SEEING INTO THE GREAT WAR PATRIARCHAL DISCOURSE AND PRACTICES THROUGH THE MALE GAZE: PAT BARKER'S REGENERATION TRILOGY (original) (raw)
Related papers
War-torn Masculinity: Some Women's Fiction of First World War Returned Soldiers
International Journal of Arts and Sciences, 2011
This paper explores how some women have written in recent decades about expectations regarding masculinity, throughout and in the aftermath of the First World War; how male characters falter, attempting to repress their reactions against these expectations, and how their loved ones struggle unsuccessfully to comprehend their suffering. In a reading of Janet Frame's Intensive Care (1970), Brenda Walker's The Wing of Night (2005) and Pat Barker's Life Class (2007), all texts featuring soldiers returning to their native lands of New Zealand, Australia and Britain, this paper illuminates the relevance of reading women's texts in which male characters feature as returned soldiers. These novels are read in tandem with a discussion of masculinity theory that addresses the image of ideal masculinity in the years previous to, during and after the First World War. For the purpose of this paper, the term masculinity refers to the British historian John Tosh's explication of R.W. Connell's hegemonic masculinity; what Tosh refers to as "minimalist hegemonic masculinity" ("Hegemonic Masculinity" 42-3). This term defines hegemonic masculinity "according to the gender norms to which most men subscribe, whether or not they fully enact them" (48). John Horne states that "the importance of gender lies not only in its own subject matter but also in its ability to cast light on other themes of history and on broader historical synthesis" (23). This is my framework for reading this post-First World War women's literature, particularly in relation to texts in which women must cope with men whose masculinity has failed them, who are haunted by the responsibilities their maleness forces upon them.
2001
At the end of the Second World War in Britain, the close of conflict was followed by an eagerness to resurrect and politically to utilise a sense of what the experience of total war had meant. The image of a nation pulling together in opposition to evil and adversity informed the social machinations necessary to establish the Welfare State. Later, a country in the grip of the individualistic ideology of Thatcherism turned again to the now well-established myth of total community triumphing over total evil, in literary and filmic representations of World War II itself or of mythic arenas in which these same basic principles could apply. This time, the myths served as comforting nostalgia rather than engines of social change. During the last decade, the First World War has rivalled the Second as a resonant source for recent authors, and the popularity and sales of fictional works by novelists like Pat Barker and Sebastian Faulks suggest a similarly strong identification amongst the modern public. If World War II provided a myth of community to those in need of reassurance, paradoxically the enduring myth of the Great War, one of disillusionment, unnecessary evil and division, is currently attractive to a post-Cold war society anxious about its lack of unequivocal aims and enemies.
This thesis discusses the experience and the aftermath of the First World War and the way it problemitised ostensibly secure masculinities and femininities, and family relationships, as depicted by some Commonwealth women authors over three generations. With a particular focus on the character of the psychologically wounded returned soldier, I contend that the authors' depictions of the home-front aftermath of the First World War challenge the dominant constructions of gender which existed at the time of the war, and that such subversions have a specific relationship to each author's historical and social positionality. I analyse why the returned soldiers are represented in the manner that they are and the significance of this representation in the trajectory of women's writing. Some of the novels are set during the First World War, while others take place many years after the Armistice. The novels are discussed chronologically and grouped according to the period at which the texts were written. In all the novels, the characters' notions of their identities and their world are challenged to various degrees. The home fronts where struggles continue are in New Zealand, Australia, Southern Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe), and Britain. The female authors studied in this thesis write about the pervasive condition that was named shellshock, its manifestations and its rippling domestic effects, as symptomatic of patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist systems in crisis. The first chapter addresses the representation of returned soldiers in novels by first-generation First World War authors, those writing at the time of the war and in the years immediately following. Rose Macaulay's Non-Combatants and Others (1916), Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) are read as war novels that highlight and critique the association between shellshock and the exhibition of "unmanly" behaviour; the effect that expectations of manliness had on those soldiers who were victims of shellshock; and how the past and present trauma experienced by the returned soldiers is filtered, perceived, and absorbed by the female characters in the novels. The narrative point of view is most-often female and this consequently facilitates my discussion of how women characters perceive men's bodies in trauma. Non-Combatants and Others is the centre of the chapter's discussion as it poignantly depicts the extent of the social malaise that the First World War highlighted. The second chapter considers tense and traumatic pasts in the autobiographies and autobiographical fiction of Doris Lessing and Janet Frame, both of whom were daughters of First World War returned soldiers. In this chapter I suggest that their fathers' war service and the trauma both men sustained shaped each author's understanding and consequent depiction