“One gets into a loose way of speaking...”: The Representation of War Shock in the BBC Adaptation of Parade’s End

The First World War is often regarded as the shocking experience par excellence, which deeply affected arts, literature, and media (See Hynes, 1990), but also impacted the dawning cinema industry (see Copping, 2020). In the years following the conflict, many authors depicted its effects on their characters’ psyche in their literary works. In the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924-1928), written by Ford Madox Ford, the conflict and its traumatic effects are central to the plot. This is still evident the BBC adaptation of the novels (2012) – written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Susanna White. Even though the screenwriter stated that “this is not a First World War story, it’s the story of a man caught between two women who he has loved and loves” (Stoppard, 2014), the conflict plays a pivotal role in the plot development and characters revelation. In particular, the change of perspective and personality of Christopher Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch) from an untiring conservative to a scarred but more open individual, undoubtedly has one of its main causes in the war trauma. This work aims at sketching how this trauma is reflected in the use of language in Tietjens’s (as well as in other characters’) depiction in the series, by adopting a functional approach – introduced by the groundbreaking work of Kozloff (2000), and further developed by scholars such as Bednarek (2018) – and applying it to aspects such as register and vocabulary (among these, the use of trench slang to achieve realism in portraying soldiers, see Walker, 2017), to pinpoint their role in representing psyches traumatised by the experience of the conflict.