Forbidden Homosexual Love in Wartime: Gaunt and Ellwood in In Memoriam
Defining the Thematic Claim
In Memoriam argues that war both enables and forecloses forbidden homosexual love. The First World War creates rare pockets of privacy and intensity where Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood can express desires that peacetime society criminalizes. Yet the same conflict rips those lovers toward death, mutilation, and permanent exile. Alice Winn does not treat the war as a simple liberator or destroyer; instead she shows how homophobia and combat intertwine to shape every phase of the relationship—from schoolyard secrecy to trench intimacy to a fraught postwar survival.
Tracing the Theme Through the Plot
Part One: The School and Its Shadows
Before the war, Gaunt and Ellwood inhabit a world where homosexuality means ruin. When Sandys urges Gaunt to confess his feelings, Gaunt lists the consequences: expulsion, hard labor, shame on his family, even hanging. These are not abstract fears. Ellwood has already learned to hide his relationship with John Maitland, and Gaunt maintains a secret sexual arrangement with Sandys that he insists means nothing emotionally. The school environment punishes any deviation: Burgoyne burns Ellwood's poetry and makes anti-Semitic remarks, and Ellwood responds with violence that lands him in detention.
The white feather incident in Chapter One crystallizes the link between masculine honor and heteronormativity. When a stranger publicly gives Gaunt a white feather—a symbol of cowardice for not enlisting—he feels deep shame and impulsively joins the army. The white feather represents how wartime society polices masculinity: to be perceived as insufficiently manly is to be branded a coward, and homosexual desire is the ultimate threat to that manly ideal. Gaunt enlists not from patriotism but from a desperate need to prove himself.
Part Two: Intimacy Under Fire
Once at the front, the rigid social codes of England begin to loosen. In the trenches, male bodies press together without suspicion. Officers sprawl across one another on trains, share beds in chateaus, and find rare privacy in the chaos. The war creates what Gaunt and Ellwood could never have at Preshute: unsupervised time together, away from families and schoolmasters.
Their physical relationship develops in stages across several chapters. In a pivotal scene in Chapter Seven, Gaunt initiates their first kiss—tentative, curious—but afterward walks away in a way that makes Ellwood feel hated. Gaunt's internal conflict is palpable: he wants Ellwood desperately yet recoils from what that wanting means. Ellwood, for his part, lies about the poem that comes to mind, substituting Tennyson for Thomas Wyatt rather than reveal his true emotions.
By Chapter Eight, the dynamic grows more complex. Gaunt tells Ellwood their friendship is too important to risk, yet cannot stop himself from climbing into Ellwood's bed. Ellwood reassures them both that the sex means nothing, that it is only a way to forget the war. This self-deception allows them to continue but also poisons the honesty between them. The poem In Memoriam A.H.H.—about Tennyson's grief for a beloved friend—becomes their private code. When Gaunt asks Ellwood what he would call a poem written after his death, Ellwood answers "In Memoriam H.W.G.," a joke that carries devastating sincerity.
The war also introduces new threats. Maitland, as Gaunt's captain, censors Ellwood's love letter and warns that such writing could destroy him. Gaunt responds by sending Ellwood a cold letter ending their correspondence—an act of self-protection that mirrors the homophobic pressure he internalized at school. Burgoyne, now a superior officer, forces Gaunt and Ellwood to perform deference while holding power over their lives. The front lines offer intimacy but never safety.
Part Three: The Cost of Survival
By Chapter Forty-Three, the war is still raging but Gaunt and Ellwood have made a pact. At a train station packed with soldiers heading to the Somme, Gaunt slips Ellwood a scrap of Keats and promises to go to Brazil after the war. The public setting makes any declaration of love impossible—it is illegal, and they both know it. Ellwood's demand is fierce: "Brazil. Promise me." Gaunt agrees, choosing exile over the England that would punish them.
The postwar chapters reveal how thoroughly the war has scarred their relationship. In Rio de Janeiro, Ellwood loves the new world but Gaunt aches for England. They argue about whether the war improved Gaunt, a claim Gaunt finds dangerous even to speak. Ellwood's injury—the loss of an eye—becomes a strange source of beauty for Gaunt, who is grateful for the wound that guaranteed Ellwood's life. Still, Ellwood can barely say "I love you" when Gaunt finally speaks the words aloud.
Maud Gaunt's letter from Berlin introduces a parallel political struggle. She works with Magnus Hirschfeld to abolish Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing homosexuality. Her activism offers a vision of organized resistance that Gaunt and Ellwood never had access to. Yet Gaunt cannot leave Ellwood, and Ellwood refuses to return to England. Their love survives, but only in a kind of suspended exile.
