Negotiating a ‘Tangled Web of Pride and Shame’: A Crimean Case-Study

Abstract

This article complements an identified ‘cultural turn’ in military history, which emphasizes the potency of perception and the extent to which successes, failures, opportunities and threats are culturally conditioned (Black 2004: 233-35). It will deal with issues surrounding ‘collective remembrance’, a concept which Joanna Bourke identifies as problematic. For Bourke, ‘collective
memory’ has been characterized by a ‘museal sensibility’ in which mass narratives ‘wallow’ in a nostalgic world of community, stability and certainty (Bourke 2004: 473). She argues that collective memory is an exclusive script, which imposes unity on individual experiences and overlooks conscious acts of cultural selection (Bourke 2004: 473). Whilst scholarship on the relationship of present with past rightly takes issue with collective, or public, memory, precluding individual, or private, memories, Bourke usefully draws attention to the mythical qualities of collective remembrance. Military history, integral as it is to national identity yet harbouring inherently difficult histories, is particularly susceptible to cultural, social and political mediation. This article traces nineteenth-century treatments of two Crimean failures and the legacy of
these attitudes today in museums, which to a large extent echo some of the dominant myths and silences of Victorian Britain.