Into the fire: Masculinities and militarism in Timothy Findley's "The Wars"

In The Wars, Timothy Findley represents the ways in which masculinity is forced to express itself within the patriarchal culture of the military. This dissertation argues that his novel examines the power dynamics of heterosexuality and simultaneously dismantles the ability of patriarchal phallicism to regulate masculinity. Working from the premise that there are a multiplicity of masculinities, the thesis posits that in The Wars Findley offers a performative theory of masculinity and, in doing so, reconceptualizes the relationship of masculinity to patriarchy.

Chapter one offers historical, thematic and critical contexts within which to situate Findley's novel and its response to the horror of the First World War. Historically, The Wars perpetuates the Great War Myth of the Generational Conflict that typifies many literary responses to the war; thematically, Findley's familial metaphor of "fathers" raping "sons" places the novel within the thematic of the "suffering son;" critically, The Wars is read against a tradition of Canadian criticism that views it dismissively as a text about homosexuality.

Chapter two examines the process that Robert Ross undergoes as he is transformed from a citizen into a soldier, from a boy into a man. Engendered with a culturally specific form of "phallic masculinity" upon enlisting, Ross discovers that being a soldier involves a radical reconfiguration of his gender identity. Chapter three focuses on Captain Taffler and his dubious position as a paragon of militarized masculinity. Taffler's enjoyment of a sado-masochistic homosexual encounter at a brothel destabilizes the military's masculinist foundation. Chapter four focuses on Harris and his "curious friendship that ended in ashes" with Robert Ross by concentrating on the semiotic relationship of homosexuality to language. The fifth chapter examines the soldiers of the Stained Glass Dugout whose creation and celebration of "non-phallic masculinities" defy the military's warrior ethos by positing what Foucault calls "friendship" as "a way of life."

The Conclusion explains how Robert Ross physically embodies The Wars' ideological perspective on masculinity and militarism in which gender, like homosexuality, is never simply a way of "being" but, rather, a process of "becoming."