The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

First published: 1918

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The period following World War I

Locale: Southern England

Principal Characters:

• Chris Baldry, the protagonist, who has suffered a partial loss of memory as a result of his involvement in trench warfare
• Kitty Baldry, Chris’s wife, whom he cannot recall having married
• Jenny, Chris’s cousin, who acts as both interpreter of the story’s events and its narrator
• Margaret Grey, the only woman Chris can remember having loved

The Novel

The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West’s first novel, concerns a tension-filled love triangle formed by Chris Baldry, the young, wealthy soldier, whose mind has been affected by shellburst in the French trenches during World War I; his wife, Kitty, whom he cannot recall ever having had as either wife or lover; and Margaret Grey, who loved Chris in his youth and prior to his marriage to Kitty.

This short novel chronicles the reactions of Kitty, Margaret, and the narrator, Jenny, to Chris’s return from war and his reaction to them. From the outset, the book’s atmosphere is one of foreboding, of an uneasy calm before the storm. Baldry Court, Chris’s stately house, so aloof from the common realm, is a mirror of Kitty, a woman of delicacy and refinement removed from the world and the war that had rocked it. The reader gradually learns that Margaret Grey, who inhabits a squalid redbrick row house, has received a letter from Chris in France instructing her to meet him on his return.

Kitty, on the other hand, receives no such message about her husband’s imminent return, hearing about it secondhand from Chris’s cousin and her friend, Jenny, the novel’s narrator. Not receiving a letter, combined with Kitty’s discovery that Chris has experienced a partial memory loss, causes her great psychological stress and pain. West first makes it appear inconceivable that Chris should have forgotten about his lovely, clever wife, recalling instead the time he spent with Margaret, a woman now faded and wrinkled by the passing years.

Margaret, an uncomplicated person, has lived her simple, quiet, almost saintly existence as the wife of an older, failed man. Yet despite her husband’s failure in life and the shabby existence his meager income allowed, Margaret has cheerfully, resolutely stayed with him and has given him comfort when it was she who most needed comforting. In spite of her lowly social status and her wrinkled features, Margaret possesses an inner illumination emanating from a love and concern for those with whom she comes in contact. Her inner beauty diminishes Kitty’s outward beauty, making it appear brittle and lifeless. Her love for Chris is a powerful mixture of emotional and spiritual feelings with a strong sexual undergirding.

Kitty, hearing of the letter sent to Margaret, must know more about her. Thus, it is narrator Jenny’s duty to learn all she can about this rival from Chris’s past. As more details about Chris’s and Margaret’s relationship surface, it is increasingly obvious that Chris’s happiest days were spent on Monkey Island and that any memories of his life with Kitty have been lost for an apparent reason: that he wished to void them and recall happier days. It would seem that those years spent with Kitty were so unimportant as to be negligible, and if they are lost, then perhaps it is for a good reason.

Yet Kitty loves her husband, and her memories of their life together are essentially happy and worth remembering. She cannot comprehend how the events she cherishes in her memory can appear to him never to have occurred, nor can she understand how she could have been left so devastatingly alone. Margaret Grey, to be sure, is an ultimate mystery to Kitty, who wonders how one so pedestrian and even drab could be so important in Chris’s eyes.

The first climax of the novel occurs when Margaret meets the returned soldier. Their love for each other has not, as Kitty and even Jenny hoped, dimmed at this reunion. Rather, it is an intensified love, each one finding in the other the acceptance and love not afforded them by other people in their lives. It is a bitter lesson for Kitty, who learns that her hopes for a new life together with her returned soldier will never be realized and that Chris will forever be a stranger to her, no matter how he otherwise might attempt to present himself to her.

The second climax comes when Margaret, out of love for Chris, tries to jar him out of his amnesia by telling him about the child he and Kitty once had who died from an illness years before. By telling Chris about his lost boy, Margaret succeeds in bringing him back to the reality of his marriage to Kitty. The memory of his son’s life and tragic end allows him to be himself. Margaret, by informing him about the boy, reveals a saintly nature unselfish in the extreme, for by bringing him back to Kitty, she loses the one resplendent love she has ever known. The poignant last scene portrays Chris after he has been told about the child’s death, foregoing his happy, casual, youthful walk for the burdened, stiff walk of a middle-aged soldier.

The Characters

It is difficult to discover which character is most central to the action of The Return of the Soldier, for each has a pivotal role to play. Yet without Chris Baldry, the plot would collapse, for he binds together the unlikely rivals for his love, Kitty and Margaret.

Chris is, at first, unreal, for the reader hears of him only through others who have known him, principally the narrator, Jenny, and wife Kitty. From them, we see him as a war casualty, a walking emblem of war’s cruelty and capriciousness. Wars not only maim and kill the physical body but also affect the mind and spirit.

