Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy FROM HERO TO ZERO The Great War and the Apocalypse of Masculinity in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy Dorien Leunens Master Thesis 2011-2012 supervisor: prof. Marysa Demoor Paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels” by Dorien Leunens With a special thanks to my supervisor prof. Marysa Demoor. 3 List of Abbreviations // † REG Barker, Pat. Regeneration. London: Penguin Books, 2008. Print. † TEITD Barker, Pat. The Eye In The Door. London: Penguin Books, 2008. Print. † TGR Barker, Pat. The Ghost Road. London: Penguin Books, 2008. Print. † IOM Bibbings, Lois. “Images of Manliness: The Portrayal of Soldiers and Conscientious Objectors in the Great War.” Social & Legal Studies 12.3 (2003): 335-58. Print. † TI Das, Santanu. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print † RG Westman, Karin. Pat Barker’s Regeneration – A Reader’s Guide. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2001. Print. 4 Table of Contents // Introduction     6   The  Heroes  of  Pre-­‐War  Britain       12   Troubled  Soldiers       17   Criminal  or  Courageous  Conchies       26   Homoerotic  Heroes       34   Male  Mothers     39   The  Regeneration  of  the  Degenerates     48   Fallen  Heroes       68   Conclusion     72   Bibliography     77   5 FROM HERO TO ZERO The Great War and the Apocalypse of Masculinity1 in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy Dorien Leunens Master Thesis 2011-2012 Burning buildings, black dots that represent human beings who are falling through the sky, and screaming people when the Twin Towers collapsed. The images of 9/11 will always remain unbelievably disturbing and have induced a global preoccupation with terrorist anxiety. It has elicited “ – especially in America – a preoccupation with questions of heroism, manliness, and honor, and with the woundings of war. These concerns stand at the center of Regeneration”2. Written by Pat Barker, the Regeneration Trilogy deals with the altering view of masculinity during the First World War. As a matter of fact, the Great War was the first war to benefit from the Industrial Revolution, but it is precisely due to this new form of industrialized warfare the contrast between August 1914 and November 1918 is exceptionally striking. At the beginning of the war, men were conceptualized as brave and fearless warriors who went off to battle, yet this war proved to be abolishing far                                                                                                                 1 The term “apocalypse of masculinity/masculinism” was first coined by Lois Bibbings in “Images of Manliness: The Portrayal of Soldiers and Conscientious Objectors in the Great War.” Social & Legal Studies 12.3 (2003), p. 350. Henceforth abbreviated as IOM. 2 Nixon, Rob. “An Interview with Pat Barker.” Contemporary Literature 45.1 (2004): 1-21. 6 more than solely the lands of France and Flanders. The First World War transformed the propagated heroic warriors into doubtful, rebellious, traumatized and effeminized men, which is the main thesis subject of this paper. Combining a historical approach to the First World War and a close reading of Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, I explored the issue of the degenerating view of masculinity and heroism, and how Barker managed to illustrate those societal troubles in her trilogy. The discussion of traumatized soldiers is supported by the trauma theories of Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub and other trauma analysts. Additionally, men felt in a certain sense effeminized, and Santanu Das’ Touch and Intimacy in the First World War enlarges on this subject. In addition, Joanna Bourke further explains the emasculating effects on the soldiers and their fears in multiple articles. The Great War generated a change in perspectives on manhood and heroism in the very classic meaning of the word. In the Merriam Webster Dictionary, a hero is first defined as a “mythological figure often of divine descent”, secondly as an “illustrious warrior”3. These ideas were nonetheless actively present in the minds of the general public, but it seems the war has demolished these pre-war existing convictions. Nowadays, we still look upon those young soldiers of the First World War as heroes, but merely as naïve and innocent boys who were sacrificed in multiple unnecessary slaughters, but who still possessed that feeling of duty towards their country. Together with the issue of masculinity, these different perspectives on heroism are also explored in this thesis. Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy serves as the perfect example to these themes, as she wonderfully explores them by taking the reader into the situation at the home front rather than focusing on the setting of the war trenches and renowned battles that took place on the Continent. Regeneration (1991) deals with the traumatized – “shell-shocked” – patients                                                                                                                 3 “Hero.” Def. 1a and 1b. Merriam Webster Dictionary Online. Web. <http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/hero>. 7 that inhabited the Craiglockhart War Hospital, where W.H.R. Rivers attempted to help these men to work through their traumas. Descriptions of the front are only apparent in the traumatic experiences Rivers conveys or in the rendition of their haunting dreams. The Eye In The Door (1993) elaborates on the themes of homophobia and the persecution of pacifists, and The Ghost Road (1995) – for which Barker received the renowned Booker Prize of Fiction – explores the primitive culture of the head-hunters by describing Rivers’ memories who travelled to the British colony of Melanesia for his anthropology study. In doing so, the reader not only acquires more insight in the character of dr. W.H.R. Rivers, but it also interestingly juxtaposes the primitive culture with Great Britain, making us attentive to the different perspectives on war and the death of two cultures. Additionally, it takes the reader to the front through Billy Prior’s diary entries, but the passivity of the soldiers is stressed rather than the attacks. As a matter of fact, the history of war has always left a mark on Pat Barker. First of all, she “was told that her father was in the Royal Air Force during World War II […] but she never had a sense of who he really was”4. Secondly, Barker remembers that she would “‘stick her finger’ into the wound of her grandfather received while an officer’s servant during the First World War” (RG, 18). Nevertheless, her grandfather only told her the story which caused the wound “near the end of his life, because […] ‘they were so horrific that he didn’t want to tell them before then’” (RG, 18). It is these stories that “provide the physical and emotional underpinning of the characters’ experiences in Regeneration [1991]” (RG, 18), since this book deals with the horrifying traumas the soldiers of the Great War were confronted with. Since the writing of the Regeneration Trilogy, Barker is widely read in the United Kingdom as well as in the United States. Her stories about the                                                                                                                 4 Westman, Karin. Pat Barker’s Regeneration – A Reader’s Guide. