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8 December 2014

Kipling’s Women: A Literary Biography of the World War One Homefront

I. Introduction

There is a common and powerful quote often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway

(“Writing”). “There’s nothing to writing,” the quote goes, “All you do is sit down at a typewriter

and open a vein.” In the Twentieth Century, World War One shocked the conscious of Europe

unlike any event in hundreds of years. In the sanguinary conflict, myriad authors and poets

literally bled all over the battlefield. Wilfred Owen, whose “Dulce et Decorum Est” has quite

possibly become one of the most famous poetic examples of the embittered cynicism that the

average soldier was left with (“Twelve great”), died while leading him men across the Sambre

canal at Ors, one week before the war would end (“Wilfred Owen”). In a different mood, Rupert

Brooke captured the idealism about the war in poems like “The Soldier” (“Twelve great”), yet he

died of complications from a mosquito bite on 23 April 1915, so early into the war. Brooke and

Owen are but two examples in a long list of famous authors and poets who attempted to bring the

war home to British citizens, to explain their perspectives on the war and take part in the

narrative discussion about British involvement and the nature of war itself. Yet, as Lycett

effectively argues, “one name has been conspicuously absent” from the list of writers who are

being recalled on the centenary of Britain’s intervention in World War One. Rudyard Kipling, a

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man who was near fifty years old during the July Crisis of 1914 (Adams 9), was not a man who

would be found in the trenches of the Western Front, yet unlike any other writer of his period, he

brought the homefront home to Britons through his work before, during, and after the war.

Indeed, a perspective of the war from the battlefield is invaluable in academic discourse; one

should not seek to strip Owen, Sassoon, or Brooke of their honor in depicting the war from the

eyes of the soldier. But war is not experienced merely by men in boots with rifles in hand,

charging for glory and dying in ignominy and anonymity; this new, “World” war was

experienced more vividly by each family that sent a son, father, or husband, so many of whom

who would not return the same in mind or body, if at all. Therefore it is of vital importance that

Kipling’s role as the witness to the homefront is appreciated both by scholars and those families

who wait in anticipation for the return of their soldier. His success, like his work, is both

professional and personal, and how he metaphorically bled on his typewriter is a powerful

addition to both World War One and Kipling scholarship. In the women he created from his

imagination, Kipling paints the pictures of opinion, emotion, and perspective that were

immediately recognizable for Britons at home.

II. Kipling and Women: Much Ado About Something

So much of Kipling’s work is biographical. As Adams explains with Kipling’s earlier

work, “[He] was cruelly abandoned and abused as a child, but [would] create some of the most

enduring children’s characters ever written in Mowgli and Kim” (1). Three of his most famous

novels, The Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, and Kim, were released in 1894, 1895, and

1901 respectively, and they were formative in people’s opinions of him leading into the new

century. His ability to illustrate India in the minds of readers was of little disagreement. Yet

Kipling’s treatment of females in his fiction has been a subject of debate for over a hundred

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years. “‘I dream of doing novels with women in them, some fine day’, wrote Kipling in 1895,”

(Kemp 30) and his work started a dialogue about whether his characterizations of women were

accurate and appreciated. In response to a New York Times Saturday Review of Kipling’s

poetry, reader Arthur Stringer singled out Kipling’s portrayal of women in a starkly negative

tone:

We cannot help admiring Mr. Kipling’s aggressive masculinity. Our poetry needs

such rejuvenating virility. But aggressive masculinity should not mean strident

misogyny. All women are not like Mr. Kipling’s. In ‘The Ladies,’ ‘The Mary

Gloster,’ ‘The Sergeant’s Wedding,’ ‘McAndrew’s Hymn,’ in the ‘Barrack Room

Ballads,’ it is chiefly that side of woman which the swaggering and amorous-eyed

redcoat sees that is presented with unpleasing persistency (Stringer).

