War and Womanhood in Rudyard Kipling’s Mary Postgate (1915) Summer Jade Dolan College

There is a scene within Rudyard Kipling’s Mary Postgate (1915), within which the experience of the titular character is narrated, whilst she incinerates the belongings of ‘Wynn’ – a recently deceased British soldier who Mary, the caregiver of Wynn’s aunt, had helped raise from a young age – she discovers an injured German airman. The extract only marginally precedes Mary’s refusal to get medical attention for the airman, who subsequently, (potentially because of Mary’s deliberate inaction), dies of his injuries. Because of this positioning within the text, the extract is crucial for an understanding of Mary’s ensuing treatment of the soldier, however rather than giving one, definitive explanation for Mary’s actions, Kipling’s construction of the passage lends itself to numerous different interpretations. Many of these, as will be explored in this essay, concern themselves with investigating the effect of war on womanhood.

The first of these interpretations relies on Mary’s role as a ‘mother’ to Wynn; that is, the extract sets up a reading where Mary’s later neglecting to help the airman is an act of revenge from a grieving mother. In addition to the significance of Mary’s name, (with surely the most infamous Mary being the...