War and Beauty: The Act of Unmasking in Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room and Louisa Young’s My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You

Abstract

Questions of beauty, pain and violence have been discussed by Jane Macnaughton and Ludmilla Jordanova in relation to the visual and artistic representation of the human body. This essay returns to Macnaughton’s focus on First World War surgeon Harold Gillies, but examines the specifically literary treatment of facial surgery in the recent fictions of Pat Barker and Louisa Young. Barker’s Toby’s Room (2012) is the sequel to Life Class (2007), and both novels focus on the figure of Henry Tonks, who, as outlined by Macnaughton, worked alongside Gillies during the First World War, making studies of the faces of the men undergoing reconstructive surgery. Tonks was professor of life drawing at the Slade in the years before the war, and Barker probes his influence on the generation of artists who were to define the aesthetic response to the conflict: Kit Neville is based on Mark Gertler and Christopher Nevinson, Paul Tarrant on Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer, and Elinor Brooke on Dora Carrington and Virginia Woolf. Young’s novel, like Barker’s, is also set in part on the wards of Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup, where Gillies treated some 5000 soldiers suffering from wartime facial injuries. As recounted in Young’s A Great Task of Happiness (1995), her grandmother, Kathleen Scott — wife of Captain R. F. Scott — was a sculptress who worked with Gillies at Queen’s Hospital during the war.