will review the submission and either publish your submission or provide feedback. The unspoken blame placed on Kitty for Christopher’s amnesia is hardly a fair assessment of a wife who has waited loyally for his return, and has suffered her own trauma through the death of their son and now through her husband’s shell-shock. Keeping these realizations in mind we can now look at The Return Of The Soldier with deeper insight. That day its beauty was an affront to me, because, like most Englishwomen of my time, I was wishing for the return of a soldier. He turns instead to Margaret, his former love, for support, and Jenny is left veering between relief that his shell-shock temporarily disqualifies him from the front and extreme jealousy of her rival. Her materialism is a well-established aspect of the text, both through the decadence of the estate and Jenny’s assertion that “Kitty had come along and picked up his [Chris’] idea of normal expenditure and carelessly stretched it” (8). Peter Gay. (The Return of the Soldier, 160) West is dedicated to truth seeking and uses her writing as the digging tool. The combat diction which characterizes much of Jenny’s narrative illustrates her appropriated role as Christopher’s testimonial voice, but in the process also becomes a metaphor for her resultant dispossession. When viewed in these terms, her obsessive attempts to surround herself with expensive décor is a method of seeking comfort from her wealth, for creating a fantasy in which she does not have to face the untimely death of her son or the possibility of her husband’s death on the frontlines. Kitty’s melancholia has resulted from an inability to address traumatic strain, as she suppresses it through the construction of a fantasy in which it does not exist. Rebecca West's 1918 novel The Return of the Soldier, centered around a shell-shocked soldier returning to his country estate, returns us to a historical moment when the general public was being introduced to issues of mental health which many had never considered. This is clearly a very important matter. All rights reserved. Anonymous "The Return of the Soldier Study Guide: Analysis". “Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. This brand of materialist consolation is a predominant feature of the novel’s early pages, as Jenny describes the rooms and grounds of the estate. Depicting the rugged reintegration of Ichiro Yamada, a no-no boy imprisoned during WWII, Japanese American author John Okada presents a traumatized and conflicted Japanese American community during the mid-1940s in his novel. She might have imagined him braving atrocities in the trenches, but he clearly was not thinking of her while he was doing so; his mind, apparently, would revert to the time spent on Monkey Island with Margaret in times of distress. Her point of reference is rather the “flattened” voice of the “modern subaltern,” who recalls his friend shouting “Help me, old man, I’ve got no legs! The … Recounting these horrors of the war front allows her to a establish a relationship to his character; since he is absent for the first part of the novel and an amnesiac for its duration, she becomes the voice which translates his experience in a way that he cannot, despite the heavy strain on her own psychological well-being. The reason memory and trauma are connected is typically because trauma makes memories very chronically harmful (especially memories of war), but by happenstance, this novel is predicated on the opposite. The trauma of his life literally makes him unable to relate to life the way he used to. Here, in this landscape that closely resembles the war front of her nightmares, an old man who is “the soul of the universe” has mesmerized Christopher with identical crystal balls of Margaret and the women at Baldry Court; Christopher grabs at the image of Margaret and breaks the other in doing so, and “no one weeps for this shattering of our world” (66-7). The Return of the Soldier is a story of a soldier named Chris returning home with a memory loss due to a "shell-shock" and the three women who awaits his arrival - his wife, his cousin and his former love. In Rebecca West’s novel, The Return of the Soldier the reader is introduced to a man named Chris Baldry who suffers from shell-shock fighting in the war. You could also do it yourself at any point in time. He doesn't remember moving on from Margaret, being with Kitty, losing their son—none of that. It was this curious phenomenon that challenged Freud in his confrontation with the ‘war neuroses’ stemming from the First World War” (151). This time it is not so much Christopher as she who is trapped on the barren stretches of No Man’s Land; in the narrative of his return and recovery, she has become a dispossessed outsider, superfluous in the eyes of her beloved cousin and subtly despised by his wife. Arguing that their situation is dehumanizing and infringes upon their human rights, Palestinians have consistently demanded the right of return as a prerequisite for peace negotiations (Tovy 40... We are all witnesses. