Sequels and phobias in The Return of the Soldier of Rebecca West

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Times of war and peace: Sequels and phobias in The Return of the Soldier of Rebecca West.

Rebecca West (1892-1983) was a prolific writer who tried every literary genre;

journalism, literary critique, the short story and the novel. Her first novel The Return of

the Soldier published in 1918 spans half a century of creative output culminated in 1966

with her last novel The Birds Fall Down. However, all her narrative is easily identifiable

because of her unmistakable style, the structure of her novels, the topics she chooses and

the coherence of her ideas about mankind and society. Subsequently, all her novels are

psychological, historical and social documents depicting human behavior in a precise

historical and social context. West synthesizes what she observes rooting her ideas in

British literary tradition. Her keen critical eye is both penetrating and enlightening, for

example, when in The Return of the Soldier, Margaret Grey appears poorly dressed

daring to invade the Baldry mansion with her mud covered boots, while Jenny, the

narrator, expresses crude feelings of resentment towards Margaret and her social group.

The latter is represented: ‘... as the rich hate the poor, as insect things that will struggle

out of the crannies which are their decent home, and introduce ugliness to the light of

day’ (West, 1918, rpt.1984: 32)1.

West’s literary reputation was revived in the 1980s with the disintegration of

Yugoslavia. Her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; A Journey through Yugoslavia (1941)

brought her wide critical attention because this novel was the last of her efforts to

understand the pre-war situation. Furthermore, it was central to West’s next book, The

Meaning of Treason (1947), where she concentrated on the psychological characteristics

of traitors and she wondered what caused these people to do what they did—for West,

war fosters deception and betrayal. The final example of West’s interest in treason is her

novel The Birds Fall Down (1966) which concludes with the deaths of both the traitor

and the friend he betrayed and in The Return of the Soldier, a study of the sequels of war

in human mind, the protagonist is betrayed by his family. In the aforementioned novel,

West employs what at the time was an original device, amnesia from war trauma or

‘shell shock’ as well as an unusual perspective on war—that of those who waited at

home. West tries to explore the reactions of three women to a returning soldier who,

though married, remembers only an earlier love for another woman.

In spite of its obvious literary quality, The Return of the Soldier proved to be a

novel severely punished by critics.

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