How Is Kitty Presented In The Bartagonist?

Kitty, the female protagonist, is a beautiful wife showered with expensive materials and a luxurious house named Baldry Court. She is completely dependent upon her husband Chris for her lifestyle and respect from society that she gains with a presentable husband. Ultimately, Kitty is the symbol of a woman imprisoned in her social class. She only knows what gender roles of society have embedded in her mind that a woman is a badge of her husband’s duty to the war as a soldier. At one point Jenny says “nothing could ever really become a part of our (Kitty and Jenny) life until it had been referred to Chris’s attention”(West 14). In society at this time, women had no say of their own but instead accepted and did as they were told by the male of the house. Because of this identity, she is pressured to present herself and her home as lovely. However while struggling with meeting gender expectations; both characters suffer from the effects of trauma which are perceived very differently by the audience of the novel.

The trauma Chris faces in the front lines of the war is an international one. He is portrayed as a hero because he is fighting for the good of his country, England, which results in suffering from amnesia when a bomb explodes. This news is delivered to Kitty and Jenny by a woman named Margret Allington who Jenny describes as “repulsively furred with neglect and poverty”(West). Kitty is monstrous because Chris wrote to this poor woman instead of her which questions her lifestyles stability. Finding a cure ultimately proposed a problem because shell shock was a new threat the war offered which is evident when Margret reveals the diagnoses to the women “as though tendering us a term she had long brooded over without arriving at comprehension”(West