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

Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 5

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

In the last post I noted that most of my great grandfather’s first letter to his son (which I transcribed here) was devoted to moral exhortation. But what kind of exhortation is it?

One way of approaching this question is to focus on the language used. In the second paragraph of the letter – which is given over entirely to advice-giving – the language repeatedly emphasises moral effort: ‘I hope that…you are endeavouring in every way to do your best’ ‘keep up your courage’ ‘persevere until you conquer it’. The short, sharp exhortations of the last sentence of this paragraph reinforce this focus on individual effort: ‘Be active Be prompt Be careful Be willing Be diligent and then you will get on.’

Behaving well – doing ‘your best’ – is seen by the letter-writer as a constant struggle against ‘difficulty’ and ‘risks’, in which effort and perseverance will win out in the end. At one point the writer lapses into the Pollyanna-ish ‘keep smiling’, but the tone is generally earnest.

In fact, the word ‘earnestly’ occurs later in the letter, when Charles promises to pray for his son. In this second bout of moral exhortation, the language is more explicitly religious, with a plea that Arthur should remember what he has been taught at Sunday School and Scouts and to ‘remember God for Christ’s sake’.  There is the same focus on moral effort as in the earlier section: with talk of overcoming difficulties and ‘Temptation’ . However, the sense of the individual struggling alone is here balanced by the reminder that ‘God loves you not for a day but eternally’, and the belief that He will ‘assist you’ in this moral battle.

Characterising moral life as a constant state of warfare leads naturally, and perhaps by association, to the final short paragraph, in which Charles asks God to make his son a ‘good Soldier of Jesus Christ’ and at one and the same time ‘a Soldier for your King and Country.’

In the last post I called this closing ‘blessing’ the ‘finale’ of the letter, and it’s possible to read the text as working up to this climax. Discourse analysis, particularly as practised by discursive psychologists, sees everyday discourse (talk, writing) as always seeking to accomplish something. Perhaps part of the ‘work’ being done by this letter is to impose meaning on the (military) experience that Arthur is going through, by associating it with the (religious) framework of meaning that is most important to his father. Since Charles sees life as a constant spiritual battle, the language and imagery for achieving this is already to hand. In rhetorical terms it is not difficult to accomplish a fusion between moral soldiering for Christ and serving ‘King and Country’ in uniform. This is the resolution achieved by the end of the letter.

However, besides the language of individual effort and struggle, the letter occasionally introduces another, altogether gentler note. We’ve already noticed the reference to the love of God, and at times Charles’ own love for his son breaks through the moralising rhetoric. In the middle of the third paragraph, when Charles has been reproaching his son about money, he suddenly interjects a ‘Dear Arthur’ and this is the cue for the message about divine love and assistance.  Charles signs off the letter ‘Loving and Prayerfully / Your / Dear Father’, an altogether more affectionate and endearing tone than has marked most of the letter.

I want to say more about these two different registers – on the one hand, the language of individual effort and moral struggle, and on the other, that of divine and paternal affection – in the next post. There are implications, I think, for how we analyse the way that Charles ‘does’ fatherhood in this letter, and also for understanding his ‘performance’ of his Christian faith.

Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 4

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

The letter transcribed in the last post offers a useful starting-point for my analysis, not only because it’s the first in the sequence, but also because it’s relatively brief and compact, while at the same time displaying many of the features that can be found in the later letters.

At this point, I should note that what follows will be relatively ‘raw’ and free of academic references. This isn’t because I’m advocating some kind of naïve, untheorised analysis, but because these are very much first thoughts. I would certainly foresee any published version of this data analysis, in a refereed journal for example, relating its findings to theoretical and methodological sources.

Having said that, I should be clear that I’m approaching this text with certain assumptions. The first is that the focus of my interest is the ways in which the letter shows an individual producing his identity as a father, at the same time as ‘performing’ his faith as a Christian, and the relationship between the two.

This focus itself presupposes a particular theoretical perspective. It assumes that identities do not exist already formed within the individual, waiting to find their  expression in social contexts, but are produced within and in relation to those contexts. Also implicit is the notion that identities are actively negotiated or constructed, and that much of this active construction is performed via the medium of language.

