Masculanity passage analysis

The passage is based on the idea that all mental illnesses are caused not by the intense psychological torment the soldiers go through on the battlefield who are surrounded by death and destruction, but rather is a disease of the 'will', which is an interesting concept as it doesn't put blame on the reasons most people would think would make a man mentally ill. By refusing to accept the scientific explanation for the mental illness, the soldiers would actually suffer more as their conditions would be treated not with medicine and therapy, but with even more work as "conventional cures stressing the need of rest were jettisoned on the grounds that they could encourage laziness", which is "ultimately destructive of manliness", which was unacceptable in those times.

The second idea that the passage takes is the idea that mental illnesses such as shell-shock, war neuroses and mutism was a result of a "crisis of masculinity and a trial of the Victorian masculine ideal", which may have occurred because the soldiers get so torn in between behaving in a 'manly' way which was the social norm on the battlefield while under fire or acting in a way as such to ensure self preservation at the expense of others. The passage further states that the constant hiding of fears attributed to shell-shock, and that it was a result of an "exaggeration of the male sexrole expectations, self control and emotional disguise of civilian life".

In conclusion, ideas that may not seem rational to a person today or to a person back during World War I was used by the British Command during the war as a method of getting more men, combat effective or not, to get into the battlefield to fight, which shows that they either don't care about the safety and well being of the men, or how desperate they must have been to send out the men to be sacrificed.