Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Page 14 Candidate Number: FYW812

becoming closer. Sassoon admits that he ‘knew about the hero-worship, but [he] think[s] [that their relationship] was rather more than that’ (Barker 1991, p.243). However, again, by demonstrating caring qualities, Sassoon is displaying emotions and love for men, which are both highly regarded as effeminate. However, Sassoon’s identity is a bit more complex than the other characters – he is homosexual, and a poet, yet he is also a critic of the war, as well as being an upper-class man and a very talented officer. Conclusion Overall, through her novel, Barker explores the concept of emasculation of men during World War 1. Through her supporting and key characters, namely Prior, Rivers and Sassoon, Barker clearly displays the various ways which men could feel emasculated. Further , through Rivers’ thought processes, Barker examines one of the greatest paradoxes of the war - that this most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers and men that was domestic and caring, thus emasculating men. Likewise, the men who set out to war to prove their masculinity were forced into holes in the ground and returned home traumatised and injured. The war had promised heroic and glorious scenes of fighting; however, the soldiers were faced with crouching in the dugouts waiting for their deaths. The men’s passivity in the trenches is ironically reminiscent of the position women are forced to inhabit in patriarchal societies, thus rendering the men helpless and more effeminate. In essence, the representation of emasculation in the novel encapsulates the internal struggles which men underwent during the wartime. Just the fact that Pat Barker wrote the novel in 1991 (73 years after the conclusion of the war) highlights the significance of the concept of emasculation during World War 1, and how crucial it is for modern readers to understand this concept.