Symbolic Connections
Several symbols in the novel reinforce the theme of forbidden love in wartime.
The POW tunnel that Gaunt helps dig represents the hidden passage that queer love must travel—underground, dangerous, requiring collective labor, and always at risk of collapse. It connects to Gideon Devi's role in the Holzminden escape, a real historical figure Winn adapted. The tunnel is freedom, but it is also a cramped, desperate struggle.
Ellwood's black silk mask, worn after his facial injury, operates as both concealment and revelation. It hides the visible mark of the war that changed him, but it also becomes the face he shows the world—a queer version of the "mask" gay men often wore in public. Gaunt finds the scarred face beautiful precisely because it represents survival.
The white feather, already discussed, recurs as a symbol of the shame weaponized against men who fail gender norms. Gaunt enlists because of it; others die because of it. The feather stands for a society that would rather send young men to die than tolerate their difference.
Complexity and Contradiction
Winn refuses a simple redemption arc. The war does not make Gaunt and Ellwood free. It gives them space to love but also mutilates Ellwood, kills their friends, and forces them into permanent exile. Gaunt's German heritage adds another layer: he is both English soldier and "Hun," both lover and enemy, depending on who is looking.
The relationship itself contains contradictions. Gaunt consistently wants more than Ellwood is willing to give, yet Ellwood is the one who first acts on his desires. Ellwood tells Gaunt the sex means nothing, then mouths "I love you" into Gaunt's hair. Gaunt submits physically but controls emotionally. Their dynamic shifts constantly, never settling into a stable pattern.
Winn also shows that the homophobia they face is not monolithic. Some witnesses, like David Hayes, seem to understand without comment. Others, like Burgoyne and Maitland, pose direct threats. The school, the army, and the law all police queer desire, but individuals within those institutions vary. This granular treatment prevents the novel from becoming a simple oppression narrative.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does the poem In Memoriam A.H.H. function as a code between Gaunt and Ellwood?
The poem allows them to express love and grief without direct declaration. Ellwood recites it to Gaunt in intimate moments, and they joke about Ellwood writing "In Memoriam H.W.G." after Gaunt's death. Tennyson's poem, written about a beloved friend, gives them a culturally acceptable language for emotions that would otherwise be criminal to voice. It becomes their private liturgy, a way of saying what cannot be said in plain English.
2. What role does Sandys play in Gaunt's understanding of his own sexuality?
Sandys is Gaunt's first sexual partner and the only person who openly challenges Gaunt's fear of exposure. He tells Gaunt to confess his feelings to Ellwood, arguing that the worst consequences Gaunt imagines are not the real obstacle. After Sandys dies, Gaunt receives his returned letter stamped "recipient deceased," a loss that underscores how quickly queer bonds can be erased without anyone knowing they existed. Sandys represents both the possibility of honesty and its mortal cost.
3. Why does Ellwood insist that their sexual relationship means nothing?
Ellwood tells Gaunt the sex is only "passing the time" and a way to forget the war. This insistence is protective: if it means nothing, it cannot be used against them. It also reflects Ellwood's own internalized fear. Having learned from Maitland to compartmentalize desire, Ellwood instinctively minimizes what he feels. His habit of obedience toward Gaunt—doing whatever Gaunt asks—further complicates his ability to name what he actually wants.
4. How does the setting of Rio de Janeiro in Chapter Forty-Six continue the theme of forbidden love?
Brazil offers legal safety but emotional hardship. Ellwood thrives in exile, learning the names of all the trees and abandoning England entirely. Gaunt, however, mourns the English countryside—foxgloves, daffodils, frosted grass—and struggles with the loss of home. Their love survives only by leaving behind everything Gaunt loves except Ellwood himself. The exile is not a happy ending but a compromised survival, haunted by the war and by the England that rejected them.
5. What is the significance of Maud's work with Magnus Hirschfeld in the novel's structure?
Maud's activism introduces the historical reality of organized resistance to homophobic law. Paragraph 175 was a real piece of German legislation, and Hirschfeld's institute was a pioneering center for queer rights. By placing Maud in that context, Winn shows that the struggle Gaunt and Ellwood face privately was also being fought publicly, elsewhere. It also offers a counterpoint to their exile: Maud stays and fights, while Gaunt and Ellwood flee. Her presence suggests that political change, however slow, is possible—even if it arrives too late for the lovers in the story.