Christine Grandy - Heroes and happy endings: Class, gender, and nation in popular film and fiction in interwar Britain (Studies in Popular Culture)

Heroes and happy endings

STUDIES IN
POPULAR
CULTURE

General editor: Professor Jeffrey Richards

Christmas in nineteenth-century England Neil Armstrong

Healthy living in the Alps: the origins of winter tourism in Switzerland, 18601914 Susan Barton

Working-class organizations and popular tourism, 18401970 Susan Barton

Leisure, citizenship and working-class men in Britain, 18501945 Brad Beaven

Leisure and cultural conflict in twentieth-century Britain Brett Brebber (ed.)

The British Consumer Co-operative Movement and film, 1890s1960s Alan George Burton

British railway enthusiasm Ian Carter

Railways and culture in Britain Ian Carter

Time, work and leisure: Life changes in England since 1700 Hugh Cunningham

Darts in England, 190039: a social history Patrick Chaplin

Relocating Britishness Stephen Caunce, Ewa Mazierska, Susan Sydney-Smith and John Walton (eds)

Holiday camps in twentieth-century Britain: packaging pleasure Sandra Trudgen Dawson

History on British television: constructing nation, nationality and collective memory Robert Dillon

The food companions: cinema and consumption in wartime Britain, 193945 Richard Farmer

Songs of protest, songs of love: popular ballads in eighteenth-century Britain Robin Ganev

Women drinking out in Britain since the early twentieth century David W. Gutzke

The BBC and national identity in Britain, 192253 Thomas Hajkowski

From silent screen to multi-screen: a history of cinema exhibition in Britain since1896 Stuart Hanson

Smoking in British popular culture, 18002000 Matthew Hilton

Juke box Britain: Americanization and youth culture, 194560 Adrian Horn

Popular culture in London, c. 18901918: the transformation of entertainment Andrew Horrall

Horseracing and the British, 191939 Mike Huggins

Popular culture and working-class taste in Britain, 193039: a round of cheap diversions? Robert James

Scotland and the music hall, 18501914 Paul Maloney

Amateur film: meaning and practice, 192777 Heather Norris Nicholson

Films and British national identity: from Dickens to Dads Army Jeffrey Richards

Cinema and radio in Britain and America, 19201960 Jeffrey Richards

Looking North: Northern England and the national imagination Dave Russell

The British seaside holiday: holidays and resorts in the twentieth century John K. Walton

Heroes and happy endings

Class, gender, and nation in popular film
and fiction in interwar Britain

CHRISTINE GRANDY

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright Christine Grandy 2014

The right of Christine Grandy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 978 0 7190 9093 6 hardback

First published 2014

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STUDIES IN
POPULAR
CULTURE

There has in recent years been an explosion of interest in culture and cultural studies. The impetus has come from two directions and out of two different traditions. On the one hand, cultural history has grown out of social history to become a distinct and identifiable school of historical investigation. On the other hand, cultural studies has grown out of English literature and has concerned itself to a large extent with contemporary issues. Nevertheless, there is a shared project, its aim, to elucidate the meanings and values implicit and explicit in the art, literature, learning, institutions and everyday behaviour within a given society. Both the cultural historian and the cultural studies scholar seek to explore the ways in which a culture is imagined, represented and received, how it interacts with social processes, how it contributes to individual and collective identities and world-views, to stability and change, to social, political and economic activities and programmes. This series aims to provide an arena for the cross-fertilisation of the discipline, so that the work of the cultural historian can take advantage of the most useful and illuminating of the theoretical developments and the cultural studies scholars can extend the purely historical underpinnings of their investigations. The ultimate objective of the series is to provide a range of books which will explain in a readable and accessible way where we are now socially and culturally and how we got to where we are. This should enable people to be better informed, promote an interdisciplinary approach to cultural issues and encourage deeper thought about the issues, attitudes and institutions of popular culture.

Bestselling books and hit films have much to tell us about the preoccupations, values and preferred role models of society in any given period. In this thoughtful and detailed study, Christine Grandy explores bestselling novels and cinematic hits, both British and American, to assess the extent of their engagement with contemporary concerns about the economy, gender and the nation in inter-war Britain in the aftermath of the traumatic upheaval of World War I.

Rightly rejecting the idea that such popular works are purely escapist, she argues powerfully that the main thrust of the culture was to endorse the worth of a capitalist democratic society with defined traditional heterosexual male and female gender roles. She focuses on the depiction of heroes and heroines (whom she significantly dubs the love-interest), villains and villainesses. In books and films like Sorrell and Son, she sees the culture working to re-establish pre-war masculine role models as patriotic soldier, breadwinner and pater familias. The male villain is the polar opposite of this value set and among the ranks of inter-war villains in for instance the Bulldog Drummond books and films are regularly to be found figures concerned with profit and the undermining of the national economy and social well-being profiteering businessmen, arms dealers the so-called merchants of death, sinister foreigners (Oriental masterminds, rebel Indian princes, Russian Bolsheviks) and renegade Establishment figures.