ABSTRACT
Between 1920 and 1922, May Sinclair wrote two novels on the Great War: The Romantic (1920) and Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922).1 Each of these novels features characters facing psychological trauma directly related to their war experience. In The Romantic, John Roden Conway joins an ambulance corps with his platonic love interest, Charlotte Redhead, in the days immediately following Germany’s invasion of Belgium. Conway’s motivations for joining up are suspicious. He thrills at the adventure and violence that the war promises, but he quickly breaks down and is labeled a coward; however, his breakdown seems more characteristic of shell shock as it was defined by many medical authorities during the war. John only lasts two and a half weeks, when he is shot in the back by the servant of a wounded soldier he abandons. In Anne Severn and the Fieldings, Colin Fielding is hospitalized on several occasions after suffering repeated breakdowns early in the war and must return home to be cared for by Anne (his adopted sister) and his mother after hospital treatment proves unsuccessful. His convalescence lasts for several years before he suddenly finds himself cured during a solo trip to Italy. Not only do Conway and Colin suffer breakdowns, but both are also described by doctors in their respective novels as having pre-existing conditions that made their breakdowns inevitable. Despite the similarities between these characters’ traumatic responses to the war, Conway is labeled a coward and degenerate by his doctor, while Colin is diagnosed with shell shock. Sinclair’s fictional depictions thus blur the distinction between shell shock and cowardice in a way that echoes conclusions drawn by the 1922 Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock”, a public document created by the War Office and Parliament to address the problems associated with traumatized veterans in postwar England. The report concludes that both cowardice and shell shock are caused by pre-existing, congenital defects of the nerves that should
exclude some men from combat. Though Sinclair embraced the emerging field of psychology, and its sympathetic explanations for the traumatic breakdowns suffered by soldiers, she also remains tied to moralistic Victorian notions of honor, duty, and cowardice that render her fictional treatments of such breakdowns problematic and ambivalent. This ambivalence she expresses through the characters of John Conway and Colin Fielding is aligned with the political, medical, and popular debates over the distinction between shell shock and cowardice, as reflected in the War Office report.