The sharply critical letter closes in an equally caustic note about Kipling’s potential

poetic influence on other men in society, stating “It is because the disillusioned debauché and the

overwise roué assume this same Kiplingesque attitude [about women] that it must be marked as

both regrettable and dangerous” (Stringer). While Stringer clearly pulled no punches on “the

man’s poet” in December 1898, three months later, a defense was made against what Lucy

Cantley called, “a slander on my sex”. Cantley responded to Stringer’s ruthlessness about

Kipling’s misogyny in an equally witty and wonderful way, declaring, “It is constantly said…

that ‘women do not like Kipling.’ Just leave out the ‘not,’ and the statement will be more

correct.” She details the review of a selection of Kipling’s poetry to a Women’s Literary Club,

which she says was received positively. She closes, in explanation to all readers of the Saturday

Review, that “of course, there are women who do not like Kipling, as there are men who do not

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like Shakespeare,” continuing to elucidate that appreciation of Kipling as simply a matter of

taste, not gender.

In the light of Kipling’s work beyond the end of the 19 th century, Sandra Kemp’s

excellent analysis of the complexity of Kipling’s characterizations actually points the reader and

critic towards his success in portraying women. The majority of Kemp’s paper argues that

Kipling’s portrayal of women in Debits and Credits (released in 1926) and Limits and Renewals

(released in 1932) “becomes one of his most powerful and subversive narrative devices” (30).

Kemp considers three later Kipling works: “The Wish House,” “A Madonna of the Trenches,”

and “The Gardener”, concluding that “Kipling’s search for such deeper understanding is a central

concern of his stories, but so too is his constant awareness of mysteries that cannot adequately be

explained, and experiences which cannot fully be understood” (36). Kipling is more than a

misogynist and less than a feminist. He merely seeks to find some truth in the human experience,

and as he balances the constant human worry of certainty with the powerful emotions found in

everyday life, “together they reflect the fundamental ambivalence or ‘two-sidedness’ evident

throughout Kipling’s writings” (Kemp 36).

Considering Kipling’s women are such a rich resource for studying human experience,

then there is true value to be mined in studying how Kipling portrays women throughout the First

World War and in its aftermath. There are four specific short stories which point towards a

universality of feeling in the homefront; two pairs which serve as bookends in experience during

the opening of World War One and in the aftermath of the fighting. “Swept and Garnished” was

published in January of 1915 and tells the story of the elderly German women Frau Ebermann

dealing with young British children (Radcliffe, “Swept”). The second early narrative involves

Mary Postgate, published in September 1915 (Radcliffe, “Mary Postgate”). The eponymous main

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character of the short story lets a German aviator die in agony rather than helping or shooting

him. In August 1924, Kipling published “A Madonna of the Trenches,” which deals with the

shellshock of Clem Strangwick, who recounts a mystical tale of death, love, and infidelity in the

trenches involving his late aunt (Lewis and Kieffer, “Madonna”). Finally, one of Kipling’s best

characterizations is that of Helen Turrell in “The Gardener”, released in April 1925 (Lewis,

“Gardener”). Whether Michael is her son continues to be up for debate, but her stoicism is an

example to all in the difficult times of life that war included. These four short stories together in

conjunction with biographical data from Kipling help to explain the man he was, the works he

wrote, and how he felt about the experience of the homefront.

III.Frau Ebermann - “Swept and Garnished” (January 1915)

“Swept and Garnished” is possibly the earliest Kipling short story that deals directly with

the consequences of the First World War. The main character is an older German woman, who

has taken sick and is resting in her Berlin flat (Kipling, “Swept”). Anna, her maid, is helping to

clean the place and make Frau Ebermann comfortable, yet a child appears in the room.

