Ottawa author looks at how mothers of fallen soldiers are used to foster support for war
Janice Kennedy
The Ottawa Citizen
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs:
World War I and the Politics of Grief
By Suzanne Evans
McGill-Queen's University Press, 224 pages
If they hadn't already been killed or maimed that December of 1915,
husbands and brothers and sons were huddling in muddy trenches
overseas, their absence a deep shadow over the approaching Christmas
holiday. Canadians, especially Canadian women left to tend the home
fires, needed hope, consolation, inspiration.
It came in an
article published by Everywoman's World, the most widely-read magazine
in the country during the First World War -- distributed to 67,000
homes in 1915, and 125,000 two years later. The article, titled I Am A
Proud Mother This Christmas, was by a "Mrs. E.A. Hughes," a widow who
had just received a telegram informing her of the death of her son,
Pte. Danny Hughes, her only remaining child.
In the story, she
describes her initial fleeting sadness, followed by her realization of
the greater truth: "I am a proud mother this Christmas. For I gave
Canada and the Empire a Christmas present. I gave them my chiefest
possession ... I sacrificed the life of my boy."
That historical nugget is just one among many found in the new book
by Suzanne Evans. Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I
and the Politics of Grief is crammed with such fascinating stories --
and with fascinating postscripts.
Researching the Mrs. Hughes
story, the 50-year-old Ottawa writer uncovered something intriguing.
Since no one with Danny's profile turns up in any of the archived
documents of the time -- something easy to check today but not within
reach of the average citizen 92 years ago -- Mrs. Hughes and her Danny,
who died so valiantly in action, may in fact have been a fiction.
Rich
with analysis and anecdote, Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs,
Evans' first book, looks critically at the manipulation of emotional
impact for a cause.
She says the image of the sacrificing war mother has long been a potent, and useful, symbol.
"We
think we would do anything to keep our children safe," says Evans, a
mother herself. "A story like the Mrs. Hughes one takes that
expectation and turns it around, so that anyone listening to it must
say, 'What is the cause for which this mother is willing to sacrifice
her child?' -- and then, 'I wish to follow this cause.' I think that is
what the propagandists of World War One were hoping. These stories were
designed to gain followers."
And gain followers they did, as
mothers by the thousands bade brave farewells to the sons they sent off
to fight for King and country. More than 60,000 Canadians, most of them
young, were killed during the First World War. It is not mere
coincidence, Evans points out, that Canada's Memorial Cross medal --
known as the Silver Cross and issued for wives and mothers of soldiers
who have died in military action -- has its origins in that conflict.
Evans,
who shares her comfortable Alta Vista home with two daughters and her
husband, novelist Alan Cumyn, has a doctorate in religious studies from
the University of Ottawa. She first became intrigued by the topic of
war mothers when she stumbled upon the phrase "mother of martyrs" while
reading a book about Islam. The reference was to Palestinian women of
the first intifada.
"It floored me," she recalls. "I couldn't imagine a mother being
proud of the sacrifice of her son for a cause -- and showing joy. At
first, I just thought, 'Well, that's gross,' and I closed the book and
put it away. But it stuck like a burr in my brain."
Evans started
looking into history and went back as far as the late first and early
second century BCE, during the time of the Maccabees, when a Jewish
mother appears as the first recorded "mother of martyrs." (The Bible
story tells of the mother's seven sons who are all tortured for their
faith before her eyes and prior to her own death. The last one, the
youngest, dies after his mother strengthens his resolve not to renounce
his faith to save his life.) But such stories, while proving the
antiquity of the willing-mother-of-martyrs phenomenon, were too far
away in time and place to provide context for its modern counterpart.
"I thought, 'It will make it easier to understand if I can find something else closer to home, in my own culture.'"
The idea came one Remembrance Day nearly 17 years ago. Bundling her
young daughter into her stroller, Evans went downtown to the ceremonies
at the National War Memorial. Seeing the Silver Cross mother, she found
herself thinking about the enormity of loss felt by mothers who lose
children to war, and went on to research the history of the Silver
Cross.
"World War One became my access point to understanding
stories from other places and other times." It was not her era, but it
was her culture. In her family, she says, there are all kinds of
stories of women, including her great-grandmother, who willingly saw
their sons off to war.
"This is my English Canadian heritage,"
says the Toronto-born Evans, "and I don't think of my family as being
crazy or warmongering. So if that's there for us, it can be a way of
understanding other places, a way of understanding that it's not
madness, it's war."
Looking for echoes of familiarity in other
parts of the world, especially in current conflicts, Evans says she
found them -- present-day mothers willing to sacrifice their children,
and government recruitment posters geared at women, urging them to give
their sons to the cause.
In other words, the gulf between the Mrs. Hugheses of 1915 and today's Islamic "mothers of martyrs" proved to be no gulf at all.
As
she threw herself into the research that would eventually become both
her doctoral thesis and the new book, Evans found another source of
cultural support as well. Her husband was also researching the First
World War for his 2003 novel, The Sojourn and its 2006 sequel, The
Famished Lover. (In fact, two of Cumyn's arresting photos of wartime
statues, stone portraits in grief, appear in Mothers of Heroes, Mothers
of Martyrs.)
But as she finished the book, and as the Canadian
death toll in Afghanistan rose, it became increasingly apparent to her
that the present ties with the past lie in more than a resonance with
intifada mothers.
"It's incumbent upon us to ask questions," she says of the mission
in Afghanistan. "I have seen how stories of old martyrs have been used
as touchstones to create a background and add a whole world view to
modern stories."
She was especially uneasy about the way Canadian
officials used the rededication ceremonies at Vimy in April, drawing
glorified parallels between then and now.
"When you see the
picture of Mr. Harper with his hand on the wall of the monument, it's
like the power of that mythology infusing him. He becomes a war leader."
While she does not compare Afghanistan to the 1914-18 conflict,
where the death toll was a thousand times higher, she thinks the
machinery of martyrology is at work in much the same way.
Evans
says there is a direct connection between her academic focus on
religious studies and the issues of her new book. Raised in a
distinctly secular home and professing no single faith herself ("They
all fascinate me"), she says she nevertheless maintains a profound
respect for the practice of religion -- as long as it doesn't become a
bludgeon.
"It can be a tool for great things, for wonderful
kindness and love and action in the world. And people can also use it
and misuse it according to their desires."
In the First World
War, she says, as in wars from the beginning of time, it was assumed
that "God was on our side," whichever side that may have been. She
cites one of the letters that her husband has from a great-uncle who
fought during that conflict. "He writes that something really snapped
in him when, on the battlefield, he saw the buckle on a German uniform.
And it says, in German, 'God is on our side.'"
Religion or
maternal love, Evans is distressed by the kind of manipulation that
exploits and twists and serves a sometimes dubious cause.
"The
whole idea of offering a son, and now daughter, to fight for a cause
and be sacrificed turns our expectation of motherlove on its head," she
says, alluding to the present because these days there is no escaping
it.
The mythologizing that comes of such reversals, she suggests,
tends to silence people at a time when there should be no silencing.
"In times of war, people seem to dispense with questions rather than
raise them." And that, says Evans, is not the answer.
Not as long
as there are sons and daughters dying for someone's idea of a cause.
Not as long as there are mothers left behind to mourn.
Janice Kennedy is a senior writer at the Citizen.
To listen to an interview with Suzanne Evans please visit CBC's The Current website: http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2007/200705/20070507.html
