The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes
Context & Writer's Techniques
This revision note explores the historical, literary and social context surrounding Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier, alongside the key writing techniques West employs to convey her themes.
CONTEXT
Published in 1918 — written during the First World War
Rebecca West composed this novel whilst the war was still being fought, publishing it in early 1918 before the conflict's conclusion. This timing makes The Return of the Soldier one of the earliest English novels to examine the psychological damage inflicted by the First World War. West's decision to write about war trauma whilst the fighting continued was groundbreaking, as the full extent of the war's impact on soldiers' minds was not yet widely understood or acknowledged.
Historically important because:
The novel appeared at a crucial moment in medical and social history. The term shell shock had only just begun to appear in military and medical discussions, representing a newly recognised condition. Most war literature of the period focused on heroism, bravery or patriotic duty, celebrating soldiers' sacrifice for their country. West took a radically different approach by confronting the emotional and psychological costs of warfare without resorting to patriotic sentiment or glorification of military service.
West's novel stands as an early literary exploration of war's mental health consequences, written before society had fully grasped the scale of psychological trauma the conflict would cause. This historical timing makes the novel both a literary work and an important historical document.
Shell shock and early psychiatry
The novel centres on Chris Baldry, an officer experiencing amnesia caused by combat trauma—an early literary representation of shell shock. West's portrayal was informed by contemporary psychiatric debates, particularly the work of pioneering doctors such as W.H.R. Rivers and Charles Myers, who were developing new understandings of war-related psychological conditions.
Key psychiatric concepts explored:
West's novel reflects emerging medical knowledge about shell shock and its treatment. Amnesia was increasingly recognised as a symptom of psychological trauma rather than physical injury alone. The novel depicts rest cure and talk therapy as common treatment approaches, mirroring actual medical practices of the period.
Importantly, West's portrayal acknowledges that trauma resulted from emotional repression and pre-war stress as much as combat experiences themselves, showing a sophisticated understanding of psychological complexity that went beyond simple cause-and-effect explanations.
This psychological depth makes the novel an important historical document of early twentieth-century psychiatric thinking.
Class tensions in WWI Britain
West illuminates the rigid class distinctions that characterised Edwardian and Georgian England through her character portrayals. The novel presents a society sharply divided by social hierarchy, with different characters representing different class positions and values.
Character representations:
- Chris and Kitty belong to the upper class—they are privileged, socially elevated, and insulated from the harsh realities faced by working people
- Jenny, the narrator and Chris's cousin, also comes from the upper class but demonstrates more reflective and conflicted attitudes about social position
- Margaret represents the working-class experience, living in poverty and economic hardship
The war begins to break down these rigid class boundaries. Margaret becomes emotionally essential to Chris's recovery, which destabilises the old social order where upper-class characters would never depend upon working-class individuals for anything important. This shift suggests that war disrupts traditional hierarchies, forcing people from different classes to interact in new and more equal ways.
Feminist and proto-feminist context
Rebecca West became a suffragette by age 17, actively campaigning for women's voting rights before writing this novel. Her feminist perspective profoundly shapes the text's concerns and critique.
The novel interrogates:
West examines the emotional labour expected of women, showing how society demands that women perform caring, nurturing roles regardless of their own needs or desires. The novel explores the social roles imposed on wives, revealing how marriage constrains women's autonomy and independence. It highlights limits placed on female autonomy, demonstrating how women's choices and freedoms are restricted by social expectations. The text also examines class-based expectations of femininity, contrasting Kitty's performance of upper-class womanhood with Margaret's more authentic, working-class femininity.
West's feminism underpins the novel's critique of masculine authority and wartime expectations. She challenges the idea that women should simply support men's military service without question, instead showing the genuine emotional and psychological costs that war inflicts on women who must cope with damaged, traumatised soldiers returning home.
Domestic front literature
Unlike trench novels that depict battlefield experiences, The Return of the Soldier focuses deliberately on the home front—the domestic sphere where families wait for soldiers to return. This perspective was particularly associated with women's war writing.
The novel's focus:
West concentrates on the emotional aftermath of war rather than combat itself, showing how trauma continues long after fighting stops. She explores relationships disrupted by trauma, revealing how Chris's amnesia affects his wife, his cousin, and his former lover. The novel examines psychological consequences on families, especially women, demonstrating that war damages not only soldiers but everyone connected to them.
This approach aligns with broader trends in women's war writing, which foregrounded grief, emotional endurance, and caregiving rather than battlefield heroism. By focusing on domestic spaces and emotional experiences, West validates women's wartime experiences as equally important and worthy of literary attention as men's combat experiences.
Modernist themes & form
The novel is frequently classified as early modernist literature due to several distinctive features that align it with the modernist movement emerging in the early twentieth century.
