The years between 1901 and 1939 are known as the Modernist Period, which came after the death of Queen Victoria at the end of the Victorian Period. Britain underwent a transformation that included the start of the first world war. At the beginning of the war, British society had a narrative of war being a glorious and patriotic endeavor and the soldiers were the first ones to be disillusioned. The war gave Modern literature its themes of war, death, and reality. It birthed the idea to resist social values and traditions through the telling of the personal traumas of returning soldiers.
Modernism, for some, was the “experience of loss” (Eastern Connecticut State University). Soldiers expressed their experiences through war poetry. They wanted to communicate with the public that the general perspective of war did not coincide with their personal experience. The belief that it was good to die for one’s country was an ultimate lie just as death was the ultimate reality.
Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway are two examples of war novels that portrayed this defining idea of the modernist era. The last date the West’s character Chris remembers is 1901, a time before modernism and the pursuit of reality began. His amnesia is a result of his repressing memories of a painful reality and his desire to return to a simpler part of his life. His last memory is of Monkey Island which can be interpreted as a metaphorical fantasy. Chris is cured when he is reminded of the death of his three-year-old son Oliver.
Woolf’s novel also tells the story of a shell-shocked soldier named Septimus returning from war. He is a parallel character of the heroine Clarissa Dalloway. They are connected but never meet in the novel. Throughout the novel, Septimus desperately attempts to communicate his experiences but fails to be understood by his wife and his doctors. When the latter seeks to take him away, Septimus jumps to his death as a desperate attempt to give one last message. When Clarissa hears of his suicide, she feels alive. She has fulfilled her suicidal urges vicariously through him. “Death was an attempt to communicate…There was an embrace in death. But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding his treasure” (West 184)? Both West and Woolf use death as an awakening for their characters. Behind the propaganda and the pretty portrait of British society, death was the ultimate reality.
Home is a well-bred lady, her hair is a radiant sun,
And her eyes are a glorious tinsel.
She sends you off with a flying handkerchief,
To dry your blood-stained coat, and send you off
Again, to the rails, the steel road to a second death.
Death is a one-inch copper bullet, Sailing in a ripple of air,
Your mind is a mirror of cracks, While your comrades shatter.
You open your mouth to cry, but she presses your lips
And says, “We do not want your words, only your breath.”
-A.C.
making it new. 