The Return of the Soldier (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Rebecca West and Ann V. Norton

In Rebecca Wests The Return of the Soldier (1918), Chris Baldry comes home from World War I shell-shocked and suffering from amnesia. He believes that he is twenty years old and in love with an innkeepers daughter whom he has not actually seen in fifteen years. His elegant wife and spinster cousin must suffer the chagrin of being forgotten, as well as face the challenge of how to cure his mental illness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411430402

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

REBECCA WEST’S THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER (1918) IS A WAR novel about women who await their soldiers at home. As such, it achieves a unique double vision. Evoking the graceful beauty of upper-class pre-war British life in the rich, painterly language that earned West praise as one of the twentieth century’s finest stylists, it nevertheless deplores the narrow existences such privileges can produce and maintain, for women and men. It also suggests that this domestic world and the masculine war have a symbiotic relationship: economic and social inequities among men and women, rich and poor, are manifested and mirrored in brutal military conflict. A casual reader might see only superior soap opera in period costume. Chris Baldry, a married, upper-class World War I officer, comes home from the front shell-shocked and suffering from amnesia, believing that he is twenty years old and in love with Margaret, an innkeeper’s daughter whom he has not actually seen in fifteen years. His elegant wife, Kitty, and spinster cousin Jenny must suffer the chagrin of being forgotten, as well as face the challenge of his apparent mental illness and how to cure it. But this brief modernist masterpiece offers much more than a simple synopsis suggests. Its layered, ironic point of view brilliantly highlights the complexities of traditional gender roles, class tensions, Freudian psychology, and a war unprecedented in the scope of its useless, violent slaughter: hot buttons both then and now.

Cicily Isabel Fairfield, who became Rebecca West, was born in London on December 21, 1892, the third daughter of a Scottish pianist mother, Isabella Mackenzie, and an Anglo-Irish journalist father, Charles Fairfield. West’s brilliant parents provided a home filled with political, artistic, and philosophical discussion, but when West was eight her father abandoned the family and soon died penniless. Isabella Fairfield moved the family to her native Edinburgh, where West attended George Watson’s Ladies’ College and early on showed sympathy for socialist and feminist causes, participating in sometimes-violent demonstrations and moving in suffragist circles. At seventeen, West studied acting at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, but left in less than a year to write for the new feminist journal The Freewoman, adopting the pen name Rebecca West from Ibsen’s radical character in Rosmersholm and attracting immediate attention with her witty, combative articles. Her passionate affair with H. G. Wells, begun in 1913, resulted in an illegitimate son, the writer Anthony West, born on August 5, 1914, the day after England declared war on Germany. During the ten years of her involvement with Wells, West had to move frequently and pretend to be Anthony’s aunt, receiving only sporadic support from Wells as she earned a living writing theatre and book reviews and political and personal journalism. Her early novels The Return of the Soldier, The Judge (1922), Harriet Hume (1929), and The Thinking Reed (1936) reflect aspects of her relationship with Wells, as well as with her father, in their critique of the economic structures that make women dependent upon unreliable men.

West was a glamorous intellectual and socialite in her thirties and had flings with Charlie Chaplin and Lord Beaverbrook, among others, but in 1930 she married the banker Henry Andrews and they lived in London and Stokenchurch until his death in 1968. Their trips to Yugoslavia in the years preceding World War II inspired her masterpiece, the unclassifiable travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). After the war, West covered the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker, later published as A Train of Powder (1946). In 1948, Time magazine called her indisputably the world’s Number One woman writer, and in 1958 she was named Dame of the British Empire. Her autobiographical novel The Fountain Overflows was a 1956 best seller, as was her 1966 spy thriller, The Birds Fall Down. In 1983, West died at the age of ninety after a seventy-year career as a woman of letters. Since her death, several more West works have been published, including This Real Night (1984) and Cousin Rosamund (1985), sequels to The Fountain Overflows; The Sentinel (2002), an early unfinished novel about a teenage suffragist; and Survivors in Mexico (2003), another historical epic, also unfinished, that chronicles her time in Mexico in the 1960s.

