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‘With Every Nerve in My Body I Stand for Peace’—Jane Ellen Harrison and the Heresy of War

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Reconsidering Peace and Patriotism during the First World War

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Abstract

This chapter examines the leading, albeit frequently dismissed, twentieth-century professional woman scholar and public intellectual, Jane Ellen Harrison, and her ardent pacifism in response to the First World War, as it puts her in conversation, through her correspondence, commentary, and anti-war, pacifist polemic, ‘Epilogue on the War: Peace with Patriotism’ (1915a), with leading pacifists and anti-war activists such as Bertrand Russell, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Clive Bell, and Gilbert Murray. Her essay ‘War and the Reaction’, which became ‘Epilogue on the War: Peace with Patriotism’ and was a model and important source for Virginia Woolf’s more well-known pacifist essay, Three Guineas, and Harrison’s other essays on war and humanism, ‘Heresy and Humanity’ and ‘Unanism and Conversion’, each collected in Alpha and Omega (1915b and d), add dimension to a discourse on peace, peace-making, and peace-building that has recently sought to historically construct both aesthetic and active resistance to the war, as well as to act as a counter to the myth of war experience (see Jonathan Atkin’s A War of Individuals: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War (2002); Jay Winter’s Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century (2006); and Grace Brockington’s Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain, 1900–1918 (2010)). Here, I explore Harrison’s engagement with and support of the No Conscription Fellowship and the Union of Democratic Control, led by ‘Goldie’ Dickinson, which she backed at great professional risk, incurring the public wrath of her male, pro-war colleagues at Cambridge; her vehement disagreement with her beloved and respected colleague, Gilbert Murray, one of the early crafters of the League of Nations and her close friend, when, in writing to him, she disputed his assumption that ‘War has its good side’; and her public support, again, at great professional risk, of Bertrand Russell. Harrison was read and respected by, and internationally well known to, her contemporaries as a pacifist and a radical, Cambridge intellectual, but her work as a pacifist remains underrepresented. This chapter seeks to act as a corrective, to fill a gap in a critical history in need of acknowledging and investigating her important contributions and efforts to prevent the war.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Harrison, Jane. ‘The Influence of Darwinism on the Study of Religions.’ Alpha and Omega. London: Sidgwick, 1915. New York: AMS, 1973, p. 144. [Hereafter, ‘Darwinism’].

  2. 2.

    Ibid .

  3. 3.

    Ibid ., p. 177.

  4. 4.

    See ‘Reading Transpersonally II—Women Building Peace’ in J. Mills, Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism (Ohio State University Press, 2014): 134–152.

  5. 5.

    See also Jonathan Atkin’s A War of Individuals: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War (2002); Jay Winter’s Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century (2006); and Grace Brockington’s Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain, 1900–1918 (2010).

  6. 6.

    Harrison, Jane. Ancient Art and Ritual. London: Williams, 1913. New York: Greenwood, 1969, p. 162.

  7. 7.

    Harrison, Jane. ‘Heresy and Humanity.’ Alpha and Omega. London: Sidgwick, 1915. New York: AMS, 1973, p. 32. [Hereinafter, ‘Heresy’].

  8. 8.

    Ibid ., p. 29.

  9. 9.

    The bulk of Harrison’s papers are made up of correspondence between herself and Gilbert Murray and are housed in Newnham College Archives, Newnham College, Cambridge.

  10. 10.

    Robinson, Annabel. The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 208.

  11. 11.

    Carpentier, Martha C. Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text. Vol. 12, Library of Anthropology Series. Amsterdam, NL: Gordon and Breach, 1998, p. 10.

  12. 12.

    Cooper, Sandi E. ‘Peace as a Human Right: The Invasion of Women into the World of High International Politics,’ Journal of Women’s History 14.2 (Summer 2002): 9–25, p. 21.

  13. 13.

    ‘Positive peace’ and ‘negative peace’ are terms created to establish a vocabulary for discussing peace as a discipline and in an effort to establish pedagogical norms and goals for peace research, and are attributed to Johan Galtung and John Burton, founders of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo in 1959. ‘Negative peace’ refers to the absence of violence, while ‘positive peace’ refers to the conditions necessary for building and sustaining peace, such as peace-building, mediation, and conflict resolution.

  14. 14.

    Qtd. in ‘Darwinism,’ p. 145.

  15. 15.

    ‘Darwinism,’ p. 145.

  16. 16.

    Ibid ., p. 147.

  17. 17.

    Ibid ., p. 148.

  18. 18.

    Ibid ., p. 144.

  19. 19.

    Ibid ., p. 147.

  20. 20.

    Ibid .

  21. 21.

    For a recent discussion of Quaker thought in the Bloomsbury peace movement, see Ashley Foster, ‘Writing in the White Light of Truth: History, Ethics, and Community in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.’ Woolf Studies Annual 22 (2016):

  22. 22.

    Ibid ., p. 178.

  23. 23.

    Brockington, Grace. Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain, 1900–1918. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010, p. 41.

  24. 24.

    Harrison, Jane. ‘Unanism and Conversion.’ Alpha and Omega. London: Sidgwick, 1915. New York: AMS, 1973, p. 22. [Hereinafter, ‘Unanism’].

  25. 25.

    Qtd. in Stewart, Jessie G. Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait in Letters. London: Merlin Press, 1959, p. 167.

  26. 26.

    Ibid ., p. 167.

  27. 27.

    Harrison was the intellectual leader of the Cambridge Ritualists, which included Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University; Francis M. Cornford, who became Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy; and Arthur Bernard Cook, Reader, then Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Trinity College, Cambridge. See also Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. New York: Routledge, 2002.

  28. 28.

    ‘Darwinism,’ pp. 151–152.

  29. 29.

