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Visualising conflicts. An exploration of Canadian artist Mary Riter Hamilton’s paintings: herstory of the war

Hanene Zoghlami

Résumés

Cette étude examine la valeur de la peinture en tant que preuve historique en adoptant une approche dite histoire par en bas (history from below). En étudiant les détails de la vie de l’artiste canadienne Mary Riter Hamilton à partir de sa biographie, cet article propose une nouvelle lecture de ses peintures de l’immédiat après-guerre et met en lumière la vision de ce conflit par l’artiste. Il va au-delà de l’interprétation iconographique littérale de ses images et aborde un aspect ambivalent peu étudié dans l’historiographie récente, celui de l’impact de la psychologie du peintre sur ses œuvres d’art. L’article se penche essentiellement sur la façon dont le conscient et l’inconscient sont associés pour créer un texte visuel de l’histoire dans les peintures de Hamilton. Nous soutenons que les significations de ses trois œuvres, War Material, Sanctuary Wood, Flanders et Albert Somme Route d’Amiens, sont plus complexes que la simple représentation des conséquences immédiates de la Grande Guerre ou des sentiments de sacrifice, de victimisation, de patriotisme et de commémoration de l’entre-deux-guerres. Cette étude va au-delà de cette dimension. Elle est centrée sur le concept clé d’esthésiologie et analyse les peintures à travers le prisme de l’émotion, en examinant les sous-thèmes de la peur, de l’anxiété et du traumatisme qui constituent le point commun de ces trois tableaux.

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Texte intégral

Introduction

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, aber macht sichtbar [Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible]
Paul Klee, quoted in Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing

  • 1 The Marxist critic Nicos Hadjinicolaou showcased the association between « scientific discourse and (...)
  • 2 Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing, The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, Farringdon, Reaktion Books, (...)
  • 3 Spector, Jack. « The Case of Psychoanalytic Research in Art History », The Art Bulletin, vol. 70, n (...)

1Art has the power to render viewable what could be an obscured historical event by incorporating life in form. The « pictorial turn1 » of the 1960s ushered in a new era whereby the image could be considered valuable evidence to particular historical trends2. The original interest in this niche was given prominence with more scholars going beyond iconography in the mode of art historians with the likes of Erwin Panofsky and Emile Mâle by corroborating a growth or interdisciplinary shift from the genuine humanistic knowledge to involve a kin discipline to history: psychohistory3.

  • 4 Acton, Carol. « Diverting the Gaze: The Unseen Text in Women’s War Writing », College Literature, v (...)
  • 5 Burke. op. cit., p. 13.
  • 6 Young, Kathryn A., McKinnon, Sarah M. No Man’s Land. The Life and Art of Mary Riter Hamilton, Manit (...)
  • 7 Frederick G. Fella was a Canadian journalist at McClure Newspaper Syndicate during the 1920s.

2Painting from a gendered outlook bespeaks witnessed events and presents history from a raw and special angle. In The World Wars through the Female Gaze, Jean Gallagher discusses how women « look » and make sense of what they perceive via textual and visual means. She maintains that « vision has […] played an important role in the development and gendering of cultural discourse about war4 ». Gender perspective shapes the way history is delineated. Mary Riter Hamilton a ‘bohemian’ Canadian painter from the Prairies who traveled to the apocalyptic landscape of the Great War – commissioned by a soldiers’ magazine – right after the armistice, brought us in the words of Stephen Bann « face to face with history » through her post-war collection5. During two years (1919-1921), Hamilton documented and recorded the past through her paintings. She narrated her story of the war without retouches as she experienced it. Hamilton asserted that « I cannot talk. I can only paint », and so she did6. The painter transmitted what she saw and witnessed through her brush. She painted the immediate aftermath of the war with its ravages, catastrophe and trauma. She inserted the missing pieces of the puzzle in the blanks left by contingencies and gaps of memory. Hamilton forged her private national herstory. It is what historians call history from below or history of the marginalsed. Frederick G. Falla7 indicated that:

  • 8 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 106.

Among the women who have most enduringly written their name on the history of the war, there are few whose record is likely to last longer or stir more deeply the imagination of future generations than the one created by Mary Riter Hamilton […]. How many wives, mothers and sisters will obtain from her paintings made before spring smiled again on the wilderness of the dead, their only vision of that corner of the world on which their loved ones looked for the last time8!

  • 9 Ibid.
  • 10 Bourke, Joanna. « Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History », History Workshop Jou (...)
  • 11 Ibid.
  • 12 Burke. op. cit., p. 183.
  • 13 Stephen Bann’s assumption is that « the visual image proves nothing–or whatever it does prove is to (...)

3Based on Mary Riter Hamilton’s biography, this investigation seeks to turn over a new leaf upon the importance of the aesthetics of catastrophe portrayed by fine art during the post-war years9. It is an attempt to challenge the double marginalisation of the visual tool as both robust and ambivalent historical contrivance and the women as decisive bearers of their historical testimonies. Joanna Bourke argues that at the core of a conflict that initiated the world to monstrosities unlike anything witnessed in the modern era, hate, fear, cruelty and love « will tomorrow have finally made our universe into a stinking pit of corpses10 ». Emotions could not be sidelined into irrelevance or considered as « by-products » as showcased by archival-prone historians11. Peter Burke asserts that images are neither a shadow of social reality nor a pattern of signs without a link to social reality but they permeate a space in the midst of these extremes12. This examination is therefore an attempt to explore an alcove in-between these edges. By excavating history from the ‘ahistorical’, I will attempt to tackle a selection of Hamilton’s paintings from the neoteric prisms of aesthesiology and emotion13.

  • 14 Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text, New York, Fontana Press, 1977, p. 147.
  • 15 Spector. op. cit., p. 60.
  • 16 Scholars have long maintained that each and every epoch has a unique nature and spirit that disting (...)

