56 pages • 1 hour read
Vera BrittainTestament of Youth
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1933A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Clothing and Hats
Brittain’s discussion of clothing and hats is frequent. She complains of the restrictive clothing she must wear as a young student at St. Monica’s boarding school, explaining that it taught her a valuable lesson about moving her body even while feeling restrained. Brittain also describes the nursing uniform in detail, as well as the uniforms that Roland, Edward, Geoffrey, and Victor all wear while OTCs and while soldiers at the front. Symbolically, these uniforms, as all uniforms are intended to do, have an equalizing effect on the wearers, just as death has an equalizing effect. While in uniform, individuals no longer exist; Brittain’s emphasis on these forms of dress echoes the grim reality that, in death, a circumstance that surrounds her, individualism also loses all significance.
Clothing is also a symbolism of positive emotions, no matter how temporary they might be. Brittain describes her black hat with the red roses as well as the clothes she buys in London just before Christmas 1915 in anticipation of Roland’s Christmas visit home; these clothes take on a sinister meaning when linked with the sadness of bad news and mourning, but the brightness of the roses, for example, represent the hope and optimism that filled Brittain at the moment at which she bought the clothes. Those these moments are fleeting, they still have the potential to exist, even during times of catastrophe.
Food, Drink, and Other Forms of Sustenance
Brittain’s experiences with food offer insight into her early experiences as the daughter of a privileged middle-class family in England at the turn of the 20th century. She is shocked at the poor quality of the mass-produced meals she is served during the Oxford summer session, which is evidence of her unawareness that something other than nicely prepared food even exists. When Brittain becomes a V.A.D. nurse, she finds out in a humiliating way that she has no practical cooking skills herself; her inability to boil an egg properly, a very basic task, represents her inexperience in other pragmatic ways. As a young lady of privilege, Brittain had no need to learn how to cook, but she soon learns as a symbol of her own progress towards independence.
Food and drink are essential to life, and during wartime, such items are in short supply, just as other essential, more abstract forms of sustenance like positivity and idealism. When the Leighton family make a toast to the Dead on Christmas, they intend to honor the men whose lives have already been lost and to demonstrate their optimistic belief that these lives were not lost in vain; ironically, they do not realize they are toasting their own Roland, who has died unbeknownst to them two days earlier. Though food is sometimes a symbol of privilege, it is also an equalizer: Everyone needs to eat, just as everyone needs comfort in times of great anxiety and loss.
Illness and Injury
Throughout the four years of war, Brittain succumbs to illness at many different points. Though her illness can easily be explained in literal terms, symbolic value can also be attached to her physical problems. Contemporary medicine makes links between emotional stress and physical illness, and problems in the mind often manifest in problems in the body; for Brittain, her illnesses mirror a sort of sickness of the soul that is harder to describe. Like most of her contemporaries, Brittain held strong to idealistic values around heroism, duty, and patriotic obligation; she prayed with fervent belief in God. As the war progresses, however, Brittain’s faith wavers and her attachment to notions of heroism dissolve into bitter resentment and sadness. At the moments of her greatest sadness and stress, Brittain falls ill, an external symbol of an internal problem.
The many wounds and injuries that Brittain observes in the men she helps as a V.A.D. nurse are similar manifestations of the ugliness and senselessness of war. World War I, in particular, is considered widely to be tragic for its unnecessary magnitude, caused by a relatively small conflict. The unusually horrific nature of the men’s injuries due to new technologies in warfare emphasizes the distance between actual need and dire outcome that characterizes the global destruction of World War I.
