Witnessing, modernism, failure: Constructions of cowardice in First World War novels by Sinclair, West, and Woolf

This thesis explores how May Sinclair's The Tree of Heaven (1917), Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) depict female witnesses to male First World War behaviours, particularly "funk" and "shell shock," that were constructed as cowardice. An individual's traumatic experience of fear perceived to be cowardice also includes the shame of cultural condemnation; moreover, because it turns on an accusation of failed masculinity, cowardice also destabilizes the male subject upon whom the social order is founded. Within these novels, then, cowardice functions as a locus for early-twentieth-century British culture's broader anxieties about shifting social structures, especially gender norms and related understandings of subjectivity. Witnessing has the potential to heal trauma by rebuilding subjectivity, but in each of these modernist novels, witnessing fails. Sinclair's propagandist form of witnessing supports normative gender roles and glorifies war; West, by contrast, criticizes the social structures that privilege normative behaviour over individual fulfillment; and Woolf shows witnessing and healing to be impossible within a postwar culture characterized by hierarchal subject relations. Read alongside psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and a model of transformative witnessing, Sinclair's, West's, and Woolf's constructions of cowardice can be seen to demonstrate a particularly modernist witnessing dynamic. All three novels employ modernist techniques to represent male trauma and female response, and all three portray failed witnessing as capitulation to British First World War cultural norms. Such failed witnessing, I argue, is part of the novels' modernist portrayal of cultural change: the pattern of female witnesses to male cowardice maps complex interconnections between the First World War and modernist literary innovation.