Ebermann yells at the child for her rudeness in intruding and insists the child leave. Anna is

called in the room and Frau Ebermann scolds Anna for leaving the door open though Anna

knows she kept it closed. This process repeats itself over again, and soon five children in the

room; a room which Frau Ebermann has tried to keep spotless and organized. She interrogates

the children about where they are from and why they are in the room, and they respond that

“there isn’t anything left,” and they have been told to wait for their people to come for them. The

children are from two villages Frau Ebermann knows from the papers the villages are places that

had been punished after firing on German troop advances. The children say there are many more

of them, and each is terribly injured. They leave with the polite French of “au revoir”, and the

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story closes with Anna walking in on Frau Ebermann frantically cleaning the floor of the blood

of five children.

What makes “Swept and Garnished” such a powerful story is what is not said in the story.

It seems even a tad bit mystical for a woman to be hallucinating about children who speak

French and randomly show up in Berlin. Of course the obvious answer is that these children are

dead as a result of the German policy of Schrecklichkeit, or frightfulness, where the people of

Belgium were to be punished if they resisted the German Army’s Schlieffen Plan to capture Paris

six weeks after mobilization (Radcliffe, “Swept”). Cursed, in a sense, with her support of

Germany and the happiness with which Frau Ebermann greeted Anna’s news of another victory,

these children are meant to rend the purity and order of Frau Ebermann’s Berlin flat. Throughout

the short story, the flat is described with everything clean and straight, as Frau Ebermann views

the state of her soul before the Lord. Twice in the Gospel the phrase “swept and garnished” is

used, and both refer to the same part of a story. Contextually in Matthew 12:43-45 and Luke

11:24-26, Jesus speaks of the a demon or unclean spirit that leaves a person, only to return with

greater power and numbers to ruin the life of the person who was once possessed. Thus is how

Frau Ebermann was treated. She believed she was not culpable for the German atrocities in

Belgium. Yet in Kipling’s story, he does hold her accountable for the sins of the army.

Consequently, when the children show up a second and third time, she too becomes possessed to

a greater and more wicked extent than she ever was before.

Kipling uses “Swept and Garnished” as a powerful story of propaganda. Bilsing explains,

“Kipling helped to create this ritualized response to the war through his pamphlet writing and

recruiting, and it is from this perspective of the jingoistic propagandist that he wrote ‘Swept and

Garnished’ and ‘Mary Postgate’” (80). While Mary Postgate is a British woman while Frau

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Ebermann is German, their two stories are alike in so many ways, and are worth further

examination together after explaining “Mary Postgate”.

IV. Mary Postgate - “Mary Postgate” (September 1915)

A raging and succinct short story, “Mary Postgate” is the culmination of Kipling’s and

Great Britain’s rage about the reported atrocities in Belgium by German troops (Radcliffe, “Mary

Postgate”). Published eight months after “Swept and Garnished,” “Mary Postgate” tells the story

of a middle-aged, middle class woman, Mary, who welcomes into her home Miss Fowler’s

orphaned nephew, Wynn (Kipling, “Mary Postgate”). Wynn later dies in a training accident with

the Flying Corps, and later a young girl is killed in a German bombing raid. Mary then finds a

German pilot who fell from his plane and will die without the medical attention for which he

pleads. However, Mary screams in German that she has seen the dead child, and takes pleasure

in the death and agony of “the thing beneath the oak” (Kipling, “Mary Postgate”, 248-249).

The similarities between “Mary Postgate” and “Swept and Garnished” are many in

structure and tone. Bilsing points out the nature of propaganda within the realm of the home

saying, “Kipling’s female protagonists are women who rely upon their own private propaganda

manifested in domestic ritual to assure themselves security in the face of chaos” (81). Further:

Kipling’s protagonists are “non-mothers,” but this non-mother characterization

works against them in their ritualized propaganda, and the fantasy of power that

emerges can be destructive. For instance, Frau Ebermann in “Swept and

Garnished” believes she has firm control not only over her own life and daily

ritual, but she also controls what information she accepts… Her detachment from

her motherly instincts makes the appearance of the ghost children in her flat all

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the more devastating to her because she tries, unsuccessfully, to fall back on the

ritual associated with mothers to try to get rid of the children (Bilsing 82-83).

