depressed try and call to mind some Hymn verse that you know like this Shun evil companions. Bad             Language Disdain – God’s Name hold in Reverence. Nor take it in Vain. Be             thoughtful and earnest. Kind hearted and true

Look ever to Jesus. He will carry you through.

In your letter you asked me for Carrie’s address I hope that you will write to her as I have sent her a letter and told that you are going to write The address is

Miss C.E.Robb

c/o Miss Chapple

“Glenesk’

Beer

S. Devon

You are asking me for a Photo. I have not got one just now to send you I hope you will be patient for a little while till we know that you are likely to be sent away. By that time I will try and have one taken especially for you

In conclusion I must tell you this is Sunday evening and I have not been able to attend the Hall or any of the meetings as I am not at all well and am resting all day. It is very quiet and lonesome by myself but I must stand it till about the 26^th when I expect that Carrie will be home again. Now Arthur I beg you to read this letter and give it all the consideration you can and Do your very best to make a True Soldier not only for your King and Country but try and enrich your Loyalty by Faithfulness and whole Heartedness in your Service to God and His Son Jesus Christ who Loves you –

From your ever anxious

And Loving Father

Charles Edward xx

Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 10

(To see Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 in this series, click on the links.)

A digression on ‘faith’

In this post I want to step aside from the business of analysing my great grandfather’s letters to say something about the nature of religious faith. I’ve said all along that I’m as interested in Charles Robb’s articulation of faith in his letters as in his ‘performance’ of fatherhood. Indeed, my original interest in the letters was prompted by a sense of how closely intertwined were these aspects of their author’s identity.

I’m aware that, in going off at this tangent, I’m stepping outside the usual business of this blog, which is mainly a repository for my thoughts on the topics that are the stuff of my academic work – that’s to say, children and families, with a particular focus on gender identities and relationships. But as I’ve mentioned before, I have a developing interest in the subject of faith and identity and at some stage would like to carry out research on young people’s experience of losing or changing their faith, perhaps with a focus on the part played by (and impact on) family relationships.

But before exploring the role of faith in the experience of particular groups – whether fathers or young people – it’s important to say a few things about the nature of faith. I want to challenge some preconceptions that seem to me to dominate popular and political thinking, as well as academic analysis, around this issue. For example, in beginning to analyse my great grandfather’s letters, I found myself falling into the trap of treating his Christian faith as one of the ‘resources’ that he drew on to discursively produce his identity as a father. In other words, I was in danger of regarding that faith as something that already existed inside my great grandfather, and that he then brought ‘fully formed’ to his role as a father.

However, a discursive, and more broadly a social constructionist approach to social identities, needs to see faith, like other aspects of identity, as actively produced in discourse. My great grandfather’s Christian faith, just as much as his identities as a man and as a father, should be seen as ‘under construction’ in these letters.  I’ve sensed a resistance to treating religious faith in this way, in academic as well as in political and popular discourse. In recent academic writing on religion, I detect echoes of the way that culture was often written about in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Back then, writers such as Avtar Brah criticised a ‘culturalism’ that viewed beliefs and practices, particularly of minority ethnic groups, as static, homogenous and hermetically sealed off from influences in the surrounding social context. British Asians, for example, were often seen – by academic analysts as much as by policy-makers and service providers – as shaped by a singular ‘Asian culture’, regardless of their age, class or gender, never mind their interaction with wider British and global cultural influences.

Something similar seems to have happened with regard to faith, since (post-9/11) it became a fashionable target for social research and analysis. Unfortunately, there isn’t a parallel word to culturalism to describe this tendency – ‘faithism’ doesn’t quite do it. But I’d argue that, just as once happened with culture, so there’s now a widespread habit of treating religious faith (again, particularly that of minoritised or racialised groups) as something fixed and immutable. The question, ‘How does so-and-so’s faith impact on their attitudes/politics/behaviour?’ tends to be asked by researchers more often than (for example) ‘How does so-and-so actively produce their faith in changing and diverse social contexts?’ or ‘How has this person or group’s faith changed as a result of transformed social circumstances?’

