But what of the Chickens: Jacob’s room and the masculine martyr narrative Riley Stephen Meachem College

The 1910’s and early 1920’s were littered with sob-stories about men who gave their lives for their country in the first world war. Poetry, songs, radio plays and indeed, many novels are dedicated to this subject. These stories nearly all centered on a young man, from a good family who had the whole world at his feet, and a long, successful life ahead of him. This young boy would then be called up to serve in the ‘great war,’ and, being a brave and noble lad, he would not decline. Instead, he would take up arms, and go with friends, brothers, and complete strangers to fight an unexpectedly gory war, only to die in battle. Some of these works, such as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Siegfried Sassoon’s “What does it matter?” or Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, for example, take a distinctly anti-war tone, decrying the conflict as a pointless travesty. Others, for example John McCrae’s “In Flanders Field” see the war as a more noble endeavor.

But none of these narratives, be they pro or anti-war, optimistic or pessimistic, are of any interest to Virginia Woolf. Attempting to craft a novel for the new age, she writes about the war from a different moral perspective entirely. The world is already filled with...