This chapter examines the use of the female gaze in the Regeneration trilogy. Ronald
Paul notes that “apart from Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) and
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), which both deal with the traumatic domestic
effects of shell shock, all of the contemporary, classic novels of the Great War were
written by men whose literary response to war was conditioned by their own personal
experience of fighting on the frontline trenches.”1 Claire Tylee claims that even when
women write about the war, their work rests on the foundations of male assumptions:
Tylee contends that both The Return of the Soldier and Mrs Dalloway
take for granted a common fund of images of the war-zone and of
home-front reactions to it. ... [T]hese novels have continued to be of
interest because they rely on generally accepted ideas about the
Great War, the use they make of these ideas in their analysis of
women’s gender identity, especially as it is defined in relation to
men.2
Kate McLoughlin notes that “[L]ikeness of experience has become a trope .... [and
that] representations of wars – like the wars themselves – are often heavily
intertextual (or interbellical).”3 Chapter Two of this thesis concurs with McLoughlin’s
idea of the interbellical nature of war novels, to the extent that the Regeneration
trilogy’s graphic representations of the war-damaged body follow a stylistic tradition
in other works of literature, mostly of male authorship, including war novels such as
Barbusse’s Under Fire. This chapter leans in the direction of anti-intertextuality, as I
argue that there are ways in which the trilogy impels its readers towards an intertextually identifiable “female gaze” upon war which achieves a dual outcome: the
gaze, firstly, protects the narrative from the limitations of Tylee’s (alleged) “generally
accepted ideas about the Great War;” ideas that derive from a male perspective; and
secondly, the trilogy transcends its own starting point of an identifiable female gaze
by eventually occluding the femaleness of the gaze, and presenting the subject of war
as something that is entirely about both men and women and the ways in which they
understand or fail to understand each other and themselves.
Ronald Paul, “In Pastoral Fields: The Regeneration Trilogy and Classic World War Fiction” in Critical Perspectives on Pat
Barker, edited by Sharon Monteith, Margaretta Jolly, Nahem Yousef and Ronal Paul (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 2005), 147. 147-161 Tylee notes: “Pace Elaine Showalter, [Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier] was not the first
English novel to deal with shell-shock” citing Rose Macauley’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916), which describes
“distressing details of shell shock.” Several other contemporary writers exploited hysterical symptoms of shell-shock “to good
melodramatic effect”: Tylee, 146.
2
Claire Tylee, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1990), 141. Claire Tylee notes
that, “Pace
3
Kate McLoughlin, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (Leiden: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 14.
1
1
Sayre Sheldon notes
There are thousands of stories, poems, diaries and accounts of war
by women ... [y]et war literature is still seen as almost exclusively
male. The reason is one of definition: war literature is traditionally
about being in war, more precisely about being in combat. By
limiting war literature to actual combat, men have claimed war as
their subject. The claim is no longer valid, if it ever has been ...
Modern war reaches everywhere.4
The comparative rarity of women at the battlefront is not fully satisfying as an
explanation for an “almost exclusively male” domination of the literary World War I:
Angela Smith points out that it is “surprising how many women did manage to
become deeply involved with the war and experience it close up, and how many of
them chose to write about it.”5 Though widely read a the time, “few of these women’s
stories ... still remain in print or feature in the public perception of the First World
War.6 As Margaret Higonnet et. al. observe, “literary scholars customarily exclude
women’s voices from the canon of war literature, favouring writings based on the
actual experience of combat.” 7 Agnès Cardinal, Dorothy Goldman and Judith
Hattaway note that “[t]he male canon, while not directly inimical to women’s writing
about the war, often seems oblivious of its existence, let alone its claims to
significance.” 8 Sheldon notes that as women incorporated their experience into
writing, they were in fact “choosing the right to imagine war, just as men for centuries
had written about war without actually experiencing it.”9 The variety and richness of
women’s war writing across several genres is evident in the anthology entitled
Women’s Writing on the First World War, which “testifies to the variety of ways in
which women on both sides participated in the conflict.”10 The editors acknowledge
that the chosen texts “reveal the difference between women’s experience and that of
4
Sayre P. Sheldon, preface to Her War Story: Twentieth Century Women Write About War ed. Sayre P. Sheldon (Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), x. ix-xii (Italics in original)
5
Angela K. Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 1988), 170. Smith notes that despite Vera Brittain’s concern, “Women had in fact been producing
the ‘living words’ she called for throughout the war and its aftermath, and continued to do so for many decades, some with great
success.” (p. 106)
6
Smith, 106.
