Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Anxieties of Class and Gender in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon"

Throughout her late 1930s travelogue through Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West meditates on the ancient and modern history of Europe and the Balkans. Considering the place of the modern woman in the sweep of history seems to provoke multiple anxieties for West, many of which she explores through parallels and contrasts between traditional Slav social arrangements and those of Western Europe. The primary cause for anxiety at the moment West completed the manuscript (published in 1941) was fascism. For West, as for many others, this modern phenomenon had the potential to obliterate the Europe she knew, and replace it with a continually violent and highly regimented political order that was threatening to creativity, to liberty, to life. Anxieties about fascism appear in the text attached to anxieties about the lower classes, particularly what West calls the "urban proletariat," whom she designates as "mindless, traditionless, possessionless" (1104). Even in their positive incarnation as members of trade union movements, West's prose describes this class as threatening, as a "seething and desperate mass [that] may develop a dynamic power" to change society. West's anxieties were in a sense typically modernist, as described well by Michael Tratner in his volume Modernism and Mass Politics. In West's eyes, this class responded most forcefully to fascism, and needed to be reined-in as "not a disintegrating but a stabilizing force" (481).

In an example of the negative force of this class, West tells the story of the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria in Geneva in 1898. For West, Elizabeth was truly "great," a "miracle of courage" (4-5). This aristocratic woman, for a short time, held power and used it wisely, but lost her life when an Italian representative of this new urban proletariat "said with his stiletto to the symbol of power, 'Hey what are you going to do with me?'"(9). His children then turned to fascism to answer that question. Elizabeth becomes in this narrative a "symbol of power" and a portrait of a powerful woman.

Ironically, then, for a feminist, an older order of class relations is figured as more beneficial to women than modernity in West's descriptions of Yugoslavia. This country becomes a romanticized land with an agricultural economy in which aristocratic women have some power (as Elizabeth did), and peasant women are respected for their abilities to bear children, even if they must pretend to be inferior to men to achieve that respect (330). West's anxieties for modern women are intertwined with her anxieties about the growing "urban proletariat" and fascism, because in her analysis, "in the modern, industrialized world" men are "devitalized by the insecurity of employment," and become prey to fascist thinking, which will not allow women power, even if they pretend to inferiority. Like other writers of this era, such as D. H. Lawrence and Yeats, West modeled in her travel writing an earlier form of society as an antidote to modernity. And yet, the book also presents liberal thinking, the values of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," as a means to "maintain peace in an expanding industrial civilization" (217), in an acknowledgement that her portrait of Yugoslavia is a fantasy, and Western Europe was not about to undo its industrialization. Even under liberal conditions, however, West envisions the "female governed" and the "male governors," reinforcing her anxieties for the modern woman. As a member of the impoverished but educated class raised in a household of women, West's travels likely sparked anxiety about her own place in the modern categories of class: she could not have the aristocratic power of Elizabeth or the assumed respect granted the peasant women, yet shared a middle class anxiety of falling into the urban mass despite her education, English traditions, and possessions.

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Updated May 23, 1999