“A Sign of Pain’s Triumph”: War, Art, and Civilization

Abstract

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, setting into motion a chain of events that led to the violent hostilities of World War I. By August, French, British, and German troops were mobilized and entrenched along what would be known as the Western Front, and Belgian and French refugees flooded into Paris. During the first Battle of the Marne, which took place between September 5 and 12, Allied forces stopped the German advance in France, but half a million soldiers died during that week. Machine guns and chemical weapons made the war unlike any other previous armed conflict, and the scale of human destruction was unprecedented. For many people, World War I was seen as a definite break in human history. Modern writers tended to regard the postwar world as a new era in which civilization would be redefined. Edith Wharton, however, though profoundly affected by the war, saw the war not as a break from the past but rather as part of the fabric of human civilization. War offered opportunities for her to explore questions about morality and individual experience. In this chapter, I examine her short story “Coming Home” as a meditation on disturbing questions about ethics during war and about the isolation of individuals through bodily pain.