We can see the political ramifications of this reification of faith in the tendency of government (particular in the later years of New Labour) to treat individuals, especially those from Muslim backgrounds, primarily as members of ‘faith communities’ (often represented by self-appointed ‘community leaders’) in a way that privileges religious identity above other identities, and also overlooks the way it interacts with those gender, class and generational identities. Attempts to make the giving of religious ‘offence’ illegal can be seen as another consequence of this attitude: again, there’s an assumption that ‘faith’ is an integral feature of an individual’s or group’s identity, rather than something freely chosen and subject to change. In the same way that culturalist assumptions can lead to a cultural relativism, in which all cultural values and practices are held to be equally valid and immune from criticism because they are part of a group’s supposedly unchanging ‘culture’ – so the reification of faith produces a religious relativism which views a person’s beliefs as somehow part of their essential character and therefore valid as long as ‘it works for them’. (This is not to say that ‘culturalism’ has itself vanished from the scene: indeed, the new essentialising of ‘faith’ has in some ways reinforced it.)

I want to challenge these assumptions and argue that faith, like culture, is dynamic, diverse and constantly shaped and re-shaped by its interaction with changing contexts. Taking a discourse analytic approach, I also want to suggest that faith, like other aspects of identity, is constantly produced and reproduced in social discourse. One problem with such an approach is that it conflicts with our ‘common sense’ view of religious faith as being ‘already there’ in creeds, dogmas and sacred texts that individuals passively receive and are relatively powerless to influence. But the meaning and interpretation of those ‘givens’, I would suggest, is constantly changing as faith is re-formulated in the discourse of believers – whether formally in sermons and official declarations, or informally in the prayers, conversations, diaries (or letters) of believers.

So when we analyse a text in which faith is on display – such as my great grandfather’s letters to his son – we should be less interested in describing the faith that he supposedly ‘brings to’ those letters, and more concerned with how he reproduces his faith – how he ‘does’ faith, if you like – in the process of writing, alongside other aspects of his identity such as his fathering.

In thinking about faith in this way, I’ve found Wittgenstein’s later writings particularly useful, with their emphasis on religion as a ‘form of life’ and as a ‘language-game’. This is not to trivialise religion, but to emphasise that it should be seen primarily as ‘language embedded in action’. For Wittgenstein, action precedes belief, not vice versa. He once wrote to a friend: ‘I believe it is right to try experiments in religion. To find out, by trying, what helps and what doesn’t’. He might have added: to find out, by trying, what you ‘believe’.

Here I’m straying into philosophical waters that I’m barely competent to navigate. So perhaps instead I can cite some real-life examples that have influenced my thinking on this issue.  I’ve long been fascinated by accounts of conversion – and even more so by stories of ‘de-conversion’, of people losing their religious faith. There may be a personal element to this: I’ve been through two or three changes of faith, and a loss of faith, in my own life. What has struck me in many of the narratives I’ve read is the important part played by deliberate actions and decisions in these major changes in belief.

For example, I remember reading an interview with Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, who was a Catholic altar boy and even entertained ambitions to enter the priesthood – until he realised that he was gay and quite suddenly his youthful faith fell away. Then there was the female Labour politician, whose name I’ve forgotten, who was also raised a Catholic but then one day, on seeing a television broadcast by a Cardinal with which she violently disagreed for political reasons, said to herself, ‘That’s me finished with that lot then’.

I find it fascinating that a person can completely and wholeheartedly believe in something one day, and then the next day (or even the next moment) no longer believe in it, or believe something very different. It goes against our ‘common sense’ understanding of faith as something internal, unconscious, even involuntary, and highlights the role of conscious decision – deliberate action – in matters of belief. Of course, it’s possible that rumblings of doubt had been going on ‘under the surface’ for some time in these two cases, but the conscious decision not to believe was clearly the crucial factor.