4The design of this study is based on the exploration of Mary Riter Hamilton’s paintings: Sanctuary Wood, Flanders (1920), War Material (1920), and Albert (Somme) Route d’Amiens (1920) through the lens of her biography. Roland Barthes in « The Death of the Author » emphasized that « once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes futile14 ». This statement is oriented not merely against the author as creator, but against the autonomous text or image15. Through a close scrutiny of her biography No Man’s Land, I will attempt to delve into every ostensibly trifling minutia of the painter’s life searching for manifestations consequential for her art. I will go beyond reading her paintings as a rendition of zeitgeist16. The aim is to transcend the literal meanings in order to extricate the internal layers of a painting via joining iconographic, psychic and social aspects of art with the view to tackle the main problematic of how the conscious and unconscious are fused to create a visual text of history in Hamilton’s paintings.

Historiography and Theoretical Groundings

  • 17 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 61.

5Mary Riter Hamilton was an archetype of women of her era. She was exposed to impressive and turbulent transformations. Within the time span of a couple of years, she lost her father, her husband and a still born baby. This triple loss somehow empowered her and could be considered as one of the main incentives that encouraged her to take up art as her career by devoting her whole life to painting. She moved to Europe during la Belle Époque, where she enrolled in Art schools in Berlin and Paris. She peregrinated across prominent European cities in the pursuit of the perfect landscape to paint. An impressionist, post-impressionist or in the words of the Mail and Empire: « Mrs. Hamilton belongs to no particular school, and apparently has no artistic fad but her canvases mirror the grand skills she acquired throughout her career17 ».

  • 18 Frizzell, Nell. « Why were so many female artists airbrushed from history? » Guardian, Monday May 1 (...)
  • 19 Nochlin, Linda. « Why Are There No Great Women Artists », in Vivian Gornick, Barbara Moran, Woman i (...)

6In a recent article in the Guardian entitled « Why Were so Many Female Artists’ Written out of History », Nell Fritzell wondered about the cause why women painters were effaced from history and she started her article by a powerful quotation by Virginia Wolf which goes as follows: « For most of history, Anonymous was a woman18 ». Fritzell’s question was actually posed by American Art Historian Linda Nochlin thirty years ago in her landmark essay « Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists19 ? » Nochlin debunked:

The myth of the Great Artist – subject of a hundred monographs, unique, godlike – bearing within his person since birth a mysterious essence, rather like the golden nugget in Mrs. Grass’s chicken soup, called Genius or Talent’: a fairytale perpetuated by the ‘romantic, elitist, self-individualising substructure on which the profession of art history is based’20

7Nochlin asked for a revision to the notion of male artistic genius and demanded a corrective to the male dominated narrative. In Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981), Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock in line with Nochlin dispute the imbedded claim of art history « that great art is created by a succession of male geniuses independent of social and historical contexts21 ». The book offers a new approach which feminists can depart from to question the institutional production of art. Parker and Pollock argue that: « Women artists are not outside history or culture but occupy and speak from a different position within it22 ».

  • 23 Young and McKinnon, op. cit., p. 3.
  • 24 Helmers, Marguerite. « A Visual Rhetoric of World War I Battlefield Art: C.R.W Nevinson, Mary Riter (...)
  • 25 Osborne, op. cit. 
  • 26 Gammel, Irene. « The Memory of St Julien: Configuring Gas Warfare in Mary Riter Hamilton’s Battlefi (...)

8Recently, a rising number of scholars ventured in the pictorial realm, and a new literature in the field is finding its way within the parameters of the present study’s problematic. This is an unequivocally welcome, if a well-timed addition to, the scholarly engagement with the visual legacy. Mary Riter Hamilton is one such female artist who received scanty interest despite her achievements and the unprecedented role she played as a Canadian painter in France and Belgium right after the end of World War One. The artist’s biography is a fundamental addition to the historiography of women and social history as pointed out by Hamilton’s two biographers Kathryn A. Young and Sarah M. McKinnon23. Margret Helmers’ and Irene Gammel’s articles are significant attempts to redress the imbalance in the literature and their contribution is momentous to the present article as it informs the main arguments of this paper. Helmers’ illuminating comparative article focuses on the Burkean pentad as the primary tool she uses to articulate the rhetorical work of the paintings in calling into question attitudes about war24. Helmers’ case studies are based on the juxtaposition of Nevinson’s Paths of Glory (1917) and Hamilton’s the Sadness of the Somme (1920)25. Gammel’s paper probes into the commemoration of the first gas attack at St Julien in a rather different fashion from official Canadian war artists26.

  • 27 Burke, op. cit., p. 35-36.

9It is necessary at this point of discussion to delineate the theoretical contours of the testimony of Hamilton’s images in conjunction with the artistic canons for portraying the aftermath of the war, as well as the artist’s impulsions and the expected objective of the image. To begin with, Nicolas Poussin and Émile Mâle were the proponents of literal interpretations. They belong to the classical trend of iconographers who bequeathed their legacy to Aby Warburg and Panofsky among others. Panofsky introduced three levels of meaning in the work of art: pre-iconographical description, iconographical analysis and iconological interpretation27. This could be encapsulated in a rather purposefully and deliberately ‘safe’ and classical method of approaching the pictorial.

  • 28 Heehs, Peter. « Narrative Painting and Narratives about Paintings: Poussin among the Philosophers » (...)
  • 29 Rorty, op. cit., p. 3.

10‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ and every picture has a story to narrate hence the importance of visual narrative as a necessary tool to fathom an image notwithstanding the opposition of wordlessness and expression, inaction and action. Whatever the connotation of a painting, spectators wield specific terminology to elucidate its message to themselves and others. According to Louis Marin, each beholder of an artwork « converts the iconic representational model into language and more precisely into a story28 ». Plainly or obliquely, intentionally or unintentionally works of art as a rule of thumb convey the theological, political, social, and economic thoughts of their age29. To dialogue with a painting is essential by transcending the surface to their abstract conventional features. Karl Michel argues about the ingrained nexus that exists in the midst of intimate experiences and art. The artist’s imaginative dexterity evokes an undertaking to grasp and uncover the sense in her/his experience. Viktor Lowenfeld discusses the concept of experience in the art sphere. He underlines that:

  • 30 Michel, Karl F. « Drawing on Experience: A Study of Vietnam Veteran Artists », Studies in Art Educa (...)

Any experience in which the whole individual participates: that means his thinking, in which he discovers something; his feelings, in which he feels what he has discovered; and his perceiving, in which he has become sensitively aware though his senses so that what he has discovered has meaning to him [her]30.

