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 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.”7 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.” 8 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.”9 The editors acknowledge that the chosen texts “reveal the difference
between women’s experience and that of men and combatants”10 – 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.”11 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 –
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
Agnès Cardinal, Dorothy Goldman and Judith Hattaway, eds. Women’s Writing on the First World War (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 5.
8
Sheldon, xi.
9
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).
10
P. 4.
11
P. 4.
2
literary [and] mythological – on which men drew when giving shape to their war
experience”12 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
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
12
P. 6.
3
particularly successful way”13 and therefore rises above the usual limitations of the
‘woman’s novel,’ it too succumbs to what Susan Clark calls “the obscenity of
sentimentality.”14 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 15 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 purported to exonerate the works of
Dickens from accusations of sentimentality by deeming his male sentimentality to be
‘of a decidedly high character.’16 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” (italics added); 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.”17 It was to be several decades
yet before literary theory would pronounce the death of the author, and erase the idea
of that the gender of the author of a work of fiction in any way defines or delimits
narrative content.
Margaret Higonnet claims that “war must be understood as a gendering activity, one
that ritually marks the gender of all members of a society” SEE LIB BOOK.
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).
14
Susan Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1991), 2. Cited by Smith, 171.
15
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).
16
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).
17
Rafaël de Mesa, “Novels by Women” The Lotus Magazine 8:8 (1917), 352 and 349. 349-352
13
4