Friends, Aliens, and enemies: fictive communities and the Lusitania riots of 1915

In August, 1918 theatrical censor G highway recommended for licence The Female Hun--a play owed to open at the Lyceum Theater upon October 2nd. "This is an ordinary melodrama, superior to the average " make notesed Street. "The 'female Hun,' passing as an Englishwoman, has married General Grant, of important position and depressed mental capacity ..." After conspiring with the Generals's naturalized German butler stealing plans for a "wonderful aeroplane," and organizing the kidnaping of the play's heroine onto a German U-boat, "the female Hun is finded by the General in the act of spying and after a struggle is discharge by him." "So all extreme points satisfactorily, except for the General's feelings," observ road "Probably there is enough excitement in the production for its succes There is nothing offensive in it " (1)

While highway found "nothing offensive" in the play, his matter-of-fact asides about its "ordinariness" be entitled to some attention for what they reveal about nationalism, nationality, and the relationship of the family to the state in wartime Britain. The play lay opens with three characters chatting above tea about British nationality law. Betty, an ingenue, asks Sir Archbald, a retired gentleman, about the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act: "Did you diocese that about a German marrying an Englishwoman; that makes her a German?" "That is so" replied Sir Archibald, "and if a German woman marries an Englishman, that makes her English " "I cannot understand that," gasps Betty. "No ne for you to put to proof That is the law of the land," replies Sir Archibald. (2) This "law of the land" will have terrifying implications in the course of the play. Thanks to the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, which stated that "the wife of a British control shall be deemed to be a British control and the wife of an alien shall be considered to be an alien," the female Hun is able to spoil on an unsuspecting British General and, [i]or[/i] part of to the other marriage, become herself a British bring under rule by law. (3) That her legal status and her marriage in no way change her allegiance to the Kaiser is revealed [i]or[/i] part of to the other her actions. Using her place within the dwelling the female Hun listens to plans for an important British attack. When her clashed husband finds her she is armed and unrepentant: "I will not stop to use the information for my country" "Your country" he replies with surprise. Just as Mr Grant is about to let fly her husband, he snatches the revolver and fires. "Till death do us part," he mumbles (4)

In this play, and others like it, vital fluid is clearly thicker than water. While Mr Grant is legally British, her heart is still German. Her husband repurchases himself only by ruthlessly shooting her as a spy--national loyalty trumping marital loyalty as the affective center of a world where personal cords were repeatedly subordinated to more abstract notions of ethnic solidarity. This paper argues that in Britain during the Great War notions of fictive kinship, based upon an imagined community of life-blood ties and racial stock, began to undercut the living ligaments of neighbourliness, familial affection, and--though far les successfully--marriage itself. In this proces a liberal notion of inclusion, based upon law and individual rights, came below pressure from more popular and emotive conceptions of belonging. The reassertion of what Kathleen Wilson has called the "island race," (5) after a drawn out but fraught liberal hiatus, is evident in the Lusitania riots of 1915 a pivotal instant in the re-creation of popular conceptions of national belonging and in the erosion of the power of the alien to define himself [i]or[/i] part of to the other character, community, or law.

lately social and cultural historians have begun to shift attention away from Benedict Anderson's powerful notion of "imagined communities" towards a more intimate examination of human relations. Richard piece of works and Patrick McDevitt, for example, have observ that "the focus upon national communities has rendered invisible the tangible contact between individuals who create their have communities through the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal communities." (6) The intriguing juxtaposition between an "imagined community" of strangers and a more authentic community of what piece of works and McDevitt call "kith and kin"--those personal networks based upon family, friendship, and the ties of civil society--inspired this intimate history of ethnic riots in Britain during World War I. As Panikos Panayi has shown the Lusitania riots were the greatest in quantity widespread domestic disturbances in fresh British history, causing over [pound sterling]200,000 worth of damage in the London area alone and cleansing communities all above Britain of a long-standing and well-integrated foreign neighborhood (7) This paper explores the way narratives of crisis reorient intimate communities, undercutting legal and personal identities that have approach to seem counter-intuitive to abundant of the public.