TRAUMA OF WAR IN REBECCA WEST’S THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER

This paper aims particularly at discussing how the trauma of twentieth-century warfare challenge the metanarratives that construct and instruct the idea of nation, and how trauma connects individuals with this ideology in Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918). The novel successfully portrays different levels of disturbances caused by the trauma of war one of which is Chris' rejection of recalling his wife to find a kind of internal unity in an unsafe world. In the novel, shell-shocked Chris' trauma strikingly leads to the narrative exploration of female subjectivity in states of psychological crisis. The story suggests many similarities between surviving at the battlefront and homefront while exploring the effects of war on men as well as women. In the novel, Chris's war trauma makes other major characters of the novel question their social and gender roles framed by the Edwardian society compelling them to re-evaluate the nature of institutional systems in relation to gender conflict; thus, The Return of the Soldier successfully places men's and women's traumas in conjunction with one another in a more puzzling connection.