Sarah Waters’s Monument to Women of World War II
Keywords:
British WWII fiction, women in WWII, Sarah Waters, The Night Watch, the Memorial to the Women of World War II, Whitehall memorialAbstract
British women’s visions of equality and acknowledgement of their contribution to the World War II effort were soon revised for them after the war was over. They were sent back to their traditional role to keep the hearth and home. It was not until the year 2005 that a monument was erected in Whitehall in London – the Memorial to the Women of World War II – eerily evocative by its array of nameless, empty uniforms of the lack of recognition accorded to those who wore them. A year later, in 2006, Sarah Waters in her novel The Night Watch filled some of these reluctantly abandoned uniforms with bodies as well as faces and gave them names, albeit fictional. The paper reads Waters’ story as a pointed individual account of the visions and revisions of the countless, for the most part faceless and nameless war women commemorated by the Whitehall memorial, sixty years on.
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