In other words, my research question already assumes a broadly social constructionist approach to social identities, with a particular emphasis on the role of discourse. That’s a very simplistic formulation, of course, and one I want to elaborate and interrogate in future posts. For now, though, it’s useful to set it out as a starting-point for my analysis.

Given these assumptions, how should we approach this letter? Perhaps the first question we need to ask ourselves is: what kind of text is it? And following on from this: what is it setting out to accomplish or achieve? Even if we had no external information about this piece of writing, we would be able to tell from internal evidence that it’s a personal letter, from a father to his son. It’s explicitly written in response to a letter from the addressee, so it’s part of a sequence of letters between these two people.

As for its purpose – or purposes – perhaps the best way to approach this question is to look at the structure of the letter. If we examine it carefully, we can see that the letter divides into a number of sections, as follows:

(1) A short opening paragraph which conveys some ‘scene-setting’ information

(2) A second paragraph which starts with some formulaic ‘well-wishing’ but quickly moves into offering advice and moral instruction, in one long unpunctuated sentence, and ending in a series of short, staccato exhortations: ‘Be active Be prompt’ etc.

(3) The first part of the third paragraph, which returns to ‘business’ (a matter of money) but maintains the exhortatory tone of the previous pragraph, with perhaps a hint of reproach (‘Where is it? I have not received anything…’).

(4) An instruction to ‘be careful’ about money provides a bridge into the second part of this paragraph, which returns to the exhortatory theme of the second paragraph, though it begins with the endearment ‘Dear Arthur’ and at the same time adopts a more explicitly religious register.

(5) A final ‘blessing’ which maintains the religious theme, but explicitly ‘blends’ Arthur’s vocation as a Christian with his current calling as a soldier for ‘King and Country’.

6) The letter closes with an affectionate and ‘prayerful’ signing off, which combines paternal informality with the formality of the sender’s full name.

This crude structural analysis begins to uncover the the multiple purposes of the letter, demonstrating that it sets out to accomplish a number of different things. At one level, the letter’s aim is procedural, its ‘business’ being to exchange information, for example about what has happened to a certain sum of money. But this takes up a relatively small amount of space in the letter. Much more space – and we might add, emotional energy – is invested in moral advice or exhortation. Although some of this advice is about money, most of it is more generic. At the outset, the advice has a rather general ‘moral’ theme, but later on it becomes explicitly Christian, and at the end this religious theme is interwoven with a patriotic or nationalistic message in the letter’s ‘finale’.

In the next post I’ll say more about this interweaving of moral messages, and about the language used to convey them.

Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 3

(Parts 1 and 2 of this series can be found here and here)

In the first two posts in this series, I outlined my plan to analyse the ‘performance’ of fatherhood and faith in the letters sent by my great grandfather to my grandfather during the First World War. In this post, I’ll reproduce the first in the series of eight letters in the collection, before going on to suggest some ways of approaching the task of analysis.

The envelope in which the first letter is enclosed is addressed as follows:

Pte A.E. Robb

32 S Batt. R.F.Regt

C. Company

Stanhope Lines

F Block

Corunna Barracks

Aldershot

Here are photos of the first, followed by the second and third pages of the letter:

Below I have transcribed the letter as faithfully as possible, reproducing the original spelling and punctuation:

50 Rosebery Avenue

Manor Park E (?)

Jany. 10 – 16

My Dear Arthur

I received your letter this morning at the Office. I have now sent it on to Carrie at the Hptl.

I hope that you are getting on well and endeavouring in every way to do your very best. You are now placed in a position that everything you are told to do must be done immediately without any excuse for not doing it so keep up your courage and at every difficulty that comes in the way keep smiling and at all risks persevere untill you conquer it Be active Be prompt Be careful Be willing Be diligent and then you will get on.