of war's inexorable infiltration of the domestic sphere. In considering each author's depiction of the war, I explore how its presence crystallised pre-existing gender conflict. Both authors spent their formative years, the 1920s and 30s, in households seething with resentment and financial hardship and shadowed by grief. I propose that, in writing autobiographical fiction-Lessing's Martha Quest (1952) and Alfred and Emily (2008), and Frame's Towards Another Summer (written in 1963 and published posthumously in 2007)-both engaged in a therapeutic act. In doing so, each author re-imagined her father's history and its bearing on her life as a means of mitigating her own trauma as a daughter of violence. Chapter three is a comparative reading of the returned soldier and war-wounded characters in the eleven novels Frame published during her lifetime. In considering these characters and the significance of their presence in her work, I suggest that Frame's writing is haunted by the emotional debris of war. In creating returned soldier characters, Frame wrote against the glorification of war-which served to reinforce notions of the triumph of imperialism, and was endemic in Britain and its former dominions-and also about the "sex war" that had taken place since much earlier times in the patriarchal family. The final chapter of the thesis explores contemporary representations of returned First World War soldiers in Pat Barker's Another World (1998), Life Class (2007), and Toby's Room (2012)-three of Barker's war novels in which the narrative point of view moves between women and men and combatants and non-combatants-and Brenda Walker's The Wing of Night (2005). The shell-shocked soldiers of Barker and Walker are characters that represent their authors' contemporary knowledge of, and perspectives on, the interplay between expectations about gender roles and war-induced psychological trauma. This study highlights how the novels imagine and articulate the haunting significance of the returned First World War soldier characters' trauma in the lives of other characters, and in the light of what each author suggests about the way the First World War produced a heightened sense of the problematics of conventional masculinities and femininities. Declaration by author This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis. I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my research higher degree candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award. I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the General Award Rules of The University of Queensland, immediately made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968.
GENDER CONFLICT AND FIRST WORLD WAR POETRY
NEW ACADEMIA: An International Journal of English Language, Literature and Literary Theory, 2020
The corpus of the First World War poetry is predominantly masculine in its extent, being preoccupied with the experiences of the participants in the war, namely the male soldiers, and limited to poems by canonical war poets like Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen and others. The First World War, however, has been one of the most transmogrifying experiences for the entire human civilization in general. It marked the end of an era of optimism and aspiration and ushered in an age of overt cynicism and desperation for all members of society, irrespective of their age, class, or gender. Following this, the paper intends to consider women war poets of the First World War of the likes of Helen Hamilton, Alexandra Grantham, and Ruth Comfort Mitchell among others, with an intention to contend that the testimonies of women's perceptions of war are as socially pertinent as the narratives produced by their male counterparts, provides a more nuanced picture of the war experiences and plays a prominent role in contradicting the misogynistic approach of the male poets whose poems often relegated women to the position of passive and at times imprudent beings who were unable to apprehend the magnanimity and atrociousness of war.
7. Cassandra's Question: Do Women Write War Novels?
Cornell University Press eBooks, 2018
I do not wish to close the frontiers of life upon my own self. I do not wish to deny myself the expansion of seeking into individual capabilities and depths by living in a space whose boundaries are race and nation.-Zora Neale Hurston The "woman's war novel" has ordinarily seemed "a contradiction in terms."1 There has always been a heroic male literature of war-an Iliad or a Ramayana. No other genre is so highly gendered. The exploits of men in the formation and defense of a people or nation, though they may provoke the "tears of women," do not justify their tales.2 The Great War intensified this exclusion of women from the canon of war litera ture. The way the "dying lines" of war have been drawn exposes the operation of sex and race in the construction of nation. Canonical interpretation has held that mass conscription created a new kind of artist: a "soldier-poet" who recorded his "direct experi ence" of a new and barbarous technology. With a typical stress on composition at the front, Patrick Bridgwater asserts, "From winter 1914 onwards most war poetry worth the title has been anti-war poetry writ ten by poets in the line of death."3 Critics have focused on the writer, understood to be a gifted veteran who responded to the test of his masculinity by shaping realist texts about the trenches, blood brother-1Cyril Falls, War Books: An Annotated Bibliography of Books about the Great War, intro. R.
Introduction – Representing, Remembering and Rewriting Women’s Histories of the First World War
British Women’s Histories of the First World War, 2020
As Dan Todman has persuasively argued, in the British popular imagination the First World War is associated with mud, barbed wire, the trenches and the Tommy on the Western Front. 1 Perhaps inevitably, therefore, public commemoration of the war has often been dominated by a focus on the men in the armed forces, who risked or lost their lives for causes that at the time may or may not have seemed heroic, noble or simply unavoidable.