Conversely, these accounts suggest that what we normally understand by ‘faith’ – that complex of opinions, feelings and attachments – tends to follow an external, willed act – rather than vice versa (shades of John Henry Newman’s ‘grammar of assent’, perhaps?). I came across an example of this in reverse in the story of Paul Moore, the HBOS whistleblower, who had been brought up a Catholic and attended Ampleforth school, but later lost his faith. After the crisis brought about by the enforced ending of his City career, he began to recover his faith. He took a job in the Yorkshire village of Wass, just down the road from Ampleforth:

When we moved back up to my alma mater I said to myself: ‘I’m going to try to have faith, to pretend that I’ve got faith.’ And as I pretended to have faith, I got faith.

This is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s advice to ‘find out, by trying’ what one believes. Just as in my first two examples it was a decision not to believe that produced a loss of faith, so in Moore’s case the decision to believe appears to have produced faith. Again, there’s a danger of sounding as though one is mocking religious faith – as a pretence, or some kind of superficial game. I’m certainly not arguing that the content of religious faith is irrelevant, and I don’t think Wittgenstein was either: if you have an appetite for such things, I’d recommend Fergus Kerr’s Theology after Wittgenstein, which defends the philosopher against this charge of ‘fideism’. (Incidentally, I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I’m in sympathy with contemporary ‘pro-faith’ commentators such as Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton, who appear to argue that ‘having faith’ is what matters, and precisely what one chooses to believe is of secondary importance. That way lies the kind of cultural relativism mentioned earlier, and in the case of those two writers, comes close to apologetics on behalf of religious extremism.)

What Wittgenstein is saying, as I read him, is simply that this is how belief works – because this is how the mind works. Action precedes cognition – and, I would add (with a nod to Bakhtin), that means action in a defined social and discursive context.

So, in approaching the ‘faith’ articulated in my great grandfather’s letters, I need to see it less as something that he brings to his writing, and rather as a product or an accomplishment of that writing, as something that is constantly created and re-created through deliberate action, and particularly through discourse.

Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 9

(To see Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 in this series, click on the links.)

In the last post I provided some background information about the life of my great grandfather, Charles Edward Robb, and suggested that this might help us to understand his ‘performance’ of fatherhood in his wartime letters to his son, Arthur Ernest Robb.

In this post I want to spell out some of the ways in which I think these biographical details might aid an analysis of the letters. I should say that my thinking here is extremely speculative, and I’m probably getting ahead of myself, since I’ve yet to carry out an in-depth analysis of most of the letters. But, as I’ve said all along, I want to use this series of blog posts as a first draft of my analysis, and I hope readers will accept my speculations in that spirit.

Two things stand out from what I know of my great grandfather’s life, in relation to his role as a father. The first is his repeated experience of loss. This is a man whose birth was accompanied by a death – that of his mother – and who was without a mother for the first three years of his life. After his father remarried when Charles was three, he was brought up by a stepmother who proceeded to have a large number of children of her own, who (we can assume) would always have been more truly her children than Charles could ever be.

Then there were the losses of his adult life. I would guess that the death in 1904 of his eldest son, also named Charles, in the course of military service, must have influenced the way that my great grandfather felt about Arthur, his youngest son, going off to war in 1916.  The loss of young Charles was swiftly followed by the death of his daughter Marion and then by that of his wife, Louisa.

When Louisa died, my grandfather Arthur would have been seven years old. In other words, just like his father, he too lost a mother at a very young age. My great grandfather never remarried. At the time his wife died, his eldest surviving son Joseph was 25, David 24, Louisa 21, Thomas 18, Caroline 12, and Arthur 7. In other words, while it’s possible that Caroline (the ‘Carrie’ of the first letter) was almost old enough to go out to work and fend for herself, Arthur would have been completely dependent on his father – and perhaps, to some extent, on his older siblings – for physical and emotional sustenance.

What I’m suggesting, I suppose, is that Charles had, in some sense, to be both father and mother to his youngest son for much of the latter’s childhood. I don’t know the statistics for single fatherhood in the Edwardian period, but I assume it was fairly unusual (was it?). It’s something we associate with the changes in father’s roles, and in masculinities, in the last decades of the twentieth century – not with the early years of the century.