West wrote The Return of the Soldier during her difficult early motherhood, and the novel seems all the more remarkable when one realizes that its author was only twenty-six at its publication, that it was her first novel, and that her experience included neither the aristocratic country house nor the working-class squalor it contrasts. Her first book, published in 1916, was a study of Henry James, and The Return of the Soldier unquestionably reflects the master’s influence. Like The Portrait of a Lady, The Return of the Soldier is a novel of manners. More importantly, however, it is a work of psychological realism, in which the first-person narrator, Jenny’s developing consciousness, like Isabel Archer’s in James’ novel, provides its substance: Jenny’s realization that she has fundamentally misunderstood key characters and misinterpreted key scenes resembles Isabel’s. But unlike Isabel, Jenny is emphatically not the main character in the drama. Neither wife nor lover nor soldier, she tells other people’s stories, constituting what James called a satellite. In this she is like Strether in James’ The Ambassadors, who observes, learns, and changes without really affecting the events he witnesses.

Yet Jenny’s unreliable voice differs from the loquacious, omniscient narrator typical of James, and the reader’s challenge is to understand the irony, and tragedy, inherent in Jenny’s initial snobbery and narrow-mindedness. In this she resembles John Dowell, the dispassionate narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel The Good Soldier, a book West reviewed and greatly admired and whose refrain, This is the saddest story, echoes Jenny’s cry, This was the saddest spring. Dowell, like Strether and Jenny, lacks the charm and passion of the lovers he describes, but he is driven to understand the truth behind his initial impressions of the good soldier Edward Ashburnham who, like Chris Baldry, seems the embodiment of the English gentleman. Likewise, Jenny has to face the truth that Chris—again like Edward Ashburnham—does not love his wife, Kitty, but rather Margaret, his youthful flame who is neither beautiful nor refined but possessed of an exquisite spirit. Slowly Jenny figures out the actual relations among the characters, including those with her, and sees that the outward perfection of Chris’ demeanor conceals quiet desperation. Thus her world shatters when she realizes that the truth of their home, Baldry Court, lies in its material seeming and nothing more.

Jenny and Kitty represent types that would have been perfectly recognizable to 1918 English society, as well as to readers of George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, and each contains within her characterization a feminist point. Kitty, the rich society wife, looks like a girl on a magazine cover with a literal price affixed; she represents the parasites the young socialist West repeatedly condemned in her early journalism, non-productive women whose lavish lifestyles impoverish the workers who supply their worldly goods and staff their homes. Jenny is also a parasite, but a more sympathetic one as the old maid (at thirty-five) who must survive by living with relatives. Too genteel to work in service or industry, unable as a woman to enter any white-collar profession, she endures Kitty’s disdain and suffers unrequited love for Chris, her destiny to be one to whom nothing happens, like John Marcher in James’ The Beast in the Jungle. But unlike Marcher, Jenny’s inactive life results less from personal failings than from her position as an unmarried woman, an extra woman in the parlance of the day, and she is acutely aware of her empty existence. Both Jenny and Kitty revel in luxury as a substitute for joy, smugly contrasting their sumptuous clothes and surroundings with Margaret’s cheap attire and ugly village home. Jenny, however, realizes that without Chris their home is merely an empty stage. What she does not say becomes obvious: women get their social value from the men with whom they are associated.

It is exactly her snobbery, her focus on the body rather than the spirit as the measure of worth, that Jenny finally loses, and it is Margaret who inspires her epiphanies. West, in much of her work, employs imagery from cooking and couture—she insisted that the domestic feminine arts be recognized as useful and important—and in this novel the changing imagery of clothing and fabrics chronicles Jenny’s greater awareness of the truth behind appearances. Initially, Margaret, unmistakably working class, seems repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, the spreading stain on the fabric of their lives contrasted with Kitty’s silken elegance. Kitty chooses her clothing for Chris’ first night home—white satin gown, bright jewels, which make her cold as moonlight, as virginity, but precious—to emphasize her difference from aging, messy Margaret. But her costume only serves to emphasize Chris’ rejection of his married life, all its circumstances his prison bars, and his idealized love for Margaret as she exists in eternity rather than time. It also demonstrates his rejection of Kitty’s sexual mores. Chris blunders into this scene like a hot animal; he needs a fully sexual woman rather than the ice maiden Kitty emulates, though not the Gaiety Girl Kitty could more easily accept than a plain woman whose appeal she simply cannot fathom.

Chris has been the good soldier of Britain’s industry and army, the male inheritor of wealth and privilege, and initially Jenny imagines that he has been perfectly happy in these conventional roles. Yet she is astute enough even at the start to recognize that this burdens him with the needs of "a mob of female relatives who