‘An uglier duckling than before’: Reclaiming agency and visibility amongst facially-wounded ex-servicemen in Britain after the First World War

Abstract

In total, 60,500 British soldiers were wounded in the head or eyes during the First World War. Despite these numbers facially-wounded ex-servicemen, in particular their post-war experiences, are largely overlooked in the social history of the conflict. Whilst part of a wider constituency of war-wounded veterans, owing to the value ascribed to the face in terms of personal identity and socio-economic values, disfigured veterans were excluded from the discourse of masculine heroism in which other war wounds were framed. Narratives of facial injury emphasised despairing passivity, which acted to emasculate and ‘other’ the facially-wounded. How accurately though does this reflect their lived experiences? Using first-hand testimony from facially-injured ex-servicemen this article challenges the representation of the disfigured veteran as passive, arguing that men exercised agency through their self-representations and behavioural responses. Drawing on normative conceptions of masculinity, and on idealised images of war-wounded veterans, facially-wounded ex-servicemen constructed counter-narratives of their emotional response to facial injury which emphasised conformity to these ideals. The conceptualisation of disfigurements as war wounds, and the high cultural status of the war-disabled, allowed facially-wounded ex-servicemen to reclaim the masculine status which they were denied in popular representations, and to assert their right to social visibility in post-war Britain.