The Death of Christian Britain

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