The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —<br />
narrative, engagement and the wedding become the displaced conversionist<br />
experience for a woman, with the marriage the arena for the contest to<br />
ensure the training and conversion <strong>of</strong> children and, if necessary, <strong>of</strong> her<br />
husband. <strong>The</strong> period <strong>of</strong> marriage is then, in narrative terms, not about the<br />
woman as the central character <strong>of</strong> the plot but about her husband or children.<br />
<strong>The</strong> woman in marriage is the facilitator, the moral foil, for the<br />
endangered moral state <strong>of</strong> others.<br />
Thus, a subtle change came upon the domestic setting <strong>of</strong> the evangelical<br />
narrative within ‘secular’ literature between the 1920s and 1950s. <strong>The</strong> home<br />
was no longer discursively the arena for tense and anxious maintenance <strong>of</strong><br />
the moral being, but became the venue for the depiction <strong>of</strong> unalloyed happiness.<br />
<strong>The</strong> foundation <strong>of</strong> the married home was no longer the restart <strong>of</strong> the<br />
‘moral cycle’ <strong>of</strong> conversion. This reflected how in these decades the moral<br />
campaigns <strong>of</strong> evangelicalism against sites <strong>of</strong> male temptation finally ground<br />
to a halt. <strong>The</strong> prohibition cause died in England in World War I, and in<br />
Scotland and Wales in the 1920s, while the anti-gambling campaign lost its<br />
argument when the 1934 Betting Act signalled the commencement <strong>of</strong> legalisation<br />
through government participation and taxation <strong>of</strong> revenue. 111 A<br />
poised ambivalence and hypocrisy reigned over the governance <strong>of</strong> British<br />
moral law between the mid-1930s and the late 1960s. Most forms <strong>of</strong><br />
gambling remained illegal, but they were virtually rampant in British life<br />
until the final legalisation <strong>of</strong> <strong>of</strong>f-course betting in 1961. Whilst prohibition<br />
was almost government policy in the 1914–18 war, drinking and ‘playing<br />
hard’ were actively condoned in the 1939–45 war. By the early 1940s, the<br />
pub was shown in many wartime films as not only ‘moral’ but as the centre<br />
<strong>of</strong> the British man’s firm resolve to beat the Nazis.<br />
This reduced pressure upon the woman in the moral sanctuary <strong>of</strong> home,<br />
and was reflected in the emergence <strong>of</strong> the married woman in the 1930s and<br />
1940s as a revered figure in British secular fiction. A classic representation<br />
is Mrs Miniver, which first appeared as a fictional serialised diary in <strong>The</strong><br />
Times in 1937–9, then as a novel, and subsequently as an MGM film <strong>of</strong><br />
1942 starring Greer Garson, and celebrated as ‘one <strong>of</strong> the most effective<br />
pieces <strong>of</strong> propaganda for Great <strong>Britain</strong>’ during the war. 112 In both literary<br />
and film versions, Mrs Miniver was striking for its portrayal <strong>of</strong> the happy<br />
home-loving domestic wife to whom nothing much happens. Domestic<br />
peace and orderliness is her joy: ‘Her normal life pleased her so well that<br />
she was half afraid to step out <strong>of</strong> its frame in case one day she should find<br />
herself unable to get back.’ 113 <strong>The</strong> ability to negotiate relations with servants<br />
and the working classes, to be the social peacemaker and the anti-snob,<br />
reveals a new egalitarian agenda – one noticeably developed in the<br />
Americanised film version which deployed Mrs Miniver (the character)<br />
as the model <strong>of</strong> how World War II’s corrosion <strong>of</strong> class division should<br />
be accomplished. She is a woman <strong>of</strong> capability and good works, freer<br />
(as Alison Light points out) from the constraints <strong>of</strong> aspiring to be ‘an<br />
83