7
Margaret Randolph Higonnet et. al., introduction to Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1987), 1.
Agnès Cardinal, Dorothy Goldman and Judith Hattaway, eds. Women’s Writing on the First World War (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 5.
9
Sheldon, xi.
10
Cardinal et. al. are critical of the editors of The Penguin Book of First World War Prose for their minimal representation of
women: “... out of the eighty or so writers included only twelve are women.” Cardinal et. al., 1. See The Penguin Book of First
World War Prose (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1990).
8
2
men and combatants”11 – women’s accounts of the war, they allege, “offer not only a
complement to men’s narratives of war but also a perspective which corrects and
reshapes our understanding of war writing as a whole.”12 The “error” encountered in
men’s war writing is not only the marginalizing of women, but the excessive
importance relegated to a common “stock of motifs – literary [and] mythological – on
which men drew when giving shape to their war experience”13 Many women writers,
of course, would be as aware as men of the war’s tropes myths and motifs, but the
patriarchal culture in which they were raised directed those cultural memes mainly at
boys and men.
THE FEMALE GAZE. DEFINE OR EXPLAIN IT. DUREE AS PER HIGONNET:
P46. BERGONZI’S PUT DOWN OF BARKER’S CONFLATION OF THE WAR
WITH ALL WARS. DEFEND. HIGONET’S VIEW THAT THE WAR DID NOT
CHANGE THE PARTRIARCHAL NATURE OF SOCIETY AT ALL DESPITE
WOMEN TAKING MEN’S ROLES AND JOBS ETC. THE EXPECTATIONS
WERE THE SAME: THEY WERE JUST FILLING IN...ETC.
THE IDEA OF OBSERVATION AND WOMEN AS THE OBSERVERS RATHER
THAN THE PARTICIPANTS OF WAR
HOW ALL THIS TRANSLATES TO THE REGENERATION TRILOGY. DOES IT
REFLECT THE DOUBLE HELEX? OR DOES IT MANAGE TO SUCCESSFULLY
TRANSCEND GENDER? IS IT A PACIFIST WOMEN’S GAZE OR AN
INTERMEDIATE’S ONE, OR A HERMAPHRODITIC/ANDROGYNOUS ONE
OR AN ASEXUAL ONE? HOW WOULD YOU TELL? WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
ALCOTT’S WRITING OF WAR IN WHICH SHE HAD TO DESEXUALISE THE
MEN AND MASCULINISE HERSELF IN ORDER TO TELL THE STORY. DOES
BARKER DO THIS WITH HER NARRATORS, ALL OF THEM MEN? OR DOES
SHE DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT, DOES SHE DE-PARTICULARISE THE
NARRATOR?
LIFT
HETEROTOPIAS?
ASEXUALITY?
IS
AN
THEM
TO
ANOTHER
PLANE
(AS
IN
THE
ONE OF THE HETEROTOPIAS A PLACE OF
ALICE
THROUGH
THE
LOOKING
GLASS:
NO
SEXUALITY: SASSOON, OWEN, RIVERS .... NO SEX. ONLY THE FICTIONAL
11
P. 4.
P. 4.
13
12
P. 6.
3
PRIOR AND IT IS SORDID AND UNLOVING .... EXCEPT WITH ADA LUMB. ...
BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
Difficulties surface immediately if the term “woman’s novel” is used in a discussion
of literature. Angela Smith, despite recognizing that Rebecca West’s The Return of
the Soldier foregrounds “a number of modernist narrative experiments in a
particularly successful way”14 and therefore rises above the usual limitations of the
‘woman’s novel,’ it too succumbs to what Susan Clark calls “the obscenity of
sentimentality.”15 Although Smith has not defined what a “woman’s novel” is, her
subject – written works of female authorship – suggests that “a woman’s novel” is
simply a novel written by a woman; however, she seems to buy in to the idea that
certain organic aspects of the narrative, such as sentimentality 16 and a female
protagonist, also play a part in what makes up the “woman’s novel.” Carolyn Burdett
notes how the nineteenth century British press excused Dickens from accusations of
sentimentality on the grounds that his brand of it was “of a decidedly high
character.”17 Rafaël de Mesa’s 1917 essay on women novelists captures something of
the popular wartime perception of women writers when it praises the illustrious “race
of women novelists ... from Mme. de Lafayette to George Sand and George Eliot”;
unlike men, “who can only describe in their books the heroic deeds of our time, the
women ... publish works of the imagination ... which are full of tenderness and of the
poetry of peace.” 18 It was to be several decades yet before literary theory would
pronounce the death of the author, and exclude a writer’s gender from discourse on
narrative content.
