"Just the Kind of Girl Who Would Want a Chap to Be a Man": Constructions of Gender in the War Stories of Tryphena Duley (Critical Essay‪)‬

WAR, SUGGESTS MARGARET R. HIGONNET, might be understood as "the space where women ... are not" (Higonnet, 1995, 87). Indeed, some scholars have suggested that the cultural memory of the Great War defined a masculine subject, conferring authority and authenticity upon the soldier in a process that has, until recently, largely ignored the contributions and perspectives of women. As Debra Rae Cohen has observed of postwar British mythologies of the Great War: [The] master narrative of the war reasserted the notion of the battle front as the only front, both valorizing the battlefield experience and emphasizing its incommunicability ... The home front was thus implicitly deemed not worth writing about, the stresses and strains of women's nascent citizenship a less important topic than 'what society had lost.' (Cohen, 85)