Changes in warfare, new weaponry and the absence of protective equipment meant that facial injuries were common during the First World War. The negative perceptions surrounding such wounds, described as “the worst loss of all” (Anon 1918), and the widespread expectation that facially disfigured combatants would be outcast from society, partly explain why facially injured combatants are rarely represented in wartime and interwar literature. This article however shows that the way in which the wounded combatants’ fates are portrayed in fiction differs significantly from these bleak predictions. Drawing upon popular fiction such as Florence Ethel Mills Young’s Beatrice Ashleigh (1918) and Muriel Hine’s The Flight (1922), this article explores literary representations of disfigurement and depictions of the physical, psychological and social consequences of disfiguring injuries. In a context in which anxieties over the masculinity of disabled veterans were increasing, the depictions of fictional mutilated ex-servicemen’s reintegration into society are discussed with special emphasis on the agency of women, who appear to have the power, in Macdonald’s words, to make men “whole” again (Macdonald 2016: 54).
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The works of fiction that do portray the fates of disfigured combatants and veterans in the aftermath of the Great War in more detail and which are studied here could be described as romantic fictions. This choice of genre is in itself telling of the authors’ – and the readers’ – desire to see the wounded integrated into a narrative of successful domestic reintegration. This article thus examines how the figure of the facially disfigured veteran has been presented and used in British narratives published during the First World War and its aftermath. The novels and short stories under scrutiny were published for the most part between 1918 and 1922, although references will also be made to works published as early as 1916 and as late as 1935. Although they are not amongst the classics of First World War literature, they were reviewed or advertised in the Times Literary Supplement. (77)
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