Citizenship, Masculinity and Mental Health in the First World War

Abstract

Writing in 1919, Emil Kraepelin, perhaps the most eminent authority on psychological medicine of his period, inveighed against the displacement in the armed services in the final years of the war of ‘the mature and emotionally well-anchored male’ by ‘excitable, unstable and weak-willed individuals, with under-developed personalities, like those of children, adolescents and women’.¹ Kraepelin embodied a standpoint in life, and a perspective on the turbulent currents of his time, that transcended his national context. In Britain as in Germany, jeremiads against ‘weak and degenerate personalities’ (or more accurately against ‘weakness’ however it manifest itself) had been much in vogue before the war. The maintenance of empire was believed to depend on a code of ‘moral manhood’, a robustly militaristic form of masculinity in which manliness provided the benchmark for both moral and mental health.² In countless adventure stories the soldier hero represented a potent figure of idealized masculinity.³ Boasted Rider Haggard’s fictional hero, Allan Quartermain, ‘there is not a petticoat in the whole of history’.⁴ Soon to be killed at Neuve Chapelle, the son of Oscar Wilde knew exactly what he had to live down in becoming a soldier: ‘first and foremost, I must be à man. There was to be no cry of decadent artist, of effeminate aesthete, of weak-kneed degenerate.’⁵