Mary Postgate is in the same way a non-mother and strives to fulfill for Wynn where he

failed in the killing of any Germans. Bilsing specifically relates Mary’s eagerness to claim the

kill as part of a character created by Britain’s “zealous patriotism and deep grief” (83). In

allowing the German soldier to die, she in a sense avenges the death of Wynn (83). Bilsing also

expertly elucidates the role of setting in the two short stories, stating:

In these stories the setting helps to define the protagonists, and it also allows these

women to experience an “intellectual” war of the kind that Kipling was waging at

home. Both were written in the aftermath of the reports on German atrocities, and

the domestic space of Frau Ebermann’s flat delineates her unsympathetic

character…. In contrast to the Frau’s home is Mary Postgate’s conservative

British domestic space. She, too, is the mother figure at home, yet she is as active

as the Frau is complacent…. As soon as Kipling sets up the domestic space of

these two protagonists as places of safety however, the war intrudes, politicizing

the private space of the homefront, suggesting that the war is inescapable, and that

the responsibility of winning belongs not only to the soldier on the front, but also

to the “guardian” of the home (84-85).

It is Bilsing’s last point about the inescapability of the First World War that is most

valuable for the overall discourse here. The heroines of Kipling are part of the propaganda and

part of the war, even if they are not on the front line in the trenches with the soldiers. It is quite

possible that this is much in the same way Kipling saw himself. Supporting the war effort with

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effective propaganda could be as much Rudyard Kipling’s duty as much as it was John Kipling’s

duty to go fight in the Irish Guards.

V. Aunt Armine – “A Madonna of the Trenches” (August 1924)

Part of a series of other short stories taking place at a Freemason’s lodge, “A Madonna of

the Trenches” tells the story of a soldier dealing with shellshock, leaving the unreliable narrator

to recount a mysterious appearance at the front and the suicide of his comrade (Lewis and

Kieffer, “Madonna”). This short story actually lacks a female protagonist. The main character,

Clem Stanswicke, works through the telling of the story that led him to suffer the trauma, and

tells the gentlemen and doctors at the lodge that it wasn’t explosives or massive death that

shocked him; it was the appearance of “the Madonna”, his Aunt Armine, and the suicide of John

Godsoe (Fischer 265). Norman Fischer explains the story as part of “Overcoming Existential

Angst through Empathy,” and says of the story, “Because of the indirect way the story is told

everything is shrouded in the transcendental apparatus of the vision of the resurrection of the

Madonna and John’s suicide aiming for a similar resurrection and reunion with her” (265). In the

story, Clem explains that his Aunt Armine had been carrying out a long-time affair with Sergeant

Godsoe (Kipling, “Madonna,” 300-301), and thus when Aunt Armine died, Godsoe hoped to join

her and spend eternity with her. In the words of Fischer, “[The story] thus reaches the outer

limits possible for an expression of a transcendental, supernatural, or religious ideal entity or

being that brings empathy and mercy to the suffering” (265). In the sense of Kipling and the

World War One homefront, “A Madonna of the Trenches” can be seen as a creative outgrowth in

a man who hopes to one day be reunited with a son whose remains he never found, a feeling

which was common during this war unlike many before it.

VI. Helen Turrell - “The Gardener” (April 1925)

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One of the more misunderstood short stories in Kipling’s list of works, “The Gardener”

in fact tells the story of the bond created between an aunt and her nephew, and the grief which

drives her to attempt to resolve her relationship with him after death. Due to an optimistic and

naïve misinterpretation of “The Gardener”, many critics have argued incorrectly that Michael is

in fact the son of Helen, but when honestly and openly considering the textual evidence as well

as the biographical evidence in Kipling, the simple truth is borne out: Michael Turrell is merely

Helen’s nephew, and the story’s end is both sad and ironic, not redemptive. Helen raises Michael

after adopting him from her brother, and as they grow together in life, they bond like a mother

and son would, if only for the mere fact that Michael is illegitimate. Michael eventually goes to

the front lines of World War One, is killed, and his body is never recovered (Lewis “Gardener”).

