Modernist women's memoir, war and recovering the ordinary : H.D.’s The Gift

The relationship between war and everyday life is complex and by way of introduction to my discussion of the ordinary in H.D.’s wartime memoir The Gift, I want to sketch out the various and sometimes conflicting ways in which this relationship has been viewed by historians, cultural theorists and literary authors, particularly in relation to the First and Second World Wars. If everyday life is, as contemporary critics in the field often define it, the “essential, taken-for-granted continuum of mundane” activities— residual and often unnoticed—then war challenges such assumptions about the nature of the everyday. 2 During modern conflicts such as the First and Second World Wars, everyday routines and activities were for many people radically altered and little in daily life was “taken-for-granted.” The nature and patterns of paid labor, leisure and the domestic changed, ordinary life was daily under threat, previously commonplace commodities and goods became scarce, and familiar objects, spaces and routines assumed renewed personal value and social significance.