Modernist characteristics:
- West employs introspective narration, delving deeply into characters' inner thoughts and feelings rather than simply describing external events
- The novel maintains a strong psychological focus, prioritising mental and emotional states over physical action
- It uses fluid temporality, moving backwards and forwards in time through memories and flashbacks rather than following a simple chronological structure
- The text explores subjective reality, showing how different characters perceive the same events differently based on their perspectives and emotional investments
These modernist techniques allow West to capture the fragmented, unstable nature of psychological trauma and memory, making form reflect content in sophisticated ways.
WRITER'S TECHNIQUES
First-person narration (Jenny)
West's choice to narrate through Jenny, Chris's cousin, creates a complex narrative perspective that shapes readers' understanding throughout the novel.
Jenny's characteristics as narrator:
Jenny is biased, bringing her own assumptions and prejudices to her account of events. She is emotionally invested in the situation, particularly in Chris's wellbeing and in preserving the family's social status. Her perspective is perceptive yet unreliable—she notices significant details but sometimes misinterprets them or fails to acknowledge her own motivations. Some critics, including Hermione Lee, suggest Jenny is in love with Chris, though this remains implicit rather than explicitly stated in the text.
Impact on reader understanding:
Jenny's narration fundamentally shapes how readers perceive Chris's condition, Margaret's power to heal him, and Kitty's fragility and superficiality. Because we see everything through Jenny's perspective, we must read critically, recognising that her account may not represent objective truth.
The subjectivity of Jenny's viewpoint proves essential to the novel's emotional depth and ambiguity. We experience events through her consciousness, sharing her confusion, jealousy, and eventual recognition of Margaret's importance. This subjective approach makes the novel psychologically complex and emotionally rich.
Psychological realism
West dramatises shell shock using techniques influenced by Freud and contemporary psychiatric theory, creating a psychologically convincing portrait of trauma and memory.
Techniques drawn from psychoanalytic thinking:
The novel depicts repressed memories—Chris has unconsciously blocked out painful or unbearable experiences, protecting himself from psychological harm. It shows emotional regression, as Chris retreats to an earlier, happier period of his life when he felt loved and authentic. The text explores childhood associations, revealing how Chris's current trauma connects to earlier emotional patterns and relationships. It examines the tension between reality and psychological protection, showing how the mind shields itself from unbearable truths.
West's portrayal demonstrates consistency with early psychoanalytic thinking about trauma, defence mechanisms, and the unconscious mind. Her sophisticated psychological understanding makes the novel feel authentic and emotionally true, moving beyond simple or stereotypical representations of mental distress.
Symbolism
West employs rich symbolic elements that carry multiple meanings and enhance the novel's thematic depth.
The garden and landscape:
Gardens and natural settings represent emotional states, with lush, growing environments suggesting psychological health and barren spaces suggesting emotional emptiness. The contrast between pastoral innocence and adult constraints appears repeatedly, with natural, outdoor settings associated with freedom and authentic feeling whilst indoor, social settings suggest restriction and performance. Gardens evoke Chris's pre-war identity, connecting him to a time before military service damaged him psychologically.
Baldry Court:
The family estate symbolises upper-class stability—the solid, unchanging world of privilege and social position. It represents social facades, showing how wealth and status mask emotional emptiness. The house becomes associated with emotional emptiness and repression, particularly through its connection to Kitty, who performs her role as lady of the manor whilst feeling nothing genuine.
Monkey Island / utopia of memory:
Chris's idealised memory of Monkey Island represents escape from present suffering, pre-war innocence before trauma and loss, and a refuge from trauma. However, this memory is ultimately fantasy, not sustainable reality—it cannot provide lasting healing because it denies the actual conditions of Chris's life.
Margaret's poverty and physicality:
Margaret's working-class poverty symbolises authenticity—she cannot afford to pretend or perform false emotions. Her physical reality represents emotional truth, suggesting that genuine feeling exists outside polite society's constraints. She embodies the 'real' England beyond class barriers, representing ordinary people's lives and experiences that upper-class characters usually ignore.
Use of contrast (foils)
West structures the novel around carefully constructed contrasts between characters, highlighting their different values and approaches.
Margaret versus Kitty:
The contrast between these two women forms the novel's emotional centre. Margaret embodies warmth, maturity, and emotional authenticity—she expresses genuine feelings and acts from honest care for Chris. Kitty represents beauty, social refinement, and emotional coldness—she performs her role as upper-class wife but lacks real emotional depth or capacity for genuine intimacy.
This opposition highlights the novel's critique of class-based performativity. Upper-class femininity, as embodied by Kitty, requires women to suppress authentic emotion in favour of social propriety. Working-class femininity, as embodied by Margaret, allows for more honest emotional expression because working-class women have less invested in maintaining social facades.
Jenny versus Margaret:
Jenny represents introspection and repression—she thinks constantly about emotions but struggles to act on them or express them directly. Margaret embodies directness and openness—she speaks plainly and acts honestly, without the self-consciousness that paralyses Jenny.
This contrast reveals class differences in emotional expression and self-awareness. Jenny's upper-class education makes her analytical but also inhibited. Margaret's working-class background makes her less self-conscious but more emotionally direct.
