Life After Life

The pastoral mode uses images of the countryside and of agricultural life to represent a different, better, or simpler time or way of life. In the novel, pastoral imagery creates a contrast to the horrors of war; when she reports with her team to the site of a bombing, Ursula tries “to think of the meadow at the back of the copse at Fox Corner. Flax and larkspur, corn poppies, red campion and oxeye daisies. She [thinks] of the smell of new-mown grass and the freshness of summer rain” (427). This provides imaginative solace, but the imagery of growing things is used elsewhere to represent constructs of nation; Ursula thinks of Germany as dramatic mountains and England as a homely garden full of runner beans.

The appeal of the pastoral also helps Ursula make an emotional connection to her patriotism, by contrasting the abstract political construct of a nation with the familiar imagery attached to her childhood home. When talking to Teddy about the war and its devastation, Ursula thinks, “she would rather die for Fox Corner than ‘England.’ For meadow and copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood. Well, that was England, wasn’t it? The blessed plot” (445).