Spurning the Sock

Just a little something I've been thinking about.

To explain the sense of the title of this post, I want to begin with a quotation from Rose Macaulay, a British author who wrote, among many other things, war poetry. If you’ve studied war poetry at all, chances are it was men’s war poetry--Wilfrid Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon. In my Norton Anthology from my first undergrad poetry class, there isn’t a single woman listed in the section on “Poetry of World War I.” It’s only in the last couple of decades or so that women’s war poetry has been seriously studied, but that’s a whole other post, isn’t it?

For now, let’s look at a few lines from Rose Macaulay’s poem, “Many Sisters to Many Brothers”:

Oh, it’s you that have the luck, out there in the mud and muck
. . .
In a trench you are sitting, while I am knitting
A hopeless sock that never gets done.
(Scars Upon My Heart, xxv)

Now, there’s quite a bit going on in these few lines: it’s a miniature dramatization of the differences between male and female roles, especially in wartime, including a valorization of war in general and the male role in war in particular, and an acknowledgement of the irony in that valorization. I’m not going to try to explicate this passage entirely, but I want to focus on the “hopeless sock” in the last line.

The narrator is speaking to an imagined male listener, presumably a soldier embroiled in the fighting in the trenches, one of the defining features of World War I. And what she is saying, on the surface of it at least, is that she’d rather be where he is--in the mucky, ugly, dangerous, but presumably more exciting, more important, and even more hopeful trenches--than where she is--at home, safe, warm, dry, but confined to the dull and ultimately useless and ineffectual, even dare we say impotent, work of knitting a stocking. Yes, it’s safe work, and she can do it from the comfort of her home (although with the bombing of London, even the home isn't particularly safe); but it’s work that goes nowhere, does little, and denies her the satisfying feeling of a job that can actually at some point be completed. Her job, in fact, is unending, and not only unending, but insignificant. And this is why I’ve used it in my title.

The history of the military is the history of war, and the history of war, until quite recently, has been the history of men, and the other side of the history of men at war is women left at home, presumably left safe at home, expected to “keep the home fires burning” and reminded of how important that job is and how the men are out there fighting to keep them safe, while back at home they are often not really safe and the only action available to them is to doggedly attempt to maintain the status quo--which is really impossible during wartime, no matter where you are. They are, in effect, left to do an impossible job, even, Macaulay’s narrator suggests, a hopeless one, because even when the war ends, as all wars do, and the men come home, the woman’s work, as the old saying tells us, is never done. Furthermore, as noted critic Jane Marcus tells us, “all wars destroy women’s culture, returning women to the restricted roles of childbearing and nursing and only the work that helps the war effort. The struggle for women’s own political equality becomes almost treasonous in wartime” (129).