    ‘Darwinism,’ p. 146.

  30. 30.

    The ‘Neo-Pagans’ were a group of undergraduate students and young dons who celebrated youth and looked to Rupert Brooke as their leader; for a discussion of the ‘Neo-Pagans,’ see Grace Brockington, 35–37, who describes them as both a ‘formally constituted group’ and ‘simply a coterie of friends who never claimed a group identity’ (36).

  31. 31.

    ‘Darwinism,’ p. 177.

  32. 32.

    ‘Darwinism,’ p. 174.

  33. 33.

    ‘Heresy,’ p. 31.

  34. 34.

    ‘Heresy,’ p. 29.

  35. 35.

    ‘Heresy,’ p. 30.

  36. 36.

    Harrison, Jane. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. London: Hogarth Press, 1925, p. 88. [Hereafter, Reminiscences].

  37. 37.

    Ibid .

  38. 38.

    Reminiscences, p. 89.

  39. 39.

    ‘Heresy,’ p. 31.

  40. 40.

    Ibid .

  41. 41.

    ‘Heresy,’ p. 32.

  42. 42.

    Fiske, Shanyn. ‘Hellenism and Heresy.’ Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination. Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2008, p. 2.

  43. 43.

    Thornton, Amara. ‘The Allure of Archaeology: Agnes Conway and Jane Harrison at Newnham College, 1903–1907.’ Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 21(1) May 2011: 37–56, p. 42.

  44. 44.

    Ibid ., p. 44.

  45. 45.

    Fiske, p. 2.

  46. 46.

    Qtd. in Brockington, Grace. Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain, 1900–1918. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010, p. 37.

  47. 47.

    ‘Heresy,’ p. 40.

  48. 48.

    ‘Heresy,’ p. 27.

  49. 49.

    Ibid .

  50. 50.

    Ibid ., p. 28.

  51. 51.

    Women were not given full membership at the university until 1948; Harrison was devastated by the fact that by the time she retired from Newnham College in 1922, her efforts on behalf of women’s inclusion had fallen short. She left Newnham disillusioned and disheartened, but turned her focus to the study of Russian, taking classes in Paris throughout the early 1920s.

  52. 52.

    ‘Heresy,’ p. 31.

  53. 53.

    Ibid .

  54. 54.

    Ibid ., pp. 35–36.

  55. 55.

    Ibid ., p. 36.

  56. 56.

    Ibid ., p. 38.

  57. 57.

    Ibid .

  58. 58.

    Ibid ., p. 39.

  59. 59.

    Ibid ., p. 40.

  60. 60.

    Harrison extends her thesis to include parents and their children, and her views speak to future disciplines of child psychology. In her revision of society: ‘Parents no longer treat their children as […] a subject-class to be manipulated for their pleasure, but as human beings, with views, outlooks, lives of their own. Children, it may even be hoped, will learn in time to treat their parents not merely as parents—i.e. as persons privileged to pay and to protect and at need to efface themselves—but as individual human beings, with their own passions and absorptions’ (‘Heresy’ 40); it is a position echoed somewhat by Sandi E. Cooper in 2002’s ‘Peace as a Human Right’, writing, ‘the message remained largely the same: Peace needs to be organized, economic justice needs to be insured, governments need to insure the well-being of the least fortunate citizens, men and women must share the management of households because the socialization of children is the smallest pebble in the continuum toward world peace’ (21).

  61. 61.

    ‘Heresy,’ p. 41.

  62. 62.

    Harrison, Jane. ‘Unanism and Conversion.’ Alpha and Omega. London: Sidgwick, 1915. New York: AMS, 1973, p. 44. [Hereafter, ‘Unanism’].

  63. 63.

    ‘Unanism,’ p. 62.

  64. 64.

    The three French poets are Jules Romains, Rene Arcos, and Charles Vildrac, whom Harrison uses to expand her discussion of spiritual unity.

  65. 65.

    ‘Unanism,’ p. 54.

  66. 66.

    Ibid ., p. 60.

  67. 67.

    Ibid ., p. 61.

  68. 68.

    Ibid ., p. 63.

  69. 69.

    Ibid ., p. 79.

  70. 70.

    Ibid ., p. 76.

  71. 71.

    Ibid .

  72. 72.

    Ibid ., p. 71.

  73. 73.

    Qtd. in Stewart, p. 150.

  74. 74.

    Ibid ., p. 148.

  75. 75.

    Harrison, Jane. ‘Epilogue on the War: Peace with Patriotism.’ Alpha and Omega. London: Sidgwick, 1915. New York: AMS, 1973, p. 221. [Hereafter, ‘Epilogue’].

  76. 76.

    Qtd. in Stewart, p. 151.

  77. 77.

    Ibid .

  78. 78.

    Brockington, p. 16.

  79. 79.

    Ibid .

  80. 80.

    Arlen, Shelley. ‘For Love of an Idea: Jane Ellen Harrison, Heretic and Humanist’ Women’s History Review 5.2 (1996): 165–190, p. 178.

  81. 81.

    Qtd. in Stewart, p. 147.

  82. 82.

    ‘Epilogue,’ p. 222.

  83. 83.

    Ibid ., p. 169.

  84. 84.

    ‘Heresy,’ p. 30.

  85. 85.

    Reminiscences, p. 11.

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  1. Department of English, John Jay College, New York, NY, USA

    Jean Mills

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  1. University of Central Oklahoma , Edmond, Oklahoma, USA

    Justin Quinn Olmstead

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Mills, J. (2017). ‘With Every Nerve in My Body I Stand for Peace’—Jane Ellen Harrison and the Heresy of War. In: Olmstead, J. (eds) Reconsidering Peace and Patriotism during the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51301-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51301-0_6

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