I wonder what kind of emotional repertoire was available to Charles in performing this role, and to what extent he saw his role – in these letters as well as elsewhere – as ‘mothering’ as well as ‘fathering’ Arthur? Recent years have seen something of a backlash against the emphasis, dominant in the 1990s, on ‘parenting’ as a gender-free activity. Psychoanalytic feminists like Wendy Hollway have called for a renewed emphasis on ‘mothering’ as a role and activity distinctive from that of ‘fathering’. This is not to say, though, that men might not be able to ‘mother’, under the right conditions and given changes in men’s and women’s gender conditioning and relationships. In fact ‘Do men mother?’ was the title of a study of fatherhood and domestic responsibility by Candian academic Andrea Doucet, with whom I recently had the pleasure of examining a PhD on fatherhood.

I’ll be exploring some of these questions further, with specific reference to my great grandfather’s letters, in the next post.

Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 8

(To see Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 in this series, click on the links.)

In the previous post I suggested that some background knowledge about my great grandfather’s life might throw light on the ways in which he ‘performs’ fathering in his wartime letters to his son. In this post, I want to share some of that knowledge, before moving on to considering its usefulness and appropriateness as additional data.

As I mentioned in the second post in this series, I never knew my great grandfather, and nor did my father. All the knowledge I have of him, apart from one or two family stories handed down through the generations, is derived from my research into my family’s history. What follows is a selection of the information I’ve been able to glean to date.

Charles Edward Robb was born in 1851 in Compton Street, Soho, the son of law stationer’s clerk William Robb and his wife Fanny Sarah Seager. William, who had been born in Richmond, Yorkshire in 1814, was the son of Aberdeenshire-born solicitor’s clerk Charles Edward Stuart Robb and his wife Margaret Ricketts Monteith, who moved to London, having spent some years in Yorkshire, in the 1820s or 1830s.

Fanny Seager was the daughter of porter Samuel Hurst Seager. Her brothers emigrated to New Zealand: one (another Samuel) became a famous architect, while Edward was a pioneer of mental health whose granddaughter was the crime novelist Ngaio Marsh.

Fanny died of pneumonia a few weeks after Charles was born, so he was brought up by his father and the latter’s second wife, Mary Anne Mansfield Palmer, in a large household in the expanding suburb of Mile End Old Town. Although the Robbs had been Episcopalian / Anglican, the Seagers and Palmers were Nonconformists, and Charles was christened in a Methodist chapel.

Charles Edward Robb in old age

Charles married Louisa Bowman in 1877, when he was 26, and they had ten children, of whom Arthur Ernest Robb, my grandfather, born in Whitechapel in 1897, was the youngest. The family lived variously in Canning Town, Whitechapel and finally East Ham. Charles had a number of different jobs, working at different times in his life as a labourer, tally clerk, messenger, and ‘housekeeper’ at the Wesleyan East End Mission in Whitechapel.

Besides the early death of his mother, Charles’ life was marked by a number of other tragic events. In 1904 his eldest son Charles William died while serving as a Royal Marine in Aden. In April of the following year his daughter Marion Fanny died at the age of 16 from heart failure, while in June his wife Louisa died of typhoid fever at the age of 48.

At the time of the 1991 census Charles, now 60, was living with his daughter Louisa, her husband Richard and their two small children, as well as his daughter Caroline (the ‘Carrie’ of the first letter) and son Arthur, 14. Charles was still working as a messenger in a shipping office. By this date, another son, Thomas, had emigrated to New Zealand. By the time Charles wrote the letters to his son Arthur, he was 65 and the latter was 19.

 

Arthur Ernest Robb in army uniform during the First World War

Of course, this information is inevitably selective, but I think it helps us to understand some of the emotional dynamics of my great grandfather’s wartime letters. I will suggest some possible connections in the next post.

Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 7

(To see Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 in this series, click on the links.)

