Testament of grief: a cripistemology of somatic loss in women's writing of the First World War

The trench-scarred and battle-weary soldier perspectives of the First World War have long been considered the authoritative source of war experience. As a result, much remains to be said about the grief and trauma women suffered in the face of catastrophic personal and nation-wide loss and mourning, both the emotionally debilitating consequences for women at home, as well as the acute trauma and debility recorded by women who served as nurses and ambulance drivers at the front. This dissertation extends current disability studies scholarship to explore forms of emotional debilitation and the interrelationship between grief, trauma, and disability in women’s responses to the war.

The metaphoric uses of disability developed tangibly in the nineteenth century and were highly pervasive in the literature of the First World War. British women writing in response to the Great War utilized this rhetoric of disability to convey the embodied experience of loss. The relationship between disability and grief in the work of these war writers contributed unacknowledged formal and rhetorical innovations to refashion modernism's language of loss. This dissertation makes a unique interdisciplinary contribution by addressing this void in the acknowledged role of First World War disability rhetorics, while working to recover the contributions of important women writers of the war era. Further, this dissertation explores the deeply imbricated relationship between grief and disability and its significant consequences for how people thought about both disability and grief throughout the twentieth century, resonating with and defining the ways we think about them now.