Representations of First World War Returned Soldiers on the Home Front in Some Commonwealth Women Writers' Fiction

Abstract

This thesis discusses the experience and the aftermath of the First World War and the way it problemitised ostensibly secure masculinities and femininities, and family relationships, as depicted by some Commonwealth women authors over three generations. With a particular focus on the character of the psychologically wounded returned soldier, I contend that the authors’ depictions of the home-front aftermath of the First World War challenge the dominant constructions of gender which existed at the time of the war, and that such subversions have a specific relationship to each author’s historical and social positionality. I analyse why the returned soldiers are represented in the manner that they are and the significance of this representation in the trajectory of women’s writing. Some of the novels are set during the First World War, while others take place many years after the Armistice. The novels are discussed chronologically and grouped according to the period at which the texts were written. In all the novels, the characters’ notions of their identities and their world are challenged to various degrees. The home fronts where struggles continue are in New Zealand, Australia, Southern Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe), and Britain. The female authors studied in this thesis write about the pervasive condition that was named shellshock, its manifestations and its rippling domestic effects, as symptomatic of patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist systems in crisis. The first chapter addresses the representation of returned soldiers in novels by first-generation First World War authors, those writing at the time of the war and in the years immediately following. Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916), Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) are read as war novels that highlight and critique the association between shellshock and the exhibition of “unmanly” behaviour; the effect that expectations of manliness had on those soldiers who were victims of shellshock; and how the past and present trauma experienced by the returned soldiers is filtered, perceived, and absorbed by the female characters in the novels. The narrative point of view is most-often female and this consequently facilitates my discussion of how women characters perceive men’s bodies in trauma. Non-Combatants and Others is the centre of the chapter’s discussion as it poignantly depicts the extent of the social malaise that the First World War highlighted. The second chapter considers tense and traumatic pasts in the autobiographies and autobiographical fiction of Doris Lessing and Janet Frame, both of whom were daughters of First World War returned soldiers. In this chapter I suggest that their fathers’ war service and the trauma both men sustained shaped each author’s understanding and consequent depiction of war’s inexorable infiltration of the domestic sphere. In considering each author’s depiction of the war, I explore how its presence crystallised pre-existing gender conflict. Both authors spent their formative years, the 1920s and 30s, in households seething with resentment and financial hardship and shadowed by grief. I propose that, in writing autobiographical fiction – Lessing’s Martha Quest (1952) and Alfred and Emily (2008), and Frame’s Towards Another Summer (written in 1963 and published posthumously in 2007) – both engaged in a therapeutic act. In doing so, each author re-imagined her father’s history and its bearing on her life as a means of mitigating her own trauma as a daughter of violence. Chapter three is a comparative reading of the returned soldier and war-wounded characters in the eleven novels Frame published during her lifetime. In considering these characters and the significance of their presence in her work, I suggest that Frame’s writing is haunted by the emotional debris of war. In creating returned soldier characters, Frame wrote against the glorification of war – which served to reinforce notions of the triumph of imperialism, and was endemic in Britain and its former dominions – and also about the “sex war” that had taken place since much earlier times in the patriarchal family. The final chapter of the thesis explores contemporary representations of returned First World War soldiers in Pat Barker’s Another World (1998), Life Class (2007), and Toby’s Room (2012) – three of Barker’s war novels in which the narrative point of view moves between women and men and combatants and non-combatants – and Brenda Walker’s The Wing of Night (2005). The shell-shocked soldiers of Barker and Walker are characters that represent their authors’ contemporary knowledge of, and perspectives on, the interplay between expectations about gender roles and war-induced psychological trauma. This study highlights how the novels imagine and articulate the haunting significance of the returned First World War soldier characters’ trauma in the lives of other characters, and in the light of what each author suggests about the way the First World War produced a heightened sense of the problematics of conventional masculinities and femininities.