In the previous post, I noted that it was difficult, as a researcher, to prevent my personal knowledge of my great grandfather’s Methodist faith from influencing my analysis of his letters to his son during the First World War. I argued that a familiarity with the language and imagery of Methodism could provide some insight into the rhetorical ‘work’ being done by these letters, and specifically their attempt to reconcile Christian belief with military experience. Referring to the work of historians of masculinity such as John Tosh, I also suggested that some awareness of contemporary masculinities, and their interaction with different forms of Christian faith, might prevent us making naïve assumptions about the masculine and fathering identities available to men of my great grandfather’s generation.

Bringing this kind of extrinsic knowledge to bear on data analysis is not incompatible with the methods of discursive psychology, at least not with the form that I find most congenial. Discursive psychology can be viewed as a spectrum, with microscopic conversation analysis at one end of the scale, and critical discursive psychology’s concern with political macro-discourses at the other. I’m most at home somewhere in the middle, and my thinking has been most influenced by the work of Potter and Wetherell, Edley, Harré, and others. In the last post, I referred to Nigel Edley’s notion of ‘interpretive repertoires’, which Edley himself has described as a social-psychological re-working of Foucault’s concept of social discourses. For this kind of discourse analytic approach, it is perfectly appropriate to make use of knowledge of the broader discourses or repertoires on which an individual speaker draws.

However, in this post I want to consider the potential role of other kinds of knowledge about the speaker, which would almost certainly be inadmissible within the canons of discursive psychology, but which (again) I find it difficult as a researcher with personal knowledge of the text’s author to set to one side. In recent years, I’ve been influenced more and more by the work of psychologists and others who have gone ‘beyond the discursive’ and explored the interplay between discourse and unconscious, intra-psychic factors. Wendy Hollway, an esteemed Open University colleague, has been a particular influence on my thinking, with her interest in exploring the reasons why individuals invest in particular discourses. Wendy’s work has taken her increasingly into the realms of Kleinian psychoanalysis, and while not wishing to follow her all the way along this route, I’ve moved away from a purely discourse analytic perspective to a more nuanced ‘psychosocial’ position. Of course, how you understand the ‘psycho’ and the ‘social’, and the interaction between the two, are vexed questions that continue to preoccupy and divide academics.

All of which is a long way round to saying: there are things that I know about my great grandfather’s life, his childhood and his personal relationships, that I believe shed light on key aspects of his letters to his son during the First World War. I think they also raise interesting questions about the nature of fathering and of men’s care for their children,  which I’ll explore further in the next post.

Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 6

(To see Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in this series, click on the links.)

I ended the last post by suggesting that a key aim of Charles’ first letter to his son Arthur was to reconcile the latter’s calling as a soldier with his Christian vocation. It’s important to note that this theme reverberates through other letters in the sequence. For example, Charles’ letter of 24^th January 1916 ends with this blessing:

God Bless you and make you a Good and Stedfast Soldier not only for King and Country but for Jesus Christ who Loves you so much.

And on 6^th February he signs off with this:

Do your very best to make a True Soldier not only for your King and Country but try and enrich your Loyalty by Faithfulness and whole Heartedness in your Service to God and His Son Jesus Christ who Loves you.

This suggests that imposing a religious meaning on his son’s military service was an ongoing and unfinished process for Charles, one that required repeated discursive labour. In a later post, I want to examine moments in the letters where this work is less successful, and where tensions or ruptures between the military and the religious become apparent.

In this post, though, I’m going to consider some other tensions or dualities suggested by the language used in Charles’ letters. In the last post I noted that the tone of strenuous individual effort – of moral and spiritual struggle – that dominates the first letter, is modulated towards the end of the letter with references to divine and paternal love.

A similar alternation between tones recurs in later letters. Charles’ letter of 18^th January echoes the first letter in its repeated calls earnest moral effort:

Try and do all and everything of your Best in all things and do not forget the best way to conquer difficulties that seem almost impossible and are likely to conquer you is to use your own energy. capability. goodwill and endeavour.

