The theme of masulinity in Regeneration
Revision Sheet
Regeneration
Masculinity and its limits are part of the main themes explored in the Regeneration
Trilogy. Barker explores these themes through different characters and their personal lives and reaction to war using memories of their postwar life, of the fighting or their behaviour in
Craiglockheart. Exemples of emasculation range from actual physical, to psychological wounds erasing his sense of manhood. The hospital patients are constantly haunted by their fears of emasculation through both mental illness and physical injury as simultaneously have to fight the commun believe that "Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men".
Emasculation seems to have reached all pacients in Craiglockheart. Wether they are privates or captain. The main characters have all gone through thou very different emasculating dreams of episodes during war or theire time in the hospital : Sassoon remembers the young boy in the bed next to him who had been castrated on the battlefield;
Anderson dreams he is tied up with women's corsets and Prior fights against his father's.
Again in page 39, Burns is in the forest, naked and surrounded by his dead “compagnions” when he stairs at his genitals feeling “they didn’t seem to belong with the rest of him”. This is a recuring patern throughout the book, shared with the other patients, as they feel as thow they are losing any form of masculinity they may have. The only answer to the viral feeling being Rivers. Indeed pacients use Rivers in order to try and understand what has trigered these feelings : Sassoon mentions to Rivers the topic of homosexuality and the idea of an intermediate sex and Anderson questions Rivers, "I suppose it is possible someone might find being locked up in a loony bin a fairly emasculating experience?". However, paradoxically, the technics used by doctors in metal institutions as
Craiglockheart sometimes
Regeneration
Masculinity and its limits are part of the main themes explored in the Regeneration
Trilogy. Barker explores these themes through different characters and their personal lives and reaction to war using memories of their postwar life, of the fighting or their behaviour in
Craiglockheart. Exemples of emasculation range from actual physical, to psychological wounds erasing his sense of manhood. The hospital patients are constantly haunted by their fears of emasculation through both mental illness and physical injury as simultaneously have to fight the commun believe that "Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men".
Emasculation seems to have reached all pacients in Craiglockheart. Wether they are privates or captain. The main characters have all gone through thou very different emasculating dreams of episodes during war or theire time in the hospital : Sassoon remembers the young boy in the bed next to him who had been castrated on the battlefield;
Anderson dreams he is tied up with women's corsets and Prior fights against his father's.
Again in page 39, Burns is in the forest, naked and surrounded by his dead “compagnions” when he stairs at his genitals feeling “they didn’t seem to belong with the rest of him”. This is a recuring patern throughout the book, shared with the other patients, as they feel as thow they are losing any form of masculinity they may have. The only answer to the viral feeling being Rivers. Indeed pacients use Rivers in order to try and understand what has trigered these feelings : Sassoon mentions to Rivers the topic of homosexuality and the idea of an intermediate sex and Anderson questions Rivers, "I suppose it is possible someone might find being locked up in a loony bin a fairly emasculating experience?". However, paradoxically, the technics used by doctors in metal institutions as
Craiglockheart sometimes