Fire or Blood? Aestheticising Resistance in Naomi Mitchison’s The Blood of the Martyrs

In 1935, Naomi Mitchison visited sharecroppers in Arkansas, describing the conditions as ‘worse than any rural housing I have ever seen in Europe.’ Four years later, she published The Blood of the Martyrs (1939), a novel centred on Roman practices of slavery and the persecution of early Christians. Foregrounding the value of forgiveness and pacificism, the novel offers a distinct contrast to her earlier interwar novels. Unlike historical slavery allegories like The Corn King and Spring Queen (1930) and The Delicate Fire (1933), Mitchison’s fiction later in the decade locates resistance to slavery outside the violent revolutions that so frequently feature in those early works. This chapter argues that Mitchison’s travels, particularly her work supporting the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in the United States, were crucial to the development of her theory of resistance to authoritarian manifestations of power. The Blood of the Martyrs sidelines violent resistance in favour of a community that fosters love, pacifism, and forgiveness as responses to abhorrent persecution. Mitchison’s emphasis on the spirit of collective action, including its ability to transcend death, reveals a new approach to the politics of resistance in her fiction.