Smith, 171. Although Smith’s containment of the expression “woman’s novel” within single quotation marks suggests the
meaning of term may be questionable, she nevertheless includes The Return of the Soldier under its rubric: “West’s text provides
a good example of how the ‘woman’s novel can be innovatory despite being ‘sentimental’ (171).
15
Susan Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1991), 2. Cited by Smith, 171.
16
Smith, noting that the action of the novel taking place “almost entirely in the domestic sphere,” alludes to it as having “the
‘woman’s novel’ format”: West’s “narrator is a very conventional woman, feminine, but not feminist in outlook, forced to
confront ideas foreign to her sphere of experience” (171). However, Jenny’s alleged “very feminine” status is not vindicated via
textual evidence; there is much to suggest the reverse, that Jenny is strong, controlling, and plays a stereotypically masculine role
by actively manipulating her cousin’s return to ‘normalcy.’ When Margaret and Jenny part at the end of the story, they kiss “not
as women, but as lovers do.”* Smith recognises that Jenny is “precarious” and “unreliable” as a narrator, so that whatever her
‘femininity’ is comprised of, it seems conventional ideas about women’s submissiveness or docility play little part in it.
*Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier: look up page in library edition ( a few pages from the end).
17
Carolyn Burdett “Is Empathy the End of Sentimentality?” Journal of Victorian Culture, 16:2 (2011), 259. 259-274 The
newspaper quote’s original source is given as ‘Sentimentalism’, Saturday Review, 6 (25 December 1858), 643–44 (p. 643).
18
Rafaël de Mesa, “Novels by Women” The Lotus Magazine 8:8 (1917), 352 and 349. 349-352 Italics mine.
14
4
As Margaret Higonnet notes, “war must be understood as a gendering activity, one
that ritually marks the gender of all members of a society, whether or not they are
combatants” 19 Higonnet contends that in the peace that follows war, “messages of
reintegration are expressed within a rhetoric of gender that establishes the postwar
social assignments of men and women.” 20 The question, though, is does war’s
gendering carry over to the historiographic texts about war produced by women, such
as works of historical fiction in the vein of The Regeneration Trilogy. Virginie
Renard discusses the way in which Julian Barnes “highlights the inescapably
discursive nature of our relation to the past” in his short story “Evermore.” Barnes’s
protagonist Miss Moss, who “can connect to the war only through its textual remains”
approaches all the extant documents of the war “with a skeptical, ... proof-reader’s
eye” but as Renard observes, “these texts do not say much about the past, despite
Miss Moss’s very close reading. The Great War remains for the most part inaccessible
to Miss Moss, who then resorts to imagination to fill the gaps: she is said to “imagine
his story,” ie. history.”21 The italics here are Renards’s but she does not enter into a
discourse on masculinized factual information that becomes history; however, she
suggests that Miss Moss’s attempt to re-enact history by revisiting the battlefields
every year is “an attempt to fuse with her own brother.”22 Though the official hisstory of history is spurned by Miss Moss, she does not generalise her rejection of the
masculinized experience but reveres her brother’s as the only possible or knowable
truth of the war. [Here you will need something from the story itself] Ironically, as
she makes her annual pilgrimage to France and re-living her brother’s finality, she is
unaware that she is occluding her own experience of the loss of her brother, which
continues long after his death, which should be as important as her brother’s
experience up to his death. It is as though only by becoming the male through the
most extreme form of empathy, through incarnating the dead man as far as is possible,
can the war have meaning for the bereft woman.
19
Higgonet, introduction, 4.
Ibid, 4.
21
Virginie Renard, “Reaching Out to the Past: Memory in Contemporary British First
World War Narratives,” in British Popular Culture and the First World War, ed.
Jessica Meyer (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2008), 291, 292. 285-304 The italics of “his
story” are Renard’s. “Evermore” .... insert details when book arrives.
22
Renard, 298.