  • 31 Spector, op. cit., p. 49.
  • 32 Elkins, James. « On Monstrously Ambiguous Paintings », History and Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, 1993, p. (...)
  • 33 Roger Fry quoted in Spector, op. cit., p. 68.
  • 34 Manuel, Frank E. « The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History », Daedalus, vol. 117, no. 3, 1988, p (...)
  • 35 O’Connor, Francis V. « Two Methodologies for the Interpretation of Abstract Expressionism », Art Jo (...)
  • 36 Burke. op. cit., p. 170.

11Deciphering the pictorial necessitates a psychology that overrides the instant experience with its direct link with a particular condition of feeling31. When analysing a visual tool intentionality and intentionalism are pre-requisite to grasp or decode meanings32. Roger Fry maintains: « It is generally in small works thrown off by the way that an artist reveals the underlying trend of his nature, precisely because such works are less moulded by deliberate and conscious purpose. In them the profounder and more unconscious needs have full play33 ». He thereafter points to the artist’s handwriting. The objective of this study is not to be submerged by a « jungle of psychologism » or try to mate an elephant and a whale34. History will be interpreted through mute images by conceptualising Hamilton’s paintings from a historical consciousness through the externalization of her feelings in an endeavour to recapture her emotions at the time when she painted her post-war collection in France and Belgium. The psychodynamics and the unconscious of the painter are crucial in her artistic concoction. The artwork should not be viewed as an unbending object of a distinct stage in the life time of its artist. It is to be perceived as partially defined by the unconscious performance of its creator. Diverse patterns function either as a sign or symbol, otherwise stated, they either denote or generate meaning. A design can be heeded as unconsciously selected by one or more of the subsequent hallmarks: its incessant reoccurrence, its connection to a recorded psychological episode, its contextual accuracy, or its numinosity (aesthetic vigor)35. This approach of interpreting paintings by examining the psychological incentive both essential and peripheral of the artists is enlightening because « the unconscious plays a part in the creation of images or texts36 ».

Tapping into the paintings of Hamilton through the prisms of aesthesiology and emotion

Fear and Anxiety

  • 37 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 90.

12The biography of Hamilton encompasses poignant insights about her life which to some degree reflect her frame of mind when she drew her visual record of the ravaged countryside in France and Belgium before reconstruction. When Hamilton reached the shores of France in 1919, this was her third trip to Europe. The previous two encounters during which Hamilton spent nearly a decade was a far cry from the new post-war Europe. Her private accounts are prolific in the specificities about the outset of her adventure, setting forth her accommodation in Arras, the maverick life and scarcity she endured on the battlefields. In one letter she wrote, « my attic is full of shell holes and the people in the house said it wasn’t fit for a dog to live in37 ».

  • 38 Gay, Peter. « Psychoanalysis in History », Poetics Today, vol. 9, no. 1, 1988, p. 241.
  • 39 Bourke. op. cit., p. 126.

13When scrutinising War Material, Sanctuary Wood, Flanders and Albert (Somme) Route d’Amiens, the external realm of the artist has to be considered. Hamilton’s biography reveals the profound exposure of the artist to a number of hardships; she never had it so easy38. In the three paintings, a striking similarity regarding her feelings of fear and anxiety are discerned on the basis of internal pressures and hidden conflicts which were significantly influenced by the environment in which she lived. Bourke in her analysis of emotion in modern history explains that the term fear is used to refer to an imminent, objective menace while anxiety touches upon a predictable subjective danger. Anxiety is expounded as a broader condition while fear is more explicit and instantaneous. In fear the “danger-object” appears to be in our face, so to speak, whereas in anxiety the individual is not mindfully alert of what is putting her/him at risk39.

Figure 1. Sanctuary Wood, Flanders, 1920.

Courtesy Library and Archives Canada/Mary Riter Hamilton collection/e011202176

  • 40 Parkes, Adam. « A Sense of Justice: Whistler, Ruskin, James, Impressionism », Victorian Studies, vo (...)
  • 41 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 100.
  • 42 According to Young and McKinnon the artist enthusiasm about going to the battlefields was ignited a (...)
  • 43 Speck, Catherine. Beyond the Battlefield Women Artists of the Two World Wars, Farringdon, Reaktion, (...)

14Sanctuary Wood, Flanders for example represents how eye-witnessing principle is pivotal in granting the artist an impression of veracious testimony. Hamilton attempted to paint the remarkable direct impact, or impression, that reality had brought to her consciousness in order to revive the inner sensation of the fleeting moment. The iconographic reading shows an environment of utter destruction of nature in which trees were chopped and stripped bare. Wrecked trunks occupying an imposing locus on the scene with an overwhelming grey pigment which pervades the space achieved through long and broad-brush strokes. She depicted light by contrasting colours without overusing dark tones for shadows. She discerned every component of her canvas not in abstract form nor in chiaroscuro (light-dark), but in proportion to the reflection of light. She selected light as one constituent of reality in order to interpret the ravaged nature. But what lies beyond the outer rim of the painting or more precisely beyond the actual sensation or what Walter Pater describes as the « primary data of experience40 »? Sanctuary Wood, Flanders is a mute witness to history. Reading behind the lines is both complex and de rigueur. Here a comparison could be drawn between the trunks Hamilton painted consciously and the image of absent beheaded soldiers that could be an unconscious image. In one of her private accounts whilst in Belgium she stated: « This place too wonderful and terrible […] it is simply one huge cemetery. I must not begin to write about it41 ». It is true that Hamilton did not write about it. She painted it. The soldiers could be the object of her female gaze. She was the marginal who absorbed their sufferings. Sanctuary Wood, Flanders was a space through which she penetrated a patriarchal world, this very world to which she was denied official access to during the war as the rest of the commissioned Canadian war artists because of her gender according to Hamilton’s biographers42. This among others could be understood as « male resistance to a changing military culture43 ».

  • 44 Peach, Lucinda J. « An Alternative to Pacifism? Feminism and Just-War Theory », Hypatia, vol. 9, no (...)
  • 45 Ibid., p. 152.

