Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality By David Waterman

on her life by a customer: “You might think I came back seething with hatred. Well, you'd be wrong. You expect a certain amount of violence in this job, you expect to get slapped around. Admittedly you don't expect a knife being pulled, but it happens. I just got unlucky, that's all” (109). (Jean's fear does, however, lead her to kill a man she mistakes for the serial killer.) A further example is the response of one of Brenda's customers to Kath's murder: “‘I see he's got another.’ There was no mistaking the satisfaction in his voice” (70). This offhand smugness regarding the murder of a prostitute by a “ripper” is largely the result, according to Monteith, of how the media represents a serial killer, since “giving them a pet name distances them from their reality as males…[they] seem removed from societal norms” (21). This same kind of resigned acceptance of violence between men and women is also part of the landscape of domestic life, thrown into relief in several places in the novels.

Liza, of the title of Barker's third novel, is also part of this infernal cycle of domestic violence, more so from her mother than at the hands of her unemployed, spiritualist husband Frank. Frank is, like many of the other men, worried about his reputation, about being symbolically emasculated in his role within the eyes of the community and, again, like so many, ultimately abandons her. Frank refuses to allow Liza to work outside of the home, go to the movies unescorted, or become politically active; her only job, her husband insists, “is to keep the house and be a good wife and mother” (Barker, “Liza's England” 148). In spite of his low social status, Frank, like countless others in this community, seems to have adopted the perspective of the governing class regarding his unemployment; whereas his situation is largely due to factors beyond his control, what Moscovici calls “third-person causality,” Frank's guilt and shame—including thoughts of suicide—suppose a “first-person causality,” the idea that the individual is responsible for his own troubles. ² Although Frank is very religious, and sees himself doing God's work, inferring third-person causality, Liza blames Frank for being too involved in spirituality; it is not until Frank leaves her and the children that Liza “came slowly back to life” (157), notwithstanding her dire economic straits that oblige her to scrat for coal on the slag heap, where she