20
5
Ben Shephard’s highly critical review of the Regeneration Trilogy, referred to in
Chapter... of this thesis (page), Shephard quotes from a review in The Guardian in
which Barker describes her trilogy as offering “very much a female view of the
war.” 23 Paul quotes Barker’s “own stated literary intention to “humanize the
experience of men by thinking of it in terms of what women do.”24 Shephard’s review
begins with a quite vituperative dismissal of the Guardian’s claim that Barker
“explodes old myths” about the war, and further that she “recycles modern academic
clichés,” in part as a result of her dependence on “post-feminist pieties”; the derisive
tone of Shephard’s initial criticism, which, as noted elsewhere in this thesis, has been
deemed “hostile” by Patricia Jackson. [PAGE REF] seem to stem from an antipathy to
feminist discourse. But rather than defend Barker from what may be Shephard’s
reactionary masculinist aversion to imputed “pietistic feminism” in her writing, or
worse still, a disinclination to accept women as having the ability (like Tolstoy,
Shephard’s war historiographer-novelist extraordinaire)25 to be true to bellical history,
I am more interested in determining whether, and to what extent, a “female view of
the war” is actually present, and identifiable, in the trilogy. Is there such a thing as a
“female” gaze at war, [1. discuss what the female gaze is] and if so, is such a gaze
detectable in the trilogy? [2. ie is the author effaced: Huntley on Ford Madox Ford]
In World Wars Through the Female Gaze Jean Gallagher examines “the troubled
nature of vision for women in a belligerent culture.” (2) the “trouble” stemming from
“a potentially damaging excess of visual experience.” (same page) Traditionally,
Western narratives have maintained “a clear and gendered distinction between the
masculine ‘authoritative eyewitness and the feminine ‘passive spectator.’” (3)
Ocularcentrism privileged the body that was present in battle, usually male; “The
soldier’s story is posited as free from narrative conventions, making male military
experience the source of immediate, “real” narratives that women may only mimic.”
(Gallagher 14) In “Writing a War Story” therefore, “it would appear that miming male
voices is the only possible choice for Ivy and Mademoiselle, even as they seek to
avoid it. (Gallagher, 15).
This is also quoted by Ronald Paul: “In Pastoral Fields” 147. The source of the
quote is Francis Spufford, “Exploding the Myths: an Interview with Booker PrizeWinner Pat Barker” Guardian Supplement, November 9, 1995, 3.
24
Paul, 147.
25
This issue is addressed in Chapter One of this thesis.
23
6
Ronald Paul distinguishes the trilogy from a canon of male-authored war novels
whose idea of Britain subscribes to “the romantic idea of rural English retreat ... a
classless, pastoral England that was nostalgically evoked and celebrated in prewar
Georgian poetry.” 26 It is unsurprising that horrors at the front should foster
exaggeration of life at home, for by any measure, even class inequalities and poverty
are likely to seem attractive by comparison. But Paul has not established that there is
anything particularly “masculine” about the pastoral ideal itself, nor that Barker’s
subversion of the ideal in the trilogy is initiated by a “female view of the war.”
Richard Aldington, as noted elsewhere in this thesis [PAGE] wrote against the
pastoral in Death of a Hero, even to the extent of the war hero’s mother shamefully
capitalising on the death of her son. [REFERENCE] Barker’s England is a paranoid,
homophobic, wife-beating, child-abusing, pacifist-jailing society. The verdict of a
gathering of Sarah Lumb’s working class friends is that the bulk of English men do
not care much for women, and spend most of their time at their clubs: “Beats me how
they breed” (178). This perspective of British represents an attack on its shibboleths
but is not necessarily a female perspective. [T. S. Eliot’s world is like hers: quote
from Hollow Men or Four Quartets and articles on Eliot, modernist poet] The male
wartime canon includes less than pastoral pictures of home: [Brown on Resolution...?
Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier] [“Eliot so contrives art as ‘depersonalization’
(53) as to render it the final negation of authorial sentiment: ‘the more perfect the
artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind
which creates’” 27 ... goes on to mention Eliot’s “objective correlative” : can you
relate this to the irrelevance of gender?] “Ford continually associates himself with this
self-consciously iconoclastic aesthetic”...same page. So this it can be argued is what
Barker does ... iconoclasm is not gender-specific.
