“Cry with the Pack and Kill What We Fear”

Abstract

After the Great War, women playwrights began to write drama addressing the consequences of war for women, the home front and for humanity as a whole and positing strategies for ways in which future wars might be prevented. This essay explores the work of these women playwrights and makes comparisons between their dramas and Woolf’s thinking about war in her novels and Three Guineas. Woolf and playwrights such as Vernon Lee, Cicely Hamilton, Muriel Box, Olive Popplewell and Elizabeth Rye ask us to examine nationalism as a catalyst for conflict and to take up the position of ‘outsiders’ in order to question our place in supporting future wars. In light of this, the essay will also address form, particularly pageantry as a mode that all these authors use to undermine the central purpose of pageantry which is to create the group cohesion that these writers believe leads to conflict.