Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Page 4 Candidate Number: FYW812

Written in 1991, 73 years after the conclusion of the war, Barker bases her novel on real characters and scenarios of World War 1 which helps to give readers a vivid and real account of the consequences of war. Regeneration is set in Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh and recounts how an acclaimed, psycho-analysist, Dr Rivers, treated his war patients. These patients include renowned war-poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. In the novel, Barker utilises her characters to display the various processes of emasculation which soldiers underwent during the war. She explores the concept of emasculation with many of her supporting male characters as well as with her three key characters – Billy Prior (a fictional character who is asthmatic and initially suffers from mutism until cured), Dr Rivers (an English medical psychologist and anthropologist who treated patients at Craiglockhart Hospital with his ‘Talking Cure’) (Robinson, 2015), and Siegfried Sassoon (a renowned World War 1 poet, writer and soldier). Overall, Barker’s novel illustrates one of the greatest paradoxes of war: that soldiers enter the war to assert their masculinity, but however return back having lost much of their identity, particularly those aspects that are tied up with being male. Through analysis of the novel and its characters, the research question of how Pat Barker represents the emasculation of men during World War 1 through the experiences of the characters in her novel Regeneration , will be answered.