The War of the Roses: Sexual Politics in Henry Green's Back

Abstract

Henry Green's 1946 novel, Back, tells the story of Charley Summers, a British soldier just repatriated from a German prisoner-of-war camp at the end of the Second World War. The first thing we learn about Charley is that he is missing a leg: "A country bus drew up below the church and a young man got out. This he had to do carefully because he had a peg leg" (3). The novel immediately yokes physical to emotional trauma through the image of the rose: Charley is shot because he fails to detect the German gun hiding "in that rosebush" on a French battlefield (8), and he is crippled emotionally when his lover, whose "name, of all names, was Rose" (4), unexpectedly dies while he is recovering in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Charley's missing leg causes him less pain than the heartache that makes him "literally writhe while he remembered" his affair with Rose (130), yet most of the characters in the novel perceive only his peg leg, which they admire as evidence of his heroism. Initially, Charley follows the lead of these characters: he too adopts a patriotic and patriarchal war rhetoric that valorizes his physical scars as signs of a battle-tested masculinity, even as it ignores the emotional scars that might undermine that masculinity. However, by juxtaposing physical and emotional trauma and questioning dominant political and sexual discourses, Back represents the wounded soldier not as an icon of heroic masculinity, but as a sign of the instability of postwar gender roles. [End Page 228]