neuroses were not to be found in their childhoods nor in their sex lives, but in the traumas of their war experiences. Concerning the war he was an Englishman of his class and generation (Rivers was 53 in 1917): he considered I know that Ms. Barker was born in 1943...imagine! 1943! Were there *people* then?...and so could not have witnessed the events that so utterly traumatized Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and so many thousands of other men, but you couldn't prove it by this: who is content to confront a cruel reality without polemics, without even visible anger and without evident artifice. And as soon as you accepted that the man’s breakdown was a consequence of his war experience rather than his own innate weakness, then inevitably the war became the issue. And the therapy was a test, not only of the genuineness of the individual’s symptoms, but also of the validity of the demands the war was making on him. Rivers had survived partly by suppressing his awareness of this. But then along came Sassoon and made the justifiability of the war a matter for constant, open debate, and that suppression was no longer possible.

Here's an interesting part of the introductory section, slightly edited. The novel is thematically complex, exploring the effect of the War on identity, masculinity, and social structure. The novel draws extensively on period psychological practices, emphasising River's research as well as Freudian psychology. In the novel Barker enters a particular tradition of representing the experience of World War I in literature: many critics compare the novel to other World War I novels, especially those written by women writers interested in the domestic repercussions of the war, including Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Barker both drew on those texts of the period that initially inspired her and makes references to a number of other literary and cultural works and events. These give an impression of historical realism, even though Barker tends to refute the claim that the novel is "historical fiction". Doesn't that sound like someone who hasn't had to do the job issuing a pronunciamento? An armchair warrior speaking from the privileged place of one who is defended, not one who defends. It was ever thus.Bourke writes history and Barker writes fiction, but both tell stories which were, when first published, at odds with how most of us imagined the First World War. They are both also stories which are very much products of their time. Dismembering the Male still repays reading today – very few historians dealing with similar aspects of the war have matched its scope or achievement since – but it is also rooted in the historiographical trends of the mid 1990s. Bourke partly inspired further historical research on masculinity, the body, and war, but her book is also a product of existing interest in these areas, and the alacrity with which her lead was followed suggests a field ripe for harvesting. There’s nothing odd about this: the discipline of history works through the continual revision of old arguments and realization of new perspectives, and sooner or later gender and the body will seem old hat. Yet although cultural history has its critics, no serious historian would now condemn Bourke for writing a history that is informed by the disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) concerns of its time. Barker, on the other hand, has been seen as fair game, with historians happy to censure her for projecting the concerns of 1990s liberals and lefties onto her wartime protagonists. (4) There is a case to be made that, at least in Regeneration, this isn’t quite what she’s doing: after all, she is writing about a soldier who protested against the war and a doctor who was transformed from an instinctive Conservative into a potential Labour candidate by the experience of war. This isn’t projection so much as selecting a story which chimed with more widespread concerns at the time of writing the book. Can you identify any other examples of men suffering because of masculine stereotypes in Regeneration? Trauma

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.” The novel doesn't end with that trench fathering, though, but with Rivers's note closing his Sassoon file. Why there, when the rest of the historical story is so dramatic and moving? Why not follow Sassoon to the That kind of knowledge would devastate Society! Undermine the Divinely Ordained Rules! Heresy!! It must be the case that these damaged men were weak, weak I say, unmanly and unworthy! It cannot be that what they lived through damaged them by its nature, or else codified gender (and skin-color) inequality is Wrong. And we all know that it is Right!It gives a glimpse beyond the poetry, which is probably just as important as the poetry itself, but I would say that biographies would tell a much better story, despite them being true life accounts.

Joyes, Kaley (2009). "Regenerating Wilfred Owen: Pat Barker's revisions". Mosaic. 42 (3): 169–83. ISSN 0027-1276.Prior arrives in Rivers’s office late one night, notably less obstinate than usual and visibly depressed, finally admitting much about his nightmares that he’d formerly withheld. Rivers offers to hypnotize him to help him remember his main traumatic incident and Prior agrees. In a trance, Prior recalls cleaning a trench, shoveling the body parts of two of his men who had just been killed by an artillery strike into a bag, when he finds himself holding a single eyeball in his palm, which triggers his mind to break down and leaves him mute. When Prior awakes from the hypnosis memory, he is both horrified and angered that there was not more to it. However, he grabs Rivers by the arm and begins head-butting him in the chest, which is as close as he can get to asking Rivers for physical affection, since he is a man.