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

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.