Un mondo do oggetti: "The Return of the Soldier" di Rebecca West

In the last three decades, a new interest in “Things” has risen in the academic discourse and a new field of Objects Studies in the humanities has opened up. The secret histories of things, the social lives of things, the sense of things have all been investigated in relation to literature, in its connection with material culture and from different disciplinary perspectives. Although it is the nineteenth-century realistic novel to which this critical approach is more successfully applied, also Modernist texts, with the coeval established concepts of commodity and fetish, lend themselves to this kind of reading, as in the case of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier. This novel, whose plot unfolds around three women characters, is inscribed in the opposition presence/absence: the presence of objects (furnishings, clothes, toys) and the absence of people (Chris, the soldier who comes back from the front after having lost his memory, and his son Oliver, who has died in infancy). The centrality of objects in the novel is marked by the recurrence of the term “thing” as well as by the use of description, the relationships each character establishes with certain objects, and the emphasis on the sense of touch. Two other novels by West, Harriet Hume and Sunflower, are also briefly examined in order to demonstrate this author’s focus on things in narrative