Set against the blasphemous horror of war are Margaret’s and Kitty’s recollections of an earlier, more peaceful time. Chris figures as a man of feeling and intellect, capable of passion and love, a gentle man who delights in making others happy and fulfilled. At the same time, he is a dreamer conjuring the ideal world.

At the center of his ideal world is Margaret Grey, a charming, loving adolescent girl later to be transformed into a seamed woman of middle years. As a girl, she fell in love with Chris’s ability to dream and hope and from him learned to do the same. Though her dreams have come to nothing and despite the fact that she is constrained by circumstance to live a rather drab life, she delights in what life affords her. Her understanding of people is at once intuitive and accurate, and she finds that the quiet life allows her to concentrate on what is essential.

Kitty, who in many ways is Margaret’s opposite, also is a sympathetic character. Her tragedy, however, is that she does not possess Margaret’s earthiness or her saintliness. Kitty’s outlook is that of a conventional young woman of high social station: She thinks in terms of money and ceremony. Her education comes when she is confronted by real evidence that her husband shares neither her conventional beliefs nor her rigid sense of what is right and wrong. Thus, she finds herself married to a stranger who finds inner beauty more alluring than outward show, and originality preferable to conventionality. Kitty’s shallowness does not extend to her love for Chris, which is genuine and deep-rooted. Her discovery of Chris’s innocent infidelity inflicts on her the most intense pain she has ever endured.

Jenny, who analyzes the actions and reactions of the other characters, is an intelligent, forceful person whose outlook could be best described as a combination of Chris’s and Kitty’s. She leans more toward Kitty, however, for, like her, Jenny is a product of the same orderly, circumscribed, and worldly social class. Yet her ability to comprehend fully and sympathize completely with Kitty’s plight hinges upon her talent for being objective. She is able to perceive the tragic set of circumstances in which Kitty finds herself enmeshed as something beyond Kitty’s control, and she deeply regrets being unable to alter those circumstances. She feels deeply about Kitty’s plight and cannot bring herself to judge her actions. Jenny is also able to understand accurately why Chris and Margaret act as they do. Like Kitty, they are seen by Jenny as caught in tragic circumstances not of their own making, which inevitably must bring them to a clearer understanding of themselves and each other.

Jenny records the human worth of each individual while at the same time noting their inner blindness and desperation. As a result of her objectivity, each reader is left to his own conclusions about the story’s ending.

Critical Context

The Return of the Soldier was Rebecca West’s second published work, her first having been a study of fellow writer, Henry James (Henry James, 1916). As her first novel, the book is a straightforward, unadorned account of shell shock and its effect on a central character and on those with whom he comes in contact. As a memorable depiction of war and its effects upon Western civilization, it is important, but as a psychological study of two very different types of women, one asexual and shallow, the other earthy and profound, it is a splendid contribution to British fiction. The novel not only drew favorable critical attention to Rebecca West and thus began her successful writing career but also allowed her to develop themes which would recur throughout her subsequent writing.

The theme of a character’s struggle between his inner magical realm and his somber, problematic outer reality so evident in The Return of the Soldier was expanded upon in two of West’s later works, The Judge (1922), and The Thinking Reed (1936). In these two novels, female protagonists, spiritual counterparts to Chris Baldry, have to abandon long cherished ideas about the ideal life and embrace the often cruel and puzzling real world of everyday experience. West’s characters are often hemmed in by their circumstances and environment. Yet if they can come to some sort of acceptance of the way things actually are, there is a measure of hope for them.

It is West’s ability to portray ordinary people and their intense unhappiness that makes The Return of the Soldier such a fascinating study in human nature. As West often emphasizes in her critical writing, what is important for her is to deal with ordinary people (such as Kitty Baldry, Chris Baldry, and Margaret Grey), whom the novelists of the nineteenth century avoided portraying. She delights in what she terms a synthesizing of their experiences which leads to a desire on the reader’s part for more such experience, even if the experience depicted is unpleasant. The Return of the Soldier is her first attempt at synthesizing ordinary persons’ experiences to give readers an intense awareness of their spiritual struggles. This novel is also her first lengthy study of women. Noted by critics as a feminist writer, West creates many variants upon her original masterpiece, Margaret Grey, in later novels. Strong, patient, enduring people, well able to deal effectively with an often somber reality, West’s women often have a courage and strength lacking in the males they encounter.

Bibliography

Deakin, Motley F. Rebecca West, 1980.

Orel, Harold. The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West, 1986.

Redd, Tony. Rebecca West: Master of Reality, 1972.

Wolfe, Peter. Rebecca West: Artist and Thinker, 1971.