Helen goes to France in search of her nephew’s grave, and after meeting the mendacious Mrs.

Scarsworth, finds her nephew with the help of a gardener who says, “Come with me, and I will

show you where your son lies” (Kipling, “Gardener”, 412). Many critics have taken this closing

line to mean that Michael is actually Helen’s son and Helen is now redeemed of the sin which

she held on to and lied about for so long.

However Dillingham addresses many of these critics, amongst other issues with the

former conclusion saying, “Generally ignored is the blatant inconsistency of characterization

inhere in this assumption, for it seems inconsistent that Helen Turrell, one of Kipling’s most

admired heroines, would make up an elaborate and atrocious lie about a brother of whom she

was admittedly fond” (Lewis, “Gardener”). Dillingham explains the true nature of the story,

which fits the broader feeling of Kipling’s own life and his dealing with the Imperial War Graves

Commission and his search for John Kipling’s remains:

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[“The Gardener” is] primarily a story not about the hidden suffering and guilt of an unwed

mother before her son’s death and her sudden revelation, consolation and redemption after it but

is a study of the excruciating and prolonged pain of bereavement… In order to depict the depth

of her grief, Kipling had first to show the depth of her love, for the one spawns the other. In

every sense but the biological, as these first sections make clear, Michael is Helen’s son. Thus

the gardener’s calling him that rings true in one sense if not in another. Michael’s death could not

have hurt Helen more had she been his actual mother (Lewis, “Gardener”).

Therefore from this context it is immediately recognizable how personal the story was for

Kipling. The story he eventually wrote is so intimately connected with his own personal

experience as a true father, that to shape it with the central purpose of dealing with past sexual

sin is to rob the sadness from his own grieving process. In connection with the World War One

homefront, this story is the final example of the grieving process for those left in the process of

bereavement. The lack of resolution was painful for the many thousands of British families who

lost men in their families, and they would be able to immediately identify with the feelings of

Helen Turrell who lost her non-biological son on the foreign fields of France.

VII. Rudyard Kipling: World War One Witness and Witnessed

After the analysis of the four major women in Kipling’s World War One short stories, it

is worth returning again to Lycett and the argument that Kipling is the purest writer of a sort of

“homefront perspective”. Clearly, Kipling is so much more than the “‘jingo imperialist’ of

Orwell’s jibes 70 years ago”. Lycett argues correctly that Kipling is more than just an author

during the respective period; he was “an incisive observer on how the Victorian world became

modern – making him a telling analyst of the First World War in both verse and prose. He may

not have fought in the trenches, but if you want a spirited commentary on what really happened

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in the conflict… you couldn’t ask for a more competent guide”. Thus Kipling is at once a witness

of the war from a far, but also a character of the larger narrative of the homefront, witnessed by

historians and literary scholars as a citizen resolving the overall war effort in his conscience.

Kipling’s life was both intimately shaped by the narratives of his time, while he himself

created narratives of the war that broadly represented feelings of the time. To further explain,

Kipling originally wrote propaganda for Britain against Germany, among which may be the

famous line of his poem “For All We Have and Are,” where in the opening quatrain he closes,

“Stand up and take the war. / The Hun is at the gate!” (Lycett). In this way Kipling straddles two

roles in British society: first he is one of many propagandists in Britain, working to rile up the

Empire over the violation of Belgian neutrality, while secondarily, Kipling is a citizen himself,

already frustrated with reported events in the Rape of Belgium that portrayed the German army

as no better than organized barbarians rolling across the continent, plundering all that could be

had.

His frustration at the Rape of Belgium and other reported atrocities at the beginning of

the war are exemplified specifically in the short stories “Swept and Garnished” and “Mary

Postgate”. Yet even how they fit quite well as propaganda early in the war, as the conflict

progressed, the stories themselves and the characterizations of Frau Ebermann and Mary

Postgate became snapshots of perspective. J.M.S. Tompkins readily explains the difference two

years makes in the stories’ appreciation, even though they still hold such power:

When Kipling assembled these tales in 1917 [for Debits and Credits], the world

had changed, and the last two tales in the book, “Swept and Garnished” and

“Mary Postgate”, bear witness to it. These two dreadful tales assault the mind.

