Rebecca West's ‘Seamed Red Hand’

The political commitments of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918) have proven hard to define. More subdued in its tone and telos than her volleys against patriarchal capitalism in publications such as The Freewoman and The Clarion, some argue that Return undermines West's socialist-feminist pronouncements, while others contend that the novel engages subtler modes of critique. Deepening and extending the latter vein of scholarship, this essay reveals uncharted lines of connection between West's early fiction and nonfiction by performing a ‘palm reading’ of Return: an examination of the work of hands in the text – particularly Margaret's ‘seamed red hand’, which ties her to the women workers West extols in her ‘Hands That War’ article-series (1916). Although West's foreclosure of Margaret's disruptive potential at the end of Return might seem ideologically suspect, I argue that this manoeuvre, rather than betray quietism, indexes West's burgeoning recognition of the difficulty of achieving the kind of social change she called for in her nonfiction.