The interior domestic landscapes occupied by the novel's three women—Kitty, Margaret, and Jenny—are a motif developing the theme of social class, beauty, and humanity.
Kitty and Jenny live in Baldry Court, a large estate that boasts classic foundations and stylish decor chosen during Kitty's extensive renovations. Jenny luxuriates in lush descriptions of the house's beauty:
I could send my mind creeping from room to room like a purring cat, rubbing itself against all the brittle beautiful things [...] basking in the colour that glowed from all our solemnly chosen fabrics with such pure intensity that it seemed to shed warmth like sunshine. Even now, when spending seemed a little disgraceful, I could think of that beauty with nothing but pride.
In this passage, Jenny expresses the sensual pleasure of living in a luxurious house by comparing herself to a cat "rubbing itself" against beautiful pieces of furniture. The allusion to the "solemnly chosen fabrics" conveys that Kitty's entire purpose in life, as a married upper-class woman, is the upkeep of this house; even Jenny, a far keener social observer, finds fulfillment in creating a comforting domestic environment for Chris. This fulfillment allows her to regard beauty not as an aesthetic quality but a moral good and to take pride in the house "when spending seemed a little disgraceful"—in other words, in a time of war when austerity was the norm for much of the country.
By contrast, Margaret lives in an ugly suburban house with a cramped yard and uncomfortable furniture. Jenny's first description of that house radiates repulsion:
I turned my eyes away from her, because she was sitting on a sofa, upholstered in velveteen of a sickish green, which was so low that her knees stuck up in front of her and she had to clasp them with her seamed floury hands [...]
While the furniture at Baldry Court is perfectly suited to the needs of its inhabitants, Margaret has contorted herself to sit on a low, unfashionable couch. Even her posture indicates her poverty. The fact that she holds her "seamed floury hands" away from the couch indicates that she has to do her own cooking. But this scene doesn't just indicate Margaret's low socioeconomic status; it also hints at a big problem with Jenny's conception of beauty. While her emphasis on creating a warm and welcoming home initially seems harmless, her obsession with beauty quite literally prevents her from looking at Margaret here. This passage shows that Jenny's concern for superficial beauty, which is inevitably the product of wealth, causes her to look down on those who lack it, considering them not just poorer than her but less morally worthy.
However, Margaret's goodness turns out to be closely linked to her humble circumstances; her unprepossessing house and appearance allow her inner beauty to shine through. When Jenny compares Margaret's appearance to that of a saint, as she does repeatedly through the novel, it's generally because of the stark contrast between Margaret's essential goodness and her squalid physical surroundings. By contrast, the expensive material reality of Baldry Court seems to preclude relationships like the one Chris shares with Margaret. While Jenny aspires to provide Chris with a comfortable domestic life, the familial atmosphere among the Baldrys grows more and more strained over the course of the novel; Chris and Margaret always meet on the grounds, never spending time inside together.
The impossibility of close relationships within Baldry Court ultimately causes Jenny to regret her dependence on beautiful interiors. By the novel's end, she describes the house bleakly as "a vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe," as its beautiful rooms have become sites of confinement and alienation, whereas Margaret's humbler home is a space of authenticity and connection.
In The Return of the Soldier, light and darkness are a motif highlighting the contrast between Margaret's goodness and Kitty's superficial narcissism. Authors have long used light to connote virtue or righteousness, while darkness is more often associated with evil. Superficially, the novel appears to adhere to this pattern, conveying Kitty's beauty through light and Margaret's poverty through darkness. In describing Kitty, Jenny focuses on her white clothes, sparkling jewels, and bright hair: on the first night of Chris's return, as Kitty waits for him before a blazing fire, Jenny remarks that "the falling candlelight struck her hair to bright, pure gold." By contrast, Margaret has dark hair and wears gray, dingy clothes; when Jenny visits her home, she notices an absence of natural light, a quality that emphasizes Margaret's downtrodden circumstances.
However, West soon inverts the moral connotations of darkness and light. In both Chris and Margaret's reminiscences, their most romantic and important encounters take place during twilight. To the lovers, the absence of light comes to represent the purity of their love. As Chris puts it:
That he loved her, in this twilight which obscured all the physical details which he adored, seemed to him a guarantee that theirs was a changeless love
In this passage, darkness is not an ominous force but a quality assuring Chris that his love for Margaret goes beyond superficial appreciation of her youth and beauty. His conviction proves correct: when he encounters Margaret in the present, her lost beauty is irrelevant to him. In the present, Chris and Margaret likewise meet at dusk; during one such meeting, Jenny finds the two lying on a blanket in a pose of such intimacy that she becomes "physically" jealous. In the present as well as the past, darkness and twilight represent the authentic love that Jenny never gets to experience herself.
By contrast, light comes to symbolize the emotionally empty nature of life at Baldry Court. Because of Kitty's expensive renovations, the house is newly electrified, and lightbulbs and roaring fires light up its rooms. While Jenny touts electric light as a modern advancement, she also expresses nostalgia for the bygone practice of eating dinner by candlelight, a ritual she associates with a level of familial harmony that is absent in the present. Instead of facilitating intimate family gatherings, Kitty's brightly lit parlor is the setting of painful arguments between her and Chris, as well as the setting for the visit from the psychiatrist that catalyzes Chris's "cure" and ends his relationship with Margaret. Within the well-lit house, Chris and Margaret are unable to express themselves or behave naturally. Jenny even notices that when Chris takes walks after dark, he carefully avoids stepping into the beams of light emanating from the windows. Far from being a force for good, light emphasizes the emotional falsity and isolation inherent to the upper-class British lifestyle Kitty is desperate to maintain.
In a climactic comparison of Kitty and Margaret, Jenny says that Kitty's face is like "a polished surface that reflected light," while comparing Margaret's to "a lamp grimed by the smoke of careless use but still giving out radiance from its burning oil." Here, Kitty and Margaret are still associated with light and darkness, respectively. But Kitty's sparkling surface has emerged as the physical manifestation of her inner emptiness. Just as a mirror reflects light rather than producing it, Kitty impersonates the role of a loving wife rather than inhabiting it. Meanwhile, Margaret's outer ugliness ultimately serves to emphasize her inner "radiance." By reversing the traditional significance of light and dark, West draws a powerful contrast between two women and their very different ways of life.
The interior domestic landscapes occupied by the novel's three women—Kitty, Margaret, and Jenny—are a motif developing the theme of social class, beauty, and humanity.
Kitty and Jenny live in Baldry Court, a large estate that boasts classic foundations and stylish decor chosen during Kitty's extensive renovations. Jenny luxuriates in lush descriptions of the house's beauty:
I could send my mind creeping from room to room like a purring cat, rubbing itself against all the brittle beautiful things [...] basking in the colour that glowed from all our solemnly chosen fabrics with such pure intensity that it seemed to shed warmth like sunshine. Even now, when spending seemed a little disgraceful, I could think of that beauty with nothing but pride.
In this passage, Jenny expresses the sensual pleasure of living in a luxurious house by comparing herself to a cat "rubbing itself" against beautiful pieces of furniture. The allusion to the "solemnly chosen fabrics" conveys that Kitty's entire purpose in life, as a married upper-class woman, is the upkeep of this house; even Jenny, a far keener social observer, finds fulfillment in creating a comforting domestic environment for Chris. This fulfillment allows her to regard beauty not as an aesthetic quality but a moral good and to take pride in the house "when spending seemed a little disgraceful"—in other words, in a time of war when austerity was the norm for much of the country.
By contrast, Margaret lives in an ugly suburban house with a cramped yard and uncomfortable furniture. Jenny's first description of that house radiates repulsion:
I turned my eyes away from her, because she was sitting on a sofa, upholstered in velveteen of a sickish green, which was so low that her knees stuck up in front of her and she had to clasp them with her seamed floury hands [...]
While the furniture at Baldry Court is perfectly suited to the needs of its inhabitants, Margaret has contorted herself to sit on a low, unfashionable couch. Even her posture indicates her poverty. The fact that she holds her "seamed floury hands" away from the couch indicates that she has to do her own cooking. But this scene doesn't just indicate Margaret's low socioeconomic status; it also hints at a big problem with Jenny's conception of beauty. While her emphasis on creating a warm and welcoming home initially seems harmless, her obsession with beauty quite literally prevents her from looking at Margaret here. This passage shows that Jenny's concern for superficial beauty, which is inevitably the product of wealth, causes her to look down on those who lack it, considering them not just poorer than her but less morally worthy.
However, Margaret's goodness turns out to be closely linked to her humble circumstances; her unprepossessing house and appearance allow her inner beauty to shine through. When Jenny compares Margaret's appearance to that of a saint, as she does repeatedly through the novel, it's generally because of the stark contrast between Margaret's essential goodness and her squalid physical surroundings. By contrast, the expensive material reality of Baldry Court seems to preclude relationships like the one Chris shares with Margaret. While Jenny aspires to provide Chris with a comfortable domestic life, the familial atmosphere among the Baldrys grows more and more strained over the course of the novel; Chris and Margaret always meet on the grounds, never spending time inside together.
The impossibility of close relationships within Baldry Court ultimately causes Jenny to regret her dependence on beautiful interiors. By the novel's end, she describes the house bleakly as "a vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe," as its beautiful rooms have become sites of confinement and alienation, whereas Margaret's humbler home is a space of authenticity and connection.
Over the course of The Return of the Soldier, Jenny repeatedly describes Margaret as a saint, metaphorically comparing her appearance to that of important religious figures as depicted in great works of art. When Jenny first visits Margaret in her home, she remarks that:
You know how the saints and the prophets are depicted in the steel engravings in old Bibles [...] she was really like that. She had responded to my irrelevant murmur of adoration by just such a solemn and beatified appearance as I had imagined.