15« Every military history is a tale of violence and destruction out of all relation to the requirements of combat44 ». It was the norm for centuries that battlefields were a no-go area as far as women were concerned. They were prevented from any engagement in conflicts. War was deemed solely a masculine endeavour where men took up the gauntlet with and against men for male-demarcated goals and results. From a cultural point of view, orthodox notions about gender roles in the West associated men with soldiering and women with mothering and peace45. It was within this social context that Hamilton crossed the Atlantic to Europe right after the armistice.

16Besides, back then the ideology of separate spheres and here again in the western context was the steering axiom of the era and it hinged on a delineation of the natural traits of women and men. Women were judged physically weaker yet morally superior to men. They were best suited for the bulwarks of their homes. Men were notably the go-getters, the inventors, the pathfinders and the defenders. Their vim and vigor was for war and conquest. At the other side of the spectrum, women’s main role was restricted to the governing of their homes in a docile way. Their intellect was not for invention or creation but to be used within the borders of their houses and never beyond.

  • 46 Acton, op. cit., p. 54.
  • 47 Venturi, Lionello. «The Aesthetic Idea of Impressionism », The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Critic (...)

17Witnessing the destruction of the war from a woman’s vantage point was mingled with gender anxieties and issues in terms of the rightfulness of what she viewed as a woman. Carol Acton explores the association between the visible and invisible specifically the imperative to fathom the conflicting bond between visualising a war scene (in this case what was considered back then not right for a woman to see) and putting this scene in writing from a gender perspective46. In Sanctuary Wood, Flanders the unseen are the fighters who are no longer there. The spectator could decipher the inner layer of the narrative by associating the impact of the combat on the ravaged nature to the absent combatants’ corpses. If the trees did not resist the magnitude of the apocalypse neither did the soldiers. There is tautness between gazing and unveiling and evading one’s sight and revealing. At this point, the unconscious has to be taken into account and cannot be muted. In line with Sanctuary Wood, Flanders, in Albert (Somme) Route d’Amiens the beholder is on the qui vive of the amplitude of destruction and desolation of a village. The viewer first notices the brown/red pigments which haunt the space of the scene. Albert Somme is a boldly drawn image oozing with Hamilton’s feelings and transcending mere artistic rules. The shades of red transgressed by white and off-white, the inconsistencies of shapes are what bestow on the painting its attractiveness for art could acquire its charm from the mixture. Nature detests both emptiness and order. Symmetry and regularity obliterate art according to Lionello Venturi47.

Figure 2. Albert (Somme) Route d’Amiens, 1920.

Courtesy Library and Archives Canada/Mary Riter Hamilton collection/c101312

  • 48 Venturi, op. cit., p. 43.
  • 49 Parkes, op. cit., p. 599.

18In Route d’Amiens the form is dictated by the way she played with her palette and the manipulation of her pigments to give an impression of the actual. The contours are determined by the junction of the colour patches without the use of lines as her boundaries. Portions of the scene are suddenly thrown into marked shadow and others are illuminated with light. Ernst Mach, in his Analysis of Sensations (1905) recognizes the unity of space and colour sensation48. This very sensation was Hamilton’s « inward world of thought and feeling »where the flame of sensational experience at its most « eager and devouring »; a realm where the radically isolated self « keeping as a prisoner its own dream of a world49 ». Hamilton sought to impart a sense of reality to this ambivalent tableau. Bypassing the aesthetic values of the painting and engaging with it as unselfconsciously as possible, the onlooker is struck by the phenomenal ravage and death as suggested by the red pigment which is the symbol of blood. Blood here is no longer that of soldiers but of civilians who were entangled in a conflict they did not initiate and consequently were not spared the military violence of the war. That was the age of total war par excellence.

19The ghostlike village is immersed in an eerie aura as the inhabitants were either killed or fled their homes to escape death. Anxiety and fear mediated between Hamilton’s inner and outside worlds. Her inner state was the mirror of the outer world. These emotions led to a negotiation of the boundaries between self (her depressed, let down self) and other (injured or dead civilians and soldiers) as suggested by the painting. Despite her seemingly early enthusiasm about her adventure when she first embarked in the combat-ravaged countryside, what she witnessed made her a nervous wreck feeling weak, lonely and lost.

20The deserted main road of the village in Albert (Somme) Route d’Amiens holds a prominent position at the centre of the painting. Coloured in off-white with a stark contradiction with the red/brown pigments to intensify its presence in the space and could be Hamilton’s choice to make the spectator circumspect about its value in the image. As it appears, this was the main road of the ruined agglomeration which means what used to be the vein and source of life of the village became abandoned and totally empty. The First World War cut a swathe of desolation throughout Northern France and Belgium, destroying centuries’ old towns, villages and hallowed buildings. As such, there were nine villages around Verdun before the Great War. Now there are none. World War I resulted in a smashed landscape, shell holes, trenches and soil sown with years of unexploded bombs. The devastation was unmitigated. A postwar report on these battlefields delineated that the lands were « completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life was impossible50 ». Today a forest cloaks the battlefields. But it covers perhaps millions of shells, tens of thousands of bodies and one of the most toxic sites in France named zone rouge51.

  • 52 Bourke. op. cit., p. 126.
  • 53 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 106.

21Through the emptiness of the road, Hamilton reflected her own isolation and loneliness. A sense of fear mounting to anxiety about being given up could be grasped. By externalising these emotions into painting, Hamilton was perhaps attempting to shield herself52. In her private accounts she told of how she went out by herself, the way she ground her colours and how she suffered from the lack of food reaching a point of starvation. She drew during the daylight and at the sunset she returned to her ice-cold sleazy canvas tent lacking the basic standards of a decent let alone normal living. She explained how she had painted long hours in a shell hole with a human corpse in it. She indicated that the land around Arras had been inhabited by hooligans who frightened her especially at night times by their tumult and the sound of their shots. As Falla writes « a woman friend from Paris, who once spent a night with her in these lugubrious surroundings, hurried back to civilization in horror when she realized the nightmare perils of a woman alone in such a situation. She concluded that she had to fight this thing alone53 ». She felt abandoned, fearful and utterly anxious.

