Holly Furneaux. Military Men of Feeling

In his 1916 poem “In Memoriam,” written to commemorate the death in battle of Pt. David Sutherland of the 5th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders, E. A. Mackintosh, Sutherland’s commanding officer, addresses his lost subordinate and his comrades as “more my sons than your fathers’; / For they could only see / The little helpless babies / And the young men in their pride. / They could not see you dying, / And hold you as you died.” Mackintosh’s poem, with its invocation of both the familial and the tactile in its construction of the relationship between officer and men, places both within an important historical tradition of the “gentle soldier,” a figure at the center of cultural impulses to reroute “tales of violence into ameliorative stories of healing and resurrection, physical and emotional” (2). The “military man of feeling” is the subject of Holly Furneaux’s important new book. This figure has, as Furneaux notes in her introduction, received a certain amount of attention in relation to both the long eighteenth century and the briefer but no less resonant years of the First World War. Yet he has, she goes on to argue, slipped from historical view in the years in between, becoming “overshadowed by perceptions of compressed Victorian lips, . . . firmly separated civilian and military spheres, and emotionally dysfunctional empire-building” (15). It is this lacuna that Furneaux seeks to remedy in Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War, her significant new study of gentle soldiers in the literature and life of nineteenth-century Britain, principally those who fought in the Crimean War.

Ancient history · Art · Battle · Courage · Feeling · Literature · Masculinity · Officer · Poetry · Political science · Pride · Psychoanalysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · History of Emotions Research · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology