"Gripping, Grewsome, Great": Re-Encountering Ellen La Motte’s "The Backwash of War" through the Lens of Obscenity

• Layne Parish Craig ^[1]
  1. [1] Texas Christian University
• Localización: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, ISSN 0732-7730, ISSN-e 1936-1645, Vol. 39, Nº. 1, 2020, págs. 39-60
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article shines new light on a lesser-known modernist woman writer whose use of the obscene was no less revolutionary than that of her male contemporaries. Ellen N. La Motte’s World War I memoir The Backwash of War was celebrated upon its publication in 1916 for its frank treatment of the human body; however, scholarly work on La Motte has focused on her biography as a nurse-essayist and downplayed her explicit depictions of male soldiers’ physicality. This paper analyzes La Motte’s use of obscenity and taboo in order to recover her place not only as a bold and transgressive documentarian of the war but also as a progenitor of a modernist writing style heavily influenced by changing understandings of the role of the body in art.