Chris's past versus present:
The novel constantly juxtaposes Chris's remembered past with Margaret, which represents innocence and authentic love, against the present reality of war, responsibility, and adulthood. This contrast structures the entire narrative, as characters must ultimately decide whether Chris should remain in his innocent past or return to his difficult present.
Exploration of memory and time
West employs sophisticated temporal techniques to represent how trauma disrupts normal memory and perception of time.
Narrative techniques:
- The novel uses flashbacks extensively, moving between present action and remembered past events
- It depicts shifting emotional states, showing how characters' feelings change as memories surface or fade
- The text blurs boundaries between past and present, particularly through Chris's amnesia, which makes past and present equally real and immediate to him
These techniques demonstrate how trauma disrupts linear memory. For Chris, the past feels more real than the present because his traumatic experiences have made present reality unbearable.
Memory as therapeutic and destructive:
The novel presents memory ambiguously. Remembering restores Chris's identity—returning his memories would make him whole again and restore his sense of continuous selfhood. However, memory also returns him to war, grief, and duty—the very experiences that damaged him psychologically.
This ambiguity captures a genuine dilemma about trauma treatment. Is it better to remember painful truths or to remain protected by amnesia? The novel refuses to provide easy answers to this question.
Intense emotional interior monologue
West's prose frequently becomes lyrical and psychological, delving deeply into characters' inner experiences.
What the prose reflects:
The writing captures Jenny's emotional turmoil—her confusion, anxiety, and conflicted feelings about the situation. It expresses longing for different outcomes and lost possibilities. It reveals jealousy, particularly Jenny's complex feelings about Margaret and Chris's relationship. It conveys sorrow about war's damage and loss. It expresses awe at Margaret's emotional strength and capacity for authentic feeling.
This modernist interiority gives the novel depth beyond social realism alone. We experience characters' consciousness directly, sharing their subjective perceptions and emotional responses. This technique makes the psychological exploration feel immediate and authentic.
Social critique through domestic detail
West uses seemingly minor domestic elements to deliver powerful social criticism.
Small domestic moments:
The novel pays careful attention to rooms and their decoration, revealing character and class through physical environment. It notices clothing and how characters dress, showing how appearance communicates social position. It observes gestures and body language, revealing suppressed emotions through physical behaviour. It describes meals and eating, using food to show class differences and emotional states. It depicts landscapes in detail, connecting physical environment to psychological condition.
What these details critique:
Through these domestic observations, West critiques class privilege and the unearned advantages of upper-class life. She reveals the repressiveness of upper-class femininity, showing how polite society constrains women's authentic expression. She exposes the emotional sterility of polite society, demonstrating how social rules prevent genuine human connection.
These small details carry significant critical weight, showing how social structures operate through everyday practices and environments.
Moral ambiguity
The novel refuses to offer simple moral judgements, instead presenting complex, contradictory characters and situations.
Examples of ambiguity:
Margaret's healing of Chris appears morally good because it helps him feel loved and authentic. However, it proves socially destabilising because it requires Chris to abandon his wife and social responsibilities. Restoring Chris's memory could be seen as both cure and punishment—it makes him whole but forces him to face unbearable truths. Kitty appears both shallow in her emotional emptiness and deeply damaged by the same social forces that damaged Chris. Jenny demonstrates both insightful perception and self-deceiving denial of her own feelings.
This ambiguity reflects modernist distrust of simplistic moral judgements. West suggests that war and social forces create situations where no purely "right" choices exist. Characters must navigate genuinely difficult ethical dilemmas where all options involve loss and compromise.
Exam tips
Using context and technique effectively in essays:
-
Context questions: Link West's feminist perspective to her critique of marriage and class. Connect the novel's publication date (1918) to its early exploration of shell shock before the condition was fully understood.
-
Technique questions: Focus on how Jenny's first-person narration creates subjectivity and bias. Analyse West's use of symbolism, particularly gardens and domestic spaces, to represent psychological states.
-
Integrated analysis: Show how West's techniques serve her thematic concerns. For example, fragmented time structure reflects trauma's disruption of linear memory; domestic detail enables social critique; moral ambiguity challenges simplistic wartime narratives.
-
Quotation use: Select brief, rich quotations that demonstrate both technique and theme. Focus on passages where West's lyrical prose reveals character psychology or where symbolic language carries thematic weight.
Remember!
-
West wrote during WWI, making this one of the earliest novels to examine shell shock's psychological impact before the war's outcome was known.
-
The novel employs first-person narration through Jenny, whose biased, emotionally invested perspective shapes readers' understanding of all events and characters.
-
West uses rich symbolism—gardens represent emotional states, Baldry Court signifies class stability and repression, Margaret's poverty symbolises authenticity—to convey psychological and social meanings.
-
The text explores memory as both therapeutic and destructive, showing how remembering can restore identity but also return traumatic experiences.
-
West's feminist perspective informs her critique of class-based femininity, emotional labour expected of women, and the social roles imposed on wives during wartime.