Larkin and Gender

Abstract

The period 1940–60 witnessed the deepest entrenchment of patriarchal values since the Victorian era, often with specific reference to parliamentary acts of the 1840s and 1850s. In Chapter Three we remarked the intense ideological pressure to take sides that was exerted upon writers and artists during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Evidence for this military conscription of literature reinscribing heterosexual norms is afforded by the career of Noël Coward, a remarkable case of a once-dissident author assuming the lineaments of a wartime national monument. In the 1914–18 conflict, Coward spent nine months in the army, much of it cleaning latrines, desperately pulling strings so as to avoid active service. After a breakdown, probably simulated, he was discharged with a six-month pension. For nearly twenty years thereafter Coward wrote and starred in plays which — in addition to his camp Postmodern masterpieces Hay Fever, Private Lives and Present Laughter — consistently addressed such taboo topics as drug addiction (The Vortex), extra-marital sex (Fallen Angels), homosexuality (Semi-Monde), troilism (Design For Living), and the culpability of church and state for the slaughter of the Great War and the betrayal of post-war promises (Post-Mortem). Many of these plays were censored or banned.