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Article Excerpt
[The Unknown Warrior has come] from an obscure grave in France, to his last resting place in Westminster Abbey, & it is to honour his passing, symbolising as he does, the unrecorded acts, the unseen devotion, the unknown heroism of the 'Digger', the 'Tommy', the 'Jack Tar' that we are all gathered here ... The streets are lined with soldiers & sailors, & there are more police to the square foot than I have ever seen in my life.
Vida Lahey (1)
In 1914, Vida Lahey (1882-1968) was an independent, practising artist with her own Brisbane studio, who also taught at Brisbane High School for Girls. She had already painted Monday morning (1912, Queensland Art Gallery), for which she is often best remembered. She had travelled to New Zealand on a painting tour, and had begun to be vocal about the impoverished state of Queensland art. (2) War brought a sharp change in direction. Her contribution to the war, as her niece Shirley Lahey claims, was in 'abandoning her career just when it was gathering strength' in order to go to London and provide a home base for the 'boys'. (3)
Among the 52,561 young men that signed up to fight in 1914 (4) was Vida's cousin Godfrey, who enlisted as a signaller. The following year, due to Gallipoli, the number of men enlisting increased, and her brothers Romeo, Noel and Jack, along with several cousins, signed up. By 1918, a total of fifteen cousins, six from the same family, had joined Vida's three brothers; four were killed. Her brother Jack was severely wounded twice, and Romeo fought in several major battles. (5) Noel died on 10 June 1917 from wounds received in Ploegsteert Wood, part of the Battle of Messines Ridge. (6)
Letters such as the one above by Lahey have always been treasured by descendants, but they have recently increased in public value. In 2005 the last Gallipoli veteran died. Gallipoli no longer exists as a lived memory. It has passed from the experiential to the memorialised realm. The veterans are dead; their memories remain only as stories told by descendants recalling the memories their loved ones shared and, more concretely, in representations generated through the experience of war itself (letters, memoirs, diaries or artwork). This increases the value of, and the need to contextualise, such primary resources.
An acute sense of the boundary of this disappearing past may partly account for the interest in the first world war that Bruce Scates traced in interviews with 200 Australian 'pilgrims' to Gallipoli. (7) Some went there as backpackers to 'party' but it is clear that for others the experience was deeply moving. Their anecdotes demonstrate how identity is intricately bound to narratives of the past, the desire of the living to find a link to their dead, and the nuances of long-term grief. (8) Gallipoli's landscape is 'charged with meanings': (9) national meanings consciously converge with personal meanings that the very process of memorialising helps to construct.
Although Joy Damousi (1999, 2001) has claimed a historiography for grief and loss, and Jay Winter has suggested that there is a 'language of mourning', Scates argues that such histories and languages are often lost. (10) There has been a failure to 'historicise grief at the level of the individual' and questions like, 'How did parents, lovers and friends come to terms with loss, how did they rationalise their "sacrifice", what form did bereavement take?' have not been asked, says Scates, much less answered. (11)
By examining Vida's response to the war, this paper contributes to the project of finding answers to such questions, and it does so in two ways that intersect. Firstly, it demonstrates that public acts of commemoration structure the experience of private 'remembering'. Secondly, it shows that the taking up of the commemorative moment is just as clearly extended into a very personal and necessary expression of grief.
In the first instance, using Vida's letter I follow through on Winter's phrase, 'language of mourning'. I argue that Vida internalises various binaries from the public ceremony of the Unknoen Warrior. These are organised through the principle binary of absence and presence where absence is, unusually, the more powerful term. Every binary contributes to a complex network that captures the complexity of her grief as an emotional response that is also an intellectual and artistic response that we can trace.
In linking emotion and intellect, I am following Martha Nussbaum's understanding of the emotions as 'upheavals of thought'. For Nussbaum, emotions are not simply feelings that buffet people around without connection to intelligible patterns in their lives. The cognitive act of 'receiving and processing information' lies within emotions, though not necessarily as 'elaborate calculation, or even of reflexive self awareness'. (12) Nussbaum adapts the ancient Greek idea that emotions are constituted through a eudaimonistic element: that is, they are self referential, connected to a person's 'flourishing'. (13) 'Most of the time', she writes, 'emotions link us to items that we regard as important for our well-being, but do not fully control. The emotion records that sense of vulnerability and imperfect control'. (14)
Vida's letter represents Armistice Day 1920. Despite the drama and scale of that public event, however, her personal grief remained and demanded further acknowledgement. The war and her loss were beyond her control and rendered her vulnerable. Indeed, that commemoration simply acknowledged the extent of everyone's vulnerability. Nowhere is the reiteration of incomprehensible loss more obvious than in the row after row of headstones in military cemeteries. (15) Some writers even argue that the enormity of emotional suffering had a cultural outcome in the shift to modernity occasioned by the Great War. (16)
In the second instance of my analysis, I demonstrate that this 'language of mourning' necessarily becomes personalised through Vida's painting Rejoicing and remembrance: Armistice Day London 1918 (c. 1923). It becomes possible to recognise the intersections between memorialising (as public sign) and a representation shaped by personal memory (as intelligent emotion) because these analyses help to historicise Vida's grief, thus restoring the specificity of personal bereavement.
In the analysis of the painting, I argue that Vida redeploys some of the binaries that the letter helped to identify. Working to destabilise binaries altogether, the painting captures an ambivalence that stands as Vida's definitive, yet characteristically gentle, critique of the war. This act of sustained critique was eudaimonistic: an extended mourning necessary to Vida's future well-being. It supplemented the memorialising represented in the letter and it existed in excess to, or beyond...
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