‘’the Experience of the Great War Stripped Men of Their...

‘’The experience of the Great War stripped men of their masculinity’’explore the ways in which Barker, Sassoon and Owen portray this in their writing. Sassoon and Owen as poets and Barker as a novelist, explore through their works of literature the changing and challenging notions of masculinity experienced as a result of The Great War. Furthermore, all three writers suggest that the often overlooked reality of the conflict was the creation of a subversion of the stereotypical ‘heroic soldier’. Replacing this image through their work, with that of the truth, we see an exploration of the emasculated and dehumanised shell that many men truly became as a result of what they experienced in service. This extends throughout their texts, to†¦show more content†¦Both the scenario explored here by Barker and the closure of Owen’s Disabled with demeaning rhetorical questions ‘And put him into bed? Why dont they come?’ demonstrate a crisis in masculinity and helplessness. However it could be suggested that although society overlooks what is hard to face in Disabled, the reader of Regeneration is expos ed to worse sense of emasculation with the feeling of inadequacy and distance the patients of Craighlockhart experience only being enhanced by their treatment by women. Barker equally uses imagery to evoke emotion focusing closely on his post-war appearance, describing his forearms ‘the groove between radius and ulna was even deeper than a week ago’, not only suggesting that Burns is physically becoming weaker, but also mirroring the ever increased detachment from the man he felt he was- turning into the ‘thin yellow skinned man’ The Great war has forced him to become. Thus we start to realise that this emasculation extends beyond the concept that many men no longer felt physically male in the way they did before the Great War, but largely protracts to the idea they felt they could no longer speak out as a male and their treatment within a society that still strived on pre-war notions of masculine behaviour