Drifting on the echoes of the hours.

emmadelosnardos:

For those who are watching Parade’s End tonight: a bit of background on the women’s suffrage movement and its relevance to Ford’s books. I’ve highlighted the bits I find most interesting.

Taken from the excellent article: Ford’s Women: Between Fact and Fiction. Anne Marie Flanagan. Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Winter, 2000-2001), pp. 235-249.

Although Ford Madox Ford wrote Parade’s End between 1924 and 1928, it is set in a period that begins immediately before the outbreak of World War I and that lasts until shortly after the war has ended. Parade’s End is a novel about military wartime experiences and the effects of war upon society. Above all, it is a novel about men and women, marriage, and sexual politics, with an emphasis on assertive women who threaten men and the institutions which they have established within society. While his experiences at the front during World War I deeply affect the novel’s hero, Christopher Tietjens, both physically and emotionally, the war that really threatens to destroy him is the one being waged between the sexes. This war extends beyond the novel to the outside world. The extent to which women’s issues affected all other aspects of the society at the time is succinctly put by Samuel Hynes:

‘The trouble with women during the Edwardian period was simply that their troubles could not be kept separate and distinct, but kept getting mixed up with each other and with other social issues: contraception threatened the family and the birth rate, divorce threatened the Church and the stability of society, suffrage threatened political balances, and so even the most moderate move toward liberation seemed a rush toward chaos.’

Parade’s End arises from this particularly complicated and anxious period in women’s history. Although not commonly asserted as such, it also grows out of a tradition of literary types and genres dating from the 1890s. Traces of the Suffrage Novel, the New Woman Novel, and the Marriage Problem Novel can be found in Parade’s End. While Ford is seeking to capture the spirit of wartime England and to respond in a progressive and liberal manner to the social changes of this period, he is bound by two forces: the literary traditions of the 1890s and his own difficulties with women before and during the war. He seeks a congenial home in the modern period but finds comfort in the ideas of the past. Despite his best efforts to represent the suffragette and the New Woman in positive terms and to dispel harmful stereotypes about women, he returns to the worn but comfortable ideas ofthe past. Within Valentine and Sylvia, Ford’s rich and complex fictional women, the battle between past and present, tradition and innovation, and fact and fiction is waged.

In some quarters, it was believed that World War I actually marked the culmination of the war between the sexes as well as the culmination of international tensions. “When war broke out on August 4, 1914, Christabel [Pankhurst] wrote in The Suffragette that the war was ‘God’s vengeance upon the people who held women in subjection.’” The end of World War I also coincided with the end of Ford’s “war with Violet Hunt.” The long relationship between Ford and Hunt, a fellow writer and suffragette, resulted in a painful and scandalous affair that had threatened both of their positions in society. As Ford retrospectively reconstructed the years between 1914 and 1919 in his novel, he sought to capture the climate of sexual anxiety that existed at that time. It was important for Ford to re-create this anxiety while maintaining that he himself was relatively free from such anxiety. He was intent upon establishing himself as a great supporter of women’s causes, and in this regard his actions were typical of those of many of his male contemporaries. At the same time that he was protecting his own place in history, he felt bound to act, as he thought all good novelists should, as “historian of his own time,” chronicling his life and that of this contemporaries and his society. He wanted to write “seriously and with something immense in mind.” With Proust’s death, Ford believed that “a vacancy in the office of novelist-historian required filling.” Readers and critics have, of course, agreed with Ford’s own estimation of his powers as an historian, citing Parade’s End as nothing less that an epic account of the demise of one world order and the emergence of a new one.

In Parade’s End, Ford’s heroine, Valentine Wannop, is first encountered by Tietjens on a golf course in the midst of a suffragette takeover of the course. Ford treats Valentine as a woman of intellect and a serious participant in the suffrage movement. Unlike the caricatures of suffragettes commonly featured in Punch and various newspapers of the time, Valentine is portrayed as an attractive young woman. Jane Miller claims that while “very few of these writers [who supported suffrage] were inclined to deal with the issue of suffrage in their fiction, apart from occasional peripheral references,” Ford presents the suffrage movement “seriously as an important factor in understanding pre-war England, writing “sympathetically about the suffrage movement in …Parade’s End.”) Ford was clearly responding to the social pressures of his day, and much of what he has to say or implies about the suffrage movement in Parade’s End reflects both the attitudes of his contemporaries and themes common in the suffrage literature of his day. However, once again, Ford’s use of these common attitudes and literary themes reflects the profound anxiety that he felt toward women. In spite of his ostensible support for women’s causes, his writing reveals his tendency to contain and control the advancement of women.

Valentine first meets Tietjens as he hears her cries for help. She and her friend and fellow suffragette, Gertie, have trespassed onto a golf course in an attempt to bring attention to their cause by destroying its greens. Valentine, who holds records for both men and women in track and field events in East Sussex, is successfully eluding a band of uncouth, male pursuers. Gertie is not so lucky. One of her pursuers has already torn her blouse and is vowing to

“Strip the bitch stark naked!” (Parade’s End, p. 67). Tietjens comes to her aid and, employing both the prerogatives of his class and his innate sense of moral rectitude, trips a policeman who is in pursuit of the suffragettes. He will solve the problem of interfering with the policeman with a drink, offered from his flask, a nod of his noble head, and the payment of a quid. [Ford’s lover, the suffragette Violet Hunt’s] remembrance of feeling “stripped naked” while collecting money to support the suffrage movement is vividly recalled in this scene. In Ford’s hands, Tietjens prevents the type of violation to Gertie that Hunt described. Indeed, it does appear in this instance that Ford is an “enraged suffragette.” However, his ambivalence toward the movement is revealed in the same scene when Valentine refers to the nation’s health.

Tietjens admires Valentine’s courage, her physical strength and agility, and her verbal spunk as she accuses her pursuers of being bullies and cowards. Ford’s heroine poses the question that the whole nation is contemplating as the scene ends; she voices a threat and turns another question that is often asked of women who are engaged in the suffrage movement upon the men: “‘Why don’t you give women the vote? You’ll find it will interfere a good deal with your indispensable golf if you don’t. Then what becomes of the nation’s health?’” (Parade ‘s End, p. 69). One of the great fears of those opposed to the suffrage movement was that the health of the nation would be compromised if women abandoned their traditional roles and entered into the public affairs of society.