One of the very prominent themes in Regeneration is the emasculation of the soldiers during World War One. The war was considered by society at that time to be the essence of masculinity; it was a man's duty to fight for his country and honourable to die for it. However, this incredibly masculine thing is shown to evoke a contrastingly feminine response in the honourable soldiers who fought in it, be it breaking down or simply caring for their comrades.
The patients at Craiglockhart hospital have all broken down in some way from the horrors that they have experienced. Rivers' method of treating them is to help each of them "abandon his hopeless attempt to forget" all of their memories and stop them from repressing their feelings. However, society expected men at that time to keep their pain and fear to themselves and throughout their lives they were "trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness", and Rivers' treatment goes against this entirely. It seems that the only way for the patients to be cured from their weakness of feeling horror is to succumb to it, thus turning away from the masculine repression. Indeed, Anderson feels that being in Craiglockhart is possibly a "fairly emasculating experience".
The war turns the soldiers into almost motherly figures who care for their men and constantly worry about their welfare like the mothers of very large familys who have no power to save their childrens' lives. In order for the army to act efficiently, the soldiers have to emasculate themselves by letting themselves care. The only problem is, if they do care, then it is so much harder to lose their comrades. The soldiers are forced to sacrifice their own emotional welfare to benefit the running of the army. This is a clear reason why so many of the respected soldiers, such as Prior, break down.
The soldiers are also emasculated by being forced to wait for their deaths in the trenches or else in the skies above. They cannot defend themselves and cannot actively help attack either. This feeling of uselessness and "prolonged strain" seems to be equivalent to what the women feel so that "this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship [produces] in men the same disorders that women [suffer] from in peace". This suggests that Pat Barker believes that the men needed to have a balance of what is "masculine" and "feminine" in their lives in order to remain sane.
2 comments:
This is a very thorough analysis of the emasculation of men in the novel. You have embedded highly appropriate and interesting quotations into the body of your writing and analysed them in detail.
It seems that traditional gender roles have been reversed on a number of different occasions in the novel. Can you add some further discussion on where the opposite of emasculation has occurred and to which characters? Is this seen as negative too?
Julia, you make some original links with the subject matter. The idea that both genders had to take on more stereotypical elements of the opposite gender to "compensate" for the lack of the other is interesting. So while women at home were taking on more traditionally masculine roles in society in the absence of the men, the men had to take on the more traditional nurturing role of the women at the front and back home. Thought-provoking ideas Julia.
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