Repression and articulation of war experience: a study of the literary culture of Craiglockhart War Hospital

Abstract

Prior study of Craiglockhart War Hospital has focused on the hospital’s two most famous patients, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, along with the work of the psychotherapist W. H. R. Rivers. Craiglockhart’s literary culture is studied in detail for the first time in this thesis and the hospital’s therapeutic ethos used as a framework by which the creative work produced at the hospital can be examined. This thesis argues that the British Army’s lack of consensus regarding the best treatment of war neuroses facilitated the development of Craiglockhart’s expressive culture, in which patients were encouraged both to articulate their wartime memories and return to purposeful activity. The hospital’s magazine, The Hydra, is examined at length; both in terms of its links to the wider genre of wartime soldier publications and as a telling document of the hospital’s therapies in action. Owen and Sassoon’s time at the hospital is also discussed, with particular emphasis on the hospital’s central importance in Owen’s poetic development and its troubling legacy in the post-war life of Sassoon. Finally, readers are introduced to George Henry Bonner, a patient of the hospital whose creative work is discussed here for the first time. This study makes clear the fact that, for the hospital’s literary-minded patients, creative endeavour was an ideal means by which to negotiate the movement away from repression to the articulation of their wartime experiences.