  • 54 Kosoi, Natalie. « Nothingness Made Visible: The Case of Rothko’s Paintings », Art Journal, vol. 64, (...)
  • 55 Blanchot, Maurice. L’Espace Littéraire, Paris, Gallimard 1988, p. 12-16.
  • 56 Kosoi. op. cit., p. 24.

22Fear and anxiety are also implied through nothingness or absence and non-being. As mentioned above, the dissimilarity between fear and anxiety is that we fear a specific and definable being, while we are anxious about unascertainable objects. Anxiety is rather abstract unlike fear which is concrete. But what was Hamilton anxious about? Martin Heidegger inferred that « although we cannot grasp nothingness, we nonetheless when anxious have an experience of it54 ». Soldiers and civilians’ absence from the three paintings haunted the place. Hamilton as an observer of what happened was immersed into the cataclysm which evoked in her mind the anxious state about her being which was a being-toward-death. Through what she witnessed, Hamilton was aware that death was something that did not happen when one grew old since most of these soldiers and civilians had perished too early. Maurice Blanchot maintained that art attempts not to present death but to negate it55. Hamilton’s War Material probably stemmed from her desire not to die. The way of such death was too abstruse for the artist to sink into her brain without a hitch. Art endeavours to make death possible by perceiving it in its incomprehensibility and therefore, « it hovers between death as the possibility of understanding and death as the horror of impossibility56 ». The egregious emotions about death traumatized Hamilton intensely as will be argued in the next section.

Pictorial trauma: unriddling Hamilton’s mind without ‘putting her on the couch’

23Taking into consideration the tragically traumatic nature of war, it is self-evident that some people emerge out of this experience transformed and possibly unrecognizable. In a letter to a friend in October 1923, Hamilton confessed that she had not responded to her letters as she was in agony because of headaches, « I really do not know anything about anything during that time57 ». In 1924 mental problems started to plague Hamilton’s psyche and her behavior showed how she was in a state of delusion, confusion and paranoia. She « thought that the people in the apartment house had poisoned her58 ». Hamilton’s fear of poisoning would become an unabating disorder over the years to come. Her insecurity and troubled state of mind are further revealed when she claimed her landlady had been opening and reading her mail59. These symptoms of paranoia and delusion are reminiscent of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a disorder which develops in some individuals who were involved in a distressing, terrifying, or hazardous event. Her fight-or-flight behavior when she sojourned in Paris after painting the aftermath of the war or when she went back to Canada attests to the physical ordeal she went through and the psychological turmoil she bitterly experienced when she stayed in the ravaged countryside. This echoes the connotation of the term trauma: « a deeply distressing and disturbing experience60 ». The appellation goes back to Greek history during the seventeenth century where the notion of trauma was linked with the meaning of both body and psychic wounding or piercing. In one of her private accounts Hamilton stated:

  • 61 Young and Mckinnon. op. cit., p. 126.

If, as I have been told, there is much of the suffering and the heroism of war in my pictures, it is because at that moment the spirits of those who fought and died seemed to linger in the air. Every splintered tree and scarred clod spoke of their broken bodies. Those scenes I looked upon I hoped would prove a true record of things61.

  • 62 Rorty. op. cit., p. 8.
  • 63 Gay. op. cit., p. 240.
  • 64 Burke. op. cit., p. 188.

24But can art speak the unspeakable? Can an artist give a voice to trauma which defies representation? What role should Hamilton’s conscious and unconscious intentions play in our interpretation or evaluation of her war collection? Considering the units of the three paintings’ significance62, their structural arrangements as well as their communicative imports, a traumatic dimension could be revealed. Trauma is an overriding theme in the images. The interpretations transcend a primary mode of significance and go beyond iconography and iconology to a profound decoding of the message. But the question that begs an answer is how the viewer could legitimately hash out what is not in the image? Peter Gay maintains that all humans are fitted with motivations and dynamic unconscious63. Burke indicates how artists generally speaking project their unconscious into images64. A diachronic and synchronic reading of War Material unveils a poignant trauma narrative. Unlike Sanctuary Wood, Flanders and Albert (Somme) Route d’Amiens whereby Hamilton depicted a totally destroyed landscape or an entirely wrecked village; in War Material there is a tension between laying bare or keeping in the dark an intriguing message. There is no heavy destructiveness the way we perceive in the other two images. The hidden message a beholder could decipher though Hamilton’s War Material is the wounded space. The black barbed wire tainted with red pigment is evocative of injured or dead soldiers whom Hamilton chose not to include in the painting. They are included through their exclusion or erasure.

Figure 3. War Material, ca. 1920.

Courtesy Library and Archives Canada/Mary Riter Hamilton collection/c102987

  • 65 Burke. op. cit., p. 188.

25Hamilton was aware of her inability to experience what the soldiers went through. What she witnessed was an occupied territory by the soldiers just a few months before. They became the motive of her gaze which she projected onto her impressions to paintings. War Material could be compared to the bodies of the soldiers. The wounded and scarred spaces of the scenes are her male veterans’ wounded and scarred bodies. Hamilton here is an observer rather than a participant in the war and through her paintings she obliquely gained an entrée into the conflict. The traumatic viewing and non-viewing are vital in the way the artist portrayed what she looked at and how she psychologically processed such viewing. In the case of images, as in texts the historian needs to read between the lines, observing the minor but influential details–inter alia important absences–and applying them as inklings to evidence which the artists did not know were bottled up in their unconscious, or to beliefs they were unaware of holding65.

  • 66 Schonfelder, Christa. Wounds and Words, Transcript Verlag, 2013, p. 29.
  • 67 Ibid., p. 34.

26Through this aesthetic depiction of trauma, Hamilton was not only making « terrifying, alien experience more understandable and accessible » but also provided means of « witnessing or testifying for the history and experience of historically marginalized people66 ». She was the marginal who represented the marginals which amounted to her self-narration and self-representation. Hamilton communicated what resisted ordinary processes of remembering, narration, representation and comprehension as asserted by Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman. Dominick La Capra, Deborah M. Horvitz and E. Ann Kaplan for example argue against Caruth’s insistence on the unspeakability and representability of trauma. Kaplan asserts that « telling stories about trauma […] may partly achieve a certain working through for the victim and also merit a kind of emphatic ‘sharing’ that moves us forward, if only by inches67 ».

