Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality
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Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality By David Waterman

Chapter 1:  Caging or Community? The “Working Class” Novels
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Martha Augoustinos and Iain Walker (citing Jonathan Potter and Ian Litton as well) remind us:

Central to social representations theory is the group-defining nature of representations. However, Potter and Litton express concern at the way in which groups have been defined and delineated within social representations research. Naturally occurring groups are usually chosen as units of analysis in the empirical studies, thus far, without solving the problem of whether the ‘group,’ as defined by the researchers, has any psychological salience to the individuals who are said to occupy it. Potter and Litton argue that the definition of a group is problematic, given that the constitution of a group is itself determined by members’ representations of the ‘group’…Group membership should therefore not be taken as a given when reaching conclusions in social representations research, but should itself be the target of such research. (157; see also Potter and Litton 83)

When asking the question of what provides a sentiment of community, it seems appropriate to begin by examining gender relations in the novels, including the effect on women when the men are not necessarily breadwinners, in other words in a context where there is a certain amount of conflict regarding dominant gender codes. Class relations also become important, since class, like gender, is largely a social construction that serves the interests of a dominant elite: in this poor, post-industrial community workers are often perceived as a function of their corporal exploitability, in terms of production and reproduction, sometimes presented as animals, sometimes as machines, but most often in terms of use-value rather than in human terms. And finally, the stories that the characters have to tell (or are unable or unwilling to tell) as they struggle with notions of memory, identity, community, and history, keeping in mind that history is also made—and sometimes changed—by communities whose voices are seldom heard. In this regard, Monteith, discussing Nicole Ward Jouve's argument regarding the possibilities opened up by fiction to represent subalterns, says: “fiction is probably the only medium through which working-class characters and prostitutes…are lifted out