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| Photo: Sally Bavage |
The return of Dr Richard
Brown, Reader in Modern Literature
at the University of Leeds, to LitFest 2014, ably supported by his PhD student
Daniel (both pictured), helped us examine Rebecca West’s debut novel – published in 1918 and
the only one written in WW1 by a woman – in the context of the movement towards
literary modernism. Human complexities and personal circumstances were explored
individually rather than in the more Edwardian approach to a narrative of mass
sacrifice. As we know, the war
produced a great upheaval in class and gender roles; this novel mirrors some of
those societal changes through focusing on the impacts for the key characters.
Why choose that novel, when
perhaps a more predictable choice for a seminal WW1 work might have been
Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or even something more in the
Blackadder mould? Exactly because
it looks at the Home Front, or at least a part of it that strove to remain
Forever England. Without giving
too much away – for you really should read this fairly brief, tightly-written
and well-plotted novel – the central character returns from the trenches suffering from amnesia. There is a wife, a lover and a cousin
who move us through the dilemma – return the wrecked man to his military career
and thus return him to the
war? Or leave him to remain in the
aspic of his youthful happily-deluded self?
This echoes the research
work and the book Stories from the War Hospital produced by the LitFest - to
be launched on Friday 21 March in the New Headingley Club. The 2nd Northern Military Hospital based
at Beckett Park in Headingley gave treatments for ‘shell
shock’, which was both shocking to military doctors and not caused by shells. At least not physically; it was
recognised in 1915 in The Lancet as an emotional or psychological response to
extreme stress; there were 80,000 cases by 1918. But even shell shock had a class bias – it was suggested
officers suffered ‘anxiety neuroses’ because of their higher education and
sensitivity whilst the lower ranks exhibited ‘mental illness’ causing tremors
and speech difficulties.
Rebecca West picks up on
these class-based approaches in a plot detailing the fractured family lives of
a wife and a lover each nursing an empty cot, the one responding to the
amnesiac by trying to keep life and him just as it always was whilst the other
adapts to the changes in the times and her man. West tries to express the
processes of change that WW1 set off in British society through the device of
the soldier who leaves one idyllic world, goes to as hellish alternative and
comes back to find his world view fits neither. Though there is a plot twist to
complicate this simple view.
Some anecdotes about which literary and
society figures West may have used for her character models, and why, completed
an enjoyable look at how class hierarchies and gender roles were affected by
WW1, then it was out into the night clutching the last of Headingley Library’s
borrowed copies of the novel thoughtfully prepared by our librarian Rimpu
Bains, for which many thanks.
As a member of the audience
said “Shall Return to the Novel Immediately. Excellent.”
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