  • 68 Kandel, Eric R. Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures, New York, Columbi (...)

27Hamilton crafted delicate outlines and imprecise contours in her paintings. Through her colour palettes, Hamilton drew the beholder’s focus piercingly to her images. Although Sanctuary Wood, War Material and Albert Somme do not have the palpable structures of academic paintings, their colour selection puts forth immense emotional dynamism68. Trauma is directly evoked by the depiction of the destroyed landscapes which could be tantamount to the annihilated soldiers and slaughtered civilians. There are complex dynamics of this portrayal. The impact of the traumatic historical events on Hamilton’s psyche is conspicuous. She naturally and immediately bonded with the soldiers via personal relevance. As set forth by her biographers, during her stay in France and Belgium Hamilton was shocked by what she saw. She lived rough in dire circumstances. She was also endangered by the male labourers who were hired to clear the war-ravaged areas. She was traumatized by what she witnessed including soldiers’ corpses. The depth of catastrophe human or otherwise was beyond her capacity as to comprehend why all of this happened. A lesser person could not survive in the insane environment where she lived day in day out.

  • 69 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 137-138.
  • 70 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 143.

28There are two facets of trauma representation which are inextricably bound up together where any possible demarcation between them is artificial. Soldiers/civilians’ trauma and the painter’s personal trauma left their lasting scars on her psyche as shown during the 1930s and 1940s. After losing sight in one eye, she suffered from PTSD symptoms. Paranoiac and persecutory in her thoughts, she refused the aid of social services. Her behavior fluctuated between confusion and lapses where she was talkative and sought attention69. On 2 April 1954 Hamilton arrived at the psychiatric hospital suffering from confusion and delusion. Four days later she died in her sleep, « among her personal belongings was her brooch/locket which had held a piece of hair believed to be that of her still born son and seen in her early photographs pinned to her dresses70 ».

  • 71 Parkes. op. cit., p. 599.

29Hamilton stood in this historical context as a witness to a world war which had just ended. The visual processing of her immediate post-war experience involved both the cultural duress on the creation of the image and the biological (what the eye records) and psychic (how the mental analyses the visual image) challenges ingrained in the processing of traumatic images. Her indescribable experience was ultimately translated into mute images via an impressionist technique. This at any rate could be associated with a return to impressionism’s etymological roots: according to the Oxford Dictionary, the Latin word impression, means « irruption, onset, attack », connotations that resurface in David Hume’s definition of impressions as « those perceptions, which enter (the mind) with most force and violence71 ». She witnessed the immediate aftermath of the carnage which was the corollary of unmitigated bloodshed and brutality the humanity had never witnessed before. The systematic industrialized mass killing and mass destruction is the main trait of the Great War. This created a conflict between what was revealed to her gaze and the unseen or the concealed intentionally or otherwise from the public gaze for censorship purposes or other factors. The juxtaposition of what was seen with an unseen trauma was integrated into the narrative of the images. She was entangled in a triple-facet trauma: that of the civilians, soldiers and her own psychological trauma as a result of what she viewed.

30The artistic history of Hamilton exposed manifold predispositions to art. Identity and circumstances contributed to the shaping of her aptitude. From 1890s till 1901 she developed her sense of identity within an artistic and cultural milieu. Her entourage belonged to Winnipeg then Victoria’s upper crust. Her life transmogrified when she returned to France and Belgium in 1919. She endured, physical, psychological and emotional extremes of the ravaged countryside and she faced the greatest danger and adversity. Her experience was traumatic. There was a tacit narrative aspect to her paintings. She imparted historical value through her images. What she witnessed was inherently arduous and harmed her body and soul to some extent. Due to a mélange of crushing feelings of fear, anxiety and ultimately trauma, she emerged a changed person. If nothing else, her experience stripped away the idealist lenses through which she appreciated Europe. She was walking on shaky ground utterly disoriented. She reflected the traumatic nature of her experience with its distressful dimension in her art.

Conclusion

  • 72 Art historians have been challenging the psychological involvement in arts. D. E. Stannard in his b (...)

31Pyrrhonists do not cease to dispute the authenticity and precision of conventional/orthodox recorded history. But would they ever earnestly consider a trend that attempts to revive private/subjective experiences which are not based on official archival documents72. This study is an attempt to initiate a new vista about the art of Mary Riter Hamilton as her rich collection cries out for investigation. An examination of the three paintings could be decoded as a projection of the overtones of her life experience. I endeavoured to explore not just her painted impressions of the evanescent moment; or the record of what she saw and arguably enough did not see but the private intentions and secret motivations, even unconscious emotions that propelled and accompanied the res gestae. Hamilton revived the inner experience by unintentionally focalising on the psychic dimensions. She externalized feelings into images and recaptured the emotion and the spirit of that particular era.

  • 73 Higonnet, M. « Not So Quiet in No Woman’s Land », in Cooke, M., Woollacott, A. (ed.), Gendering War (...)

32Hamilton’s paintings are a personal testimony of a marginalized female artist who experienced what was deemed to be a male-only enterprise. She crafted what was considered back then as inadequate for a woman to illustrate. Unlike Hamilton, Olive Mudie-Cooke gained access to the front during the war through the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) and served as an ambulance driver. She had an insight into the gruesome reality of the conflict, however the commonly held belief encases that « a woman, who at least theoretically remained unwounded, should not attempt to describe this hell or the masculine heroism it entangled ». Thereupon, Mudie-Cooke did not represent the horrors of the war in her artwork73. Hamilton was a first-hand witness of the destruction and devastation of the war and, like her male contemporaries, sketched her indescribable experience. She lived in the war-torn areas which were previously strictly restricted to men and reflected that in her art. She penetrated male artists’ sphere and eroded the sexual barrier which bound female artists for centuries.

  • 74 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 61.

