The dominant ideologies present within this masculine discourse of war are exemplified in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida through Pandarus’s indictment of Cressida.
“Well, well? Why, have you any discretion,
Have you any eyes, do you know what a man is? Is not
birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learn-
ing, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality, and such like,
the spice and salt that season a man?”
(Act1Sc2: 251-57)
This description perpetuates a clear image of the Renaissance ideal of the gentleman-soldier. Having understood the qualities that typify a man we now turn to those desirous in a woman.
Lovelace when describing Lucasta uses imagery of purity such as ‘nunnery’ and ‘chaste breast’. The sexism of the period is apparent as the reader is given the patronizing impression of the persona going away to war and important affairs that the women is assumed to know little about. However in Troilus and Cressida Cressida probes this assumption and it soon becomes obvious that she is more aware of the similarities between love and war than she is prepared to admit to.
“…Women are angels, wooing;
Things won are done - joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she beloved knows naught that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.”
(Act1Sc2: 272-75)
In this time of war and politics Cressida is hardly the naïve waif women are thought to be. Despite her regard she deploys strategic planning to her relationship with Troilus, believing that succumbing to her feelings and to his would demolish the power she has while his desire is not yet satisfied. Traditional roles are reversed in the play, and while Troilus is utterly infatuated, Cressida is far more tactical and manipulative in her dispersion of love. As a far-sighted woman she therefore chooses to prolong the ‘chase’ of courtship, by retreating and feigning indifference because she knows that "things won are done". The connection between love and war here is a direct one. Courtship is the battle, her heart is the prize and through all this planning Cressida’s obvious intention is to win.
Helen, who Paris has stolen from King Menelaus, is the other dominant female character in the play. Here it is not war that has affected relationships but rather one mans desire for another man’s woman that begins the war. Reminiscent of merchant discourse of the period, the worth of this action and the subsequent worth of Helen are continually questioned throughout the play. At the Trojan council (Act 2 Sc.2) Troilus talks of Helen as the woman ‘whose price launch’d above a thousand ships.’ However in the previous Act in private he expresses a very different view.
“Peace you ungracious clamors! Peace, rude sounds!
Fools on both sides: Helen must needs be fair;
When with your blood you daily paint her thus.
I cannot fight upon this argument:
It is too starved a subject for my sword.”
(Act1Sc.1: 87-91)
Troilus is cynical that there is any merit in the war’s cause and the sounds of war are ‘rude’ and ‘ungracious’. Then he describes those fighting on both sides as ‘fools’ and recognizes the ultimate lack of worth of Helen, the prize. We are left to wonder the measure of her worth and decide if it is for Helen’s beauty that so many men are willing to die or if it is the willingness of these men to perish which in fact generates our perception of Helen’s beauty. The affect of war is again a destructive one, being fuelled by Paris’s lust for Helen to which all of Troy falls victim.
Troilus’s witnessing the betrayal of his beloved marks the tragic climax of the plays love plot. Cressida’s actions are motivated by the compromising position in which she is placed by the war. This fuels his disillusionment and is the catalyst for the change in Troilus who loses faith in both love and war. The futility of the war and its negative affect on those in the play is then reiterated with the climax of the martial plot when Hector is ambushed and murdered by Achilles after a display of his naïve belief in the code of honour.
Finally in William Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth we see the way war dehumanizes young men who are ‘killed as cattle’. We are given funeral imagery and yet there are no funeral bells to mark their individual passing- they are masses. Use of alliteration and onomatopoeia ‘stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ mimics the sound of machine guns and the repetition of the word choirs (Line 6,7) alludes to the sound of screaming and ‘wailing shells’, both images of immense grief. The affect of the war on personal relationships is then shown in the second stanza when we are told that although there is no funeral where candles can be held the ‘glimmer of goodbyes’ shines in the eyes of those that die, the eyes of those who wait for them at home and in the eyes of those who fight to avenge them. Heartache causes the girls who wait for the men to turn pale and this turn of countenance ‘shall be their pall’. The poem ends with the domestic image of the ‘drawing down of blinds’ at the end of the day. The word ‘blinds’ is linked to the word ‘minds’ on the previous line creating a metaphor of the mind being killed off with movement of the blind. War is seen as dooming youth. It robs the men who fight of their lives, the women who wait of their loves and shatters the innocence that allows youthful love and personal relationships to blossom, therefore dooming youth.
In all three sources we see that in war there are no real heroes and no real victories. The futility of war is perceived through the trail of broken relationships left behind after the battles are fought. Hence the affect of war on personal relationships is to maim if not destroy them.