You ask me to send you 4/4 from the Hearts of Oak. Where is it? I have not received anything from them except a demand for 5/- to make up the arrears they ask for and I expect there will be a few more weeks on the card that I have sent to Mr. Rattray. I am sending you a P.O for 2/6 to help you over this week. I expect you will get your pay at the end of the week. Be very careful with it as it does not amount to much but you have not many expenses to meet so you must be very considerate. Dear Arthur I trust and pray earnestly for you that you will not forget the teachings of the Sunday School and the Scouts to Trust in God at all times and remember God for Jesus Christ’s sake. God loves you not for a day but eternally and in answer to your Prayer assist you to overcome all difficulties and Temptation Do not forget to Be constant in Prayer and Watchful against Temptation

God Bless You and make you a good Soldier of Jesus Christ so that it may Blend with your life as a Soldier for your King and Country Goodbye

Lovingly and Prayerfully

Your

Dear Father

Charles E Robb

In the next post I will use this first letter as the starting-point for a discussion of how one might go about analysing this kind of text.

Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 2

(You can find the first post in this series here.)

In this post I want to say something about the letters that I propose to analyse in this series, and about the issues raised by using them as data for research. I have in my possession, or rather on loan from my father, a collection of letters, photographs and mementoes that belonged to my grandfather and which passed to my father when the former died in 1979. In this collection is a set of eight letters written by my great grandfather, Charles Edward Robb, to my grandfather, Arthur Ernest Robb, when the latter was a soldier during the First World War.

The letters, which are in their original envelopes and in reasonable condition, were all sent between January and March 1916. All of them are from my great grandfather to my grandfather, and all were sent when the latter was in barracks at Aldershot, before embarking for France. There are no surviving letters home from my grandfather, at least not in this collection.

I borrowed the letters from my father in the course of researching our family history, something I’ve been doing for a number of years now. Using mostly online sources, I’ve managed to trace our branch of the Robb family back to the early 18^th century in Aberdeenshire, and to discover a fair amount about the lives of succeeding generations, as they moved firstly to central London and then eastwards to Mile End and East Ham, where I was born.

Obviously, my primary interest in my great grandfather’s letters is as a family historian. They supply some of the richness and personal detail that’s missing from the catalogue of births, marriages and deaths that are the stuff of most genealogical research. And on a more personal level, these letters bring immediately to life a great grandfather I never met, and a grandfather whom I barely knew, at the same time connecting them both vividly with the wider historical events in which they played a part.

So my decision to use the letters as research data is hardly detached and objective: something that gave me pause when I first began to think about doing this. On the other hand, I would argue that, even if these letters were not associated with members of my own family, and I had come across them by other means, I might still have found their ‘performance’ of fatherhood and faith of interest. I would certainly have regarded them as legitimate resources for exploring these themes in a research context.  Of course, the fact that I have a family connection to the letters provides me with an additional motive for writing about these letters, rather than any other random textual material.

I want to argue, tentatively, for the legitimacy of combining family history with other kinds of research in this way. In the same way that researching the history of one’s own family, or locality, can be a ‘way in’ to the study of history for those of us who are not professional historians, so I’d like to suggest that one’s own family data – letters, diaries, photographs, etc – can potentially be resources for other kinds of academic investigation. I’m aware this raises all kinds of questions about objectivity, reflexivity and the role of the researcher, some of which I’m sure will come up as I proceed with the analysis of these letters. But I know of a number of researchers who are using their own family data as a focus for their work on issues of gender, ethnicity, identity and relationships, and it would seem that the legitimacy of work of this kind is becoming more widely accepted.

Does it matter that we only have one side of the correspondence, and only a small part at that? As will become clear, my methodological starting-point for this research is discourse analysis, and more specifically the methods of discursive psychology. As I understand it, any piece of textual material, no matter how small or incomplete, can be a legitimate resource for discourse analysis. If we only had access to one of my great grandfather’s letters, for example, it would still be legitimate to analyse it using discourse analytic tools. I’ll return to this and related methodological issues in a later post in this series.

In the next post, I’ll reproduce one of my great grandfather’s letters, as a trigger for launching a discussion of methods of analysis.

