Towards an Ethics of Witnessing: Traumatic Testimony in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier

I argue that Rebecca West’s wartime novel The Return of the Soldier (1918) elaborates an ethics of witnessing occluded historical pasts. Its staging of testimony as an intertextual and allegorical discourse challenges a dominant critical paradigm of modernity which posits the Edwardian era and the Great War as traumatic ruptures in the continuity, stability, and stasis of an earlier period in British history. Although the novel appears to repeat this paradigm by plotting trauma as a soldier’s war illness that results in amnesia and mourning of a lost, apparently idyllic Victorian past, the rhetoric of witnessing troubles this narrative of loss. By invoking other literary representations of memory, testimony reveals how this nostalgic narrative obscures colonial trauma and socio-political and economic inequities of gendering that shaped the Victorian era. I conclude that attending to testimony enables a precarious reconstruction of the age of empire from marginal perspectives enfolded in the novel.