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They are the utterances of deep outrage. Both have, at times, if read quickly, the

quality of a hardly suppressed scream. This, though painful, is integral to both,

since both describe a repressed horror that in the end breaks out (Radcliffe,

“Swept”).

Thus the raw energy of each story comes anew to each reader each time the tale is read.

Yet, as his short stories reveal, Kipling’s rage and revulsion with Germans is not the only

emotion that he or Britons widely felt. The death of his son is an even more powerful and life-

rending experience for which Kipling spent the rest of his life dealing with. Maybe the most

affecting part for Kipling and the average British parent is the feeling that they might have

encouraged or helped their sons go to war, as Rudyard did. John was rejected twice from military

service due to terrible eye sight, and only after his father pulled strings, John got accepted into

the Irish Guards (Brown). At 18 the boy died as an officer in his first and only combat he saw at

the Battle of Loos in 1915 (Gilmour 257). He was one of 50,000 British casualties, one of 50,000

sons or fathers or husbands who would never return (Brown). Quite possibly speaking to the

inner question of what Kipling ought to have done for his son, Kipling wrote a particular line of

his Epitaphs of the War: “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our father’s lied”

(Lycett). The emotion of the father is so powerful, and Kipling was able to communicate the

guilt and grief better than any other British citizen would.

Kipling’s poem, “My Boy Jack” (1916) is another excellent example of Kipling as the

World War witness and witnessed. As described in an article from 2006, “[Kipling] was never

able to write directly about John’s loss. ‘My Boy Jack’ is about a sailor – but still a thinly

disguised poem about regret and mourning…. Rudyard Kipling lived until January 1936. But

father and son live on in [Britain’s] consciousness” (Brown). Once again, the “Jack” of “My

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Boy Jack” could be any of the sons in Britain whose whereabouts were ambiguous to their loved

ones. However, Kipling’s characterizations in “A Madonna of the Trenches” and “The

Gardener” point the reader and literary historian to the sorrow that Kipling surely felt with the

loss of John.

Of “Madonna”, Philip Mason raves. “In this story, above and behind Strangwick and his

troubles there emerge the writer’s conviction that there is a life after death in which personal

relations are renewed, and his belief that there is the possibility of the kind of love between man

and woman that Dante wrote of, instantaneous and eternal” (Lewis and Kieffer “Madonna”).

Sandra Kemp as well relates Kipling’s use of imagery in cold and warm dead bodies to create “a

vision of perfect love” from the combined examples of Mary and Isolde (Lewis and Kieffer

“Madonna”). So while the relationship being rekindled in death is a more mature one between a

man of Kipling’s age in Godsoe and the equally old Aunt Armine, versus that of a father and son,

the central hope of an eternal reconvening remains in the heart of the author (Lewis and Kieffer

“Madonna”). This resounding hope is powerful from an authorial perspective, but again,

Kipling through his work serves a dual purpose; beyond the writer of “A Madonna of the

Trenches,” Kipling is a father who never recovered the remains of his son. Like so many parents

and loved ones who only heard their children and family members had been physically destroyed

in the war, the hope of future physical healing and unification in heaven is as fervent a belief as

Clem’s vision of his Aunt at the front.