However, the letter ends ‘With Prayer from Your Loving Father Charles Edward’ and ‘Love and Kisses from all’. Other letters end in a similar fashion, with references both to the divine love of Jesus Christ ‘who loves you so much’ (24^th January), ‘Jesus Christ who loves you’ (6^th February), and to paternal love ‘With abundance of Love and kisses from your father’ (10^th February), ‘With love and kisses from your loving Father’ (18^th February), and so on.

How are we to read this constant movement between the ‘hardness’ of self-reliant moral struggle and the ‘softer’, even gushing tone of divine and paternal affection? I want to say a number of things here.

First, it’s difficult not to let what I know about my great grandfather’s religious affiliation, and my own personal knowledge of that milieu, colour my interpretation. A ‘close’ discursive analysis of these letters would probably limit itself to the evidence of the text, but that becomes difficult when the text has personal associations for the researcher. I know that both my great grandfather and my grandfather were devout Methodists, and I too grew up in a Methodist home. It is almost impossible for me to read these letters and not to hear the familiar themes – and language – of Methodist piety. To use Nigel Edley’s term, Methodism provides the ‘interpretive repertoire’ for much of Charles’ discourse.

Some of the phrases in this first letter (‘Be constant in prayer and watchful against Temptation’) might have been ‘lifted’ from Methodist hymns or choruses, or from favourite Bible passages, their random use of capital letters making them resemble the half-remembered quotations they probably are. Indeed, in later letters Charles explicitly mixes whole lines from hymns and from scripture with his own exhortations.

What’s more, the emphasis on the self-reliant, determined individual, struggling constantly against sin and temptation, is a familiar trope of Nonconformist spirituality. Its association with middle-class and respectable working-class self-improvement, and the ethic of entrepreneurial capitalism, has often been remarked upon. But Methodism combined this puritan moral earnestness with a powerful emphasis on the unconditional love of God and on a personal, emotional relationship with Christ, which finds expression in the gushing and often graphic lyrics of Charles Wesley’s hymns. I find both of these elements, and the tensions between them, pervading my great grandfather’s letters to his son.

At the same time, given that my primary interest is in how Charles ‘performs’ fatherhood in these letters, it is tempting to see this tension or modulation in gendered terms. To generalise crudely: if the tone of much Puritan and Nonconformist discourse is ‘masculine’ in character, emphasising work, effort and self-reliance, then Methodism counterposes a ‘feminine’ note which positions the individual as passive and receptive to the overflowing love of God in Christ.

In his discussion of ‘Methodist domesticity and middle-class masculinity in nineteenth-century England’, John Tosh challenges the received image of the stern evangelical patriarch and argues that Methodism permitted a certain kind of emotional expressivity for men, and particularly for fathers. Certainly from the evidence of my great grandfather’s letters, it’s possible to see how a sense of the ‘Fatherhood’ of God, that encompassed both firm moral demands and the unconditional love imaged in an almost feminised Jesus, provided a kind of model or simulacrum for this particular Methodist father.

To recast this in gendered terms, we might suggest that the Methodist image of the divine made possible a way of ‘doing’ fathering that included both conventionally ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ elements.

At the same time, we need to be aware that, as 21^st century readers, we bring our own preconceptions about Victorian and Edwardian fathering to letters like these. Perhaps we are only surprised by Charles’ ‘love and kisses’ because we have an image of our grandfathers and great grandfathers as stern patriarchs unable or unwilling to express open affection for their children. But the work of Tosh and other historians of masculinity has begun to undermine this image, and to reveal examples of affectionate and expressive fatherhood in earlier generations.

In addition to my knowledge of his religious beliefs, there are other things that I know about my great grandfather’s life which I find it difficult to exclude from my analysis of his letters – and particularly from my interpretation of the way in which he ‘does’ fathering in them. I’ll say more in the next post.

References:

Edley, N. (2001) Analysing masculinity: interpretive repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions’, in Yates, S. Wetherell, M. and Tayor, S. Discourse as data: a guide for analysis, Sage/The Open University

Tosh, J. (2005) ‘Methodist domesticity and middle-class masculinity in nineteenth-century England’ in Manliness and masculinities in nineteenth-century Britain, Harlow, Pearson