Fatherhood and faith in wartime letters: 1

I want to try something a little different in the next few posts. I want to experiment with using this blog as a space for doing some ‘raw’ data analysis.

Why do this online? Well, to be honest, it’s primarily for my own benefit. Having to produce something for publication, even if it’s self-publication in the ephemeral world of the blogosphere, will (I hope) provide me with the structure and discipline that I badly need when it comes to my own research. But I’m also hoping that, as this blog slowly acquires a readership, others with similar interests will comment on my work in progress – thus helping me to refine my thinking, but also starting to create an online conversation about the issues raised.

The focus for this series of blog posts will be my analysis of a set of letters written by my great grandfather, Charles Edward Robb, to his son, Arthur Ernest Robb (my grandfather), when the latter was a soldier during the First World War. I mentioned these letters in a recent post, in the context of a discussion of Michael Roper’s book The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War.

I’ve had a longstanding interest in the broad topic of men, masculinities and the care of children. About ten years ago I carried out a small-scale study of men working in childcare settings (Robb, 2001), followed by some work on men’s discursive production of their identities as fathers (Robb, 2004a ; Robb, 2004b). Recently, I wrote a chapter for the Reader for the new OU module Critical practice with children and young people (K802), questioning the ‘male role model’ discourse that informs current campaigns to recruit more men to work with children (Robb, 2010), and Sandy Ruxton and I are working on a funding proposal for new empirical research that would develop this theme.  I’m also in the process of writing up some secondary analysis that I carried out on data from the Inventing Adulthoods study, focusing on young men’s relationships with their mothers.

What interested me about my great grandfather’s letters to his son, when I first came across them, was the vivid way in which they showed a man ‘doing’ fatherhood in unusual and testing circumstances. Getting men to talk about fathering, or about personal relationships of any kind, is notoriously difficult: a common problem for researchers in this field that was one of the emergent themes from our recent ‘Questioning masculinities’ seminar at the Open University. Finding textual data that presented a father actually articulating his feelings towards his son, and at the same time ‘practising’ his role as a father, seemed to present a rich opportunity for analysis.

Another factor that attracted me to the idea of analysing these family letters was their open expression of religious belief, and the way in which my great grandfather’s identity as a father was interwoven with his deep Christian faith. For some time, I’ve wanted to undertake some research on religion and identity. Last year, with my colleague Sara MacKian, I submitted an unsuccessful bid for funding to do some work on young people and religious identity. I also have a PhD student (whose studies are currently suspended) who is exploring the production of Christian identities in a church youth group. (Sara has continued to pursue her own research on ‘everyday spirituality’, interestingly via a blog: a method that I’d like to explore at some point in the future.)

My great grandfather’s letters, which combine tender (and sometimes not-so-tender) paternal feelings with a profound Methodist faith, seemed to provide an opportunity to explore the ways in which both fatherhood and faith are ‘performed’. Moreover, they appeared to offer a fascinating demonstration of the diversity of ‘fatherhoods’. As with masculinities, there’s a need to speak of fathering identities as plural and as interwoven with a diversity of determining factors and contexts.

In the next post, I’ll say more about the letters themselves, and about the issues thrown up by using them as the focus for research.

References:

Robb, M. (2001) ‘Men working in childcare’, in Foley, P., Roche, J. and Tucker, S. (eds.) Children in society: contemporary theory, policy and practice, Basingstoke, Palgrave/The Open University

Robb, M. (2004a) ‘Men talking about fatherhood: discourse and identities’, in Robb, M., Barrett, S., Komarmy, C. and Rogers, A. (eds.) Communication, relationships and care: a reader, London, Routledge/The Open University

Robb, M. (2004b) ‘Exploring fatherhood: masculinity and intersubjectivity in the research process’, Journal of Social Work Practice, Vol. 18, No. 3, November (Special Issue: Psychosocial Approaches to Health and Welfare Research)

Robb, M. (2010) ‘Men wanted? Gender and the children’s workforce’, in Robb, M. and Thomson, R. (eds.) Critical practice with children and young people, Policy Press/The Open University