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. He uses the knowledge to castigate Kitty once more for her omission, then urges Margaret to “take him something the boy wore, some toy they used to play with” (82). A second glance, however, reveals that she embodies many of the traits of the melancholic personality. The Return of the Soldier Analysis In her novel, The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West defines shell-shock and amnesia as changes in a person’s emotional and mental state. Christopher has sought refuge with Margaret and has all but forgotten her. The horrors of World War I have robbed returning veteran Chris Baldry (Alan Bates) of his memory. His bumbling method, however, proves effective, for when Christopher returns to the house after seeing Oliver’s ball and jersey, he looks “every inch a soldier” and is declared “cured” by his wife (90). The Demon-Lover functions as a significant motif in English Gothic ballad tradition, which scholar Hugh Shields articulates as a “supernatural intrusion into a narrative which is of this world” (Shields p. 107). , Hershman, Emily R. 2011. Although most Ancient Greek literature focused on male characters, a literary analysis of Homeric poetry reveals an inquisition of femininity, motherhood, and what it meant to be a woman in Ancient Greece. At this point there are over nine million Palestinian refugees scattered throughout the globe (King-Irani 924,). The room has been “kept in all respects as though there were still a child in the house” (3). © 2021 Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse LLC. Freud, Sigmund. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse, 3(03). Her torturous cataloguing of the hardships of trench warfare is almost a reproach for the expensive lifestyle she and Kitty have been maintaining at Baldry Court, a reminder that he is far from “this green pleasantness his wife and I now looked upon” (5). By Emma Holland For this blog post, I am focusing on Chapter 5 from Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier. Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier is a complex novel that brilliantly explores the militaristic and sociocultural tensions of its historical moment. Though Margaret is the bearer of bad news, there is a great deal more to this exchange than shooting the messenger. 1972 Words 8 Pages. When she tries to explain Christopher’s shell-shock, Kitty dismisses it as fraud and snaps that she is “impertinent” (14). Here Jenny’s appropriation of battlefield imagery indicates the stress of his rejection. To install click the Add extension button. Lastly, this mode for analyzing West’s novel illustrates her unique perspective on the credos of modernist representation and the larger cultural anxieties of her time. "Rebecca West's 'The Return of the Soldier': Analyzing the Interrelationship of Male and Female Traumas." An editor Chris’s cousin, Jenny, who lives at Baldry Court with Kitty and has been devoted to Chris all her life, is also worried. The tension generated by their disdain towards the working classes comes to a head when Margaret comes to inform them of Christopher’s amnesia. Another insight that can be drawn from paralleling trauma theory and The Return of the Soldier is the field’s relative silence on the subject of the First World War. For the women of The Return of the Soldier, the arrival of Dr. Gilbert Anderson is in many ways both a blessing and a curse. You can help us out by revising, improving and updating Rebecca West's 'The Return of the Soldier': Analyzing the Interrelationship of Male and Female Traumas. The work of leading trauma scholars such as Cathy Caruth and Dori Laub have primarily discussed the Second World War, particularly in terms of the mass destruction caused by the Holocaust and Hiroshima and their manifestations in literature and film. True to a Lie: Two Perspectives on Moral Responsibility in "Return of the Soldier" Disclaimer: content on this website is for informational purposes only. Chapter 1. Representing the work of students from hundreds of institutions around the globe, Inquiries Journal's large database of academic articles is completely free. Reviving herself from the leaf-pile hallucination, Jenny cries out that “Gilbert Anderson must cure” Christopher and fills herself with “a gasping, urgent faith in this doctor” despite others’ failed attempts through hypnosis (67). Ed. This essay will explore how poet and scholar Sir Philip Sidney effectively manipulated poetic devices in... Justice in The Eumenides is established as an objective entity and it is in The Eumenides that it is solidified as a concept which has causal power over the material world. Baldry Court, built with “the knowing wink of the manicurist” and “matter for innumerable photographs in the illustrated papers,” is a well-maintained symbol of a dying aristocracy, their haven away from the horrors of the modern world (4). Yet this repression of trauma through classism is not excluded to the material; it also colors their social interactions. The financial center of the world transferred from London to New York City, indicating America’s rise to preeminence. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1989. He is changed by the trauma, and the detail of memory loss can be seen through that lens, as the symbol referring to those changes. Freud describes this phenomenon in his essay “Melancholia and Mourning,” asserting that “melancholia…is on the one hand, like mourning, a reaction to the real loss of a loved object; but over and above this, it is marked by a determinant that is absent in normal mourning or which, if it is present, transforms the latter into pathological mourning” (587). The toll this has taken on her sanity becomes apparent when she realizes that she is “utterly cut off from Chris” and flings herself face-down in a pile of leaves while on a walk outside Baldry Court (63). The dream itself is an almost cinematically vivid depiction of a war scene: “By night I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of No Man’s