Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality By David Waterman

rush to “place” an author. Sharon Monteith makes the point that such classification, for example defining the “working-class” novels as feminine while the Regeneration trilogy is defined as masculine, misses the essential point of relations between the genders (“Pat Barker” 2, my italics; see also John Brannigan, “Pat Barker” 3). Even the feminist temperament of the first three novels, all published by Virago Press, must be contextualized within the network of relations among and between men and women. Likewise regarding the labels of regionalism and realism; John Brannigan warns of the difficulty in trying to pin Barker down geographically:

While Barker does indeed anchor all of her novels in a specific socio-historical context—in this case, the rampant unemployment of post-industrial, Thatcherite Britain—Monteith too rightly argues against applying the realist “epithet” too quickly, saying: “Barker's fiction incorporates wide-angled representations and close-up shots of particular historical moments or events, delving into the unresolved tension between memory and history” (“Pat Barker” 5–6), thus setting Barker's fiction apart from romanticized accounts of the working class, notably by her focus on de-industrialized Britain, women's working-class identity as well as the importance of collective experience (see Brannigan, “Pat Barker” 15). It is from this critical position, namely the broader canvas and wide-angled representations, that I would like to approach Barker's first three novels, given that social representation theory is more interested in relations than in contents, ¹ that societies are more than just the sum of their parts, and that group formation and membership is not a given, but a subject of inquiry in its own right, as