In this talk I explore some examples of photography, poster art, and film from the Spanish Civil War and their implications for reading Woolf's Three Guineas (1938). These aesthetic responses from Spain underscore the connections between war and private life that Woolf enumerates in Three Guineas, and help us see how the kind of total war that took place in Spain merged the home and battlefronts, demanding new ways to understand the combined front of twentieth-century warfare. The photographs and propaganda images that depict this kind of merged or total war arena employ the transformation of the city into the scene of war for emotional effect and mobilize the figures of women and children in deeply problematic ways. Looking at these materials can help us to understand Woolf's struggle with the brutal images coming out of Spain and her effort to substitute not only a different set of photographs but also an alternative way of viewing. In particular, this talk will explore the way that Woolf's manipulation of structures of address in Three Guineas and her use of what the film-maker Joris Ivens called “personalization” helps counter the univocal, teleological and emotionally manipulative perspective of war propaganda while working to revise and refocus our understanding of the scene of total war.

In these cultural products we can also see the boundaries among war reporting, art, and propaganda being contested. The Spanish Civil War put particular pressure not only on categories of home and battle front, but also on the possibility of separating polemic from war narrative, photographs, or reportage. Yet the high degree of self-reflection, ironic detachment, and openness of form that characterizes modernist narrative, may mitigate against the most extreme effects of propaganda. Looking at Three Guineas in connection with multi-media responses to the war helps show how Woolf's manipulation of the structure of address in Three Guineas —her foregrounding of her address to the letterwriters, her constant self-reference, her acknowledgement of her scrapbooks or her pile of photos—becomes crucial to her ability to avoid the emotionally manipulative perspective of war propaganda.