Representations of Threshold Chronotope in Jessie Pope’s Selected War Poems
Hikmat Khalaf Hussein AL Hussein
PhD student at Ankara University / Graduate School of Social Sciences/ English Language and Literature
NAZAN TUTAŞ
Graduate School of Social Sciences/ English Language and Literature / Ankara University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/Lang.8.5.13
Keywords: Jessie Pope, Mikhail Bakhtin, war poems, the First World War, threshold chronotope
Abstract
The First World War displayed the complicated connection that people have with space as they navigate between the exterior environment and their interior emotional reactions. Among these spaces is the threshold chronotope, which is one of the most notable ones that Mikhail Bakhtin discusses in his article “Forms of the Chronotope in the Novel”. He characterizes this category of space as one that elucidates the demarcation between spaces symbolized by the in-between; it can be summed up in periods of unrest and absence of resolution and decision-making during times of crisis, such as train stations, airports, bridges, and borders; it is also exemplified in the time of anticipation, as when women wait in windows and doors in the time of the war. This study aims to examine the poems of Jessie Pope’s war poems in terms of her representation of the chronotope of threshold based on the spatial perspectives of Bakhtin. During wartime, this space category has a direct impact on the experiences of women and soldiers. Pope, despite her supportive and encouraging stance and her explicit response towards war through her patriotic poems for soldiers during the time of the war; however, she employs threshold chronotope to address the challenging issues and situations that arise during times of crisis, including isolation, fragmentation, separation, distance, marginalization, and restriction. She employs metaphor to represent this form of chronotope, as areas that affect women’s lives as poets, ordinary citizens, and soldiers who are the women’s sons, brothers, husbands, and friends. Finally, Pope’s portrayal of space as a crisis-ridden environment that befalls both women and soldiers corresponds with Bakhtin’s definition of the concept of the threshold.
References
Bebbington, W. G. (1972). Jessie Pope and Wilfred Owen. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 3(4).
Beer, David. (2023, September 13). “War Poet Jessie Pope”. Roads to the Great War. http://roadstothegreatwar-ww1.blogspot.com/2019/06/war-poet-jessie-pope-by-david-beer.html. Accessed 14 September 2023.
Božić, N. (2021). The Poetry of the Great War and Propaganda [Doctoral dissertation, University of Zagreb. University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Department of English language and literature].
Çiftcioğlu, S. K. (2021). Contextualizing Space In The Contemporary Scottish Novel: Alasdair Gray’s The Fall of Kelvin Walker, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, and Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy [Doctoral dissertation, Ankara University Graduate School of Social Sciences Department Of Western Languages And Literatures (English Language and Literature)].
Cook, M. M. (2015). Reconsidering Jessie Pope: The Writer Before” A Certain Poetess” (Doctoral dissertation, Auburn University).
Cuijpers, I. F. T. (2019). “Nobody asked what the women thought”: An Analysis of the Relationship between Women and War in British Women’s Poetry of the First World War (1914-1918). Radboud University, Master’s Thesis.
Dawson, C. (2017). Poetry of the First World War in Britain in the Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts. Edinburgh University Press.
Hammill, F., Miskimmin, E., & Sponenberg, A. (Eds.). (2006). Encyclopedia of British women’s writing, 1900-1950 (pp. xi+-343). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Holquist, Michael, ed. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press.
Ingham, J. (2007). The Function of Physical Space in the Cuban Novel of the 1950s.
Khan, N. (1988). Women’s poetry of the First World War. University Press of Kentucky.
Murad, I. A. (2022). Politics of the Space: Drone War in Andrea Brady’s The Blue Split Compartments. Journal of Language Studies, 6(1), 82-92.
Pope, J. (1915). Jessie Pope’s war poems. G. Richards, Limited.
Sillars, S. (2007). Fields of agony: British poetry of the First World War. Humanities-Ebooks.
Sulaiman, N. F. (2020). Trauma in Drama: Relieving Suppression in Contemporary Monodramas of Heather Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire and Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife. Journal of Language Studies, 3(2), 107-136.
