Read the following selections from the war poetry of WWI: Rupert Brooke's (1887-1915) war sonnets ("Victory" and "The Hill"); Wilfred Owen's (1893-1918) "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth"; and Thomas Hardy's (1840-1928) "The Man He Killed" and "Channel Firing" (2296). Read the poems in order of the assignment; how do they progress to reveal the evolving attitude about the War? What have they in common with Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth?

Read Brittain's Testament of Youth. How does this memoir reflect England before and after the Great War? Likewise, characterize the five young people that the book focuses on: Vera, Edward, Roland, Geoffrey, and Victor. How does the experience of war mold their characters and shape their lives (beyond the obvious, that is)?

Vera Brittain was a prolific author, and this book is one of her best. In terms of style, characterize the book's structure, tone, and balance. How does the author keep the story from becoming maudlin and sentimentally sad? How does Brittain utilize symbol and theme? For example, the principle symbol working throughout the story is Somerville College, Oxford; how does Brittain utilize Oxford as a symbol to reflect the disillusionment that comes to all the characters with the passing of time? Why does Brittain return to Oxford after the war? How is school different for her? How is the book typical of the bildungsroman (see your literary handbook)?

As you read the novel, mark the following themes or motifs running throughout the story: "feminism," "work as salvation," and "letting go." What other themes do you find prominent in the book?

To understand this novel, which is a typical bildungsroman (a "coming of age" story)--in this case, not just the narrator alone but, emblematically, the whole of her generation)--one must become familiar with the social and cultural events leading up to WWI, the war years themselves, and their aftermath.

With the passing of Queen Victoria (1901) and the coming of a new monarchy and a new age (the Edwardian Period), old values and inhibitions were pushed aside and replaced by a wonderful sense of confidence and youthful exuberance (note, for example, the Bloomsbury Group: Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forester, Vanessa Stephen, Clive Bell). The idealism of youth wished to sweep away the old-fashioned prudery, the stifling inhibitions, hypocrisy, and moral strictures of their parents' generation--the Victorians. The time between the turn of the century and the first World War was thus an extraordinary period of experimentation in the arts--with the Picassos, Stravinskys, Diaglihevs, Woolfs, and Joyces among the premier innovators, the "avant-garde" generation of artists.

As the war commenced, that idealism was still present. This was to be the war "to end all wars," a war worthy of the lives of valiant young men and women, a war to vanquish the German "Huns" and bring the world together in peace at the end of a millennium--so rang out the peel of the propaganda machines of 1914. In reality, the war became an ugly, stagnant killing field, where mud and mire and the horror of trench warfare supplanted any glory that youth might have hoped for, and the "enemy" sometimes seemed as frightened and sick unto death as any of our own.

As the war dragged on, as idealism faded into disillusionment, daily life evolved into blackouts, rationing, and reading of the daily casualty lists in the papers. America waited until April 1917, three long years after the fighting began, to join the allied countries against the Germans, the Ottoman Empire, and the Austrian-Hungarian forces; nonetheless, in 1918, the war came to a close (Armistice, November 11).

When Lloyd George, Count Orlando, Clemenceau, and Wilson met to iron out the specifics of the Treaty of Versailles in 1819, there were still great hopes for a time of peace and for prosperity to be reclaimed. With his Fourteen Points in hand, Wilson met with his three peers, the leaders of England, Italy, and France respectively, to establish the terms of peace. Wilson's ideas were liberal toward Germany, calling for free and open world trade and the establishment of a League of Nations to function so that no more wars would have to be fought like the one just ending. All of his ideas were rejected, except the League of Nations concept, which ironically would be rejected, along with the Treaty of Versailles, by the American Congress when he returned home. Perhaps the only good to come from the War was the political enfranchisement of women (their reward for a heroic war effort) and the short economic boom that usually follows any war. The establishment of an Irish Republic also came after the war, as well, but the establishment of an Irish free state was fraught with complexities that would keep violence alive in Ireland until this day.

With ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, a defeated Germany was punished excessively, the colonial world was merely reapportioned among the victors (setting the stage for more violence around the world), and the League of Nations would be rendered effete and ineffectual without American participation. Any hopes for a millennium of peace were dashed; indeed, even a few decades of peace seemed unlikely.

By the time Vera Brittain is writing her memoir, Testament of Youth (1933), the world stage was set for economic depression, fascism, and another world war. One World War would ignite another. And on the individual or human level, those valiant young warriors, at least those who returned to England not in body bags, were jaded, disillusioned, weary, and spent. The world was neither a perfect place nor a safe place; it was, as Arnold wrote, a place filled with uncertainty and anxiety, a "darkling plain," where "ignorant armies gathered by night."

2) Wry humor and subtle irony are employed to keep the tone in this incredibly sad story from becoming maudlin and sentimental.

3) Balance and parallelism: The disillusion found at the European Front is a contrasting parallel with the idealism of the young people at Oxford; Roland's senseless death parallels Edward's heroism and Military Cross.

In terms of theme and message, how does such narrative balance enhance meaning? 4) Freudian use of dreams (168) to enhance meaning.

5) Rich use of symbolism to enhance theme or message. Symbolism is the hallmark of any organic work of literature (novels, poems and plays that are constructed credibly, compactly, and artfully), and symbolism in Brittain's book is used to present and enhance both theme and meaning. What are the most poignant symbols that Brittain utilizes in the novel?

1) Somerville = Idealism of youth, "sweetness and light," the Apollonian, all that is hopeful and right with the world, possibilities and potential, gender equality and dreams of some good work . To reject Oxford is to resign oneself to disillusion and despair (260). How does Somerville figure into Brittain's feminism?

2) War = Chaos, disruption, despair, the Dionysian, dark forces, "a candle stuck in the neck of a bottle, the tiny flame flickering in an ice-cold draught, yet creating a miniature of illusion of light against an opaque infinity of blackness" (372). What does Brittain mean above by the "illusion of light" in her symbolic representation of war? War represents the crass happenstance of life, disillusionment and nihilism (243, 446), futility (167). Remember Emily Dickinson's "after great pain, a formal feeling comes"--458--this is how Vera recovers for the pain war brings. How does society welcome home those who survive the front, in particular women like Brittain who had risked their lives along with the young men? How are these youths altered by the war? (469) What good, if any, comes to Vera from the war? (495, 472-477) What lessons can be learned from so much loss? What does Vera determine to study when she returns to Oxford? (473) How does the war itself function in the story as a "character"? (215-16)

1) Feminism (188) When both Roland and Edward are dead, who replaces them as Vera's confidant? Describe Winifred. How do Winifred and Vera do battle against misogyny? (508-09) What is the double-edged sword that comes with gaining political enfranchisement after the war? (577) What conflict do women find between the personal and professional? (422) How does the motif of "self-dependence" function with the feminist motif in the book?

2) Futility of War (167)

4) Salvation through Work (173)

5) Letting Go How does this theme work in the story? What must Vera "let go" of? Why is she so fearful of marriage; what does marriage to G. represent to Vera? Why must she struggle so to overcome her abhorrence of marriage? (619, 651)