33A telling indicator of the value of the three paintings scrutinized for the present study is to be found in her impressionist technical execution notwithstanding the harsh conditions. She nevertheless got the details right despite a not too polished finish which is reminiscent of the training she got from the Dutch masters and New England Art Club74. Her long sweeping and broad-brush strokes were gently fragmented by fine-grained strokes to recapture her version of reality and/or herstory of the Great War. The diffusion and mixing of her colours applied on the whole space of her canvasses are mixed side by side which replaced hard lines and discarded outlines.

34She revealed what happened through her art. She aspired to ennoble the civilians and men in arms who died. From this perspective, she hoped to preserve the record of their sacrifice and even her own. The most obvious aesthetic trait that binds the three paintings is the tendency to respond to the psycho-physical scars as she saw them. Her main purpose was to transport the viewers to the gritty reality of war and to transport herself before them so she could relive what happened and portray that through her impressions. The emotional trauma she experienced was impossible for her to fully grasp and to forget. Distressed, destitute and isolated with the sole company of her dog Bob, she yet again found a refuge in art which became her safety valve for repressed prospects and feelings. This was the fountainhead of her empowerment and self-realization. The singular journey of her life at that era as a woman artist made her a ‘shero’ against all odds, who painted the heroes of the Great War.

35The value of history is the insight it gives about the relationship between lived experience and art as mirrored in the images of Hamilton. The three paintings reveal knotty approaches about resisting death, means of seclusion and connection and tones of identification and alienation. Historical experience is to be lived, witnessed, endorsed and appreciated without being eventually comprehended. Gaps and silences remain within the historical record and are in fact acknowledged in any ‘true’ history of events. Hamilton bore witness to history and its erasure through her art. She testified to the wounds of the past and transformed her pain into images. These visual tools have their position by the side of historical and literary sources and oral testimonies despite their potential pitfalls.

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Bibliographie

Acton, Carol. « Diverting the Gaze: The Unseen Text in Women’s War Writing », College Literature, vol. 31, no. 2, 2004, p. 53-79.

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Hamilton, Mary Riter. Sanctuary Wood, Flanders, 1920. Oil on plywood. Support: 59.100 x 45.700 cm. Platemark: 70.500 x 57.500 x 8.000 cm. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-21.

Hamilton, Mary Riter. Albert (Somme) Route d’Amiens, 1920. Oil on plywood. Support: 33.300 x 25.800 cm. Platemark: 45.000 x 40.000 x 8.000 cm. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-8.

Hamilton, Mary Riter. War Material, 1920. Oil on cardboard. Support: 23.800 x 18.500 cm. Platemark:35.500 x 30.500 x 8.000 cm. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1988-180-165.

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Notes

1 The Marxist critic Nicos Hadjinicolaou showcased the association between « scientific discourse and visual ideology ». He argued that: « The very idea of scientific objectivity in the social sciences changes not only with the passage of time but also, as can easily be observed, according to the class ideology of the researcher himself », Art History and Class Struggle, 1978, p. 143. John Pope-Hennessy, in « Self Portrait of an Art Historian », New York Times, December 8, 1985, lamented about the contradictory conclusions often reached by competent art historians from identical evidence.

2 Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing, The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, Farringdon, Reaktion Books, 2001, p. 12.

3 Spector, Jack. « The Case of Psychoanalytic Research in Art History », The Art Bulletin, vol. 70, no. 1, 1988, p. 50.

4 Acton, Carol. « Diverting the Gaze: The Unseen Text in Women’s War Writing », College Literature, vol. 31 no. 2, 2004, p. 53.

5 Burke. op. cit., p. 13.

6 Young, Kathryn A., McKinnon, Sarah M. No Man’s Land. The Life and Art of Mary Riter Hamilton, Manitoba, University of Manitoba Press, 2017.

7 Frederick G. Fella was a Canadian journalist at McClure Newspaper Syndicate during the 1920s.

8 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 106.

9 Ibid.

10 Bourke, Joanna. « Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History », History Workshop Journal, vol. 55, 2003, p. 114.

11 Ibid.

12 Burke. op. cit., p. 183.

13 Stephen Bann’s assumption is that « the visual image proves nothing–or whatever it does prove is too trivial to count as a component in the historical analysis ».

14 Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text, New York, Fontana Press, 1977, p. 147.

15 Spector. op. cit., p. 60.

16 Scholars have long maintained that each and every epoch has a unique nature and spirit that distinguishes it from all other eras. In German language this is called Zeitgeist.

17 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 61.

18 Frizzell, Nell. « Why were so many female artists airbrushed from history? » Guardian, Monday May 19, 2014.

19 Nochlin, Linda. « Why Are There No Great Women Artists », in Vivian Gornick, Barbara Moran, Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, New York, Basic Books, 1971.

20 Churchman, Fi. « How Linda Nochlin Changed Art History forever »,Art Reviewhttps://artreview.com/how-linda-nochlin-changed-art-history-forever/ accessed October 22, 2021.

21 Osborne, Caroline. Feminist Review, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1057/fr.1982.35, accessed October 22, 2021.

22 Ibid.

23 Young and McKinnon, op. cit., p. 3.

24 Helmers, Marguerite. « A Visual Rhetoric of World War I Battlefield Art: C.R.W Nevinson, Mary Riter Hamilton », The Space Between, vol. V-1, 2009, p. 77-95.

25 Osborne, op. cit. 

26 Gammel, Irene. « The Memory of St Julien: Configuring Gas Warfare in Mary Riter Hamilton’s Battlefield Art », Journal of War and Cultural Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2016, p. 20-41.

27 Burke, op. cit., p. 35-36.

28 Heehs, Peter. « Narrative Painting and Narratives about Paintings: Poussin among the Philosophers », Narrative, vol. 3, 1995, p. 211.

29 Rorty, op. cit., p. 3.

30 Michel, Karl F. « Drawing on Experience: A Study of Vietnam Veteran Artists », Studies in Art Education, vol. 45, no. 3, 2004, p. 190.

31 Spector, op. cit., p. 49.

32 Elkins, James. « On Monstrously Ambiguous Paintings », History and Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, 1993, p. 229.

33 Roger Fry quoted in Spector, op. cit., p. 68.

34 Manuel, Frank E. « The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History », Daedalus, vol. 117, no. 3, 1988, p. 199.

35 O’Connor, Francis V. « Two Methodologies for the Interpretation of Abstract Expressionism », Art Journal, vol. 47, no. 3, p. 224.