“effacement of the author as
editorialist or emotional guide.” P 105... again, Barker effaces the author. “— Ford
seeks a literature stripped bare, to reveal not the naked passions of its creator but the
stark outlines of his place and time” 105. “veritable negation of personality” “it may
26
Paul, 149.
27
DeCoste, Damon Marcel: “'A frank expression of personality'? Sentimentality,
silence and early Modernist aesthetics in The Good Soldier.” Journal of Modern
Literature (31:1) 2007, 101-23. 104. QUOTE from Eliot: Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood:
Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1920. London: Methuen, 1966. 53, 54.
7
be true, as H. Robert Huntley contends, that “all signs of authorship are obliterated
from the novel” 105
“His [ie, Edward’s] romantic attachment to “the big words, courage, loyalty, honour,
constancy” (54: 28 enables him to be, in fact, the good soldier of the novel’s title:
winner of the DSO, twice recommended for the Victoria Cross, an officer who dives
into the Red Sea in attempts to save Tommies who have fallen overboard (109). Nor
is he in his private life, Dowell observes, some unfeeling letch; even here, his
transgressions mark him as a Romantic drawn to infidelity by pity, generosity, and
chivalrous impulse (80). No unfeeling monster, he is for Dowell “just a normal man
and very much of a sentimentalist” (153) undone by the fact that the norms of his
class, as of Dowell’s art, can abide no expression of passion or sentiment. As Dowell
concludes, “there was too much of the sentimentalist about him and society does not
need too many sentimentalists”... page 117. [Might be useful somewhere, esp the “big
words allusion, relate it to the “these words now mean nothing, vomit vomit vomit in
Regen.]
A comparable sort of gender-reversal or gender chiasmus occurs in Louisa May
Alcott’s Hospital Sketches. [expand, quote...]
Barker’s trilogy endorses none of the conventional gender norms for war writing, and
even subverts them in the manner of Alcott. Men, even those generally considered to
be heroic by virtue of their military status, such as Manning, his very name impliedly
ironic, are not contained within paradigms of “masculinity” Manning loves to be the
passive partner in sex with another man: QUOTE: I NEEDED THAT AND “YOU
ALL DO” Prior. This direct attack on conventions of gender-appropriate roles or
activities permeates the narrative, and runs deeper than a rather easy
acknowledgement that the hysterical symptoms that the shell shocked men experience
are human, rather than a sign of femininity or weakness. (QUOTE: RIVERS,
EMOTION, ETC). Barker mounts a multi-fronted attack on all war writing norms as
28
(54: link this idea to previous chapter in which you refer to the words that Prior now says have no meaning, linked already by
others to Hemingway, to Henry James “who said in a 1915 interview, ‘The war has used up words ... they have ... been more
overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before’”
Quoted in Jean Gallagher, p 15 as being qtd. In Buitenhuis p 61: Peter Buitenhuis The Great War of Words: Literature as
Propaganda 1914-18 and After, 809.93358 1987 GRE ] The source of the James quote is cited as New York Times, 21 March
1915, 5: 3-4. Gallagher notes that James’s use of the phrase “voided of happy semblance” lacks any indirect object or term of
comparison: “(semblance of what?)”, This lack both underlines and enacts in language the gap in mimesis that so much
concerned James, Wharton, and their contemporaries during and after the war.” (15, Gallagher)
8
she presents women as the stronger sex, happy to have their abusive or unloving
husbands out of their hair (Quote: BUGGER THE PEACE...OR whatever it is) and
breaking through the secrecy as if entering a realm of secret men’s business: the
woman who sees what she is not supposed to in the ward. The Salome performance of
Maud Allen not only accentuates the victory of a mad woman over an abusive
father...the trial acts in the narrative as the apotheosis of masculine failure. It is
impossible to read the account of the reasons for the trial as anything but a travesty
brought about by a paranoid fear of things “real men” did not understand or needed to
have publicly denounced, in order to promulgate their own masculine myths: only
depraved men have sex with other men, or women with women. The trial indicates a
need to have the myth re-ingrained into the public’s consciousness, and the general
public seems not to have noticed, as Rivers and ... do, that Billing’s attack on Allen’s
character and upon homosexuality stems from weakness, rather than strength.
MOSS ROLE REVERSING HERSELF INTO THE MALE, AS ALCOTT
DOES...TAKE THIS SOMEWHERE....?
9