Visions of “Blighty”: Fairies, War and Fragile Spaces
Visions of “Blighty”: Fairies, War and Fragile Spaces

Summary/Abstract: Estella Canziani’s fairy painting, “Where the Little Things of the Woodland Live Unseen” (1914) was informed by her fascination with the landscape and folklore. This paper explores the relationship between the sociocultural and psychological condition of English society during WWI and the enthusiastic reception of reproductions of Canziani’s painting. Her picture is analysed in relation to the revived popularity of J.M. Barrie’s protagonist Peter Pan and the proliferation of recruitment propaganda that inundated the British public during WWI. Canziani’s image located as a site across which viewers enacted self-interpretive, interrogative relationships between self/environment and reality/the imaginary is also positioned as key for a culture that fabricated a contemporary, mythologically based, omnipotent champion to personify English notions of the heroic soldier. In addition, the androgynous appearance of Canziani’s piper disrupts socially constituted positions of gender difference in English society that, with the onset of WWI, challenged and distorted gendered boundaries.

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