The use of the stream of consciousness in Speed the Plough creates a confusion regarding the location of the recovering soldier. The war hero, who is in a hospital bed, “drowsed back to France”(6) in a day dream, reminiscing the time he spent in the country during the war and the women he encountered who were more “lustrous” than the “pretty”(6) women back home. The soldier’s visions of France and its women are interrupted by the on goings that surround him in hospital and his own movements, which are greatly confused by the stream of consciousness that results in the reader jumping from one location to another, from the soldier’s private mind to his public movements and actions. The stream of consciousness allows the reader a window into the soldier’s mind, as his mind transports him from France and back. The intimacy of the soldier’s thoughts and feelings, particularly towards women and in his memories of the war become public due to the narrative technique of Butts. This is supported by Jill Marsden who argues that “the ‘privacy’ of the ‘personal mind’ is well represented in the most familiar stream of consciousness technique: interior monologue.”(7) It is through this intimacy that we are able to be transported from country to country within the text.
Butt’s childhood and upbringing in the countryside is demonstrated in Speed the Plough through the soldier’s work on the farm, milking cows, after recovering from his injuries. Butts writes that “There are places that are signatures. I do not mean where one has lived continually or where important affairs have happened, but a place felt to be significant, & passionately, & irrationally cherished.”(8) The importance of the English countryside as one of the “places” to Butts is demonstrated through the soldiers relocation from the fields of France where the war took place, to a hospital, and then back to the countryside, but this time in England. This is supported by despite the soldier’s “unfamiliarity” (9) of being on a farm he was a “born milkman”(10). The soldier has never lived here, nor is it where important event relating to him have taken place, but it is somewhere he belongs.
The idea of belonging, and how a place can be ‘home’ to someone is questionable to the soldier, whose mind often wanders back to France and imagines a life he was once living and one her wishes to continue to live. Due to the shellshock and other war injuries, the soldier may believe that his daydreams are in fact reality, which would suggest that although place is important, your location is not as your imagination can transport you back. This is evident through the soldier’s day dreams which we experience through the stream of consciousness. Although the soldier fits in and is a natural on the farm, the place that is “signature” to him is France.
6 – Mary Butts, Speed the Plough in The Complete Stories of Mary Butts, (New York: McPherson & Company, 2014), p.22
7 – Marsden, Jill. “Adventures At The Fringe Of Thought: William James, Modernism, And Disability Studies.” William James Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2017, pp. 92–116. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26203817 [Accessed 30 Jan. 2020]
8 – Mary Butts, The Journals of Mary Butts (USA: Yale University, 2002) p. 195
9 – Mary Butts, Speed the Plough in The Complete Stories of Mary Butts, (New York: McPherson & Company, 2014), p. 23
10 – Mary Butts, Speed the Plough in The Complete Stories of Mary Butts, (New York: McPherson & Company, 2014), p.24
Modernist Networks and Place 