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2001, henceforth abbreviated in text as RG. p. 7. 8 Great War are refreshingly deviating from other war narratives, as she explores the themes of masculinity and heroism in the three novels. By inserting the real lives of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and W.H.R. Rivers, Barker proved to be exceptional at interweaving both fact and fiction, making the reader more educated about their lives. However, the line between what is real and fiction is less clear, which is the essential energy of these characters. As aforementioned, one of the prominent themes of Barker’s trilogy is the change in the general perception of the so-called heroes before, during and after the First World War. As it happens, before the war men were perceived as proud, brave, untouchable and fearless heroes, yet the faith in this classic idea altered over the four mortal of the First World War. This blind belief in knightly men before the war constitutes the first chapter of this thesis. In the second chapter it becomes apparent that not only the view towards men was changed, but also the soldiers became doubtful about their heroic label, and questioned the necessary killings and slaughters the war demanded. Additionally, in Chapter 3 the reputed Conscientious Objectors or conchies are discussed, who refused to fight and hence defied the existing belief in men as true heroic combatants in battle. Homophobia and the fear that this abnormal same-sex love will affect the Victorian ideal of perfect manhood is another theme that deals with the subject of masculinity and is at the centre of the fourth chapter. Combined with this effeminizing view of heroes, Chapter 5 elaborates on the ties that bind an officer to his soldiers, as young officers were thrown into the parental role of comforting fathers, which also links up to the implicit portrayal of heroes that marks the relationship of fathers and sons. As Sharon Monteith states, Barker is “energized by the ways in which gender stereotyping may distort and repress the personal development of 9 individuals of both genders”5. Officers were occupied with the same worries that characterize motherly instincts, and this gender contrast is more emphasized by Barker’s inclusion of female characters. Women were given new opportunities to work for a better wage in munitions factories, finally unlocked from their domestic households. Therefore, these female characters can be juxtaposed against the aforementioned men who felt they were losing their masculinity, because “war, the ‘most masculine of enterprises’, [in fact] represented the ‘apocalypse of masculinism’” (IOM, 350). Finally, the sixth chapter deals with the last aspect that is interlaced with the issues of masculinity. The fact that many soldiers returned from the front after being diagnosed with neurasthenia emasculated them and made them doubt their own personality. As it is, this mental condition was formerly assigned to women who were supposed to be unable to bear the passive domestic life, which like the metaphorical Victorian corset was supposed to fit them. This hysterical condition gave rise to the label “shell-shocked” soldiers, a condition the men were confronted with and which made them feel more effeminate. This was in stark contrast with the previous view of a manly war that would serve to strengthen their manhood. As Elaine Showalter explains, “[t]his parade of emotionally incapacitated men […] was in itself a shocking contrast to the heroic visions of masculinist fantasies that has preceded it”6. All these aspects combined, the final and seventh chapter deals with the aftermath of the First World War, when millions of men were killed or returned suffering from extreme traumas. The heroic message that was abundantly present during the war propaganda in August 1914 could not be compared to the horrified men who returned and who resembled not in the smallest degree to the expectations of a heroic return.                                                                                                                 5 Monteith, Sharon. Pat Barker. Devon: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 2002, p. 2. 6 Shaddock, Jennifer. “Dreams of Melanesia: Masculinity and the Exorcism of War in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.3 (2006): 656-674, p. 661. 10 These views are all aspects of the general decline in manhood the Great War engendered. As Jennifer Shaddock argues, Pat Barker is “excavating masculinity within the hyper-masculine exigencies of war, as well as within their traumatic by-product, the intimate confessional of the shell-shocked soldier and his hospital psychologist”7. The First World War denied the pre-war existing beliefs that every man is a fearless hero, and altered its definition to the naïve young boys who sacrificed their lives for a war in which they never should have fought. The war claimed the death of an “estimated 10 million men […] and another 20 million were wounded”8. Those who survived showed courage trying to settle back to a normal life after having faced the front and deaths of friends and family. To conclude, by writing three novels about the First World War, Pat Barker has pointed to the issues of masculinity that British society was facing at the beginning of the twentieth century. A.S. Byatt’s statement on the back flap of The Eye In The Door asserts that the novel is a “[n]ew vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians”9. Barker set her stories at home, providing the reader with less evident facts that are known about the Great War and only allowed a window to the front through the description of the traumas the patients at Craiglockhart were experiencing. Undergoing the social status of a hero to a zero, they were the degenerates who had to be regenerated.                                                                                                                 7 Shaddock, Jennifer. “Dreams of Melanesia: Masculinity and the Exorcism of War in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.3 (2006): 656-674, p. 658. 8 Johnson, Patricia E. “Embodying Losses in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy.” Critique 46.4 (2005): 307-319. p. 307. 9 This appears on the back flap of Pat Barker’s The Eye In The Door (2008). 11