Response to Alex Lehr's reading of Glory of Women

Maikel O'Hanlon English 354/Finley (6 October 1999)

In his examination of Siegfried Sassoon's Poem, Glory of Women, Alex Lehr

appropriately locates the line reading, "You make us shells"(5) as a point for interpretation

and explication. However, I think that he treats the significance of the line in an extremely

one-dimensional manner. Alex posits that just as women are involved in the physical act of

knitting at the time, so they are actively incorporated in the literal production of

ammunition shells. As a result, the wartime women actually end up further replenishing

the agents of greater death, instead of helping to accelerate the inertia towards the end of the

war. Alex concludes that these women are in fact partly responsible for the dead heroes

whom they so fervently mourn.

By this progression of logic, the tangible war shells serve as a determinable source

for the naiveté of women as regards female-wartime actions and perception. Though I

think this reading is quite valid, I believe that it glosses over a fundamental association

between this line and the prevailing sentiment of the entire poem. Specifically, the

recognition that by unfailingly digesting the insidious dogma of the events of the war

appearing in home publications, women were literally making shells out of men fighting in

the war. The "heroism" and "decorations" and "chivalry" by which the women adorned the

soldiers made the actual experience of combat hollow. The men knew that there was no

correlation between what they experienced and the praise they received, and so the

deification which the men received at the ideology of women made them nothing more than

shell structures.