Authors

Juliette Bretan¹;  ¹ University of Cambridge, UK

Discussion

Writing in 1939, the Anglo-Welsh author David Jones proposed that it was only through the art of allegory – ‘only by some such imaginary situation’ – that Brits could be fair to and understand contemporary politics in Poland, Ukraine and East-Central Europe. Jones was specifically encouraging comparisons with Britain as a mode of advancing sympathy – but in this paper, I want to take his statement as a jumping-off point to explore the substantial use of stage sets, theatrical tropes, and allegory in British depictions of Poland and East-Central Europe in earlier 1930s writing.

In works by Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, H.G. Wells, and Rex Warner, among others, I argue that tendencies to what I will be referring to as melodrama capture enduring British stereotypes and essentialisations about East-Central Europe. The formal techniques of melodrama were used to imagine political power, to suggest forms of social control, and to interrogate the capacity for truth and representation, through suggestions of fantasy and virtuality – giving an insight into contemporary British ignorance about Polish and East-Central European politics. Yet this paper will also explore how melodrama allowed new connections to emerge between East-Central Europe and Britain – not only through late 1930s cross-cultural understandings, as Jones suggests, but also as a critical framework which could be reapplied to evaluate political developments at home (such as in Patrick Hamilton’s Impromptu in Moribundia (1939) and Ruthven Todd’s Over the Mountain (1939)). I will also consider how melodrama’s modes of artificiality took on new meaning and resonance during periods of mass destruction in the early days of the Second World War.