Book: How WWI shaped remembrance rituals
A new book explores the evolution and continued resonance of remembrance rituals in post-World War I Britain.
Each year on November 11, bright red artificial poppies appear prominently across the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth—pinned to clothing, made into wreaths, and placed at monuments, and in more recent years, added digitally to social media profiles. In the years following the war, the poppy became the quintessential symbol of Remembrance Day, itself a commemoration of the end of the First World War and those who died in the line of duty.
“World War I is when many of the rituals we associate with the memorialization of the dead start: poppies, the two-minute silence, listing the names of the fallen, reading certain poems,” says Bette London, a professor of English at the University of Rochester. London explores the rise and evolution of such memorialization rituals in a new book, Posthumous Lives: World War I and the Culture of Memory (Cornell University Press, 2022).
“[Virginia] Woolf is implicitly asking a central question: Who is—and, perhaps more importantly, who isn’t—being memorialized at this moment?”
Hers is a book “about afterlives—the afterlife of World War I, the afterlife of its remembrance, and the afterlife of individual soldiers,” she writes. Following the war, “the scale of loss and its reach across the entire population” prompted a kind of “memorial mania” in Britain and Europe, according to London. In addition to the traditional war memorials such as the Cenotaph at Whitehall and the Edith Cavell Memorial in London, many villages and hamlets in Britain erected their own, more modest memorials.
The devastating loss of life also resulted in a rash of posthumous compilations and publications by family and friends seeking to construct—and commemorate—the lives of lost loved ones. London brings the tools of literary analysis to bear on the range of such source materials: the homemade memorial volumes compiled, and often published privately, by the families of dead soldiers more than a century ago; the life and work of the relatively unknown war poet Charles Hamilton Sorley, who was killed in action at age 20 but became a kind of cult figure for various constituencies; Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, an extended meditation on women’s writing that London argues can be read as a “monument to the unmemorialized”; the campaign to obtain pardons for the shot-at-dawn soldiers who were executed by firing squad for desertion; as well as recent art installations and exhibitions commemorating the World War I centenary.
London’s research illuminates a diversity of memorialization rituals that have taken shape in Britain over the course of more than a century—a diversity that is perhaps belied by the ubiquity of the remembrance poppy:
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