Female Sacrifice: Gender and Nostalgic Nationalism in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Abstract

Near the end of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her sprawling, compelling, encyclopedic account of traveling through Yugoslavia in the late 1930s, Rebecca West describes a spectacle she and her husband witnessed. As they sat at a hotel cafe in Prishtina, with elbows ‘on a tablecloth stained brown and puce’ eating ‘chicken drumsticks … meagre as sparrow bones’, a Serbian couple walked towards them, clearly having traveled a great distance. The woman had ‘the better part of a plough’ tied to her back while the man ‘went free’. As the man conversed with the hotel-keeper, the woman stood nearby, unable to sit down, with ‘a blue shadow of fatigue’ on her face. Although West did not converse with the couple, she felt able to sum up their situation and explain the condition of the cafe’s repast by drawing on Balkan history (894–5). West reads this incident as emblematic of the effects of imperial oppression by the Turks, the Austrians, the Italians, the Russians, and the Hungarians over centuries in the Balkans. Imperialism, she argues, had created the material and spiritual squalor, and what she interpreted as the distorted gender roles, of some communities in Yugoslavia. West describes finding these mean conditions in her travels interspersed with remnants of the admirable peasant cultures of the Balkan peoples.