Finally, Kipling’s “The Gardener” is perhaps the most poignant of his postwar work

because of his recruitment to the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1917 (Lewis,

“Gardener”). “He composed epitaphs for [the Commission] and wrote a booklet The Graves of

the Fallen… Over the next few years he would make several tours of the battlefields, but unlike

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Helen [Turrell] he and his wife never found a grave for their son John, missing since September

1915.” It is fair to read Helen’s character as the manifestation of the bereavement (as Dillingham

refers to it) that Kipling goes through, further pointing towards a universal emotional weight laid

upon British hearts. The ending of “The Gardener” is so relevant to the average Briton because

Helen has grown to love her nephew as her son, just as Michael had grown to love his aunt as his

mother. The stoic response to Michael’s death and the lack of resolution for Helen captures the

same life-shattering grief that Kipling felt when he lost John in 1915, and just as so many other

parents and love ones would lose their men to the war. Therefore it is such a sad and affecting

irony that the Christ figure of the gardener cannot truly help Helen or Kipling himself; the grave

is final, the future is gone, and the grief shall be with the parents forever.

VIII. Conclusion

This paper has sought to explain Kipling’s characterizations of women in his World War

One short stories through the lens of Kipling’s own reactions to the conflict. In Kipling’s early

war short stories, “Swept and Garnished” and “Mary Postgate,” the rage against German

atrocities in Belgium and France are clearly seen. Frau Ebermann is an elderly German woman

who has dead British children appear to her, which is metaphorical to pass on the grief and sin of

each child’s death to the citizens who approve of it, especially those who believe their soul is

ready for the Lord. Mary Postgate is equally consumed, but with rage and inhumanity, not grief.

The death of the children in her village drives her to the abandonment of a German aviator as

she, like Kipling, “Ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel” (Kipling, “Mary Postgate” 249).

While both stories were written prior to John Kipling’s death, the immediate frustration would

only be enhanced in Rudyard Kipling’s reality as he lost his only son.

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In the second pair of stories, the reader sees the results of World War One manifest in

Kipling’s characters and in the author. “A Madonna of the Trenches” sees the main character

going through shellshock, but his post-traumatic stress disorder was caused by the vision of a

ghost, his Aunt Armine, and the suicide of Sergeant Godsoe. It is an honorable feeling to aspire

to, that love can transcend physical boundaries, and it was a power notion for many Britons

hoping for an impossible reunification with their lost loved ones. The final major short story of

Kipling’s World War One period is “The Gardener,” which powerfully exemplifies the

developed mother-son relationship between an aunt and a nephew. The melancholy tone of the

piece, as well as the direct biographical references to Kipling’s time with the Imperial War

Graves Commission points toward his reflective and bereaved nature at the time of “The

Gardener’s” writing.

The sum of Kipling’s writing during the period enhances the understanding of the

emotional state of the British homefront in the same way famous poets and authors like Owen

and Sassoon described and critiqued the battlefront. Because Kipling is both a provider of

narratives as an author, poet, and propagandist, and part of narratives as a citizen, father, and

critic, each interpretation is enriched. The scholastic personal view Kipling is better enlightened

through the complexity of women characters he produced, but so too is the scholastic

understanding of the British homefront during the war illuminated through the light of Kipling’s

four stories. Criticism may still contend that Kipling can be easily defined as an imperialist, or a

children’s story writer, or any of the various descriptions that the vast discourse on his work has

labeled him. However it should not be said, like in Stringer’s letter to the editor in 1898, that

Kipling does not appreciate or accurately portray women in his fiction. Each of the four women

he created in the short stories discussed in this paper are dynamic, in-depth characters who

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provide an interesting glimpse into a perspective not often considered: the women at home. More

importantly though, each woman is uniquely a product of their time and the environment they

live in, just as Rudyard Kipling was to Britain during the First World War. Through these

women, we can understand the man; and through the man, we may understand the British

homefront.

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Works Cited

Adams, Jad. Kipling. London: Haus, 2005. Print.

Bergonzi, Bernard. “Kipling and the First World War.” The Age of Kipling. Ed. John Gross. New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1972. 135-141. Print.

Bilsing, Tracy. “The Process of Manufacture - Rudyard Kipling’s Private Propaganda.” WLA

Spring/Summer 2000: 74-98. Print.

Brown, Jonathan. “The Great War and its Aftermath: The Son Who Haunted Kipling.” The

Independent 29 August 2006.

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