The Great War and Modern Sexuality: Rudyard Kipling and James Hanley on the Disorientation of Desire

World War I stories by James Hanley and Rudyard Kipling represent wartime experience as able to disorient the sexualities of flat, unreflective characters. In Kipling’s “Mary Postgate” (1915) and Hanley’s “The German Prisoner” (1930), isolated protagonists confront perceived or real enemy combatants in plots that depict sexuality as wildly malleable. Suspension of normativity at the front or at home unleashes feelings and acts that are not queer in their critique of, or resistance to, the “normal.” Together, these stories represent sexual pleasure experienced outside of intimacies and the identities that came to dominate understandings of the sexual self over the twentieth century.