36 Burke. op. cit., p. 170.

37 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 90.

38 Gay, Peter. « Psychoanalysis in History », Poetics Today, vol. 9, no. 1, 1988, p. 241.

39 Bourke. op. cit., p. 126.

40 Parkes, Adam. « A Sense of Justice: Whistler, Ruskin, James, Impressionism », Victorian Studies, vol. 42, no. 4, 2000, p. 598.

41 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 100.

42 According to Young and McKinnon the artist enthusiasm about going to the battlefields was ignited as early as January 1917, when she applied for the Canadian War Memorial Fund (CWMF), founded by Max Aitken (later Lord Beaverbrook), a Canadian newspaper tycoon in Britain. The First official war artist commission was awarded to A.Y. Jackson, and later a member of the Group of seven. The terms of the fund made it clear that only men would be allowed to go out to the battlefields. A few women were granted commissions, but they were confined to painting the female contribution to the war, such as in the Canadian munitions factories. By April, when the artist had not received a reply, she then appealed directly to the fund and asked to be allowed to paint in the battle region. She wrote: « There are many subjects that suggest themselves at once for [war] pictures of historical interests, the details of which can only be collected on the spot at the present time […] ». Nonetheless the Advisory Arts Council denied her request without explanation, but likely because women were not allowed entering the battle zones. Hamilton did not apply again. (Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 83-84).

43 Speck, Catherine. Beyond the Battlefield Women Artists of the Two World Wars, Farringdon, Reaktion, 2014, p. 64.

44 Peach, Lucinda J. « An Alternative to Pacifism? Feminism and Just-War Theory », Hypatia, vol. 9, no. 2, 1994, p. 155.

45 Ibid., p. 152.

46 Acton, op. cit., p. 54.

47 Venturi, Lionello. «The Aesthetic Idea of Impressionism », The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 1, no. 1, 1941, p. 39.

48 Venturi, op. cit., p. 43.

49 Parkes, op. cit., p. 599.

50 Dunnell, Tony. « Zone Rouge », https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/zone-rouge

51 The size of the « red zone » in 1918 was 120,000 acres, which covered the 11 departments that made up the Western Front of the First World War. The presence of thousands of dead bodies and millions of pieces of unexploded munitions had transformed this formerly agricultural land into a lunar landscape whose sight startled those who visited it in the immediate post-war period. All traces of vegetation had disappeared by then. The Verdun sector (Meuse) was particularly affected by the fighting. The town and its surroundings are said to have received nearly 60 million shells, 15 million of which did not explode. It is hard to imagine the state of the land after such sustained shelling. Between the mercury and lead in the shells and casings, the bacteria germinating from the putrefaction of human and animal bodies, the heaps of metal and the remains of gas, the land could no longer support any human activity in 1918. Domenico Morano, « Verdun dans la « ‘zone rouge’ », 8 November 2016, https://www.defense.gouv.fr/actualites/articles/verdun-dans-la-zone-rouge

52 Bourke. op. cit., p. 126.

53 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 106.

54 Kosoi, Natalie. « Nothingness Made Visible: The Case of Rothko’s Paintings », Art Journal, vol. 64, no. 2, 2005, p. 21.

55 Blanchot, Maurice. L’Espace Littéraire, Paris, Gallimard 1988, p. 12-16.

56 Kosoi. op. cit., p. 24.

57 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 114.

58 Ibid., p. 111.

59 Ibid., p. 116.

60 Oxford Dictionary, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/trauma

61 Young and Mckinnon. op. cit., p. 126.

62 Rorty. op. cit., p. 8.

63 Gay. op. cit., p. 240.

64 Burke. op. cit., p. 188.

65 Burke. op. cit., p. 188.

66 Schonfelder, Christa. Wounds and Words, Transcript Verlag, 2013, p. 29.

67 Ibid., p. 34.

68 Kandel, Eric R. Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures, New York, Columbia Press University, 2016, p. 65-69.

69 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 137-138.

70 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 143.

71 Parkes. op. cit., p. 599.

72 Art historians have been challenging the psychological involvement in arts. D. E. Stannard in his book Shrinking History 1980, fiercely criticized anything Freudian, especially psychohistory. Hans Sedlmayr, ardent critic of psychology and art, delineated a rigid authoritarian theory. In his book Kunst und Wahrheit 1958, he wrote: « This conviction, that there is one and only one correct interpretation, is […] important for art history as a science […] » the substitute results in « chaos and confusion ».

73 Higonnet, M. « Not So Quiet in No Woman’s Land », in Cooke, M., Woollacott, A. (ed.), Gendering War Talk, New Jersey, Princeton, 1999, p. 206.

74 Young and McKinnon. op. cit., p. 61.

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Table des illustrations

Légende Figure 1. Sanctuary Wood, Flanders, 1920.
Crédits Courtesy Library and Archives Canada/Mary Riter Hamilton collection/e011202176
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/docannexe/image/10045/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 60k
Légende Figure 2. Albert (Somme) Route d’Amiens, 1920.
Crédits Courtesy Library and Archives Canada/Mary Riter Hamilton collection/c101312
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/docannexe/image/10045/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 88k
Légende Figure 3. War Material, ca. 1920.
Crédits Courtesy Library and Archives Canada/Mary Riter Hamilton collection/c102987
URL http://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/docannexe/image/10045/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 92k
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Référence électronique

Hanene Zoghlami, « Visualising conflicts. An exploration of Canadian artist Mary Riter Hamilton’s paintings: herstory of the war »Mémoire(s), identité(s), marginalité(s) dans le monde occidental contemporain [En ligne], 26 | 2021, mis en ligne le 16 décembre 2021, consulté le 16 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/10045 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/mimmoc.10045

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Auteur

Hanene Zoghlami

Université de Tunis I
Hanene Zoghlami est titulaire d’un Doctorat en histoire britannique de l’Université Roehampton, Londres (Royaume-Uni). Elle est actuellement maître assistante à l’Université de Tunis 1. Son domaine de recherche porte sur l’histoire britannique contemporaine, notamment les aspects militaires, politiques, sociaux et culturels.

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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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