A Man Could Stand Up: Masculinities and the Great War
Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present, 2011
In her critically acclaimed Regeneration trilogy-comprising Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995)-Pat Barker describes the impact ofWorld War I on British society from the summer of 1917 to just before the armistice in 1918; in the process, she destabilizes the boundary line between the (feminine) 'home front' and the (masculine) 'war front,' or rather exposes the permeability between these two gendered spaces. The title of the first volume and of the trilogy as a whole is borrowed from a medical experiment conducted by W. H. R. Rivers, anthropologist, neurologist, and psychiatrist and one of the protagonists of the three novels, and by his one-time colleague Henry Head, on the latter's radial nerves, which were severed so that the two could trace their "regeneration" (R 45; Eye 142 and 232). Rivers is portrayed in the trilogy in his wartime working environments, chiefly as medical officer at Craiglockhart War Hospital, one of the specialized treatment centers set up to deal with the vast number of soldiers suffering from what was then known as 'shell shock' or 'war neurosis' and is nowadays usually referred to as posttraumatic stress disorder. Rivers is only one of the historical personages who populate Barker's trilogy; the others include trench poets Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen, the latter two ofwhom were Rivers's patients at Craiglockhart, or Rivers's friends and opponents in the medical establishment. In addition, there are cameo appearances S. Horlacher (ed.), Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present © Stefan Horlacher 2011 190 • SILVIA MERGENTHAL by, for instance, Charles Lutvidge Dodgson, a friend of Rivers's father, and by Rivers's sister Katharine, one of the young girls whom Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll, was notoriously attracted to, inflicting on her, as Barker has said, "an emotional pressure and emotional demands that call something out of the child that the child is not ready to give" (qtd. in Stevenson 178). However, although Barker herself rejects the label "historical fiction" (qtd. in Westman 163) for her texts, 2 as it seems to her to consign historical events to the past while ignoring their relevance for the present, these 'real' people are made to interact with fictitious characters such as Billy Prior: Prior, in whose person issues of gender, class, and individual and collective violence are united, is one of the minor figures of the first, but emerges as one of the key players in the second and third volumes of the trilogy. It is through him that the reader, in The Eye in the Door, is introduced to the repressed and repressive atmosphere of a wartime London riven by sexual and political tensions and obsessed with espionage and surveillance. It is also with Billy Prior that the reader is finally taken, in The Ghost Road, to the Western Front: paradoxically, the excerpts from the diary Prior writes there, which supposedly provide the most authentic account of life in the trenches in the novel, are those chapters in which Barker, in the one fully invented case history of the trilogy, departs completely from her sources. These sources, some of which she acknowledges in her para textual "Author's Notes," in which she also identifies historical precedents for the less commonly known events that she has fictionalized, 3 fall into three groups: one group is comprised of first-hand, and thus to an extent unmediated, accounts of the Great War written during the war itself, such as diaries and letters by Sassoon, Owen, or Graves, poems by those three and other trench poets, and medical treatises like Rivers's "On the Repression ofWar Experience." This was alecture initially delivered before the Section of Psychiatry, Royal Society of Medicine, on December 4, 1917, and later published in The Lancet and again in the posthumous volume Conflict aud Dream, where Sassoon makes a brief appearance as "Patient B." Sassoon's poem of that title, incidentally, predates his stay at Craiglockhart, but was probably re-titled following his treatment by Rivers. Secondly, there are autobiographical and semiautobiographical narratives of World War I, written predominantly during what has been called the 'War Books Controversy' of the late 1920s and early 1930s, for instance Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War of 1928, Robert Graves's GoodBye to All That of 1929, and Siegfried Sassoon's
The War and the Gender divide: Examining Women’s Poetry of the First World War Era
The Creative Launcher
World War I poetry generally tends to take into consideration only the works of male writers such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, male poets who had been in the line of duty themselves. However, what is largely ignored is the vast body of women’s writing of the era. This blind ignorance, even with the existence of published anthologies is due to the prevailing notion that war is largely a man’s business. Little existing documentation of women’s contribution in various serving units during the Great War also contributes to the ignorance. They served as nurses, drivers and a wide variety of other roles on the battle front. The women who remained at home showed immense courage in handling the situation. Some were involved in knitting, some in solving the food crisis. Others entered the munitions factories to serve the country. This paper aims to bring to light the crucial role that these women played during the Great War. This paper will examine how women battled sexism and the ...
Female Identities of the Interwar Period: A Feminist Narratological Analysis of British Literature
2019
During the interwar period (1918-1945), women in England were faced with conflicting roles and identities. The men had left to fight in the First World War, leaving the women, who had previously held domestic and, at times, subordinate roles, to take over jobs and leadership positions. Women were exposed to and able to participate in public spheres, which caused social changes to arise. However, as the men returned after the war, women were expected to fit seamlessly back into their earlier subordinate positions. Literature of the interwar period written by female authors represents the struggle of female identities for voice, agency, power, and relief from social oppression. This project explores the identities of women as represented in three British interwar period novels. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway is conflicted between her differing identities in public and private spaces, and her daughter Elizabeth dreams of her future opportunities while exploring pu...