Regeneration

• Regeneration


  Title of the work
• Pat Barker


  • Born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1943
  • Grew up in a working-class home
  • Early writing offered a unique and critical viewpoint on the problems of poverty, violence, oppression, and exploitation faced by working-class women in post-industrial Britain
  • Later writing focused more on male protagonists and raised challenging questions about men's gender identity and its ideological formation
• With the publication of the first volume of the Regeneration Trilogy in 1991, a distinctive phase of Barker's writing began
• Regeneration Trilogy


  Barker's novels that concentrate on male protagonists and raise challenging questions about men's gender identity and its ideological formation
• Barker uses the narrative of the First World War as an analytical tool to critically reconsider and reflect not only the distinct history of the war itself but also "his story" of war, violence, power and dominance to profoundly reveal the social foundations on which men's gender identities have been built
• Barker's Trilogy


  Presents an interrogative viewpoint into the war among nations, the war among men and the war inside men
• Barker's Trilogy provides a prolific ground to understand men's gender identities constructed through the relations of power, domination and hegemony within the gender order of wartime Britain, which eventually become damaging both for men and the whole society
• This thesis offers to analyse Barker's texts from the aspect of the damaging impact of hegemonic forms of masculinity experienced by men during the war
• Barker realised that her grandfather's silence about his bayonet wound, his deafness, and her stepfather's stammer stemmed not only from their experiences of the war but also from their experiences of masculinity
• Hegemonic masculinity


  The dominant mode of masculinity characterised by physical and mental strength, heterosexuality, courage, competitiveness, aggressiveness and violence
• The pressure put on men to live up to the ideals of hegemonic masculinity is what causes the greatest harm to men, and this fact is given as the core cause of both societal and individual ills prevailing in wartime Britain
• Barker's male characters are depicted as becoming unable to conform to hegemonic ideals of masculinity while at the same time trying to come up with ways to survive the violence of the war and hegemonic modes of masculinity
• The mental and physical breakdowns suffered by soldiers at the time of the war is not brought on by their inherent weaknesses or flaws but rather by their attempts to negotiate with the hegemonic masculinity that predominated in wartime Britain
• Craiglockhart War Hospital


  A homosocial environment where diverse power relations among men are construed in line with the homophobic and hegemonic gender project in wartime Britain
• The Craiglockhart War Hospital is an area of contestation through which the novel comes to explore how competing and warring masculinities are constructed, reproduced, and contested through gender relations of domination and subordination among men in order to make them fit into military, patriotic and nationalist ideals of wartime Britain
• The characters' rehabilitation at Craiglockhart consists of therapeutic sessions of talking cure led by the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, who attempts to make them turn back to the front as ideal officers and soldiers fit for their duty to fight and kill in the service of their nation
• The characters' emerging dualities, splitting of personalities, inner conflicts, ambiguities, and bodily dysfunctions brought on by their experiences of masculinity appear as forms of individual resistance against the hegemonic masculinity of the time and the violences it perpetuates
• The physical disabilities and psychological breakdowns experienced by the male characters of the novel are exposed to be induced by their experiences of masculinity during the war
• Craiglockhart


  Can be interpreted etymologically as referring to the homosociality and homophobia maintained both at the Craiglockhart Hospital and within gender order of wartime Britain, in which men feel to be "hunted", namely emasculated, deprived of power, and effeminized
• British society


  • Damage and exploitation wrought on men by the hegemonic project itself
  • Physical disabilities and psychological breakdowns experienced by the male characters of the novel induced by their experiences of masculinity during the war
• War neurosis of the characters

  Linked with the social construction of their masculinities
• Craiglockhart


  Refers to homosociality and homophobia maintained both at the Craiglockhart Hospital and within gender order of wartime Britain
• Craiglockhart


  Reflects the social mechanism of gender in which men feel to be "hunted", namely emasculated, deprived of power, and effeminized
• Sassoon's initial sessions with Rivers

  1. Rivers competitively attacks on Sassoon's masculine identity

  2. Rivers tries to persuade Sassoon to go back to the front by intimidating him
• Wearing a military uniform is like signing a contract that signifies the risk men take for their lives in the name of their nations
• The war is reflected by the author as a battlefield of challenge in requiring men to prove their manliness by taking risks rather than to lead a life of personal safety
• Sassoon's pre-war poetry lays special stress on patriotic undertones or militarist, nationalistic ideals of bravery, fearlessness, honour and the need for sacrificial deaths of the young soldiers for the sake of British national glory
• Sassoon's anti-war poetry that he begins to produce after his trench warfare experience critically reflects on the predicament of the soldiers in the trenches, the violence and the brutality of militarist and nationalist ideals that send soldiers to death, and the sacrifice and devastation of the young in the dug-outs of the war
• Shell-shock or war neurosis is described not as a pathological illness but as a condition caused by men's experiences of wartime hegemonic masculinity, to which they cannot live up
• Shell-shock or war neurosis is caused not by the actual physical experience of shell explosion but by their military training and duty that are based on the repression of fear
• Since the military demands men to repress their feelings of fear to be manly, the atmosphere of the war that renders men more passivised, confined and helpless in the trenches leads men to become unable to repress their fear, and thus they break down
• Being unable to enact the demands of hegemonic masculinity since they feel removed from the social actions and practices enabling them to exercise their power and control, Barker's men in the trenches are shown to be passivised and thus disempowered
• Rivers' therapeutic sessions with the patients unexpectedly turn the mirror to his inner world, and he comes to understand the social mechanism upon which his masculinity is built, and the role of men's repressed emotions in maintaining this mechanism that shapes not only the patients' masculinity and their attitudes to war but also that of his own
• Rivers acts like an authoritarian father who represses his feelings to exercise his authority over his patients and thus prove his manliness
• Sassoon develops a split personality that is divided between the socially inscribed public world of masculinity and the private world of femininity as he feels lost and disoriented after his father's death
• Burns' experience of disorientation and dismemberment he confronts in the wood reinforces his sense of insecurity
• Barker's employment of the troubled father-son relationship helps her to criticize how class distinctions create more inequalities among men that also intensify men's sense of emasculation
• Affected by his father's dominance and authority over him, and also becoming conscious of the class distinction, Prior feels himself emasculated and deprived of power
• Prior's inability to meet the heroic ideal of warrior masculinity which his father expects him to perform in the army frustrates and disgraces his father and this results with Mr. Prior's despise for his son
• "A man like sassoon would always be trouble but he would be a lot less trouble if he were ill"

  Chapter 1, page 13

  -Rivers