ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

coinciding roughly with the splitting of Alick’s self following his conflict with
Richard two weeks before the war. The war remains in the background until the end
of the novel, when Frobisher reports for duty and receives a medical exam. However,
it is easy to read Alick’s story as an allegory for the West, and, given Heppenstall’s
interest in national identity as expressed most acutely in The Fourfold Tradition,
Britain in particular over the same period of time. During the first half of the book,
Frobisher dithers as Neville Chamberlain continues the policy of appeasement
through most of 1938 and 1939. There is internal squabbling in the run-up to the war,
the declaration of war revealing, as does Frobisher’s vision of himself, a crack that
had already existed. (Here we might compare Maggie’s realization in the middle of
The Golden Bowl—or the cracking of the bowl itself.) There is, near the beginning of
the war, still false hope that things may return to the way they were. But soon it
becomes clear that this war is something different—and Frobisher dies. His rebirth is
constituted gradually over the final three chapters of the novel, with a rededication on
Frobisher’s part to family and nation. The final chapter, however, ends on a note
which suggests that, in some sense at least, everything will remain the same: the
military is a ridiculous bureaucracy, from which Frobisher maintains an ironic
distance which is continued in the novel’s sequel, The Lesser Infortune. This
undercutting of Frobisher’s transformation is typical of the skepticism of modernism,
leaving Frobisher-reborn a similarly ambiguous figure as Mr. Ramsay at the end of
To the Lighthouse. In both cases, we are left with an individual male survivor as a
stand-in for the uncertain transformation of Britain and Europe in the face of
unprecedented war. Even these endings leave their characters and societies in the
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