Land, starting back there because of the awfulness of an unburied head…For on the war-films I had seen men slip down as softly from the trench parapet, and none but the grimmer philosophers would say that they had reached safety by their fall” (5). In her essay “Trauma and Testimony,” Dori Laub analyzes a similar dynamic between interviewers and Holocaust survivors: “The listener (or the interviewer) becomes the Holocaust witness before the narrator does...To a certain extent, the interviewer-listener takes on the responsibility for bearing witness that previously the narrator felt he bore alone, and therefore could not carry out. Soldier's return. Although Haynes states, truth seeking is not exactly the goal for West, but truth is what frames’ the sign of her work. Depression and anxiety are increasingly widespread. In a nuanced reiteration of the typical trope of a soldier’s return, Christopher Baldry is dispatched from the Western front when it becomes apparent that selective amnesia has trapped his mind fifteen years in the past. An examination of the importance of female characters in West’s depictions of trauma re-affirms her subversion of this male-centered literary tradition. Disregarding the national interest and everything else except the keen prehensile gesture of our hearts toward him, I wanted to snatch my Cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness his wife and I now looked upon. The Return of the Soldier is a work of fiction published in 1918 by the English novelist Rebecca West. Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse 3.03 (2011). West’s choice to conclude the novel with a psychologist’s agenda for curing Christopher’s shell-shock is an abrupt one, generating ambivalence toward the relative advantages and limitations of the psychoanalytic method. What he remembers, is being in love with a woman named Margaret, the daughter of an innkeeper. The newsletter highlights recent selections from the journal and useful tips from our blog. By analyzing the feminine role in West’s trauma narrative, insight can be gained into the novel’s larger motifs of classist tension, the gender divide between the war and home fronts, as well as the advantages and limitations of Freudian psychoanalysis. After you claim a section you’ll have 24 hours to send in a draft. During these fifteen years his parents have died, he has taken over the family business, he has married, and his son has died. Save Citation »  (Works with EndNote, ProCite, & Reference Manager), Hershman, E. R. (2011). The disturbing tenor of this scene, as well as the fact that all of Oliver’s former toys have been kept eerily in place, indicates that Kitty has not mourned the loss of her son in a healthy way. That's it. In his assessment of the melancholic, Freud discovered that in self-evaluation “it is only his fears of becoming poor that occupy a prominent position” (585). Aside from the socioeconomic aspects of The Return of the Soldier, Jenny’s narrative use of wartime imagery is a more conventional aspect of the trauma narrative, but also addresses the gendered tension between the war and home fronts. Here the narrative focus, while ostensibly on the man returning home, in fact explicates the ways in which women handle trauma on the home front. The title The Return of the Soldier embodies a common trope in Great War literature: soldiers return from war and interact with everyday life, confronting trauma sustained through the brutality of war. The Return of the Soldier. Throughout the novel The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, Kitty Baldry experiences trauma that is constantly controlled by characters who perpetrate patriarchal ideas. The Return of the Soldier is about the effects of shell-shock on a soldier and the three women in his life. Margaret pulls him up in “the movement of one carrying a wounded man from under fire,” and “it was as though her embrace fed him, he looked so strong as he pulled away” (59). for the return of [her] soldier’, in a room ‘full of whiteness’ to which the soldier’s son will never return (West: 1918/2018, 3-6). She thinks of “it happening somewhere behind the front” where the houses have “uncovered rafters which stick out like broken bones” (66). It is not intended to provide medical or other professional advice. I'm sorry, what editorial are you referring to? Margaret is an irritation because she is an outsider, a reminder of the wartime present outside the enclosed estate. The women in Chris's community knew him both before and after. The classist preoccupations of the female characters of the novel, in particular Christopher’s wife Kitty Baldry and his cousin Jenny, constitute an intriguing manifestation of the central tenets of trauma theory. While the power of psychoanalysis to reenact rather than cure trauma became apparent in the Dr. Anderson episode, a more nuanced Freudian reading does have the advantage of portraying Kitty’s character in a more rounded and sympathetic light. As he sees it, his job is to return Christopher to a stable psychological state and to the war front; the stress and shame this attempt will place on the women in his life is immaterial. With deeper insight is broken apart, and Chris and Margaret, ) Process and the Struggle. ” trauma Explorations. S novel ; our age is one of innocence lost Holland for this blog post I. Is the bearer of bad news, there is a crucial instance that reveals women. Her friend life the way he used to intended to provide medical or professional. 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