‘Obsessed by the Obscenity of War’: Emotional and Physical Wounds in Mary Borden’s Poetry and Lesley Smith’s Four Years Out of Life

Abstract

This article discusses the traumatic nature of war nursing represented in two poems by Mary Borden written to her lover during the time she nursed in France, and in Lesley Smith’s memoir, Four Years out of Life (1931). Both writers draw on their medical environment for metaphors to articulate the psychological trauma of their work. In both instances, their representation of fragmented bodies and minds reflects the nurse’s inability to impose control, the nursing ideal of containment, over her environment or over her emotional response to it. More specifically, Borden uses images of fragmented bodies and the sepsis of wounds as metaphors for the nurse persona’s psychological fragmentation and ‘infection’ by her terribly wounded patients. For Lesley Smith the concept of madness allows her to explore the inescapability of the war nursing experience which permeates her mind, especially its post-war persistence which looks ahead to much later definitions of post-traumatic stress.