Up until this point, Jenny has behaved condescendingly toward Margaret and privately deplored the shabbiness of her home, husband, and personal appearance. But all of this changes when Jenny reveals that Kitty wants Margaret to meet with Chris. Misunderstanding Kitty's cynical motivations, Margaret says that Kitty "must have a lovely nature," and her mistaken belief in Kitty's selflessness causes her face to take on a "beatified" (or saintly) appearance and inspires Jenny's metaphor. By linking Margaret to the "saints" and "prophets" who are depicted in art as impassively beautiful, Jenny implicitly argues that even though Margaret lacks the superficial beauty that Kitty possesses in abundance, her innate goodness imbues her with an otherworldly appearance that distinguishes her from other women in the novel. (Notably, Jenny says that Margaret's appearance in this moment makes Kitty seem "faceless" by comparison.)
Since Jenny goes on to make similar comparisons in the rest of the novel, the metaphor of Margaret's saintliness becomes a motif. When Jenny shows Margaret the nursery where Chris's dead son, Oliver, once lived, she compares her explicitly to the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ in Christian theology. Describing how the Virgin Mary is portrayed in art as powerful and life-giving, Jenny compares Margaret to paintings of the saint:
“Let there be life,” their suspended bodies seem to cry out to the universe about them, and the very clouds under their feet change to cherubim. As Margaret stood there, her hands pressed palm to palm beneath her chin, and a blind smile on her face, she looked even so.
Even though Margaret is a visitor in Baldry Court, looking at baby clothes and furniture she could never have afforded for her own child, her saintly appearance imbues her with a spiritual beauty that outstrips the house's grandeur. It's notable that Jenny compares Margaret to the Virgin Mary—a woman who famously conceived a child without having sex—even though Margaret is far more sexually developed and transgressive than the novel's other women. During Dr. Anderson's visit, Margaret implicitly admits to having extramarital sex with Chris, and the romantic encounters that Jenny observes between them are so intense that she can hardly bear to describe them. By contrast, Jenny frequently describes Kitty as bride-like or "virginal," emphasizing her adherence to social expectation's of women's sexual purity. The fact that Margaret is frequently associated with saints suggests that spiritual elevation does not come from adhering to those expectations but by pursuing authentic relationships, even those deemed unacceptable by others. While Kitty's virginal appearance contributes to the novel's characterization of her as cold and unloving, Margaret's saintly aura is the direct result of both her goodness and her willingness to violate social norms for love.
Over the course of The Return of the Soldier, Jenny repeatedly describes Margaret as a saint, metaphorically comparing her appearance to that of important religious figures as depicted in great works of art. When Jenny first visits Margaret in her home, she remarks that:
You know how the saints and the prophets are depicted in the steel engravings in old Bibles [...] she was really like that. She had responded to my irrelevant murmur of adoration by just such a solemn and beatified appearance as I had imagined.
Up until this point, Jenny has behaved condescendingly toward Margaret and privately deplored the shabbiness of her home, husband, and personal appearance. But all of this changes when Jenny reveals that Kitty wants Margaret to meet with Chris. Misunderstanding Kitty's cynical motivations, Margaret says that Kitty "must have a lovely nature," and her mistaken belief in Kitty's selflessness causes her face to take on a "beatified" (or saintly) appearance and inspires Jenny's metaphor. By linking Margaret to the "saints" and "prophets" who are depicted in art as impassively beautiful, Jenny implicitly argues that even though Margaret lacks the superficial beauty that Kitty possesses in abundance, her innate goodness imbues her with an otherworldly appearance that distinguishes her from other women in the novel. (Notably, Jenny says that Margaret's appearance in this moment makes Kitty seem "faceless" by comparison.)
Since Jenny goes on to make similar comparisons in the rest of the novel, the metaphor of Margaret's saintliness becomes a motif. When Jenny shows Margaret the nursery where Chris's dead son, Oliver, once lived, she compares her explicitly to the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ in Christian theology. Describing how the Virgin Mary is portrayed in art as powerful and life-giving, Jenny compares Margaret to paintings of the saint:
“Let there be life,” their suspended bodies seem to cry out to the universe about them, and the very clouds under their feet change to cherubim. As Margaret stood there, her hands pressed palm to palm beneath her chin, and a blind smile on her face, she looked even so.
Even though Margaret is a visitor in Baldry Court, looking at baby clothes and furniture she could never have afforded for her own child, her saintly appearance imbues her with a spiritual beauty that outstrips the house's grandeur. It's notable that Jenny compares Margaret to the Virgin Mary—a woman who famously conceived a child without having sex—even though Margaret is far more sexually developed and transgressive than the novel's other women. During Dr. Anderson's visit, Margaret implicitly admits to having extramarital sex with Chris, and the romantic encounters that Jenny observes between them are so intense that she can hardly bear to describe them. By contrast, Jenny frequently describes Kitty as bride-like or "virginal," emphasizing her adherence to social expectation's of women's sexual purity. The fact that Margaret is frequently associated with saints suggests that spiritual elevation does not come from adhering to those expectations but by pursuing authentic relationships, even those deemed unacceptable by others. While Kitty's virginal appearance contributes to the novel's characterization of her as cold and unloving, Margaret's saintly aura is the direct result of both her goodness and her willingness to violate social norms for love.
