Gender Roles In Pat Barker's Regeneration

Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration is a mixture factual and fictional writing in the sense that it takes scenarios from the real lives of characters like Seigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves as well as Dr. W. H. R. Rivers who treated both Sassoon and Owen at Craiglockhart war hospital. Barker is said to have consulted diaries, notes, publications and letters in order to create her characters. In Regeneration we see a clear divide between what would have been considered the standard gender roles of men and women and how The Great War had in some ways altered the way people behaved, such as with soldiers having to become more nurturing as they fought on the front lines and women gaining more of a financial freedom as they would have …show more content…
. . the war facilitated not just a liberation from the constricting trivia of parlours and petticoats but an unprecedented transcendence of the more profound constraints imposed by traditional sex roles’ (Gilbert, 179) we see this transcendence from traditional sex roles in Regeneration through Sarah Lumb who is ‘direct and almost boyish’ (Barker, 85) through her character we get an insight of what Gilbert meant when she said women were freed from their constructing lives as women like Sarah had started to work in places like munition factory's, something that would have been considered a mans job as its was dirty and dangerous. Women would have also started to earned more money in the case of Sarah ‘fifty bob a week’ (Barker, 85) compared to just ‘ten bob before the war’ (Barker, 85) here there is a five times increase in her pay and this would have created a sense of freedom for women like Sarah as they became financially independent and were able to start living life for themselves, women would have started to no longer be seen as having to stay at home and be domestic but during the Great War were encouraged to go out and find work as the men were off battling for their